My head was beginning to spin again. As I brought my hand out of the water, a head bobbed to the surface.
A very pretty head.
Attached to lovely white shoulders.
The dark waters hid the rest.
Her eyes were sad and haunted. And just as green as her long hair that flowed down the sides of her elfin face.
“Hello,” I said. “Do you know the aguane?”
She smiled sadly and a white arm came up out of the water and grasped the rope that dangled from the pirogue’s bow.
A sudden squelching sound accompanied a row of geysers that stitched the water nearby.
“Go away, Honey; you’re gonna get hurt if you hang around here. Shoo. Scat.”
She ducked back under the water and I couldn’t hold my head up any longer. I lay back down, my face resting in damp bilge that hadn’t been there moments before. Either the boat was leaking or I was bleeding out even faster now.
Either way, it didn’t make much difference.
I closed my eyes and sank into watery darkness.
Chapter Eighteen
The roaring beats against my ears, my skin, shivering and shaking my body, filling my head until I fear it must burst!
If I concentrate on the flames, I can almost forget the crowd, can almost believe the roaring comes from the great fire, alone . . .
That I am alone . . .
The faceless one comes, his head enclosed in a lopsided cone of dark leather. I try to see the color of his eyes but the eyeholes reveal nothing but deeper shadows. I look down and see the iron pincers in his massive hands, its curved and sharpened ends glowing a dull, cherry red like the baleful eyes of deep-dwelling demons from Hell.
I force my gaze away—away from the executioner and the judges. Away from the accusers and witnesses. Away from the coming horror . . .
A horror like that which I wielded when I took my turn beneath the castle as de facto judge, witness, and executioner . . . tormenting Her unwilling guests while She looked on, seemingly apart yet more the participant than we who wielded the whips, the pincers, the irons, and the blades at Her will.
At Her pleasure.
The others will hold their tongues despite this final, excruciating injustice. Erzsi has escaped their net, so far, but I think she will not live long. She is doomed as we all are for having come under the Witch’s spell.
Our dark Mistress maintains Her hold over us still, though Her bloody reign of terror has all come unraveled and we have been bound with the chains with which we once played. She formed our answers as the questions were asked and the heated irons were applied like lovers’ kisses, subtle, intimate, then ardent . . .
Even the countess, shackled not with chains but with stone and mortar, high in her dark tower—but I cannot dwell upon this last, great injustice.
She will not let me, still.
The secret will die behind our blackened lips.
The secret will only be told by the blood, the blood that has no voice of its own.
I turn back to the fire and stare into its shimmering depths. The fire is all. The flames fill my field of vision as they fill the town square. The screaming starts and the world begins to burn.
The fire is all.
* * *
Some say the world will end in fire.
Others, ice.
Perhaps there was a third alternative: water. Not too cold, not too warm. But dark. And something akin to desolate nothingness.
My return to consciousness was like a reversal of my descent into its watery depths. I was a bubble trapped under layers of dark silt and mud. Slowly, drowsily, I slipped the confines of my premature burial and began to rise, ascending through the heavier strata of cold, dim waters and moving toward the light and warmth that lay just beyond the surface, high above.
As I ascended, the murky, muffled sounds resolved into voices—clarified—until I could finally distinguish words and phrases. Then sentences.
Although the water was warmer and clearer, now, I still had a ways to go. My eyes would not yet obey my desire to open.
But I could listen now.
So I lay quietly and listened to my first sermon on the other side of the grave.
“You have heard it said that God is an angry God, a vengeful God! That He delights in punishing the wicked and destroying the evildoer!”
It was a strong voice, a powerful voice. But it became soft and gentle a heartbeat later.
“I know that you say in your hearts: ‘I am wicked! I am an evildoer!’ And you believe that you are damned because fearful men, ignorant men, men with no love in their own hearts, have told you so!”
Near the surface now, I cracked my eyelids a bare sliver and squinted against the harsh whiteness that seared my eyes.
“These same men, out of the darkness in their own minds, the fear in their own hearts, would presume to enslave you—to shackle you to their own fears, their own darkness! In you, they see the reflection of their own evil, their own sin and corruption, and they have made you into spiritual scapegoats—the sin-eaters for their twisted purposes!”
My eyelids twitched and I began to bear a bit more brightness, now.
Again the voice thundered, “I say to you, do not fear the judgment of men! That is what has enslaved you! Enslaved your fathers! And your fathers’ fathers, going all the way back to the ancient times! It is not by men that you will be ultimately judged, but by God! It is God’s judgment that matters and not the fearful imaginings of ignorant men. And some of you should understand this all too well because some of you were once fearful and ignorant men. And women.”
I lay on my back. Above me flared a panorama of white. Flickering white.
“Now, now that you should know better, you are still held hostage to the fear and ignorance of those who cannot see beyond the grave!”
I saw seams in the whiteness . . . stitches . . .
“Do you truly believe that you are beyond redemption? Consider the words of Paul, an Apostle of Jesus, called Messiah by the Christian sects: ‘There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one. Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit . . ’.”
