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A HELL OF A DAY

'Fancy seeing you here,' said a voice behind him.

'Yes, I suppose it was inevitable really,' John replied, as he shrugged his shoulders and resigned himself to his fate. 'And to think we actually had to queue to get in!'

A tall, cloaked figure, dressed in black was there to guide them; it was none less than the grim reaper himself, scythe poised, knowing John and his friend had no choice but to follow. 'Memento Mori,' he said mournfully, as his bones, denuded of all flesh, rattled beneath his sombre cloak. 'Remember, you must die.'

Speechless - for what was the point in protesting? John did as he was instructed. Countless others shared his unenviable destiny; they too could never retrace their steps, into the world they had left behind.

The hapless duo was led towards a place of eternal damnation where doomed souls were being tortured before their very eyes. A malodorous stench of death hung heavily in the air as they wound their way through twisting labyrinths, down into the final abyss, the realm of the dead. A skeletal figure, enmeshed in dusty cobwebs, brushed against John's shoulder making his flesh recoil at its monstrous touch. Looking the very harbinger of Mephistopheles himself, the skull stared menacingly at him out of two cavernous sockets where the eyes should have been. 'As you are, I once was, and as I am so you will become,' it warned icily, through clenched teeth, chilling John to the very core. Apart from the dim glow of torches hanging from the labyrinth walls, the bleached whiteness of the skeleton's molars and picked-clean bones was the only stark contrast amidst perpetual darkness.

'I wish we could go back,' John's companion gasped in dismay, still a few paces behind him, but he was rebuked by several demonic laughs nearby.

'You cannot go back, it is not possible,' the reaper informed him gravely, as he pointed to a sign on the dimly-lit walls.

Bats screeched devilishly above John's head, causing another lost soul beside him to let out an eerie, blood-curdling scream.

'There will be a weeping and a wailing and a gnashing of teeth,' shrieked the reaper with a sardonic laugh as-he wielded his scythe high in the air for extra emphasis. 'You will be judged according to your works and cast down into an unfathomable lake of liquid fire and sulphur, into the bottomless pit, from which there is no escape, and the unquenchable flames and smoke will consume you forever and ever.'

It all sounds like something of a Dave

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