She found herself staring at a tintype, a late-nineteenth-century photograph.
There was no judgment day, no final explanation, no luminous moment in which all terrible wrongs would be made right, all horrors redeemed. The witches burnt at the stake would never be avenged. No one was ever going to tell us anything!
It was the darkness exploded, the darkness molten, and the beauty of it was like the glow of smoldering coals; just enough illumination to show how much darkness there really was.
Good and evil, those are concepts man has made. And man is better, really, than the Savage Garden.
Telling people-did it ever make things better?
Sometime in the far future there may be such a leader. He will reduce man to the nakedness and fear from which he came. And we shall feed upon him effortlessly as we have always done, and the Savage Garden, as you call it, will cover the world.
Those clothes. Impossible. I mean, tomorrow night, as they say in the twentieth century, you will lose that sweater and those pants.
Don’t be afraid. Just start the tape.
He wasn’t a living thing. He was a monster. A vampire was what he was, a blood-sucking corpse from the grave gifted with intellect!
Even the avowed atheist probably thinks that in death he’ll get some answer. I mean God will be there, or there won’t be anything at all.
We are all born without our consent. Should it really be so thoroughly shattering to be reborn the same way.
The old gods go into the sun, into the fire, or they meet with obliteration through violence, or they bury themselves in the deepest earth never to rise again. But the Mother and the Father go on forever, and they do not speak.
In memory I went back to the days in Rome when I had been mortal, and there was my garden, the garden of the villa of my father, and I was walking in the soft grass and listening to the sound of the fountain, and then it seemed that all through time, the garden changed but never changed, and it was always there for me.
It’s only mercy I ask, that I go now to find hell, if there is a hell, or sweet oblivion which surely I do not deserve. If there is a Prince of Darkness, then I shall set eyes upon him at last. I shall spit in his face.
Those Who Must Be Kept are at peace, or in silence. More than that we may never know.
And now we stand again on the cusp of an atheistic age – an age where the Christian faith is losing its hold, as paganism once lost its hold, and the new humanism, the belief in man and his accomplishments and his rights, is more powerful than ever before.
Right before my eyes he was seemingly as solid as I was; and then I felt the tingling all through my limbs as he merged with me, and the tiny stabs on my hands and my neck and my face. I struggled as if I were caught in a perfect net.
By morning, I realized that I was his complete superior and I had been sadly cheated in having him for a teacher.
And I’ve more reason now than ever to say that happiness is not what I will ever know, or will ever deserve to know. I am not so much in love with happiness.
I’m theatrical and incorrigible. A regular beast when it comes to the exaggerated and the eccentric.
As for his father, he saw death in the falling leaves.