30.6

 

Roisin can feel her nipples harden again against a background noise of Astaroth laughing. “Brother,” he says, “Were you listening to our conversation?”

Hasmed tilts his head to his right shoulder and rolls it around the back of his neck to the accompaniment of several vertebrae cracking as they move into alignment. He does the same with his chin to his chest, then rolls his shoulders, laces his fingers and stretches out his arms first to the front and then over his head. He stands on his left leg to bring the bring his right knee to his chest, then straightens it first to the front, and then vertically in a perfect standing second position, which does nothing but emphasise his penis which, to Roisin’s mind, is disappointingly small. “I would not, brother.” He repeats the motion with his other leg. “However, with your revelation that I have the ability to evolve and choose my own form, I will admit to plucking the image of the perfect human form from the thoughts of the Fifth.”

“And this is what you found?” Astaroth’s lewd grin is decidedly devilish. “And fully endowed, as well. I don’t recall Creation giving you the option of genitals. Have you, perchance, also given yourself fertility?”

“It was part of the Fifth’s perfect human form.” Hasmed looks at them at last. “Was I in error?”

“Er…” Even the mantle cannot help Roisin forms a coherent sentence. “No… no, you’re all good.”

“Excellent.” Hasmed lifts his hands to chest height and stares at them. “What perfection this creation is.” He stretches out his fingers, curls them one by one into his palm and makes fists, then turns them over and looks at the backs as he extends his fingers once more. “Curios, though.”

Astaroth glances at Roisin, then back to Hasmed. “What is?”

“That the Creator should allow His servant to alter the form he was given.”

Astaroth shifts his stance from one foot to the other, then opens his hands in a display of apparent honesty. Roisin has a flashback to the last time she saw The Merchant of Venice performed at the Grand Theatre. “That’s the freedom of choice, brother. The Creator gave humanity the choice to choose between His path and any other. How could He do less for his beloved Elohim?”

“There is truth in that.”  Hasmed bows his head, as if in prayer, then holds his arms out to the side, palms upward like he was blessing the remaining protestors. Were it not for the uniforms of the police and the supporters, Roisin would no longer be able to tell them apart, they are so comingled now. “Score one for peace,” she thinks.

The crown looks up as a low growl of thunder rolls across the square, several of them backing away and heading down streets and into whatever shops are still open after the turmoil of the last few minutes while above them something shifts.

Not in the clouds or the sky. Not in the slowly dissipating void, but through the small remaining gaps in the view something shimmers.

Roisin and Astaroth look up, in time to see the shimmer as the planes of being shift. Heaven, Hell, the Void, Limbo and a dozen others flicker past like images on a child’s spinning top, settling at last on just the sky, which would have filled in the gaps if it had been the same cyan colour of the rest of it.

Which it is not.

What can be seen of the sky through the rapidly expanding tears in the blue is the night, but while the idea of seeing the night sky while the sun is still shining can be unsettling, eclipses are understood by everyone who believes in basic geometry. What makes the crowd of people below start screaming is the sun beginning to grow dim. Not out, for that would freeze the world instantly, but dim as if a muslin cloth had been put over a lamp in the reception of a brothel, and as the daylit sky is torn away, more is replaced by the black of night.

In the buildings around the square, lights flicker on and Roisin can see people in the rooms inside, cupping their hands at the windows the better to see what was happening.

She looks back at Hasmed, who has now closed his hands in front of his chest, palm over palm as if receiving communion in a massive church. The mantle shifts inside her as she watches soul fragments streaming down from the rips in the sky, filling his hands until the overflow and begin falling to the earth like unripe figs shaken from the tree by a mighty gale.

Hasmed looks down at her and smiles beatifically. Fifth,” he says, his voice clear as a piano key struck with the maximum of sustain. “I forgive thee.”

Roisin frowns, wondering what he means, just as his hand shoots forward into her chest, yanking the mantle from inside her.