The castle lay forward on the bleeding edge of the horizon, with erect, muscular turrets and a vampirish battlement flanked with rivers of warm, bobbing organs and terse thickets of overgrown fungi. The red-bricked road led right to its monstrous opening, acting as the castle's virulent tongue, lipped right and tight at the gates of the disparaged. The acreage spanning its exterior was plastered with atomic refuge as far as the eye could fathom; various and gargantuan pieces of sharp hardwares and machineries laid heavy on the land in numbers too obese on the eye. The ocean of debris ebbed and flowed as tidal waves, clamoring with thunderous bangs of loud metals and brutal, gnawing alloys. The stenches of wet, molded copper and thick, saccharine steel clung to the palette with dizzying metallic fallout. It was junk as its own metalliferous earth, an ecosystem constructed on total refuse.

On the top of the hill to the right of the castle stood a gargantuan effigy of Adam the Son in a clear, grassy clearing, seemingly constructed as a refuge from the viciousness of the heaping garbage. He was sculpted in limestones and various granites, with his legs spread eagle, as if to receive an eternal, slobbering blowjob. Adam, without his Eve, had his shoulders bent back into a stiff, erotic lean while his chin poised upwards towards the sky. In the middle of his phallus lay a large marbled apple, placed as if though he had given birth to the fruit himself. Tiny pops of uncontained energy kept bursting around the atmosphere, little terrible firecrackers of excess energy that fissured with a delicate and succinct whirr like water droplets on hot burning metal.

The vitreous gluck swimming in my eyes had cracked under the vicious heat, making what surrounded Adam impossible to see. The eyes became brittle and ungreased; and without the gratification of a deep, lubricated blink, there began to arise flotsams of kaleidoscopic colors and shifting transitory lights as the road warped in and out of my sight like the vibrating recoil of a chunky rubber band. My body still seared with that acidic monster rash, so much so that it had began to flay back several layers of skin, exposing the strawed tendons in my hands that recoiled when I made a tight fist. There were shifting eyes and intentful glances buoying all around my peripheral current, as swathes and globs of running dark matter began whirring past my side in the span of a half blink, both fast and menacing. I assumed these shadowpeople, sneakily avoiding their entire electrical occupancy in the secret field of my dwarfish vision, though I could almost catch spotted entrails of their jagged walk if I moved sideways quickly enough to their unencumbered rhythm. I was still no closer to the castle than I was when I started; the timespan of this particular environment still loomed heavy like a wet dog, hours and hours caught up between my very footsteps.

I continued onward, though a plump weariness had begun to settle deep into both calf muscles, laden thick with a quivering thrum so heavy and erratic, I could start to feel the hard throb of my heart beating at the caps of my knees, like gelatin hardening into cold steel. I couldn't help but dwell on whether my father had already existed here, in this sort of purgatorial plane, or if he had already died well before me. Why was he pregnant, and what exactly had the fetus done to his body? Was it as simple as a demon rejecting its host, or something more dastardly? The fetus with no head, born in purgatory? The way it swum around that amniotic fluid was subhuman and vicious, pulling on my father's swollen umbilical cord as if to ring a mighty cloister bell. It was already the size of an underfed toddler, with talons that curved prehistorically and a neck that suggested similarities to the build of some Paleolithic ghoul. Its business seemed both inhospitable and cataclysmic as its gonzo DNA seemed to suggest. I suspected I would have to confront that mangled vertebrate eventually, hopefully getting the opportunity to break its spine across the brunt of my bony knee.

The cascade of the castle grew much closer now, with each ascending step I mounted further towards the gate. There were pungent blusters of fermented excrement and dour vinegar, so I knew the downwind of the castle moat was much closer now than before. Though now I was no longer alone on the road, as little groups of cock-heads sauntered into jogs right alongside me, sneezing and clucking lewdly, throwing toothy, bashful smiles in my direction. Their face was that of a fat farmyard rooster, with a puckered, creamy feather and boisterous, quivering waddles the color of newborn blood. But from the neck down, they possessed the bodies of burly, chiseled men; with juicy, brawny shoulders and throbbing pectorals with huge, mutated nipples the size of an oily pepperoni, glistening their hairy, strapping frame in the tender sunlight. They clucked faster and faster, bucking and galloping their monstrous frames with recklessness, beaming brightly as their chubby cocks swung like a pendulum, acting as my wide-eyed garrisons as I continued with a heavy foot.

The weather seemed to shift on pure whim, cascading between storms of bitter, astringent rain to quick surges of brutal humidity, cloyingly muggy and opaque. There were massive, tortuous monoliths that fringed around the surrounding vistas, molded out of thick, rusted barbed wire, dominating the sky thousands of feet high; with seemingly no purpose but their strange, empty grandeur. I was stuck with a certain languid spectacle, my field of vision totally keen to the entirety of this fiendish environment around me, as it revealed itself more and more grotesque and untrustworthy with each wander of the eye. It was as if its reality contorted itself on a passive impulse, like the change of a season threaded around the lapse of one singular moment, folding and coalescing into this barbaric, unrhythmic ecosystem where objects evaporated and reemerged altogether, erroneously shifting into soupy absurdity that possessed no scientific law.

