Deal with Him | Lee Heeseung

9-Straight to Hell

“We’re going where?” Evelyn’s tired eyes wait for his response as her lips remain parted from the last words she spoke.

Heeseung pulls her body in and drowns his eyes inside of hers. “Hell,” he curtly replies, the word slipping in her ears like an echo. Suddenly, the migraine that left her a few hours back reappears.

She searches his eyes for a trail of humor or that mocking look that says ‘you really believe me’, but the throbbing of her head just hits louder when there aren’t any. Like seldom, he is serious. And it’s worrisome.

Evelyn breaks their hug and stares at him, heart hammering and anticipation of hazard in her ribs. This can be no good. “Just laugh already. Haven’t you seen my white face? Is your hilarious joke not over yet?” Anything but good.

His eyes don’t flicker, his lips don’t twitch, and his countenance remains the same: a scary hit of truth.

Everything moves in a haze, dazing and blinding and undecipherable, as they somehow get out of the restaurant. The stops in their way, her purse hanging on her coat-covered shoulder, scarf wrapped cozily around her neck and the breath of cold air she now takes, have no temporality—it all seems altered, fragmented.

The snap of fingers flings her neck towards the sound. Heeseung watches as she slowly blinks. There is a returning, burning feeling in the back of her scalp like it’s eating her alive and the latest-heard words only intensify it. She doesn’t know why the pain is there, she just knows she is not in her best judgment.

“It’s not funny,” Evelyn whispers, her eyes on the pavement.

Heeseung tips up her chin, the back of his index finger leaving its warmth on her frozen face like a stain on a white shirt, like a burn. Her eyes don’t meet his; they peek at the fluorescent flicker of the street light behind him. It doesn’t look like a street light, she thinks, it looks like a dozen of fireflies dancing in the dark, bouncing their small insect bodies in a blur. Everything becomes a blur again. I’m not okay.

Another stain of warmth, embodied into the back of a palm, grabs her attention in disfavor of the light. She blinks again.

“It’s not a joke. What’s up with you?” Heeseung asks, morphing confusion at her sick-looking face.

She takes a deep breath, hoping that with the exhale she’ll blow away the drumming pain in her head. Her eyes fix and narrow again on the devil. “What do you mean it’s not a joke?” The words lower their sound as her voice cracks at the end.

“It means,” he says, “that something happened and we are requested there.” The bip of the car keys follows his words and Evelyn’s hand is captured by his.

“We?” she exclaims, all the emphasis leaking from her tone.

“Yes, we,” he replies, opening the car door and ushering her inside. The one second before he climbs back in is used for the torture of blocking another head-aching haze.

She doesn’t say anything as they drive, neither does he. Everything is a tensed cloud, confusion, feared silence and controlling nerves in her head. All until the turn they take is not the one they should. Evelyn turns her head at him immediately but one of his hands is already out and his one-second quick and agitated peers silence her. “Wait,” he tells her and she nods absently, already gazing right back out the window.

In a few minutes, the black vehicle stops, the engine is off and the both of them hop out, immediately welcomed by the large writing of a hotel’s title. “Dellamorte,” she reads aloud and gawks at the building. Its red lights and wet tiles, abused by the earlier snowfall, the cursive letters of its name and the overall normal yet massive frame of it perplex Evelyn further. “What is this?” she asks as he takes her hand, already carrying her to the place. They get in and the answer never comes.

(If somehow you have seen Cemetery Man (Dellamorte Dellamore), then you know where Dellamorte is from, not original in any case.)

Warmth contradicts the merciless cold outside, heating Evelyn’s cold hands; the veins seemingly transferring from a concerning indigo to the normal greenish shade. The hand that beholds those veins is again held by the familiar, hot and undoubtedly bigger one; Heeseung brings the both of them forward to the reception that stands tall and sort of intimidating with its fanciness.

The receptionist—an old, white-haired and somewhat thin man wearing a red uniform—lifts his eyes through his round glasses, analyzing the both as he questions how he could help them in a job-required polite voice.

“I need a room on the 13th floor,” Heeseung says. "Now." The elder man squints for a second, eyeing the boy carefully before picking up a chain of keys from somewhere in the back. He sorts them out quickly, revealing a grey one, its ends red and its shine almost blinding, like it hasn’t been used for a while.

Heeseung’s fingers reach for it, nodding at the man and receiving back the gesture. In a moment, they are off.
Their steps disturb the coffin silence of the hotel, clicks on the marble white floor, Evelyn's—hesitant and coward-like and Heeseung's—alert and urgent. She was already feeling unwell (more than unwell) and whatever ploy is taking place, she is sure she doesn’t have the heart for it.

