Hell is always painted red.
Why is that? What about our minds conjures landscapes of cracked earth and simmering fires? Fire is life. Fire is the light in the darkness, the only thing that keeps madness at bay. Though it turns the walls and caverns around me into menacing, flickering places, without it I would be trapped in something worse than Hell – I would be trapped in darkness. If we have learned only one thing from horror movies, it should not be that to be alone is death. It should not be to avoid graveyards at night. It should not be never split up. No, the one lesson we bring away from those silly constructions of celluloid and determination is this: everything is more terrifying when barely seen, when cloaked in shadow; nothing is worse than what our imagination can fill in.
Hell is always red in the story books, but in reality it is green, brown, yellow, all masked and augmented by ever-present shadows. Hell is whirling black pits and twisted rock caverns, narrow wooden bridges over chasms that fall so deeply they seem to have no bottom: and maybe, in truth, they don’t. Hell is not dark, either, because in the blackness there could be no shadows to remind you of how precarious your light is. No, every mouth of every cavern is lit just enough to show its shape in the gloom. Hell is gloaming.
And hell is not the dead. No, souls would give this place a flicker of life, for what is a soul but a memory of existence? But nothing lives in these depths, not tree nor sprout nor snail. Only this creature I have come to face, this imp of green and black, with a cloak of living shadow and skin like drowned frogs, waxy and pale, memory of green.
Hell is a vista, a panorama too large to face, and I stand against it armed only with this one flickering branch, with the colour I have dragged down from the surface, bright crimson coat and flaxen hair, cloth of gold and whitest silk. It has to be enough. It must.
Image by Kieran Macanulty