The preacher flung open the double doors and plunged into the storm. By the time Poe had mounted his ‘throne’ with the aid of his unique two-step stirrup and had clipped and buckled the harness into place, the hatless, shoeless and gloveless three hundredfold had also braved the storm and stood in the rain awaiting further instructions.
‘Onward!’ cried Poe, and dug his spurs deep into calloused flanks. The ancient nag uttered a sick neigh, then seemed to sigh as he bore Poe away. Down Glory Trail and north along Maine, away from the town, and toward the wetlands. The multitude clamoured in his wake.
Two immense, grape-coloured clouds butted and brawled in the vault of heaven, roped in by a cincture of spine and gorge. So low were the dark colossi that the tops of both versants were engulfed, and so completely did they cover the valley that, even though it was mid-afternoon, the three hundred or so denizens were barely able to see just where they were headed.
As the storm thickened Abie Poe held high a spirit lamp, waving it wraith-like beside him and allowing its light to fire up his gaunt skull and catch the madded glint within his eyes.
Barking wild edicts at the throng who blundered blindly behind, Poe allowed himself to become fully ensconced in his newfound role as Messiah. His rhetoric became bombast, his manner nothing less than burlesque.
‘O flock! Follow! I am the light that shines at the bottomless pit! When darkness is upon everything let me be your guiding lamp! For mine is the way to salvation! To glory! If redemption is thy wish, sinners, then follow, for I am the luminary that flickers, even in the valley… of the shadow… of death!’
A cleaver of lightning leapt from the belly of a dark and purple cloud like a silver finger splitting a dead tree that stood at the foot of the ruined crops some two hundred yards away. Poe swung the spirit lamp madly.
‘Yonder are the waters! For God speaks and clear is His voice! Yonder, sinners! Yonder!’
And to the roar and tumble of the black-bellied nimbi that butted thunderously like two battling moose, Abie Poe – arms flapping above his head – burst into song, in a tenor so rich and strong that it might conceivably have reached and even soothed the empyrean arena of war above, had the nature of the song been a little less mean-spirited.
‘Ah told that ol’ backslider!
Ah told that ol’ backbiter!
Told the rambler! Gambler!
That midnight rider!
Ah told them, “God Almighty’s gunna cut you down!!”’
Then, pointing his nag toward the north-east, he turned off Maine, tramping up an unnamed track that terminated atop a low rise upon which sat a weather-punished clapboard shack, built beside a sprawling junk-heap. Clambering aback of him came the multitude, like a grand parade of clowns, tripping and tumbling their way to a sloppy, fully slapstick salvation.
If it had not been for the bolt blasting the left arm clean off the gallows-tree, ah might never have let up playing with mah blood at all. As it was, mah anxiety in regard to the uncertain nature of mah delinquent blood saw me digging up the shears from beneath the gallows-tree and smuggling them into mah room. Ah had already gouged a sizeable hole in each palm with a fang of ragged tin, prised from the grinning jaw of a trap that hung rusted and redundant on the shack wall – one of a vast gallery of ghastly steel goblins. As it turned out – though things turn a little murky here – ah did not use the shears upon mah person, though ah do remember snipping mah bed sheets into strips that ah used, one by one, wound upon wound, as bandages. Later, when ah had taken control of mahself, ah folded the used and crusty bandages and put them in a shoebox. Ah labelled the box ‘Strips’.
After three days and three sleepless nights, with the corked and sordid air of mah cell sticky and damp and the rain outside showing signs of a fucken monster thunderstorm – ragged pitchforks of blue fire, deafening tonitruation, thrashing rain – ah sat in mah unnerwear, oozing grey sweat, corpse-like and ashen-faced through lack of sleep and food and quite possibly blood. The initial inspection of mah claret’s complexion having taken a murky turn, ah picked at the evil, black crusts that capped each wound with a dead and ghastly crown. New blood would bubble in each one’s place, bright and red at first but darking blackly at the heart to a grim crimson curd, finally to clot and to harden, sick and black. Yes, sick and black. Ah put the scabs in a tobacco tin that ah lined first with cotton wool, and put the tin in the shoebox with the hair and nail clippings, the shoebox labelled ‘Clippings’.
Ah find it hard to recall… all this… for want of details… all lost in the impossible tangle of thorny gore and crimson briar… dark mutterings… sticky pools… trembling palms and little thickened wellings… dimly… filling… these days of fear.
Ah had pulled the loosened plank in the wall of mah room to one side and was in the process of pissing on a few thistles, when ah saw through the wedge-shaped opening a lightning bolt leap from the leaden heavens and thrust its prong into the soggy heart of the gallows-tree, blasting its left arm clean off the main stem, leaving but one arm to beseech the sky, begging Heaven’s tender mercy. God, it seemed, had at last acknowledged its dumb cry in the wilderness, and roaring with laughter, had flung down one sure bolt of fire to dismantle its beggar’s gesture.
It made a sickening crack.
Ah sat back down on mah bed, and as if suddenly delivered from some kind of bedevilment ah gaped in horror at the state of mah being and at the state of things about me – the litter, the smeared sheets, the splattered potato-sack blind, the wet balls of newspaper, the threaded needles, mah Bibles soiled and torn – pages strewn around the room and glued to the walls with mah blood – the splashed floor beneath mah feet, the unholy state of mah sick-bed studded with tiny glass fragments, thumbtacks, splinters –
Mah skin crawled. Ah oozed icy grey sweat. Tears streamed down mah cheeks. Ah sat with fingers splayed, arms lifted, and ah felt mah very soul squirm within its shabby vestments of squalid flesh. The tiny room reeked with the stench of me. Ah was filth. Ah was foulness. Ah was swinishness itself. And ah longed to be clean.
Ah rose weakly and stumbled from the shack, across the front porch and into the yard, mah hands bandaged into two filthy gauze mittens. Ah felt the heavens’ cold emission upon mah upturned face, on mah tight-shut lids, rinsing the muck from mah gaping mouth, from mah scalp, from the slum of mah body. The storm thundered and crashed, the air crackling with electricity. Rain thrashed about me. The atmosphere swelled with God’s brawling legions – butting bull clouds grew tusks of fire, renting the leaden bellies of other welkin beasts of war.
‘Cleanse me,’ ah thought. ‘Cleanse me,’ and the heavens whelmed me with their ablution.
Ah opened mah eyes and looked to the smitten gallows-tree, and ah thought for a moment that the thunderbolt had struck the long-dead tree to life, for in silhouette both its arms seemed lifted again, heaven-raised and thrashing wildly, its thin fingers raking the sky and its trunk reeling on its spindly roots. And then it was magically given voice, and in that second a flash of white light burst upon the horizon and exposed the enchanted gallows-tree for the madman it was – Abie Poe.
Standing there in mah nakedness ah watched the horse-borne preacher ride toward me, and all of a sudden ah was overwhelmed with dread – the horror of imminent doom. Ah heard a voice inside mah head intone: ‘Death wore black and came by horse and many thronged behind him’, then repeat it, and in that instant mah palms began to itch madly and ah inspected the blushing holes and the itch and the rain and the bellyache of the clouds, and the voice inside mah head – which seemed to me like many voices now – and the man that came toward me shouting, always shouting –