the invocation of fire
There was a fire of old tires, and driftwood, on the mud bank of the river, and someone, once upon a time had pulled some fallen trees up around the pit in a rough triangle. They’d been here forever, covered over with carved names, who was fucking who, what bands kicked ass, and what bands sucked. We were drinking Keystone, because for whatever reason, Keystone was just the right mix of palatable and cheap in those years, and we drank rivers of that shit. “The bottled beer taste in a can” every can promised, and failed to deliver. Somebody, probably Rich Moon, came and took most of the cans away, but if you wandered off into the underbrush, you’d still find the old steel ring top cans of Schlitz and Hamm's our parents had drank at the same spot, rusting away. Fuz found a glass bottle marked “medicinal whiskey” from prohibition hidden in a hollow tree down there once , and drank it, even though we all told him it was probably piss. He said he got drunk, but who could tell. Fuz was always full of shit. He swore up and down he’d seen UFOs hovering over Indian head rock in the river, but that was behind five hits of silver star acid. On one hit of silver star, I’d seen the world crack open like an egg, and heard the streetlights singing.
The catfish jump and fall into the water, the coal barges roll past with foghorns and spotlights, down on the muddy bank on the Kentucky side, and the shitty town lit up like a poor kid's Christmas, long bars of light across the black water. Ty found the old copper axes not far from here, the sunrise sights up along roads plowed over the tops of mounds and the mud and gravel beech is littered with bone beads, the flooded fields behind you littered with pottery shards, sometimes the plows turn up skulls, or lead shot.
You are waiting, waiting for the Russians to drop the bomb, for the war to come that will swallow the boys trying to fish, for the bottom to drop out. you are waiting for a blue fog of crushed pills and heroin and coke that will make the pin joint, the fifth of Beam, the Keystone light in cans seem innocent as milk.
someone is always fucking somebody else's girl, someone is always hustling someone out of a few bucks on a bag of dirt weed, there is always a reason for someone to be looking for someone else, for shifting alliances, and bullshit drama, for fights over who is controlling the stereo in the car that runs, doors open, radio blaring out over the foghorns and the river, headlights in the fog.
This is the era of spray painted pentagrams and shoplifted black candles and misformed prayers to a destroying angel who will not deign to come, it is the season of denim, of guttural screams and invocation and apocalypse, and the four horsemen arguing over speed metal and Creedence and Hank Williams and Danzig and Venom and the girls just want to dance under the big ass moon, and tonight , at least everyone is content to wait, for the world to hang on the edge of the black river, that line between never and always that feels like dying, and you never know there is a place for nostalgia for this waiting, this anteroom to your life, the fish dropping liquid in the dark, the taste of cheap beer, the sound of your friends laughing, and you are all dying, sick with smokestacks and yellow fog, sick with hopelessness and the hunger for anything outside the damned bowl of these hills that girdle round the horizon and the hollers and t and garages with poached deer hanging and going to school with pigshit on your boots, with stealing pills and smoking shake and waiting for the black curve in the road that will be the one where you finally shake the hills off for good, where you finally will shoot out onto the plain towards the city, over the rim of the world like a ship on the ocean, like a coal barge on a black river hurtling towards a light that might be a fire, you are staring into, the speedy blotter acid spinning behind your eyes like a kids toy, your pupils eerie and big and the stars all pouring in, or houses in the fields beside the road, the lights of something spinning around your head, and you wait, and a ball of fire rises in the east, and it's done
The river bottoms were such a good place to drink, because they were far enough away that P-town looked like a city, long lines of light reflected in the black water, the coal barges passing…and it was far enough from everything you could really raise hell, if you wanted to. I remember when Billy caught Cinnamon Holley fucking around on him, he bellowed for an hour and a half about how he was going to kill someone, and no cops even popped into make sure everything was alright. With only one pig for all for Firebrick, it wasn’t that surprising. He wound up in county that night, for hitting some dude over the head with a cement block, which was pretty fucked up considering that guy wasn’t even fucking Cinnamon, which I knew for a fact.
