Preparations for War

Sebastian Gloom
Part Thirteen

Gloom's worries that the Resistance movement might be losing its momentum turned out to be unfounded. He became aware of rumours circulating among the damned, rumours that things were getting organised at the highest levels of the demonic hierarchy. Lucifer, Metatron and half a dozen of the most powerful demons had been meeting, it was said, the second rebel archangel filling the others in on the latest changes that had been made to Heaven's organisation and politics. The infernal high council used this information to make plans and strategies, and sent instructions to the next level down, telling them what their individual goals and objectives would be in the coming war. They, in turn, would hold meetings with their peers and subordinates to decide how best to achieve those objectives and pass instructions down to the next level of organisation. By the time it percolated all the way down to Gloom's level it had become little more than rumour and gossip, but it was enough to reassure him that things were moving.
He was discussing this with Nacoma when he was interrupted by a joyous shout and looked around to see a familiar figure running through the flames towards him. “Gloom! At last I've found you! I've been searching for an eternity!”
“Benson!” The two men hugged joyously with cries of delight and much slapping on backs. “By God, Benson, how long have you been here?” He knew it was a meaningless question but he didn't care. “By God it's good to see you!”
“I've been searching for so long! I've been asking everyone I met and no-one had heard of you. So many people down here, so many millions! I was beginning to think it was hopeless, and then all of a sudden there you were, standing right beside me! Would you believe it?”
“If I'd known you were dead I would have been searching for you too. How much time's passed back in the living world?”
“More than sixty years when I died, God alone knows how many years since! I lived to be ninety six! Can you believe that? I've got children, grandchildren. A whole tribe of descendants. I named my eldest Sebastian, in honour of you. He went off to join the navy and last I heard he was first mate on the Prince of Wales!”
“How splendid!” He suddenly remembered Nacoma, still standing there, watching the reunion with an amused smile, and he introduced them to each other. “The man Paul spoke of!” said Benson, shaking his hand excitedly.
“You remember then?” said Gloom.
“Yes, I do. I was having trouble with my memory in my final living years. I couldn't remember names, not even the names of my wife and children, but when I found myself standing before God my memory was completely restored. I suppose he wanted to make sure I knew what I was being punished for.”
“Who did you end up marrying?”
“Melody Winters, the finest girl who ever drew breath. You don't know her. Never will, unless she ends up down here.” He frowned with anger at the thought. “The money you left us in your will set us up nicely. I bought a pub, lived in the rooms above it. I'm afraid your museum got knocked down shortly after your death to make way for an accounting firm.”
“Could be worse. I always feared it might make way for a theological college.”
Benson laughed. “In a way, I'm glad it took this long to find you. I wouldn't have wanted you to see me before I conquered the flames. I have my pride, as the almighty Himself told me, and I wouldn’t have wanted you to see me in helpless agony. God, you've no idea how it tormented me, knowing you were here, in Hell. I've cursed God and the church a thousand thousand times since that awful day!”
“I understand, my friend,” Gloom replied. “I'm also glad that nobody who knew me in life saw me while I was going through the Agony. Strange to think that we're feeling the same pain right now, and that it's completely lost the ability to hurt us.” He looked down at his bare flesh, at the skin that was eternally blackening and peeling in the flames, eternally healing so that it could burn again. It now took a real effort of will to remember what the pain had been like at first.
“Yes, and I'm afraid that worries me a bit,” said Benson. “Are we gradually losing all ability to experience sensation?” He looked at Nacoma, wanting to include him in the conversation. “We no longer need to eat, so we no longer enjoy the sensation of good food. We no longer enjoy the pleasures of sexual congress...”
“Some of us never did,” said Gloom with a smile and his former manservant apologised for the thoughtless comment. Gloom waved it away. “I see what you mean, though,” he said. “We may eventually become creatures of pure logic and reason, no longer driven by the needs of the body or the desire to experience pleasurable sensations.” He decided to change the subject before the other two men followed the train of thought to its logical conclusion, the ultimate despair of eternal boredom. “Have you taken part in any of the demon wrestling contests yet?”
