My heroin addiction had spiraled out of control for years, and I had progressed from breaking into cars to robbing people at ATMs, stealing from drug dealers or waiting in dark alleys for drunk partiers to pass by. I had never had an issue with the generally incompetent and understaffed cops around here and, while the police had my general description, I always used a mask and they didn’t know exactly who was committing this crime spree.

The night it happened started like any other. I had shot up dope, nodded off for a few hours, then woke up broke and penniless, like usual. I casually walked to an area frequented by college students, filled with bars and too many guys and girls living off of daddy’s money, and waited behind a dumpster, my .45 Ruger tucked under my leather belt. I could see my breath in the air, and my hands and feet were freezing. The winters here were brutal, and without the drugs I needed to live, I felt even worse- cold, shaky and anxious. I wanted to get this over with quickly, get some money and go back to the motel I was renting to call my connect.

I first saw the man by accident, as I heard a car passing by the nearby road and peeked my head out to make sure it wasn’t a cop. If someone nearby had seen me hiding behind this fetid-smelling dumpster, waiting, they might call the cops out of spite. But it was just some pick-up truck, his headlights illuminating the silhouette of the man walking towards me. He wore an expensive suit, his hair professionally styled with gel, a heavy gold chain hanging off of his neck. He looked like he was in his late 40s, but still had a strong and chiseled frame.

As soon as he got close, I jumped out of my hiding spot, pulling the gun up. His eyes didn’t even widen in surprise. He didn’t yell out. He just smiled at me, his blue eyes flicking from my gun to my face, covered in a surgical mask, then focusing in on my eyes.

“Empty your pockets, now,” I said, gesturing with the gun at his pants.

“No problem, friend,” he said in a low, guttural tone. “You can have it.” He pulled out his wallet and gave it to me. I patted his pockets, but that was all he had on him. It was strange to see someone who didn’t even carry a phone. Not that I would be likely to steal a phone, as they have GPS, but I would at least smash it so that he couldn’t immediately call the police as soon as I let him go.

“Just make sure you don’t bite off more than you can chew,” he said to me cryptically, his smile widening. His eyes looked too black even for the darkness of the alleyway, and his smile seemed to stretch wider than humanly possible. I raised the gun instinctively, stepping backwards and never taking my eyes off of him. Yet somehow I felt like he was the one with the power, and he seemed to have no fear or anxiety despite the circumstances of our meeting. It looked as if he thought the gun would do no damage to him.

Once I was near the end of the alleyway, I tucked the gun back into my waistband and started sprinting down the street. I got back to my motel a few blocks away in record time, running into the room and locking it behind me. I pulled out the wallet and began to examine it.

It had no ID, no credit cards, not even a library card. All it had was four hundred-dollar bills which looked like they were brand new and not even creased in the slightest, and a one-way bus ticket to some place called “Naraka”. I immediately turned most of the money into drugs and ended up nodding off in the bed with the TV set to old reruns of the Twilight Zone, having nightmares of that man’s eyes turning black in the alleyway as he watched me with evil joy, toying with me like a cat toys with a mouse before it murders it and rips it apart.

I knew I had to leave the area soon. Things were getting hot, and police were being dispatched in areas I liked to frequent. Undercover informants were trying to find information on who was behind the string of robberies and burglaries in the city, and I was afraid every time I left my hotel room that I would be rushed by an entire SWAT team and locked away for decades. But by some miraculous stroke of luck, I was left alone. I stopped all criminal activity that weekend, however. I had pushed myself as far as I wanted to, and was determined to restart my life. I went to a nearby methadone clinic and bought a couple dozen bottles from some of the desperate opiate addicts standing outside, telling myself I would wean myself completely off within a few weeks by taking small sips of methadone every few hours to take the edge off the worst of the withdrawals.

I read the one-way ticket I had stolen from the man. It stated that it was good for any date, and that I could get to the city of Naraka by bus. I called the number on the back of it, and a robotic voice told me that a bus was scheduled to leave for Naraka at 9 AM the next morning on some seldom-used one-way street next to the state Capitol building downtown.

After packing up my meager belongings and my last few hundred dollars, I got a few hours of sleep, doing the last of my heroin before throwing away all my needles and paraphernalia. By the next morning at 8:30 AM, I was waiting on the deserted side street, listening to music on my phone, wearing multiple jackets and a couple shirts to try to keep the cold away. But the first fingers of withdrawal were beginning to affect me by the time the bus pulled up. I felt like someone was dripping ice-water down my back and spine, goosebumps popping up all over my skin so badly that they hurt, a rising sense of anxiety and fear about the impending withdrawals rising in my chest. I was afraid, and wondered whether I was making the right decision.

The bus was totally empty except for the driver. It didn’t look like any bus I had ever seen. It was painted in bright shining red paint, with seven-pointed stars of all colors covering the exterior, a set of scales next to the logo which read “Ma’at Transportation Co.” The driver looked like he was from the 1950s, with a highly polished leather round cap, an old-style suit and leather shoes to boot. He looked down at me with icy blue eyes, his expression cold and unreadable.

