| EPILOGUE |

JUDECCA

 

 

 

I,Judas, am the paragon of suicides.

I, Judas, am the ghost hand of your faith.

I, Judas, am your suspended disbelief.

 

Lucifer was there, his immense torso projecting from the ice of Judecca, like a man waist deep in arctic water. Even from a distance, he was colossal, surrounded by hundreds of frozen corpses that draped the cold, impenetrable slabs. The permanent ice held him and was made thicker by his tears as his gargantuan wings beat weakly, torn and bloodied where he tried to free himself. At the center of the earth, his wings cast one final shadow of futility.

I beheld the goat horns that grew from the brow of his leonine head, bowed in the half-light of the cavern. The rope of his red hair ran over his shoulders. I witnessed the churning of faces in the glassy ice beneath my feet as my crampons bit the surface. My presence there unleashed a siren scream as the corpses on the slabs began to split open like stitched mouths breaking their twine, coiling blue-black entrails over the frost, and the spectral noise reverberated in the halls of all death.

Lucifer looked up.

In the muscular vortices of his fists he gripped the decapitated corpses of the traitors Brutus and Cassius, their legs flapping like rubber. I thought of Malchus and imagined pushing my revolver into the soft plate of his mouth. I pictured the muzzle flash suppressed by his tongue, a shard of his skull exploding off like smashed bloody crockery, and his corpse falling silently into a transparent ravine. Lucifer’s mouth chewed the heads of the traitors like an obscene child chewing a pair of dolls. He closed his teeth on their hair and let them hang there. A tar of black lipstick slipped from the maw that called me like a return to an unknowable womb. I made my way across the ice, breathing in the stench of he who died as slow as a star, Lucifer, from the back of the heavens.

The pain in my throat increased from the effort of breathing again. Lucifer’s breath came like a storm. The smell of it was the same as the smell of the rope that I had taken from the animal to make my death and my transfiguration. He reached down to me and opened his bloody fingers. His long nails scraped and whined across the permafrost.