It was crazy to expect this thing to help me, after all, I didn’t know it in any way, all we had done was exchange a few words before it shed its skin and revealed its identity as a shadowy monster to me. But putting all of that insanity aside, this thing was proof that I was either going insane, or that the paranormal is real.
If I’m insane, my sister is gone for good and I’ll have lost her forever. Despite it being a slim possibility, I want to believe that the paranormal is real, that I can save my sister, that I can see her again, laugh with her again and argue about stupid shit again. I want that possibility to be real.
“Get off your knees, you’re getting blood— my blood, all over you.” The thing went back into its disguise and pulled me up. I still want to puke thinking about the scene. “I cannot help you, the only way is to almost die yourself but even that won’t bring her back. She’s dead.” A solution.
“Thank you, teyze.” I kissed her knuckles and brought them to my forehead, “Please tell me how I can repay you.”
“You have nothing I want, your failure and eventual descent into madness will provide great entertainment.”
I grabbed a random bottle full of pills and poured them into my mouth. They were large and coated in wax that melted into a massive ball and blocked my throat. I tried to drink some water to ease them in but the wax was so thick it repelled it, creating a small pool in my mouth. My eyes filled with tears as I tried to breathe to no avail. The thing simply watched with an uninterested look, her fingering toying with my frozen mother’s curls.
A massive headache started at my left temple. It was sharp and travelled down my neck slowly, like the source of my pain was in my blood. Tears ran down my face as my lungs did summersaults in my chest, I’d be passing out soon. Good. I laid down comfortably in my bed and waited. The old lady muttered a few words everything unfroze, my parents ran to my side, only to find me choking. My father tried to reach into my throat to pick out the pills one by one while my mother pressed the big blue button on the side of the bed to call a nurse.
By then, my soul had already left my body. I watched as all this happened, stared at my seemingly lifeless form as nurses ran in with emetics and a bucket to get me to breathe.
Suddenly, The Thing waved her hand across the floor. A massive hole that nobody else in the room seemed to notice had formed in the middle, waiting to swallow me whole. I gazed at my parents one last time, their weeping faces shaking my body and yelling at the nurses to do something.
I felt the familiar nausea of vertigo as I stared at the hole, massive, black, and seemingly endless. I still wasn’t sure what this thing was, it could be a malevolent spirit trying to trick me into my own premature death, did I really want to barter with my life? I felt a push at my back and fell in before I could decide for myself. Strangely enough, it didn’t feel like I was falling at all. In fact, it reminded me of the warm embrace a mother gives her child after a nightmare. We had a soft landing on a field with a stone path that led to a lake below a weeping willow. Not at all what I imagined the underworld to be.
“Is this Heaven?” I asked as I stared at my reflection.
“Heaven doesn’t exist,” said The Thing. “Neither does Hell.”
“Whatever you are exists, surely they must as well.”
The creature sighed in exasperation and pulled me back, “Don’t stare at it for too long, we’re only going to be here for a short while if we can help it.”
“What do you mean? How long are we staying?”
“However long it takes for you to regret your decision.” The Thing sat up straighter and puffed out its chest. In that moment, it resembled a crow grooming itself. “Aren’t I so merciful, giving you an opportunity to change your mind before you make the worst decision one can possibly make.”
I clenched my fists, trying to hide my frustration. “Just take me to Fidan.”
The thing sighed, “Fine, it’s your funeral— literally” and pushed me into the lake. Why must I be pushed into everything?
The weight of the cold water crushed me as I tried to swim up, to no avail. This can’t be how I die. I know how to swim, I used to swim in the Bosphorus as a kid, there’s no way this is how I die. I grab at the water, desperately trying to pull myself up. Nothing worked, I just sank to the bottom like an anchor and stayed there, lungs inflamed.
The old crone had tricked me, I’d die here before ever finding my sister, my parents would suffer twice because of my stupidity. I felt hands wrap themselves around my ankles and a pull even deeper than I thought the lake would go. The pressure accumulated in my head and I heard a pop in my ears before losing consciousness.
I awoke in a cave that smelled damp and mouldy like an attic that hasn’t been cleaned in a while. There was an uncomfortable feeling of water in my lungs, climbing up with each breath without ever leaving. I tried to cough it out, only for black, tar-like substance to come out. That’s what I get for smoking all of those cigarettes.
“That’s normal” said the old lady, squeezing water out of the dress, “How do you feel?”
I lunged at her, wringing her neck with my hands and squeezing tight. She laughed at me, clearly unaffected. “What the fuck was that?” I growled, “I could’ve died!”
“You’re already dead,” She shrugged, “sort of. This is the only way into the Underworld.”
I tried to feel for my pulse to no avail. “Couldn’t you put me in a near-death situation or something, like those people that get visions one? Isn’t that why I took all those pills?”
She snorted, “You took those pills because you’re an idiot who can’t follow instructions. As for those people, they’re liars. Being dead for a few seconds isn’t what’s going to bring you here,” she stared at her watch, “You’ve been ‘dead’ so to speak, for seven years yet you’ve just awoken.” I guess she could see the panic on my face because she continued on, “Time works differently in the land of the living, if you go back, it’ll be closer to seven hours.”
“You mean when I go back.”
“No, if.”
I sighed, exasperated. “Why seven years?”
“That’s how long it takes to get your hands on one of these,” she flashed a stack of papers at me.
“Don’t tell me I need a visa to die,” I groaned, “does my passport strength also determine if I end up in Heaven or Hell?”
“I already told you, Heaven and Hell don’t exist. This grants you access into the Underworld, that’s all there is to it.”
“You can’t tell me we all go to the same place after we die!” I groaned.
“I can and I am. Punishment is a human concept, you’re already dead, nothing here can hurt you,” she sighed after seeing my confused expression. “While you were ‘drowning’ did it hurt?”
