“God, is it hot in here, or what?” I asked.

Probably not the most insightful question to ask, because yes, it was hot. My t-shirt was already starting to carry more sweat than usual, particularly in the lower back. I stuffed my hands between my back and my backpack so air could flow through and cool me off, though it didn’t help that the air was hot, too.

I didn’t ask because I wanted to know. I asked because my friends and I had become uncomfortably silent. We’d been hiking down one continuous tunnel for the past hour or so, none of us saying a word. At times it felt like I was walking down the path alone. Our scraping footsteps blended into the sound of one pair of footsteps descending down a dark and lonely tunnel.

Thankfully, they replied.

“Well, duh, it’s hot,” Ashley said. She turned to me, nearly blinding me with her headlamp. “You think you’re the only one sweating like a hog?”

“Ack, Ashley,” I said. “Face forward.”

“Oh. Sorry.” She moved the light away from my face. “Forgot, I guess. Smells like rotten eggs down here.”

Which wasn’t incorrect.

“Sulfur, I think,” Earl said.

Which hopefully was. “Isn’t that poisonous?” I said.

Earl shrugged. “Yeah, I mean, a little.”

“A little? A little poisonous,” Ashley said. “Well is it gonna kill us, smart guy? ‘Cause we should turn back if it is. Puh, a little poisonous.”

Earl took a whiff. “It’s not good, but good thing it stopped, then, huh.”

I smelled to confirm, it did indeed stop. What also stopped was the slow descent down, I realized, as we were walking down a level tunnel. Up ahead, I thought I saw a faint red glow, but I couldn’t be sure. “Hey guys, stop for a minute,” I said.

“Yes, Captain,” Ashley said.

“Switch off your headlamps,” I said, switching off my own.

I heard two clicks, and I had to take a few seconds to try to blink away the afterimages of our bright lights. However, sure enough, the cave wall down the path ahead of us was glowing red, and the source of it seemed to be further down the path to the right.

“You see that?”

“Yeah,” Ashley said. “Freaky.”

We followed the light and the tunnel as it curved around. The red light got brighter, and the end of the tunnel grew in color from red to orange. We turned a sharp corner and found a giant cavern.

It must’ve been about thirty feet high, and it extended far down the cavern, forking off into larger areas. There was a path in front of us, but on either side of the path was a cliff edge. The path kept going, branching off into other paths, like buttes that stretched out to form elevated walkways, some of them with holes eroded underneath like giant walls of wax held too close to an equally giant candle.

Down the cliffs to the cavern floor was fire, or something that looked like it. It had the typical orange glow that illuminated the whole cavern, and certainly seemed to be the source of the heat, but it moved much slower than fire as I knew it. The flames were slow and distressingly calm, like a rolling fog instead of a rushing wind. It didn’t roar like regular fire. It was more of a howl, or a moan.

Ashley walked further out onto the path, her hands on her hips. Without moving too close to the edge, she looked down the cliff face at the fire below. She scratched his chin and looked at Earl and I. “Hey guys, we in hell or something?”

I couldn’t hold back a laugh, but I cut it off; Ashley wasn’t grinning. She looked at Earl and waited.

“What?” he said.

“I’m asking you, genius.” Ashley spread her arms to everything around her. “Are we in hell or what?”

“Are you looking for a yes?” Earl said. “What makes you think this is hell?”

Ashley pointed at the cave floor. “Does that look like regular fire to you? Does it sound like regular fire?” She looked between both of us. “Am I the only one thinking this?”

I raised my hand stupidly. “I thought of that too.”

Earl shrugged. “It’s a lot of heat all in one place. Could be distorting the light from the fire.”

“So you agree it’s fire,” Ashley said. “So what is fire doing down there? Down everywhere?”

“Maybe it’s lava.”

“But it’s burning.”

“Then something’s in the lava.”

“What else would be in lava but lava?”

“I don’t know. I can’t see down that far.”

Ashley threw her hands up. “Okay, the sound then. What’s causing the sound, ‘cause it sounds like the muffled screams of the damned.”

“That’s an oddly specific description,” Earl said. “How would you know what that sounds like?”

“Well, they sound like screams and they’re muffled. The damned thing was a logical extension.”

“Wasn’t anything logical about it, really.”

“Wait,” I said, pausing to listen to the sound again. They did sound like screams, but far away, like we were standing outside of a stadium and couldn’t hear the sound directly. It wasn’t a high and excited sound, either. It was below a superstar-player-entered-the-field cheer, but still above the mean-spirited-booing-for-the-team-that-isn’t-the-home-team jeer. It was uncomfortably in between.

