THE GENTLE FRIEND

Bernard turned away from the looking-glass in Hell with tears in his dead eyes. The image of his teenage self being hugged by his mother faded.
“That’s the only time I ever remembered,” he whispered.
“Of being shown affection? Of being loved?” asked Satan with a frown on his ruddy face.
Bernard nodded. “She was quick to hurt me,” he said thoughtfully. “She wanted to save me from sin and if the only way to do that was through punishment, then punish me she would. Even when I was big enough to defend myself from her quite easily I didn’t dare. I knew it was for my own good because she told me so, and she knew how to hurt a lad.”
“She’s here too,” said the Devil. “She’d been here since she died, in a corner over there…” he pointed into the shadows at the far end of the cathedral-like hall with its sulphurous fumes and the constant background sound of souls in torment. At least that’s what Bernard thought the noise was, though he hadn’t as yet seen any souls, tormented or otherwise.
“Her sin was wicked because it was creating your sin,” the horned monstrosity went on to explain to him. “Bit by bit and year by year she reduced you to the mean spirited creature that you are, and for that she earned her Eternity with my angels caressing her with whips of fire and rubbing acidic salve into the cuts left by their lashes. For every time she hurt you, for every time she punished you, she’s receiving an endless series of beatings and thrashings herself. She quite likes it, I’m told. It seems that she liked inflicting pain on you more because she liked receiving it in a strange sort of way herself than because she was really worried about your immortal soul! I don’t think she’d have coped much with Heaven, which was what she said she really wanted. Humans are odd things: they think they want one thing when they really want another! Would you like to see her?”
Bernard thought for a moment, and then shook his head vigorously. No. He’d had enough of her when she’d been alive even though she’d claimed to have saved him from evil. But what good had it all done? Here he was in Hell anyway despite her efforts, and apparently she wasn’t so far off either.
“Then attend to your story,” said the Devil.
Bernard found himself looking back to the mirror, which was clearing once again.
“You’re about to see the finest person you met in life,” sighed the Devil. “Even I liked him, and that’s saying something. Look: you’ve moved on and you’re now a student at the Church University, having finally left home and gone to study for a life in one or other of the rather silly churches that abound on the world. I suppose it was what you wanted?”
“Mother chose it…” mumbled Bernard, and stared in horror at the image that was forming in the huge satanic glass.
“Look well,” urged his horned guide, swishing his tail in encouragement.
“It’s going to be Philip,” whispered Bernard, “I can remember the day … I can remember Philip…”
He saw himself standing in his own small study by a fireplace where the smallest imaginable flames flickered, hardly warming the room at all. And that room was freezing. He could see that the windows across from the fireplace quite clearly had ice on the inside, crisp and white and crazed. That was a cold room even in summer, he recalled, but in the depth of winter it was painfully freezing. It was rumoured that in the past weak students had died in it, their bodies too weak to withstand the chill hour after hour and day after day.
Another student entered, shut the door in order to minimise the draught and smiled at Bernard. He had a fresh complexion and the winning smile of youth on a face free from blemishes.
“You’re right, it’s Philip and right now he’s in the other side, plaiting daisy chains and singing little songs of praise,” whispered the Devil. “He died too young, I’m afraid, but he was too good for this place. But watch on!”
“Hi, Philip,” the Bernard in the mirror said to the other, smiling.
“I was hoping to find you sweetheart,” smiled Philip, “it’s cold enough to freeze the warmest heart in here! Put another log on the fire!”
“It is cold,” agreed Bernard, “but there’s only a small amount of fuel left and we might need that later.”
“That’s the good thing about you,” smiled Philip, “always planning for tomorrow in the hope that tomorrow will actually come!”
“It will because it always does,” murmured Bernard.
“Well, we need warming up or we’ll freeze to death! How about a game of wrestling?” suggested Philip, “you know rough and tumble to warm ourselves up? There’s nothing like exercise to ward off the cold of winter, and there’s no doubt that a good old tussle is really good exercise …”
“I don’t understand…” replied a very confused Bernard, always frightened of any kind of proximity to others.
“It’s not against anything in the good book,” assured Philip, “I have checked, you know, though if we accidentally got too close … accidentally, mind you … it might get interesting and we might lose control…”
“Lose control? Lose control?” almost shouted Bernard at the word control. “There’s too much sin in the world, too much intimacy, too much … touching!” It might have sounded like a well-worn mantra to Bernard even back then, but it had been hammered into him over many years of parental indoctrination and he didn’t recognise it for what it was. Yet he could remember the feeling he got at the suggestion from Philip, and part of it, a shard of it, was one of joyful anticipation, and that needed to be repelled as if it was poison.
“No!” he almost shouted, “I need to….”
“You need to what, darling?” asked Philip.
“I need to live a life free from sin!” It was as if his own mother was speaking her words through him.
“But darling…” stammered Philip, “I don’t mean… you can’t think … Oh, darling…”
Bernard hadn’t noticed it at the time, but he did now, from his vantage point in front of the looking -glass in Hell. Philip was crying, real tears oozing from the corners of his eyes as they welled up, and then trickling down his too-smooth cheeks.
“He’s weeping,” he whispered. “Why?”
“He loved you,” replied Satan. “See.”
Bernard watched as Philip slowly, sadly, backed out of the cold room and out of the door, his face a mask of horror at what he clearly saw as a rejection.
“I’m no sinner…” he mumbled as he closed the door behind him, “I’m not!”
Then Bernard was alone in the freezing room again. Puzzled, he left the meagre fire and took the few steps to the window. Then, with a wavering fore-finger, he scratched in the ice that had formed on the inside of the glass I hate sin in angular almost childish letters before sitting on a tatty armchair in a dark corner of the dark room, the picture of abject misery, and weeping himself.
© Peter Rogerson 15.09.16

