Gloom had no idea how much time passed in Hell. There was no passage of day and night. He never grew hungry. Time might be standing still for all he knew, or eternities might have passed already. He measured the passage of time by the souls he helped, therefore. Each one seemed to take forever, as Nacoma had warned, but when the woman he'd selected as his first patient finally paused in her screaming and met his gaze he felt such a sense of relief and triumph that he almost forgot the ever present agony of the flames. He spoke to her for some time, reassuring her that she wasn't alone, that there were others sharing her torment who understood what she was going through, and this alone seemed to help her more than everything he said to her after.

     He discovered that her name was Sandra Pennyworth, and that she was an ordinary housewife. The husband of a good man and the mother of two wonderful children. She had been raped by her employer in the food packing factory in which she worked. Unable to bear the shame of giving birth to the child of a man other than her husband, she'd had an abortion in a dirty, backstreet clinic. The procedure had gone wrong, though, and she'd bled to death on the table. It was for the sin of having had an abortion that God had sentenced her to Hell. Gloom held her tight as her tears evaporated in the flames, and his hatred of God rose to a height he hadn't thought he was capable of.

     There were also plenty of genuinely bad people in Hell, though, and he met plenty of murderers, rapists and thieves as he went from one damned soul to the next. People for when even he could feel little sympathy. He wondered whether one of the rapists he met was the man who'd attacked Sandra, then decided it didn't matter. If it hadn’t been Sandra that a particular man had attacked, it had been some other woman equally undeserving of such a horror, and if Sandra's attacker wasn't down here somewhere, he would be one day.

     Even for these people, though, such eternal torture seemed excessive to Gloom, and so he spent the same amount of time (as far as he could tell) helping them as he did anyone else, although they rarely thanked him for it. By far the majority of the people he spoke to were what he would have described as good, though, and most of them went on to help other people in turn, mainly because there was simply nothing else to do.

     Many times he had to scream and pretend to be a new arrival as a demon passed overhead, and he watched many other souls being carried up above the flames to be abused in some imaginative way by the creature. When his luck finally ran out and the demon chose him to be its victim, though, he found that he was able to endure the torment the same way that he was enduring the flames and was able to watch his internal organs being torn out and discarded with an almost clinical interest. When the creature grew bored with him and dropped him back into the flames, the sensation of his ravaged body healing itself was an interesting one.

     He wondered whether he would come across any famous historical characters as he interacted with the other denizens of Hell. He wondered what it would be like to have a conversation with Pythagoras or Ramasses the Second, greatest of the Aegyptian pharaohs. Or even Cain himself, the very first murderer. He did come across someone claiming to be King Barjurr the Third who seemed to think he should have heard of him, but the name meant nothing to Gloom and he didn't even recognise the name of the country that he claimed to have once ruled over. He supposed that the ordinary, common people outnumbered the famous historical characters to such an extent that he would only run across one of them by the sheerest good fortune.

     After a time, he found that more and more of the people he tried to help had already been helped by someone else, which shouldn’t have surprised him. Even if only half of everyone who received help went on to help someone else, the number of helpers would grow exponentially and soon everyone in Hell would at least have been offered help. He found that the sound of screaming was diminishing as the majority of damned souls found ways to cope with the ever present pain, the pain that lost its grip on them precisely because it never went away. As Nacoma had said, it became simply a background sensation, like a bad smell that you simply stop noticing. Even the malicious attentions of the demons lost its power to scare them. Thanks to the work of the Resistance, almost all the denizens of Hell were coming to realise what only the oldest souls had understood until then; that they were immortal spirits that could not be harmed in any way. All pain and suffering was nothing but an illusion.

     Conversations began to break out among the damned souls as they got to know each other. Even the truly evil ones began to join in. No matter how spiteful and sadistic a person might be, there was very little that they could now do to harm their neighbours. The murderers couldn't murder anyone, and any physical injury they tried to cause not only healed very quickly but was insignificant compared to the pain of the flames. No-one had anything to steal, and even rapists were hard pressed to carry out their crimes. The new arrivals who hadn't come to understand this and who could still be tricked into thinking that they were being raped were protected by their neighbours, who were always right beside them in the crowded ocean of fire. Attacks from evil people trying to hurt their neighbours were mainly limited to the hurling of insults, therefore, and the victim as of these attacks soon learned to simply ignore them.

     Gloom soon had a circle of friends, therefore, whom he entertained with tales of cases he’d solved and mysteries he'd uncovered, and he listened with interest to the tales of their lives in turn. After a while he would wander off through the flames to seek out new companions to talk to. He even found new mysteries to solve as he compared one person's account of an unsolved crime with the accounts of other people who had been involved with the affair. He was beginning to think that Hell might be quite an interesting place, full of interesting people, and that he could perhaps let go of some of his hatred of God, but new, freshly damned souls kept falling out of the sky to land nearby, whereupon they instantly started screaming at the Intolerable torment. Someone would immediately help that person, teach them what they needed to know to endure the pain, but this always took time, as Gloom remembered from his own first arrival, and his resentment towards God would return full force. Even if the pain could be conquered in time, why should good people have to suffer such torment at all?

     As more time passed, though, he realised that a new torment lay in store for them. Still a long way in the future, but if they were truly trapped there for all eternity it didn't matter how far in the future it lay. Sooner or later it would happen. The new torment that he foresaw was one that most people wouldn’t even have imagined was a possibility in Hell, but Gloom had the intelligence to look ahead and follow the events he had witnessed to their logical conclusion. Only the newest arrivals suffered any more, and their suffering eventually ended. What followed was a continuation of their existence, without change and without end. Forever. The new torment that Gloom foresaw was boredom.

     As he contemplated this, he came to a new realisation of the sheer magnitude and power of God's malice. God had known that the flames would eventually lose their ability to hurt them, but against tedium and boredom there was no escape and it would simply grow worse as they ages drew on. The damned souls could talk amongst themselves for a time, comparing each others experiences and memories, but with all eternity to fill even this would eventually lose its power to occupy their minds. What would follow was mind numbing tedium, each day exactly the same as every other, and it would eventually drive them all insane.

     Terror gripped him as he contemplated this. He shook with horror. He paced back and forth wiping his brow with a feverish hand. People asked him what was wrong and he could only shake his head, not wanting them to be troubled by it any sooner than they had to be. Surely there had to be some escape. Some way to avoid this unthinkable fate.

     Only one ray of hope shone through his despair. Surely God had found a way to spare the occupants of Heaven from this fate. After all, they also faced eternity. What was the point of Heaven if the blessed souls who dwelled there faced the same nightmare that he saw in his own future? There had to be an answer to the horror of eternity, and if God had provided it for the occupants of Heaven, then he had to be persuaded to share it with the occupants of Hell as well. The revolution still had to happen, he realised. Escaping from Hell and storming Heaven had become more necessary than ever.