White Rabbit Chapter 6

6.

The Church looked very familiar to Delores as she strode apprehensively behind Woodrow like a girl going to the gynecologist for the first time. “I don’t want to be judged. Why should I be?” She complained half-heartedly like a teenager would over being grounded. “I mean, unless, I am dead. Wait, woodchuck, am I, dead?!”

“No.” Woodrow replied. “You are not dead for if you are dead that would mean that I must be dead; and I know that I am not dead so, therefore, you are not dead. Understand?” It sounded logical but Delores reminded herself there was no such thing as logic in this world.

“I am so confused.” She sighed.

“The confusion will subside.” Woodrow assured her. “It is a mere side-effect of being.”

She waited expecting him to finish. “Of being what?”

“Simply of being.” He replied.

Delores looked up at the magnificent church and smiled because it was familiar to her and there is always some inexplicable comfort in seeing something even vaguely familiar when you are lost. “I have been here!” She said happily. She studied its beautiful stained glass windows, its neo-gothic flying buttresses, every block seemingly perfectly placed and she thought of when she might have seen it. She remembered it from a family photo-album but couldn’t recall where the photographs were taken. On the impressive tower there was a modest clock that glowed under the moon’s light saying, of course, 6:30. She wasn’t sure if it was 6:30 in the evening, or the morning, but she supposed it didn’t matter being that the weather and day and night were all subject to the whim of the creator. She stood there alone as Woodrow crawled into a portal juxtaposed to a tombstone-shaped wooden door, seemingly meant for small packages and flower baskets. Her mind began to wonder about Him. There was a Him missing to all of this, she was sure.

When Delores was young and something peculiar happened she always blamed Him. Who? They would ask confused—her teachers when she was explaining away missing homework, or a low test score, or sleeping in class—her parents when she was explaining spilled grape juice on the carpet, or the many occurrences of mischief. “Him! Him!” She would say, not able or willing to be any more descriptive. But gratefully when something good happened she gave Him credit so it wasn’t always just dead roses. She had no idea who He was and she knew she shouldn’t really blame Him for the bad but she made it alright by giving Him credit for the good—every A, every possible good fortune. After all, it was fair to do so, it was right and judicious. He was once pardoned as an imaginary figment when she was eight, as being perfectly healthy and normal, by an expensive psychologist who even packaged Him up neatly as being something incredibly good. The psychologist said it was perfectly natural and the product of an over-imaginative brain—a brain with too much for its world. But His name? What was His name? The puzzled psychologist asked Delores repeatedly. Imaginary friends always have a name. “He has no name; He is just Him—capital H, I-M.” She would say sardonically.

Delores saw the psychologist when she told her mother that she didn’t believe in God—not because of all the hogwash about Him. Her mother would have been fine with Him if he was the Holy Spirit, or named Bill, or Bugsy, or Pete and would go away when she hit puberty. But at eight, she was already calling God an absentee landlord. A God would not stricken the Earth with death, disease, war, and addiction and let it work itself out promising the faithful eternal life for fear and faith. And so He sent His own Son to Earth to die but a mob of corrupt Jews and dirty Romans ruined it for everyone? Then the Romans worshipped him and started a church, which later killed millions of people they called heretics, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, her mother’s church (interestingly, long-since jested for the hypocrisy of its people), and the Jews never acknowledged him but they made amends by returning to Israel? She found it all to be goddamn ridiculous. Those are the thoughts of Delores Marlowe take them or leave them. They are not published or polished but they are there and they are real and it’s hard to argue against her if you have seen anything beyond the scope of your daily bread. Her mother didn’t mind her disaccord with Judaism, or Islamism, but she refused to tolerate her disobedience to the Catholic Church.

So like the Cowardly Lion that was saying repeatedly as they traipsed though the woods on route to the Wizard, “I do believe in spooks,” Delores said to herself, “I do believe in God.” She always believed in God, just not her mother’s God, not the Holy Roman Catholic Church’s God, A Jewish God, or an Islamic God, Earth’s God, the way they say He is. They got him wrong. “Put ten people at a conference table and tell them one simple Bible verse and by the time it gets back to where it started it would be incoherent. So how the fuck do you suppose what Moses or Jesus or Mohammed or any of the prophets had to say fared any better over thousands of years?” That is what Delores said last year on Easter in an internet chat room, the last time she committed what could be construed as blasphemy. So now that the apprehension of one Delores Marlowe can be properly understood for not desiring to be judged, now that she was up against it, so to speak, we continue…

