The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Roots cccxvii-cccxlix

Nevertheless genuinely concerned for his fate at the hands of their infinitely merciful Creator if he should be permitted to persist in his errors, the inquisitors had handed the prisoner over to the secular arm with the usual plea for mercy. The instruments of the secular arm were sharp with zeal and hot with enthusiasm, and the sacred strappado and blessed bastinado were employed with creditable rigour. Yet nothing could persuade the prisoner to accept these compassionate persuasions and recant, for he had been taught that the prospects for his eternal future depended on maintaining, despite the most terrrible torments and unto his uttermost demise, those very errors which the inquisitors burned to expunge.

Meanwhile, those charged with his salvation had discomforts of their own, for at that time and place an excessive concern for personal hygiene was considered an unpardonable worldly vanity. All the inquisitors, as well as the instruments of the secular arm, were infested with lice, fleas, ticks and other favourites of the Creator, including tapeworms which could attain the length and fullness of a particularly well-motivated confession; and the inquisitors in addition wore scratchy shirts and coarse robes to mortify their evil flesh. Besides these everyday tribulations, the second most senior inquisitor was martyr to a small but highly carnivorous species of toadstool, whose spores the Father of Teeth had creatively mutated and then whimsically applied to the rearward side of the holy man's venerable scrotum..

"Don't fidget," said the senior inquisitor as the prisoner was hoisted by his bound wrists upon the sacred strappado.
"Sorry," said the second most senior inquisitor, whose perineum the toadstools had by now thoroughly tonsured.
"Remember that your present fleshly ills are but due and deserved preparation for the discipline of purgatory and the eventual joys of paradise," said the senior inquisitor.
"You are misinformed," said the Father of Teeth, who was straddling with some difficulty the bulbous abdomen of a blood-sucking tick upon the saggy slope of the senior inquisitor's pallid and pendulous left buttock; "one of the few mercies the Creator ever showed was depriving His creatures of the knowledge of why they suffer - though of course mercy wasn't the reason He did it."

But the senior inquisitor had not ears to hear, and was aware only of a brief quasi-flatulent whisper somewhere down below. "Have a care," he warned his subordinate; and the instruments of the secular arm, misinterpreting his words, released the sacred strappado prematurely, causing the prisoner an undeserved interval of impenitent unconsciousness as the Father of Teeth, much to his own relief, shifted to side-saddle.