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was nothing furtive about a dog stretching itself on a rug after a long nap; no mystical bombshells about that. After all, eternity was forever. And that could get very old.
    Eventually, though, he’d realized that the answers weren’t likely going to be so anemic; that he just wasn’t able to see beyond the facade. Some things were not for him to comprehend. Not yet. He was still an errand boy, a mere mortal, and knew there was plenty to forfeit should he lose that perspective.
    He was so close now; the answers dangling this very moment from the talons of one of his mentor’s more domesticated beasts.
    Eli thought he couldn’t wait to see the rest of that menagerie.
    And if it turned out that the whole experience was nothing but a kind of hazing, a test of his will and devotion, perhaps something all inaugurates for the higher ranks had to endure, then he could live with that. For they had not been tribulations. He enjoyed the art of angel-making. Immensely so.
    It sure as hell beat fasting for forty days and forty nights while playing stenographer to some burning bush. Eli didn’t know what he was going to bring down from this mountain, but he was certain it wasn’t going to be two stone tablets and a sunburn.
    So far, he felt confident that he’d more than proved his loyalty, and would continue to do so no matter what shape or color or however allegorical the escapade.
    But then, it was all allegory. Nothing but one contrived comparison to a systematized delusion after another, life and religion were. He’d reached that way of thinking long before his first day of catechism so many years ago. Then, he’d just referred to it less eloquently as “a crock of shit.”
    The scriptures couldn’t fool him then, and—after three decades and counting as a Catholic priest—they most certainly couldn’t fool him now.
    On a scale of one to ten, Eli would have to set the marker at maybe two-point-five to indicate his belief in the autonomous existence of orthodoxy’s God. Or any god, for that matter, all heavenly and not-so-heavenly creatures included. And given that same stipulation, he would have to place his own mentor at a six. Maybe seven. A generous placement indeed, for Eli didn’t believe anything deserved an absolute ten, because nothing absolutely existed. Although he wasn’t exactly a charter member of the “Reality Is a Self-Perpetuating Illusion” club, he’d snuck into enough meetings to finally come away persuaded. Hell, to rate anything an eight was charitable. Nine was downright altruistic. Ten and beyond were…well, the EEG tracings of a comatose Stephen Hawking.
    He wasn’t exactly sold on this ideology, or any other for that matter, but it continued to maintain a certain appeal; was alluring in a maverick sort of way, he supposed. And the obscured relationship he and Gamble maintained only added to the eccentricity. But this folie a deux sometimes caused him distress, as he would occasionally feel alienated from the rest of the world and would go searching for his sanity. Until he again realized that there was no such thing.
    And throughout his years as an angel-maker, he’d become even more suspect that reality was just a land of mirrors. But sometimes the image staring back was something more than just the reflection of the one peering in. Staggeringly more.
    Eli’s mentor, case in point, was once himself the likeness of man’s biggest fear (or so he claimed), but was now boasting a different visage, one smiling buoyantly back from that reflective surface, as he had finally removed himself from man’s hip and was now his own free-floating person.
    The mirror-makers, Eli thought, were likely in for some wild mimicry now. Eternal fire and brimstone would soon become passé, those reflections replaced by the faces of new and astounding horrors; tortures more chic and stylish, and more grisly than any man could ever dare imagine. His mentor had confided in him that much.
    He snickered.