It suddenly came to her as to where she had seen this church before—this terrific, beautiful, noble church was the spitting image of Trinity Church in New York on Wall Street. It looked strange and far more gothic alone in the moonlight without the business of the city around it, without the flow of tourists and the sound of cabbie horns blaring in traffic. She saw it every time she had been to New York with her mother. It was Episcopalian, she thought she remembered, but truly for such a blessed place denomination doesn’t matter. She remembered it at a 9/11 memorial service she happened to be there for, though neither her nor her mother knew anyone who had lost their life that dreadful day when she was only six but not too young to comprehend it. She was eight at the memorial service and no longer believed in a God like theirs who would let maniacs fly planes into buildings. They stopped showing pictures of people jumping and had long-since prettied it up to neatly grieve it. But it was raw to her as it was for those who lost someone like a wound that wouldn’t heal. Being in the Church that day wasn’t like it was the other times when it had the feel of an empty museum with no gift shop; it was like being inside the sorrow of a tear. She remembered looking around at other kids about her age who were weeping profusely and sitting without parents that they had probably lost and then the memory fleeted.

The large door slowly creaked open and Woodrow stood there. Delores was marveling at the white hulk of a moon that was seemingly directly overhead flooding her with its indulgent glowing meddlesome light. The moon was ten times larger than any moon she had seen in the ‘overworld.’ And rather than having some obscure white rabbit on it, or a crab, depending upon whom you ask or the particular view, it had a powdered face—sullen dark eyes and a dopey tight mouth like a vaudevillian comedian. Woodrow was normal size again, about as tall as Delores’s waist.

“Don’t look at him.” He hissed.

“Who?”

“Him!” Woodrow replied pointing a digit on his paw upward. His eyes followed sneakily. “I can’t say his name. He will hear and when he hears his name he always meddles. He is so intrusive,” he continued in disgust, “and if you give him a reason…”

 “It is a ‘him?’” She smiled. “That’s comforting.”

“Be that as it may, come in. It’s time. We have no time for the likes of him!” Woodrow insisted waving his paw looking up scornfully at the old night watchman, who didn’t say anything in his defense. Perhaps, he was mute, Delores reasoned. But she looked up at him and their eyes met. He didn’t have regular eyes, he had hollow pupil-less white dull eyes, and he smiled as he looked. His happy face followed her as she went inside.  “Come on!” Woodrow said pulling her forward.

“What is the rush?” Delores questioned drolly. “It is still 6:30?” She had a point. They entered and organ music filled the musty cold air. There was a large stained-glass window that wasn’t like anyone she had seen in Trinity Church. There were strange characters on it that Delores didn’t recognize, nor did she think any of them came from the Bible, at least not the Bible to which she was accustomed. They seemed too grotesque to be Christian. There was a snarling medieval-looking fellow with sharp grim fangs for teeth and a frown that was ogling a pretty blonde (same old story). There was a tree behind them and a man hanging from it by a cheering mob and a half-man/half-devil, which Delores presumed to be the devil, or The Devil, as you like it. And there was a drunk that looked like Shane McGowan; and another playing a violin (or a fiddle); and another passed out in some berry bushes; and a couple fornicating behind the tree where the man hung. The devil character cheered them all along like a corrupt maestro, laughing wildly. The sole worthy character of the peculiar art was the man on the metaphoric white horse who was riding in with a fearless look upon his face. He wore no armor and had no sword but was carrying a fantastic quill in his right hand that he kept upright in a writing position as though he may write something at any moment of monumental importance.

 The moon snuck in behind the stained-glass window and lit it up marvelously not because it intended to, only because its light goes wherever it pokes its nosey nose. It was merely peaking in to see what was happening and when Woodrow wasn’t looking, Delores waved a swift hello and the moon smiled kindly and winked.  They stood between the first two rows of pews and stepped nervously forward toward the altar, where once the religious used to sacrifice virgins or anything weaker than them. Delores could hear the heavy footsteps of someone coming and was thankful that it was a man, a tall, thin, old man in a white robe that was as bleached-white as his skin and hair. He was an albino, and between the white robe and the apostolic setting, he looked like a priest from some haunted church with teen actors that charges fifteen bucks for admission and is always ruined by some asshole overzealously gunning a chainsaw. Delores felt relieved for he could have been anything, any humanized animal, but he was a man and again there is something comforting about seeing something even somewhat familiar when you are lost and Delores certainly felt as though she was lost. But as The Priest got closer, she could see that he had chilling red eyes and he was instantly the most horrendous thing she had seen thus far in the underworld. And when he spoke, he exposed a frightening scrapyard of wicked black teeth that were stacked like wrecked station wagons. He had a long sinister nose and sunken cheeks and she couldn’t have dreamt of anyone spookier.

“Woodrow,” he began in his mellifluous baritone (he would have been a terrific jazz radio host), “what have you brought upon The Church?”

