Purgatory Story

(Trigger warnings: self-harm, suicide)

Alec Manning felt himself being pistoned sideways slowly before it ever occurred to him to open his eyes, but when he did he found himself in a plain elevator, nothing special — silver doors, linoleum floors. He looked down at himself and he saw his legs wearing a pair of black pants that for sure knew he didn’t own. The top half of his body was covered in a white shirt; a Polo by the make of it. Out of sheer curiosity, he reached up to his head and felt the bill of a baseball cap. He pulled it off his bald cranium to get a closer gander at it

Black-and-white, of course.

He plopped it back on his head. 

A sound from his left drew his attention and he turned to see a young girl, maybe no older than a 16 with black, unkempt hair long enough to reach her lower back and dressed in a black-and-white outfit close to his own, though her shirt was more of a tank than a T. He leaned forward in an attempt to catch her face, though she didn’t bother to look back at him primarily. 

“Excuse me, miss? Do-do you know where we are? I don’t exactly remember how I got here.” It took him saying it aloud to realize it was a true statement and it disturbed him a little, but not enough to deter him from talking to the girl. At the sound of his voice, she at last graced him with the sharp glare of a wild animal realizing its been seen. Her eyes were a watery blue, but he couldn’t tell if it was because she’d been crying or if they were naturally that way. 

Either way, she vigorously shook her head as a reply to his question, then said nothing following. Alec sucked his lips so they disappeared thoughtfully into his mouth. 

“Do you know how you got here then?” He asked, again to a rapid quake of the head. “Aaaallrighty… Well, do you have a name? Mine’s Alec — Alec Manning.” He held his hand out for her in greeting. She peered at it as if it were foreign and for a minute he thought she would leave him hanging but eventually she gingerly grasped the ends of his fingers like a child half her age. He couldn’t help pondering on the action until he heard her soft, frightened voice from beneath her hair.

“C-Claire Munroe.” She stuttered, like literally stuttered, and it was the nail in the coffin that something bad must have happened to her land her in the state she was in now. Being a respectful man, though, Alec felt a bit dirty wanting to pry into her personal business right off the bat after just learning her name so he decided to try a different approach.

“So, Claire…any idea where we are?” He asked, taking his one hand back, then shoving the both of them in his pockets. Alec wanted her to be able to see that he meant no harm. It seemed to be working, because she turned to him fully now, though her own hands clasped on to each other in front her shyly. From this viewpoint of her, realized her hair was much more spiky up top so that the further it down the more it had the appearance of a goddamn mullet.

Poor kid. Who in their right mind would give her a haircut like that?

“I don’t know. I honestly thought I was dreaming until you spoke to me like…I was here. To be honest, though, it still feels a bit dreamy.” Claire said rather cryptically, whispery tone gaining strength the braver she seemed to get around him, but in a way Alec felt he knew exactly what she meant. The elevator they were standing in did have a hazy border around the edges, but when he stepped to the double doors to touch them they felt as real as the sausage-y digits that pressed against them. He returned to his place beside Claire, muttering a hmm.

“Well, you are correct. This all appears to be some weird-ass dream — ‘scuse my language, kid — might explain why we’re whipping sideways in this crazy contraption, too, if you are able to tell.” Alec motioned to her feet, which were as bare as his own. She nodded as an answer.

“I can tell, yeah.” She said almost excitedly, voice now almost at a normal octave, and he smiled at that. 

“Well, since it look like we’re gonna be here awhile, why don’t we get comfortable and get to know each other, yeah?” Alec said, clapping his hands once and rubbing them together like they were about to forklift some crates with one another. Claire chuckled at his antics, but nodded and lowered herself into crisscross-applesauce on the elevator floor. Alec followed her example, though it took a bit of grunting and rolling due to his older, more girthy body. It clearly gave Claire a laugh because he could hear her giggle whole time. Once he was situated finally, they were facing each other like they were both on the numbered carpet in kindergarten. 

“Okay, so you go first.” He offered politely with a smile. Claire nodded, something she seemed to be doing a lot of this whole time. 

“Well, you know my name, I guess… Um, I’m sixteen.” Alec’s smile grinned wider at this, feeling proud of himself that he got an earlier assumption he had about her accurately. 

“Sixteen, huh? I have a daughter about your age.” He stated suddenly before realizing it to be a true comment but wasn’t exactly sure how it was true… He didn’t have time to mention it to Claire, though, as she was off speaking again.

“Really? What is she like?” She was asking. Alec’s forewent replying for a moment, his eyebrows furrowed as he tried to draw forth his memories of the daughter he just claimed that he had. He was having issues, however; it was like trying to drag a house from its foundations. It appeared he could remember the girl but couldn’t recall anything that made her special to him other than the fact he’d been her father — that they had been related. He raised his glance to Claire, who was observing him worriedly. He figured he must have been quiet for longer than he meant to be. 