“That’s actually a good description of it, Ashley,” I said. “Like, surprisingly accurate.”

Ashley gestured to me and pursed her lips at Earl. “See? Dustin agrees with me.”

“But I don’t get the damned bit either.”

“Well who asked you, Dustin,” Ashley said, lightly slapping me on the shoulder with the back of her hand. “It’s hell and I’m…” She stared past me with her jaw hanging open. I turned around.

The tunnel we just came out of was gone. There wasn’t even a wall there. The path we were on continued backwards, into yet more paths that branched into yet more areas of the cave.

I looked to my friends to see if they were seeing the same thing I was, but it was pretty clear they were. For a minute, all we could do was give each other dumbfounded glares, glancing between each other and what we thought used to be the entrance.

Earl spoke first. “Huh.”

Ashley’s face grew red and her neck tightened, like she was ready to scream, in a much higher and less muffled fashion than the flames down below. But she breathed, and looked to Earl. “Explain to me again that we’re not in hell. And please,” she said, nearing Earl’s face, “be as logical as possible.”

---

When we’d moved on from trying to explain it, we tried to collectively face the same direction and turn at the same time, in case doing that again would reverse the effect.

When that didn’t work, the logical next step was to search for the tunnel. We started with the main cavern area we were in. There were some paths that led right up to the walls, but none of the walls had tunnel mouths, nor did they feature any sort of hidden lever or button that would reveal such a wall.

Before we moved on, I suggested that the fire was an illusion, and we could simply walk across the space above the fire and access yet more cave walls in hopes of finding a tunnel. My thinking was that if walls in this cavern were prone to magically disappearing, perhaps there were other magical occurrences at work here, too. I also had that one Indiana Jones movie in mind, but I didn’t share that with my friends.

However, unlike Indiana Jones, I decided not to opt for the leap of faith, and instead tested my theory with a cheap plastic pen in my backpack. I tossed the pen out over the edge in hopes it’d skitter across a walkable surface and we’d be fine.

I had nothing to write with anymore, and a little less hope.

We continued on past our starting point further into the cave, reasoning that there must be some other way out, or the tunnel had teleported elsewhere in the cavern. We chose paths with a strategy in mind: at every crossroad, we’d always take a left turn, unless it obviously led to a dead end or a different path obviously led to an exit. Earl said that’s a guaranteed way to solve a maze. It takes forever, but we’d packed for a long hike anyway.

The air didn’t get any less hot, and quickly it became clear that we had to be careful with how much water we drank. The plan was to purify river water, originally, but iodine packets and pots and stoves don’t come in handy when there’s no water to boil.

We trudged along in the heat, the gravel on the paths scraping under our hiking boots. The fire on either side of the path did nothing to encourage me. If exits were prone to disappearing at a moment’s notice, surely they could reappear anywhere. But with no exit or open tunnel anywhere in sight, not even in the cavern ceiling, I couldn’t help but think that exit was gone forever, and we were stuck down there until we ran out of water or out of left turns.

I almost ran into Earl, who had stopped in the middle of the path. I stopped as well, careful not to fall off. “What’s up?”

“Look,” he said, pointing ahead.

Further down the cavern, a rock lay up ahead at a crossroad. It looked like a narrow pyramid with a square section cut out neat the top. A red figure sat on the rock, with something like legs on its bottom and a head at the top.

We looked among each other. I said it first. “A person.”

We bolted for the rock.

As we got closer, it was easier to make out the details. The person sat at the top of what looked like a lifeguard chair made out of crudely shaped stone. This person almost looked like the devil, with the horns and tail and trident and everything I’d expect out of a cartoon depiction, until I noticed his face was strikingly human. In fact, his demon-skin, demon-horns, and demon-tail looked to be made out of red rubber, like he was wearing a large red rubber onesie. He looked like the type of guy that stood on a street corner and spun signs advertising a mattress store, with a costume and everything.

He was slouched in his chair, resting his head on his hand and mumbling something when we approached. When he saw us, he lifted his head, his arm falling limp at his side.

“People,” he said. He blinked. “Oh wow, people.” He stared at us, studying our faces and our clothing.

I stood there, wondering if he was going to say something first, but I decided to go for it. “Excuse me, do you know the way out of here?”

“Oh, there’s no way out of here. I—actually, no, there’s an exit here, I think.” He looked around. “It’s somewhere around here. I can’t remember which direction, though.”

Ashley stepped forward, craning her neck upward. “Hey, don’t play stupid. We need to get out of here.”