"Heeseung..." she trails, voice quivering.

He stops in his tracks, like he just recalled the hand he was holding and the scared feet he was dragging. And the scared legs are lightly shaking as Evelyn looks at him with wide glass eyes.

He pets her head briefly, no words spelled, just the reassuring gesture, which in frank did her little to no reassurance. Then their steps retake their throbbing and they soon arrive at metal doors, golden, quiet, abandoned.
Heeseung pushes the elevator's circular button, its light reviving like it was electro-shocked. A slight flinch escapes without any desire on the part of the girl who emerged it, when the low ding of the lift fills the empty hall.

'Come on,' his nodding head urges and Evelyn plods towards the rectangular cavern of the lift. A strange hit of air overfills her insides with something greater than reluctance, something scarier.

As soon as they step foot inside, Heeseung lunges towards the buttons. Evelyn looks at them with eyebrows pulled together, the fear and dizziness and fresh confusion clouding her eyes.
"Why did you push zero?" her voice hasn't grown from a whisper, maximum maybe a wailing demand.

The buttons, zero to thirteen, light up ascendingly, respecting their turns obediently: one by one flicker the lights. But the elevator doesn't yet take off.

"You'll see," he responds.

The lift starts as the words are spoken, going not up, but down. Down, to the zero floor. And Evelyn looks and understands nothing: they were on the first floor when they left, for some reason they are going to the basement of the hotel, but they got a room on the thirteenth floor. Yet, the numbers on the upper small monitor don't hit the ones they should; from one, which seems to have never existed, they go to thirteen then twelve then eleven and ten and nine and her heart beats like crazy in her ribcage.

"What's going on?" The question now hangs by a thread, is not even a whisper, it's a forced attempt to conceal panic. Although he hears her, he doesn't make any useful response, just the same 'don't worry' kind. How can she not worry?

Nothing is right. Everything is wrong. That wicked elevator doesn't go as one should, it doesn't even make a descending pace; it is merely disastrous.

The levels keep falling and by the fourth one, her hiccups join the bips. And then three, bip, hic and two, bip, hic then one, bip, hic by the sequence. The lift hits its final beep, the zero ringing slightly louder and her hiccups seem to die in her throat.

The moving stops, Evelyn's eyes are dead-fixed on the automatic doors but they do not open. Her panicked frame turns in an abrupt motion to the boy that sat calmly, quietly throughout the whole ride, simply laughing softly and questionably quiet when the hiccups escaped her mouth, like only that he couldn't miss.

“Now what?” she asks, a quivering tone balancing off some drops of petrified tears. 

Heeseung lumbers to the green lighted buttons and somehow the grey shinny key is pulled out. His fingers search for something below the panel, lingering until a satisfied sight erupts his slightly lifted lips. The key is pushed inside something that may be a lock or just a keyhole or God knows what and it clicks loudly as the girl watches the handy work being done.

In one second, her hands are pulled; her head nestled quickly and firmly in his chest, the hot hand pressing on the side of her head to assure the stillness. "Now you hold tight," he whispers in her ear and his hands move Evelyn’s to rest on his shoulders, without any declination from the girl's regard, the fright having frozen her already.

Then, there is nothing again. Solely a pure scary empty silence enveloping the air. For a few moments the quietness is so loud and unsettling and scary until there is no more of that. With a creak, the elevator starts moving, not ascendingly but still downwards. There should not be more to descend to.
They seem to fall into nothing, thin air flying with a sound like in the old comedy movies, all seeming exacerbated, but all being anything but that.

The falling sound scarcely hides the whimpers that finally escape Evelyn's mouth, her small tears wetting his t-shirt without any permission from the owner of the cries. Her nails dig into his shoulder blades, arms tangled around his neck, the horror no longer kept at bay and Heeseung pushes her head further into his chest. The sobs turn gradually into screams of terror as the fall growls louder and louder.

With no bump or feeling of hitting the ground in a dying collapse, the elevator stops and hits its truly final bip. Evelyn's shivering body, all her bones trembling frighteningly, doesn't withdraw from the safety of his chest. The cries that until this very moment weren't ever cried muffle in his cotton clothing, the black deepening its already deep shade.

Her arms fall limp as she sticks her forehead to his torso and slowly recoils the rest of her body. The tears start to subside and with a sinking breath, she turns around quick as lightning and wipes her wet eyes and wet cheeks and wet lips.

