half way done

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The Reverend Billy Swiggert was dreaming. He could tell he was dreaming, because he had no hands. In real life, waking life, the world outside of dreams, where things were not as they should be, the Reverend Billy Swiggert had hands. He was fairly certain of this fact. It seemed true to his memory, so he concluded that it was a fact. He had hands, and so, because he lacked hands at the moment, he must be dreaming. He tried to remember how he had lost his hands. Surely, losing his hands would be a memory that he could recall, were it something that had actually happened. But he could not remember losing them. A trauma so great should be recallable. He decided, with great certainty that he was dreaming.
In his dream was a tree, and he was under it. He was laying on the grass, reclining in slumber. In his dream, he was dreaming. The tree was tall, and large. Its branches spread out high above him, tangled, leafy, and dense. They blocked out the sunlight. He was covered, in his slumber-in-slumber, in darkness. Rays of light poked through the dense canopy of the tree, but they did not reach him. They landed on the grass that surrounded him, and illuminated nothing. In his dream, he opened his eyes and gazed upon one of the rays of sunlight. It shimmered and danced, and split in two. Two parallel rays of light beamed down on to the grass in front of the Reverend Billy Swiggert, and between them, beams of light reached across the gap to form crossbeams. A ladder, thought the Reverend. I’m looking at a ladder, a ladder of light ascending all the way to Heaven.
He let his gaze ascend Heavenward, following the beams of the ladder of light, to see where it would lead. Through the branches of the tree it went, and his vision soared on wings of dream to follow it up, up, up, through the clouds, through the sky, penetrating the firmament, ascending beyond the stars and planets, all the way to God’s Heavenly realm. It jutted through the ground, near the Throne of the Lord, and an Angel of the Lord was walking toward it. The Angel grasped the beams of the ladder and put his feet upon it. He began to descend.
The descent took ages. Thousands of years passed as the Angel descended upon the ladder of light, and it seemed he never got any closer to God’s Creation. In his dream, the Reverend Billy Swiggert had an eternity to wait, and after an eternity had passed, the Angel did arrive at the canopy of the tree, and came through it, brushing aside the branches, holding them at a distance to allow for his wings to pass through. At last, the Angel arrived upon the grass, and set his heels upon the Earth, the Creation of His Father, and spread his arms and wings wide, and inhaled.
“Air,” he said. “It is not something I have tasted. It is sweet, and it is good. Come, mortal, let us embrace.” The Angel of the Lord spread his arms even wider.
The Reverend Billy Swiggert arose from his reclining, and approached the Angel to return its embrace. The Angel’s face became twisted into a sneer, and from its fingers sprouted claws, and from its mouth sprouted terrible fangs. It roared at The Reverend Billy Swiggert, and grasped at his feet. It caught the Reverend in its grasp and flung him to the ground. The Reverend fought back, as best he could, but he was no match for God’s Messenger. He was defeated, and the Angel of the Lord sat upon him. The weight was greater than any the Reverend had experienced. He could not move, not at all, not even the parts of him that were not under the Angel. He was paralyzed with fear, and fright.
God’s Messenger, thought the Reverend Billy Swiggert, should not best me. God’s Messenger should kneel to my will, he thought, for I myself am God’s Messenger, here on Earth. I have carried the Word in my heart for my entire life, and I have spread it amongst Creation. Why does the Lord send this tormentor against me? The Reverend Billy Swiggert gathered as much strength as he could muster, he inhaled great gasps of air, enough to exhale a single question, in a single word, the most oft asked and most oft ignored question in all of Creation, in all Time.
“Why?” asked the Reverend Billy Swiggert.
