Fear that man

mouths.
         The man on the cross raised his head, looked to the dawn. He seemed very weary, as if he were ready to give up more than the body, the spirit also. There were dumps of matting at the corners of his eyes that interfered with his vision. His teeth were yellow from long neglect.
        “ Dammit, let me down!” he shrieked.
         The words rebounded from the low sky.
        “ Please,” he said, groveling.
         The sun was a flaming eye. When it was at its zenith, there came angels, beings of light and awesome majesty. They floated about the man, administering to his needs. Some carried water which they poured between his cracked and crusted lips. And some brought oil with which they anointed him. And still others sponged away the oil and fed him. Then they were vanished into air.
         The sun was setting. It seemed only minutes since it had risen.
        “ Please,” the man wept. The angels had missed some of the oil in his beard. It glistened there-and tickled.
         With darkness came the demons. Crawling from under brown stones, slithering out of crevices in the earth, they came. There were dwarfs, slavering, eyeless yet seeing. There were wolves with sabers for teeth. There were things with tails and horns, things with heads that were nothing more than huge mouths. They screamed and cawed, muttered, shrieked, and moaned. They came at the cross, crawling over one another. But they could not reach the man. They clawed the wood of his prison but could not claw him. One by one, they began to die…
         They withered and became smoke ghosts that the cool wind bore away. They collapsed into dust. They dribbled into blood pools.
         Then there were stars for a short time.
         And again came the dawn…
         And the angels…
         And the night and the demons and the stars and the dawn and the awesome, awesome angels and the night… It continued at a maddening pace. Days became weeks; weeks turned to months. For years, he hung there. For centuries, he remained. Finally, all time was lost as the sun spun madly across the sky and night with its devils was barely a blink of an eye.
        “ Please!” he screamed. “Please!”
        The last screams brought them out of sleep, breathing hard. Sam pushed himself up, looked about the ship to reassure himself. Then he turned to Hurkos. “What sort of dream was that?”
        Gnossos looked curious.
        “He’s a telepath,” Sam explained. “Irregular talent. But what the hell kind of dreams were those?”
        “That’s what I’d like to know, Sam,” Hurkos said. “I was getting them from you!”

----

    VI
        
        “ Me?”
        “Well, not really from your mind. Through your mind. The generator of those thoughts is very distant. No one in this room. And the mind of that generator is horribly large. Immeasurable. This was only a fraction of the thoughts in it, a small corner of them. In this case, I picked up this trace of thoughts and for some reason my subconscious talent began boosting their vividness and re-broadcasting them.”
        “But I wouldn’t have dreamed them without your help.”
        Hurkos smiled sadly. “You would have dreamed them just the same and just as completely. You would not have been aware of dreaming them, is all.”
        “But then what was it? It reminded me of the man on the cross you toppled after Belina’s death.”
        “It’s the Christ legend,” Gnossos said. They turned to stare at him. “I make legends my business. Poets work in all sorts of mythologies. There have been a large number of them-and a large number of wild ones too. The Christ legend is not so ancient. There are still Christians, as you know, though damn few. Most of the religion, along with all the others, died out about a thousand years ago, shortly after the Permanent Peace and the immortality drugs. According to legend, the god-figure Christ was crucified on a dogwood cross. This dream seems to be a reenactment of that myth, though I do not recall that the man hung there that long or that there were administering angels and tempting demons.”
        “This could be another clue,” Hurkos offered.
        “How so?” Sam was ready to clutch at the smallest straw.
        “Perhaps your mystery hypnotist is a neo-Christian, one of those who refuse the immortality drugs. That would certainly explain why he would want to overthrow the empire. He would want to convert