(11 April 2001) Another paper I came across while studying for my PE exam. Again, I found it interesting to compare my stylistic writing changes in the intervening 11 years. Any student of the classical Dante should appreciate my sarcasm and extreme dislike of the study I was forced to undertake, but even a general knowledge of The Inferno should make this short story seem humorous. Comments are always welcome. Be sure to check out the .jpg map of Hades.
The Inferno (reprised)
27 November 1989
Author's Note: This presentation of Hell was devised to give a sarcastic tone to the subject that would reflect the author's views on the ideas of afterlife, Divinity, and Hell. Rudeness, crudity, and sacrilege are entirely unintentional. The views presented in this paper in no way represent the policies of the editing staff.
One day while Dick was sitting in his Lazy Boy watching football, Jane came over and said to him, "Dick, we don't ever do anything. Let's take a trip."
Dick got up, turned off the television, and said, "Okay. Go get Spot. I'll warm up the car."
Jane went to the back yard. Spot was chasing rabbits. Watch Spot chase rabbits. Spot chases rabbits well. Good dog, Spot. Jane clubbed Spot and dragged him to the family car, a black 1976 BB512 Berlinetta Boxer. She put Spot under the bonnet.
Dick was already sitting in the car with a map unfolded. He said, "Well, Jane, it looks like we have to go down I-43 about 12 miles and take exit 17b. That should take us straight to the tollbridge over the Styx."
The road to the deepest pits of the Abyss is fraught with many dangers. The powers of Evil exhibit great and wide-ranging influences over the world we all inhabit. Only those travelers with courage, stamina, and great luck will be able to brave the dark lands. One contemporary danger is the possibility of being hit by a drunk driver on the way towards exit 17b; I-43 is a dangerous road.
"Look ahead, dear. It's a tollbooth. Slow down and I'll see if I have any spare change," said Jane. As the car slowed they could see the Gates of Hell grow more and more slowly, because they were not going as quickly towards them. "Did you read that last sign, Dick? I missed it. Okay, I've got my purse out."
Dick stopped at the tollbooth and rolled down his window. The attendant, a shade wearing ring armour and a white tunic with a blue cross on it held out a rubber stamp and said coldly, "One soul and a dollar ten." Bob leaned out of the window with the money as it punched his hand in a rich blood-colored ink smear. The shade looked as if it wanted to say something, but a window closed between them and Dick drove on.
At the front gate to Acheron stands a great stone sign, carved by forces long forgotten. It reads, "ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE, LAST GAS AND BATHROOMS FOR ETERNITY NEXT EXIT." Here at the entrance to the first plane of hell the carnal (punished for sins of the body and mind) work. Their punishment is to be made cold and inhuman but always close to other souls. In this way they are forever denied even the pleasure of conversation with other humans. GUNTER of Gretz is punished here for his overindulgences of flesh, and as the Ferrari accelerates away he weeps for himself.
Dick jumped on the clutch and jammed the stick shift of the Ferrari from fourth straight into first, producing a near-instantaneous deceleration that relocated all of the cargo in the car with a loud thump and almost sent Jane through the windscreen. Jane was wearing her seatbelt. Good girl, Jane.
"Aaaaaiiiiieeeee! Why did you do that, Dick? You could have killed us," yelled Jane, panic-stricken.
Dick said, "Look at that. The bridge is out. We'll have to find another way across." Dick drove down the rocky bank to what looked like a road. "Look. There's a ferry. I guess the tunnel construction's behind schedule."
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Phlegyas, a charonodaemon, waits by his barge on the river Styx, the first barrier to Hell. The charonodaemons noiselessly ferry the souls of the dead across. He is a large silent form covered in a grey shroud, and he pushes the barge with a large pole that dips into the black waters of the river.
The second layer of hell, Stygia, lies across the river. A wasteland, Stygia is a land of frozen ground, barren except for a few small plants and mosses and the souls that haunt the place. Here, corpses in various stages of decay run about, heads facing upward, chasing invisible objects that seem to fly always just out of reach of these dead, the opportunists. As they took all they could in life, so are they denied all in death.
Beyond the domain of Stygia the air gets warm and humid, and the land gets wet and swampy. A muddy marsh extends as far as the eye can see, with some grasses and rice plants growing out of the giant paddy. This is Dis, where the gluttonous are punished. The souls of those who over-consumed of everything have been transformed into lemurs, creatures of slime with no specific structure. They are sunk in the slime and garbage that they produced in life as punishment for misuse of Divinity's gifts. Cerebrus, a giant three-headed mutant dog, blocks the road here. His responsibility is to discourage further trespass into Hell.
