Purgatory

Jon could still feel them inside, their sharp tools and prodding gloved fingers. Their faces half-hidden behind masks, erasing their identities, so that all he could see was the gleam in their eyes under their shadowed brows.

Bright white light, aggressive, overwhelming, and marvelous, shone down on him directly, as if cast down from the balcony of a high school auditorium by some nerdy AV kid or from the blissful plane of Heaven by God Himself. Before falling asleep, he remembered how badly it stung his eyes.

He recalled it so clearly, like an all too vivid dream. For a moment, just a brief, fleeting moment, he had slipped out of the anaesthetic slumber they had put upon him. It was then, in that sliver of unreal time, that he had witnessed it.

They had taken something out of him.

He had made out the head doctor with his blurred and sleep-crusted eyes, as he fiddled around inside of him, poking, jabbing, invading the most intimate nooks of Jon's being, his inner body, his guts. The ugly, abominable, unsightly contents of all humanity that should not be seen. The head doctor toyed around within Jon's body feverishly, almost hungrily. Searching for something. For it, whatever it was.

"I've found it," the head doctor had said to some other faceless minion in white. And a moment later, there was something bizarre and grotesque in the man's hands, pulled out from Jon's own body. Half-awake within this sacriligeous ceremony, he could not make out what it was, not completely. All he could tell was that it was rather large, able to be held by the head doctor only by the use of both hands, and that it seemed dark and oddly-shaped, a blob of repulsive inner-matter.

Then he was gone again, lost in the netherworld of forced sleep, where his dreams were too foggy and too strange, as if he had not entered a world of his subconscious at all, but had instead crossed into a realm of grey and silent horror that no man was meant to go.

When he awoke again, he was lying in a room they had given him, recovering after the surgery. It was quiet and dim, except for a lonely beam of light shining into his eyes from across the room; some kind of night-light. It stung his eyes.

Turning his head away from it, he looked out the window of his room and saw a black and uncaring night. He could see little out of it, save for a dead tree with branches curled like the claws of some skeletal beast, and a slow-moving herd of cumulus clouds, leviathan apparitions in the upside-down sea of midnight.

Jon weakly fumbled for his buzzer, pressed it with nervous ferocity. The time inbetween doing this and the arrival of a nurse seemed disturbingly long.

"Is everything alright, Mr. Harrison?" the nurse, a plain, but not unattractive looking, young woman, asked.

"No one...no one was here...so I thought I'd buzz to see if something was wrong," Jon replied with a raspy throat.

"Nothing's wrong, Mr. Harrison. It's the middle of the night, that's all."

"Wh-what time is it?"

"There's a clock right above the door, Mr. Harrison," the nurse said and pointed.

"I can't make it out," he replied, "it's too dark and they made me take out my lenses before surgery."

The nurse took another glance at the clock. "It's 3:19, Jon."

Jon stared at the nurse with a confused and paranoid look upon his face. He felt as if he were still asleep.

"How...how do you know my first name?"

The nurse retrieved a chart off the end of his bed. "It's all right here, Mr. Harrison. Should I call you 'Mr. Harrison' instead?"

Jon shook his head, embarrassed at his childishness.

"No, Jon is fine."

Yes, he thought to himself. Jon is fine. He stared back out toward the window, at the tree hand under the hovering and gloomy clouds. Something felt off to him.

"'This is the condemnation'..." he heard the nurse suddenly mutter.

"Pardon?"

"...'That light is come into this world'..."

"What are you talking about, miss?"

"...'And men love darkness rather than light'..."

"I'm...I'm sorry, I'm not feeling very well. I think the drugs they gave me are still in effect. I'm rather disoriented."

"...'Because their deeds are evil'."

"Would you mind just getting me a glass of water and then, maybe, I can go back to sleep."

"Not a problem, Jon."

The nurse retreated into the small bathroom on the other end of Jon's room. By the time she had returned, Jon had nearly fallen asleep again. When he stirred, he was momentarily frightened at her sudden reappearance. Despite the fact that it felt as if she had been gone for some time, he knew it could not have been longer than a few moments.

"Here you are, Jon."

Jon took the plastic glass from her hand and took a sip of water. It felt cool and alien going down his dry throat. He gave it back to her and she set it down on a small table near the wall on Jon's right, where he could see there were also a group of chairs for visitors. This reminded him of something.

"Has anyone been here to see me?" he asked the nurse.

"A woman," was all the nurse said.

"Who was it?"

"I'm afraid I don't know, Jon. I don't usually deal with the visitors."

Jon thought for a moment. Who could it have been?

Katherine? His sister.

Lauren? His cousin.

He didn't know many women. Not now. Now, he barely knew anybody.

Penelo -- No...

