Stairway to...

A dead man found himself in pitch blackness on what appeared to be a staircase. "What now?" he asked himself.
We would be happy to leave this at that, but perhaps should indulge in what could be described as a psychological glance at our protagonist. He was surprised. In short, he had expected the total absence of light but not the awareness of that absence. He felt it to be somehow personally insulting, but perhaps more so the staircase...though the two together...the surreal banality of it all. Surely if there was to be an afterlife, as there evidently was, he deserved something more... more what? More in keeping with his dignity, importance. If reality had the temerity to continue to exist, it should at least present itself in some more exalted form.
What happened next, if anything, is a mystery.

While the above may seem to have been an opportune moment to close the doors on the above as a whole, we might observe that while it would perhaps be indecent to allow ourselves too easy access to the private thoughts of this, our central and only figure, still it is at least possible that he wondered if the position in which he found himself didn't have similarities to a passage from The Brothers Karamazov, and if so whether this was derivative, even if only subconsciously so, or coincidental- owing simply to the common human origin of these creations' creation, and the the not unlikely similarites of certain of these humans' thought processes, and the imaginative channels into which they flow. Though whether he did ponder this, and if he did, whether it would have been of any use to the situation, is again a mystery. Perhaps a kind of mythic Sisyphus situation arose of perpetual movement upwards, or downwards, depending on inclination, through the darkness. Perhaps he stayed where he was, in moral and intellectual indignation. Perhaps through, I don't know, faith, he finally arrived somewhere.