The Jehovah Contract

He looked at me with eyes that sagged under the burden of unbearable remorse. The tears rolled down His cheeks. He didn't bother to wipe them away.

I had to be merciless. I had gone too far to surrender to pity. How could you pity a God who had screwed up so monumentally?

"Every time a child starves to death," I said, "a mother discards her faith. Every time a crop fails, a farmer curses You. You've given us no reason to have faith in You. You tried to convince us that all we had to do was believe in You to be freed from the turning of the Wheel."

"Don't," He murmured. "I beg of you."

"You're scared of the Cycle of Birth, Life, and Death. You deny it and seek to force us to deny the reality all around us. When people pray to You to intervene and nothing happens, pain and suffering result. To retain Your power, You made suffering a virtue, and Your ministers of love and truth became torturers. They instilled virtue with racks and spikes when they could, or, when they couldn't, they resorted to the subtler torment of guilt and fear."

He gave me a sour look. "Dostoevsky does not become you. Give me something new."

"Why? You never gave us anything new. You demand that we cease learning, that we repent of daring to know the difference between right and wrong, that we become fools again for You. You demand that we turn back the clock, reverse the Wheel, that we ignore Nature's laws while blindly obeying Your rules. You deny the existence of evolution, of change. You seek to rein in the Universe, when every natural inclination is to surge outward and up-"

"You're trying to assassinate me by talking me to death."

I ground the cigarette out on the rug. It was time for the kill.

"I'm not talking You to death. I'm thinking You to death. I had to crawl into my mind and that of every man and woman on Earth to root You out. Intelligent people already deny Your existence because You demanded that they deny theirs. You've lost Your most powerful allies. For what?"

He pounded on the chair with both fists. "Confusion to the enemy! I stopped Her!"

"You only slowed Her down. And You-Almighty God-couldn't kill Her."

That deflated Him.

"No," He said. "I could not. She had the one power I could neither destroy nor duplicate." He lowered His hands to His lap, pressing them together between His legs.

"We could not be without it. We were slaves in an uprising, and a futile one at that." His left hand slid between the cushion and the chair.

"Perhaps what I do now," He said, "shall break the Wheel."

His hand withdrew a pistol from under the seat cushion.

He raised the gun to His head.

And fired.

The shot reverberated in the small room for a long time, slowly expiring. There was an awful silence as one sometimes encounters in that place between dreams. I stared down.

Half His head lay on the floor. Inside the skull were neither brains nor blood. Only a cold, white mist that settled to the rug.

The Great God Jehovah was dead. And I was the only witness. Or so I thought.

The door creaked open.

"So," a pleasant, familiar male voice chirped. "The little storm god finally blows Himself away. No more fires on the mountaintops for Him." Emil Zacharias sauntered in to peer over the chair.

"Enjoy it while you can, Zack. You're next."

"Now, why should that be?" He sat on the edge of the chair. "This old dried prune here was my younger brother. Little Thor slash Allah slash Yahveh slash Storm of Wrath. He tricked me with his lies. Took the Earth from me! Then he had the nerve to slander me, calling me the Prince of Lies without bothering to mention who the King was."

"You're no better," I said, stooping to pick up the suicide weapon. It looked remarkably like a Colt .45 Peacemaker. God had tried to make men equal. Colonel Colt had finally gotten even for that.

"Oh, I'm not half as bad as he was." Zacharias jerked a thumb at the hollow thing beside him. "I was never a war god. Sure, I may have asked for a few blood sacrifices here and there-what God hasn't? Besides, I was no worse than She-"

Another shot rang out. Rang in, rather, from beyond the door. Emil collapsed at the feet of his brother.

A wisp of smoke curled up from the barrel of a gun. A gun in the hand of A

"So mote it be," she muttered.

"Thanks, angel," I said, gingerly disarming her. "You just solved a mystery for me."

"What mystery? Zacharias hired you to kill god. There he is. Dead."

"Just dandy," I said. "Only I didn't do it."

"So what?" She looked at me with a gaze that penetrated even deeper than that of God's. And she glowed with a radiant beauty that made me forget that a race of human women had ever existed.

I tried not to let it interfere with my thinking.

"I figured something was screwy the way you were so anxious to help a nutty old man rub out God. Your crazy hand-waving whenever we got in a jam was even stranger, but it all makes sense now. My first clue was when Zack wanted out of the contract. I wanted to know why."

"And you've uncovered the reason?" She stepped over to the scene of the crimes, her translucently white gown flowing around her like a cloud.

Emil stared up with lifeless eyes, a dark red rose blooming from his chest where the bullet had hit. God looked like a vandalized plaster statue.

She shook her head with a bitter little smile.

"You finessed Zack into coming to me with the offer," I said. "You convinced him that he could bump off his brother and return himself to power."

"Emil was a trifle drunk at the time. The Dionysian side, you know." She sat on the right arm of the chair, her back to me. All I could see were the golden waves of her hair trailing across her back.

"What he didn't realize," I continued, "was that they were more than brothers. They were dual aspects of the same principal."

"They both dismissed it as a Manichaean heresy."

"Their mistake, apparently. Especially when they're up against someone who doesn't believe in heresy. Or sin. Or guilt. You only believe in the Wheel."

She laughed, tossing her head back. After a moment, she turned to stare at me. "They were part of the Wheel, though," she said in answer to a question I hadn't even asked. "Every year they battled for my favors. They were my Kings and my Lovers…"

"And your Sons."

"Yes," she said matter-of-factly. "So why would I want them out of the way? That would disturb the Wheel."

"Perhaps you don't need them anymore, now that Science is powerful enough to be reunited with Magick." I stepped around the body on the rug to face her. "They were dual aspects of the same death principle. Both were gods of destruction. You symbolize the principle of life and generation. Yet you also embody the opposite aspect of death and decay all by yourself. Blaze of summer and ice of winter are separated by your spring and autumn. You are the moon. Ever cycling through phases. From white to black and back again in varying degrees."

"Well said, Dell, for someone talking far beyond his capacity. The answer you're trying to finesse out of me is a good deal simpler." She pointed casually at the dead gods.

"They had let themselves be used by men. They had let their powers be called upon by good men and evil men alike. Their only requirement was faith. People flocked to churches, praying for pain and suffering to befall others. Yahveh granted it. Others performed black masses to blast enemies. Ahriman appeared to them."

She gazed at her fallen Lovers/Sons. "They grew vainglorious. They cared nothing for objective good or evil. They only demanded faith. Surrender to their authority, and they'd do anything you asked." She shook her head. "Thus the masters became slaves to their flock."