10. TALK OF GOOD AND EVIL.

Her father tells Janie who he really is and weariness sends her to sleep.

In a kind of weary delirium Janie staggered behind the grotesque creature who called himself her father. He led her across the drawbridge (which, fortunately, was down) and Janie found part of her half-asleep mind wondering why is was there at all, because there didn’t seem to be a moat or even a stream for it to be crossing.

Once the other side of the huge gate, and it clanged behind them with a satisfactory dull thud, she looked around her.

There was but a single room, and that room had a fierce fire raging in the centre of it, a fire that by some miracle managed to send its smoke straight up and through the rafters where it no doubt dispersed in the night air.

There were two areas of bedding, so inviting to her weary mind, and she flung herself down on one of them. Her eyes were sore with tiredness and all she wanted to do was get some sleep. It seemed that she’d been awake for hours and there was only one solution to it. Sleep.

But her guide, it seemed, had other ideas.

“I will show you all sorts of marvels, dearest daughter,” whispered the grotesque horned figure standing next to where she lay and gazing down on her. His words couldn’t have been less welcome as she wriggled herself into the bedding and was as cosy as possible despite the nature of the night. She was genuinely tired. It had been a very late and frightening few hours and the last thing she wanted was for the man (if man he was) who called himself her father to keep her eyes from closing one moment longer.

“Not now,” Janie whispered, her eyes clenched shut in an attempt to demonstrate her weariness in a way that obvious enough for even him to understand. Didn’t he know that she wasn’t grown up yet and needed her sleep? A proper father would, surely?

“Now don’t you be offensive to your daddy,” chided the other, “or I will have to summon up all my demonic powers and take you with me to the underworld where you can cry and stamp your feet and be as horrible as you want to, and nobody will take a blind bit of notice of you while you burn and burn and burn for longer than any eternity you’ve ever dreamed of.”

She opened her eyes at that. “Who are you?” she asked.

“I am your daddy,” he grinned.

“Besides that, if you really are?” she demanded, “Who are you?”

“Some call me Satan,” he replied, his eyes glowing and his horns twitching, “whilst others simply call me the Devil. But you may call me daddy, for I am truly your father. You were born of my, what would you like me to call it? Seed? Essence? The juice of love on a night such as this thirteen years ago? And your poor mother bore you for me, a joint creation by a moment of passion. And she did as she was told and called you Janie. She was a good woman and given a little bit longer in her company I might have learned to love her...”

“But you didn’t love her?”

“After one night? One solitary night? What kind of sprite do you think I am, wooing a beautiful woman and actually falling in love with her in just a single night?”

“You really are the devil? The evil spirit preached about by the Priest? The dreadful sprite who is constantly at war with God?”

The other seemed to swell, his face seemed to turn to a visual representation of earthly thunder and he clenched and unclenched his hands. Janie noticed that the nails on the end of each finger were long and had curled into horrible spirals. “Don’t use that name in front of me or I will… I will … I will….” he shouted, suddenly losing the suavity with which he had so far conducted himself.

“What? God?” she asked with assumed innocence, “I can’t say God in front of you? What can I say, then? The Lord? Something like that?””

“There you go again!” he shouted, his face writhing with uncontrollable passions and his horns growing a good six inches longer. He stormed around the room thrashing his forked tail wildly into anything that got in his way and Janie found herself shrinking further and further into the bedding that she had been trying to pull over herself in order to sleep.

“What’s wrong with God?” asked Janie, still seeming childishly innocent, but really scared whilst at the same time doing her best to see how far she could go when it came to infuriating her father.

“Don’t you know, child?” stormed the Devil, “haven’t they taught you anything in that blasted village where you lived, the place that seems more preoccupied with torching old ladies than passing real knowledge onto the their young? God is the anti-Satan! God (and I spit when I say his name)”, and the grotesque figure spat onto the floor, his spittle steaming and bubbling where it landed until it had completely evaporated in mere seconds, leaving no stain behind it but filling the air with a metallic sort of stench.

“Yes, I spit,” he repeated, “for he represents everything that I do not.”

“You mean, he represents good whilst you prefer evil?” asked Janie, still assuming an innocence she didn’t feel.

“Good and evil? What are they, child? Two sides of the same coin, perhaps? Meaningless words to define a meaningless morality? It is is said that it is good to worship him I refuse to name again and that it is evil to have words with me. Yet we are both invisible to mortality...”

“I can see you,” interrupted Janie.

He grinned at her, a wide and possessive grin. “Of course you can,” he almost purred, his anger of mere moments ago seeming forgotten, “I am your father after all and that means that you are part of me. Half of you, to be precise, is part of me. Indeed, half of you is me! Think of that! You probably won’t remember being born...”

“Of course I do!” interrupted Janie again, “and it wasn’t very nice. I was glad when it was all over and I could tell them all what I thought of them.”

“Well, when you were born you took part of me into the world and because the darned priests and everyone believe that I am evil you took evil into the world. You spread it over the people you got to know, spread it like toxic tumours, foul growths that poisoned their minds. So don’t talk to me of good, child, when you are the incarnation of evil!”

“I like evil,” she conceded.

“And love? Do you like love?” he demanded, “when that Priest of yours, the one they nearly burned tonight, the one rescued by a pompous bishop, teaches that there are many kinds of true, heart-wrenching love that are bad, that are evil? Cannot a man love a woman unless they are wed? Cannot one man love another man because they are both men? Yet a man can go to war and slay another man because he must, because he is told to, because he is at war with strangers who are equally out to kill him? So which is good and which is evil? The love of a man for a man or a woman for a woman? Or death, pointless and needless death, in battle?”

“It is confusing,” she admitted.

“Too confusing for me, so it must be even more confusing for you,” grinned her father. Then he sighed. “There were things I was going to show you tonight, but I see you are but a child. It will have to wait until another time. Meanwhile, I’ll let you close your eyes and sleep. That’s the right, the good, thing for me to do.”

“And not evil?” she yawned.

“Evil is tomorrow,” he told her, “evil is when you grow old enough to look it in the eyes and know its true name. Meanwhile, my little love, try getting some sleep.”

“Is … love … always good?” she asked, but was so tired that her mind had resorted to sleep before he had a chance to answer.

© Peter Rogerson 17.11.17