I took a minute to think about it, it didn’t necessarily hurt. I used to dive as a kid and had experienced breathlessness more than once. This time, it had just felt like my lungs were caving in on themselves without the pain that came with it. I was strangely aware of each of my organs, which was uncomfortable to say the least, but not painful.
“All are equal in death then,”
“Precisely.” She dragged me deeper into the cave, she narrowed her eyes at me with a terrifying smirk. “You’ll learn that soon enough.”
I ignored her, there’s no way I’m leaving this place without my sister. “So you’re like a grim reaper?”
“More like a tour guide. I don’t kill people, I just get their travel documents ready and send them off to the Underworld. It’s grunt work, really.”
I reached for my papers but she batted my hand away, “So you’re an intern? I got dragged into the underworld because of an intern?” This is insane, this is actually insane. Who’s to say I’ll even be able to go back?
“Hey!” It yelled, its feather-like shadows sticking out. “I had nothing to do with this. You chose to swallow those pills!”
One, two, three, deep breath in. One, two, three, deep breath out. I am zen, I am calm, I am not dead.
“What’s in those papers, anyway?”
“Just general information about you, who you were as a person, your actions and how they affected people. Classic stuff.”
“But if there’s no Heaven of Hell, why do you care?”
My tour guide sighed, “I don’t care about anything, Death on the other hand, likes a more hands-on approach when it comes to dealing with humans. They say it helps them assign a fitting setting for a soul’s next life.”
“So you do punish bad people.”
“No, we send you into familiar environments that’ll help you thrive and be the best person you can be, if we punish you for things you committed in a previous life in the next, we’re no better than those who believe the sins of the father are those of the sons.”
“That’s bullshit.”
My guide shrugged, “There is no such thing as justice. You die and after that, you get a new life. If Death takes a liking to you they’ll give you a more pleasant one, if they don’t, you’ll get stuck with a normal or bad life like the rest of ordinary people. You’ll continue this cycle until the end of time.” She shrugged. Her wrinkles softened and faded the deeper we got into the cave, she must’ve been rejuvenated twenty years since I first met her.
We walked for what felt like years until we finally arrived at a dead end. “How did we manage to get lost on our way to the Underworld, I thought you were supposed to be a tour guide!” Fucking interns. I reached for my pocket for a cigarette, only for my pack to have been swept away as I drowned in the lake.
“We’re not lost, we’re early,” she crossed her arms across her chest and started tapping her foot to the ground, “Need I remind you that you’re not supposed to be here yet?” She sighed, exasperated once again. “We don’t even have an appointment. Give it a minute, Death is coming.”
Sure enough, a skeleton in a trench coat materialised in front of me almost immediately. I had to hold in my laughter, this was probably the most ridiculous thing I’d ever seen, it was like staring at a caricature of death instead of the thing itself. I swallowed my laughter, I mean seriously! Where was the big scythe or long black hair and robe? Where was the black horse? I straightened my back and extended my hand for them to shake.
“Oh trust me, you don’t want to do that.” The woman pulled my hand back.
Death turned to her, “What is she doing here?”
“Trying to cheat you.”
They laughed like this was the beginning of a joke they’d heard several times throughout the eons.
“Please stop talking about me as if I’m not here,”
They turned towards me, I don’t know how but I felt like Death was smirking despite their lack of facial muscle. “So, who do you want to rescue? A friend? A pet? A lover?”
“My sister.”
“Alright let me see what I can do… which is nothing.” they muttered before. snapping their fingers. Suddenly, our surroundings changed. I found myself in an office with dozens of creatures similar to my guide exchanging workplace banter and gossip by the water fountain.
We walked into a secluded room made of silver mud and roots interlocking to form a beautiful marbled pattern. Death filled their cup with what I assume to be coffee and gestured at me to sit. “So, you want to bring your sister back to life. Why?”
I stared at them, dumbfounded, “What do you mean?”
“I mean just that: why?”
“Because she’s my sister? And she was murdered?” The answer seemed obvious to me, her life was stolen from her, of course I wanted to get it back.
“What about all the other people who were murdered? Should they come back too?” They asked, bemused.
“I don’t really care about them, I just want my sister back.”
“I’m just curious, if your sister had died of old age, would you be here?” Death asked, leaning in as if impatient for my answer.
“Of course not, I’d be the one that died first and it would mean that nature took its course.”
Death chuckled before resting their head on their hands. “Wouldn’t you say that nature took its course in this situation as well? Isn’t this what survival of the fittest is all about? Your sister simply didn’t make the cut.” Their voice was cold and unbothered.
I could feel all of my pent up frustration making its way to my fist but it was like an invisible power was holding me back from punching them. “That’s not how it works.”
“I don’t care, and it clearly works since your sister ended up in one of my files, let me see…” They reached into a cabinet and flicked their fingers over the files, muttering random years and last names as they did so. “Ah yes! Here it is.”
Death handed me the file. I stared at it in confusion, my sister’s life was summarized in that tiny little thing, just a single double-sided piece of paper— It wasn’t nearly enough to encompass everything we had discussed. Every joke, every argument, every time we went into each other’s room to vent after one of our parents yelled at us… There was no way her life could be summarized in just a single sheet of paper.
“You’re in luck,” said Death, pulling me out of my train of thought. “You’re actually the second person to try something like this.”
I felt a spark of hope within me, “Did they succeed?”
Death let out a hearty laugh, the kind that you let out after hearing a knee slap-worthy joke. “Of course not and neither will you.” I felt my shoulders sag, “But I’ll tell you what, you get the same requirements as the last guy except if you fail, you won’t be able to find your sister in your next life.”
© 2026 C. H. Gökdemir. All rights reserved.
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