He saw a squirming man who was trying to crawl away from a dwarf who had managed to imbed himself halfway up the man’s arse.
He saw eternally starved serpents silently slurping up slimy fetuses in a boiling lake. And he did confess that this scene was actually pleasing him.
“Look, my satyr son, behold this horror of religion. Merely seeing this tableau will burn parts of your soul away for all time. You must experience this to become all things.”
And this is what the son saw:
There were two diamond towers standing fast in the blackened earth; one would say that they appeared to be 110 feet high. No heat could affect them. They were elaborately carved with 3,000 human figures, jutting out at odd angles as if they were agonizing in the flames. A green demon, five times larger than any mortal, stood next to these glittering twin towers. He had a new arrival gripped around the waist with a massive fist. He was jerking the newcomer back and forth between the cruel towers so rapidly that he was no more than a blur, a confusion of arms in the painful rhythm of the nerves of the dead.
It made Red laugh so hard that many golden tears were falling from his sightless orbs. The large green demon’s laughter kept him from seeing what he was doing; it was all instinct. There was snickering as well.
Red turned to his son after their shared experience and said, “This is what all beings ever created refer to as, ‘The Single Most Holy Vision!’ Spread your legs wide, my son, I must become one with you.”
And it was so.
“Another tableau, my son?” the father asked after he had sexually abused him for a [century] passing of a small time.
“Oh, my father, please, please me!”
A blister bug fell from one of the son’s sockets. He picked it up and shoved it into his arse. He heard its shell crunch.
They stopped before a cave. The entrance was soaked in evil blackness that roiled out at them, inviting them to move closer with invisible tentacles. They obeyed its calling. Within, as a white light came up, a little drama was being played out.
The son observed a man, black as slate, standing within a room. He was nude, huge and burning. He stooped to walk under a stone arch into an adjoining cave.
A gorilla stood there staring at a statue that was baked red as clay in a kiln. Its right shoulder was low, for it was leaning on the burning floor with a sizzling fist. The gorilla, its coat shimmering cobalt blue, casually looked his way.
“Come here, my son,” it said to the man, its eyes observing him with intelligence.
The statue, animated, was pointing in the distance with its left arm and tirelessly plunging a knife into its own chest, over and over again.
“What is this?” the man asked.
The gorilla drew him to his side with a massive, leathery paw and nuzzled his neck. He barely whispered into one of the man’s ears. “See the plaque on the pedestal? What does it say?”
“It says, ‘Man’s Best.’ What does that mean? ‘Man’s Best… Friend’? What?”
“No,” the gorilla replied gently. “This is the best that man can possibly do.”
The statue opened its mouth and spoke. “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you.”
It kept its left arm pointing in the distance, at an unseen enemy. It continuously plunged the knife into its chest with malicious intent. And glee.
“This is the best that man has to offer?” the black man asked.
“That’s right.” The gorilla laughed.
“We’re screwed.” The man sighed. “Poor statue, thanks for reminding us how doomed we are.”
“It’s not a statue,” the gorilla calmly replied, then laughed at the shock on his pupil’s tormented face.
The gorilla took the man there, coupling with him in a pitch-black corridor. The connecting cave drew dark, signaling that it had shown them all of its great and secret show.
“That tableau seemed vaguely familiar to me,” the son said, clearly confused.
“I don’t suppose I have ever seen the likes of that tableau before,” Red stated.
They moved on.
They approached a gray and brown cemetery with two small buildings in the middle of the entrance. A weak sun, unseen, flooded the area with an amber overcast.
A metal track suspended on waist-high wooden poles ran between the buildings and disappeared into large concrete arches on either end.
The father and son walked through the entrance and stood in front of the track.
“What is this, Father?”
Before he could answer, his attention was captured by five young blonde girls marching with rigid, militaristic steps toward the track. Their ages were mere years apart, and one looked identical to another. Each held a long, broad-bladed knife in their right hands.
A distant clacking began until a gray flat car — glowing bright red, as if heated — rolled into view from the building entrance on the right. (Its ride, therefore, was clockwise.)
A woman was securely lashed to the car with massive chains. She was dressed in a white linen dress trimmed with lace. Her hair was golden and fell about her shoulders in long curls. Her face was smeared with despair and resignation. She had to look over her shoulder at the young girls, for she was turned away from them. The chains pulled her down toward the car’s surface and left her back stretched tight and exposed.
Two things happened when the car clacked and clattered and reached the equidistant place between the buildings:
Flames roared from the building’s arch on the left, which sounded like an angry animal.
The young girls began penetrating her back with the blades. They ripped them backward and out, looping thin strings, slung here and there, and covered the five girls and woman with wet red. The woman’s only response was that she desperately tried to disappear into the metal car, though it burned bright crimson. There was no cry from her. The girls did not shriek with delight, but merely grunted with their efforts.
Before the car entered the flaming arch of the building on the left, two more things happened:
The girls stopped stabbing the miserable woman. They held the blades over their heads, shook them like savages, but made no victorious cry. Red strings were flinging all over and down on them.
Then the flames intercepted the woman. Her body instantly bloomed bright orange and she became a fat crackling jittering lump before she disappeared into the glowing hole.
“Father-”
“Aaaah, this is a beautiful scene,” said Red, ignoring the son as he was often wont to do. “Do you wish to pretend this has meaning?”
“Yes.”
“Very well.” He sighed. “She was asked, many, many years ago if she knew why she was here. Foolishly, she should have said that there was no good reason she was there/here.”
“No?”
“No. She believed she came from another place called ancient Greece, where she had been a queen. She said her name had been Gamoor, and she had, in a strange fit of maladies, drowned her five daughters in a large vat of boiling pig’s blood.”
“But, why this punishment, Father?” The son swept his arms toward the comedy playing out before them.
“This is the revenge that was set before her for believing such nonsense. No such thing ever happened. And there are no daughters. It was asked of five demons if they would pose as her daughters that she’d dreamt and torment her for all eternity. Naturally, they were only too happy to comply.”
“How long has this been happening?”
“It cannot be expressed properly for you to comprehend, but it’s close to billions of infinities.”
“This cemetery is somber and beautiful, Father,” the son said as the woman came out of the building on the right once more, whole and ready to begin again.