Читать книгу The Harvest of Chronos - Mojca Kumerdej - Страница 8

Doubt … Doubt … Doubt …

What’s hardest is spotting those who, to look at, are no different from us at all. They do nothing in particular to make you suspect there’s anything malevolent in their activities. On feast days they crawl on their knees around the altar, just like we do, and give to the Church no more and no less than we do ourselves on average. And when they go about their work, they do it no better and no worse than we do. They resemble us in every way, but in reality they are very different. Just because you find them in bed at night when you go to their house in secret and peek in, it doesn’t mean they are really lying there on the mattress. Not entirely. Because while their body is sleeping, their soul could be flying off to one of those ill-famed places where people of their ilk like to gather, people who do us harm and make our lives much worse than they could be otherwise. They’re the ones, the ones you can’t catch in the body, who are the most powerful of all, since they’re able to travel outside their body. They don’t need a broom, and they don’t have to depend on creams that make their body float above the bed or above the floor. Their body can sleep – and be truly asleep and even snoring – while they fly around doing evil. Even when they do quite ordinary things, it doesn’t mean they’re all there, working, their soul included – since they can make it so their body moves and speaks while their little soul is somewhere else entirely.

So how can we prove that such people are part of the evil host, when there’s no external evidence or facts?

Well, it’s hard, but not impossible. For where there is faith, everything is possible. The one who truly believes won’t be taken in by some evil spirit, no matter what alluring enticements it tempts him with. Who among us is devout and who isn’t – here there can be no doubt. For wherever doubt appears, faith starts leaking out and has to be verified. Where doubt bores a hole, evil makes its home.

Verify. Verify. Verify.

Apart from God, nothing is entirely certain. For there are forces that don the likeness of God, that disguise themselves as God’s voice and God’s words …

‘But what does the voice of God even sound like?’

‘It is terrible, true and strict – but beyond this, it is hard to say anything about it. God usually speaks to man not through the ears but through the heart, and what he says we first feel, and the moment we feel it, we understand. And whosoever’s heart is uncorrupted, pure and clean, he will know when it is God speaking to his heart and when a worm is residing there. For a worm bores holes in the heart, that tender yet strong piece of meat which is the nest of the soul. The worm burrows in, nibbles at it with sharp teeth – and it hurts, oh, how it hurts, when the worm sinks its teeth in the heart and with every nibble gnaws off a little piece of faith and hollows out a place for doubt. Doubt. Doubt. Doubt. Always and everywhere, that accursed doubt.’