“Good morning, Grims. Sleep well last night?”
“Well enough,” I said. In the morning light he didn’t look so menacing.
“I like to give people a little time to adjust to progressive ideas,” he said. “You should think about my offer.”
My heart stopped at the same time as my feet. “Your offer?”
“Surely you didn’t think that because it was a dream I wasn’t serious?”
“Wait–how did you–was I really talking to you, then? In my dream?”
“Don’t concern yourself with details, Grimsley. Just because it was a dream doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. What? Confused? You should’ve studied the Old Testament harder. It’s not so strange.”
What was strange was the winter light behind him. His head was rimmed with light, but I looked through the shadow to his face. His good looks vanished. The features were the same, but they had distorted into pride, and lust, and anger. What had been appealing became grotesque. He saw what I had seen, and it somehow amused him.
“What now? You’re thinking how a good student like me would want to rebel? Grow up, man: my theology is perfect,” and here he leaned toward me until I smelled the breath of death itself. “It’s not enough. I won’t stop until I’m in charge.”
In that moment my alarm sounded. I was utterly confused. I had already awakened, or so I thought. Last night’s dream was the dream–or was it a dream within a dream? I was truly afraid, but the student in me still got the point. I fumbled for the notebook next to my Bible. My shaking hand managed to scrawl the awful truth:
The devil’s theology is just fine. The problem is he wants his own way.
