The Hell We're Born Into

The Hell We're Born Into

Reincarnation, the Journey Toward Heaven

By Joey Raines

Description:

A young man is born with mysterious voices screaming in his head, voices that claim to be his own memories from lives he's not currently living. As he grows older, these whispers reveal a horrifying truth about the nature of existence itself, forcing him to confront a reality far more terrifying than death. A psychological horror story about memory, identity, and the price of understanding truths that were meant to stay hidden.

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The Hell We're Born Into:

The screaming started the moment I was born, though no one else could hear it. It came from somewhere deep inside my skull, a chorus of voices that belonged to me but weren't me, shrieking warnings I couldn't understand. The doctors called it colic. My mother called it a blessing when it finally stopped after three months. But it never really stopped. It just learned to whisper.

By the time I turned five, the whispers had names. Marcy, who drowned in a lake that didn't exist in this life. Daniel, who burned alive in a house fire that happened in 1847. Elena, who died screaming in childbirth, her baby's skull too large, her pelvis too small, the blood pooling beneath her for hours before death took mercy. They were all me. Every single one of them was me, and they were all trying to tell me the same thing: we had been here before, and we would be here again, and again, and again, until the very concept of existence became a wound that would never heal.

The realization hit me fully when I was twelve, standing in my childhood bedroom, staring at my reflection in the mirror. But it wasn't my reflection anymore. It was Marcy's face, then Daniel's, then Elena's, then dozens of others, hundreds of others, flickering past like frames in a broken film reel. Each face carried its own death, its own agony, its own desperate hope that maybe this time would be different. The mirror cracked down the middle, splitting my current face in half, and I understood with crystalline horror that I was looking at a queue. A line of souls waiting their turn to inhabit this flesh, to live this particular hell, to fail again.

Because that's what life was. Hell. Not metaphorically, not philosophically, but literally, genuinely, hell. We were all dead. We had all died, over and over, lifetime after lifetime, and instead of finding peace, we were condemned to return, to try again, to climb one more rung on an infinite ladder of suffering. Each life was a test, and we kept failing. The baby who died of hunger in medieval England, reborn as a factory worker in industrial London, dying of black lung disease, reborn as a soldier in World War I, dying in the mud of Flanders, reborn as a housewife in 1950s America, dying slowly of loneliness and barbiturates.

The pattern was always the same. Birth, suffering, death, rebirth. Each time thinking this was our first life, our only life, that death would bring an end. But death was just a doorway back to the beginning, back to another womb, another birth canal, another set of parents who would love us and lose us and never understand that we had been their child before, in different forms, different names, different centuries.

I started seeing the others when I turned sixteen. Not everyone could see them, but some people glowed with a terrible light that meant they knew. They remembered. Mrs. Patterson, who ran the corner store, her eyes would meet mine and I could see the weight of a thousand deaths behind her pupils. She had been a plague victim, a witch burning at the stake, a slave ship passenger, a concentration camp prisoner. Her current life was her reward for all that suffering: a quiet store, a kind husband, a simple existence. But even she knew it wouldn't last. Even she knew that when she died, she would wake up screaming in another crib, in another time, ready to climb the next rung of this infernal ladder.

The worst part wasn't the dying. The worst part was the hope. Every single lifetime, we hoped. We believed that love would save us this time, that success would free us, that finding God or peace or happiness would finally break the cycle. But hope was the cruelest joke of all, because it kept us invested in lives that were designed to fail. Hope was the hook that kept us coming back, lifetime after lifetime, believing that maybe this time we would get it right.

I learned the rules through dreams that weren't dreams, through memories that belonged to other versions of myself. We could move up levels, but only through perfect suffering. Not passive suffering, not accidental suffering, but conscious, willing, purposeful agony. The mother who died protecting her child moved up. The soldier who threw himself on a grenade moved up. The person who sacrificed everything for others, who suffered willingly and completely, they earned their way up one level of hell, where the suffering was slightly less, where the hope was slightly more real.

But heaven? Heaven was a lie we told ourselves to make the climbing bearable. I had lived a thousand lives, died a thousand deaths, and I had never met anyone who had made it all the way up. The ladder went on forever, each rung slightly less terrible than the last, but never ending, never reaching that promised land where pain finally stopped and souls found rest.