Shadows of limbs and moss-draped branches danced, faded, and reappeared across the whiteness with the shifting patterns of light.
“ ‘The poison of vipers is on their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know’.”
The voice paused dramatically, then continued: “Paul goes on to say that ‘all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.’ “
I turned my head and saw that my canopied ceiling descended to the floor in swooping drapes and folds. I was inside a tent.
“Have you done evil?” the voice asked. “Well, let me tell you that you are in good company!”
I wasn’t sure about my afterlife theology. I might hear sermons in Hell . . . but would I see tents?
“This book that I hold in my hands contains a veritable roll call of evildoers! This Paul, the Apostle of Jesus, whom I just quoted a moment ago, went around arresting and executing Christians with a viciousness that made him hated and feared throughout his country. He held his friend’s coat and watched in utter indifference while the man was put to death. And, when he finally repented of the evil that he had done, he had to change his name and assume a new identity, so utterly fearful was his reputation in the land!”
I looked down and examined my blanket-wrapped body. It lay upon a canvas and wood-frame cot. As far as I could tell, I still had a physical body and it ached like hell. Again, the theological rules regarding corporeal existence were unclear. Was I still alive?
“Remember the story of Moses? Moses was a murderer! Before his exile into the wilderness and his destiny on Mount Sinai, he killed an Egyptian with h
is bare hands! Not by accident, not in self-defense, but in a murderous rage—a rage not unlike that crimson tide of fury that has swept many of us to violent acts in our own circumstances!
“Solomon was an adulterer. His daddy, King David, was always getting into trouble on that front and even ordered his best friend on a suicide mission so he could possess the man’s wife without complications! How’s that for cold?”
As a matter of fact, I was cold. The blankets kept some of the chill at bay, but I didn’t generate enough body heat for the blankets to trap it effectively.
“The prophet Jonah defied God. Jonah! Sent on a mission by his God, he effectively said: ‘The Hell with this!’ He defied God and abandoned his mission! Ran away from his responsibilities! Not because he was afraid for his life, not because it was too difficult! He ran away because he was afraid the people he was supposed to preach to . . . might be converted!
“He didn’t want them to be saved! He wanted them to suffer! He wanted them to be damned to eternal hellfire! Now what kind of evil is that?”
I worked on unwrapping the blankets. Whoever had tucked me in had done a bang-up job of it. I felt like a moth seeking premature release from its cocoon.
“Peter. The Apostle Peter. What a disappointment!”
While the “Sermon in Hell” scenario seemed less and less likely with every spasm toward wakefulness, it seemed pretty clear that I hadn’t fallen into the hands of the 700 Club, either. Nope, not the sort of material one would expect from Graham, Falwell, Robertson, or Swaggert. And definitely not in the province of those TV evangelists with the gold furniture and the lady who looked like the love child of Dolly Parton and Tammy Faye Baker.
“Peter who is all noise and thunder when it comes to proclaiming Jesus as the Messiah,” the voice continued, “suddenly loses his spine and denies that he even knows this man! Not once, not twice, but three, count ‘em, three different times! How’s that for eternal damnation? Denying the Son of God!”
I managed to work an arm free and then lay quietly, waiting for the room—er, tent—to stop spinning.
“Except the New Testament doesn’t say anything about Peter being damned!”
I—and, presumably, some unseen audience—endured another dramatic pause. The tent seemed to spin a little less. “So what is the message here?” the voice continued quietly. “It’s a very powerful one.”
I noticed a familiar quality to the voice when it spoke softly—I had heard it somewhere before. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but, in my present condition, I was just as unlikely to come up with my own telephone number.
“The message is simply this: the great men and women in the Bible, by and large, were guilty of great wrongs! They sinned on both sides of the aisle: the sins of ‘commission’; and the sins of ‘omission.’ But—in spite of their failings, their fears, their acts of disobedience or destruction, even their acts of evil—God used them! In fact, God blessed them!
“Oh, there were struggles and consequences, to be sure. But the scripture says ‘Nothing can separate us from the love of God’?”
I worked my other arm free and was gratified to see that, while the tent’s interior continued to revolve slowly, the revolutions didn’t increase in speed.
“Do you believe that you are damned for all eternity? Do you really believe that you are beyond the forgiveness of Eternity?”
A large shadow darkened on the wall of the tent, shrank and darkened as someone approached.
“The Bible says that there is only one sin that is unforgivable! Only one sin that is unpardonable! It is not murder! It is not denying the Son of God! These sins, though not inconsiderable in their consequences, are not beyond the possibility of redemption.” The voice dropped in volume and then continued softly: “No, the only sin that the Bible claims as being beyond God’s mercy is—”
Lost as someone swept the tent flap aside, the stiff canvas making the sound of a colossus striding about in gigantic corduroy pants. Three women entered, the last pulling the flap closed behind her.
