“Oh, but she does!” exclaimed Wolfgang. “Has a whole room in the Abbey just to store the Old Geister’s stone tablets. Absolutely compulsive, that woman. Won’t throw away anything. I’d certainly throw away God’s stone tablets, if He sent me the kind of nasty notes He sends her!” He shook his head. “But she keeps right on with her correspondence. Says it’s her bounden duty as a pious Abbess to tell God the plain and simple truth about Himself, even if He doesn’t want to hear it. Which He certainly doesn’t! The Deity doesn’t take well to criticism, you know, and my aunt has quite the sharp tongue.”
Gwendolyn threw up her hands. “I give up! The Fangs I can understand. Those reactionary maniacs are just as crazy as you are, but at least they deal with the real world.”
“Well, of course they do!” exclaimed Wolfgang. “What’s the point of being a vicious reactionary, if you’re not going to deal with the real world? Might as well be a liberal!” He shuddered. “Such sane people, liberals. Really ought to be locked up, the bunch of them. For their own sake, if nothing else. Not that I’d wish a pack of whining liberals on a lunatic asylum! The rest of the inmates would all commit suicide, just to escape the platitudes.”
He paused, beaming down on Gwendolyn.
“I can see you’re about to get angry with me, again. Can’t be helped, I suppose. Not too many sweet-tempered revolutionaries around. Executions, torture, imprisonment—doesn’t make for placid, jolly types. Still, I think you should—”
Gwendolyn silenced him with a sharp gesture. “Never mind what you think I should do.” Suddenly she laughed. “After all these years, you’d think I’d know better than to try to get any sense out of you.”
She stared off into the forest for a moment, then turned back to the giant.
“All right,” she said, “I suppose I can trust you. And it means nothing to me, anyway. The message which I was to deliver to Zulkeh from Hildegard was this. I was to tell him that Hildegard had a vision—”
“I knew it! She’s had another vision!” cried Wolfgang, clapping his huge hands like a child filled with glee.
“—and in this vision she saw Zulkeh, with a long beard—long, all the way down to his feet. And then, out from under his wizard’s hat, crawled a monster. The monster made its way down to the ground, using the wizard’s beard like a rope. It took the monster a long time to get down, she said, but once—”
“Of course it took the monster a long time!” cried Wolfgang. “That’s such a long and perilous journey, climbing down a sorcerer’s beard!”
Gwendolyn scowled at the interruption, then continued.
“But once the monster reached the ground, it began to swell, and grow, like a storm cloud. And it was very angry. And then the world ended.”
She took a breath. “And that’s it. That’s the message. Makes no sense to me, at all.”
She stopped, gaping with astonishment. For the giant lunatic started capering around the meadow, leaping and doing cartwheels, and howling like a banshee.
“He’s finally flipped,” I said.
Gwendolyn shook her head. “No—at least, no more than usual. He’s just very happy and excited.”
Sure enough, after a couple of minutes of these bizarre acrobatics, Wolfgang calmed down and shambled back over to where we were standing. Tears of joy were streaming down his cheeks.
“Best news I’ve heard in years!” he boomed. “Marvelous! Absolutely marvelous! I’d be ecstatic even if I’d had the vision in one of my hallucinations—but coming from Hildegard!” He grinned, drooling. “Her visions are infallible, you know.”
“I don’t suppose you’d explain what it means?” asked Gwendolyn.
Wolfgang looked about, like a little boy trying to keep a secret.
“Well, I suppose I could give you a hint. It means the world’s going to end. Way ahead of my schedule, it looks like.”
Gwendolyn visibly restrained her temper. “This is good news?”
Wolfgang was shocked. “Well, of course it’s good news!” Then he clapped his head with his hand. “Oh, of course! You think—no! no! Dear Gwendolyn! You have such a grim, apocalyptic view of things! Twilight of the gods, all that rot. No, dear, the world’s going to end like—like, how shall I put it?—yes! Like all the low things in life end! That’s it! Like all the things that crawl, and lie in the mud, and stink, and wriggle.”