Night Boat. Alan Spence

      ONE

      THE GATES OF HELL

      My childhood name was Iwajiro, and I was eight years old when I first entered at the gates of hell.

      The old monk looked like one of the gaki, the hungry ghosts. He was gaunt and skeletal, cheeks caved in, skin shrunk tight over the great craggy dome of the skull, fierce eyes bulging in their sockets under thick black eyebrows that met in the middle just below the third eye. (When he glowered I could see it there, blazing.)

      My father had brought me to hear the monk deliver a sermon, on the Eight Burning Hells. When the monk started to speak, voice dry and cracked, rasping, I felt he was talking directly to me, as if he had singled me out. He glared at me, pierced me with his gaze, cut me to the core.

      I whimpered, grabbed my father’s sleeve. My father shook me off, smacked the back of my legs.

      Sit, he said. Listen.

      The hells, the monk explained, descended in order of severity, down and down, ever deeper into the underworld. The first of them was the Hell of Reviving, and even here, he said, the heat was unbearable, far beyond endurance. The ground was a searing expanse of white-hot iron and it was impossible to rest your feet even for a second without being scorched.

      I felt my feet twitch. It was a hot day and the shoji screens were open to the temple courtyard, shimmering in the glare. Inside at least it was shaded, cooler. The old wooden beams smelled of pine incense. I watched a little lizard, bright green, flick and dart across the wall.

      In the Hell of Reviving, said the monk, you will be consumed by perpetual rage.

      He looked at me, he definitely looked at me.

      Think how angry you can get if you are thwarted in some small desire. You are ready to smash and destroy if you don’t get your way. Well, increase this a thousandfold so you would kill anyone who obstructed you. This is what you will feel in the Reviving Hell.

      I wondered, why Reviving? How could coming back to life be hell?

      In this realm of the angry dead, said the monk, there will be countless millions of others like yourself, like your self, so many, so many, all consumed by their own incandescent fury. You will fight and tear and hack at each other with weapons you can only imagine, forged from your own karma. You will slash and cut and gouge, you will stab and rip till you fall down dead, a death within death, a death beyond death.

      The monk paused.

      And then, he said, looking at me again, answering my unspoken question, you will be revived immediately, you will wake up, you will once again be fully conscious, and the whole process will start again. You will fight, you will die in agony, you will be revived. And so it will continue for what seems like endless time. The scriptures are quite clear. You will fight and die in this realm for millions on millions of years. To be precise, for a hundred and sixty-two thousand times ten million years, you will fight and die in anger and pain. And this is the first, the least, of the Burning Hells.

      A young monk bowed and placed a small tea-bowl of water in front of the old man who nodded, took a sip, just enough to wet his thin old lips. I felt my own lips dry and parched. I looked up, saw the little green lizard scuttle across the ceiling, upside down.

      The old monk coughed, loosed the phlegm in his throat. He sipped more water, continued.

      The next level down, he said, the second level, is Black Line Hell. Again the ground is burning iron, hotter than the level above, and the demons of the underworld will lay you out on this white-hot surface and mark your naked body with black lines, dividing you up into ever smaller sections – four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two. And they will use these marks as guidelines for their burning saws and axes, and they will cut you into smaller and smaller pieces – sixty-four, a hundred and twenty-eight. And no sooner will you be reduced to tiny pieces of flesh and bone, than you will be reassembled, only for the whole process to start again, repeating, over and over, for twice as long as the first hell, for three hundred and twenty-four thousand times ten million years. And this is only the second of the Burning Hells.

      Only the second, that meant six more to go, each one hotter and deeper and more terrible than the one above. The lizard had gone now, into the freedom of the world outside, and I wanted to follow, to run out, find my friends and play. My legs ached from kneeling on the hard wood floor, but when I shifted, tried to ease the discomfort, my father prodded me, cuffed the back of my head.

      Be still, he said. Listen.

      The third level, said the monk, is Crushing Hell. It is even deeper, even hotter. Here you will be rounded up with the millions of others suffering for their sins and you will be cast into a long valley between two ranges of fiery mountains. You will be packed in with these millions, piled on top of one another till there is no space to move and no air to breathe, and all that can be heard are the screaming and weeping of the damned in their agony and terror. Then the giant demons of this world will raise their mallets of red-hot metal, each one as big as Mount Fuji, and pound you to nothing. For a brief moment, an infinitesimal part of a second, there will be oblivion, then in a blink you will be awake, and immediately the whole cycle will begin again, the rounding up, the casting down, and this time the walls of the valley will close in on you, like great beasts butting each other, and once again you will be crushed. And this will continue for twice as long again as the previous level. Six hundred and forty-eight thousand times ten million years.

      The numbers meant nothing. I could count, a little. But I couldn’t imagine a million. Ten million. Grains of sand on a beach. Snowflakes falling through a whole winter day. My mother would laugh when I asked about these things. How could they be numbered? But I knew the way the old monk spoke, he meant they went on for ever and ever. And every time you thought the torture was over, it would start again.

      The sermon hadn’t even lasted a day, maybe not even an hour.

      Howling Hell, said the monk. This is the next level down. Here you will be herded with all the rest into a gigantic red-hot building. And once you are inside, crammed together, suffocating, you will realise there is no exit, no door, no way out. You are trapped there, unable to move, as the intolerable heat increases even more and all you can do is howl and scream and cry and add to the cacophony of all those millions howling and screaming and crying all around you. And this you will endure for twice as long as the previous level. Ten million years, times twelve hundred and ninety-six thousand.

      He looked at me again. I felt sick in my stomach.

      You may think the exact numbers don’t matter. But when you are there, and every single second is agony, it matters very much indeed.

      Thinking of the numbers made my head feel like stone.

      Now, said the monk, we descend ever further, from the Howling Hell to the Great Howling Hell. Here you will be crammed into an even bigger, even hotter building with thick burning walls, and outside those walls are thicker, hotter walls. You will be in a box within a box, a prison within a prison, a tomb within a tomb, where the space between the inner and outer walls is filled with molten metal, sealing it completely. And all the time you are there, you are tortured by the knowledge that even if by some miracle you could break through the first wall, you could never ever broach the second. So you howl and scream and cry, endlessly, or at least for twice as long as before. Some of you can add it up for yourselves, I’m sure.

      Did his features twist a little as he said this, into a kind of grimace that might have been a smile? That was even more unsettling, and already he was racing ahead, ever deeper.

      The sixth level, he said, is known simply as the Heating Hell – as if the other levels were not hot enough. Here you will be impaled on red-hot spikes, you will be flayed and wrapped in strips of white-hot iron. And for how long? Yes, twice as long as the hell before.

      I noticed at the corners of his dry lizard-lips were little flecks of spit. He closed his eyes for a moment, continued.

      And what is below the Heating Hell? What is the next level down? By