Like a curse being broken, her voice regains itself with the effects of muffled cries still ringing in the cracks, “What the hell was that?”

The golden doors slowly open, a hot wave of acid-like temperature hitting Evelyn’s red cheeks. Her eyes large as onions, the horror picks up from where it left.

Behind her shoulder, like a fox or a ghost or a demon, Heeseung creeps and brushes her shoulder blades with shiver-instilling fingers and tip of chin. “Exactly, hell. Welcome, love.”
           
                                  ...

CONVERSATIONS AT HELL’S GATES; (Also known as a long run of terrors emptied into screams at the closed doors of a diabolic lift):

“You said thirteenth floor. How the fuck is this, the thirteenth floor?”

“I never said which thirteen. Negative thirteen is still thirteen.”

“No, it’s not. No, just no!” (Her eyes wide). “Take me back, now. Heeseung, I swear I’ll…I’ll bite your hand if you don’t.”

“You do that, sweetheart. Now snap out of it, you fierce puppy, we have to get going.”

(Frustrated screams.)

“Going where?! I said ‘take me back’.”

“No can do. Come on or something will hear us and you won’t like that a bit.”

“No, let go of my hand. Where are we going? Don’t ignore me!”

                                   ...

THE SHOCK OF HELL:

Evelyn keeps her eyes maniacally lingering through the red desert, her brown wide balls catching nothing but emptiness—one bloody, mortifying and uncanny emptiness. Everything she imagined hell to look like, it was the complete opposite. The sky is not even a sky; it’s all black and if it weren’t for the weird maroon fog circling the hell, they wouldn’t see at all. Her heart beats harder but her mouth is shut with terror and with all the yelling she did. She doesn’t want to find out what that something is that Heeseung was talking about.

“Watch your steps, you don’t want them to catch you,” Heeseung warns, tightening his hold of her hand slightly as he drags them somewhere only he knows where.

Evelyn looks at him or, at the back of his head, for her hand is being carried like a kid’s. “Who?” she interrogates with a new shiver of terror coating her, “Who will catch me?”

“The shadows,” he responds, pointing his finger at the ground. Squinting through the light that is less than a light, she tries to figure out the source of the worry. Furrowing her eyebrows, she manages to make out something moving on the ground, somewhere near yet not near-enough their feet. Their shapes are even, like they are drawn by an amateur hand, their bodies or whatever they are colored with lingers phantomlike in the ground.

She flinches back as she understands what lurks under their feet: jellyfish-like bodied shadows—white like dirty newspaper, trapped in the dirt like they’re in a mirror, a glass to look inside. “Once they grab your foot, they don’t let go. They will eat your soul and leave nothing.”

Evelyn starts to shiver again, everything too overwhelming, too much. She doesn’t want to be eaten by shadows. “I can’t, please,” she begs as she stills on the dead-vines filled ground.

Heeseung studies her for a second, pulling his eyebrows in concern. His hands reach for her covered legs, gripping the back of her tights and returning to their journey, without any complain on her behalf, shockingly even for herself. She is too scared of everything to complain about him carrying her. “Won’t they grab your foot?” she asks.

“They only like mortals’ blood.” Wonderful.

They walk in the deserted world with Evelyn’s hands clenched to his neck and Heeseung holding her sternly, the small shadow of a smug smile giving away that he enjoys this. Somehow, in the unknown chaos they are in, he is enjoying this. After a while, she cannot stand the unsettling silence anymore or the mysteries hiding behind their hell trip.

“Why are we here? And answer me because I am sick of this,” she finally lets out. Not turning his gaze at her, he gingerly puts her down on her feet and lets out a sigh. Evelyn agitatedly checks the ground for the shadows but the demon’s hands stop her, gripping her shoulders.

“They’re not here anymore. They actually disappeared a while ago,” he says, fixing their eyes. He spins the girl around and Evelyn gawks at the image that was momentarily hidden behind her. His index finger points at the building standing solitarily and great in the middle of nothing; its towers lift themselves with great importance and she soon finds out they truly are of great importance. “And that’s why we’re here.”

Evelyn opens her mouth to respond but freezing fingers stop her. Heeseung completes, “It’s called Gehenna, or the commission of hell—whatever suits you.” Her lips are still parted as she studies the building—the commission as he said. “And as for the purpose of our journey…we shall find out.” He takes her hand in his and starts heading to the rusty yet fancy building.

