Kris found himself in a dark place.
And there with him was the Sound – clearer and more present than he had ever
heard before.
He was in a maze of dank halls; he felt that he was below a
building, below the place that he needed to be.
What was that? He
heard something move very nearby. He
looked to see and caught the most fleeting glimpse something or someone
disappearing around a corner. What was
it? “Hello?” he called. The something fled and he went after it.
Kris was in the bowels of Sacred Heart. And whatever it was that was ahead of him was
making the Sound. He was so close
now! Finally!
He turned a bend only to find himself in another
disorienting hallway. The thing making
the sound appeared to be a man, dragging something behind him. “Wait!” he
called to the Man, but the Man slipped around another corner. Kris began to run, but each time he turned a
corner, the Man would disappear just before he could reach him. Kris was running in a full sprint now,
yelling for the Man to stop. Each
hallway was identical to the one before, each one a déjà vu of being nowhere,
of running and running and getting nowhere.
And then Kris turned a corner and found himself in a
different hallway altogether: doors lined each side of the entire length, and
each door had a red letter of the alphabet painted on it. One of the doors swung shut and Kris heard it
latch behind. He ran to it and found
that it was the door with a large red A.
Kris’ heart raced in the darkness; he knew intuitively that something
important awaited him on the other side.
He turned the knob cautiously and opened the ratty
door. When he did, he was assaulted with
a blinding light that pained his eyes.
Through the glare, Kris could detect a stairway stretching up ahead of
him. “Hello?” Kris called to persons
unknown. He made his way slowly up.
Kris was still blinking as he came out at the top, exiting
into some exceptionally large, open space.
This place was familiar to Kris, but he couldn’t place it. Bright rays of light fell in through
clerestory windows, describing sharp columns in the placid air. Dust specks scrolled secret geometries within
the shafts. To Kris, the great volume,
still and illuminated as it was, took on an ecclesiastical air. This was a very holy place.
From some place in the cavernous sanctuary, a great rustle
was heard. Kris looked and saw that
which his subconscious had been searching for all these months.
Kris was still blinking from the light. And the source of the noise, the Man, was
apparently dressed all in white; the Man’s clothes dazzled Kris’ eyes. It pained Kris to look directly at him. The Man had his back to Kris, and the thing
behind him, was something tall and white, touching the ground, and extending
over the Man’s head. In fact, Kris
noticed, it was not one thing, but two.
Slowly, the Man and his parcels came into view.
This was the Source, the Source of the Sound, which had been
haunting, beckoning to Kris since he first stepped foot on to Sacred Heart’s
campus.
Facing Kris was a pair of two massive wings, like the wings
of a crane, but dingy and worn, like something found in the forgotten storage
room of a taxidermist. Their crest was
possibly 10 feet high. The bottom
plumage scraped the ground, and was filthy from what looked like years of
abuse. The delicate follicles of the
feathers were pulled into greasy strands at their tips, rather of the
white-white gossamer that they should have been. Refuse was caught between the layers of
feathers.
And then Kris realized that the wings were of course
attached to a Man: an angel!
The angel turned about to face Kris, and although he did
this cautiously, the movement terrified Kris nonetheless. The angel unfurled his wings slowly and
nearly touched the two side walls along the room’s narrower dimension; arcane
glyphs glowed on the undersides of the wings where they fell into the shafts of
light. The angel beat his wings mightily
one time. Fragments of debris and a
waft of unhealthy dust flung about the sanctuary. The gust knocked Kris off of his feet. And then the angel calmly recoiled his wings.
The dust whispered further secrets to the light.
The man was enormous, maybe seven feet tall or more, and
built like an Olympian. His face was
clearly once handsome beyond compare, but now was rendered as ugly as a veteran
boxer’s battered visage. His nose was as
crooked as a slow river and various scars spoke a history of battles. The basic symmetry of the angel’s face had
been lost some time ago.
The great seraph was dressed in a linen blouse and pants,
with a very wide leather belt, and wore no shoes. The fabric, to Kris, was cut from exactly the
same cloth as the baptismal gown that so beautifully adorned the body of
Tiffany Trammel, that first day he came back to Kensington. The stitching on the angel’s garments were
the same color as the beige fabric, which made the almost unnoticeable, but
Kris could see upon closer inspection that the handiwork was in fact exquisite
beyond any craftsmanship of this world.
Intricately stitched Mandela
patterns, a language native to that Sacred Country, described celestial symbols
and motifs upon the angel’s every cuff and hem – each symbol impregnated with
code beyond human comprehension - each thread the very eternal narrative of one
of the angel’s mortal charges.
But the garments were all now clearly faded from their
original splendor. The creature’s pants
were spoiled to the shins with a clay-rust-red stain, from either mud or blood
or, very likely, both. The crevices of
his feet were encrusted with a black-brown detritus.
The overall of the seraph effect would be to imagine the
richest, most noble and beautiful prince that Morocco had ever known, exiled
from his gilt-spired palace and sentenced to survive unaided for a decades’
penance in gutters and wilderness of his own kingdom.
With a soul full of doubt and terror and determination, Kris
asked, “Who are you?”
The angel answered kindly in his terrible voice, “Why do you
ask question to which you already know the answer?”
“Of course,” Kris conceded.
“But . . . what happened to you?”
