by Mark de Rond
And so it came to be that I stood with others accused of high treason in the court of God. They like me had seen the beginning of the end: a black cloud half the size of a man’s hand high in the Eastern skies. As this cloud drew near it gained luminescence from the firestorm on which it sailed till it was brighter even than the noonday sun. In silhouette on top was a horse and riding it the Son of Man, His eyes flames of fire from which even islands fled. At the sound of His trumpet we believers joined a chorus of Saints not defiled by women while false Christs and counterfeit prophets, sodomites and fornicators were put on notice. Hades and the sea meanwhile gave up the dead that were in them as those bearing the Mark of the Beast were cast into a sulphurous pit to join four monsters already there: a lion with eagle’s wings and a man’s heart; a bear holding three 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 which we knew was the Pope. This then, the most significant event in the history of the universe, came like a thief in the night, as we knew it would.
Because I lived so near to where the cloud touched down, I was second in a rapidly forming queue. Believers from far and wide surfaced from joyless homes and ran to join the end even as their eyes were still adjusting to the bright outdoors. Before long, our queue stretched to beyond the horizon. Still people came in their thousands. They looked like they hadn’t much enjoyed life and nor had I but been sustained by the belief drilled into us from childhood that this day would come; that our self-deception and guilt would turn out to have been a price worth paying all along. That we at last might return the contempt shown us by our heathen neighbours – none of whom had the slightest inkling of the weight of the moment and nor saw what we were seeing. Turning around to look at the queue behind me (and here I couldn’t help but gloat a little), people seemed excitable and restless, and a tad breathless for the scurrying and jostling. I said to the woman in front of me how lucky we were to have beaten the crowds and was she confident I asked that all would end happily. She said she had never been surer about anything.
Ahead of her and out of nothing appeared a gate six metres high and four wide, with heavy doors and an inscription (lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate) that meant nothing to me. On the doors and along the posts were half-alive humans, skeletons and corpses cast in bronze – tormented, contorted, deformed, the lot. There was also a man about to eat his own offspring and copulating couples pulled apart by demon angels. I wanted to ask the woman what she thought it all meant.
I asked her instead if she thought our prophet might be attending the verdict and she said, ‘I expect Joseph to be there,’ and I said, ‘Joseph? Not Ellen?’ and she said, ‘Ellen who?’ and I said, ‘White’ and she said, ‘not Smith?’ and I said, ‘who’s Smith?’ and she said, ‘Joseph Smith’ and I said that I didn’t know anyone named Joseph Smith but that Ellen White might, and she said, ‘who’s she?’ So I told her how Mrs White would receive visions for up to three hours at a time without breathing once. I told her of how a colt so dangerous that it killed two men calmed down only when Mrs White placed her hands on it, and that if this weren’t sufficient proof then no matter how savagely her husband beat the colt afterwards, it never again became violent.
The woman in front said Joseph Smith discovered the Book of Mormon on golden plates buried in soil. How he was able to translate them even if his English was so poor that he couldn’t dictate a letter let alone a book. I said how Mrs White received not one but 2,000 visions in her lifetime. The woman said that maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that this visioning began after she was hit hard in the head with a rock. I said that nor was it a coincidence that a church that promoted polygamy was begun by a man.
Someone behind us had been eavesdropping on the conversation and said that polygamy was hardly worse than a cult infatuated with masturbation, and didn’t I know that Ellen White’s physician John Harvey Kellogg created a cereal to stop people touching themselves? He then said she and I were in for a roasting anyways because we’d not been baptised into the one true faith. He also said that today’s judgment had begun already in October 1914, to which I responded by saying that it actually started in October 1844, or 2,300 prophetic days after King Artaxerxes decreed that Jerusalem should be restored to the Jewish people. I said to him to read Daniel 8 verse 14.
Before he could reply, the great gate opened and a lamb told the woman to come in and then pushed the heavy doors to. I moved up a place and being so near the gate, put my ear to it.
I was up next and followed the lamb into a courtroom. The woman who’d preceded me was nowhere to be seen. For the prosecution to my left there was a llama and a woman with child who wore white and was on a spotted horse; and 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 carried a big sword. To my right were the souls of martyrs crying for vengeance, 144,000 all told, with eyes on the Great Dragon next to me. The Dragon was waiting impatiently for the woman’s water to break so it could devour her child.
Behind us sat the 12 tribes of Israel and, in the upper galleries, a chorus of Saints to accompany the judgement with song. Ahead of us and beyond the cloud ran the river Euphrates, out of which came 2,000,000 horsemen ready to inflict a cruelty not seen even in Babyn Yar, fuelled by 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 hurt our backs and made us crazy.
Seven angels and seven trumpets sent fire to eviscerate a third of all trees and grass and caused a great mountain to tip into the boiling seas; and from where the mountain stood came locusts with faces like humans and stings 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 24 children of different ages and heights and all of whom resembled Kurt and would rule as elders while he readied himself to scorch the earth in a final blowout. I looked on as one of the children petted the Lamb of Revelation, here to open the Seven Seals and interpret the Scroll.
The lamb turned to face me and asked about masturbation. ‘What about it,’ I said, and she said, ‘do you do it?’ and I said, ‘that’s none of your business,’ and she said, ‘whatever is God’s business is my business’ and I said, ‘aren’t we meant not to judge each other?’ She said that not answering the question meant that I was guilty and would burn in the Eye of Sauron and I said, ‘that’s from Lord of the Rings, not Revelation,’ and she told me to go fuck myself. I told her to go fuck herself 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.’
‘Christ,’ I said, ‘what a shitshow,’ and the lamb said, ‘fuck you’ and ‘mind the children’ and ‘wash your mouth out,’ and I said, ‘you first, you retard,’ and Kurt said, ‘stop it please’ and ‘someone give the Dragon something to cover himself up with.’
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 told me to keep the Dragon under control. I said, ‘it isn’t my Dragon,’ and she said she 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 speaking.
‘Everything is connected’, the Preacher said as 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.
‘Fuck this!’ 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 while they had words about it, I turned to Kurt and asked him the question I knew to be on the lips of all those queuing patiently outside.
The lamb was first to speak and said she would see to it personally that I’d be in a ton of pain when cast into the Eye of Sauron, and I said ‘I told you it’s not called that,’ and the lamb said ‘who gives a flying fuck’ and I said ‘and, FYI, Allah is spelled with two l’s, not one. As in llama,’ and turning to the martyrs the lamb said that whoever cut the cheese to put a cork in it, and the Dragon said he was smelling his upper lip, but Kurt said it was probably the four monsters who had begun to smell, and that’s when I knew He wasn’t who everyone said He was because it was me suffering from wind and God would have known.
Kurt then zapped the lamb and said to me that he needed thirty minutes to confer.