Anyway, the night I’m thinking of was while Billy was in county. We were down in the Bottoms, drinking Keystone and Old Crow, and Tony had some pinners of shitty ditchweed he was trying to sell for five bucks a joint, which was highway fucking robbery, but you didn’t have to drive to go get it at least, so we were smoking that. Herb had Lucretia , his black Olds88 down there in the mud, running so the alternator would charge the battery, and Danzig’s second album, the bluesy one, was playing,over and over again, loud as fuck, on the stereo. The girls kept putting Creedence on, and once we all got drunk Bug might have slipped in some Hank Jr, but I remember it was Lucifuge playing when Josh told me about the temple.
Say what you will about P-town, it has the most well-read rednecks I’ve ever seen. Dr Mark, at the college made sure of that. He was in charge of the Appalachian Literacy Initiative, which meant that the town was flooded in free, or yard-sale-cheap editions of “Enriching Literature”, intended to uplift our hillbilly asses to middle class-respectability. Thing is, Dr Mark had some weird ideas about what was “enriching”. Josh and Herb I had been in a dead heat reading all the grail romances, Parsifal, The Song of Roland, and all the medieval grimoires The Lesser key of Solomon, the Black Pullet, the sixth and seventh books of Moses, Cavendish’s Black Arts, Barret’s Magus, all of that witchy shit.. It may sound funny, but it’s really not that big a leap from playing D&D, and listening to Samhain, to reading Crowley and listening to wax-cylinder recordings of the Enochian keys,. I mean, it’s one thing to play a few records backwards, quite another to stuff a cat in a pillowcase, take some shoplifted Halloween tapers from Big Lots and see what you can call. Blame it on the fact that we didn't have an arcade, fuck if I know. I guess the preachers were right enough, in their way.
Me “Bug, don’t throw that fucking tree in the fire. You will burn down the whole damn riverbank, or have to sit up all night babysitting the goddamn thing. Bug’s got his shirt off, and he’s burning shit. That must mean I’m drunk.”
Josh “so there is this church, in Indian Hills. Up where all the doctors and shit live, right? And all over the inside of it are carvings that are crazy..i man there’s a green man, and a black sun, and what look like Templars, the eye in the pyramid, all of it...
Tony “ big fuckin deal. The only green Jesus I give shit about is the new blotter acid in Wayne Hills. I saw Bob Dobbs’ disembodied head reciting Mary had a little lamb on that silver star, I’m not going to Indian hills about it”
Herb “ Josh ,are you reading that holy blood holy grail shit again? I told you that was all bullshit, you gotta read Eschenbach directly. Pass me the Old Crow.”
Tony “ what the fuck are you doing in church anyway, teaching vacation bible school?”
Josh “Fuck you, man. I had to go to my granny’s funeral, she was in that assisted living place up there, and they wanted her new “beau” to be able to walk to it, or someshit… and while I was there, I saw all this crazy shit behind the altar.. Including what look like maps of mound park, with Basil Valentine-style alchemical shit all over em.
Tony. “your granny was fucking some old dude. Ill bet he has wrinkly balls.”
Me :” Fuck you Tony. Let’s go tomorrow and check it out. I don’t get how this is supposed to help, though. You gonna hit this?
Herb. If he’s right, it could fix everything
Me “whatever you say, man. Nothing is gonna fix everything.”
I woke up in the Dungeon. I could smell old keystone all over me, my head felt like someone had used it to strain shit, and I could hear some godawful pounding. It was Josh, knocking on the basement window, carefully covered over in old “auto zone” bumper stickers and an upside down American flag, so as to not allow even a spot of light in. I flipped the latch, and he slid in through the trailer–size window, and was immediately standing at the foot of my bed. Even worse, he left the flag flipped over, and let all the dark out.
Josh“ Get up, man, we gotta go up the slope to that church I was telling you about,”
Me “right, Rennes le Chateu for the hee-haw millionaires. You know all that “sacred architecture” shit is bullshit, right? I mean the way to keep a secret is to keep it, not to build a fucking convocation center that hides it in weird sculpture and measurements.. I mean the pyramids are the pyramids, they are not the colonel's secret recipe”
Josh “well if we don’t figure something out soon, we’re fucked, and you know it. You’re just hung over, and don’t want to get your lazy ass up
Me “touché, douche. Just let me get dressed”
I pulled on my leather. It wasn’t quite cool enough for it yet, but if we were going off the slope, I sure as hell wanted to have my armor on. It was covered in Saint scapulars, and lucky charms, and had the archangel Michael painted on the back, straight off a botanica prayer candle, including the invocation. I had anointed the whole thing in holy water and oil, and It had little twists of goofer dust, rue, salt and whatnot in little bags in the pockets. It also had a razor in the sleeve, and a buck knife in the inside pocket... it was heavy as fuck. Josh’s was similar, although instead of a saint, he had some kind of Geiger/sigil on the back, and his charms weren’t catholic. We got a lot of shit at school, till we told them we were a band. At least I thought that was the reason they backed off, though Johnny Whisman told me years later it was because everyone was sure I had a gun. I had something a fuck of a lot more dangerous than a gun.
