The lock of hair which ah carefully wrapped in a handkerchief was the link. Yes, it was. The lock was the link. Yes, it was.
As ah slipped and lunged and skidded and rolled homeward, mah mind turned each word – the lock was the key. The lock was the key. The lock was the key. The lock was –
XVI
At around eleven o’clock that Sunday evening, the rusty red pickup belonging to the brothers Holfe could be seen approaching the valley.
Now, as they passed through its northern entrance, the pitch firmament issued what seemed at this late hour to be a torrent of gushing oil, pissing down upon the windshield and coiling about the windscreen wipers like asps, black and alive.
‘It isn’t stopped, brother,’ said Philo.
Carl shook his head and flicked the lights on to full beam. Pressing his face right up to the windshield, so that his body curved in a hunch over the wheel, he squinted into the rain. ‘No, it isn’t.’ Then a little farther down Maine, he added, ‘Brother Philo, I think that if there is one thing clear in this whole valley, then it is… that it isn’t… stopped.’
To be sure, the heavy drizzle of early afternoon had swelled to a fully drenching deluge. Nothing had stopped. Nor in the days to come did it stop, nor quell, or even temper. Not a single ray of sunlight broke the black and brawling firmament. God, it would seem, was blind to their acts of contrition. Their despair was allconsuming. There was nothing left to do but remain in the valley and suffer, or pack up and leave for more sunny climes and so live in guilt and shame for ever.
Poe, the self-appointed Messiah, became almost overnight the living embodiment of a township’s private shame, a manifestation of their wretchedness and the focus of insuperable hatred. He refrained from entering the township itself again.
The church on Glory Flats grew ever more derelict – eventually leaning, as the months drew on, a little askew on its stilts, attended by no one except an increasingly drunken Abie Poe. His black apparel, ragged and soiled, his harried face bitten by deep crevices of shadow and his eyes lost in the dark pools of their orbits, the deranged preacher would skulk around the chambers of the church, muttering half-remembered prayers, sometimes climbing into the pulpit to deliver lunatic sermons to the ever-faithful – the rats, the toads and the rain. The roof leaked. Windows got broken. Never rung, the vespers bell rusted in its frame. The once refulgent interior grew squalid and foul.
Thus another year passed. And the rain pissed down.
XVII
A wind whistled through the valley and blew on through the town. Ah sat in the rain, by the petrol station, listening to the Texaco billboard knock above the pumps on the count of three each time the wind hit it – the first always the loudest, the last you could barely hear. ‘Knock!! Knock! knock.’ ‘Knock!! Knock! knock.’
The string of red and white canvas flags tied on to the cornerpost of Noah’s Barber Shop would flutter and flap, flutter and flap with each new gust. Just as the last knock of the billboard sounded, the little canvas flags, hanging limply, would perk up as the same bluster of wind hit the barber shop, and all red and white they would gaily flutter and flap, flutter and flap, until the gust passed onward down Maine, and then they hung silent again, awaiting the billboard’s next signal.
If the wind did not whistle then nor would the billboard knock, and if the billboard did not knock, up there above the pumps, then the canvas flags would hang, limply strung, never to flap, never to flag and never to flutter.
And if the wind did not come waltzing through the valley on this wet and windy summer night of 1943, then the township of Ukulore Valley would in windless silence be – bar the fremitus of the rain, of course, its incessant racket like the endless clamour of the blood, long since gone unnoticed by the ear.
And if the wind did not waltz, then not a flap, knock or whistle, not a single pump or rustle would break the solemn silence of those wind-worried things.
Did ah tell you how we did not hear the rain anymore?
Not a soul could ah see in town, for not a one could be found – not a solitary one nor a strolling pair. It was customary for the Ukulite elders to walk in pairs – in pairs that is – though many often strolled alone, as is the custom of the aged all around the world – that is to say all around the world, strolling for the old is quite the custom – paired or alone, till the ends of their hearts, or their legs, or their days – alone or in pairs and into their graves.
But not here in town – not a strolling, whistling, waltzing soul – not in a house, up a hall, on a stair – not along Maine nor in Motherwells nor in Memorial Square.
And thusways ah allowed mah mind to ruminate on this rainy day, so much so that ah almost did not register a thin, hunched figure hobble past, dressed from head to toe in a filthy dun-coloured blanket. This enigma walked as if its shoes were filled with sharp stones. From the coarse cloth in which it was clad a deep cowl had been fashioned, and as it hobbled down Maine the stranger looked to me like a rogue leper right off the pages of Leviticus and ah imagined the quick raw flesh hidden in the folds of the sopping sackcloth.
With the veils of grey rain obscuring mah pursuit – both sound and vision-wise – ah found ah could tail the shambling wretch at close range. Occasionally the mysterious figure would buckle at the waist as if gripped by a nagging colic, then hitch the ragged blanket at the shoulders, cough thinly and continue the painful trek down the centre of Maine.
Leaving the road at the gardens, the figure paused beneath a wrought iron arch – the main gateway into Memorial Gardens. Framed in a romping embranglement of iron filigree, crimson roses and rusting cherubs, the hooded blanket remained unmoving. A yellow bulb throbbed and crackled overhead. Ah stood about ten feet away, the pluvial curtain mah only form of concealment.
Ah searched for an exposed hand, a peeping toe, a slice of face caught in the humming light – proof that a being of flesh and blood existed within – but ah found none. And the more ah considered the enigma before me, the more ah thought how like a phantom or enshrouded wraith the figure seemed to be.
Ah was reminded of an illustration ah had torn from a book ah had found buried unner some mutilated girlie magazines on the junkpile out back of the shack. It was called Go Ask The Angel or O The Ass On That Angel or some such smut. Anyway if it had ever had any pictures then they had all been torn out – all except one, on the very first page.
It showed a little girl, feverish and wasted and terribly sick, lying in her little bed. All around her were bunches of red and yellow and pink flowers, and standing at the end of the bed was a macabre figure – dressed in a long, hooded robe and looking all the more ghastly because of its gaping, faceless hood and empty sleeves, one of which was raised and pointed at the little hollow-eyed sickling. Along the bottom of the picture it read thus:
‘… and it being time, Death called Angel home, saying slowly and resonantly, “Angel… Angel… Angel…”’
Ah had cut the picture from the book and put it in a large paper envelope labelled ‘Pics. Cut-outs. Signs. Omens.’
Examining the figure huddled in the gateway to the square ah was left aghast at its similarity to the picture of Death. Ah was. A formicating horror spread across mah person and mah mind jabbered doggerel, chilling and terror-riven.