The Souls of Limbo

In the poem they are the ones who did not sin and were never baptised, people with slow grave eyes who seldom speak; in the game they are human scenery and terrain at once, standing upright in the dark, blocking the corridors between the seven walls and drinking the trace you leave behind. They do not move, and that is not an oversight: they used to, and players rejected it twice in the same words, that a crowd walking behind your back is not tension.

They do two things only, and neither of them touches you. They turn their heads towards where the smell is coming from, not towards you, so behind a stone and with your breath held nobody turns at all. And once you have gone by they close in on the gap you just used, always leaving a way through, because the road back is the road in and a sealed corridor would lock the chapter by itself.

Then you take the book of their names, the one thing down here that can still get out, and from that moment they want you. One breaks off at a time and runs slower than you do: it is not a race, it is a slalom between bodies. Whoever catches you grips your arm, and for half a second you can still tear free; if you do not, they take you for one of the queue and carry you, in first person and not behind a black screen, to the slab of the judgement, which is where they are going anyway. It is not a death and nothing reloads: it costs you the road to walk again and the oil that burns while you do.