The Fool waded through the trampled sunflower field. The Sun was at his back as he headed the way Hermes suggested. He felt wary, and now he knew what his true purpose is, to take this knowledge back and help people take this journey.
He came out of the sunflower field into a swamp. The ground was mushy and the air was thick. He started sweating profusely. There were cypress trees jutting out of the wet ground. He saw a small white church, so he headed there.
The small white church was falling down. The swamp was reclaiming the building with vines climbing up the walls and a tree was growing out of the roof. The paint was peeling off and some boards hung off with one nail left. None of the windows were intact. There was a cemetery around back.
The cemetery was filled with vaults, above-ground graves. The stone sarcophagus was old and covered in moss.
The Fool noticed old rum bottles strewn on strings going from church to tree or tree to tree. They clanked in the wind. He saw that there were lights in the bottles. When the Fool looked into one of the dirty dusty brown glass bottles, he saw a ghostly light that looked almost humanoid floating. It was eerie.
A horn blasted from above and when the Fool looked up he saw a giant man in makeup to look like a skull and a top hat with a boa constrictor snake around his neck come out of the clouds blowing his horn. Whenever he blew the horn, lights in the bottles would brighten.
Then the tops of the vaults started sliding off and corpses were standing up facing the horn blowing man.
I am the Baron Samedi, the giant man said, and I am the final Judgment.
Some of the bodies began walking trance-like towards the giant man while others just fell back into their graves. A mist curled and whipped into the cemetery.
The bottles also started floating up into the air. Baron Samedi grabbed the bottles out of the air and drank from them.
These are souls, Judgment said after drinking a bunch of bottles, they are worthy of final Judgement. They will have no more restrictions on what they can and cannot do. They will reside beyond reality.
Baron Samedi laughed heartily to that and the ground shook from his laughter. The corpses were disappearing into the mist.
I have a harsh Judgment for you, Fool, Judgment said looking right at the Fool, you have stood before me too many times and still have not been worthy of your final Judgement. You are supposed to be guiding these souls to me, not being one.
For that, Baron Samedi continued, I will cast you into the bowels of the earth to see what awaits you if you do not do what you were made to do.
The Fool stood at the shores of a large body of water obscured by fog. He was no longer in the church cemetery. Corpses of all forms of decomposition stood around him staring out over the water. The ground was small smooth pebbles and the water had no movement but soft lapping at the shore.
A man on a boat came out of the fog and steered the boat towards the crowd with a long rowing oar. The man’s face was gaunt and lacked color. His hair was white and was closely cropped to his skull.
The corpses started boarding the boat, each giving the oarsman two coins. Some of the coins were pennies, some were gold coins, and others weren’t coins at all, but a pair of something. The Fool tried to get on, but the oarsman stopped him.
You don’t belong here, Fool, the oarsman said, you aren’t through with your journey. Besides, you have nothing to pay me.
I have this bell, the Fool said. That bell isn’t meant for me, the oarsman responded.
The boat turned and drifted back into the fog with the Fool standing on the shore. He stood on that shore for a million years – or it was twenty minutes, but he waited on that shore as new corpses staggered onto the shore from behind the Fool. They didn’t even acknowledge the Fool’s presence.
Over and over the Fool tried to get on the boat, but the oarsman wouldn’t let him. The Fool tried to steal money from one of the corpses, but he found the corpses to be incorporeal. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do. He was stuck.
He then turned around and went the way the corpses came from. He walked through the fog with dead bodies passing him the other way. He sometimes couldn’t see the bodies, but he heard them in the fog.
Before long he was in a field of wheat.
Judgment watched him finally go the right way. He sadly has watched the Fool take a long time to figure out the beach. He knew that the oarsman was annoyed. He looked forward to the day that the Fool would bring souls for him to judge and change.
He had been there when they had made the Fool. He had made the Fool a complete entity. He made sure that the sum of all his parts created a whole. The Fool kept choosing to not act whole, but the sadness in thinking he was missing something when he had everything all along.
He watched the Fool walk towards the end of his journey.