Danielle's Inferno Read online

  “No! Pudding, help me!”

  “There isn’t much I can do, Danielle.”

  “But Treachery? That’s not me. Who on Earth did I betray?”

  Panic filled my chest and my teeth began to chatter as I felt the frozen ice start to climb up my legs. I scrambled to escape, but I couldn’t move.

  “That I can show you,” said Pudding as she looked over her shoulder.

  A young girl suddenly appeared then next to the cat. She had a dark brown ponytail on her head and held a spiral notebook over her chest. She looked so familiar, but it took me a long minute to recognize that the girl was me. I was about thirteen.

  “We were supposed to be a singer. We wrote lots of songs, and we promised that we would be a big star when we grew up,” said the young me, all innocence and youthful.

  My face screwed under my disgust. The ice was crawling up my shins now, freezing every pore of my bare legs. My stomach lurched and flopped with anger. I used to be so very hopeful, and now, that naivety was what put me in Hell.

  “Why Danielle? We were supposed to be more,” she said.

  “This is ridiculous,” I said.

  “But why?”

  Anger flooded my face, and I could almost hear the rush of blood. I willed the fire down to my legs, but it stayed behind my eyes. I started crying those rage tears every woman hated.

  “Because, you little moron, life doesn’t work that way. You write some songs, you get a gig or two at a coffee house, but no one comes. No one cares. Thousands of dollars in college debt and rejection, that’s what our little dream got us. No screaming fans. No concert posters with our face on it. Just a whole lot of nothing. Nobody cares about the stupid songs you wrote in that damn journal.”

  The young, stupid version of me looked heart-broken as her mouth fell open. Water filled her eyes and her lip quivered.

  “Y-y-you…you still shouldn’t have given up, Danny,” she said stammering.

  “Don’t call me DANNY!”

  “But, it’s what mom…”

  The anger exploded from me without hesitation. Years of my struggle bubbled up inside me. After all, it was me I was yelling at. There was no reason to hold back. I might as well tell her what we were in for. Life wasn’t like it was in the movies.

  “You have no idea and won’t until you are me. A dream is a beautiful thing until no one wants it but you. Then, you have a fucking choice. Either you keep trying, keep putting your bleeding heart out there with no money, or you grow up and get a real job. My job at my office may not be anything special, but it pays the bills and feeds me. I can’t believe I’m in the bottom of Hell because of you!”

  She burst into tears, and I looked down at my legs to see that the freeze had made it up past my knees. I strained my calves trying to move. The tingle numbness of cold was leaking in and telling my feet they weren’t going anywhere. With a frustrated grunt, I reached down to try to pull my legs free with my hands. Still, they wouldn’t budge.

  Suddenly, Pudding was there at my feet, looking very solemn. She motioned with her head for me to look back up to where the teenage Danielle was standing. The younger me was still there weeping, but she was weeping into the chest of a woman. She had raven hair, like mine, and the look on her face was accusatory. That face I knew all too well.

  “Mom?” I squeaked.

  “I never knew you to be cruel, Danny,” she said sternly.

  “Mom?”

  Tears forced themselves to the surface. My mother comforted the young me by stroking her hair. Teenage me buried her face in our mom’s shoulder. Her chest heaved up and down with the sobs.

  “Where were you, Danny? I waited for you, you know,” Mom said evenly.

  Everything she needed to say was in her eyes. She was always good at that, conveying the unsayable with a look. I remembered how long she was sick. The length of time she took to wither away had exhausted me at the time. That fact stung me now as I stared into her watery eyes. I hadn’t been there when she passed. There was a deadline I had to meet, one more important than hers at the time. Shame consumed me like it did every time I remembered her.

  “Mom, I…I’m so sorry. I meant to be there. There was this deadline…I thought…I thought I had time,” I managed to spit out, but the words fell short.

  They always did fall short, even when they were only said to the shower every morning, even when they were only thoughts in my mind every night. I tried to steady myself, but I started crying uncontrollably. The ice was freezing over my thighs now, yet my face was hot with tears.

