Inquisitor Dreams
Page 35
“If that’s what you want to call it,” she replied.
“But… look!” Hand trembling, he pointed at a group he had just noticed a little to their left.
One of the most misshapen whip wielders, even as it stood flaying the victims before it mercilessly, was using its other hand to peel its own face. Half the forehead and the cheek below lay bare already, one round white eyeball staring out from flesh like butchers’ meat. As Felipe watched ahast, it dug its long talons into its chin and began slowly rolling the first long strip from the other side of its face.
“Guard,” Rosemary explained, giving it a glance. “Dehumanizing himself.”
“An alternative hypothesis,” another voice put in, “concerns the pangs of conscience and self-chastisement for actions known to be wrong.”
From somewhere—in his horrified fascination with the spectacle of a creature skinning itself alive, Don Felipe had not seen where—the dark man of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory had joined them.
“Why, then, not simply drop the whip?” Don Felipe asked him as their little group pressed on.
“Obstinate perversity, perhaps. Or possibly inertia. The human heart has even more convolutions than the human brain. Yet another theory proposes that those who perpetrate such deeds make themselves victims along with those whom they persecute.”
The three had almost reached the convent door. Looking up, Felipe saw Raymonde waiting there.
“It is the Golden Rule,” she said, joining their conversation even as she opened her arms in welcome. “The way one treats others is the way one treats oneself.”
“Great-great-grandmother.” Nodding, Rosemary reached around her and, with one forefinger, gave the door a nudge that sent it swinging inward.
The contrast with the outer yard was complete. At a great table laid with gold, lace, and crystal, stretching to infinity beneath marvelous trees and a dome of incredibly pure light, an immense multitude shared graceful good fellowship. Pilar’s people Don Felipe saw there, and Gamito’s, Hamet’s and El Santon’s; pink skins, yellow, and all shades of brown; Adamites, Taborites, and priests of Baal; persons representing every guided dream of his life, as well as many in attire he had never glimpsed before… each one a distinct individual, yet clearly a companion to all the others.
And, rising over and infusing all their happy conversation, the overpowering immanence of GOD.
“But where is Juan El Santon himself?” Felipe cried, searching the table with an anxious gaze. “Surely that earnest soul cannot still be among those in the outer confusion?”
“This is but the first of Heaven’s many mansions,” Raymonde reassured him. “San Juan de Calamocha has already passed far beyond here.”
“Heaven, then, is not where we instantly know the answers, but where we may without burning or bloodshed discuss the questions!”
“And Purgatory,” Raymonded added, “is the state of learning how to talk of all these things with neither violence nor anger nor bitterness.”
“As for the question of how we can mingle here freely,” the dark man remarked, “without reference to our chronological timeframe, I have long suspected—I may of course be in error, for even now I discern problems with the theory—that within one’s initial step through the portal lies the entire space of time between personal death and the general resurrection, from whence we can dip back into history as sent.”
“If you will excuse my absence from you for a while,” Don Felipe replied, “I see one beckoning me.”