Wonders of the Invisible World Read Free

he had seen anything in the dark in his life. He had forgotten the fire. I tried to be patient. Good angels were beyond temperament, even while at war with angels who had disgraced themselves by exhibiting human characteristics. But the floorboards were getting very cold.
    “You have felt the invisible chains about them,” I prodded. “The invisible, hellish things moving beneath their bedclothes.”
    “The children cannot seem to stand my books,” he said a little querulously, with a worried frown. “My writing sends them into convulsions. At the mere act of opening my books, they fall down as dead upon the floor. Yet how can I lead them gently back to God’s truth if the truth acts with such violence against them?”
    “It is not against them,” I reminded him, “but against the devil, who,” I added, inspired, “takes many shapes.”
    He nodded, and became voluble. “Last week he took the shape of thieves who stole three sermons from me. And of a rat—or something like a hellish rat—we could feel in the air, but not see.”
    “A rat.”
    “And sometimes a bird, a yellow bird, the children say—they see it perched on the fingers of those they name witches.”
    “And since they say it, it is so.”
    He nodded gravely. “God made nothing more innocent than children.”
    I let that pass. I was his delusion, and if I had truly been sent to him from God, then God and Mather agreed on everything.
    “Have they—” this was Durham’s suggestion “—not yet seen the devil in the shape of a black horse who spews fire between its teeth, and is ridden by three witches, each more beautiful than the last?”
    He stared at me, then caught himself imagining the witches and blinked. “No,” he breathed. “No one has seen such a thing. Though the Shape of Goody Bishop in her scarlet bodice and her lace had been seen over the beds of honest married men.”
    “What did she do to them?”
    “She hovered. She haunted them. For this and more she was hanged.”
    For wearing a color and inciting the imagination, she was hanged. I refrained from commenting that since her Shape had done the hovering, it was her Shape that should have been hanged. But it was almost worth my researcher’s license. “In God’s justice,” I said piously, “her soul dwells.” I had almost forgotten the fire; this dreary, crazed, malicious atmosphere was more chilling than the cold.
    “She had a witchmark,” Mather added. “The witch’s teat.” His eyes were wide, marveling; he had conjured witches as well as angels out of his imagination. I suppose it was easier, in that harsh world, to make demons out of your neighbors, with their imperfections, tempers, rheumy eyes, missing teeth, irritating habits and smells, than to find angelic beauty in them. But I wasn’t there to judge Mather. I could hear Durham’s intense voice: Imagination. Imagery. I want to know what they pulled out of their heads. They invented their devil, but all they could do was make him talk like a bird? Don’t bother with a moral viewpoint. I want to know what Mather saw. This was the man who believed that thunder was caused by the sulfurous farts of decaying vegetation. Why? Don’t ask me why. You’re a researcher. Go research.
    Research the imagination. It was as obsolete as the appendix in most adults, except for those in whom, like the appendix, it became inflamed for no reason. Durham’s curiosity seemed as aberrated as Mather’s; they both craved visions. But in his world, Durham could afford the luxury of being crazed. In this world, only the crazed, the adolescent girls, the trial judges, Mather himself, were sane.
    I was taking a moral viewpoint. But Mather was still talking, and the recorder was catching his views, not mine. I had asked Durham once, after an exasperating journey to some crowded, airless, fly-infested temple covered with phallic symbols to appear as a goddess, to stop hiring me; the Central Research Computer had obviously got