  “It was nice you came for the funeral, honey.”

  “Mom, I’m so sorry. I’m so so so…”

  I was cut off by the sudden appearance of a man next to my mother. He had sandy blond hair that was shaggy around his ears. The man dressed in flannel and denim and had blue grey eyes that pierced me from afar. His presence made me gasp.

  “Daddy?”

  “Hi, Bug,” he said.

  “Daddy, but why?”

  He looked down at his shoes as if ashamed.

  “I miss you, you know. You promised to come see me, but you never do, Bug. I don’t mean to be a pest and all, but I’m all alone out there at the lake house. Every summer I get out our fishing gear. I clean the rods and oil the reels. I think, this is the year she’s going to come. But you never do, Bug. I miss you.”

  “Daddy, I have…I’m…busy. My job it’s so stressful. I just don’t have time. I call.”

  “You do call, Bug. You do. I just miss your face.”

  I looked at the group of people in front of me and felt ashamed. My father hung his head and shifted from foot to foot, trying not to show his disappointment. My mother held my younger self, comforting her the way I never comforted her in her last days. The teenage me wept like a baby at my cruelty. I couldn’t help but wonder when I had become so callused and cold. When had this happened? When had I lost myself?

  “Daddy, I’m sorry. I always meant to.”

  “I know. You have your big job and all.”

  He looked so heart-broken trying to be understanding. The tears started again, and they just wouldn’t stop. It was like an avalanche of water poured out of my eyes. My face, which was hot with the sorrow of it all, started freezing as the hot tears began to crystalize on my cheeks. The ice had crept up to my stomach, and my very organs felt cold.

  That’s when I noticed him. Not my dad or Brutus, but the colossally beautiful, frozen man just behind my family. He was smiling. Slowly, his eyes opened, and he sat up straight. His smile ended my tears because the maliciousness in it was so frightening. He laughed then, and it rumbled the very walls around us. The golden locks fell around his shoulders.

  The freeze covered my breasts, and I felt the chill around my heart.

  “Who is that, Pudding?”

  “Who do you think?” she asked without a whiff of sarcasm in her voice.

  “No,” I said, only glimpsing the idea of what was next.

  Lucifer raised his enormous hands over my family, and with one giant motion, he crushed them beneath his palms. One second, they were there, and the next, they were bloody stains.

  “No!”

  Before I could react, there I stood before me. By that, I mean the exact mirror image of me was standing face to face with me, looking very sad and serious. Then, a terrible grin spread across my mirror image’s face. Her mouth, my mouth, spread ghoulishly like a cracked mirror from ear to ear. Had I ever looked at anyone that way? Had I ever shown someone a side of me so evil?

  “Are you happy, Danielle?” asked the demon me.

  “Give me my family back!”

  “Are you happy, Danielle? Answer.”

  There was no relenting. She was a statue of mocking, and I was frozen in place. A captive audience to whatever this was.

  “No! I’m not. I hate my life. Is that what you want to hear?”

  “I don’t want to hear anything.”

  “I hate everything about my life. N
othing has worked out like it was supposed to. Please, don’t let me die this way. I just do what everyone does. I survive,” I said.

  “But others smile. Others laugh. Others live,” said the Lucifer me.

  “Please don’t let me die!’

  “You are already dead. You have been for years. You breathe and eat and shit like everyone else, but the truth is your soul is dead. You drift through the world without feeling anything. That’s why you are here. Your treachery stole the light inside of you. You betrayed the most important people in your life, and it killed your soul.”

  “I want to live!”

  “Do you now? That’s cute.”

  The frozen ice was closing around my neck. Breathing became hard and real panic started settling into my body. I knew panic attacks, and this was one of the worst I’d ever felt. My body wanted to buck, but it couldn’t move inside the ice prison.

  “I want to live. Please. I want to live! I can be better. I want to sing again!” I said in raspy breaths.

  “Let’s just see how much of that is really true,” Lucifer said.

