The Hell of Dementia
Ashet Among the Meadows of Asphodel
Tap, tap, tap.
The gray figure in the hot steam pushed against the barrier with its broken fingers, unaware that its tapping hand long ago had worn its digits down to stubs.
Tap, tap, tap.
Ashet could sense the barrier. No one crossed into it and came back again, but the mind worms in his crushed skull didn't care what no one did and didn't do. Nada commanded. They obeyed. Ashet's form bulged forward as he rolled toward the barrier, his infected body roiling with mind worms. Millions filled his body. Inside the barrier were billions of souls ready to be harvested by Nada for the Holy Father.
Nada would need them to overwhelm the profane gates of that vile city. These were the souls who spent their lives scheming, manipulating, and conniving. They had died of old age and dementia. Most had died feeble of mind and body, drooling into a blanket and unable to wipe their face or their cheeks. Humans were pathetic and disgusting.
Most people in the Dead Lands ended up captured through the loss of their cognitive faculties. Great men and women, all brought low by senescence and living out the remaining years a burden to their families, souls trapped by dementia that could not reason its way to that cursed cross. They rubbed shoulders with the low—men and women they would have crossed the street to avoid in life. Now, everyone bumped aimlessly against each other endlessly. The only communication between them was wails and giggles, madness and insanity.
While the Holy Father’s plan was brilliant, it came with a cost. Their soft brains were useless to the Dead Lands as much down here as they ended their lives up there.
He sensed the impulse to roll forward against his will. His body tensed and undulated as his suit creased as he moved toward the barrier. He tried to resist, but he had no power against Nada’s control of him.
The worms forced him through the barrier. He felt the invisible wall squeeze against him, pushing broken bones out through his torn suit pockets and shirt sleeves.
Pain seared his torn skin, tore at his broken nerve endings, and ripped away at his ligaments until, with an audible pop, he burst through. It shouldn't have been possible. No demon had entered the fields of Asphodel. If I can get in, maybe I can get out.
No sooner had he thought of freedom than the mind worms fled him. All of them. His one singular remaining purpose was gone. They swarmed the demented souls who never even registered the flood of worms spreading out from him like a wave of black bats. One by one, they entered into a new body, and Nada roared triumphantly from the other side while Ashet's lumpy form rocked back and forth in a divot made by the hot sand around him.
"Come to me, my children." Nada's voice carried in it a pleasure of power and promise.
Nothing happened.
The demented grinding teeth in the distance, and several wept uncontrollably, but they had been doing that before he had entered the barrier.
Nada beat on the barrier with her fat fists. Her curly brown hair bounced with her rage. "Come to me now, my children. You will obey your mother."
After several minutes of slamming her fists, Nada abruptly turns her head. Her eyes grow cold, dark, and hard. Her face, moments before, puffy with rage, turns away with no emotion. Not even cold distance. She says nothing, but takes her army on, leaving Ashet with the insane on the sandy meadows of Asphodel.
A lumbering soul, a woman, comes by giggling and stumbles against him. She runs away giddy, but her reaction attracts the attention of others. He's novel in a bland eternity. Soon, he's being kicked quickly across the meadows, sounds of his squishy interior spilling out in squirting splashing across the sand. As he lands, sand enters his suit, grit getting under his skin and into his bones and organs.
New agony rose within him as he was sifted and scattered. One set of hands gripped him, trying to pick him up, but failed, tearing chunks of him away. Another set grabbed hold, jerking away more of him as the hands gleefully laughed as they threw him across the hot landscape.
He landed hard, his body flying in every direction, leaving only a smaller core.
His suit was ripped open, leaving him exposed to every mad hand and foot that came along to explore this new thing that had entered their world. Nothing new came here.
He was transferred from one hand to another. He could sense weight shedding from who he was as he grew lighter and lighter, until he noticed he seemed to weigh almost nothing at all. If he were dropped to the ground, he would fall like a feather.
Instead, he ended up in the hands of a frail old lady missing all of her teeth. She picked him up and put his remains into her mouth, gumming him around, grinding him down to a nub, before spitting him out onto the ground.
Ashet lay there in the spittle, sizzling, sounding like a wailing, on the hot, steamy ground, as he slowly evaporated into negation.