PASCAL’S WAGER
by Wrath James White
Spectral flames flashed about the room, casting horrible shadows that moved independently of the light as if animated. The twisted silhouettes of tortured, malformed creatures limped and convulsed in the fiery twilight, shrieking and roaring as fire ran down the walls and long finger-like tendrils of electricity crackled in the air like lightning. Ghostly figures whirled around the room in a mad frenzy, hurling their ethereal bodies against the walls and knocking books and artifacts off the dressers.
More of the bizarre apparitions crowded their way into Jamie’s bedroom as he rubbed sleep from his eyes and tried to focus on the chaos raging all around him. Dark abominable creatures growled, screamed, and shouted in unknown languages. At least Jamie tried to pretend that he didn’t understand them, but he could make out enough of the gibberish to be afraid. All of them were calling out for Jamie’s soul. Jamie shuddered and prayed, sweat bulleting down his face, his body shivering, a scream trapped in his throat.
Fire belched from the floor and engulfed the room in smoke and ash. The sudden, stifling heat seared the air in his lungs and boiled the tears in Jamie’s eyes. A voice like the roar of thunder buffeted his eardrums and shook the room, rattling his skull and threatening to shatter his mind like a pane of glass in a hurricane. Jamie clamped his hands over his ears and screamed as loud as his scalded lungs would permit him.
The flames died away suddenly as if they had never been, leaving only the cold night air blowing through cracks in the locked windows and shut doors. The caustic stench of burning souls still lingered in the air, tickling the hairs in Jamie’s nostrils with the scent of hell.
Jamie knew he had welcomed many horrible things into his life with his compulsion, but he could not stop. He had no choice. He had to be sure.
Doors slammed and mirrors and windows cracked. The floors and walls heaved as if they were breathing and undulated like a snake gorged with a fresh kill. The shadows in the room grew denser. Jamie could feel hot breath on his face as they moved in closer. He felt hands all over him, tugging at his skin, trying to claw their way through his flesh to get at his soul. Many voices shouted in his face at once, cursing and spitting at him as they dragged him from bed.
Every night these ghostly assaults worsened. The Gods were getting angry. It was time to begin his morning rituals.
JAMIE FLOGGED HIMSELF IN a delirious rapture as he simultaneously dug his jagged nails into the goat’s thigh, wrestling the muscle free of the sinews and ligaments that held it. A warm arterial spray spurted into his mouth, gagging him as he bit into the animal’s jugular with his blunt little teeth, ripping the still twitching and spasming muscle from the animal’s bones as it moaned and yelped.
He continued lashing himself with the cat-o’-nine tails, praying and chanting fanatically in Aramaic, Greek, and Latin. The knotted leather barbed with bits of bone flayed open his skin and gouged deep into his back muscles, ripping out small chunks of meat and hurling them into the air. The pain was terrible. Luckily, flagellation was not a part of his daily rituals. At best, it was a bi-weekly thing.
Jamie collapsed as the pain washed over him. His stomach roiled and bile scalded the back of his throat. The room spun and began to blur as he fought to hold onto consciousness and fend off the waves of nausea. Jamie turned his eyes heavenward, imagining how Jesus must have felt as he was lashed by Roman soldiers on his way to be crucified.
“Oh, sweet Jesus.”
Jamie’s back was a bloody ruin when he finally laid down the blood-drenched flail and picked up the sacrificial knife. He was panting heavily and dizzy from pain and exertion when he cut open the goat’s belly and dug his fingers into the animal’s steaming entrails, tearing out its guts in ragged handfuls. After all this time, the oily texture of the fat worm-like intestines slipping through his fingers was still revolting to him.
Finally, Jamie removed the goat’s still beating heart, held it above his head, mumbled a long litany of prayers honoring nearly a dozen different deities and then bit into the heart, stilling it.
He ate one entire ventricle, struggling to keep it down as his stomach tried to reject it, then divided the rest of the heart up between four different altars. The intestines he placed on the crude little altar by his bedside. The head he placed atop a particularly dark and terrible looking shrine that was tucked in the closet. Next, he began draining the animal’s blood and dividing it up into bowls which he placed on different altars in the bedroom, living room, and kitchen. Even the animal’s eyes and genitalia were laid at the feet of one of the myriad statues and icons decorating Jamie’s apartment.
After the goat had been completely gutted, he placed part of it in the freezer and the rest in the garbage. He’d learned with difficulty that the garbage disposal could not handle large bones. Jamie went back to the cages and removed a chicken. In a gentle reverent voice, he chanted prayers in Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Hindu, Spanish, and Yoruba before ripping the chicken’s throat out with his teeth, cutting off its feet and head, ripping out its entrails, and splattering its blood on the walls and floor.
The chicken blood decorated seven other altars by the time he was done. It helped, he found, to combine rituals. Otherwise, his morning prayers would take forever. Even now, he had to start before the sun rose in order to finish them all before work. Next, Jamie removed a rabbit, then a dove, then two more chickens, and then a lamb. The apartment was a slaughterhouse before The Gods Jamie worshipped were finally satiated.
Blood splattered the room in every direction and rained down the walls like red teardrops. The plastic tarp covering the floor now held the expanding puddle in which Jamie knelt, knees splashing in the tacky effluence. The animals Jamie had sacrificed to one God or another littered the tarp around him. Birds, butterflies, rabbits, sheep, and goat, some vivisected, some disemboweled or beheaded, and some immolated. Warm entrails, heads, limbs, and bowls of blood decorated the innumerable altars and icons crowding the candle-lit apartment.
The bloodiest part of his morning ritual over, Jamie stared at the ceiling, trying to see through it to the sky above and through that to The Gods in heaven as he pierced himself with needles and inhaled incense while kneeling on a mat and praying to the east. He still had many more rituals to go, many more gods to pay homage to before he could begin his day. To some, he offered fruit. For some, a simple candle and incense sufficed. For others, he burned money or special herbs. For some, he wrote prayers on the walls, or he scrawled them on paper and burned them. For others, he gave sacrifice. To them all, he pledged his eternal, unfailing devotion.
He recited prayers from The Bible, The Book of Mormon, The Koran, The Torah, The Tao Te Ching, The I Ching, The Dhammapada, The Adi Granth, The Bhagavad Ghita, The Vedas, and The Avesta. He chanted spells and incantations from ancient grimoires and from fading xerox copies of hieroglyphics chiseled into temple walls and written on ancient scrolls. He had to make sure he had all his bases covered. Any of them could have been the true religion, any of the hundreds of deities could have been the right one, the one that would assure him a place in paradise when he died. Since he could not be sure which one it was, it was best to be safe and believe in them all.