They both laughed as loud as they could over their own screams.
In their wandering, they came upon a lake of diamond, one flat solid body made of a precious jewel. It was absolutely clear. As they stood on its surface, they could easily see the bottom miles below.
“This is the lake of the seven thousand, my son. Notice how you can see bodies below these bodies near the surface? And bodies below them all the way to the bottom?”
“My father, are they dead?” he asked, hypnotically staring at the wide-eyed bodies of all the people stacked, seemingly, one on top of the other, all the way to the bottom.
“Look at me, son. Think about what you asked, ‘Are they dead?’”
“Oh,” he said, humiliated.
“The lie of death is one of the most cleverly guarded secrets until now. Since all are here now, and hope alone has died, there is little reason to support the lie. So what is the reality, my son?”
“There is no such thing as ‘Death’?”
“Yes, good. Now look at these. They are frozen in the diamond lake. But they are all mortal. How can this be? Those that drown state that right before death swallows you, there is a moment of panic that takes you that is so profound, so horrid. It occurs right before the surrender that everyone experiences where ‘going over’ is pleasant. If that were to happen here, Infernus would be a joy. No, these all experience that profound, soul-stripping panic I was just telling you about. All of them. Yet, they cannot go on; they must endure the most hideous pain for billions of infinities [one billionth of an endless microsecond].
“Now, if we were to jump on the absolutely balanced surface of this solid lake, it would quake the bones of every occupant. At least that would be a different set of circumstances for them to deal with.”
“Let’s, Father!”
“But all the bones would break simultaneously.”
“And, your point being?”
So they proceeded to do that for many millennia with much glee.
“That is so horrible, and tasteless,” one student offered. “Why would you want to produce a book like that?”
“It’s the most honest way I could convey these concepts,” the naked model simply replied. “I am powerless to do it any other way. I commit my crimes on paper, some people inflict them on the world, and shatter the societal order. How self-destructive.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“THE IMBECILES”
The two entered one of Infernus’ many caves. To the son, it seemed that the father would be more at home with a crown of victor’s leaves perched smartly on his head. The father adjusted the crown, that had slipped slightly to the right and down. A rich purple robe was wrapped carelessly about his muscular body; his hand was around his throat to hold it closed. His downcast eyes surveyed the hideous death sprawled before him; the scars and scores of battle (or so it seemed). One arm swept the room in a grand, all-encompassing gesture.
“Look, behold these wretches that you see stretched upon the floor, my son. Their intelligence is so low that they cannot even stand. Look upon them and be glad that your dream of the dream world did not make you religious. It is this world that these fools dreamt to get out of their eternity. First look upon the wall and see what it says there written in the blood of one of them. Read it now to me and express your loathing of their low estate.”
The son could barely tear his eyes away from the imbeciles long enough to see the legend written on the wall in blood. It read, ‘You have the mind of the creator, so act like it!’
“What does this enigmatic sign mean, Father?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care. One thing I do know, though, is that they thought they could dream that they were religious geniuses and torment others and lord it over them. Look, for their dreams play like out-of-focus dramas in and out of the flesh along the walls. See? And there.”
“Where do these pieces of words and phrases come from, my father?”
“I do not know; they seem to be from an ancient book of oriental wisdom, but I cannot think where its origin is right now. Maybe I’ll remember it later. Watch these walls, son.”
What the son saw were pieces of pictures, unfinished dreams, parts of stories. In one, he saw a puppet-looking person forcing a young woman to have sex with him. He heard in his gangrened brain the puppet-looking man say to the woman, “When you serve the flock, you serve the main shepherd, my dear.”
Another showed a group of old men beating some children and relieving them of the books in their hands. “We are the only ones who can understand and interpret these sacred books, children of filth. We will tell you what they mean.”
In another dream, in what seemed to be ancient Rome, it showed some slaves getting drunk and beating their fellow counterparts mercilessly. They were saying, “We will criticize you until you realize we are the holy ones. We will wield weapons for all time and oppose you and let you know that you must be like us if you want to win the creator’s approval.”
“I do not understand all this, Father.”
“I suspected as much. You belong in here with these idiots.”
The father noticed that the son must be aware of the gray wings he had sprouted, for they were long enough to drape halfway down his massive, hairy back. They had to itch, growing at this rapid rate.
“Were all these idiots capable of dreaming these religious dreams up, my father?”
“It doesn’t take much intelligence to merely follow orders, my son. They created a religious world where the only way to excel was to become like themselves in their group. All sorts of these religions sprung up because of this — you must realize that these imbeciles were incapable of anything in their dream world except protecting their own paranoid egocentric system; for it is all a moron knows. Because they really are morons, they were incapable of creating anything that smacked of unity or creativity. They merely (poorly, I might add) copied what others had done. They couldn’t lead, for what they really wanted was to be petty tyrants, so they weakly imitated every fad or fashion of their day. They were followers of the Chief Demon, but didn’t know it. If they had calculated the nature of the creator they were really following (someone fostering intolerance and hatred and division) they would have realized where they were all the time — here! Anything that came along that they did not agree with, they cast out or made that other moron feel so uncomfortable that they had to leave. Does that sound very intelligent or creative to you?”
“It’s something only a moron could dream up, I suppose.”
“But, odd as it sounds, their dream world consisted of ‘geniuses’ who knew better. As the mythos goes, others before them had created a foundation of love, and they tortured it completely to death. And each other. It is probably the most mysterious thing in Infernus. Something so totally self-defeating; so backwards. A topsy-turvy existence.”
“But, Father, it does make sense that if these beings (you can hardly call them human; just brain-dead morons) really were morons, that this mess is exactly what they would make of a world if they dreamed of one.”
“Yes, it is,” the father said, smiling.
“But we should participate in this little tableau. Let’s torture them for many lifetimes, shall we?”