On Easter Monday night, past midnight, before lying down to sleep, I went out into the small garden we have behind our house and stood for a while, looking up at the dark sky filled with stars.

It felt as though I was seeing it for the very first time. It seemed so deep, and as if a distant psalmody were coming from above. My lips softly spoke: "Exalt ye the Lord our God, and worship at His footstool." A holy elder had once told me that during these hours, the heavens open up. The air was fragrant with the smell of flowers and sacred herbs we had planted. "Heaven and earth are full of Thy glory."

​I would have stood there alone until dawn, as if I had no body, nor any bond with the earth. But I thought someone inside the house might wake up and worry about my absence, so I went inside and lay down.

​Before sleep could fully cloud my mind—I do not know whether I was awake or asleep—I saw before me a man with a bizarre appearance. He was pale yellow, like a dead man, but his eyes were open, looking at me in terror. His face was like a mask, like a mummy, with shiny, dark-yellow skin clinging tightly to his skull, highlighting every hollow. He was breathing heavily, panting; in one hand he held a strange object I could not identify, and with the other, he clutched his chest as if in pain.

​That creature made me shudder. I looked at him, and he looked at me without speaking, as if waiting for me to recognize him. And indeed, despite his bizarre appearance, a voice within me seemed to say: "It is so-and-so!" As soon as I heard the voice, I recognized who he was. Then he opened his mouth and sighed. But his voice sounded as though it came from very far away, as if rising from a deep well.

​I could see he was in great agony, and I suffered along with him. His hands, his feet, his eyes—everything revealed he was being tormented. In my desperation, I stepped closer to help him, but he signaled with his hand for me to stop.

​He began to groan in such a way that I froze. Then he said to me:

"I did not come on my own; I was sent. I am trembling constantly! I am in a state of great dizziness. Pray to God to have mercy on me. I want to die, but I cannot. Ah! Everything you used to say has come true. Do you remember, a few days before I died, when you came to my house and talked about religious matters? Two of my friends were there, unbelievers like me. As you were speaking, they were smirking. After you left, they told me: 'What a shame for someone with such a mind to believe in the nonsense that old women believe!' On another day, I had told you—as I often did—'Hey, F., gather money, or you'll die in poverty! Look how much I have, and yet I want more.'

​Then you told me: 'Have you made a contract with Death that you will live as many years as you want, to enjoy your old age?'

I answered: 'You will see how long I last! Now I am seventy-five. I will pass one hundred. I have secured my children: my son makes a lot of money, I married my daughter off to a rich man from Abyssinia, and my wife and I have more than enough.

I am not like you, who listen to what the priests say about a Christian end to our life. What will you gain from a Christian end? Better to have money in your pocket and not care. Me, give alms? And why did your merciful God make the poor? So that I would feed them? They talk you people into feeding the lazy so you can go to Paradise! Listen to that—Paradise! You know I am a priest's son, and I know these tricks well. Small-minded people might believe them. But not you, who have such learning—to go to waste! The way you are going, you will die before me and drag your family down with you. But I, as a doctor, tell you and sign for you that I will live to be a hundred and ten years old.'

​As he said this, he writhed back and forth, as if being roasted on a gridiron, uttering grunts from his mouth: 'Ah! Ouch! Oh! Oh! Oh! Hoo!'

​He calmed down for a moment and spoke again:

"I used to say all that, but in a few days, I died! I died and lost the bet! What turmoil! What terror I went through!

Bewildered, I was sinking one moment and rising the next, crying out: 'Mercy!' but no one heard me. A current spun me around as if I were a dead mouse. What I suffered until now, and what I am suffering still! What agony this is!

​Everything you said turned out to be true. You won the bet. Back when I was in the world where you live, I was the smart one. I was a doctor, trained to speak and be listened to, to mock religion, to argue about tangible things. But now I see that tangible things are the very ones I used to call fairy tales and paper lanterns. The agony we find here is what is tangible. Ah! This must be the worm that sleepeth not; this must be the gnashing of teeth!"

​Upon saying this, he vanished from my sight, and I could only hear his groans, which also gradually faded away. Sleep took me for a short while, but at one moment, I felt a cold hand pushing me. I opened my eyes and saw him before me again. This time he was even more terrible and smaller in stature. He had shrunk to the size of a nursing infant, with a large, aged head that he wobbled back and forth.

​He opened his mouth and said:

"In a little while dawn will break, and those who sent me will come to take me back!"

I asked him: "Who sent you?"

He uttered some confused words without me understanding anything. Then he said to me:

"Where I am, there are many others who used to mock you for your faith, and now they realize that cleverness does not extend beyond the graveyard. There are also others to whom you did good, yet they slandered you. And the more you forgave them, the worse they became. For instead of goodness bringing joy to an evil person, it embitters him, because it makes him feel defeated.

​These people are in a worse state than I am, and they cannot leave their dark prison to come and find you as I did. They are tormented very severely, for they are lashed by the scourge of love, as a saint once said.

​How different the world is from how we saw it!

It is the exact opposite of our clever perception. Now we realize that our cleverness was foolishness, our talk was malicious pettiness, and our joys were lies and deceit.

​You who have Christ in your hearts, and for whom His word is truth—the only truth—you have won the Great Bet that stands between believers and unbelievers. That bet which I, wretch that I am, lost, and so I am lost, trembling and sighing, finding no rest: Truly, in Hades there is no repentance. Woe to those who walk as we walked while we were on earth. Our flesh was drunk, and we mocked those who believed in God and in the life to come, and the world applauded us. We called you fools, we made a laughingstock out of you, and the more graciously you accepted our taunts, the more our malice grew.

​Even now, I see how grieved you are by the behavior of evil men, yet how patiently you receive the poisonous arrows that come from their mouths, calling you hypocrites, deceivers, and deluders of the people. If those wretched people were in the position I am in now, and saw from where I see, they would be terrified by what they do. I want to appear to them and tell them to change their way, but I do not have permission—just as that rich man did not, who begged Patriarch Abraham to send poor Lazarus. But he did not send him either, so that those who sin become truly worthy of condemnation, and those who walk the path of God become worthy of salvation.

​'He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still.'"