By that time there was no turning back. Some major decisions had been made. Some serious instructions had been received. Ah had no choice but to comply.
You know, ah can’t help but wonder, just what part you play in all this. Yes, you, you silent and most sinister sitters. Ah mean, where do you fit in? Ah wonder.
Do you have a long face and wear a grey wig and bang a little wood hammer? Is that where all the strange knocking ah’ve been hearing lately is coming from? Ah imagined it was the sound of some more strenuous activity. Such as carpentry. Are you building me a scaffold? Do you wear a black death-hood? Is your life all switches and sawdust? Are you knocking up a crucifix? Ah can’t help but get the feeling that you’re waiting. Are you a big black buzzard in a top hat with a pine-board coffin under your wing? Is that what all the weird flapping sounds ah’ve been hearing – feeling – lately have been? Ah wonder if we’ll ever meet. Ah mean, are you some bit-part players and extras who will make their entrance in the final scene, faces twisted in rage, in disgust at the measure of mah most heinous deed, waving your humble, home-made implements above your heads – plough-shares beaten into swords, pruntng-hooks beaten into spears – shouting, screaming, ‘O horror! Horror! Look what he has done! Killed us all and we don’t even know it yet!’ Ah mean, you tell me! Or did the cat get yours too? Are you some kind of informer? A snitch? Have you been servicing mah enemies with valuable information? Is that why mah leaping pitchforks have never been trigged? Is that why somebody decided it was safe to infiltrate mah Kingdom and crucify a subject to the wall of mah shack? Because they knew that ah was holed up somewhere on the other side of town? Is that how come those six swacked lackeys at the camp managed to ambush me yesterday? Ah wonder. There is me and there is them but what about you? What about you, mah murky third party? Where do you fit in?
To be? Hmmm. To not be? To be not anymore? Ah’m not asking you a question – ah sink therefore ah am! Yes? Am. Am not. Am not to be? Ah mean, what would your advice have been? What measures would you have taken if you were in mah boots, ah wonder? For me such eschatalogical deliberations are a grievous waste of time. But all the same it’s funny how the value of seconds rockets the moment you decide to sell out. Don’t you think so? Hello? Still, ah haven’t traded in all mah coupons. Ah still have a few last grubby moments left to be. Mah arms and legs and torso and genitals and hands and feet – they are all warmly gone, never to be seen in their earthly form again. Never to be seen. Never to be. In short, ah am nearly not. And while this limits mah range of options, severely, there is still the odd decision left to make – like to sink, or not to rise? To blink or not to – one moment – miasma – burning mah eyes – gotta close them for a while – shit, damn – and the pressure on mah chest – one moment – one moment, please –
Euchrid stood in the yard, mouth agape, stupefied, breathing in short, shallow gasps. The headless dog lay in the dust at his feet. He looked like a trained circus chimpanzee with his captain’s jacket, his question-mark stance – a performing ape in some gag involving a bloody hammer and a stuffed dog. He nudged the dead weight lightly with his foot, then, rocking a little, leaned back, and turning his eyes to the sky, bared his teeth and hissed like an animal.
Ah stormed around the yard, ma… – angry as hell, gnashing mah teeth and swinging the hammer at the thousand imagined faces that hovered there before mah eyes, smashing the skulls of mah tormentors like eggshells – all the gloaters that sought to stand in mah way. Ah broke their fucken idiot faces to bits. But it gave me no relief. Even as ah lay flat out in the dust and closed mah streaming eyes and looked on like some higher being at all the spilling thought-vengeance that mah head played host to, ah found no cause for comfort, found no cause for any comfort there at all.
And after a time, the boiling sea of blood and all the lopped and all the hacked-up humanity that swam within it drained from mah head, and from it rose a pillar of chaogenous calculus, cold and hard. And some serious weighing up of terms ensued. Yes, there, supine beneath a bold and brazen sun, ah struggled with some pretty eternal, some pretty adult problems. Listen.
Then swinging the hammer wildly, Euchrid ran about the yard, ducking under the skins and pelts, running to the great wall of junk and listening, ear pressed up to mute tin, dumb plank, dead brick.
Ah cast mah mind back to that – to this dark place, where nothing grows that isn’t twisted, where nothing exists that doesn’t twist – mah heartland – the swampland – mah dim sanctuary. Ah thought of mah bridal chamber where mah guardian angel was so long ago invoked – the temple of mah tokens, mah treasures, mah solitary pleasures. There, in those darksome quarters, ah had passed away one thousand hours, secure in the absence of man, away from the mock and the savage, safe from the beat-downs. There ah had indulged in harmless congress with mah invocations, mah fetish-isms, in peace.
Then Euchrid began pounding the wall with his hammer, stopped, heard something, and ran across to the other side of the yard, booting a jaw-bone as he went. Pressing his ear against the wall, he listened for any outside sound, began pounding the wall again with his hammer, chopping the air with his teeth.
But they sought me out. They did. Into the swampland they came, trespassing without hesitation. They came to violate. They came to rape. They came to sully mah last shred of self. They went and smashed mah grotto down. They scattered mah tokens like unwanted things. They scared away mah supernal bride. The cunts.
And Euchrid was off and running again, past the leash pole and the training wires, to listen again at another part of the wall. Pitch forks, pointed sticks, pieces of brick and sheets of tin all trembled at perilous angles above, all the booby traps perilously trembling.
Ah had never been able to find, in that holy shelter, the same state of transport again. Instead ah grew spines. Doghead. God’s work. For in violating mah sanctuary, they had violated God as well. He was not pleased, ah can tell you that.
Euchrid staggered back from the wall a few paces and clapped his hands over his ears, then turning he fled into the shack, the slam of the front door resounding over the stillness.
And although ah built a fortress and enclosed mah humble shelter within its great wall, still they came, and still they will continue to come, on and on, to lay their snares and to set their traps until ah am thoroughly dead and even then they will jig on mah grave, dig me up and kill me some more.
Euchrid burst through the front door and on to the porch, the shotgun cradled in his arms. The shotgun was wrapped in newspaper, and the paper was stained with large brown spots as though the gun itself had bled into its wrap. He stood on the porch, his legs apart. Jaw clenched, he spat into the yard, then marched briskly down the steps and strode across to the great wall, ripping away the paper as he went. He pointed the gun at the spot where he had last stood and brought his eye up to the sight. The sun had climbed higher into the sky, and all about him shadows pooled as he stood aiming. There was no sound, within the Kingdom or without. Euchrid lowered the gun and walked across the yard, past the leash pole and the training wires, to the other part of the wall where he had stood listening. And again he raised the shotgun and pointed it at the wall, and again he lowered it and did not shoot.