“May I see your ticket, sir?” he asked in an emotionless voice, reaching out his hand towards me. I hesitated for a moment, then pulled the one-way ticket from my pocket. He looked down at it, frowning, then looked back at me.

“Alright, let’s go,” he said. I quickly got on the bus and went to the back, grateful for the rush of warm air as I did so. I took a couple sips of some watered-down methadone, still out of it from barely getting any sleep the night before. Before I knew it, I had fallen asleep.

When I awoke, the bus was totally packed. A little girl sat next to me, dressed in an old-fashioned blue dress, tiny blue bows wrapped through her hair, her little blue eyes staring up at me with curiosity. I groggily turned my attention to the rest of the bus, and it looked like the bus had stopped at a United Nations conference after I fell asleep. There were Asian men with glasses and briefcases talking quietly in a foreign language, a few rail-thin black men with countless scars, red bandanas and no shirts, a few white women with dyed hair and more piercings than I could count who looked like they had been pulled out of a nearby strip bar, and much more besides.

I felt absolutely terrible, like I always did when I woke up and was withdrawing. Freezing cold waves ran through my body, my eyes were watery, my nose wouldn’t stop dripping, my stomach was doing flips and goosebumps stood out all over my arms and legs as the heroin withdrawals crashed into my mind with dysphoric intensity. Ah, darkness, my old friend, I thought to myself.

“Are you going to Naraka?” the little girl beside me asked in a low voice. I turned my bleary eyes down at her. “You don’t look like you belong. At least not yet. One day soon, I think you will be ready, if you don’t change the path you’re on.”

“I’m going anywhere but here,” I said to her. “Where are your parents anyway?”

“My parents,” she said softly, looking down at her lap, “are dead. I killed them.” I rolled my eyes.

“Sure,” I said. “That’s not a very good joke, little girl.”

“My name is Zenaida, not ‘little girl’,” she said, smiling up at me.

“Harry,” I said, shaking her small, soft hand. I looked down, thinking I should take a sip of methadone to try to get rid of the worst of the opiate withdrawals, and realized my backpack was gone. I immediately freaked out, looking around frantically, my heart feeling like it would burst out of my chest. I couldn’t go cold turkey. Like most addicts, I was absolutely terrified of cold turkey withdrawals, the endless weeks of insomnia and nightmarish intensity of the symptoms.

“Where is my backpack?” I asked loudly. No one looked at me besides Zenaida. Most of the passengers on the bus totally ignored me, acting like I didn’t exist. A girl with dozens of piercings and a face tattoo looked over at me and frowned, shaking her head.

“I don’t know,” Zenaida said, smiling slightly and shrugging. “It wasn’t there when I got on at my stop. Why? Was something important in it?” I shook my head violently.

“You have no idea,” I said. This whole trip felt more and more like a mistake.

“Next stop: Veriden,” a robotic voice echoed throughout the bus. The bus started slowing down, and as I looked out the windows, I realized I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

The world outside had huge, tree-like molds growing everywhere. They were fiery red with jet-black streaks and grew hundreds of feet tall, like the fungi equivalent of redwoods in this new land. I saw humanoid beings walking on trails that wound through the forests of fungi, their legs bending backwards as they crept forward like birds. They stood twenty feet tall with deathly pale skin, like some worm from a cave that has never seen the light of day, and wore black suits on their thin, skeletal bodies. Most disconcertingly, their faces were totally blank, without eyes or mouths or noses or hair, just perfectly smooth skin. They walked by in twos and threes, and I saw some of the passengers of the bus get out and begin following the trails traveled by the strange beings.

“Am I tripping right now?” I said, mostly to myself. I tried to remember if I might have been dosed with psychedelic drugs without my knowledge, if someone might have put drops of LSD in my water bottle or food, but I couldn’t remember any opportunity anyone would have had to drug me. I had certainly had enough experience with psychedelics, and this almost felt like something from the DMT world.

The bus slowly began driving forward again, the Asian businessmen who had departed and the faceless beings in front of them fading out of view. The fungi forest thinned out, and on the horizon, I saw a floating city. Spiraling silver spires without any visible windows or doors were interspersed with massive statues and domed, spiky houses with a most disconcerting Lovecraftian appearance. The metal streets of the floating city looked thousands of feet wide, the structures and skyscrapers disappearing into the white, puffy clouds of the sky.

Then we were off again, entering a black tunnel. I could see nothing outside the bus now.

“Next stop: Naraka,” the emotionless voice of the robot sounded. A gasp of horror rolled through the bus as some of the passengers in front started weeping or praying.

“Naraka, Naraka, no, please, no,” a starved-looking black man said in the seat in front of me with a thick South African accent, before putting his face in his hands and crying.