“Sorry, I was…trying to remember what I could about my daughter so I could tell you about her, but I’m having a little trouble. Can you remember anything before you came here, Claire?” It was Claire’s turn to scrunch her eyebrows together. After a wait, she shrugged a bit.

“I…I remember feeling angry.” She breathed, her quiet tone returning. “But I-I’m not entirely sure why I was? The only other thing I can recall is the sensation of something in my hands.” She said, shakily bringing her hands palm up to study them closely, switch her gaze from one to the other. Alec watched her do this until his focus zoomed in on her wrists where it came to his attention that there were puckered scars lining them up and down. Some were old, a little bit darker than her natural skin color, some pink and fairly new. Without thinking of the consequences of doing so, he reached his own hand out and gripped one of hers to take a closer look at the morbid railroad marking. 

Neither of them said anything. 

“I used to do something similar when I was your age.” He mused in a soft voice, barely even registering that he said it aloud, only when Claire responded to him and he looked up at her.

“Why did you?” She inquired simply, no judging note in her expression or the inflections of her sentence. Alec blinked at the kindness and maturity in this young girl. Was his own daughter like this?

“I think…I think it had something to do with my old man.” Alec said hesitantly, acknowledging at the very edge of his brain that it was a certain fact. “He wasn’t very good to me and my mama, but she hadn’t wanted to leave him so I took a razor blade to my wrists some nights until I was old enough to move out.” He released Claire and turned his own arm over to find that he wasn’t making it up: there on his epidermis were the whiteness of aged scars. It shocked and concerned him that he had apparently been down at such a low point in his life. 

“I’m sorry…” Claire told him sympathetically. “I think mine had to do with my dad, too.” She admitted at length following her apology. Alec nodded in understanding. 

Again they went silent for a second or two.

 “I think may have actually killed him.” Claire abruptly confessed to her right knee. Alec’s eyes widened. 

“What makes you say that?” He asked a bit dubiously. Why would someone so sweet kill her own father unless…

“He might have been molesting me. I am not for sure, but I have this strong inkling pinching in the back of my mind.” Claire muttered almost a little too matter-of-factly. Alec just stared hard at the side of her head, not sure what to make of her story. If someone as slight as she oils do something so horrible, even in defense of herself, what was he capable of?

Again, he sorted through his memories from before opening his eyes in this cramped elevator. This time, an incredibly intense motion of red appeared out of the blackness of his psyche, followed by the phantoms of screams. A sudden weight could be felt in his chest where his heart was supposed to be.

“I murdered my wife’s lover. She was cheating on me, after twenty years of marriage. Shot him dead with my revolver.” He absent-mindedly mimicked a gun with the fingers of his right hand, then mimed it shooting out a bullet. “Caught them in my bed. Heard my wife screaming and  then run outta the room. That’s when I annihilated the bastard.” He paused, processing his own words. Out of his peripheral vision, he could see the blur that was Claire attending to him meticulously but he couldn’t make out the expression on her face to tell what she was thinking. He abruptly hoped she wouldn’t hate him now because of what he just revealed. Despite the small space in which they had no escape from each other, it would really suck if she suddenly gave him the silent treatment now. 

“What happened then?” Alec snapped a gaze to her at her question. Her watery eyes were intent on him, as if she’d been hanging on his every syllable. 

“I don’t know. I wound up here with you.” He said solemnly, looking down at his lap. Another silence. 

“Hey, do you like music?” Claire asked quickly, catching Alec of guard and he blinked at her a second time with the hurried turn in topic. 

“Uh…yeah. Mostly hard rock from the late Seventies, early. You?” Claire smiled sheepishly, nodding so hard her mullet flew all over the place.

“I do! I love a lot of newer bands you’ve probably never heard of. Imagine Dragons, My Chemical Romance, but the old stuff that you mentioned is cool too. My friends and I would bop to songs like “Bohemian Rhapsody” all of the time.” She said with the biggest grin she had given thus far. Alec gave a scowl and actually snorted. 

“That overblown bullshit? Nah! You want something really good like “The Four Horsemen” by Metallica.” With that, Alec stood (with some trouble, but eventually he got there) and shaped his hands and arms in over-and-under arcs so that it seemed as if he were holding on to a guitar. He then started making noises that imitated the guitar riffs off the song in question while he head-banged hard enough for the white cap to fall off of his head and plop on to the floor where it stayed. Still on the floor, Claire laughed out loud heartily before standing up and joining in along with him; shaking her own head so profusely that her black hair was completely soaring haphazardly like wildfire.