The Angel of the Lord laughed. It was a cruel laugh. He clutched at his torso with his long, spiney arms, his claws scraped against his skin, and his fangs shuddered. He laughed, and laughed, and laughed, for a long time. When he had finished laughing, he twisted his head so that he could look directly into the eyes of the Reverend Billy Swiggert. The eyes of the Lord’s Messenger were blazing fire, and they burned into the Reverend’s skull. The Reverend closed his eyes, but it made no difference. He was consumed by the gaze of the Messenger of the Lord. There, beneath the tree, and the ladder, and the Angel, the Reverend Billy Swiggert died, by fire, and was reborn. Reborn, he knew. The answer to his question, he knew it. In his death, he had seen it. The answer invigorated him, he had strength again. He looked at himself, at his arms, and his gaze followed his arms down to where his hands should be. He had hands again, and this confused the Reverend Billy Swiggert. If he had hands, was he awake? Was he still dreaming if there was no way to tell whether he was awake or dreaming?
If he had hands, was he alive again?
It did not matter. The Angel was still upon him, it was still staring cruelly at him with eyes of fire and a heart full of malice. Its claws still stood poised to tear into the Reverend, and its fangs still stood ready to rend his flesh. And the Reverend Billy Swiggert knew why. He, among all humans of all time, had received the answer to the unanswerable question, the accursed answer that God had withheld for millennia. A terrible secret.
He was not of God’s Chosen People. He was not of God’s Children, even. He was an abomination in God’s eyes, he and all of Mankind were hated by God. God’s messenger had attacked him, not in defiance of God’s Will, not as an impenetrable expression of God’s Love, not out of Divine Benevolence masked and warped by the Divine Plan. No, the Angel of the Lord had attacked him, and brought him to defeat for the same reason one Man kills another: out of hatred. And that hatred did not start and end with the Angel. That hatred had come directly from the Throne of the Lord, the Angel was God’s Divine Hatred, and it had descended the ladder from Heaven to strike directly at the Reverend Billy Swiggert.
Mankind was an abomination, hated by the Lord. It was damned. He was damned, he and all his fellows upon Earth, by the sins of his forebears, liars, murderers, and fornicators of old. His ancestors had committed acts forbidden by God, his ancestors, Angels of the Lord, had disobeyed their Father and committed terrible acts, and then compounded their sins with even more horrific acts, in vain attempts to conceal their betrayal. And for that, their entire race was accursed, and there was to be no forgiveness.
The Reverend Billy Swiggert, despite living his life as best he could by the Word, despite his earnest attempts to spread the Word, despite his impenetrable fortress of Faith in God’s Benevolence, was damned. Doomed to an eternity of Hell.
If that were the case, decided the Reverend Billy Swiggert, then his acts upon Earth were no longer of consequence. The Lord God was Benevolent, but once His heart had stiffened against a people, the cries, the pleas, the prayers of that people would go forever unheeded. This, the Reverend Billy Swiggert knew, would be the fate of Humanity, to be forever outside God’s good graces; to receive Divine Attention only in the form of Hateful retribution. To at best go unnoticed by God.
If there could be no Forgiveness, decided the Reverend Billy Swiggert, if there can be no Heavenly Reward to anticipate, no Grace of God to save him from eternal Hell, then there can be only Earthly survival. To strike at ones Earthly enemies, and to succeed. That was all that was left to Mankind.
To destroy those that tormented them, to murder the Messengers of God that oppressed them. There was no forgiveness to be had, no Grace of God reserved for them.
The Reverend Billy Swiggert did not utter a prayer to God as he tightened his muscles and prepared for battle. He stood up right, heaving the Angel from off his chest, and clenched his fists into mighty weapons. He swung his fists, and with a furious cry, landed blows upon the head of the Angel. The Angel, at the moment of contact, turned his gaze again upon the Reverend Billy Swiggert, and his divine eyes were no longer filled with fire, no longer consumed with hatred and power of God, but with fear. But only for an instant. The Reverend Billy Swiggert’s fist smashed through the Angel’s skull, and it disintegrated into dust, and vanished without a sound.
The Reverend Billy Swiggert walked over to the ladder of light, and grasped its uprights. His hands burned at the touch of it, but he persisted. He stretched his gaze up its span, clear to Heaven, and uttered words, words spoken in a voice that in the past, he would have called a Prayer, words that were directed to the Heavenly Father, words that he never would have imagined uttering.
“You’re next,” he said, and began his ascent. If survival were all he could have, if murder were all he could look forward to, if torment was to be his lot, he would try, with his last breath, to murder his tormentor.