Still woefully behind on my word count, but here's a sample of what I have so far. This story is a little more serious than my usual stuff, so don't go into this expecting giggles. Unless the idea of Hitler's afterlife gives you the case of the happies. This is only a rough draft and is probably rife with spelling and grammar mistakes. Spellcheck SS and Grammar Nazis need not reply:
Almost Eternal Avici
By Karen Williams, Written as Karen Plaisance
I found Hitler at the end of his life-that is
to say, I found his spirit in the room where he died. This isn’t unusual. Most
people, when they perish tarry in or near the area of their demise. For Adolf,
this happened to be in the personal study of his Fuhrerbunker, a cold,
damp room made to be as comfortable as possible for the former leader of the
Third Reich. It must have been quite the shock for such a once powerful man to
find himself alone in a tiny room, staring down upon the blood stained sofa
where his corpse lay slumped over, brains leaking out of his skull, frozen in
time.
It was strange meeting him here after all
this time, and not just for the obvious reasons. He appeared to be much older
than the last time we met. Older even than the last news-reel I had seen him
in. This new world war had aged him much more than the last one. Such are the
perils of those who lead during wartime, especially those who lead the losing
side.
“Where is this place?” he asked, eyes wide
with fear and confusion. “Where is Eva? She was sitting next to me when we…”
“Your wife will not be joining you in this
place,” I explained to him. “This is your Avici, not hers.”
He whirled toward me, fear receding, quickly
being replaced by that hate filled, toothbrush mustachioed snarl the world had
come to know.
“Who are you?”
“You don’t remember me? Honestly, I didn’t
think you would. It’s been quite some time since our last meeting. And it isn’t
as if we were formally introduced.”
“How did you get past my guards?” He looked
me up and down with such a look of disgust, it would have withered me had I not
been beyond such things. “Are you a member of the Soviet scum come to string me
up by my heels like that fool Mussolini? I will be damned if I allow myself to
be taken by any of you Communist Juden!”
I smiled at the irony of that. “Damned is an
interesting choice of words. However, you’ll be happy to know I am not a member
of Stalin’s Red Army, and if you were thinking straight you would have figured
that out for yourself. Do I sound Russian, Herr Hitler?”
“No. No, you are British,” he said, pausing
for a moment in his puzzlement and shook his head. “I received word that the
Russians had broken through the Berlin
“Neither the Russians nor the Americans will
be coming for you, sir,” I said somewhat amused at his relieved expression. “No
one is coming for you. Well, no one living.”
Fear and confusion returned as his eyes
darted from me to the corpse on the sofa and then back to me again. His eyes
grew cold and his face became hard as his obvious predicament finally started
to sink in.
“You said this is my ‘Avici’,” he said eyeing
me and keeping his distance as if I were some new and dangerous creature. “I am
unfamiliar with the term.”
“It is a word I learned from an old Chinese
Buddhist by the name of Zhang. I met him in Hong Kong a few years before my own death while I was
there on business. I was living under the false assumption that men of his
religion did not believe in such a thing as hell. From what he told me, I was
only partially right. Buddhists do not believe in ‘a’ hell,” I said watching
him carefully. “They believe in many hells, some being the freezing torment of
Dante’s Inferno, other’s being the fire and brimstone the bishops teach
us on Sunday mornings. The way it works is like this: the worse you are in
life, the more bad karma you accumulate. The more bad karma you accumulate, the
nastier the hell you are born into and the longer you have to reside there
before you can burn off that bad karma and be reborn into one of the higher
worlds. He was right about most of this, but not about the nature of the hells.
But you’ll soon learn that.”
Herr Hitler gave me a cold look. “I won’t be
learning anything. If what you say is true, I must truly be in heaven. No man
lived such a blameless life as myself.”
I stared at him long enough to make any
ordinary man uncomfortable. Hitler was no ordinary man, however. You would
think the blood stained sofa behind him would have dropped a few hints. The man
may have been born with a silver tongue, but his brains were pure Pyrite. I
sighed.