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"Wow, this looks just like a big wet swampy forest without the trees," said Jane.
"Yeah. And look at the big bubbles of mud moving around. This is just like that time we went to Universal Studios, except better!" exclaimed Dick. They passed a 'Stop Ahead' sign and Dick slowed the car to a semblance of a normal highway speed.
Dick performed an all-American California stop at the stop light (using the brilliant rationalization that, "Well, I haven't seen any cars on the road for fifty miles"). Cerebrus leaped from the mud at the side of the road and Dick was just able to stop the Ferrari before it slammed into the behemoth.
"I think you'd better roll up the windows, dear. It looks dangerous, said Jane. One head with particularly large canines growled deeply, shaking the road and Ferrari. Another head (the Chihuahua) yipped insanely. The third just slavered.
A few long seconds passed as Cerebrus and Dick stared at each other, but before either could act the bonnet exploded open and Spot leaped onto the top of the car, wagging his tail voraciousy.
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For the few travelers able to pass el perro, the road becomes more dangerous. The next layer of Hell is Minauros, named for the avarice of Mynose. Here the road is just a suspended highway over a swampy and dismal black land, with a ring of broken volcanoes around the perimeter of the swamp. The sky is dark like dusk and filled with a heavy rain. A burning glow from the volcanic cones lights the highway dimly. The dark shapes of daemons, creatures formed directly out of the blackness of Evil, fly occasionally through the air over the highway. The natural vileness and hatred for life of the daemons is put to use tormenting and ripping their charges, the hoarders, wasters, and suicides. These pitiful creatures are continually tortured by the winged (say wing-ed) black daemons, causing them great pain and also denying them what was most precious to them in life, their bodies and selves.
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"Gee, I'm glad we got Spot spayed, Dick."
"Yeah, well I'm glad I found that club." They drove on in silence for a few minutes. "Yawn. It's getting dark. I think that I'll stop at the next motel we hit, okay?"
"Have you seen one since we crossed over the river?" asked Jane. "I can't remember." A black form swooped over the Ferrari, just scraping the roof. "Damn. We just got this one replaced, too. It'd better not crack."
"I'm stopping to see what damage that did. I'll make sure that Spot's secure, too." Dick brought the auto to a stop on what passed for the shoulder and looked in his side mirror. All clear. He got out of the car into the heavy rain without checking in the Ferrari's blind spot, an often fatal mistake, especially considering the size of the blind spot on a BB512. Bad boy, Dick. "No cracks," he satisfied himself.. he pulled himself over to the edge of the road and looked over the guardrail. There was a black puddle below him, with some soul being shredded by a shadowy daemon, almost invisible in the dark. Through breaks in the howling wind he could hear the screams of pain of millions of others being held in the same regard. He looked on the roof of the Ferrari and saw where sharp claws had sliced through the ropes tied around Spot. Spot was mostly gone (except the left rear leg, which had been tied tighter than the rest).
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Oh, yes, I forgot. Daemons eat dog. Sorry about that.
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"Everything okay, dear?" Jane asked as Dick got back into the car.
Not wanting to alarm her, Dick replied, "Oh, yes. Just some person being ripped limb from limb by some wild animal. Nothing to worry about."
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The road bends upward from Minauros into the heights and onto a flat plateau past the volcanoes. The plateau is a rocky wasteland with a cratered and pitted surface. This is Avernus, where the treacherous spend eternity running naked over the hardened lava surface, cutting and ripping their bodies as they fall. Alternating gravity fields over the land ensure that they cannot stay any way but prone for long, but red-hot balls of fire dart about the area, burning those who are not agile or lucky enough to move out of the way. JOSEPHUS is here for his betrayal of the Jews, and happens to be near the road when the Ferrari passes by. He stumbles out onto the road just in time to be snagged by a roving gravity field and flattened in the left lane in the wake of the car.
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"Gee, I sure wish the cops would keep the drunks off the road," Jane muttered.
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The river Lethe divides the upper and lower hells and presents a barrier that the souls of the truly wicked cannot pass back over. A new tunnel under the river makes travel faster and safer. The boatman Charon stands by the entrance to the tunnel, his ferryboat in a drydock at the side of the road. In his new role as customs agent, Charon checks people coming back across the frontier for contraband and condemned souls in their luggage. A sign in front of the return say, "STOP. DECLARE HERE ALL POSSESSIONS AND EX-LIFEFORMS. NO ONE UNDER THE AGE OF 17,545 MAY TRANSPORT ALCOHOL INTO UPPER HELL. PAID FOR WITH YOUR TOLLS AND SOULS."