Out in the sun, everything was worse. All I wanted to do was sleep, and instead, here I was, sweating my ass off in this ridiculously heavy jacket, trying to stay upright on the pegs of his 20 inch bike, cobbled together of warm-ish parts and painted a drippy purple.
Me: why'd you paint this thing that godawful color.
Josh: why are you such a fat ass? Why don't you get your own damn bike?
me. fuck you man, I'm just tall.
Josh..yeah, big boned,,too, I guess
me. fuck you, man. Pedal.
P-town has a layout like a feudal village. Up in the hills, the gated community and the retirement homes, the doctors, the lawyers, the cheerleaders and the jocks, on the riverfront and the east end, the hillbillies, the white crack heads, the smalltime pot dealers, the serfs on the west side, the same, only also the black churches advertising their perpetual 'building fund' fund raisers, the 'ville, the crumbling projects...in between them, the slope all the rich people's shit rolled down. Don't imagine this means the slope is middle class, because it aint. The slope is HUD houses, mound park, ..the streets run right over the old mounds, and you can feel the bumps when you cross..mixed in among the houses are a few neighborhood stores, the old springs too polluted to take water from, the cemetery...The slope is ours, is all I can say about it. Josh and Tony and I lived on the slope, and that's how I knew them. Herb lived right on the edge of the bottom, on the tracks, next to a power transformer, with eight million brothers...i seriously don't know how many he had, we used to fuck with him about being cloned. They slept in bunk beds like a barracks. Can't say I blame him for coming up the slope to hang with us, just to get a little room...besides, who else was he going to argue about the black pullet with? Anyway, he was way to far out of the fucking way to go get today, with this hang-on still clouding the edges of my head, and Josh on a mission, for whatever reason. Usually he was content to stay in the dungeon, smoke some, or drop a few hits and talk physics and chaos magick all night. Whatever he saw in the storm sewers must have put a bug up his ass for sure.
The thing about living in a third world Appalachian shithole like p-town, is that an income that would put you solidly in the upper middle class anywhere else will let you live like a fucking king here. I mean,Zsa Zsa Gabor fuck-you rich...that's where we were going today, up among the gilded palaces of the flies on top of the p-town shit heap, the mcmansions, the beverly hillbillies...my least favorite place in the whole damn town
The invocation of earth
we were in the storm sewers. To get to the room you had to walk what felt like a mile into the ground, hunched over and squatting in the dark. We all had flashlights, but all you could see was the guy in front of you anyway, the water at your feet. It had that old, dead dried fish smell, like the ghosts of tadpoles and sewer rats, of catfish carcasses, and it all drained down to the river,and it was dark and ringing, and we were all crammed together, the seven fucking dwarfs off to work in the mine, Herb at the lead because he had found it, Me, Josh, Tony, Bug, I think, someone with some weed, someone with spraypaint cans clanking in the dark. Fuz had that fucking cat, mewling away in a floral pillowcase. And deeper and deeper into the ground we went.
If you read enough folk tales and fairy tales, you eventually come across this story..it's a lot like the Robert Johnson crossroads story,or the old Faust-deal with the devil story except that it's about a school in a cave in Spain, or in the hollow hill, or a coalmine or whatever...the first time I came across it, it was as an aside in a story about wandering bishops, then I found it referenced in one of those wandering scholar-jack tale sort of stories, found out later Dracula went to high school there, The Scholomance, or Solomanari...anyway, back when metallurgy was black magic, and whatnot they said it was in Spain, in a cave, and that if you went, you could learn all the knowledge available at the time, that you could make all the 72 demons of the lesser key come to you and do your bidding, that you would have your way on all the aethyrs, that you had all the passwords, and grips and shit to all the lodges, that you basically could fart gold dust and shit rubies, when you came out, but that from each class,as they graduated, the doors closed, and the dark took the last one, the weakest or slowest or just some random dude, and that was the price for power, glory, hot and cold running chicks and the ability to shred like a motherfucker on harpsichord and whatnot. It's where 'devil take the hindmost” comes from if you've ever hear that. Serious, look it up.