“You are not only in hell, sir. You are in
the worst level of hell. What the Buddhists might refer to as the ‘Avici’ realm.
Your suffering will be epic, and it will go on for eons (upon eons).”
“Impossible!”
“I’m afraid it is the truth whether you wish to
believe it or not.”
He tore at his hair and began to pace the
room. “But why? What did I do to deserve such a fate?”
“Well, among a long list of sins, you killed
millions of innocent people in a bloody war nobody but you wanted.”
“I didn’t start this war!” he yelled. “It was
the doing of the international Bolshevik Jewry and their like-“
“You killed or had killed men, women, and
children who were no threat to you, had done nothing to you or to anyone. And
this does not even begin to cover the small deaths inflicted on the one’s who
will live through this mess you helped to create. The concentration camp
survivors who will live with the torture of their insufferable memories of a
hell on earth and survivor’s guilt, for instance.”
“Subhumans, all of them! Just waiting to stab
us in the back like they did during the Great War,” he raged, waving a clenched
fist at me. “They got what they deserved.”
“And what of the war widows, orphans, and
myriad other friends and family of fallen soldiers that won’t ever be coming
home again? Your own men who will come back wounded and disgraced or not at
all?”
“They died defending the Fatherland. The most
honorable death there is.”
“Be that as it may,” I said through clenched
teeth, knowing any argument on my part would be ignored, “you are here. All of
these lives were affected by the turmoil that you caused, Adolf. You. Not the
international Jewry. Not the Gypsies or the Slavs. Not the Homosexuals or the
Communists. You did this. You allowed this to happen, and it will be you that
pays for it.”
He only shook his head. “I did everything in
my power to save my people. I only did what I thought was right.”
“You’ve heard the old saying, ‘The road to
hell is paved by good intentions’? Well, now you’re about to learn the truth of
that expression. And you’re about to learn just how ‘good’ those intentions of
yours were.”
“I do not accept this!” he snarled.
He shoved me out of his way, marched past me
through the door behind me. I knew where he was trying to go. He was trying to
escape to the staircases that led to the emergency exit of the bunker and to
the gardens of the Reich Chancellery above. I knew it would be useless, but I
didn’t try to stop him.
As I predicted, the door to the study opened.
The corpse on the sofa had disappeared. The room was clean. Adolf entered with
Eva, his newly wedded wife of just forty hours. She had been waiting for this
day since the moment she laid eyes on him in 1929, the day he walked into
Heinrich Hoffman’s studio where she worked. She loved him then as she loved him
now, longed to make their love known, but he had kept their relationship a
secret from the German public, fearing he would lose his appeal with the female
voting population if he were to marry. Now she had what she had always wanted,
a wedding ring and a piece of paper declaring her to be Mrs. Eva Hitler, the
wife of Adolf Hitler. But the feeling of joy and triumph was quickly being
replaced by dread. She had her reward, and soon it would be taken away from her
along with her life. Because they were losing the war. No, not losing. Lost.
And now the Russians were on their doorstep, ready to storm the Chancellery at
any moment. It was all for nothing. Her shining knight had failed. He had
failed Germany
I watched as she sat with her husband upon
the brown sofa, listened as he whispered words of encouragement to her, watched
as she bit into the cyanide tablet, writhe upon the sofa in agony and perish
just as her husband pulled the trigger against his temple. And all the while, I
could hear Adolf’s spirit inside of her body, screaming to be released.
It wouldn’t end until he felt her death-all of
it, but it would start again somewhere above us. Soon, he would be screaming
inside the body of a Berliner being gunned down by a member of the Red army.
And then inside a child being torn to pieces by artillery. And after that, by
the hundreds of people dying or praying for death within the city. One by one,
he would experience it all. One death at a time. He would be killed outside the
city as well, in the trenches, on death marches, in the liberated concentration
camps. He would die of typhus, dehydration, starvation, etc. He would die a
million deaths, each one connected to the evil he had started when he came to
power.
And that was just his first moments in Avici.
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