By Andrew Winter

As yet we below had heard nothing of the Endtimes, though I remembered perfectly what I had read about it in life. For hell sharpens all things, not least the memory of grief.

So we heard Time had begun to limp down the last ridge into its grave, and some said its fate was worse than ours, but we could only imagine, or remember, what the world looked like above. For a long time we had been mustering, mustering down below, even as the Dragon on earth was mustering his troops for Armageddon. Where we were going to I did not know, and I remembered that such an exodus from hell should not happen. But the whisper ran that we were preparing for some war, but Naked and unarmed as we were, I could see no hope in fighting.

Yet the demons, up and down the ranks, cheered us on as we stood in readiness, saying that great deeds were awakening in the mountains above us, and assuring us that our part in the great war was far from over.

I had never felt like a soldier. Hell is never passive, nor are its shades, but the only thing I had fought against for ages beyond count was my own weariness and the justice of God. But to ask the demon commanders what we were going to fight was useless.

Though hatred never ceased, there existed between the demons and the souls a certain commonality that brooded on the brinks. And now drawn up in host upon host we presented one front, impressive in its size, certainly, well-ordered like the twisted strands of an obscene carpet, perhaps in the pattern of an adultery scene. If I had taken flight above us as we waited near the mouth, the mouth that all tales said never opened, I would have no doubt wondered at our strength of assembly.

After long moments of waiting and listening in the half-dark, I and some beside me began to wonder if the mouth would ever open, whether the demons had called the muster just to taunt us of escape. But even if so I was glad for the respite of a moment.

But as the timeless time wore on and the chatter of the demons up and down the line became more and more common I began to understand that the world was near its end indeed, and the mouth certainly must open soon. Like the Harrowing, certainly it would be, and I shuddered with that perfect memory again.

Whips cracked, and shade feet stumbled forward, and fire blazed up to the left and to the right, and as through a tunnel of fire — that element most familiar and inglorious — we moved ahead, slowly and chokedly at first, but then faster and faster, until we were moving as quickly as artillery shells in the grim night. For the mouth was opened, but it admitted no light, and its opening was no true opening at all, but more like a pair of jaws, leading deeper in rather than further out, and the one seeking to reach them can only expect that they will snap shut just when he is in the middle of them, and then, with his head on the outside and his legs bleeding caught on the inside, he will just be able to see that escaping through them would never have helped his plight at all, and his folly will be revealed to him.

But legion by legion we passed out, and many of the souls on that Last Day were sent to earth’s dayside, and no doubt such were the worst sinners of all, for even the new moon, which gave no light to the mortal eye, was an unbearable pain of brightness to we souls on the nightside. My shade feet touched down amidst a burning wreck of the world, the last torment of the earth in which at last it began to resemble hell more than heaven. For it was sliding nearer and nearer to annihilation. Legion by legion we set down in perfect silence and order, for even the sounds a soul makes in agony or exultation are no sound at all compared to the tiniest real sound of a lonely cricket singing in a thicket amid a sea of apocalyptic fire.

A great rushing of wind surrounded us, and rain fell through us, and poisonous air swirled all about us, but we heeded it not. Then we began to move, and after hours of running without hope I realized that my home in life was quite near. The same mountains that all my childhood loomed in the distance were visible now as the barest shapes in the starlit night. But I did not think even their dark forms beautiful now. Slowly the block of running souls about me began to break up, and I saw we were nearing habitations of the living or newly dead. One by one the souls peeled away from the main contingent, and the demons were everywhere, directing and screeching and whipping us along. I felt the pain of the whip and the pain of being unable to feel any wind, though I knew it flowed all about me. And I cursed the wind, for I had dreaded its cold sting in life, but had never seen the beauty and the life of it, and now that I was sundered from the sting of it I cursed it because I could not feel its pain, a pain that would have been so welcome to my weary soul because at least a wind-pain carries vitality and not lethargy, breath and not stagnation. But though now I heard the worried gusts of earth I felt nothing, and my loneliness consumed me.

But at last the purpose of the great march became slowly clear to me. And finally with a demon captain to guide us we came to an open field where usually now cattle grazed, and rocky hills were all about. And digging with shadowy hands we quickly delved into the hills, and passed out of the hateful light of the stars and dark moon under the ground, and I have not felt more at home ever, ever in all of eternity than in the belly of that hill of honest rock.

And all about me souls began to utter great cries of lamentation, but my soul was stirred upward a little, for I remembered this hill, and my heart told me that here my own body had been buried centuries before the world’s ending. And with the thought of it in my mind I dug more fervently, for I longed to see again that part of me which I left behind in this happy world, the part of me untouched by the fires below, the part which — O blessing — would break under the weight of infinite suffering. O happy gift of the corporeal! The suffering of my body’s last days seemed now an old friend long estranged, to which if not now I could return, I could at least revisit its footprint.

With a last effort I came to the very center of the hill, and no shade nor demon was visible anywhere near me, for I was alone at the heart of the rock. And I found bones, some dust, but some more fully formed still, rising out of the rock. Slowly they grew, and the dust joined to itself, and became strong, and more dust seemed to come on the wings of a great wind that began to blow about me, and the cave was filled with, not light, but a luminous presence of air and swirling matter. The bones joined one to another, and sinews and blood and flesh appeared slowly before me as I watched, until the form of what had been my form began to appear. And I cried in a loud and awe-filled voice: “Vaticinare de ossibus istis!” For I remembered what once I had read, and forgotten. Just a while longer and the body was complete, and stood before me in the cave, illumined with itself, and it was as strong as the body of Christ had been, and forever youthful, now indestructible. And I loathed it more than I did the demons, for I saw that now it had become like one of us, like a spirit, but weaker, and less able to bear the torments destined for it. But it could never die, just as Satan or God Himself were immortal.

I had hoped to find it beautiful, but though now it had recovered from its death throes it became more ugly to me than any material thing had ever been, and I wished that some worm would dwell in it and consume it, rather than my own trapped soul.

But a trumpet rang behind me, and the voice of some demon whose name I knew not: “Do not be afraid! They shall soon look as though they deserve the inhabitants they shall receive!” And in an instant a great host of us was taken and assembled in the great pasture, and beside each shade its proper body stood, alike to the appearance it had borne in life. But standing by my body felt as though I had come to an altar to wed a stranger who had done me grave injury without regret, but that already my Nakedness was revealed before her.

And as the demons sang the command came forth from one, that we were to assume our forms. I stepped forward as a living man might step into a marsh which must swallow and smother him, and yet preserve his body forever. And after ages I was again a full man, healthy and lithe and well prepared for the judgment my person had long ago received. And I knew this loathsome body was myself, and it would serve its purpose faithfully unto ages without end: consummation in the fire where the worm does not die.

Then at last the demons stood apart from us, and we faced them rank upon rank so that it seemed all the world was assembled there. And one of the higher ranking of them hovered above and said: “Gloria! We now must give you up for a short while as Time is at last put to death, and the Judgment begins. If you hate the beauty of your new bodies, look forward to the final scene of this world’s play, for Beauty is its great theme, and He shall scorch you beyond the power of any of us who hold you, who cherish you.”And hardly knowing what direction we went, all we countless human people began to run, and the demons fell away like fleeing shadows, and ever before us afar off a light grew, and grew, until it became so large and terrible that it filled not only our eyes, but our nostrils and mouths and ears and souls. And it said: “Ephphatha!” but we would not.

Andrew Winter is a senior studying English and History.