Silas is a man of the world. Money is the most important thing to him because it is the only way to secure peace of mind. When his wife whines to him about the problems with their mansion-sized home, or about the troubles of their two teenage daughters, he throws money at her to shut her up, and it seems to work. His daughters are still alive and the mansion was featured in his town’s annual home tour and was awarded best house in the neighborhood for the third year in a row. A man of the world need only work hard to earn enough money to keep his family happy and smiling.
Silas works as an investment banker and manages the retirement portfolios of many local small businesses. He does a considerable amount of work from home, but he also goes to the office every morning, seven days a week, where he meets with the other bankers of the firm to compare notes and make predictions about financial trends.
Silas’s wife worries that he will work himself to death. “You never sleep. Even when you’re not at the office, you’re on the internet doing research or you’re on the phone with someone in Europe. I’m worried about you Si.” Silas uses his wife’s worry as an excuse to take solitary vacations. He loves his family, but vacations with the three women of his family were more stressful than his work. When he took solitary vacations, though, he usually kept the same business hours and hardly slept. It was just nice to have a new backdrop behind his computer screen.
Silas has created an enviable life for himself and everyone that knew him in his younger years, tells him what a hero he is for managing his way to real financial success. But Silas has a secret that will eventually lead to his undoing. Silas has not slept in years. Sure, he’s taken naps and usually when he gets in bed with his wife every night, he’ll wake up to the sound of their alarm in the morning. But he has not had deep, restorative sleep in years and it is a wonder that he has maintained his sanity for as long as he has.
After the birth of Silas’s second daughter, he was in a deadly car wreck. He’d been driving home late one night and was trying to respond to a text message. When he looked up from his phone, he swerved to avoid a deer and his car smashed into a tree. He survived with minor injuries to his body, but he was in a coma for a week before he awoke in the hospital. His wife was there when he opened his eyes and she tells him that it was the scariest day of her life.
“When you opened your eyes, I could see the fear of God in you, Si. And when I asked you what was wrong, you said you had been to hell. You said you saw the devil.”
Silas later denied it to his wife because he knew that he had scared her with the things he’d seen in his dreams while in his coma, but Silas had been to hell. After crashing his car, Silas remembers that he left his body, he felt that he was falling away from it, and he descended down to a depth where he felt the black flames of hell. And then he saw it. He stood in what looked to be a dark cavern and the echoes of agonies bounced all around him. He walked through a narrow hallway and eventually he came to a place where demons tortured men in the horrible ways that man’s body can be tortured. The demons were all different; some looked like pictures of devils he had seen before with horns and pointed tails. Others looked human, some like hybrid animals; but they were all menacing and cruel. Some drank the blood from the bodies they tortured. He saw what appeared to be a beautiful women with pale skin and golden blond hair, rip the arms from a man and then beat him into a bloody heap with the arms, and then she knelt at the heap, scooping the bloody mound into her delicate mouth. Silas hugged a wall in horror, unable to move for fear that he would be noticed and then tortured along with them. When the pale woman was done with her feast, the man she had eaten reappeared in the same spot, dangling from a chain that hung down from the roof of the cave. The woman took one last bite of the man and then she smiled a bloody smile at Silas. His heart began to race and he ran from the room and directly into a man with the legs of a goat and the horns of a ram. Silas fell to the hot ground and curled up to protect himself.
“You do not need to fear Silas. Nothing here can harm you, for you are not yet dead.” The man with the ram horns said to him. When he opened his eyes again, Silas was in the hospital with his wife.
“I was delirious,” he told her later. “I was in a coma for crying out loud.”
She wanted their family to start going to church so they wouldn’t meet hell at their end. But Silas thought it was just a dream that he’d had to make himself feel bad about texting and driving. He could have killed someone and he thought his conscience was playing tricks on him. Or at least that’s what he tried to convince himself was the truth.
It was getting harder to lie though, because since the accident, every time Silas sleeps, he returns to the same place and the man with the horns of a ram is there waiting for him, smiling at him.
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