by Mark de Rond
As a child and for as long as I can remember there hung above my bed a sign that said ‘Lord, let my prayer come before Thee.’ I have no memory of how I came to have it but still remember how comforting these words were as I made my peace with a fiendish God. I now know this comfort to have been because of a mistake on my part for I’d taken ‘before Thee’ to mean ‘before Thy return’, which I knew would be announced by a cloud half the size of a man’s hand. As a child, and several times day, I scanned the Heavens in search of it. I knew it to sail on a firestorm and to grow brighter till it was brighter even than the noonday sun and to then reveal its payload: riding a white horse would be the Son of Man, his eyes flames of fire from which even islands fled.
To the sound of trumpets those in Christ would rise to meet Him and join a chorus of Saints not defiled by women while counterfeit prophets, sodomites and fornicators were put on notice. Then, after a thousand-year separation between righteous and damned, the sea and Hades would give up the dead that are in them and the Book of Life would be opened. Those bearing the mark of the Beast were to be cast in a sulphurous fire to join four monsters already there: a lion with eagle’s wings, a bear with ribs between its teeth, a leopard with four wings and four heads, and a fourth beast with iron teeth and eleven horns, the smallest of we knew was the Pope.
This then, the most significant event in the history of the universe would come like a thief in the night, and so long as my plea for forgiveness arrived before He did, all might be well, and so it was from an error that I drew strength.
So just imagine my surprise when after years of prayerful watching I found myself accused of high treason in the court of God. For the prosecution to my left there was a Preacher and a woman with child who wore white and was on a spotted horse. Next to the spotted horse was a red one, and next to the red one a black one, and next to the black one a pale one whose rider had a big sword. To my right were souls of martyrs crying for vengeance, a hundred-and-forty-four thousand all told, who had eyes on the Great Dragon, and the Great Dragon on the woman who was pregnant, waiting impatiently for her water to break so it could devour her child.
Behind us sat the twelve tribes of Israel and in the upper galleries a chorus of Saints to accompany every judgement with song. Ahead of us ran the Euphrates, out of which rose two million horsemen ready to inflict a cruelty not seen even in Babyn Yar, sated on self-pity and the spite of incels, nativists and Seventh-day Adventists. Sins and sinners would be no more: there’d be no television, no alcohol, no smoking, no cursing, no coffee, no jewellery, no unclean foods, no masturbation. Masturbation ruined our backs.
Seven angels with seven trumpets sent fire to eviscerate a third of all trees and all the green grass and the racket of which caused a great mountain to tip into the boiling sea. From where the mountain once stood now came locusts with faces like humans and tails like scorpions. They, along with everyone in court, bowed in reverence before the Son of Man, who looked like Kurt Cobain.
Playing on His right were twenty-four children of different ages and heights but all of whom resembled Kurt. They were to rule the world as elders while he readied himself to scorch humanity in one final blowout at a time of His choosing. I looked on as one of the children petted the Lamb of Revelation, here to open the Seven Seals and tell us the meaning of the Scroll.
The Lamb turned to face me and asked about masturbation. ‘What about it’, I said, and he said ‘do you do it?’ and I said ‘that’s none of your business,’ and he said ‘whatever is God’s business is my business’, and I said ‘aren’t we meant not to judge each other?’ and he said that not answering the question meant that I was guilty and would burn in the Eye of Sauran and I said ‘that’s from Lord of the Rings, not Revelation,’ and he told me to go fuck myself. I told him to go fuck himself or, for that matter, to go fuck the Dragon, and the Dragon said that he’d quite like a piece of that Lamb, and as the martyrs gasped in horror at the Dragon getting hard, it said ‘that’s right; y’all take a good look now’.
‘Jesus Christ,’ I said, ‘what a shitshow,’ and the Lamb said, ‘fuck you’ and ‘mind the children’ and ‘wash your mouth you mingebag,’ and I said, ‘you first you retard,’ and Kurt said, ‘stop it please’ and ‘someone give the Dragon something to cover himself.’
