[ WP ] One person says to the other `` I 'll see you in hell '' before dying . Time passes and the second person dies and goes to hell . The two people reunite .

Oh, *those* two. Sorry, I thought you meant the ones with the bicycle. There's a bit of a story there. Not an altogether pleasant one, if you want my opinion. Like so many of the other ones here, there's not really a moral to it. It's more a pathology. 
 
 Well, alright. I can tell by the way you're looking at me I'm going to have to tell it. Ugh, it's sooo cheap, though, of a story, just as horrid as all the other ones here, but - I think we're better off getting to the next room. No? Okay. Fine. 
 
 The tall one. Well, the one on the ground. With his back to the ground. The one with hair. He's a rapist and a muderer. Not a big one, comparatively to some of the usual suspects around here. Three rapes, I think, the murder was somewhat incidental. It happens, sometimes, you know, with the rape and all. But criminals, they get caught, and he did. 
 
 It's a pity, I suppose, that he did n't get caught for any of the crimes he commit. But you know how it goes, `` well, m'lord, he's prolly guilty of sometin','' and the next thing you know it's to the chair or the gallows or whatever it was then. I'm not keen on chronology. Actually, I'm embarrassed. I think I was trying to do a Tennessee accent there. Do n't tell, will you? Good. 
 
 Anywho, in the process of committing this injustice against the guilty comes the other one. The bald one. Bound and determined to bring his wife's attacker to justice. Or at least *someone* to it. Mind you, baldy is a curious one in his own right. List of venial sins that runs a marathon, but only one mortal one, sort of, when he perjured himself to try and convict the one he's wrestling with. If he perjured himself, that is, I've seen much more narrow cases run the other way. He was so desperate to believe that he could catch his wife's assailant, felt so emasculated by the situation, blamed himself so much for being so drunk after the poker game, that, well, **I'm** willing to cut him some slack. 
 
 But the drama begins when, before the mob strings him to the tree, or maybe it's soundlessly mouthed on the other side of the thick glass: whatever it is, the bald man says to the tall man, `` I'll see you in hell.'' 
 
 Not an uncommon thing to say, mind you, and there are certainly exculpating circumstances. But he says it. And he believes it. He believes it, in fact, with the sort of belief that he has n't displayed over any other teaching of the Good Lord. It's a promise to him. It destroys him. It consumes him. Not overtly. He does n't descend into anguish and alcohol or whatever. He remains married to his wife, for a time. Then divorces her and takes up with another, for a time. He is respected and feared at his job. But a promise like that, it's a sort of spark, right? If you do n't actively quench the fire, it keeps burning. 
 
 So, the rapist, unrightfully condemned but justly punished. He's a bad man, a bad, bad man, but he's nowhere near the worst of men, and it may be that is greater sin is being too impressionable. He suffers, and he learns his penance. He'd be to Lethe by now. 
 
 Except for the other man, the husband, out to make good on a promise he did n't know the price of. Oh, we ca n't let the rapist go when the husband wants to make him his punishment. We simply *ca n't. * That would n't be fair to anyone. And the husband - and this is what makes the story so tawdry from my point of view - he keeps wanting something different out of the rapist. He wants to forgive him. Then he wants his forgiveness. Then he wants to fight. Then he wants to be rid of him. But he ca n't get over the idea that he's somehow not his lodestone, that he's a person in his own right. Meanwhile, the rapist, well, he does n't really understand, in part because he's moved beyond his moral self, but also in part because he's being held to task for a crime that he did n't commit. However similar to ones he did. 
 
 The husband, as things in hell goes, is positively moving backwards. The most piteous quality of the story, I suppose, is that the wife languishes in purgatory, unawares of this whole drama being played out for her purported benefit, and I've not the faintest if the actual perpetrator is even passed on to the Beyond. 
 
 Frankly, the whole caboose stinks of cheap melodrama. Which is n't hell's thing. So you see why I did n't want to have to tell you about it?
