THE PRIEST A Gothic Romance by Thomas M. Disch

THE PRIEST A Gothic Romance by Thomas M. Disch

Author:Thomas M. Disch [Disch, Thomas M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00


21

Silvanus had come to the conclusion, somewhat reluctantly, that he was not in hell, and this for three reasons. Primus: The sun rose each morning and cast its light upon a world that was not infernal in a subterranean sense. True, there were teeming hordes of people here, as one might expect to be the case in hell, but few were conspicuously in torment. Indeed, they lived amid unimaginable luxuries and pomp, not unlike the riches of Babylon, whose fall was foreseen by the apostle John, when he wrote: Alas, alas, that great city that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls!

Secundus: Contrary to his first impression, there were no demons here but only men—sinful men, maybe, with great powers of sorcery, but all mortal men of flesh and blood, like the Bishop himself. For a while he had suspected that the illuminated figures that appeared upon the dark glass of Delilah’s Trinitron might be demons, but having pondered them for many hours, he now believed that though they were very often grotesque, indecent, and unnatural, they were not actually alive, but only simulacra, the work of cunning artificers, like the image of the Beast that John writes of, that was given breath and the power of speech, so that all men would worship it. The Trinitron (the very name a mockery of the Triune God) revealed not a single beast but a whole menagerie of unclean spirits: some lustful, like the voluptuous Astrud Gilberto or the preening incubus Marky Mark; some warlike, like Popeye the Sailor Man or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; some wooing evil like a bride, like the two Moors, Geraldo and Oprah; and still others, kindlier, nameless beings, who appeared in intervals as brief as flashes of lightning to promise relief from various forms of suffering—headaches, stomach upset, hemorrhoidal distress. All of these creatures were illusory, all of them. They seemed to live when one manipulated the Trinitron a certain way; with another motion they ceased to exist. Silvanus found it difficult, now that Delilah was dead and no longer a spur to his lust, to do anything but marvel at these shadowy allegories and try to decipher them. His hope was that if he studied the Trinitron closely, it would reveal to him the nature of this new world and, possibly, the means by which he might escape from it.

But then, in the middle of The Flintstones, unable to fathom its allegories, which seemed of a sudden inane and infantile, he became bewildered, disgusted, and despairing, as though all the sins of all the phantasmal figures swirling on the glass of the Trinitron had boiled up inside him. He darkened the Trinitron, and, to be doubly sure its simulacra would be stilled, he removed the small flexible pipe by which the Trinitron’s sorceries (and myriad others no less marvelous) were accomplished. Delilah had shown him where the pipe connected to other pipes hidden within the walls of her little house.



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