The Book

The Book

Twenty-four year old Erin Bellamy didn’t cry at her parents' funeral, not one tear. It really didn't surprise anyone, they already knew Erin was a strange woman.

She hadn’t always been considered strange though, friends of her parents remembered a lovely young girl in her earlier years. A smiling, dimpled, blonde, moppet with hundreds of questions; not at all strange for a child.

It was also generally understood, that some time around her twelfth birthday, Erin turned strange. Oh, she was still the same blonde, dimpled, smiling girl, then woman, that she always had been; but those interminable questions gradually became quite strange.

“Why do people go to church?” she asked Reverend Johnson, “Do you really think there is such a thing as Heaven? If Jesus was a Jew, why don’t Jewish people believe in Him? Why are there so many different kinds of religions and beliefs? Do all the millions of people that believe in Buddha and Mohammed go to Hell when they die? What about the people that believe in Voodoo or magic? Wasn’t Jesus just a very good magician with some pretty good tricks and illusions?”

After she stood up and disrupted the class for the thousandth time, Reverend Johnson told Erin’s mother that he would rather Erin not come to Sunday School any more. After she stood up in church and asked if Mary Anderson’s abusive grandfather was really in the company of Jesus, like the Reverend said at the funeral; the good reverend asked Erin’s mother to not bring her to church at all. Erin was of the opinion that if Mary’s grandfather was buddies with Jesus now, she would just as soon not go to Heaven anyway.

That didn’t stop her questions though. Erin took them to the library, after she had exhausted all reference materials there, she took them to University and then finally; to dark little bookstores that specialized in ancient occult texts.

That was why Erin didn’t cry at her parent’s death, nor the funeral. She knew something. Something she had discovered in one of those dark musty bookshelves. She wasn’t worried about her parents, they didn’t go to Heaven, nor Hell, if she believed anything else it would have put the lie to her “ebon” philosophy. Somehow, she didn’t think visualizing them in Heaven, dancing on gossamer clouds, was going to make her feel any better about the fact that they were gone. No; they died, they are dead, they were put in boxes, the boxes were put into the ground.

She was just waiting for the right stage of the moon, then she would go dig them back up, they would be okay after she read over them from The Book, they would be together again. A happy family, just like they had always been.