They did this for at least five minutes to chase their blues away, if time was anything to go by in this small world they were creating for their own. It didn’t matter their ages or their backgrounds. They were just letting themselves be. 

Their fun ground to a halt when the elevator, which they had grown used to the constant, sideways motion, stopped in an instant. Alec, still in the zone of a rock n’ roller living it up on stage, fell into the wall do to a buildup of momentum. Claire squealed as she fell into and bounced off of his girth. Alec, not thinking too much about it because he just hadn’t wanted her to hurt herself by careening to the floor, quickly wrapped her in a one-armed hug. Claire curled into his side as if he were a mountain-sized teddy bear and raised a wide-eyed expression to him that made her eyes shine brighter than ever in the fluorescent lights. 

“What happened?” She asked almost dumbly, a little fearfully. Alec shrugged the shoulder of the arm squished against the wall. 

“It seems like we’ve arrived to where we were going.” He said nonchalantly and as if in reply to his “brilliant” observation, a light ping! sounded somewhere above them and the elevator doors slid out of sight to their respective ports. Alec and Claire gazed out and were greeted by a dull, machine world full of smog and dank, dark, cloudy skies, and reminded Alec for all intents and purposes of the Industrial Revolution that ran from the 1760-1840. He and Claire exchanged glances before stepping off together still embracing. They hesitated right outside the elevator, afraid to go too far.

“I assume you both are looking for me?” A disembodied voice that perfectly personified a rusted potato peeler came out of the gloom to their right and they looked over to see a rail-thin man dressed in a long dark hood behind a wooden podium that wouldn’t have looked out of place in front of a high school classroom. He was shuffling something they couldn’t see. Behid him stood a tall, black, wrought-iron gate that stood open to a wet cobblestone road that seemed to disappear the farther it got toward what looked to be a city off in the distance after traversing through a forest of skeleton trees reaching at the sky for help. If they inclined their glances higher, they could see in wrought-iron letters above the gate: 

Purgatory

Alec gulped. He wasn’t a particularly religious man, but he had heard of Purgatory before. He knew it wasn’t as bad as Hell, but by all appearances, it didn’t exactly look like a jolly, good time either.

“What’s ‘Purgatory?’” Whispered Claire from where she was hidden in his armpit and he turned down his head to peer at her sadly.

Poor, poor kid. Her father must have been a real dick.

 “It would do the both of you well not to dally.i haven’t got all day.” The Potato-Stick Man called out to them again, this time slightly more annoyed. Alec still dithered where he was, squeezing Claire closer to him to protect her.

“Claire?” He said simply. She shifted against his side. 

“Yeah?” She countered tinnily.

“I think… I’m pretty damn sure we’re both dead.” Alec said without any hint of double entendre. 

“Oh.” Was returned with.

They shuffled over to the gate together at an even pace.

They finally reached the man and all Alec could see of him under his dirt-length cloak was a sliver of leathered face and an eye with the eyelid narrowed as he still focused down on his podium. When they drew near enough, they could both see it was a game of fucking Solitaire that he was fixating on. The cards were all line up end-to-end on top of what looked to be a sign-in sheet. 

Alec and Claire quit their approach and waited patiently in front of the podium like lambs for the slaughter. The man didn’t even glance up or even said anything to them and they were left to watch him shuffle the cards until Alec was finally fed up enough to clear his throat as loudly as he could. The man opened his eye to them as if they were inconveniencing him and it was bright, fucking yellow. After a staring contest between all three of them in which no one one, the man at last sighed wearily and shook his cards off of the clipboard with the sheet. 

“Alec Geralt Manning. Shot David Glenn Bright at 8:30 pm on April 3^rd, 2020 and then shot by your wife, Laura Jane Manning at 8:30 pm on the same date. Claire Linsey Munroe, beat William Blake Munroe to death with a hammer at 7:50 pm and then killed herself by bleeding herself out. Sign in please.” Potato-Stick threw a pen on to clipboard and handed it to Alec as he swapped one more glance with Claire, her own expression curious too.

So that’s what happened to you… They both thought of the other.

Alec signed his name first, followed immediately by Claire.

The man jerk the clipboard back.

“You both will stay until you’ve atoned for the crime of murder. The girl will be set free before the man as her wrong was self-defense. You both may proceed.” And with that, they were ignored again for a game of Solitare.

            Alec and Claire glanced up at the Purgatory sign, then to each other. Claire hadn’t released her hold on him for anything.

            “Together?” Alec asked plainly. Claire merely gave a last nod, face set in stone.

            They entered side-by-side.