I lingered for a moment and watched the sky mutate into a new, ascending scene, were there now what seemed to be hundreds of thousands of floating doors plastered against the open sky in a fringe along the road all of dissimilar shapes and sizes, hovering there sturdily in the gushing wind. There came tiny knocks and little annoyed rappings, seemingly happening at every single one almost simultaneously, like a percussive chorus. Some would suddenly open and close to reveal nothing but darkness on their strange, apathetic inside. The rooster men still flanked my side, running and whipping out their big, chunky thumbs up, all while flourishing their Cheshire grins in my general direction. Many more creatures now populated the further vista, all stuck idle in their loops of repetitive motions. There were little serpentine crocodiles praying quietly at their altars and slobbering, crooked vultures croaking deep-chorded symphonies that big-winged succubi made joy and merriment to. And paces ahead were leagues of devilish imps that had taken to sodomizing what looked to be a caucus of God's only archangels, frozen dead in their beatific twinkle, ripping up their limp nimbuses and ejaculating ferociously all over their slain corpses, laughing wildly like children.

It was such a hostile and nightmarish circus, some brand of heinous Underworld that I'd only ever heard about in either yarns of allegory or subjective hearsay. And then, with an ugly cerebrum smack, it suddenly clicked: This was Hell. I am dead and this is Hell. And it was exactly as it was spoken through myth and fable, an amalgamation of many barbarous elements, rightfully plucked from varying religious sects; a sort of Inferno patchwork quilt, all laced together to create the very zenith of eternal damnation. And what damnation it was! The roosters, still scuttling to my side, started squawking in unison: Hellhellhhellhellhell! Hellhellhellhellhell! Welcomewelcomewelcomewelcome! Their phalluses now fully erect and all ballooned up with fiendish pride, twinkling their soft-core smiles with a feverish and spiteful giddiness until the so-called leader of the chicken clan stopped himself mid-motion, only to roar another humongous cry: There came ye Beelzebub, dressed in feathers and adorned in sin! And the rest repeated: There came ye Beelzebub, dressed in feathers and adorned in sin! The other remaining creatures all joined in on the chant, a fuck-all choir peddling little harmonies of doom and despair.

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The castle was finally within eye reach, so much so that I could see the gnarled ivy growing out from the crumbling brick, smelling wafts of rotted brimstone and gaseous waste deep inside the nostril, burrowing itself upwards enough to scratch the nasal cavity with an unrelenting itch. I assumed my father and his newborn child waited for me within the castle, likely with a council of varying Hellish creatures; demons and hellhounds and goblins and imps alike. And where there is a court, there awaits a trial, likely for me to stand and defend my noble honor. Though for what, I had no idea. My purpose here had yet to be entirely revealed, though the torture had indicated something even more barbarous was bubbling upon the horizon. Unfortunately, I still could remember very little about my life before death, just amorphous strokes and thin, nebulous memories that dissipated right before they took cohesive shape. Though, surprisingly so, I did remember the legend of the Inferno.

It was said that there are nine circles of Hell, all ricocheting outwards off each other like the rings of an elder tree, until the revolting thrum of the very center, where the High Holy Prince himself sat, on top of his gilded throne made of dry, knotted cartilage and wet mucal sod, grinning wildly while thumbing out human gristle between his mammoth, serrated teeth. These nine layers encompassed 'levels' of Hell, different sects of atmospheres committed to one particular of the Seven Deadly Sins. Though that was the Christian flavor of Hell, likely wildly untrustworthy. Though I never believed in any iteration of Hell or Heaven, and I still don't, despite quite possibly being damned to the latter. To me, it was only a pacifying fable, but one told masterfully. So masterly, in fact, it left millions of dismembered corpses in its bloody, crusading wake.

Since the dawn of civilization, humanity so desperately needed its regular dose of good vs. evil. A majestic performance of the two; clashing mightily, with the dashing Good prevailing over winged Evil in a boisterous, supernatural affair until the heavy velvet curtains close in their quick, swooping grandeur. Their creator, their so-called God the Father, lulled their existentialism away; gave them their life's purpose, a wholly personal beatitude: to do good in his service, for him (father), by him (son), and with him (holy ghost). They clung to his phony phantasmal word like dew on terse thickets of grass, shouting his fanciful scripture and empty fallacies with a Shakespearean gusto. They too would march unto battle in his holy name, ready to spat and conquer with evil, with their rampant, glimmering swords and boxy, obtuse shields in hand, beheading their made-up demons one right after the other, only to lay at them at the naked foot of their beloved master. And then, when Evil so victoriously defeated, they would spend eternity amongst the flotsam wisps of the clouds, flicking their hardened nipples and slurping their tonics with a sticky, fat lip, resting easily in the stillness of their hard-earned afterlife, free eternally from the horns and the rut.

