“THE IMBECILES”
The two entered one of Infernus’ many caves. To the son, it seemed that the father would be more at home with a crown of victor’s leaves perched smartly on his head. The father adjusted the crown, that had slipped slightly to the right and down. A rich purple robe was wrapped carelessly about his muscular body; his hand was around his throat to hold it closed. His downcast eyes surveyed the hideous death sprawled before him; the scars and scores of battle (or so it seemed). One arm swept the room in a grand, all-encompassing gesture.
“Look, behold these wretches that you see stretched upon the floor, my son. Their intelligence is so low that they cannot even stand. Look upon them and be glad that your dream of the dream world did not make you religious. It is this world that these fools dreamt to get out of their eternity. First look upon the wall and see what it says there written in the blood of one of them. Read it now to me and express your loathing of their low estate.”
The son could barely tear his eyes away from the imbeciles long enough to see the legend written on the wall in blood. It read, ‘You have the mind of the creator, so act like it!’
“What does this enigmatic sign mean, Father?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care. One thing I do know, though, is that they thought they could dream that they were religious geniuses and torment others and lord it over them. Look, for their dreams play like out-of-focus dramas in and out of the flesh along the walls. See? And there.”
“Where do these pieces of words and phrases come from, my father?”
“I do not know; they seem to be from an ancient book of oriental wisdom, but I cannot think where its origin is right now. Maybe I’ll remember it later. Watch these walls, son.”
What the son saw were pieces of pictures, unfinished dreams, parts of stories. In one, he saw a puppet-looking person forcing a young woman to have sex with him. He heard in his gangrened brain the puppet-looking man say to the woman, “When you serve the flock, you serve the main shepherd, my dear.”
Another showed a group of old men beating some children and relieving them of the books in their hands. “We are the only ones who can understand and interpret these sacred books, children of filth. We will tell you what they mean.”
In another dream, in what seemed to be ancient Rome, it showed some slaves getting drunk and beating their fellow counterparts mercilessly. They were saying, “We will criticize you until you realize we are the holy ones. We will wield weapons for all time and oppose you and let you know that you must be like us if you want to win the creator’s approval.”
“I do not understand all this, Father.”
“I suspected as much. You belong in here with these idiots.”
The father noticed that the son must be aware of the gray wings he had sprouted, for they were long enough to drape halfway down his massive, hairy back. They had to itch, growing at this rapid rate.
“Were all these idiots capable of dreaming these religious dreams up, my father?”
“It doesn’t take much intelligence to merely follow orders, my son. They created a religious world where the only way to excel was to become like themselves in their group. All sorts of these religions sprung up because of this — you must realize that these imbeciles were incapable of anything in their dream world except protecting their own paranoid egocentric system; for it is all a moron knows. Because they really are morons, they were incapable of creating anything that smacked of unity or creativity. They merely (poorly, I might add) copied what others had done. They couldn’t lead, for what they really wanted was to be petty tyrants, so they weakly imitated every fad or fashion of their day. They were followers of the Chief Demon, but didn’t know it. If they had calculated the nature of the creator they were really following (someone fostering intolerance and hatred and division) they would have realized where they were all the time — here! Anything that came along that they did not agree with, they cast out or made that other moron feel so uncomfortable that they had to leave. Does that sound very intelligent or creative to you?”
“It’s something only a moron could dream up, I suppose.”
“But, odd as it sounds, their dream world consisted of ‘geniuses’ who knew better. As the mythos goes, others before them had created a foundation of love, and they tortured it completely to death. And each other. It is probably the most mysterious thing in Infernus. Something so totally self-defeating; so backwards. A topsy-turvy existence.”
“But, Father, it does make sense that if these beings (you can hardly call them human; just brain-dead morons) really were morons, that this mess is exactly what they would make of a world if they dreamed of one.”
“Yes, it is,” the father said, smiling.
“But we should participate in this little tableau. Let’s torture them for many lifetimes, shall we?”
The son was already eagerly popping eyeballs out of a smallish shark-faced man. It kept idiotically murmuring, “I am a tin god, you cannot hurt me. I am an elder, a semi-apostle.”
“Infernus is too good to them, Father. I wish it was possible to throw them into other dimensions that they had no threshold of pain for.”
“It is done,” said the father simply.
And it was so. The room was suddenly empty, save the two spelunkers. “If you could only hear their shrieking, as only I can feast upon,” the father said, closing his black sockets so he could concentrate on their terror more acutely.
“Is it truly horrid, my father?”
“It is so much so that even I cannot imagine the horror of what they feel. I can let you listen for only [one second] of times.”
And instantly, in the son’s brain, he felt the most heinous pounding, as the voices of many morons were tortured many millions of times, greater than anything they ever thought was possible. But, even though it only lasted a brief hour, the son’s brain felt like curdled oatmeal.
They laughed many a lifetime.