“I’m sorry, I really can’t remember.” He stretched out his legs and yawned. “I’ve been sitting here for too long. I get so bored, I can’t remember much of anything anymore.”

A vein stuck out in Ashley’s neck, and I wondered if she would’ve had Earl yank that guy down from off his chair and get the truth out of him if his chair wasn’t so high off the ground and hard to climb due to the smoothed rock. Then I wondered if the chair was like that specifically to deter people like Ashley.

She looked at me with a clenched jaw, clearly under the impression that this guy was no help. I figured maybe he was still of some use to us. I looked up at him. “Say, where are we?”

“Oh, hell,” he said. “Yeah, uh, welcome to hell.” He scooted forward on his chair. “So, what’s your guys’ story? How’d you get down here still in one piece? Most people float down here as spirits.”

Earl stood with his hands on his pockets. “Are you supposed to be Satan?”

“Nah, just one of his demons. Anyway, how did you guys get down here?” he said, setting down his trident and leaning forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I’ve been here for an eternity and it’s so boring. Tell me about something. Talk.”

“How about you talk first?” Ashley crossed her arms. “Prove we’re in hell. Prove it.”

“Prove it? Eh, well, whatever.” The demon frowned, then hid his face behind his hands. Scales poked out of his red rubber suit, replacing the bright red rubber with a dark, blood-red crust. His hands and feet morphed into slender, bony claws, and he revealed his face, red and crusty as his skin, his jaw hinging unnaturally wide with long and wiry teeth. His pupils were sharpened to slits and his red eyes blazed. He screeched, making my skin prickle on its underside and my heart tighten. We ducked, covering our ears.

Instantly, the scales and the claws and teeth shrunk back into him, and he became his red rubber suit self. He rested his chin on his palm. “Now you talk. Tell me what happened.”

Ashley uncrossed her arms. I looked at her and Earl. This was real. This was actually hell.

I stepped forward, clasping my hands in the hopes I’d look innocent and non-sinful. “There must be some mistake,” I said. “We were on a hike through the mountains, found this cave, explored it, and ended up down here. We never actually died, though. We’re still alive. We just need to get back up, is all.”

The demon raised his eyebrows. “How do you know you’re not dead? You’re in hell, after all.”

I looked at Earl. He looked about as lost as I felt. “I’m pretty sure we’re not dead. I feel like I’d remember it. Earl?”

“We seem fairly not-dead to me.”

“Ashley?”

Ashley ran her fingers over the bottom of her shirt. “Well, we are in hell.”

“That’s my point,” the demon said. “Maybe you died and came here and you’re not aware of it yet? Happens to some people. They think they’re dreaming being dead. But memory loss before a blackout is common. Not many people will remember being hit by a bus and dying on impact.” His red rubber feet swung back and forth as he sat. “You folks think there’s any reason you’re down here?”

I sighed, but I asked to make sure. “What do you mean?”

“Any major felonies committed? Mass murders, molestations, rape, animal cruelty, any of that?”

I’m not going to say I know my friends cover-to-cover, but I’d been around them long enough to know the likelihood of any of those being true. So when they both said no along with me, I believed them.

The demon nodded. “Any misdemeanors, then? Have you taken candy from a baby? Did you laugh at a 9/11 meme? Ever worn crocs? Even once?”

That I couldn’t be sure of. I’d never done those things, but I looked to my friends, and they looked to me.

Ashley looked back, about as confused as I was. Then she looked down at the ground and muttered, “Crocs are actually comfortable—”

The demon winced. “Ooh.”

“—indoor shoes!” Ashley said. “I know well enough not to wear those in public.”

“But you still wore them,” the demon said.

Ashley crossed her arms and mumbled something.

Earl raised his hand. “The meme thing. But it was a down syndrome joke.”

“Yeah, that’ll do it.” The demon turned to me, putting his hands on his hips. “How about you?”

I stopped before denying doing anything wrong, because it’s not like I was perfect. I do know better than to allow crocs anywhere within a hundred feet of me in case they were to somehow find their way onto my feet via some freak accident. But there wasn’t anything—oh.

“Yeah, arson.”

The demon nodded. “That’ll do it. I mean, property’s never been such a big deal, dust to dust and all that. Pain, suffering, and death were the big three. But it’s still a misdemeanor. As long as no one was in it, right?”

“Nope.”

“Good. But still kind of bad. Might be the reason you got here, just saying.” He spread his arms, looking among us. “Say, while you’re here, want to hang around for a bit more? It’s kind of lonely here.”