“I saw one a while back. They're training us to fight angels, I understand.“
“Yes. I took part in one a while ago. This big creature calling itself Sammael challenged us to pin it to the floor. Thousands of us took part, it was rather fun. It tore apart hundreds with its teeth and claws, trampled hundreds of others beneath its feet, but they just healed and we swarmed over it like ants over a vulture. Eventually there were so many of us hanging onto it that it couldn’t move and it had to tell us to release us. That's how you take down an angel, it said. It’s strange to think of an angel as something we can defeat, but we’re the same as them now. They're big, powerful spirits, we're small spirits, but there are millions of us.”
“There are millions of human spirits in Heaven too,” pointed out Benson.
“Not as many, and I strongly doubt that they’re driven by the same fury and desire for revenge as we are.”
“I will not be fighting for revenge,” said Nacoma, though. “I will be fighting for justice, for people to be rewarded and punished for their actions in life, not for their religion. I do not care what a man believes, and a just and fair God would not care either. I have studied your English history, and what we need to do is force God to sign something like your Magna Carta. He has shown that He cannot be trusted with absolute power. He must be made to recognise that we have rights too, that He can no longer treat us with such callous contempt.”
“I agree completely,” said Benson, “But I'm afraid it won't be so easy. Angels can fly, while we are earthbound. They can remain high in the air, beyond our reach. The blessed spirits in Heaven are also supposed to have wings. How can we win when they have total air supremacy?”
“If they want to fight us, they'll have to come down to us,” said Gloom.
“Not if they have weapons. Guns, rifles. Even bows and arrows. They can stay high up out of our reach and rain fire down on us.”
“In all the paintings and works of art you've ever seen,” said Gloom, “Have you ever seen an angel depicted holding a bow and arrow?”
“Cupid?” suggested Benson.
“Also, I'm not sure that angels do have wings. The bible never speaks of angels having wings, it describes them as being much like us in physical form. They were never depicted as having wings in artwork until the fourth century.”
“If they are beings of pure spirit, they can probably have wings if they want to,” suggested Nacoma.
“And we're also spirits of pure spirit,” said Benson. “Does that mean we can have wings too if we want?”
“Now that is an interesting question,” said Gloom. “I suspect the answer is no, though. The oldest damned souls are almost as old as the world itself, nearly six thousand years old, and I've never heard that any of them have learned to change their physical form. They apparently learn to see other souls as not having physical forms at all. We remain confined to the ground, though. Only demons can fly, not damned human souls.”
“Then we will be at a serious disadvantage against an adversary that can fly,” said Nacoma.
“No, I don't think we will,” said Gloom though. “What if they do have guns, bombs, whatever. We know now that such things have no lasting effect on us. We heal, in seconds. To defeat us, they will have to grapple with us and overpower us by sheer brute force and that is where our superior numbers will give us the advantage. Enough talk of war, though. I want to know what you did with your life after my death. Tell me everything!”
Benson did so, and the three of them talked for a long time, just enjoying each other's company. Benson told them about the troubles the British Empire had been having as the new century grew older. Britain's dominance of the world depended on being the world's only fully industrialised country, but as more and more of the provinces developed steam power and electricity they began to chafe under the collar of Imperial domination and yearn for self government. As Benson had been entering his eighth decade political pundits had been warning that the days of the Empire were numbered, and that it might soon be replaced by some kind of Federation of independent former provinces. Soon after that, though, his gradual mental decline had meant that he'd fallen out of touch with world events, and he was unable to tell the others what had been happening in the world on the days leading to his death. They would have to do find someone who'd died more recently if they wanted to learn more.
The conversation was cut short as a massive figure appeared on the horizon and sped through the air in their direction. It was a demon, massive, dark and terrible, or did it only look that way because that was how he expected it to look? For centuries, popular culture had depicted fallen angels as evil creatures, terrifying to look at, but Gloom now suspected that the church was largely responsible for this. Propaganda, the church literally demonizing the enemies of their God. Gloom knew that many demons were indeed evil and terrible, but he was now becoming more and more certain that many, perhaps most, of the demons in Hell were good, moral creatures who had been damned for speaking out against God's injustices.
As the demon loomed large above them, therefore, Gloom tried to ignore what his culturally programmed preconceptions were telling him and see the creature as it truly was. He closed his eyes, aware that everything he was seeing (and hearing, and feeling) was an illusion. The eldest damned souls claimed to be able to ‘perceive' other souls directly, to see the spirit world as it truly was. Sight, hearing and the other senses of the living human body were only relics of the past and had to be discarded. They only showed them what God wanted them to see anyway, and God wanted them to suffer. He closed his eyes, therefore, searched within himself for another sense of which he'd previously been unaware, concentrated...