Kurt then asked for the first exhibit to be called in: a bent-over old man covered in sores filled with pus and another who went by the name of Carl Sanders. The Lamb approached the stand and asked if Brother Sanders could please explain to the court whether the mark of the Beast of Revelation 13 meant anything to him, and Sanders said, ‘yes Sir, it does’, and said that Henry Kissinger and Bob Gates of the C.I.A. had said to him to design a microchip to control people and how this chip could be inserted below the skin with a hypodermic needle. The Lamb then asked what would happen if the lithium battery inside the chip leaked into the body and Sanders said that it would cause painful sores filled with pus. At that the Lamb recited from memory: ‘And the first angel went and poured out his vial on the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore on the men which had the mark of the beast,’ and everyone turned to look at the old man, who looked at the Dragon, who flashed the Lamb, who said for me to keep the Dragon under control, and I said ‘it isn’t my Dragon’, and he said he would sock me in the mouth if I carried on like this, while the Preacher spat in disgust and announced that the mark of the Beast is the number of a man and that number is 666.
The court fell silent at this exposé and all eyes turned to the llama they called the Preacher who spat twice more before addressing the court: ‘Six-six-six is 6 plus 6 plus 6 which makes 18, and 18 is the verse in Revelation 13 that gives us the mark of the Beast, and can be written as 66 and 6 or 6 and 66, each of which adds up to 72, and 72 added to 72 is 144, or the number of souls times 1,000 who have their Father’s name written on their foreheads’ — at which the martyrs sat up excitedly — ‘and adding 18 to 72 and another 72 we get to 162 and dividing 144,000 by 162 we get to 888 or the name of Jesus in Greek gematria’ — at which even a wearied Kurt perked up — ‘and when applying the same formula to 888 as we did to 666 we get 8 plus 8 plus 8 which gives us 24, which gets us to the twenty-four elders seated around the throne of God’ — which got the children excited — ‘and if we take 888 to be 88 and 8 or 8 and 88 we get 96, and 24 plus 96 plus 96 is 216, and then when we divide 144,000 by 216 we get to 666: the mark of the Beast!’, at which the Saints broke out in song and the martyrs roared and some fainted for here truly was a Preacher preaching.
‘Everything is connected’, the Preacher said, his eyes rolled back, and then said how Obama’s zip code as senator was 60606 and how his daughters are called Malia and Natasha and when writing these names backwards, we get ‘ailam ahsatan’, and if we now remove the letters that spell ‘Alah’, we end up with ‘I am Satan’. He said that nothing ever happens by chance, and nothing is ever as it seems and, as the courtroom fell still, the Preacher hawked and spat a full stop.
‘Christ’, I said at which the Lamb charged to strike me and might well have done had it not slipped on the gob-filled floor and said ‘fuck my life’ as it slid towards the llama; and as they had words about it, I turned to Kurt and said: ‘What You say is your ‘good news’ is a sham I defended for years, and not out of conviction but because I was afraid it were true. And so I turned the world into a playground for bigots, paedophiles and sodomites who think everyone fair game for being born sinful. You should have known better than to fuel our lunacies with dreams of a new world built on glass where are no blemishes and nor deformities and no tears nor funeral trains, and with flowers in silver and gold and with a table many miles long where all of us would sit wearing crowns. Whatever this lot here (and I waived my arms about) hold You for, You ain’t it. Oh, and Allah is spelled with two l’s, not one. As in llama’.
At that the Lamb said for me to be quiet and that she would see to it personally that I’d be in a ton of pain when cast into the Eye of Sauran, and I said ‘I told you it’s not called that’, and the Lamb said ‘who gives a fuck’, and turning to the martyrs said that whoever cut the cheese to put a cork in it, and the Dragon said he was smelling his own upper lip but Kurt said it was probably the four Monsters who had begun to smell.
Kurt then zapped the Lamb and said to me that he needed thirty minutes to confer.