The Lord Protector's Dream

On the night of September 3, 1658, as the wind howled outside, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, knew he was finally dying. Not the way he had died hundreds of times before in his hypochondriacal panics - with a pounding heart and icy sweat, confident that God had already stretched out his hand over him - but for real. Renal colic twisted his body into the fetal position. The Lord of Britain lay on rumpled sheets, his knees drawn up to his chest, and large drops of sweat flowed onto a pillow that smelled of lavender and fear.

The doctors scurried about outside the door, but Cromwell did not hear them. His consciousness, tormented by malarial heat and pain, began to disintegrate.

First he saw the axe. The same one that landed on Carl Stewart's neck. But now it was clean, polished to a mirror shine and lay not on the block, but on a velvet pillow. Then the room disappeared, and Cromwell realized that he was lying on his back in an absolutely motionless, unnaturally horizontal position. Above him was not a canopy, but a glass sarcophagus. Through the glass he saw someone's chin tilted down. Eyes. Thousands of eyes looking at him.

“I died,” flashed through my head. But this was neither Heaven nor hell. There was no smell of sulfur around, there were no angels, no demons, no Great Judge. There was cold, formalin and a strange, echoing echo of steps on granite.

He tried to turn his head and couldn't. His body was not just dead - it was alien. He was wearing a strict dark suit instead of a shroud. The hands that he tried to fold in prayer were limply placed by someone: the right one was clenched into a fist (he felt it, although he could not move it), the left one was relaxed and stretched along the body. The speckled tie was choking my throat.

“It's not me. This is an idol,” the part of the soul that still remained a Puritan was horrified. “They made relics out of me.”

People walked and walked in an endless line, looking into his glass coffin. Their faces were gray, and in their eyes there was neither love nor hatred - only empty, ritual curiosity. Snatches of whispers reached him: “...they say that his entire brain has already been studied...”, “... but his body is waxy, by God, it’s not real...”

And then Cromwell realized that he was not just dead. He is an exhibit. He is a thing. He, who all his life crushed idols and cleansed “papist abominations” from churches, himself became the main idol of some monstrous, atheistic religion of the future.

Suddenly he felt that he could move his lips. With a huge, inhuman effort of will, tensing every dead muscle in his face, he parted his sealed lips. From a throat filled with embalming fluid, what came out was not a scream, but a quiet, gurgling whisper addressed to the nearest onlooker:

- “God... be afraid...”

But an onlooker, an elderly collective farmer in a cap, just elbowed his wife: “Look, what is he doing?” The woman crossed herself finely and dragged her husband to the exit, whispering something about the “evil one.”

And then Cromwell was flooded with that same, painfully familiar, sadistic anger. Wrath of Drogheda.

An anger that he suppressed all his life, calling it “righteous judgment.” But now he couldn't even clench his fist. His body, turned into a wax doll, betrayed him.

And suddenly, in this endless, gray string of empty glances, Cromwell singled out one. Meaningful. With a sly squint.

It belonged to a short, broad-shouldered man who stood a little further from the procession. He had a reddish wedge beard and an incredibly convex, lumpy skull, in which one could discern a colossal, frightening intellect - not a divine revelation, but a cold, dissecting thought.

This man did not pass by. He stood there, with his thumbs behind his vest, in the pose of a master, and looked straight into Cromwell’s closed eyelids. And through them - into dead pupils.

- Well, Oliver, my friend? — the redhead’s dead, yellowish lips did not move, but Cromwell clearly heard his voice right in his brain. The voice was burry, quiet and terribly everyday. — Have you finished playing at holiness?

Iron Puritan, Scourge of God... And you lie here, under the supervision of the Kremlin commandant, embalmed in the second category. I’ll tell you a secret: your left ear is getting wet, lousy formalin was brought from the Kostroma wards.

- Who are you? - Cromwell shouted silently, and this scream echoed with pain in every embalmed cell. -Where is my God?

The redhead laughed quietly. The sound was like the grinding of a rusty saw on bone.

- There is no God, Oliver. There are only transit flows of energy that do not care at all about our kaftans. You thought that you were building the Kingdom of the Saints, but in fact you were simply clearing the site for factories and butcher shops, shipyards to build ships, and sell tea and sugar. You started the fire in the seventeenth century, I - in the twentieth. There is only one formula, my friend! You executed Karl, I executed Nicholas. Only I didn’t hide behind quotes from the prophet Isaiah. I took live human meat and packaged it in maternity leave.

The redhead pressed his forehead tightly against the glass, and Cromwell saw a tiny, juicy earthworm slowly crawl out of his nostril and immediately dissolve into the air that smelled of overripe melon.

“Look at this mass,” the redhead nodded at the gray faces floating above the coffin. “Your corpse will be pulled out of the grave, hanged on the gallows, and your head will be impaled on a pole.” Your own shopkeepers will betray you. And they will take care of me. I will be washed in a bath every year and a half, dressed in fresh cloth and shown to the pioneers as the main symbol of world justice. I am your perfect reincarnation, Oliver. I don’t have your melancholy and your snot. I turned off the soul in these people, inserted a dynamo there and lit a light bulb.

Cromwell wanted to scream that this was a lie, that God had not abandoned him, that every drop of blood shed was sanctified by prayer. But the red-haired man had already unstuck himself from the glass and stood looking down at him with an expression of slight, almost professorial disgust.

- Don't try to argue, Oliver. You yourself feel: there is no one up there. There are only you and me and millions of those who walk by. Do you know what the difference between us is? You believed until the very end that you were serving Him. And I knew from the very beginning that I was serving the void. And emptiness requires no justification. She just takes your body, embalms it and puts it under glass. And you become a naked fact, Oliver. Not a saint, not a sinner - just a showpiece. Welcome to eternity, colleague.

The redhead turned around and, without looking back, walked away - into the depths of the granite hall, where some gray people with notepads were waiting for him. And the last thing Cromwell heard before the glass of the sarcophagus fogged up from his silent, dead breath was the red-haired voice thrown over his shoulder:

- Yes, and one more thing. There, in England, when they put your head on a pole, it will stand for exactly twenty-five years, until a storm breaks the shaft. And then some shopkeeper will buy your skull for a guinea and put it in the living room as a paperweight. So don't rush home, my friend. You're calmer here.

Cromwell was left alone.

He realized that it was not the Antichrist who had just appeared to him. He himself appeared to him, only purified of the last illusion. And it was more terrible than any ax.

Cromwell sat up in bed, tearing off his wet nightgown. The body burned with fire, but it was the fire of life. He could move again. The candle was floating in the corner. Outside the window, the wind howled, and in this howl he seemed to hear snatches of other people’s words: “...the teaching of Marx is omnipotent because it is true...”

He didn't understand a word. But he remembered the cold of the glass sarcophagus forever.

A few hours later he will have his final, fatal attack. And, dying, he will look not at the crucifix, but at his own hands, checking whether he can move them. Could. And this was the only thing that reconciled him with Eternity.

And two years later, his corpse will actually be pulled out of the grave in Westminster Abbey, hanged in Tyburn, and his head impaled on a pole. And it will stand there not for twenty-five years, but for twenty, until a storm breaks the shaft. And no one will wash it in the bath every year and a half.

The cycle is complete. The mausoleum remained waiting for the next guest