Anyway. Down and down into the storm sewers we were going, and every once in a while you can hear a river rat book off down the tunnel, running from the flashlights, and the water is dripping, and it smells like an anchovy's grandmother's cunt, and my back and my knees are fucking killing me, and I hear Herb say “turn off your flashlights and stand up”
and we're in the room.
The room is really just an overflow, where three or four storm sewers meet and all drain down the river in one line, and it is tall so the water can back up without going out to the streets if it needs to. The floor is all silt, and bottom mud, but dry and powdery, like for whatever reason, the water has not overflowed in here for a long, long time.
Herb lights one of the shoplifted big lots candles, and for a second I see nothing but the phosphene burn of the match. Then I see it
me: Holy fuck. I didn't believe it.
Sitting in the powdery dust are desks, the old-timey Little-House-On-The-Prairie ones with the inkwells for dipping pigtails in and the wrought iron curlicues like a park bench. They have pen-knife carvings in their tops like they were used, and they are bone dry.
Tony: we crawled through a sewer for half a fuckin hour to look at antiques?
me. "you what tony, you tell me how the fuck these got down here"
Soon there is a ring of shoplifted candles around the cluster of desks. There is a triangle of invocation spraypainted on the wall, and the dark gathers around, liquid and black. Herb is reading a bunch of guttural shit from the big-ass book and the rest of us are sitting quietly in our seats, which is fucking hilarious to tony.
Tony, lighting a joint: I can't believe we skipped school to hang out in a study hall in a fucking sewer and listen to herb read death metal lyrics. This shit is retarded.
He goes to get up, and jostles Fuz, who drops the bag with the cat in it. The cat takes off out of the bag like a whore out of church, and knocks over two candles. The dark rises like a tide and all the candles go out, and it is darker than dark, a palpable dark that presses against your eyes, opaque, and heavy..darkness visible.
it stays dark for a long time.
3 the invocation of air.
we are headed up the slope, and we stop at the corner store, the last outpost of the slope. We get a pack of Magnas, cheap Marlboro knock-offs we all smoke. Tony and Herb are outside the store with Rich Moon. Rich is the local lunatic, and local teenage legend claims that he ate several sheets of acid, or was dosed, or made his own and spilled it all over himself, at any rate the consensus is that Rich is crazy as hell, and he is, he is prone to arguing with himself in Jim Dandy, of accosting strangers for things he imagined they said, for walking down the street with his arms crossed in a filthy jean jacket, his weird kinky hair streaming behind him, a long shaggy corona around his bald spot, as he curses at Jesus and argues with him. Josh said once it was like he had an imaginary friend but didn't like him very much. He is also a pretty safe bet to score a twelve pack of keystone from, if you cover his forty of Old E, and that is exactly what Herb and Tony appear to be up to, even though it is early as hell, and they have to have at least half the hangover I do, not to mention the dreams and lack of sleep. Josh chains his drippy purple bike to the telephone pole, and Herb motions us over. He has a brown paper bag held in front of him like chicks hold their books to hide their tits. We all walk off behind the store briskly, and towards the armory. The sooner we can get off the street with the alcohol the better.
Herb seems weird. There is something in his nature, something in the way he walks so purposefully towards the gravel alley that winds along the hill. I know already Josh and I won't be going off the slope today, and there is relief in that, but at the same time, the underlying problem remains. There is a broken chain lock on a logging road, and we start up, the dirt road, into the woods. As soon as we are under the canopy of the trees, tony lights a joint and passes it around, Herb hands out Keystones and we start up the logging road. Large swaths of it are covered in tall grass, like a prairie, or a meadow. Powerlines snake up along side the road. At the top of the hill is a clearing, spraypainted concrete slabs that once held satellite dishes, and a disused radio tower.
From the top of the hill you can see the trainyard, the river, the hills on the Kentucky side burning off their morning mist, the coke plant. The trees move slightly in a breeze, and you can hear the radio tower creaking, like a a ship's rigging. We don't say anything for awhile, just feeling the sun on the concrete slab, listen to the wind and the birds and get baked.
