The Fool waded through the trampled sunflower field. The Sun was at his back as he headed the way Hermes suggested. He felt weary, but now he knew what his true purpose was: to take this knowledge back and help other people take this journey.
He came out of the sunflowers and 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 nearby, so he headed there.
The small white church was falling down. The paint was peeling off and some boards hung off with one nail left. The swamp was reclaiming the building. Vines were climbing up the walls and a tree was growing out of the roof. None of the windows were intact. There was a cemetery around back.
The cemetery was filled with vaults, above-ground graves. Each 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. The bottles clanked in the wind. He saw that there were lights inside of them. When the Fool peered into one of the dirty, dusty, brown-glass bottles, he saw a ghostly light that looked almost humanoid floating within. It was eerie.
A horn blasted from above. When the Fool looked up he saw a giant man coming out of the clouds, blowing a horn. His face was made up to look like a skull, and he wore a top hat, with a snake around his neck, a boa constrictor. 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 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, and 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.
Suddenly the Fool stood at the shores of a large body of water that was obscured by fog. He was no longer in the church cemetery. Corpses of all forms and stages of decomposition stood around him, staring out over the water. The ground was small, smooth pebbles, and the water had no movement but the soft lapping at the shore.
A man on a boat came out of the fog, and steered the boat towards the crowd of dead with a long rowing oar. The man’s face was gaunt and lacked color. His hair was white and 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, and others weren’t coins at all, but a pair of something. The Fool tried to get on too, 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, leaving the Fool standing on the shore. He stood on that shore for a million years – or perhaps it was twenty minutes – but he waited on that shore as new corpses staggered endlessly 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 that the corpses were incorporeal. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do. He was stuck.
He turned around and went the way the corpses had come from. He walked through the fog with dead bodies passing him in the other direction. He sometimes couldn’t see the bodies, but he heard them among the fog.
Before long, he was in a field of wheat.
Judgment watched him finally go the right way. He had sadly 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. It was he who 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 was in his thinking that he was missing something when really, he had everything all along.
He watched the Fool walk towards the end of his journey.