They are not words that need corroboration.
“Imagine what it must be like to have to believe.” The bishop shakes his head, almost sadly. “Imagine the doubt, the uncertainty, the discord and petty strife over which dreams are divine and which are blasphemous. Sometimes I almost pity the heathens. What a terrible thing it must be, to need faith. And yet they cling to it. They creep into our towns and they wear our clothes and they move among us, and they shield themselves from the very presence of God.” He sighs. “I confess I do not entirely understand them.”
“They ingest some sort of herb or fungus,” I tell him. “They claim it connects them with their own god.”
The bishop mmmms. Doubtless he knew this already. “I would like to see their fungus move a monorail. Or even turn a compass needle. And yet, surrounded by evidence of the Lord’s hand, they continue to cut themselves off from it. This is not widely known, but we’ve received reports that they can successfully scramble entire rooms. Whole villas, even.”
He runs one long fingernail along the envelope, slitting it lengthwise.
“Like the chapel you purged this morning, Praetor. It was scrambled. The Spirit could not manifest.”
I shake my head. “You are mistaken, Teacher. I’ve never felt the Spirit more strongly than—”
The grim-faced escorts. The detour through Golgotha. The shaft of inexplicable sunlight. Everything falls into place.
A yawning chasm opens in the pit of my stomach.
The bishop extracts a sheet of film from the envelope: a snapshot of my passage through the Tunnel of Light. “You are possessed,” he says.
No. There is some mistake.
He holds up the snapshot, a ghostly, translucent image of my head rendered in grays and greens. I can see the demon clearly. It festers within my skull, a malign little lump of darkness just above my right ear. A perfect spot from which to whisper lies and treachery.
I am unarmed. I am imprisoned: I will not leave this place a free man. There are guards beyond the door, and unseen priestholes hidden in the dark corners of the room. If I so much as raise a hand to the bishop I am dead.
I am dead anyway. I am possessed.
“No,” I whisper.
“I am the way, the truth, and the light,” the bishop intones. “None can come to the Father except through me.” He stabs at the lump on the plate with one accusing finger. “Is this of the Christ? Is it of His Church? How then can it be real?”
I shake my head, dumbly. I cannot believe this is happening. I cannot believe what I see. I felt the Spirit today. I felt it. I am as certain of that as I have been of anything.
Is it me thinking these thoughts? Is it the demon, whispering to me?
“It seems there are more of them every day,” the bishop remarks sadly. “And they are not content to corrupt the soul. They kill the body as well.”
They force the Church to kill the body, he means. The Church is going to kill me.
But the bishop shakes his head, as though reading my mind. “I speak literally, Praetor. The demon will take your life. Not immediately—it may seduce you with this false rapture for some time. But then you will feel pain, and your mind will go. You will change; not even your loved ones will recognize you by your acts. Perhaps, near the end, you will become a drooling infant, squalling and soiling yourself. Or perhaps the pain will simply grow unbearable. Either way, you will die.”
“How—how long?”
“A few days, a few weeks…I know of one poor soul who was ridden for nearly a year before she was saved.”
Saved. Like the heretics at Golgotha.
And yet, whispers a tiny inner voice, even a few days spent in that Presence would be easily worth a lifetime…
I bring my hand to my temple. The demon lurks in there, festering in wet darkness only a skull’s thickness away. I stare at the floor. “It can’t be.”
“It is. But it does not have to be.”
It takes me a moment to realize what he’s just said. I look up and meet his eyes.
He’s smiling. “There is another way,” he says. “Yes, usually the body must die that the soul can be saved—crucifixion is infinitely kinder than the fate that usually awaits the possessed. But there’s an alternative, for those with—potential. I will not mislead you, Praetor. There are risks. But there have been successes as well."
“An… an alternative…?”
“We may be able to exorcise the demon. We may be able to remove it, physically, from your head. If it works we can both save your life and return you to the Lord’s presence.”
“If it works…”
“You are a soldier. You know that death is always a possibility. It is a risk here, as in all things.” He takes a deep, considered breath. “On the cross, death would be a certainty.”
The demon in my head does not argue. It whispers no blasphemies, makes no desperate plea against the prospect of its extraction. It merely opens the door to Heaven a crack, and bathes my soul in a sliver of the Divine.
It shows me the Truth.
I know, as I knew in the crèche, as I knew this morning. I am in the presence of God, and if the bishop cannot see it then the bishop is a babbling charlatan, or worse.
I would gladly go to the cross for just such a moment as this.
I smile and shake my head. “Do you think me blind, Bishop? You would wrap your wretched plottings up in Scripture, that I would not see them for what they are?” And I do see them now, laid bare in the Spirit’s radiance. Of course these vile Pharisees would trap the Lord in trinkets and talismans if they could. They would ration God through a spigot to which only they have access—and those to whom He would speak without their consent, they would brand possessed.
And I am possessed, but not by any demon. I am possessed by Almighty God. And neither He nor His Sons are hermit crabs, driven to take up residence in the shells of idols and machinery.
“Tell me, Bishop,” I cry. “Was Saul wearing one of your prayer caps on the road to Damascus? Did Elisha summon his bears with one of your wands? Or were they possessed of demons as well?”
He shakes his head, feigning sadness. “It is not the Praetor that speaks.”
He’s right. God speaks through me, as he spoke through the Prophets of old. I am God’s voice, and it doesn’t matter that I am unarmed and unarmored, it doesn’t matter that I am deep in the devil’s sanctum. I need only raise my hand and God will strike this blasphemer down.
I raise my fist. I am fifty cubits high. The bishop stands before me, an insect unaware of its own insignificance. He has one of his ridiculous machines in one hand.
“Down, devil!” we both cry, and there is blackness.
I awaken into bondage. Broad straps hold me against the bed. The left side of my face is on fire. Smiling physicians lean into view and tell me all is well. Someone holds up a mirror. My head has been shaved on the right side; a bleeding crescent, inexplicably familiar, cuts across my temple. Crosses of black thread sew my flesh together as though I were some torn garment, clumsily repaired.