“Ah. You’re awake I see,” said the first, an older woman with a scattering of long, dark hair amid the predominant gray. She could have been in her late fifties or early sixties—assuming she was human. Actually, she did look human, and more than a little Amerind, but I had long since learned to not go with my first impressions.
The woman just behind her left shoulder appeared younger, taller, and plumpish. She wore glasses and had a kerchief bound over her long, dark hair. The woman standing just beyond the first woman’s right shoulder was smaller, roundish, with dark hair and skin tones evidencing Hispanic origins. All were dressed similarly in blue jeans, tee shirts, and sneakers. If they were the Three Fates they were remarkably casual dressers.
“How are you feeling?” Fate Number Two asked pleasantly.
“Like Hell?” I croaked.
“Well,” said Fate Number One, “you’ll feel better in a bit. We’ll do a session, with your permission, and Father Pat will be collecting communion shortly.”
I wanted to ask: “A session?” Then: “Father Pat?” And before I could even get my mouth open: “Communion?” Instead I bypassed all three and asked: “Where am I?”
They all looked at each other and Fate Number One asked, “Where are we, girls? I’m afraid I haven’t been paying attention lately and lost track.”
Fates Two and Three exchanged expressions of bemused befuddlement and shrugged.
“The swamps,” said Two.
“There aren’t exactly any streets, addresses, or postal drops out here,” added Three.
“We move about on a regular basis,” concluded One.
I sighed. “So, I guess I’m still alive.”
The oldest one chuckled and her eyes crinkled up into a dozen smiling creases but her words chilled me: “Not necessarily . . . your aura is all wrong.”
“My what?”
“And your chakras are all running backwards,” chimed in Number Three.
“Angela!” Number One scolded.
“Well, they are.”
“Reading someone’s aura from across the room is one thing,” One continued, “but we don’t do scans until we have permission.”
“But I didn’t scan him—not really. I can see it from here! Can’t you, Lynne?”
Number Two cocked her head and looked me up and down. Or, more accurately, from one end to the other as I was lying down. “Nooo,” she said slowly with a slight shake of her head, “I need closer proximity to his energy field in order to visualize the patterns of flow . . . but his aura . . .”
“It is unusual, isn’t it, girls?” One remarked.
“I’ve never seen anything like it!” Angela breathed.
“Except for the time,” added Lynne, “that Brother Mike—”
“Ladies!” One sternly admonished, “we are being rude.” She turned her attention back to me. “Forgive us our nattering. We would like to help you but first we must ask your permission.”
“My permission?” I croaked.
“To do a scan,” Angela elaborated.
“And adjust your energy fields,” Lynne added.
“If we can,” Number One amended.
“Marilyn!?” the other two gasped, as if she had suggested something unthinkable.
“Well, look at him,” Marilyn said matter-of-factly. “He actually has three distinct auras. I’m betting that his chakras don’t total the requisite number either. Tell me, friend; are you alive, dead, or undead?”
I shook my head, causing the tent walls to take a quarter-turn about me: “I honestly don’t know.”
She nodded, thoughtfully. “Well, you’ve got holes in your auras that I could drive a truck through. With your permission, we’ll attempt to close those gaps and rebalance your ki.”
“Anything to make the room stop spinning.”
Marilyn nodded and the three ladies took their positions at my head, my feet, and my side. Hands were extended, turned palms down, and
then floated over my body a few inches away from actual contact. Aside from a series of “hmmm"s, a sigh, and a couple of “now that’s interesting,” the tent was quiet for a time.
“Angela is right,” One—er—Marilyn said after a prolonged silence. “I count fourteen definable chakras—doublings actually—and three, hmmm, I don’t know—para-chakras? And more than half of them are running backwards!”
“Is that bad?” I asked, starting to raise my head. The tent started to shift to the right so I lay back and closed my eyes.
“Not necessarily,” answered Marilyn’s voice. “If you were completely human, your energy flows would be completely out of whack—you’d be one very sick puppy.”
“Voilà,” I said, making a weak gesture with my hand.
“But you’re not human,” she continued. “Aside from the evidence in your multiple auras and chakras, you simply would not have lived three minutes after being gut shot the way you were—never mind surviving these past two days.”
“Two days?” I murmured.
“And not just survived,” she continued, “but begun to heal. Wiggle your toes.”
I complied as best I could, though my feet felt numb and far away.
“See? Already your severed spinal cord has begun to knit.”
I pushed past that surprise to ask about my liver.
“I’d stay away from hard liquor for another week or two but you could probably crack a bottle of wine tomorrow.”
I doubted that I would be up for much of anything by tomorrow but I learned a long time ago to not argue with one’s nurses.
Unless, of course, the topic was bedpans.
“So, to answer your question . . . we don’t know.”
“Um,” I said, “you don’t know what?”
“Whether half your chakras running backward is a good thing or a bad thing,” Lynne answered, her eyebrows performing a series of merry pliés.
“Normally we would work on reversing the vortexes that are turning counterclockwise,” Angela explained.
Dead on my Feet - The Halflife Trilogy Book II Page 29
