|
someday will come the end of Hell. And then I shall go back to Heaven,content to stay there for the first moment of my existence, since thebeginning of Time.""Take me with you into Hell, please. I want to see it now."He reached out and stroked my hair, put his two hands on thesides of my face. They felt evenly warm and caressing. A sense oftranquility came over me.
"So many times in the past," he said, "I almost had your soul! Isaw it almost spring loose from your body, and then the strongpreternatural flesh, the preternatural brain, the hero's courage, wouldhold together the entire monster and the soul would flicker and blazeinside, beyond my grasp. And now, now I risk plunging you into itbefore you need to go, plunging you into it when you can choose togo or come, in the hope that you can endure what you see and hearand return and be with me and help me.""Was there ever a time when my soul would have soared toHeaven, past you, past the whirlwind?""What do you think?""I remember . . . once, when I was alive. ...""Yes?""A golden moment, when I was drinking and talking with mygood friend, Nicolas, and we were in an inn together in my village inFrance. And there came this golden moment when everythingseemed tolerable and independently beautiful of any horror thatcould be or ever had been done. Just a moment, a drunken moment. Idescribed it once in writing; I tried to reinvoke it. It was a moment inwhich I could have forgiven anything, and given anything, andperhaps when I didn't even exist: when all I saw was beyond me, outsideme. I don't know. Maybe if death had come at that very moment?
"But fear came, fear when you realized that even if you died youmight not understand anything, that there might be nothing. ..."". . . yes. And now I fear something worse. That there is something,certainly, and it may be worse than nothing at all.""You're right to think so. It doesn't take much of a thumbscrew orthe nails or the fire to make men and women wish for oblivion. Notmuch at all. Imagine, to wish that you had never lived.""I know the concept. I fear knowing the feeling again.""You're wise to fear, but you've never been more ready for what Ihave to reveal."21THE WIND swept the rocky field, the great centrifugal forcedissolving and releasing those souls who struggled to be freeof it at last as they assumed distinct human shape andpounded on the Gates of Hell, or wandered along the impossiblyhigh walls, amid the flicker of fires within, reaching out for andimploring each other.
All voices were lost in the sound of the wind. Souls in humanshape fought and struggled, others roamed as if in search ofsomething small and lost and then lifted their arms and let the whirlwindonce again take hold of them.
The shape of a woman, thin and pale, reached out to gather awandering, weeping flock of baby souls, some not old enough yet towalk on two legs. The spirits of children wandered, crying piteously.
We drew near the gates, near narrow broken arches rising as blackand fine as onyx worked by medieval craftsmen. The air was filledwith soft and bleating cries. Everywhere spirit hands reached to takehold of us; whispers covered us like the gnats and flies of thebattlefield. Ghosts tore at my hair and coat.
Help us, let us in, damn you, curse you, cursed, take me back, free me, Icurse you forever, damn you, help me, help ... a rising roar ofopprobrium.
I struggled to clear the way for my eyes. Tender faces driftedbefore me, mouths issuing hot and mournful gasps against my skin.
The gates weren't solid gates at all but gateways.
And beyond stood the Helpful Dead, seemingly more solid, onlymore vividly colored and distinct, but diaphanous still, beckoning tothe lost souls, calling to them by name, howling over the fierce windthat they must find the way inside, that this was not Perdition.
Torches were held high; lamps burnt atop the walls. The sky wastorn with streaks of lightning, and the great mystic shower of sparksthat comes from cannons both modern and ancient. The smell ofgunpowder and blood filled the air. Again and again the lights flaredas if in some magical display to enchant a Chinese court of old, andthen the blackness rolled back, thin and substanceless and cold allaround us.
"Come inside," sang the Helpful Dead, the well-formed, well-proportioned ghosts梘hosts as determined as Roger had been, ingarbs of all times and all nations, men and women, children, old ones,no body opaque, yet none weak, all reaching past us into the valleybeyond, trying to assist the struggling, the cursing, the foundering.
The Helpful Dead of India in their silk saris, of Egypt in cottonrobes, of kingdoms long gone bequeathing jeweled and magnificentcourtly garments; costumes of all the world, the feathered confectionswe call savage, the dark robes of priests, self-conceptions of allthe world, from the crudest to the most magnificent.
142/163 首页 上一页 140 141 142 143 144 145 下一页 尾页
|