He knew he was trying to do what the elder souls had taken thousands of years to accomplish, but he had the advantage of knowing that it was possible. It wasn't something that could be taught, since there were no words to describe it. Words could only be used to describe something that two people already understood. You couldn't describe the colour red, for instance. You could only take someone to something that was red and say “There, that’s what red is!” Gloom was facing the same problem as he struggled to access his sense of spiritual perception. He had no real idea what he was trying to do. He only knew that something was possible. He had no idea what, or how.
His efforts were interrupted as the demon spoke, though. A great, booming voice that rolled out across the red hot, flaming landscape like rolling thunder following a titanic flash of lightning. “Attend me, all ye damned souls! Attend to my words!”
“What's going on?” said Benson in alarm.
“It’s Sammael, I’m sure of it!” replied Gloom. “The same demon that’s been teaching us how to fight.”
“What does he...” Benson was cut off in mid sentence as the demon spoke again. “The second rebellion is at hand. All must attack their assigned targets All those within the sound of my voice are commanded to attack Netzach the Sublime, Prince of Eternity, Keeper of the Mournful Countenance...”
He was interrupted by shouts coming from the damned souls below. “Who are you to command us? I am a king, I follow no man's commands!” Other shouts supported him, Gloom heard someone saying “I am loyal still, Your Majesty! I follow you even beyond death!” Others voiced their own refusal to follow the commands of a demon, some of them insisting that they were still loyal to God, but a far greater number of voices shouted them down. “We have to act together!” someone said. “Our one chance of victory lies in our unity!”
The demon had his own answer to the protests, though. “If we are victorious,” his voice boomed out, “any who chose not to fight alongside us will remain in Hell after the rest of us have left. The spoils of war will not be shared with those who have not earned them.”
That silenced the crowd, and the demon waited until the last angry mutters had died down before continuing. “I cannot defeat Netzach by myself, for he far surpasses me in power. I shall lead you to him, though, and grapple with him. I will drag him down to the ground so that you can engage him in your massed thousands. You must subdue him as I have taught you to do. If you fail to do this, he will simply tear me apart and return to the skies, and although my body will heal, it will not be soon enough to help in the war. He will go to assist other angels being engaged elsewhere, and that may be enough to secure our defeat.”
He looked down at the massed ranks of the damned below him. “If we are victorious, we will share in the bliss of Heaven, and those undeserving of paradise will be cast out. Judgement will be fair, according to the character of each soul. That is what we will be fighting for. That is what I have sought to achieve since the sun first rose on Earth, that is the crime for which I was damned. I still believe it is a cause worth fighting for, and I intend to fight for it until the end of eternity if necessary. Are you with me?”
A great cheer went up from the thousands of damned souls gathered below, but Gloom found himself troubled by doubts. All his life, since earliest childhood, he'd been taught that demons were evil, that the devil only wanted to lead people to misery and pain. Now they were presenting themselves as champions of liberty and justice. Most of them, anyway. Gloom looked around and saw that quite a few of the other damned souls around him were having similar doubts. Could this all be some kind of trick? Lucifer just using them to overthrow God for his own personal gain? What if they helped Lucifer become Lord of Creation, and he turned out to be a worse tyrant than God ever was?
Then he remembered where he was. He was in Hell, and most of the people surrounding him did not deserve the torment that had awaited them upon their first arrival. People whose only crime had been the breaking of some arbitrary religious law. He could believe that those who murdered or raped or abused children deserved to suffer, but what about people of other religions, whose only crime had been to have absorbed the beliefs of their parents, something over which they had had no choice? A case could be made for adulterers maybe, but what about sodomites, a crime that, as far as Gloom was concerned, affected nobody but the people committing the act themselves? And the bible spoke of God’s wrath falling upon the children and grandchildren of these people, people who might be completely innocent of any crime. When you looked at the kind of people who went to Hell, it was almost as though the Lucifer portrayed by the church was already in charge. How could things be worse than they are right now? Gloom mused. We have to try something, and this is the only thing we can do!
“Be prepared!” cried Sammael, spreading his black wings to their fullest extent as he loomed above them like a bat above a broken ants nest. “The call will come very soon now! Be prepared for battle!” Another cheer went up, and the demon soared away into the distance as a massive hubbub of conversation rose from the damned souls, everyone talking among themselves about what was to come.
