D. Mitchell - The King of Terrors

She studied a dirty patch of linoleum at her feet. ‘In order to understand what’s going on you’ve got to go back to the origins of the Church of Everlasting Bliss, and that starts in about 1471.’

‘Everlasting Bliss? You kidding me?’

‘Are you going to shut your trap and listen? I thought you wanted to hear. Fine if you don’t, it’s your funeral!’

He held up his hands at her unexpected outburst. ‘Ok, sorry, go ahead…’

‘1471. Edward IV is on the throne of mediaeval England and the country is being rocked by a widespread outbreak of plague. It’s devastating, entire communities all but wiped out by the disease. Villages decimated with some never to recover. Given the sheer scale of this, and that religion was at the heart of medieval society it’s little wonder the plague was seen as God’s punishment visited upon a sinful world. Now into this mix add a man whose belief system was to extend even beyond the common orthodoxy of the day and whose life was to be transformed by the plague. His name was Benedict Jones.

‘On the face of it our Benedict seems nothing special. He’s a merchant who made his name in London. He was a successful man, part of what we call today the merchant aristocracy, having his fingers in many entrepreneurial pies. He owned properties which he rented out, he had part-ownership in ships that exported cloth to the Baltic and Low Countries, wool to Calais and imported goods from the Flemish markets. He had political ambitions, and his connections to the Crown because of his trading placed him in a good position for him to realise his ambitions. Things were looking up for Benedict Jones till the plague struck.

‘Records indicate the disease wiped out his entire family — his wife, his father, mother, cousins, grandparents — all of them died. The entire population of his district was virtually wiped out. And yet, in the midst of this carnage he survived. The loss of his family troubled him greatly. He commissioned a large stone memorial to them. It’s still there, if you look hard enough. His family all dead, his business hanging in tatters, being the man he is he decides to start up again from scratch.

‘Eight years pass and he remarries, again at the head of a successful trading business. This man clearly knows how to sell and make money. But in 1479 a fresh wave of plague strikes, and again everyone he knows and holds dear dies — his new wife, all her family, his friends, servants — all wiped out in an instant. But Benedict Jones survives a second time, and it is this second immersion in the aftermath of the plague that is the catalyst for the extraordinary thing he does next.

‘He believes the plague is Divine retribution on an unprecedented scale. Moreover it is all part of God’s Great Plan. There’s a printed pamphlet in which Benedict declares that God is now so distressed at seeing his wonderful creation being destroyed by man’s greed, lust, debauchery and war that He will wipe out the entire human race and return God’s earth to the heavenly state that existed before the Fall. A return to Eden.

‘There is nothing new in such sentiments being expressed at the time — all around was proof of God’s displeasure and that his wrath had been invoked. What makes our Benedict stand out as being different is his own part in God’s Great Plan. You could argue the loss of his family, twice over, affected his mind. Perhaps he went mad. Perhaps at the time he was trying to find a reason why he should live whilst all those he held close had died. In any event Benedict Jones next appears on trial accused of blasphemy of the highest order. It appeared, from the scraps of records left, that he’d set himself up as some kind of new messiah. God, you see, had preserved him whilst destroying others. God had chosen him to be his new Adam, and when the New Eden was eventually created, Benedict was to be set up as the earth’s natural leader, living forever with his chosen few followers in a world that was now pure, unsullied and free entirely from the sins of man that had so soiled the world and angered God.

‘Benedict Jones built up quite a following. People, fearful of the widespread death being handed out to prince and pauper alike, terrified that their souls would spend eternity in purgatory with no one to pray for them, condemned to the flaming pits of Hell for the accumulated sins of mankind, were easy targets for his preaching. He had a particularly strong following amongst the burgeoning and increasingly wealthy and powerful merchant class, which he’d been courting from early on, who were willing to pay handsomely to save their damned souls. Though his movement, which he called The Church of Everlasting Bliss, went underground for a number of years he was eventually denounced to the authorities.

‘This is where it gets interesting. Not only was Benedict Jones brought to answer for his religious unorthodoxy and heretical preaching, it turns out that evidence was provided accusing him of murder. You see, he believed that the serpent who tempted Eve, thus helping bring about the Fall, before God cast it to slither for all time on its stomach, existed in human form alongside Adam and Eve. Descendents of that first serpent, whom he named Serpentiles, evil creatures that he believed still roamed the earth, had to be sought out and destroyed otherwise any New Eden would be in danger of being corrupted for a second time.

‘The trial documents reveal the case of a man killed by Benedict and his followers. He had been ritually dismembered, every limb removed, including the head. This was, they testified, to prevent the evil soul from rising — it’s a belief that persisted into the Eighteenth Century when criminals could be hung, drawn and quartered. The soul cannot pass on if the corporeal body is in many parts. The man he employed to do the dirty work was someone he named Camael, so called after God’s avenging angel who would be sent to earth to punish those who transgressed God’s holy laws. They both freely admitted to the crime, and as a result were guaranteed an early death. But they did not die. Judgement was never passed because Benedict and Camael disappeared from their cells before it could ever be made. Helped out? Who knows?’

‘So who is Doradus?’

‘Change of name. When exactly the leader of the Church of Everlasting Bliss became known as Doradus we don’t know — obviously the name came into use after the invention of the telescope and its use in studying the stars three hundred years later, but it’s interesting they chose this name for their leader. Doradus is a star in the large Magellanic Cloud, one of the brightest stars known in the Milky Way. The brightest star in heaven, you might say.’

‘Like on the symbol,’ said Gareth thoughtfully. ‘At the centre of the cross there was a star.’

‘That’s our Doradus alright,’ she said. ‘Take the symbol: symbolically the star sits with Christ on the centre of the Holy Cross. The circle is in the shape of a snake eating its own tail; this represents the creature than tempted Eve with the old Cox’s Pippin. On the symbol, both physically and representational, it sits outside the cross, outside purity, outside Eden. As you can imagine, for the time such a belief was heretical to say the least.’

‘The woman murdered in Manchester in the same manner…’ he said. ‘Are you telling me this Church of Everlasting Bliss is still around? Still murdering people? After all this time? Jesus, are you asking me to believe those guys back at Godstone mines were really from a medieval sect?’

‘You got it. The position of good old Camael still going strong. How’s that for a job for life? See, unlike a lot of mediaeval sects and sub-sects that came and went — take Lollardy, for instance — this one sticks around. In fact it grows in numbers and grows in strength. It’s still an underground movement, naturally, but it gains followers amongst the medieval elite — particularly the nobles who already pay through the nose in indulgencies to the church in order to secure prayers for their souls in purgatory. Well, they also like to hedge their bets, and Benedict Jones’ radical new vision offers them another route in, so to speak. And given that the Church of Everlasting Bliss backs anything that kills off large numbers of people in order to fulfill God’s Great Plan, it suits those nobles who are thinking of financing the odd-war or two to further their own earthly ambitions. Killing two birds with one financial stone, so to speak. They can now secure an eternal place in the New Eden without feeling guilty about their bloody terrestial gains. So this new and dangerous religious belief feeds off both men’s fear of death and lust for power.