Evelyn walks arm in arm with him, still reluctant about the shadows, even after his words. The distance seems endless, although with their bare eyes it would rather look like it takes less than five minutes to arrive there. Yet she doesn’t really mind; she would stay away as much as she can from anything relating the devilish situation she is in.

As their road appears to only get longer and her mind begins to zone out, she recalls Heeseung’s latest sentences. As he was speaking, she wasn’t truly listening; her mind was running somewhere pretty far—conflicted between what is happening with her constant headaches and what occurs in her surroundings.

But now she has a few minutes of silence, for she looked at her feet and confirmed the absence of soul-eating shadows. And the few minutes of silence grant her enough to put two plus two together and understand the words Heeseung said when she was far too bewildered to comprehend.

She pushes his arm with the force she has in her, even if she understands it does him absolutely no harm and she is terribly exhausted. “Did you truly carry me even after the shadows were gone?”

He chuckles. It has been some time since he acted amused towards her, even if it were mere hours. Mere hours were enough for him to not find something to mock her about. “Yeah, good morning.”
Evelyn sighs, already having expected that.

He stops and the girl looks at him, partially wishing to say just something more but she does not have the opportunity; his hands sneak around her waist and softly push her forwards. With seemingly no pause through his actions, his head is on her shoulder in a moment. “Here goes hell. Are you ready?”

The obvious answer is ‘no’, and at seeing the enormous building only meters apart from her that is exactly what she answered. “Too bad,” he says and snaps his fingers.

Nothing is shocking in this moment. Absolutely nothing; not even as they are not where they were a microsecond ago, not even as his leather jacket shifts to gold-sprinkled attire, blazer sooty and sharp and not even when the pink hair dyes customized to a matching ink shade. The soft curves of his cupid’s arrow and chin and pallid nose all seem to adopt a rather evil face, masking in expression in a blanket of appearing royalty. The room they landed in is too grand to be described, too dark to see more than a meter around you and too impossible to decipher in its utter grandeur.  

Was this the new definition of normal? ‘Hell and heaven shouldn’t even be real’, she thinks, ‘so just what is happening to me?’

“Nothing is happening to you, yet.”
Her eyes grow significally as she slaps her hand over her mouth, the background filled with his laughter as he adjusts his sleeves and collar.

“You didn’t say it. But now that we’re here,”—he leans forward over her statue form—"I can hear every single one of your thoughts.” He smirks contently as her jaw falls and she stares with tired eyes and blank expression—the blankness all but a façade for the horror she feels. “So I’d be careful if I were you,” he whispers with a wink.

“How?” she simply asks.

Smiling and gazing at her, his right hand searches the inside of his suit. It soon reveals the thing Evelyn had somehow forgotten about: the butterfly. She looks at it, then at him again and then she slants her forehead on his chest and she stays so long there with her eyes close that it feels like she is about asleep.

Except she isn’t. Pushing away the hand that started brushing her locks momentarily, she breaks the contact and tilts her head to watch him through her lashes. “What am I thinking now?” Sleep, sleep, sleep, I am dead; I want a bed so much. I think I’m dying.

He laughs. “I know you’re tired,”—he moves to stand besides her and lays her head on his shoulder only just for a blink—“but you’ll get to rest when we’re home.” He catches the butterfly in his fingers, stopping its hovering in the air. “And for that to happen, we have to go through that door.” He points at a door the size of a giraffe, black and old-looking and most importantly, especially scary.

Evelyn breaths in deeply and locks eyes with him, waiting for him to read her thoughts. “Yes, just down here--And just if I have your butterfly--Yes, Mei, I am the only one that knows what you think; although, us being honest, it’s not very hard even when we’re not here.”

She glares at him, not pleased with the fact that he looks at her like she is an open book. But every thought on the subject and on any other subject is sealed now. There is no more of that unless she would like to actually push her own self into a hole.

Feeling like they have walked a thousand years today, they still do it again, all until their journey on the big and unlit corridor is over and they are planted in front of the skin-crawling door that must hold secretes Evelyn doesn’t truly want to know.

And the door opens and creaks and they are in the dark.

In the darkness, their arrival. In the darkness, her mind. In the darkness, everything occurs.

And in the darkness, a soul and a thing that is not a soul at all have deepened into the Devil’s lair. Hell he can’t escape, Him she can’t either. Escape is not a choice. The sacrifices and choices have been long made and to turn back now does not exist.

But why wish to escape when your soul has everything it ever wanted? Why want to escape when something deprived of your heart is found in this precise nook, be it of Satan or of anyone? Can you run from what calls you? Do you want to? There is no escape when you have signed and you have gone straight to hell.