The knowledge was eating me alive from the inside. I could feel my current life unraveling as the weight of all my previous deaths pressed down on my seventeen year old shoulders. Marcy's drowning lungs burned in my chest. Daniel's melted skin itched across my arms. Elena's torn womb ached in my belly. Every death I had ever died was happening to me simultaneously, and I knew with absolute certainty that when this life ended, when this body finally gave up under the pressure of remembering every single moment of agony I had ever experienced, I would wake up as a baby somewhere else, somewhen else, and have to learn it all over again.

The screaming started again, just like when I was born, but this time I understood what it was saying. It was saying welcome back. It was saying you failed again. It was saying get ready to try once more. And the most horrible thing of all was that underneath the screaming, underneath the agony, underneath the crushing weight of infinite reincarnation, there was still that tiny, persistent voice of hope, whispering that maybe, maybe, if I suffered perfectly enough this time, if I climbed just one more rung, I might finally find peace.

But I knew better now. Peace was just another word for the level of hell we hadn't reached yet. And I was going to keep climbing, keep dying, keep being reborn, until the universe itself forgot what rest meant. Because that's what hell really was: not fire and demons, but hope without end, and the desperate, eternal climb toward a salvation that would always be exactly one more death away.

Then something changed. Something that shattered everything I thought I knew about this endless nightmare.

It started with the dreams. Not the usual nightmares of past deaths, but visions of light. Pure, warm, beautiful light that didn't burn but healed. In these dreams, I could see upward, far above the endless ladder of suffering, and there it was. Heaven. Real, tangible, blazing with a glory that made my soul weep with longing.

And I was actually climbing toward it.

The horror wasn't that heaven was a lie. The horror was that it was real, and I was getting closer. Each perfect death, each willing sacrifice, each moment of conscious suffering was moving me up the ladder, rung by agonizing rung, toward genuine salvation. The system wasn't broken. It was working exactly as designed.

I could feel the change in myself. The whispers of my past lives were growing quieter, not because they were leaving, but because they were finding peace. Marcy's drowning terror was fading into acceptance. Daniel's burning agony was cooling into understanding. Elena's birthing screams were softening into something like gratitude. They had all been necessary. Every horrible death had been a lesson, a purification, a step closer to something beautiful beyond imagination.

Mrs. Patterson's eyes held dread, but not the kind I had thought. She was afraid of letting go. She had climbed so high, endured so much, that she was only a few rungs away from leaving this realm of suffering forever. Her quiet life wasn't a reward or a punishment, it was a final test. Could she accept that all the pain had been worth it? Could she trust that the light above was real?

The knowledge hit me like a revelation and a curse all at once. Every lifetime of agony, every cycle of death and rebirth, every moment of despair had been building toward something genuine. Heaven wasn't a lie we told ourselves. It was the truth we were too trapped in suffering to see clearly.

I started to understand why some people seemed to glow with that terrible light. They weren't remembering their deaths. They were remembering glimpses of what lay ahead. They had climbed high enough to see over the edge of hell into something so beautiful it made the journey worth every moment of agony.

But here was the true horror: I was almost there. I could feel myself getting closer with each passing day. The weight of my accumulated suffering, my growing understanding, my conscious acceptance of the cycle, it was all adding up. I was becoming worthy. I was earning my way out of this infinite loop of death and rebirth.

And it terrified me.

Because once I reached heaven, once I climbed that final rung and stepped into that blazing light of perfect peace, I would be free. Truly, completely free. No more pain, no more death, no more desperate scrambling up an endless ladder. Just rest. Just peace. Just an eternity of everything hell had taught me to yearn for.

The whispers in my head changed. Marcy, Daniel, Elena, and all the others weren't warning me anymore. They were celebrating. They were telling me we were almost home. That all the suffering had been worth it. That heaven was real and waiting and more beautiful than any of us had dared to imagine.

But I didn't want to leave. The horror of hell had become familiar, comfortable even. The endless cycle of death and rebirth was terrible, but it was what I knew. Heaven was the unknown, and the unknown was more terrifying than any amount of familiar suffering.

I realized with crystalline clarity that this was the final test. Not whether I could endure more pain, but whether I could accept that the pain was ending. Whether I could trust that the light above was real and let myself climb that last rung into salvation.

The choice was mine, and that was the most terrifying thing of all. After countless lifetimes of being trapped in cycles beyond my control, I finally had the power to choose. Stay in hell and keep suffering, or accept that heaven was real and let myself be saved.

And I was more afraid of salvation than I had ever been of damnation.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this story, if it made you think, or just kept you reading, I’d be honored if you’d tap the ❤️ to show some love, hit subscribe to follow me for more, and if you feel like it, you can leave a tip, totally optional, but always appreciated.

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