REVELATION

The skies were blue and the road dusty and a dry heat washed over the world as the ebony black man walked down the centre of an ancient road, past the crumbling remnants of long forgotten buildings, towards the centre of town. His face gleamed with the effort of all that walking, but he slowly made his way past the curious eyes that seemed to shine from the shambles and detritus of the ruins, frowns and scowls aimed at him because of his very blackness. He was difference, and here where God ruled difference had always been hated.

In this part of the world there never had been seen such black skin. It was, to the eyes of the hidden watchers, everything that skin shouldn’t be. Skin, they thought, should be like theirs, white and shining with cleanliness and holy: yes, holy, for wasn’t the lamb of God himself a pristine white man? So the pictures said, and pictures are never wrong, not if the ancients painted them.

Eventually one of the watchers detached himself and strolled with a quiet malevolence towards the visitor. This, he thought, must never be! There can be no room in their town for one with skin like this!

He arrived before the black-skinned man and stood before him, blocking his progress

“Yo jus’ turn yoself round and git outta here,” he drawled. “There ain’t no room in this ‘ere town for a man like you, if man you be! Outta the jungles o’ Afric I’ll be bound, down fro’ the Afric trees and’ ‘ere to spread your wickedness an’ sickness amongst us clean good folks!”

The black man eyed him curiously, an innocent enough look, one that had about it a certain charming naivety.
“I’ve come to help,” he said, quietly. “I’ve come to put things straight.”

“Yo daft black bugger!” exclaimed the other. “Standin’ there like an ape fro’ the forests o’ Afric an’ tellin’ us real folks stuff like that!”

Then he turned towards the crumbling buildings where shafts of sunlight from the dry blue skies cut through the ribs of old roofs that had lost their tiles and slates, and over piles of dusty debris to spread like cruel butter on a dishevelled world. “We’ll ‘ave t’ get ‘im, folks,” he drawled. “We’ll ‘ave t’ put things right! Get you them there stones like they do in Muslim lands and let’s sort that black bastard out once an’ f’r all!”

Half a dozen scruffy figures detached themselves from their background and made their way towards the confrontation.

“Let ‘im ‘ave it, let ‘im ‘ave it for good,” growled the white man, and he picked up a stone, heavy as a clenched fist, and drove it at the ebony stranger.

With a whoop and a shout of anger mingled with what a stranger might have taken for insanity the others joined in. They picked up stones, jagged fragments of the broken buildings and shattered streets, and hurled them at the stranger.

There was a cry of pain, but he did nothing but stand there, bemused, wondering what he might have done to precipitate such anger. There was a ferocious light in the eyes of the aggressors, one that might have been confused with insanity in any other land, though here it was nothing but the cold light of righteous anger.

Mere moments later the black stranger lay on the dusty broken road surrounded by a motley collection of old stones, a pool of blood spreading from him and drying like blood does when the sun is hot in a morning sky and there hasn’t been a drop of rain for days beyond count.

“I’m off t’ give thanks t’ the Lord,” muttered the original aggressor, and the others grinned at each other and nodded their heads, following him.

The little group of dusty men made their way to the only building that was still intact in the old town, and sat in a seat at the back whilst the pastor droned his message out.

“And the Lord said all must end,” he intoned. “He said that there would be a second coming when all things were arriving at an end, and that Christ would stand before the righteous and the wrong and judge them, and the world would be healed and our enemies smitten down like all enemies should!”

The dusty aggressor on the back pew grinned at his comrades, and sniggered.

The pastor continued. “And he’d better come soon enough,” he muttered, tearing his eyes from his hastily scribbled notes for a moment. “For it is said that war is coming this way! The foreign foe even as I speak is preparing to send powerful weapons this way, for he needs our lands, his own being flooded by the rising seas! And though the roads and fields are not his he will take them, of course he will, take them from us and enslave us! But it is said in the old books that the Saviour will come again…”

The aggressor grinned, and nudged his companions.

The pastor coughed, and stared directly at him. “And when he comes the pains of our world will be healed, wars will cease and we will be given a golden time,” he whispered, “but you, my friend at the back, sitting there in so much righteous dignity, you know that he will never come, not now, not since you stoned him on the road from the old world, not since you let the Christ bleed into the old road and die like a strangled rabbit into the broken concrete….”

The aggressor was going to stand up, to protest that all he’d done was what any man might when he saw a black bastard daring to walk the sacred streets of their town, but all of a sudden there was a roar in the world outside, one that stole his voice from him, and beautiful as a new statue wrought from gold and ivory a column of dust and fire and the flesh of thousands rose into the late morning air, and a wind blew from nowhere as the gigantic cloud spread out, above their church and the road and the blood-dried remnants of a black man, and out of it a few spots of toxic moisture fell down to splash like rain does onto a world that might have been a desert, but wasn’t quite.