All these things – each by their own and as one legion of voices – all these things spoke to me of death and of darkness and of blood – and ah dropped to mah knees and inclined mah head, numbed by the rain, deafened by the fremitus of the deluge, and ah closed mah eyes. Ah think at that moment ah heard – for the very first time – God’s voice begin to speak to me – yes, ah believe that God did try to speak. For above the chantings that grew louder and louder ah heard – inside mah head – a voice, low and soft-spoken yet clearly apart and unaffected by the chanting.
‘Euchrid,’ it said, ‘Euchrid…’
There was a low peal of thunder. There was a flash of white lightning – and in that instant ah was hoisted by both arms onto mah feet and swept up by a scrambling mass of persons in pursuit of Poe – up the slope and down. Pushed and bullied and jostled, ah spun wildly midst the horde of sopping, shoeless creatures, like a blind man in a busy street. Ah had not heard them coming, drowned out as they were by the storm’s thunderama, but once within the scrum’s mad bosom its din was such that the war in heaven seemed almost tamed.
Darkness drenched the valley as men and women slipped and skidded down the muddy slope in the wake of Poe, who, gesticulating wildly, led them in a wide half-circle around mah shack, to stop at the brink of the murky and bloated waters that surrounded the swampland – a vast moat, a circular girdle of black, poisoned water.
Through the milling crowd that teetered upon the moat’s uncertain edge, ah glimpsed Poe wading fearlessly through the atramental waters, clad in white unnerwear, his sinister black jacket and shirt and his ridiculous black hat – ah hate hats – doffed and left with his horse back on terra firma somewhere. By the way he took to the water, it is mah belief that as the raving wompster waded deeper and deeper into the drowning-pool of his swollen religious mania, he saw himself not as one in a long line of disciples re-enacting the sacred ritual of Baptism, but rather this cachexic and beardless huckster, who was now bellowing at his followers to join him, believed he was the great hairy hydrophiliac himself, and that his sodden and shapeless longjohns were no less than camel skins.
One or two of the throng had stepped gingerly into the water, frightened by Poe’s tirade and the grim vision he proffered for any who did not partake of his exoteric ablution. Bulrushes rocked and reeled in the low waters. People swarmed about me, closing in on all sides, bumping me on.
Some of the less hysterical participants stood further along the bank like a flock of water-birds, each balancing on one leg as they rolled up their trousers and removed their heavy black, their starched shirts smeared and splashed with mud. Others flocked to the very lip of the bank, which was not altogether rock solid – if you know what ah mean – mostly it was just slippery and limp and sagging and unsafe. Ah was an animal in unnerpants trapped in a cage of legs – hoary, hairy, mud-caked and discalced – and ah was getting very fucken tired of being trodden on, kicked, tripped and trampled. Ah wanted desperately to scream ‘Let me out of here! Ah don’t wanna be cleaned! Mah natural state is unclean!. Ah am a very filthy human being. Just shift to one side and let me out of here!’
But ah was hectored, bullied onward and onward and onward.
The thin shadows of bulrushes, backlit by spirit lamps, reached across the tar-black waters, so that gilded fingers of light raked the swelling dominion of the wild-eyed baptist with their eerie fidgetings.
‘Praise the Lord!’ bellowed Hilda Baxter who, judging by her busty anhelations, had clearly pushed Wilma Eldridge on her two cranky, mud-packed wheels from the church to the lip of the baptismus, quite probably unaided. But now, her sanity temporarily unhinged through sheer exhaustion – or so it seemed – she ignored the frantic objections of the crippled crone and, abandoning her place behind the wheelchair, leaped monstrously into the raven drink and thundered toward the evangelist.
‘I am vile! I am foul! My spirit stinketh!’ she roared, as ah squatted in her spot behind the chair and watched through the wheels.
‘Wash me! Wash me!’ she cried, and ah noticed the wheelchair, packed with black muck, sink an inch into the muddy bank. The cripple stiffed, hovering as she was on the threshold of ablution.
‘Elijah! Baptise us!’ burst forth Carp Boone and, hand in hand with his wife Sadie, he pressed past me and plunged into the sinister water. The throng inched forward.
‘I want to be clean! Renew my spirit, Baptist!’ piped pink-eyed Sadi’e, and a thunderbolt rent the heavens with a spike of blue light.
‘And I, Baptist! Wash away my sin!’ cried another who had braved the floodlands. Ah turned around and attempted to push back through the crowd, but people were clambering from the rear ranks to the front, pushing and shoving their way to redemption, and ah found mahself, after considerable struggling, precisely where ah had started – pressed against the back of the wheelchair.
Wilma Eldridge had a front-row seat and she sat facing the soup, frozen stiff and speechless with fear, her two bony hands gripping the sides of her contraption, her bare wet head sitting erect on her scrawny neck – and, well, ah was kind of sandwiched between this twisty old gimp and the roiled throng – and, well, all the time the pushing and the shoving and the jabbing was getting more intolerable – yes, it was – and the cloacal sump that they were rejoicing in was filling more and more with candidates ready to be purified – and, well, a lot of things were working their way through mah mind – like, well, first off, ah didn’t belong here with these people, and, secondly, ah was going to be up to mah eyeballs in sewerage if ah didn’t do something fast, and ah was thinking about some kind of diversionary tactic, and how, if something fairly drastic happened to Poe or one of the faithful – and someone elbowed me again and ah thought ‘Dear Wilma Wheelchair, why is it that we unfortunates, the lame and the dumb – why must we forever be the ones who catch all the crap? Why?’ and as ah leant over and yanked back her safety brake, ah believe ah almost heard her draw breath in order to answer me – ah did – as ah squeezed to one side and let the surge of the mass do its ugly business.
The chair rolled forward with a groan of vulcanized rubber against steel, a flurry of futile fingers furiously back-braking, raking the mud-caked spokes, hammering the handbrake. It leaned, toppled forward, and loomed out over the water’s grim catoptric surface that stretched before her, and then completing a half-somersault plunged headlong into the shallows of the abysmal, baptismal bilge.
Then, like the legion of unclean spirits that Jesus bid enter the swine, the squealing herd went the way of the wheelchair, leaping to each side of it or diving over it so as to avoid becoming entangled in the infernal contraption – the two slow-churning wheels only partially submerged like the paddles of a river steamer. And while the surging, floundering, flailing stack-up of semi-naked bedlamites thrashed in the shallows, ah, standing in relative safety to one side of the bank, noticed the cripple’s upturned feet connected to about six inches of ankle, protruding quietly from the bubbling waters between the sinister wheels – two peaceable mud-monsters calmly observing the madness about them – and, well, let me say right now that the sight of those numb, blue feet and the sense of calm they maintained in the face of such crying evil somehow touched me – yes, reached right out and touched me – and, well, shit, you know what ah mean – ah mean, hell, ah… ah dunno -look, it just touched me… all right?