At the far end of the tunnel lies a land of chaos, a dry, black desert filled with gorges, canyons, and eroded rock structures built of the materiel of chaos. The rocks are swirled with grey and black, and the pattern changes like a mixed drink in a blender. This is Malbolge, where the fraudulent are condemned to wander for eternity. Each canyon holds a different variety of sinner, and in each the sinners are punished or tortured according to their specific crimes. This land is infinite in all directions, with one entrance from a tunnel coming out of nowhere (under the river Lethe), and the other a curtain of shimmering light ending the highway in this realm.
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"Oh, look! We're in Arizona!" said Jane.
"No, I don't think we've gone that far yet," said Dick, soothingly.
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After passing out of Malbolge travelers come onto a flat plain covered sparsely with sickly green and yellow foliage. In Oinos the wrathful and sullen work eternally to perfect their lives; the wrathful attack one another viciously and the sullen mope about without purpose, wandering about the plane aimlessly, sometimes stepping into a brawl or hackfest, which only depresses them more. Here POLYNICES and EURIPEDES fight, each dressed in princely Greek battle armor and carrying short swords. Neither ever has an advantage over the other, and they are destined to kill each other and be reformed over and over until the judgment day.
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"Quick, quick, where's the camera? The leaves are changing color!"
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The highway begins to twist and snake back and forth across as it climbs up toward the slope of the next plane, Maladomini. The most natural and earthlike of all of the layers, it is covered with the waste of humankind's wars and unnatural actions. It is a scar even on hell's surface, twisted with destroyed fortifications and ruined weapons of war. Here death is a constant presence for all of those consigned here, the violent and warlike. It has been turned into a huge battleground for all of the armies of infidels and the evil. The armies of history are involved in a great free for all fight for dominance, and VESPASIAN leads the Roman legionnaires. Various demons and devils flit randomly about destroying battlegroups and insuring that no side becomes too powerful. Death is the only winner in war.
The road finally turns into a ten-lane highway with wide shoulders on both sides and leads into a long, dark tunnel which seemingly has no end. This is the Pit, Phlegethos. The classical inferno is cut by rivers of lava and ridges of rubble and rock, and covered with a dense, brackish smoke. Tremors and eruptions frequently rock the ground, increasing the hot chaos. Those who denied the existence of Divinity in life, the heretics, burn in hellfire, the heat generated by the sins of raw evil. FREDERICK, the Holy Roman Emperor, is one of those also tortured for his sins of other circles. The torturers are the fallen angels, demon princes of evil who changed from good even after seeing the beauty of eternal life.
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One particularly large and nasty-looking fallen angel stopped the car with a motion of his hand, and asked in a deep voice of impending doom, "How the Hell did you get so far down here without someone notifying us?"
Dick began to answer that he had paid the toll at the gate and driven, thank you very much, but the being was already engaged at another torture. Almost as an afterthought, it waved its hand at the Ferrari.
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Jane walked over to Dick, sitting in his Lazy Boy, and said, "Dick, we don't ever don anything. Let's take a trip."
"Shut up, I'm watchin' football."
Fin
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Compository notes: Several additional sources were cited for construction of a realistic Hell. Various mythological names and descriptions were based on accounts given in these sources and adapted for the purposes of this paper:
Barber, B. Welcome to Hades. Dragon. September, 1986, pp. 10-26.
Grubb, J. Manual of the Planes. Lake Geneva, WI, TSR, 1987.
The level Oinos (circle 7 by Dante's reckoning) is actually a Gloom borrowed from the plane of Hades. It seemed appropriate to place the sullen in a Gloom, especially one in which their crimes could be so well punished.
Some further notes are necessary to complete the understanding of this work. Dick represents the average American male. He is of medium height, with brown hair and a slight excess of body fat. Jane is the generic female character. She is blonde, thin, and very dumb. Spot is a brain-damaged plot device.
The shades from the readings (Dante, Michener, Sophocles) are noted in the paper by all capitals. They include: Gunter of Gretz (Michener, Level V), Josephus and Vespasian (Michener, Level VIII), Polynices and Euripedes (Sophocles), and Holy Roman Emperor Frederick (Michener, The Tell, Level IV).