  The freeze overtook me. Something seemed to kick me in the chest, tightening my heart in a vice. My whole body twitched and revolted against the ice. I screeched like an animal and clawed at my frozen prison like a mad woman. Nothing did any good. I shut my eyes and could hear nothing but the banging of my heart in my head. That’s all there was until I heard her voice.

  “Danielle?”

  It was Pudding. The Hellcat’s voice wasn’t sarcastic. It was sad and pleading and gentle.

  “Danielle, reach up. It’s not too late. Don’t listen to it. Danielle, all you have to do is reach up. Try. Please, dear God, try.”

  I tried to open my mouth to say something, but the ice had frozen over my face. Frosty ice cycles entered into my nostrils and spilled down my throat, choking me with the muffled scream I couldn’t let out. There was nothing but ice. I was in Hell, and all I could feel was cold.

  “It isn’t over, Danielle. Reach up. Try.”

  My ears were frozen over. How could I hear her?

  “Reach up, Danielle. Reach up. There is still a chance. You can do it.”

  The world darkened bit by bit. A terrible tremor moved about all of us like something was angry, furious enough to quake the earth and Hell below. My energy drained away from me. Everything inside me told me to give up, to sleep. Falling was everything right in the world. What was the point? Nothing was up there to reach for.

  “Don’t sleep. Try, Danielle. Please try. Please don’t give up.”

  Her voice sounded like it was crying. A cat crying? Did cats cry?

  Everything went black, but I tried. I tried to reach up. My frozen fingers rose to touch something I wasn’t sure was there. Would anything touch me back? Would it matter at this point? Who knew, but I tried. At least I could say I tried. Even if it was the last thing I did, I would try.

  11

  Poof

  I awoke to a beeping rhythm and a very dry mouth. Something was stuck in my nose and a tube made cool air leak into my nostrils. It took several blinks and a few seconds before I could focus on anything in particular.

  I was in a warm bed, and there were machines all around me. Judging by the wallpaper with a floral pattern and the generic landscape painting under the television, I was in a hospital room. An IV was plugged into my hand along with a number of other tubes coming from various areas of my body.

  No ice, no Hell, and no demons. I was alive, tits and all. Relief flooded my body in a warm, crashing wave.

  A light snore came from a recliner next to me, and I looked over to see my Dad sleeping. He looked a little wrecked with a few extra lines on his face than I remembered. His body was folded in an odd way as he snoozed away next to me. He let out a sudden snort, and I laughed out loud. My vision blurred with tears as I suppressed a hysterical giggle behind bandaged palms.

  Never had I been so glad to see anyone in my life. Never had I been so happy to breathe. I laid there, breathing and watching him sleep, for an unknown amount of time. The tears eventually stopped flowing, and I let them dry warm on my face.

  “Daddy?”

  The snoring turned into a few more snorts as my father woke up. I smiled when those thirsty eyes of his focus on me. In a quick, desperate motion, he leaped from the chair and hugged me roughly.

  “Bug? You’re okay!”

  “Daddy, it’s you? You’re okay?”

  “Of course, I am. I’m not the one in the hospital.”

  All of the sudden, a buzzing sound interrupted our reunion. It sounded like an alarm of some sort. My dad jumped back with his hands in the air like he was getting arrested.

  “Oh, I think I’m on one of your tube or sensors or something.”

  “I don’t care. Hug me again,” I said.

  Tears streamed down my face as I grabbed my father and hugged him tighter. Nurses rushed in with a middle-aged doctor in tow. Despite my firm grip, they manage to separate me from my dad. He moved to the side and held my hand while the doctor grabbed my chart.

  “You should take it easy there, Miss,” said the doctor. “You were technically dead for a while.”

  “You’re telling me I was clinically dead?” I asked.

  “Yes, that is what we are telling you. You left us for a whole three minutes and sixty-six seconds.”

  “It seemed like so much longer though,” I said.

  “Come again?”

  “How did I die?”

  “Severe cardiac arrest. It is unusual with a woman of your age, but it happens. Have you been drinking heavily or taking any illegal substances we should know about?” the doctor asked.