We exited the seemingly endless black tunnel, coming into a horrifying world. The streets were paved with bone, and it seemed like we were encased in a metal container thousands of feet tall. The smell of smoke and burning meat entered the bus, and as I looked around, I saw countless people stretching all the way to the horizon. They ran constantly, most of them naked, their skin burning as fire seemed to sprout from the ground itself. It came out everywhere except for the roads, flames rising a couple feet in the air and sending off thick black clouds that rushed in the strong breeze inside the massive container.

To my left, only a hundred feet away, I saw a crying man on his knees in front of a blue-skinned being. The being looked like a tall man in most ways, except for his luminous skin and bulging black eyes. As I looked past him, I saw countless more of the blue humanoids. They appeared to be in charge here and seemed unaffected by the fires, heat or smoke around them.

“Those are the naraka-navas,” Zenaida said to my right, peering out the window dispassionately. “Look at how well they take care of the sinners.” She giggled slightly.

The crying man grabbed at the feet of the naraka-navas in front of him, saying, “Please, sir, I am so thirsty. I have been thirsty for so long. I cannot take it anymore.” Smiling an ear to ear grin, the naraka-navas grabbed the man, pinning his arms behind his back while another blue-skinned being came over with a black pot of boiling water. They forced the man’s mouth open and poured the boiling water down his throat, his skin being scalded off in papery layers by the intensity of the heat.

As the door of the bus opened, dozens of blue-skinned men stormed the bus, dragging out each passenger one by one. The driver grinned, turning to look back at me, and I realized with horror that it was the same man that I had robbed in the alleyway.

“This is the last stop, friend,” he said, his piercing eyes focused so intently on me that I had to avert my gaze. The blackness of his pupils seemed to expand and take over his whole eye. “After all, didn’t you come to me and ask for this? You demanded it, by knife or by gun, and you will get all of it you desire. Maybe even a little more, in fact.” He laughed sarcastically as the passengers screamed in panic before they were one by one dragged out the door of the bus and thrown into the fires and streams of lava that cut paths all around us. Then he pointed to the wall of the metal shell nearest us, maybe a quarter mile away. I realized it had a door on it, one that stretched hundreds of feet in the air.

“Every one hundred thousand years, that door opens, and those who are nearest can flee this place,” he continued. “And do you know where the door leads? It leads to a forest made of swords, where their limbs are cut off, their eyes are gouged out, their skin and muscle is sliced open, and they are healed over and over and forced to run again. Their heads are cut off, their chests are cut open, and they cry for death, but it never comes. And that place, too, has a door. But the destination beyond each is just as foul, just as evil, and just as deathless.

“So it is for those with impurity in their hearts, those who kill the innocent and harm the harmless. Their suffering is as incomprehensible as the universe itself. And as long as the last drop of their evil karma is not exhausted, they will never die.” As he spoke, the last passenger was dragged off, leaving just the driver, Zenaida and me in an otherwise totally empty bus.

“So, I’ll ask you only once- is this your stop or not?” he said.

“Please, God, get me out of here,” I said, starting to cry, despair overtaking me. My withdrawals had disappeared under the mortal terror and existential horror I now felt. I had a mental vision of myself living here for millions or billions of years, having fetid boiling water and molten lead poured down my throat, being thrown into streams of lava, being cut apart and always healing, always returning, always wishing for death. “I’ll do anything, anything, please- take me out of Naraka.”

“Will you make good what you have done? Will you turn yourself in for the crimes you have committed?” he said, his smile disappearing, his face returning to its prior placid state.

“Yes, please, I don’t want to end up like these people here,” I cried. The driver turned away from me, starting the bus and driving forward on the road of bones. Soon we entered a black tunnel, and the smell of smoke and burning flesh started to pass away.

As the bus exited the tunnel, I saw with incomprehensible relief the pale blue sky of my world. We appeared to be in New York City, over a thousand miles away from where I had first started this morning. I saw Manhattan and its distinctive skyscrapers in the distance.

The bus came to a stop in front of a bus depot. I turned to Zenaida, who held out a black bowl, made of some volcanic obsidian-like material. It was the same bowl I had seen the naraka-nava use when it poured boiling water into that poor man’s mouth.

“This is for you,” she said. “A memory of your journey, perhaps. Take it with you and remember, always.” I smiled down at her.

“I will.”

I exited the bus and wrote this up on my way to the police station. I’m turning myself in for the armed robberies I committed, among other major felonies. They will have to extradite me to the other state, but I am going to tell them the truth, and let whatever happens happen. Hopefully they have some leniency on me because of my addiction and my remorse, but I have no choice in the matter. Even life in prison would be far better than what I had already seen today.

I’m going to send the bowl out to a scientific institute to be studied before I go into the police station, though. If it is what I think it is, it may be made of a material never before seen on this planet, but one that only comes from Naraka.

I hope I will never see that evil place again.