FEB 2026

Benjamin reached forward with his right arm as his head seemed to pull backwards, and in that paradox is where his mind snapped. The seconds could have been hours, the hours, days – he didn’t know he had collapsed. Not until he felt two lasers boring into his chest which was upright and poised, lain and slain.

“Am I dead,” he asked the person he could not see. His eye-lids opened slowly, heavily – as though waking from a death, yesterday or last century… here he was. Here he lay.

“Do you have anything to confess, Ben,” spoke the voice, whose peering, laser-like, had awakened his lost soul. His demented mind.

“Am I dead,” he asked again, leaning up to meet the pin-point of the lazar. A woman as fat as a hog — sat there for hours, days — hell? Had it been a century? Her cold, empty stare – her eyes as compassionate as two lumps of coal, her face fixed in judgement.

“Who are you? Where am I?” he asked horse, dry as bone. She laughed. He froze. And so began, Benjamin’s greatest nightmare, alive.

He had no personal care for his own fate but these monstrous beasts who knew naught of love – they can never, they could never remove that sacred bond of love and commitment.

Nonetheless it terrified him to the marrow that should they take it his soul and that of his purest loves would disappear down a tectonic split and all heaven would weep tears of blood in a spiritual war as old as mountains, seas or stars in the sky.

His love was not lost, not so long as the squatters found nor saw any value in the metal wrapped round his wedding finger. He had no personal care for his own fate, but the ring still tight on that finger meant the war was worth fighting – that the enemy of light had forgotten the most important part.

“Do it. Do it, now!” said a voice so urgent it seemed to echo — then they did it. Ben was enveloped by a revolting ungodly odour and a crimpled awful itchy cover came over his spent body — not so much a coffin yet felt as such in a transportation box with this stinking cover. Stinking. Revolting. Horrendous.

His legs did not work. He could no better stand than he could think. But he sat upright checking he still had two arms, and touching his chest, and then his face, his head, his ears…

“Who are you? Where am I?” he asked again, pulling each leg up by the backs of his thighs. No sooner could he become vexed by the laughing hog whose manic laughter sent electric shivers down his spine – then in ran the squatters.

He didn’t know how he knew, but for sure he knew these were the squatters in his tiny mind. They set again about him. Again, because this was not the first time. He knew. How did he know? The hog seemed to sprout arms, and upward Benjamin was hoisted.

“Wait. No…” He pleaded, “Not again.” Six pairs of arms folded him from the floor, rolled, pulled, fell, drown – it all felt the same. Into the special bed his body was thrown.

In the quickness of panic and confusion Benjamin felt for his wedding finger and his platinum gold diamond studded band was still there as the hog’s arms stripped him nude.

Words couldn’t describe the stench. At least Benjamin could not place the fowl river of stench – like rabbit meat weeks old, stewed long and slow. Like the decay and sludge of rotting leaves atop a meadow strewn with chicken shit, yet hotter than all hell to inhale and exhale, as though heaving rather than breathing – unctuous, oily, lingering.

He couldn’t vomit. He hadn’t eaten in hours, or days or centuries. He fingered his own anus as transportation began – nope. His anus was not the source of the stench. He could not cry. He could not ablution, he could not sweat, and he could not even—

Hell? He thought. I am dead? I must be dead.

Benjamin could not, in this blind panic and fear even begin to fathom his form of transport yet transport it had to have been. Not the odd bump of a road, not the sound of wheels but the hum and traction of something far out of his imagination. Then it just stopped with a belting flash of light and sudden silence. Now the fear had grown like wet moss — worse to wonder, where had he been taken?