Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [40]
Then Enoch had a vision. It appeared one evening in his furnace and revealed the purpose of his life. Two terrible and beautiful angels of flame foretold him the end of the corrupt and mortal world. God, they confessed, had tried to purge the world with water, but sin had refused to drown. Now it was the turn of fire. All sinful flesh would melt, burn, vaporize.
“We speak of fire from the fire,” the male angel said, “yea, even unto a man that worketh with fire.”
“Hallelujah,” Enoch cried, dropping his tongs and falling to his knees.
“Know that the earth shall be like unto thy furnace.”
“Amen!”
“Know this, also: the seed of the fire is already in the hands of men. It shall become a mighty tree that groweth up to heaven, and all shall be consumed in the leaves and branches of its burning.”
Enoch’s eyes were wet with joy.
“When, angel? When will this come to pass?”
The female angel smiled at him. Her uplit breasts were perky under her flame-resistant robe. She spoke without speaking.
“The revelation is in the Book.”
This answer came as no surprise to Enoch Hoseason, who came from a long line of biblical fundamentalists. As soon as the angels faded back into the glowing coals, he reached for the Good Book with a trembling hand.
The end of the world is almost as old as its beginning. In chapter one of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, God spends most of a week creating the earth and all that is in it; then a mere six pages later (in Enoch’s dog-eared copy), He destroys it all in a flood, the only survivors being, of course, Noah and his family and their floating menagerie. So it’s hardly surprising that for thousands of years people have been predicting another End. The Apocalypse. Armageddon. The Day of Judgment. Again. Nor is it unreasonable. Consider our brutal, bloody, and filthy history, our nasty habits. If there was ever a species that deserved purging from the surface of the planet, it is humanity. We are, or should be, a temporary infestation or infection, a smart virus awaiting its divine antidote. The prophets of the Bible return to the theme over and over again. Enoch was keenly aware of this. He had spent countless hours studying them. He was particularly interested in the book of Hosea — naturally, since the name was the seed of his own. The trouble was that the book of Hosea was almost impossibly difficult to understand. It was also drenched in sex. It began with God commanding Hosea to marry a prostitute:
The LORD said unto Hosea, Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredom and children of whoredom: for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from the LORD.
Did this mean, Enoch had often wondered, that his own mother (long since gone to her reward) had been a whore? Well, yes, sadly. All women, from snake-fancying Eve down, were; this truth was the very foundation of God’s Word. Satan works his wiles through women. Salome, Jezebel, Delilah, the Whore of Babylon. But Hosea, like the other prophets, promised universal cleansing.
Therefore shall the land mourn, and every one that dwelleth therein shall languish, with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven; yea, the fishes of the sea also shall be taken away.
That last bit pleased Enoch. He’d always had problems with the Flood. If all things were sinful, it seemed odd that fish, not to mention ducks and seagulls, for example, had got off so lightly.
But the female angel (whose breasts still troubled Enoch) had said, “The revelation is in the Book.” She was clearly directing him to the book of Revelation, the Bible’s violent and visionary climax. He was already deeply familiar with it: the Lion of Judah, the blood-soaked Lamb, the seven seals, and the seven candlesticks. The four horses and the seven plagues were constant visitors to his waking and his sleeping. But now he returned to the