“Can you make an exit appear?” Ashley said.

The demon rubbed his arm. “Well, no, I can’t do that.”

“We need to find one,” Ashley said. She waved us over to a path on the left. “Come on, guys.”

Earl and I followed. I looked back a few times at the demon, but he said nothing. He slouched on his seat, watching us leave.

---

I stopped counting left turns.

We stopped turning left anyway after long enough. Earl had reasoned that with how many caverns there were, it was possible we’d been going in circles. Whenever possible, then, we’d go straight. However, I was so often struck with déjà vu, I could’ve sworn we were going in circles anyway.

I watched Ashley’s legs drag. Earl focused on leading us. I focused on legs, the sound the boots made scraping the path, the swish of blue jeans.

We’d been walking for too long. Turn after turn after turn and nothing. No exits, no tunnels. Just more path and more crossroads. Our faces were glazed over with sweat, and our clothes were drenched in it. My backpack was already starting to make me feel top-heavy, even though I’d already left behind my sleeping bag and our tent.

We reached a fork in the road. “Stop,” Ashley said, pulling away the straps of her backpack and letting it drop to the ground. “Water.”

“Say no more,” I said, dropping my own. I meant it, too. Talking meant losing water. Already, the saliva in my mouth felt thick. I turned around and pulled out my canteen from the side pouch and popped off the lid, downing the little water I had left.

I smacked my mouth and sighed. I stuffed the canteen in my bag in the silly hopes we’d find water down here. I sat down, lowering my upper body to the ground and resting. “See anything?”

Nobody said anything. I assumed it meant they saw nothing. I turned my head and looked at them, except I saw nothing.

I sat upright. Ashley and Earl were gone. I stood up and spun, searching for them, but they were nowhere in sight.

For some dumb reason, I figured even though I couldn’t see them, they might be able to hear me. “Ashley?” I called, even though it strained my voice. “Earl?”

No response. “Ashley? Earl? Where are you?” I looked around. I still couldn’t find them on any path in sight.

My eyes wandered along the side of the path in front of me, and the very real possibility dawned on me that they might’ve fallen off the path.

I dropped to my knees and crawled to the edge, peeking my head over the edge. They weren’t there. I checked every other cliff face nearby. Nothing.

“Ashley!” I said, my throat scraping the sound out. “Earl!”

They were gone. Nowhere to be found. Their backpacks weren’t even there. I could only assume they were taken away by hell magic.

I felt a headache coming on. This hell was making my life worse at every turn... but I guess that’s why it’s called hell.

Touché, hell.

Also fuck you, hell.

---

The demon was right. The arson honestly wasn’t that big of a deal.

I ran away from the orphanage at a young age. I took refuge in some decrepit foreclosed house on the other side of town. The wooden walls of the house were old and grey, barely any paint still clinging to the wood. It lacked water and electricity and a roof in some places, it had barely any windows left, and it leaned like it suffered from major depression. I grew up there with no food and no parents to care for me. I lay awake every night, scared that someone would break in and steal something, though the only stealable thing in the house was me, and I imagined that if someone stole me, that maybe at least they could be my father or mother and end my crippling loneliness.

Besides that, I had a normal childhood. I had ice cream sometimes and all that, though that was only a treat reserved for the special occasion when someone dropped it on the ground at the local boardwalk down by the beach. No matter the color of the ice cream, it always tasted like rocky road.

I still made it through school with the help of some helpful neighbors and my best friends Ashley and Earl, but I grew up despising the house. It wasn’t solely the run-down nature of it, but that was certainly a part of it. The house was empty in every sense of the word. Empty rooms, empty walls, empty pipes, empty holes in the ceiling. It was poison, is what it was.

So when I was a teenager, I went down to the local arson store and the rest is history. It was a miserable house, so really it was an act of mercy.

The thing I hated most about that house was feeling empty while standing on the inside, where I had nothing else to listen to but my own thoughts, and I hate to think about my own thoughts.

This is why I hated hell. The heat was tolerable. The thoughts were not. They were hard reminders that yes, I was alone, thank you, brain. Ashley and Earl’s voices were much more comforting than my own, which is why I couldn’t give up looking for them.

I plodded along the endless path, my legs feeling like jelly and my tongue feeling numb and prickly from being so dry. My backpack was abandoned somewhere behind me. Or in front of me. Who knows. Direction had no meaning anymore. Paths changed as soon as I turned around. I gave up on going straight only or left only—anywhere worked. Anywhere that looked new, like I’d not yet been down that path yet and still had a chance.