In his drugged, half-asleep state of mind, he had thought of Penelope, his old girlfriend. But that was impossible, of course. It couldn't have been her. She was dead.

She had died three years ago, that night they'd had their big fight. Killed. By accident, by animal, or by malice, no one knew. They had just found her one grey morning, lying face down in a ditch, pale and lifeless.

No one knew how she'd died. No one. Not even Jon. Especially not Jon. No. No, he didn't know. He didn't.

He still remembered the fight. She'd wanted the child. He had not.

Something Biblical popped into Jon's head.

"And God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten son..., he quoted to himself.

He never had found out if it had been a boy or not, after all.

Penelope, coming to visit from beyond the grave. Perhaps with the little dead child in arms, both of them decayed and reeking. Or perhaps they'd have been transparent and hovering; ghosts. He laughed at the thought.

"What is it, Jon?" the nurse asked.

"Nothing...what time is it again, miss?"

Without even turning to the clock, the nurse said, "It's 3:19, Jon."

Jon rubbed his forehead with his hands. Deja vu, he thought.

Something felt off to him.

"Didn't you say that a little bit ago?" he asked.

"No, Jon."

"Oh...well, they took me into surgery around seven or so...how long did it take?"

"I'm afraid I don't know, Jon. I don't usually deal with the records."

"Well, what do you deal with, then?" Jon was growing steadily and intensely tired and it was beginning to seem to him that this nurse was playing games.

"I am here to watch over the patients while they wait."

"Wait? Wait for what?"

"To recover, Jon. To leave."

"Well," he said, grimly, "that's a rather odd way of putting it. What about my surgery, do you know anything at all about that?"

"I know some things, Jon, yes."

"So, what about it? Did it go alright? Did they get what they wanted out of me? Were there any complications?"

"You'll be all better soon, Jon. They've made sure of that."

Jon smiled weakly. "Well, that's good to hear. You know, I probably would've died if I hadn't had this surgery. It was that serious. They said a lot of bad things were going on inside of me."

"Yes, Jon. It wasn't good. But you'll get better now. You're on the road to recovery."

He started to say something, stopped a moment, then continued. "You know, it's the funniest thing, but I thought I'd woken up in the middle of it and that they'd taken something out of me. Something big."

"You must have been dreaming, Jon."

"Yes, I suppose so."

Jon looked around the room. It seemed to have gotten brighter to him somehow. His eyes were aching from the light shining at him from the other end of the room. It cast everything near him in shadow. His sheets, the walls, even half of the nurse's body.

"You're sure you can't find out who that woman that came to see me was? There must be some kind of sign-in sheet or something."

"I'll look into it for you, Jon."

"And, um..." Jon paused in hesitation.

"Yes, Jon?"

"Well...it's just that that light over there is bothering me immensely. Could you turn it off, perhaps? You see, I...I have this thing about light. If there's too much of it, it hurts my eyes. Ever since I was young."

"...'And men love darkness rather than light'..."

"What was that?" He looked at the nurse suspiciously.

"I said, of course I can turn off the light, Jon."

She promptly went to the other end of the room and did so. When the light clicked off, Jon immediately felt different. Cold, maybe. And as if he were in a suddenly much larger space. He noticed that everything seemed far darker than it had before. The light hadn't been that bright, how could everything be so...black now? He felt like he had sunk into a void. A cold, black void, that was it. An abyss.

"'...Because their deeds are evil'," he heard the nurse's voice say somewhere close to him, perhaps back where she had been standing before, beside his bed.

"What...what's all this about darkness and light and...evil deeds?" he asked, voice beginning to quiver. He pulled his sheets up about him.

Jon felt a hand on his shoulder. He jerked back. The hand touched him again.

"Relax, Jon. You're still recovering. It's alright. You'll be better soon," he heard the nurse's voice say. "Just go to sleep for now."

"Yes," he murmured, "I should sleep. I'm so tired..." He lied back onto the bed.

"You've been through a lot. There was a lot of bad things going on inside of you. But they fixed that. You'll be better soon. '...Light is come into the world...'."

Jon ignored the odd rambling of the nurse. He felt her move away from him, heard her footsteps as she neared the door. Then, he heard them stop.

"Oh, I just remembered, Jon..."

Jon didn't even bother to open his eyes. "Yes?"

"I did run into that woman for a moment. I remember now. Her name, it was Penelope."

And the nurse was gone.

Jon clutched at his sheets in the dark and tried desperately to fall asleep, to fade once again into that silent dreamworld of fog and strange fantasies. There, perhaps, he did not understand what happened around him, but, at least, he thought, he might be safe. He lied there for what seemed like a long time. And even though he felt like he'd been awake for ages, and he knew that he couldn't have seen the clock in the dark without his lenses if he had tried to look, somehow he knew exactly what time it was.

It's 3:19, Jon. It's 3:19.