Herb goes over to the side of the platform, and heaves up some broken blocks and stone onto the platform. Soon we are all helping, joking with each other about strength, but never questioning his purpose, just content to build the cairn of stone and concrete
Once we have worked up a good sweat, and through most of the keystone, he separates the stones out into a ring of individual standing stones and a central table with a flat concrete top. The sun passes directly overhead as it gets towards noon, and there is a feeling I have of concentric rings around the sun, of beams of light shooting through the standing stones and connecting with the old mound complex on the Kentucky side, with the park,the cemetery... for a minute, high and slightly buzzed on the keystone, I can feel it all throbbing with connection, and I feel better, feel the dark chased back a little, feel like something that was broken has been fixed, like part of a shiny clockwork watch.
Then I look up.
Tony, bored with the seemingly pointless work has gone under the chain link fence and started climbing the rungs of the radio tower. He is a distant spot, his long hair whipping in the wind, heading ever upward. He is about 2/3 of the way to the top, and I watch his hand slip, see him look down, and see the whole bowl of the valley under him. There are red tailed hawks riding thermals over the river valley under him, and us, in our stone circle, and the sun is directly over head, shining almost into our eyes as we try to see. He yells something, and then stops moving upward.
4 the invocation of water
the Ohio river winds through the river valley, separating Ohio from Kentucky, carrying the detritus of flooded towns and fields towards the sea, drowning small towns, making encampments of others, huddled behind flood walls and gates. Coal barges skim along the top, low to the water.
The flood walls stand in the river bottoms, covered over in spray paint “White Zombie”, “Waster's Union Local 420” cryptic verses and unfinished sketches. The sections of the wall in the downtown are covered in authorized murals, a sanitized history, steamboats and community leaders, tromp l'oi arches, dates, a senator in a heavy masonic ring, a television cowboy, the other side with plain white stars autographed with what passes for local celebrity, a sportswriter, a maitre de from new York, a vice president renowned for his inability to spell. What a joke. A list of escapees, invited back to sign the prison walls.
A dirt road winds along the ruined loading docks, absurd brickwork castles of the local water treatment plant, tangles of rope and bleach bottles, garbage from the river, the smell of rotting catfish. In the dry heat of summer we are walking the road, disturb a nesting pair of eagles. The fish jump in the brown water, the shade under the scrub brush of the bottoms is cool and green. The water crashes in small brown waves, stirred by a passing barge, a screech of fishing birds. The heat is an omnipresent blanket, heavy in your mouth as stale bread, and we are walking to waster's wall, the old loading platform for the defunct steel mill, that rusts beside the river.
The local Walmart is built on top of loose fill from the old mill, and the concrete floor was poured cheaply, and not to spec, as the building settled, the old girders and glass bottles began to rise through the floor. Behind the parking lot, the rusting buildings not yet plowed under. We have explored here, and found tanks of black sludge standing open to the air, dripping into the soil and the river, hid from men in chemical suits examining these... found brick buildings with paperwork scattered across the floors, old welding tanks still under pressure, acetylene torches, rusting chains. Behind all of this is the old loading dock for the barges, now claimed by the waster's union, spray painted in blurry blue pot leaves, in a palimpsest of names upon names, the block where the crane mounted now a diving platform for the deep brown water, a shadowy staircase descending below the word “midian” in pink spray paint, into a dark room with pissed-in corners, the cavity in the wall's rotted tooth..a richer scrawl of graffiti and, our own personal addition, a portrait of Dagon, rising from the water, a papal headdress on, the barbed head of a catfish...that fucker must have took a week to finish..the shadow over Portsmouth, it says on a banner overhead.
Technically, this is not p-town proper at all, but New Boston, a shithole even worse than p-town if truth be told, being primarily a cluster of old steel mill housing, brick and uniform facing onto the highway that has incorporated itself so that Walmart will not have to pay taxes to p-town..on a map it looks like a tumor, a red splotch surrounded by the yellow bruise of Portsmouth They have their own cops, laid off mill security, and more prone to leave you with your ass kicked on the side of the road than p-town cops, but for some reason,, the wall is off limits, an anarchic place not worth the trouble of policing, mainly because who wants to chase a bunch of stoners into the ruins of the mill..better to leave them be.
You run to the edge and jump, hoping to clear a rock, a tangle of rusted metal, then hit the brown water, ramrod straight, feet first, arms at your sides.. Herb jumped once with his arms out, crucifixion style, and both arms hit the water with an audible smack.. his arms were bruised purple and black for a week.