I felt too dizzy to walk and stumbled to my knees to crawl. The gravel on the path was just sharp enough to dig into my hands and my knees through the jeans, but I kept going. After a few minutes of this, the pain was too much and I stopped to rest.

In fact, I stopped to give up. If I was to die there—if I was already dead there—then I had no chance anyway. I lay flat on my back and looked up at the ceiling.

However, the demon blocked my view of it. He stood over me, his face framed by his red rubber suit. Up close like this, I noticed his horns were made of felt, and they jiggled a little as he spoke. “Hey,” he said.

I closed my eyes and tried to speak, but I had no energy left. All that came out was a wheeze that I could only hope could be interpreted as a request for water.

“Right, sorry, here you go.” He wrapped his arm around me and helped me sit up. He sat down next to me, our feet dangling over the edge of the cliff. I looked down at the fire, which was still howling, still slow. I leaned back, still afraid of falling off.

“You know what that sound is?” the demon said, nodding to the flames below. “Muffled screams of the bored. I mean, they’re damned too, but they’re damn bored, you know what I mean?”

He poked me in the shoulder.

“Eh? You get it? It’s… Come on, it’s the first joke I’ve told in forever.”

“Ha,” I croaked, hoping that humouring him would convince him to help me.

He looked at me, gasping. “Oh, sorry. Forgot. Here.” He handed me a canteen. My canteen. I grabbed it and chugged, feeling the cool and crisp water stream down my throat. I drank, not stopping till the glass was empty. I ran my tongue around my teeth to get everything nice and wet again. My headache started to fade.

He smiled. “So as I was saying, those are muffled screams of the bored, right? ‘Cause, like, they’re damned, but—”

“You had these magical canteen power all along?” I said. “And you overheard our conversation earlier? The whole ‘muffled screams of the damned’ thing?” I pointed to his chair behind us. “And you’ve been messing with the paths and exits? And you made me lose my friends? What the hell is wrong with you, man?”

He raised a finger, slowly, and shrunk back. “ ‘What the hell’?. That’s a good one—”

“Stop,” I said, resisting strangling him. “Why are you doing this? Why are you messing with me—with us like this? Where are my friends?”

“They’re still around, all right?” the demon said, holding up his hands, as if he knew I was ready to choke him. “They’re just lost, like you were. You were never in danger. You’re all okay. Well, sort of.”

I waited for him to continue. Patiently.

He clasped his hands together and slouched. “I’m Satan, all right? I’m him. I’m just tired of being angry and taking out that anger on other people. All I was doing was playing around with the definition of hell. Dangled hope in front of your face and took it away, for both you and your friends. Did it work? Was it hell?”

I seethed, trying to control my breathing. “Wasn’t pleasant.”

“Okay, I’m sorry, all right? Look, I’m bored. It’s been an eternity.” Satan’s shoulders sagged. “I’m thinking of just calling the hell thing off. I mean, God’s not gonna forgive me—I’m literally Satan—but I’m kind of done.” He shrugged. “Either way, you’re dead. You and your friends.”

“Wait, what?”

“Yeah. Cave-in situation. Thought I’d mix it up by making you think you never died.”

I said nothing, staring across at the far wall to avoid looking at what I knew then was the damned. On the one hand, I didn’t want to be dead. On the other hand, at least I had some closure knowing that I had died. Supposedly. Whether Satan was telling the truth or not was still unclear, though allegedly the embodiment of sin and evil wasn’t working in his favor.

“So I’m dead.”

He nodded. “Right. You and your friends. Anyway, want to do something else?”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. My headache still wasn’t gone. “Like what?”

“Playing cards,” Satan said, twiddling his thumbs. “I’m thinking of doing some restructuring. These folks have been here forever. I want to start picking and choosing now. Like, the mass murderers, yeah, they can stay being bored forever, but I’m thinking of like a Hell Lite for the misdemeanors or something. And we can all hang out and play cards or something. Want to join? I mean, you’re dead anyway, so.”

I sighed. Satan seemed to mean well, so he wouldn’t be that bad to hang around. If anything, it’d mean I still had hope for finding a way out. “As long as my friends are all right.”

“Yeah, one’s over there,” Satan said, pointing to a distant figure lying on the ground. “The other’s around the corner the other way. We can go get them.”

I nodded. “That’d be good.” I also no longer felt thirsty, and the heat was tolerable once again. A perk of being dead and knowing it, perhaps.

Satan and I walked down the path to help Earl, chatting on the way. Talking to someone was good any day, even if it was Satan.