“Can we actually do it?” asked Nacoma, glancing back and forth between the other two men. “Can we actually overthrow God?”
“If we fail, how will we be worse off than we are now?” replied Benson. He gestured at the flames that still surrounded them, constantly burning their flesh. “This is God doing the very worst he possibly can to us. Remember how we screamed when we first arrived?” They all cringed uncomfortably. “If there were something worse that He could do to us, He would be doing it. That's the problem with infinite sadism. It leaves you with nowhere else to go when it fails.”
“Are we absolutely sure that this is the worse He can do to us?” said Nacoma though. “Maybe the fire is nothing compared to some even greater torment that He has held in reserve so far.”
“It doesn't matter,” said Gloom though. “Not if the torment lasts for all eternity. Even if He does have something worse in store for us, if it lasts for eternity then it will eventually cease to hold any power over us, just as the flames did.” He felt a little guilty saying this, because God did indeed have a greater torment waiting for them, and it was something that would not lose its hold over them as eternity ticked away. The ultimate torment of boredom would only get worse as time passed endlessly. It would happen no matter who was in charge of the universe, though. Toppling God or leaving Him in charge would make no difference. All Gloom could do was spare his friends for as long as possible by keeping his fears to himself.
Benson chuckled. “This is the kind of war I like! A war in which nobody, neither us nor them, can be killed, or even permanently hurt, which will benefit us immeasurably if we win but will cost us absolutely nothing if we lose! If the kind of God the church preaches about really existed, all wars would be like this!”
“There is one thing that bothers me, though,” said Nacoma. “I have heard much about this Christ your people worship. What will happen if we come face to face with him on the battlefield? What if he tells us to meekly return to Hell and cease our rebellion? Even the damned, feeling some kind of residual reverence, might balk before opposing him. The war might come to an end there and then with us ending up right back where we started.”
“Then we have to tell people the truth about him,” replied Gloom. “That he had wonderful powers to heal people and used them cynically as the means to recruit people into the worship of God. When I was a child, my religious education teacher told us a story about Christ healing a man with leprosy. She said that, so great was his power that he could have healed every leper in the world just by raising his hands. So I asked her, why didn't he? Why didn't he heal all the lepers in the world? She scolded me for asking a stupid question. A question she didn't like the answer to, she meant.”
“All the lepers in the world suddenly getting better all at once might have been taken as a natural event,” agreed Benson. “It wouldn’t have been attributable to him, or to God.”
Gloom nodded. “Every healing in the Bible was hands on, face to face, so that the patient knew exactly who it was whose power had healed them. To him, the power to heal people was nothing more than a tool, a means to an end. I despise him for it. If I had the power of Christ, I would just heal everyone, and I wouldn’t care if anyone knew it was me or not.”
“The problem may be all his words about loving your neighbour,” said Nacoma.
Gloom laughed. “Do as I say, not as I do. The message was a good one, but for it to come from God, who created Hell as a place of everlasting torture... Christians believe that everyone should be loved, and that sinners should be tortured forever. They believe both things at the same time!” He chuckled again. “I will never understand them.”
“The problem is not Christians, it is Christ himself. How can we fight someone who preaches love and non violence?”
“Christ apparently has no problem with this place. When he died on the cross, it’s said that he came down here and rescued all the righteous who had ended up down here through what I can only imagine to have been some kind of monumental bureaucratic blunder. He left everyone else behind, though. All the people who were not considered ‘righteous' because, I assume, they were the wrong religion. What choice do people have about what religion they're born into? If you're born in a country where everyone worships Baal, you're going to worship him too. That doesn't make you a bad person. Those people were abandoned here because of an accident of birth. If I find myself face to face with Christ, I'll have no problem punching him in the face.”
“Many others may not feel the same way, though,” warned the Cherokee, “and that may be a problem for us. Also, he is said to have been given authority over all demons and damned souls. Suppose we find that we're physically incapable of opposing him?”
“Given authority by God,” said Gloom. “It follows, therefore, that if we can defeat God, we can defeat Christ. Besides, as Benson just pointed out, what have we got to lose? The worst is that we end up back here.”
“We'll know soon enough,” said Benson, looking up. The demons were back and were taking their places above their designated troops. “Looks like things are about to kick off.”



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