  “What? No,” I said.

  “Sometimes, it’s genetic.”

  “Her…mother…she had a condition…” Dad started.

  “Doctor, tell me how I came back,” I said, interrupting him.

  I didn’t want get into Mom’s story. My heart couldn’t take it. Not yet.

  The nurses twitched a little. One of the younger ones looks antsy as if she really wanted to ask something. An older nurse next to her whispered something inaudible. The doctor hushed the others and continued.

  “That is actually something we’d like to know. We about gave you up for dead quite frankly. Then suddenly, poof, you started breathing again. You came back. You were unconscious for a while, but alive. Just…poof.

  “Poof? I died for three minutes and sixty-six seconds, and your only explanation for why I came back is poof?”

  “Well, it’s not so much an explanation as…”

  “Poof?” I asked with a thick layer of sarcasm. This guy was unbelievable.

  “To be honest, there isn’t a medical explanation for how you came back to us. The paramedic’s called it. They stopped working on you. We were just wondering if maybe you remembered your experience at all. Some people see a light in a tunnel or claim to have out-of-body experiences. Did anything of that nature happen? Do you remember anything?”

  “So, you want me to try to remember the poof? Really?” I said, feeling the anger fill my veins with much-needed warmth. “You medical professionals want me to tell you what my poof was? Is that a medical term?”

  “Okay, I think my Danielle needs some rest now. If you will excuse us, please,” Dad said, stepping in to save the day.

  “Yeah, I need to go back to the tunnel and follow my guiding light because…you know…poof,” I said with enough dark sarcasm to make Pudding proud.

  Dad led the nurses and doctor out of the hospital room and shut the door behind him. He pulled up the recliner he’d been sleeping on next to my bed. My arms were crossed angrily over my chest, but I allowed him to take one hand.

  “Can you believe those guys?” I asked.

  “I know I know. But honey, we’ve got to tell people something. We’ve got to talk about what happened to you. I’m getting calls from news media, bloggers, and all sorts of people. They want to know what happened. It was all ov
er the news. Do you remember anything?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said with a long sigh. “I remember every bit of it in vivid technicolor. But nobody’s going to believe it when they hear the truth.”

  “You might want to give them the benefit of the doubt. People might be more open than you think. They’ll want to hear what really happened to you.”

  “I don’t know, Daddy. I mean, maybe I should just stick to the poof light at the end of the tunnel story. It’s more believable that what actually happened.”

  “Try it on me. I’ll be your barometer,” Dad said with a hopeful smile.

  “You sure you won’t think I’m crazy?”

  “I’m sure. You’re my baby girl. I believe you whole-heartedly, Bug.”

  I took in another deep breath and let it out. Breathing meant good oxygen could steel my body for everything. Hopefully, that meant unloading a crazy ass story to your father. I looked him square in eye and dove into the deep end.

  “When I died, a bitchy Hellcat, named Pudding, came to me and led me through the nine circles of Hell using cat shit. Demons kept trying to serve me Poors Light because it is the official sponsor of Hell. There were weird cat demons in Gucci, and a three-headed dog, and TV evangelists that made marshmallows taste like nutmeg. When I got to the final level, a super hunky Satan tried to freeze me in ice because I wasn’t good to you and mom and me, but I fought my way back here with Pudding’s help.

  “Ummmm…”

  “And I saw Hitler. Well, he was a tree. It was a Hitler tree. And he got pecked by big breasted bird things. And there was a woman who was basically a hamster. And I think everyone in my office saw my boob.”

  I paused to check in with Dad. He had this “I’ve made a mistake” look on his face. He was both trying to believe me and trying not to be afraid I lost my marbles.

  “Daddy? Daddy, say something.”

  “I mean…”

  “Daddy, do you believe me?”

  “Sweetheart, I am thinking we should just tell everyone the poof story.”

  I took a deep breath and nodded. Hearing myself was weird. Even I wouldn’t have believed me. If I didn’t want to get rolled up in bubble wrap and sent an asylum, it was best to go with poof.