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He’s a bit surprised to find it’s warm after death. The idea of an afterlife never much crossed his mind, but if there was one, he couldn’t think of anything he’d done to end up in the ‘bad’ place. Luckily for him, Hell didn’t blaze like he’d expected. Maybe it wasn’t quite Hell at all. It was a gentle glow with twisted roots and vines. It was a lantern.
No longer freshly dead, Julian Browning spends most of his time (if time, a concept made and meant for the living, even matters postmortem) wandering what he now knows to be Fear’s lantern. A force of habit, he supposes, after a cut-short lifetime of aisle-walking and ticket-taking. He looks for something to clean, someone to correct. He finds nothing.
Most paths lead to closed doors. He’s yet to meet the other residents, if the demon holding him here is to be believed. Each door is marked with a glowing symbol and a word as opposed to a name, carved sharp and jagged into the wood. His own reads ‘vengeance.’ He doesn’t understand the meaning of this term in relation to himself. He doesn’t feel vengeful— he doesn’t feel anything at all.
“You are… transitioning,” Adaru had said. “Death threatens to take the soul away. I have brought it back, but it has dulled.”
This, Julian understood. Though he saw the physical realm of the lantern with great clarity, his mind’s eye could not conjure anything beyond a grey haze. All that he knew with certainty was his own name, and the name of his true home, the Theatre— but when he tried to think beyond the basics, his throat began to close, the fog closed in, and he was forced to push the thoughts away.
“Do not worry,” he said, a burnt, clawed hand resting on Julian’s shoulder. “You have great potential. I feel it within you like the flame that keeps us all alight. You will become exactly what I need you to be in due time.”
The thought of this ‘becoming’ swirls Julian’s mind disconcertingly as he continues his walk. He turns another corner, the cold metal of his flashlight familiar in his hand as something unfamiliar catches his eye— an open door.
Sunlight is the first thing he notices. It beckons him closer, surprising him again as the ground beneath his feet turns from creaking wood to soft grass, damp from morning dew. The grass extends towards the sky in an endless expanse, interrupted only by three mobile homes in a small cluster, a section of a neighborhood sliced like a cake and deposited into the middle of a sunlit void.
Resting on the stairs, Julian notices, is a man. Broad-shouldered and scarred with a pinkish tan, hair buzzed to the root, wearing a cutoff denim vest and a strange metal mask that seems almost screwed to his jaw.
“Are you the new guy?” He hears, but it seems disembodied— the words are too clear to be emanating from behind such a dense metal. The man isn’t looking at Julian, but he must sense his confusion all the same. “It’s telepathy or something. A gift from a demon to the mute kid.”
“Hm.” Julian says, taking a slow seat next to him on the steps. “What are you called?”
“Eddie,” he says, still staring at the grass. Julian follows his gaze, calm and somehow jaded, and watches as a bead of water glides down a blade. “I don’t have a title or anything. I’m only here to be with my brother.”
“Brother,” Julian says. This word seems to mean something to him, though he can’t yet place it. A brief silence settles between them, and eventually, he continues. “I’m.. Julian. My space here reads ‘Vengeance,’ though I’m not sure I’m too vengeful and all. I’m not sure I’m much of anything.”
This causes Eddie to look up, finally examining Julian’s face so that he may do the same in turn. As their eyes meet, something clicks— with Eddie’s facial scarring, one eye is left a milky white. Julian reaches a hand to his own face, glove circling the skin under his own damaged eye as a flash of memory returns to him as an audio track— jeering and laughter, the sound of someone falling to the ground.
Eddie seems to smile. “You’re like me. That’s got to mean something.”
“Birth defect,” Julian mutters. “Blind in one eye. Why can I see now?”
“Why can I speak?” Eddie replies. “We’re not stuck anymore. Adaru says this is freedom.”
“But he keeps us here.”
Eddie shrugs. “You telling me you’d prefer purgatory over this?”
A comfortable silence again.
“Were you blind and mute in life?” Julian asks.
“Only mute. The eye came with dying. And the face.”
Julian hums again. “I don’t remember how I died,” he admits, looking down at the grass as Eddie had been. He thinks he sees a frown in the corner of his eye.
“I think you have a hint,” Eddie says, and Julian looks up.
“What do you mean?”
He sees Eddie’s eyes flick briefly to his neck, and the closing feeling settles in again. Eddie lays a hand on his thigh.
“Hey, you don’t have to try too hard just yet. He’ll let you out soon enough. Then you’ll know.”
Julian frowns. “Is that how you remembered? Being let out?”
Eddie shakes his head. “I don’t get let out. I got one chance, but there was an accident with a plane, and Jack took my spot.” His brow furrows, and Julian’s does in turn.
“What does that have to do with you?”
Eddie shakes his head again. “I try not to think about it. I’m angry about a lot of things— how I died, how I lived. I don’t want to be angry at the brother I never got to meet. It’s not his fault either.”
The word ‘brother’ settles in his head again. He should remember something. It’s important. But all that comes forward is fog.
“I don’t know what I should be vengeful for. It’s worrying me.”
Eddie frowns. “..Try not to think about it.” When Julian sighs, he says, “It’s nice out here, yeah? Let’s just stay where it’s nice for a while.”
Basking in the sun is preferable to what will come, the shadows he can feel creeping up behind him. So, while he can, Julian Browning turns towards the light.