Letters From Hades Read Online Free PDF

had not accepted the Son into their hearts, the Son being the only door to salvation. It didn’t matter, apparently, that they had lived and died many thousands of years before the Son came to earth. Just like unbaptized infants, who don’t live long enough to accept the Son, banished here even if they would have been very much inclined to worship Him had they only had the chance. (I remember Swedenborg writing that unbaptized babies go immediately to Heaven. I’m sorry, but that’s just wishful thinking.) Though I hadn’t stopped to think that prehistoric people might dwell in the netherworld, in school I had been told that aborigines and pygmies and other primitive peoples who had never been exposed to belief in the Father and the Son were still damned…not so much by predestination, but simply due to bad timing, the luck of the draw. However, the Father was not without some dregs of mercy, as in the case of Muslims and Jews; we were told that those who had lived before the arrival of the Son would not suffer nearly so much as those who had come after the Son but had turned their faces from Him. These souls would not be hunted by Angels, captured and tortured by the various tribes of Demons. But they would spend eternity in this nightmare realm, sentenced to immortality…denied the presence of their Creator, in His Heaven.
    Still, the hominids frightened me as much as the Demons had when I first saw them. Seeing so primitive an ancestor of your species, so very animal-like but unmistakably human-like, is like having a glimpse of yourself as you will look one day, old and waxen in your coffin. It seems a violation of time. Yet another perversity, another blasphemy against Nature. But Nature is the Father’s raped and debased lover in this place, like a respectable wife who behind closed doors is forced to endure her husband’s sadomasochistic fetishes.

    Day 35.

    I  am reluctant to leave the forest. If I am to discover any part of Hell in which I might be relatively safe from the Demons and the Angels, it seems it would be here. But despite my solitary ways at the university, I am beginning to at last feel a lonely desolation. I have seen a few other humans like myself openly wandering or creeping stealthily through these woods, but have no more than exchanged a nod with them. Not even a smile. Earlier today a Native American came running out of the underbrush and nearly collided with me. In fact, he raised a crude hatchet as if to cleave my skull down the middle. But when he saw I was a man more or less like himself, he darted past me and vanished into the forest. I changed my aimless direction sharply after that, in case I came face-to-face, next, with whatever it was that pursued him…
    Later.
    I spoke too soon about the comfort and shelter of these woods. There has been a fire, sweeping through the forest, and I imagine it was this that the Native American fled from. I didn’t know at first if it were purposely set by Demons or Angels flushing out game like myself, or if it were a natural occurrence (can such a thing be innocently called an act of You-Know-Who, now?). I suspected it might be natural, because I’d noticed a change in the high ceiling of clouds that forever smother the sky. They were blacker, heavier, more heaped-looking, and yet there was a reddish glow on their swollen bellies. It might have been the reflected glow of the forest fire, and the ash that fell like light snow could have been from the fire as well…but there was also a rumbling in the earth beneath my feet, occasionally a startling, deep boom like a thunderstorm raging in a subterranean world. I came to suspect that there was a volcano beyond the thick, obscuring trees.
    I tried to keep ahead of the smoke that increasingly hazed the woods, but found it difficult; the forest all around me grew ghostly, misted, and I ran faster, faster, branches lashing my face, smoke beginning to sting my lungs. Once I even heard crackling ahead