But the moment ah breached the threshold of the swampland, the queerest absence of sound prevailed and mah flight became dreamlike, rhythmical, painless. Ah felt as though the line that ah followed, hand over hand, was, in fact, attached to me – that it was a part of me, and that ah mahself was being reeled in – that ah mahself was being called home.
Arriving at the gates of Doghead, Sardus Swift leapt from the front seat of a pick-up, Beth’s smock bundled under one arm, the murder weapon in his hand. He raised the blood-glazed sickle above his head, and in a voice shrill with rage, commanded Euchrid to come forth. Already sweat-soaked cane-men were attaching tow-ropes to the gates. An order was given to stand clear, followed by an angry gunning of engines, whereupon the great gates of Doghead tore from their hinges.
The mob stormed the yard, their farm tools poised awkwardly over shoulders and above heads, now graceless implements of destruction, pitchforks and long-handled hay-rakes held straight out in front like lances. They charged into the space defined by the bizarre wall of reconstructed junk.
Even from the yard the stink of death should have been intolerable, but the rage that consumed them was a blind kind of rage, and so strong was their collective anger that the queer contraptions, the rigging, the obsessionals, the booby stakes, the flags, the poles – all the flights of fetish knocked together to construct the absurd kingdom of steel and plank and rope and nail and bone and skin and blood – inspired no horror, no outrage, nor even wonder in the hearts of these men – just as the foul stench that wafted from the shack went unrecognized as the mob clambered up the porch steps and charged headlong inside.
The bright fingers of their torches probed the dark interior. The turbid air clung to their faces like warm wet skin and all about them was revealed an appalling vision of bestial and human filth, of gangrenous crawling carnage, of death piled upon death.
And it was only then, inside, that the sickness became apparent, and rage shrank back and grew clammy and cold. The men swatted wildly about their faces and panicked at lumps of flyblown meat hung from the ceiling, tripping on piles of soiled bedding and screaming at the death, screaming at the death and the rats screaming back. And the men fled the shack, blundering across the porch and lurching over the rail to disgorge their festal supper across the clumps of sun-shrivelled periwinkles that grew below.
But the screaming was for inside. Outside no one spoke. And from the shack came the work-song of the flies – a relentless whine, high and strange.
Though no order was given, petrol canisters were opened and splashed about the shack, and in silence the men stood together in the yard as they watched the shack become a vast crematorium before their eyes, witnessing the sky seared by hungry flames a second time that day.
Two men came running through the gates, shouting.
‘We found his trail!’
‘He’s in the swampland!’
And the crowd all turned. And the crowd all cried out.
Ah eased through the inner boundary of the hypertrophia, into the clearing – the girdle of unvegetated terra firma, no more than four paces wide at any point, that encompasses the circle of quickmud. Ah was bereft of all robing and in a state of nature and mah body was covered with a legion of new welts and wounds, nettles, spines and thorns and blotches of ivy irritation.
Yet the pain is perfect, for the warm mud is so completely soothing to mah crucified flesh, that that which passes out of life is relieved of its suffering, whilst that which remains within merely hurts.
Death is the poultice to the pain of Life-that’s mah news to the world.
And ah stood there before the bog, sweating salt into mah wounds and consciously suffering the pricks of mortality, that mah death be that much sweeter – and it is! It is!
In town, in Memorial Square, women clad in black prostrated themselves, while others reeled about on bended knee, gnashing their teeth and execrating the heavens. Others stood chanting, frozen, as if hypnotized, and others still simply ran in blind circles, beating their breasts with stones.
The glass in the prophet’s sepulchre had been shattered and his white robe shredded and strewn about the grounds. Three women slogged at the marble monument with mallets.
In time ah began to circle slowly the awesome muck, taking step over painful step, observing the way of the quag and noticing subtle undulations and shifts of tension upon its surface – sullen, soundless contractions, a slow building swell, then a sudden retraction – indeed, a clench – and ah saw the ringed swamp as a sinister, annular muscle, and this threw me into a state of fear – of doubt.
Walking a complete circle around the bog, ah drew to a halt, inclined mah head, and folded mah fingers together, as in prayer.
Ah prayed.
And then – and then ah knew exactly what to do.
Full of God, ah stepped bravely out and gently lay mahself down in the very centre of the circle, in the mire’s eye. Upon mah side, knees pulled up to mah chest, head tucked in, ah was secure, sainted, unborn.
The clamorous mass that bulldozed its way across the marshlands appeared in the uncertain light of dusk to resemble a giant black beetle with many thrashing, tramping beaters going, returning to its sinister nest. But once the crowd had entered into the swampland itself, it was hard to imagine that it had ever existed, so thoroughly was it absorbed into the darksome terrain. It was only the crushed and trampled rushes, and the three carrion crows that circled beak to heel above, that betrayed there ever having been any trespass at all.
You know, as ah go below – and really ah am so nearly almost gone – all that remains is mah head, and perhaps the very crest of mah hump – ah can hear them coming, yes ah think ah can. All the trees about me, why, their heads are veiled in fog, inclined toward me – inclined toward me like ah am a source of light, a luminary. O could it be that ah am glowing, even now?
And once inside the confines of the swampland, the mob beat and hacked a blind trail – blinder now, for their rage had by no means tempered and their road to revenge had become a bright and blinding one – but no matter, for the bog brought them miraculously on, drawing them toward its threshold.
Is it you, Death? Is that you, Death, there behind me?
Crashing into the clearing they come, from all sides, heaving and panting from fear and from rage and from blindness. They had come for his head and this, of course, is all they will get – but time is against them. They must work fast.
Look there, up above me. See the heavenly hemisphere? Notice the way it curves around me, like ah am the middle pin! And the trees, see how they too lean toward me!
And now. Look! Up there. Great grape-coloured storm clouds moving single-file across the empyrean plains. O ah know, ah know, they are the souls of the dead marching out to greet me. See? Look! The spooked nag! Hear its beating hooves.
A series of leaden nimbuses cross the dome, gathering at its northern extremity then sealing off the clearing as cloud piles upon cloud.
From above, the clearing looks like a cattle brand, seared into the hide of the world. Makeshift weapons point at the central pin, at the one they hate, like so many broken spokes.