Woodrow was immediately walking on eggshells. “I, um, well, I,” Delores looked at him, the moon looked at him, those bizarre stained-glass people looked at him, he stammered, “I, uhhhhhhhhhhhh, ummmmmmmmmm, I don’t know. I was only trying to be a g-goo-oo-oo-d, a, um good,” he swallowed, “citizen fearful of my, my, my, my church and the, the…” he was a wreck trailing off pathetically scratching his head. The Priest looked upon him contemptuously and held up his skeletal hand as though to say “cease” to which Woodrow gladly complied. Then The Priest stood up on the pulpit which greatly accentuated his height. There was a large wooden crate beside of him that was ornately designed—the sort of large box that would fetch a pretty penny at an antique shop, Delores thought. Her father’s passion was banking and antiques. She had no idea what the box was for but she didn’t want to know. It was not a something that anything good came from; it was crate where souls were interned.

Woodrow collected himself and in his own defense added quickly. “We were told to bring all fallers to our local Church and I live up on—”

The Priest’s hand rose again and this time Woodrow seemed physically effected by it and fell to the ground writhing in agony. It looked as though he was having a seizure and Delores empathetically came to his aid. But the pain quickly fleeted and the brave woodchuck rose again to his feet like a stubborn prize-fighter, as you should in the presence of a parishioner, at least in those that have the power to rip your soul from your body and dispose of it like a tampon. The Priest stood there in ominous silence and removed a pipe from a discreet pocket and began to smoke. Large clouds pillowed from the pipe through the room and rose to the incredible heights of the ceiling and he reached his hand out and touched them as though he were finger painting. Then he seemed spellbound and his red eyes flickered and went pale white and from beneath his gown there suddenly came three small creatures that looked like little goblins, or gargoyles, which ran off the pulpit and began flying around the room. They pulled the clouds of smoke with their terrible little fists making angry noises that frightened Delores, Woodrow, and the moon who was still peeking. 

 “What is happening?” Delores frantically asked Woodrow, whispering, not knowing if she was allowed to talk. The Priest didn’t notice and was lost in some chant that sounded like nothing Delores had ever heard before. He sounded like a dying badger fighting for its life, or how Delores thought a dying badger fighting for its life might sound.

“You’re being judged.” Woodrow said evenly.

“By him?” In saying him she was not referring to the mysterious Him that was the cause of all good and bad in her young life. She was referring to the ghostly kook who was more of a witchdoctor than priest.

“Yes. He judges everyone who falls.”

“What happens after that?”

“Either you will go to the bridge or the docks.”

“The bridge or the docks?” Delores repeated gloomily. Neither sounded appealing.

“Hope for the bridge.” Woodrow advised. “It will take you to a pretty place. But the docks are for the evil. You will be ferried across a black sea to a land of torment called Torga; and you will become a Torgan slave.”

Delores shivered. “Is it like Hell?”

“Hell doesn’t exist; Torga exists. That is like comparing Candyland to Disneyworld.” Woodrow analogized. Delores has very fond memories of Candyland. It is her favorite game and if she could find someone to play with her still, it would not sit lonely in her closet beneath shoeboxes bursting full of photographs, letters and suicidal love poems.

“But it’s like Hell?”

“No. It’s much worse.”

“Worse?!” Delores cringed.

“Sure. Being that hell doesn’t exist, naturally, it is much worse.”

Delores was getting agitated by Woodrow’s games. They were watching the clouds turn into things and change colors like two people watching fireworks. Delores found herself enraptured by the strange incantations of The Priest and the clouds of smoke and the flying goblins. It was like he was performing an exorcism on the room and his pipe furiously smoked as his chanting became louder. Then suddenly she remembered him. She remembered him very clearly. He was the priest from Boston, Priest Munhall, who came to their house in Maine to exorcise the demons out of her when she was eleven. Delores’s mother was convinced her questioning of her faith and her seizures were the handiwork of a crafty Devil and if she didn’t do something soon Delores would be a whore. Delores woke up from a seizure and the same pale face and bloodshot-eyed priest was blowing smoke about the room but not from a pipe, from something he carried and waved about in his hand like a lantern. It smelled like incense. His features were greatly exaggerated in the underworld but it was unquestionably him. The exorcism seemed to work then. For two weeks she was a perfect angel and doubted nothing but then she locked herself in her room and refused to go to church until her mother admitted, she demanded, that religion was for “sheep and whack-jobs.”

The stained-glass people began to move and speak and sure enough the one who looked like Shane McGowan sang “The Wild Rover.” And the others passed out and the fanged-toothed one ogling the girl did more than ogle but the pale-horsed writer stuck the quill into his eye. Then the horseman sobered the drunks with pages of paper he threw up in the air that fell like snowflakes. And the man hanging in the tree cut himself down and the tree withered and died and bloomed again and repeated the process until it got bored and the devil looked dismayed and angrily protested. Then everyone was engulfed in flames so it seemed not to matter anymore what had happened in the first place. The Priest’s eyes stopped wildly fluttering like the wings of some desperate bird and he said only one thing calmly and ordinarily as one might say “white,” or “wheat,” at a sandwich shop.

“Docks.”