8. FEAR

THE TALE OF SEVEN KISSES (8)

FOREWORD

Plague…

THE TALE

Everything was a vague misty nothing sort of anything. Amorphous, what a good word to describe it, and shapeless, without form, just there. And there was an endless swirling like he’d never seen or tasted or witnessed at the edge of his consciousness before as Cyril Boniface drifted from himself and became one with the Universe or that part of it reserved specifically for him. There wasn’t much he understood, but enough to get his head round everything he needed to know, not that he had a head any more.

There was one thing that really struck him and that was how confusing the whole of everything was, but there was one thing he really wanted to forget and that was the moment the blackness started descending on him. He might have fallen or he might not, the blackness had taken any recollection of that away from him because it was a physical thing and he was surprised to discover that now he was far from physical.

It was odd not being physical, no hands to feel the nothing around him, no feet to tread it, no lips to taste it. And, of course, no head with eyes and ears and senses.

“Good to see you,” said a voice from everywhere, the sweetest voice, the truest voice, the most loving of voices. And when it spoke it didn’t use crude sounds but a beautiful sort of pattern in the ether. Lovely.

“You’re new and you’re old,” it said, and giggled. But he knew it was true: he was new and he was old, the two simultaneously, and it made sense to him though he knew there had been a time when it would have seemed nonsense.

“You love me, don’t you?” continued the voice, and he knew that yes, he did love her. Or him. Or it. Gender was a thing of the past and the past was nothing, a flickering moment in which absurdity existed, and then didn’t.

“And I love you,” he said. Or thought. Or projected. But it was out there. In the misty unfocused space he found himself surrounded by, the whatever it was, thought or words or projection, became a form that encompassed both nothing and everything, and from its misty heart a shape emerged. It was nothing a living soul could recognise, but he did. At that moment he realised he was no longer a living soul but a dead one.

“I know you do,” it said, “you always did. Do you remember?”

“Everything,” he murmured, “I remember everything and nothing.”

“You were a good man,” sighed the vision taking shape. It was a girl. The shape, if shape it was, was young and pretty and clothed in smiles. Yes, that was it. Smiles. No knickers, just smiles, and that was perfectly all right because besides having no knickers she didn’t have any flesh to put them on.

“I remember you,” he postulated, and he did.

“We might have been together, though not in time,” she said, so sweetly he felt something inside where he’d once had a heart, and it lurched with joy.

“Tell me,” he invited, “as you can probably judge I’m new to all this.”.

“Time is so restrictive and our life was hard,” she sighed or thought or murmured through the fog, “for the days were never easy. The god men, you remember them? Preachers with their Latin and their books and little boy choirs, sweet voices raised to soprano heights, and nobody listening.”

“Calling it Sodom and Gomorrah and punishment,” he told her, suddenly knowing if not remembering, “how the reward for the proliferation of evil is death. And we were evil, weren’t we? All of us? For our bodies were given us to cherish and we abused them...”

“We abused them,” she sighed, “but who were we, and what is abuse? And how can we abuse what is ours and ours alone? Yet we lived our lives in fear.”

“You and me?” he projected, “just you and me, and the thoughts in our heads. I loved you, Gwennie.”

“No, not Gwennie, it was long before I was Gwennie, in time. In the village. You remember the village? The priest who lived in his big house and called us all sinners whilst in his purity he sinned? Who told us fornication is an evil that should be punished by death, that we should be sent to this hereafter and suffer an eternity of agony, flames in hell scorching the flesh we haven’t got for all of time, floral pastures in heaven for him and his innocence that was really guilt misnamed, but he didn’t know the truth, that there is no hell and no heaven, just this eternity...”

“I remember many villages,” he thought slowly.

“You remember the priest?”

“I remember many priests...”

“They said I was pretty, did the boys. They said I was like an angel. And being boys they turned to me for kisses, and so the priest condemned them. He called demons down onto them and they became black with the plague, and they died and were cast into a pit and covered with mud and ashes and stones and rocks, but he didn’t know the truth, did he?”

“Who didn’t?” he asked.

“The priest, silly!”

“And what was the truth he didn’t know?”

“You’ve forgotten already?” She giggled at the thought, or if it wasn’t a giggle made of sound it was a giggle made of thought, and thought, in that place, was louder than sound.

“I must have forgotten.” He was so sorry about forgetting what he’d never known.

“I’ll tell you if you’ve forgotten because I care and you might have been here for ever, but you’re new and need time, which doesn’t exist, to adapt. We all need that when we arrive. Time in a timeless place. To adapt.”

He was beginning to understand the lovely girl, and he told her so, and she smiled back at him, though he only felt the smile because, of course, it didn’t exist in a physical sense. But he got it anyway. And he smiled back.

“The truth the priest didn’t know is that he was the most wrong philosopher who ever dreamed a thought,” she said, and giggled again in the special non-physical way she had.

“Of course,” he agreed, “it’s all about love, isn’t?”

“And generations,” she said, “back then, before the plague hit, we needed generations. Hands to till the land, feet to tread behind the plough, little ones to nurture, old ones to bury and dead ones, like me, for the plague pit...”

“And more to carry on so that tomorrow can dawn on a fertile world,” he agreed. “Tell me why you’re not Gwennie?”

“You’ll find out,” she laughed, only she didn’t laugh, but something inside his head did. “And, you know, you’ll meet others you’ll mistakenly call Gwennie until, one day, maybe yesterday or could be tomorrow, you’ll meet her in the dead flesh.”

“I will,” he nodded, knowing. “So all is not lost?”

“If your heart is right,” she grinned. At least, her voice, which was silent, grinned.

“I might love her,” he confessed.

“Gwennie?”

“Yes. The lonely old book woman...”

“She’s here, you know,” smiled the plague woman, “you’ve met her in me, but she is not me. And others. You’ll meet the others. All Gwennie and yet all not Gwennie.”

“I might love them all,” he sighed.

“You should,” she told him, almost fiercely, “for the only sure thing in all creation is love, and that’s the one thing the priest never knew, and it trumps fear every time.”

“Love.” Cyril found dry non-eyes weeping. “Love,” he concluded.

“You lovely sentimental man,” she whispered.

© Peter Rogerson, 17.03.20