The angel, Truth, smiled tiredly, and somewhat embarrassed,
at his wings. “What happened to my
wings, you mean? Hmm. I am sure you know
the old story of the man, Icarus. He
fashioned wings of wax and feathers. And
when he flew too close to the sun, his wings were ruined and he fell to
Earth.” The angel flexed his wings
slowly, “I guess it is the same with me.
Except that I – I flew too close to the Earth, and this was the ruin of
my wings.”
The angel looked sad at the state of his wings. “There is not an angel in all Creation that
doesn’t bear the stains of this world.”
“Why do it?” Kris
rose to his feet. He was indignant. This creature, this angel, had clearly been a
being of such incomprehensible beauty.
People aren’t worth it, he thought.
“Why come here? Why leave
Perfection only to foul yourself for broken, perverse little insects?”
The angel chuckled a single weary laugh, “We can’t help
ourselves: we are in love with your kind.
To us,” Truth opened his arms and wings wide, “you are chief of all the
cosmos, the very embodiment of magic.”
Truth’s hand moved into a sunbeam and a prism of white-hot light
shattered about the room, burning ancient Hebrew letters into whatever surface
they happened to fall upon. He pointed
to one of the words and translated. “Love.
When you have a child someday, you will begin to understand.” Then the angel asked Kris, “And who are you?”
“I am Kris Whitlowe.”
“Your name, I already know, Kris Whitlowe. What I am asking is, who are you?”
“I . . .” Kris was answering to himself as much as he was
the angel, “I am a shepherd.”
The angel nodded his great head and reflected upon the
answer, “Hmm. Yes. I can see that.” The angel rustled his mighty and dilapidated
wings once more and looked about the skating rink. “Then you will need this.” Truth slowly unsheathed a grand sword from a
sheath at his waist. The blade had been
tucked beneath a wing, and Kris had not noticed it before. There was something about the slow
metal-on-metal sound that electrified Kris.
The angel held the sword aloft, twisting it to and fro as he
examined it. The blade of the sword
flashed brilliantly whenever light fell upon its flat surface, but the groove
along its length, as well as the grip, were caked will tendrils of black-red
blood. The angel admired the old weapon,
its make, its history, the gift that it had been to him. It was an old friend of sorts. How many battles must they have seen
together? One last momentary indulgence
of memory, and Truth resolutely swung the blade about and presented the handle
to Kris.
Kris shrank from the terrible, swift sword. He was embarrassed at the angel’s
sacrifice. But more than that, Truth was
pushing him down a path that he had never chosen. He leaned upon MLK, which was at the heart of
him: “. . .through violence you may murder a murderer but you can't murder murder.
Through violence you may murder a liar but you can't establish truth. Through
violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate. Darkness cannot put
out darkness. Only light can do that."
“So what then?” the angel inquired.
“I will not take the path of the sword. Violence to kill violence is Madness”.
“Hm. Yes. This is true.
But, Shepherd,” Truth posited, “Madness is their native language. And therefore, only in Madness will you find
the ends that you are looking for. In
Madness is your Salvation, Kris. I am
sorry, but there is not another way.”
The great, battered creature lifted the sword high and speared it
forcefully in to the wooden floor between Kris’ feet. The blade rang with the deep timbre of a
temple bell. Its point, Kris saw, was
stabbed into a smoldering Hebrew rune.
Truth translated the word, “Protection.”
Kris reached out his hand and touched the butt of the great
blade. And it was good. He wrapped his hands around the hilt and was
surprised to find that he could lift it.
And it was good. Kris discovered
that the blade was full of Power. And it
was good.
Kamal had been right.
The blade in his hands hummed with living primeval
force. It held prophecies of the past
and memories of the future. The Blade
had been there in the Garden, cloaked in righteous flame. The Blade had been there at Jericho,
unleashed upon her inhabitants. The
Blade had stood silent sentry for millennia beside blind Lady Justice. The Power would protect Kris’ flock.
The hum in Kris hands became a buzz, and then an electricity
which ran up to his elbows. The writings
on the walls and floor began to crack into shards light. The electricity running through the Shepherd
became atomic, then nuclear, then cosmic, and then eternal. And then he felt that the Power of the sword
might tear his very being asunder. He
screamed as the world began to disintegrate around him.
There are two kinds of Nothingness, Kris realized. There is the Nothing at one end of the Line
of Time: The Nothing Before Everything –
The Void. It is profound absence, an
emptiness beyond understanding: utter cold, utter darkness. The other Nothingness, that at the far end of
Time, after history will have completed her work, is that which will come at
the very end: Obliteration. It is the being filled with the Everything
that ever was or will be, every particle of matter, every hot displacement of
energy, in the entire expanse of the universe, consolidated into one singular
point, melted so compact and heavy as to be without dimension – utter heat,
utter light. And in this infinitesimally
small point is contained every memory, every desire and every pain, of every
living being; every silvery proton and every slowly spinning celestial cluster
that ever existed; the collective experience of an entire cosmos, in his
hand: Truth.
His vision became a tightening cone of migraine-white
light. Before it completely closed in
upon him, the last thing Kris saw was the angel’s face. Through a haze of violent light and
dissolving reality, Kris could just make out the Truth, watching on calmly. He made eye-contact with Kris and then
pointed to his leather belt. The last
thing Kris saw was Truth’s leather band.
And then everything simply went away.
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