Having finally reached the castle door, I rapped loudly against the aging wood and it gave a weak, sodded recoil that felt weird and buoyant against the knuckle. The door had no instruments, both lockless and knobless; just a hunk of rubbery wood wedged in between slabs of tight steel, looking totally immovable and unwelcoming. I pounded and pounded in one, twos, and threes, but there came no answer or any semblance of movement behind the big, bulking door. The moat surrounding the castle door bubbled loudly with carbonation, some fermented byproduct of the rotted waste and slaughtered carcasses. It boiled like water, fierce and frenzied with big, upwards gravity, with large, extraneous bubbles popping up to the surface with a big acidic bite. With every other gaseous pop, a tremendous, bloated body would buoyantly erupt to the top, skin mummified all over, plastered thickly with fierce green mold and a slimy, charcoal colored loam. Their eyelids had been gnawed off their skulls by some river chum, exposing big, bulbous doll-like eyes, shimmering and spherical, flashing a specific brightness totally unfamiliar with death or decay. Each singular river-corpse had a self-imposed cheek to cheek grin, shining upwards with a blight of weary hopefulness, all dressed with full sets of sparkling white teeth; perfectly pearly with plump, healthy gums. They all floated there like Ophelia, sapphic and serene, migrating gently amidst the slow, winding current.

I stood there, wholly mesmerized by the muted sound of the bobbing bodies, sounding something like big, fat droplets of condensation plopping into an empty tin can. They seemed to be entirely transfixed with this kind of gravitational rapture, like muted, salacious sirens, lulling and teasing their prey unto the murky depths below. I couldn't seem to break the fantastical yearning I had, to join them at their stream bed, feeling that soft, coagulated silt, first at the nape of my neck, then gliding smoothly across my rough, naked ass, feeling a warm, tranquil tingle in my taught, volatile anus. As I began to disrobe, a trio of gruff, entirely unrecognizable voices broke through the stratosphere like the raucous rip of a fractured bone. You go, how go, through here? they chanted. As I turned around to greet them, I was met with a raspy choir of three towering giantesses, their heads barely grazing the wispy clouds above. You go, how go, through here? They sang-spoke again, staring downwards with certain viciousness, towering over my small, nimble frame by at least a hundred feet. They were all adorned in robes of lush, smooth velvet, one in purple, one in emerald green, and the leader, standing astutely in the middle, wore one of a deep, crimson red, though hers was embellished with threaded designs of gold and wire. They wore masked faces made of various shiny alloys and dried, leathery hides, vaguely resembling an amalgamation of the mask of Hannya and that of a medieval plague doctor, though each mask had weird, gnarled expressions the others did not. I need to get through. The three of them looked around at each other in unison, nodding, then communicating in clicks and long, throatful croaks. You wish, we wish, his wish, they howled again in chorus. Youwishwewishhiswish, youwishwewishhiswish, they slurred into a mangled incantation, frenetic and nefarious.

They began swaying and casting in unison, their necromantic arms outstretched towards the sky, which was growing darker and darker by each shortened breath. Their murmuring became a hollowed, garbled chant that stung my body with a crawling itch, which began tickling my ribs with whoops and whirrs of heavy agitation. I began to feel my skin contort and contrast as though it was made of pliant rubber, bubbling up at the surface, folding itself into new, blistering graphs of alienish pigmentation. There came barbed pinchers and tiny, fuzzy feelers germinating up from my cankered pores as swaths of long, full-bodied antennae oozing out from the scalp, sprouting like tafts of new hair, all while I excreted some sticky, syrupy goo. A fierce, electric thrash of hot, rippling lightning threaded through the horizon, first striking at that molted steel monolith in the distance, which spat it right back skyward, building a kinetic charge so dense, it scattered across the ground like the collapse of a mushroom cloud.

The women now bellowed their resounding spell, echoing a piercing ripple of sound so gigantic, it shook the ground in a seismic pucker, vibrating so egregiously it oscillated through both muscle and bone. Their hex wasn't over, and neither was my transformation, as rippling tarsuses took the place of my two legs and molded themselves into five new hinds. A hard rip of skin revealed forewing and hindwing aplenty, at least two dozen threaded back between each knob of the spine, resembling something like a buggy transfusion; some transmogrified mixture of human, cicada, and mantis. Though I still stood at well over six foot, hardly insectful, I now possessed a fully nonmortal physique, half mangled insectum, half metamorphic anthropoid.

And I was alone again; neither the giantesses, those hung, cackling roosters, or any other Hellish creatures could be seen across my periphery now, as if they all suddenly evaporated into the swirl of the humid air. I waited for what seemed like hours at the castle gate, mulling over my new, Kafkaesque anatomy, until suddenly, the door finally let itself loose from its large, archaic hinge, revealing just a burrow of pitch black nothingness, with no disconcernable figure awaiting my entrance. All I could hear was the mutilated cry of a newborn infant, wailing deep and colicky.