The Only Free Man in Hell

I don’t belong here. I didn’t do anything wrong. There’s been some sort of mistake, and I’m pretty sure they know it.

You see, the first thing that happens when you get here is they assign you a torturer. A demon drags you off and sets to work. They flay your skin and press hot needles into your eyes. They drop boiling oil in your ears and take hammers to your teeth. On and on. No breaks, no pauses.

But you’re dead, of course, so when there’s nothing left they just remake you from scratch and start all over.

Everyone down here has a torturer. Except me. I’m the only free man in Hell.

That’s how I know there’s been a mistake.

I never hurt anybody. Never stole anything. Never went to jail. I was just a quiet family man. I don’t belong here.

I can’t find a way out, but I did find a particular room. It was my daughter Emma’s room. Or something like it. I had so many fond memories of that place. Of Emma being a little girl. Of reading bedtime stories and tucking her into bed.

In the room, I found a mirror and when I looked into it I saw my Emma. Not as she was then, but what she’d become since I’d died.

It was nice, seeing my Emma. She’d been distant in my last few months. I assumed she just hadn’t liked seeing me like that, withered away from the cancer. Now I could watch everything that she did. I didn’t have anything else to do.

Emma started going to therapy. Eventually, the therapist asked about me. I figured Emma maybe had some sadness over my death, but she had a different kind of sadness. And she started telling the therapist about things she wasn’t supposed to talk about. Things that were our secret. Worse, she was remembering things all wrong. And the therapist wasn’t helping. They were making it sound bad, like I’d done some terrible thing.

It went on for years. With that therapist egging her on, Emma told my wife. She told my brother and his family. She told strangers. She made me sound like some monster.

And I thought, “Maybe this is my torture after all?”

Then Emma got sick. Same cancer as me. But she wasn’t sad at all. Instead she started doing all this horrific stuff. Drugs. Theft. Violence. Finally, she shot a man and said out loud, “That should be enough,” before putting the gun to her head and pulling the trigger.

I didn’t get it until she was standing right in front of me, together again in that room where we’d had so much fun together. She was smiling so wide. I’d never seen her smile so big before.

That’s when I understood.

You see, I was never a free man.

I was just waiting for my torturer to show up.