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He could hear no voices above the terrible roaring.
A trickle of blood kept seeping into his eyes. He wiped at it with his forearm so as to avoid staining the wafers with gory fingers. Wrong blood, Lord, mine, not Yours. Dealba me.
He returned most of the scattered Victim to the vessel, but a few fugitive flakes eluded his reach. He stretched for them, but blacked out again.
“JesusMaryJoseph! Help!”
Faintly he heard an answer, distant and scarcely audible under the howling sky. It was the soft strange voice he had heard in the confessional, and again it echoed his words:
“jesus mary joseph help”
“What?” he cried.
He called out several times, but no further answer came. The dust had begun sprinkling down. He replaced the lid of the ciborium to keep the dust from mingling with the Wafers. He lay still for a time with his eyes closed.
The trouble with being a priest was that you eventually had to take the advice you gave to others. Nature imposes nothing that Nature hasn’t prepared you to bear. That’s what I get for telling her what the Stoic said before I told her what God said, he thought.
There was little pain, but only a ferocious itching that came from the captive part of him. He tried to scratch; his fingers encountered only bare rock. He clawed at it for a moment, shuddered, and took his hand away. The itch was maddening. Bruised nerves flashed foolish demands for scratching. He felt very undignified.
Well, Doctor Cors, how do you know that the itch is not the more basic evil than the pain?
He laughed a little at that one. The laugh caused a sudden blackout. He clawed his way out of the blackness to the accompaniment of someone screaming. Suddenly the priest knew that the screaming was his own. Zerchi was suddenly afraid. The itch had been transmuted into agony, but the screams had been those of raw terror, not of pain. There was agony now even in breathing. The agony persisted, but he could bear that. The dread had arisen from that last taste of inky blackness. The blackness seemed to brood over him, covet him, await him hungrily — a big black appetite with a yen for souls. Pain he could bear, but not that Awful Dark. Either there was something in it that should not be there, or there was something here that remained to be done. Once he surrendered to that darkness, there would be nothing he could do or undo.
Ashamed of his fright, he tried to pray, but the prayers seemed somehow unprayerful — like apologies, but not petitions — as if the last prayer had already been said, the last canticle already sung. The fear persisted. Why? He tried to reason with it. You’ve seen people die, Jeth. Seen many people die. It looks easy. They taper off, and then there’s a little spasm, and it’s over. That inky Dark — gulf between aham and Asti — blackest Styx, abyss between Lord and Man. Listen, Jeth, you really believe there’s Something on the other side of it, don’t you? Then why are you shaking so?
A verse from the Dies lrae drifted into mind, and it nagged at him:
“What am I, who am wretched, then to say? Whom shall I ask to be my protector, since even the just man is scarcely safe?” Vix securus? Why “scarcely safe”? Surely He would not damn the just? Then why are you shaking so?
Really, Doctor Cors, the evil to which even you should have referred was not suffering, but the unreasoning fear of suffering. Metus doloris. Take it together with its positive equivalent, the craving for worldly security, for Eden, and you might have your “root of evil,” Doctor Cors. To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law — a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.
The trouble with the world is me. Try that on yourself, my dear Cors. Thee me Adam Man we. No “worldly evil” except that which is introduced into the world by Man — me thee Adam us — with a little help from the father of lies. Blame anything, blame God even, but oh don’t blame me. Doctor Cors? The only evil in the world now, Doctor, is the fact that the world no longer is. What pain hath wrought?
He laughed weakly again, and it brought the ink.
“Me us Adam, but Christ, Man me; Me us Adam, but Christ, Man me,” he said aloud. “You know what, Pat? — they’d… together… rather get nailed on it, but not alone… when they bleed… want company. Because… because why it is. Because why it is the same as Satan wants Man full of Hell. I mean the same as Satan wants Hell full of Man. Because Adam… And yet Christ… But still me…Listen, Pat—”
This time it took longer to drive the inky Dark away, but he had to make it dear to Pat before he went into it all the way. “Listen, Pat, because… why it is I told her the baby had to… is why I. I mean. I mean Jesus never asked a man to do a damn thing that Jesus didn’t do. Same as why I. Why I can’t let go. Pat?”
He blinked several times. Pat vanished. The world congealed again and the blackness was gone. Somehow he had discovered what he was afraid of. There was something he had yet to fulfill before that Dark closed over him forever. Dear God, let me live long enough to fulfill it. He was afraid to die before he had accepted as much suffering as that which came to the child who could not comprehend it, the child he had tried to save for further suffering — no, not [or it, but in spite of it. He had commanded the mother in the name of Christ. He had not been wrong. But now he was afraid to slide away into that blackness before he had endured as much as God might help him endure.
Let it be for the child and her mother, then. What I impose, I must accept. Fas est .
The decision seemed to diminish the pain. He lay quietly for a time, then cautiously looked back at the rock heap again. More than five tons back there. Eighteen centuries back there. The blast had broken open the crypts, for he noticed a few bones caught between the rocks. He groped with his free hand, encountered something smooth, and finally worked it free. He dropped it in the sand beside the ciborium. The jawbone was missing, but the cranium was intact except for a hole in the forehead from which a sliver of dry and half-rotten wood protruded. It looked like the remains of an arrow. The skull seemed very old.
“Brother,” he whispered, for none but a monk of the Order would have been buried in those crypts.
What did you do for them, Bone? Teach them to read and write? Help them rebuild, give them Christ, help restore a culture? Did you remember to warn them that it could never be Eden? Of course you did. Bless you, Bone, he thought, and traced a cross on its forehead with his thumb. For all your pains, they paid you with an arrow between the eyes. Because there’s more than five tons and eighteen centuries of rock back there. I suppose there’s about two million years of it back there — since the first of Homo inspiratus.
He heard the voice again — the soft echo-voice that had answered him a little while ago. This time it came in a kind of childish singsong: “la la la, la-la-la—”
Although it seemed to be the same voice he had heard in the confessional, surely it could not be Mrs. Grales. Mrs. Grales would have forgiven God and run for home, if she had got out of the chapel in time — and please forgive the reversal, Lord. But he was not even sure that it was a reversal. Listen, Old Bone, should I have told that to Cors?