Everyone talks shit about seeing someone dive head first, like a cliff diver, but no one has ever seen it. I have seen a kid get carried out strapped to a stretcher, having clipped his head pretty good on a rock, and his buddies calling the ambulance from the Walmart pay phones..
we stick to the safe jump, swing out from a rope tied into a tree, climb up the muddy bank and do it again. It is dumb, adolescent machismo, a pissing contest. Tony climbs up in the tree and jumps from there, but we are content to give each other shit for jumping, drinking hot beer and smoking leaf. There are a few other groups come out to swim on this hot, muggy day, and we shoot the shit with them, everyone know everyone else at least provisionally, but the new Boston kids are just a little dumber, just a little broker, than us. Billy shows up with Cinnamon in a bikini, and everyone pretends not to look. He has better weed, too.
Josh and Tony end off catching a ride home in a van with some other kids from the slope, but Herb and I decide to walk back, and talk. For a while, again, the dark unclenches from my gut, and we are goofing around, Talking Huck Finn, talking river, and we take some of the tangled nylon cords, some logs, lash them all together with some detergent and bleach bottles, and build a raft that rides low in the water. We are clearly high. We are sailors, and floating in the river is a little different than jumping from the wall
Herb: we are growing to wind up growing extra limbs and shit from being in this water this long. You are going to have flipper babies.
The raft is floating, and there are tampon applicators, pens, bottles, all sorts of plastic crap caught up in the current with us, including an honest-to-god syringe. We are laughing at the SS. Flipperbaby, at our clumsy paddling, at the joke of Dagon rising from the deep, a great Lovecraftian catfish, when the coal barge passes, and shakes the raft apart.
I go under the water.
5.
Celeron De Blainville had been tasked with exploring the ohio river valley, with confirming the claim of the french to the territory...he would plant a flag, bury a brass plaque which stated that the territory belonged to the king, and move on. The woods were crawling with eyes at every stop, with sounds in the silence. It was unnerving, to lay claim to the endless woods, the deer drinking at the rivers edge, unafraid, the heavy fog boiling from the hills.
The stone head
the sun is setting behind the Earl Thomas Conley bridge, and the sky is bloody with it's dying, the river reflects a ribbon of crimson. You are standing at Alexandria point, where the scioto and the ohio meet. Across from where the first sorry european settlers here perished in mud and water. There is a circle of pavement, where cars pull up at night, cruising boys and meth to be consumed alike in the scrubby brush on the river bottom, popcorn beach, where the scioto had their village.. you see a wave of black coming across the water, a standing wall coming across, and you hear the rain before you feel it, see the dimpled impression of the drops on the water, and it like a curtain, drawing the dark over the water, and the yellow sodium glow of the streetlights startts up, carves out circles of light along the road. Here is the clubhouse of the portsmouth motorcycle club, hallowed by age into respectibility,and an almost sanctioned violence, here the abandoned ruinous icehouse fo the brewery, overgrown with kudzu that climbs the telephone lines, the wires wrapped in green, everything waiting to crumble into dust..carved out of darkness is the shadow of the old jail, open barred windows and rooflessness, grass growing inside and out. All are eaten in the dark that falls, and the streetlights fizzle, one by one and die in the black, and the lights of the city all crackle and die, in a wave that rolls up the hills and highways, the cars headlights lasting another moment and there is only the pale skull of the moon through the thin clouds, and the grey rain and dark. And the moon burns up like film in a projector, and the stars burn bright as pinholes and then, shining in unlight softly black against the black and you hear the stone rising, something terrible and ancient, almost mechanical in the way it rises from the water, like a dredger, a like a barge rising from the bottom, like some terrible eyeless catfish from the dark below the dam and it shines with it's own dark light, the face wrapped in chains, dripping, fish falling from the carved hollows of its eyes and the mouth opens, and it is hunger and darkness against the dark , and you cannot see, but know that the river, and the bridge, and the stones of popcorn beach are all rattling into the hollow of that mouth, the singular point of it's emptiness swallowing all refraction till it is dark as the sewer, as the caves below the earth that have never seen light, and you, yourself are flowing inside that terrible mouth like water, and you open your mouth to scream and you are bound in irons in cold water,and you are swallowing the world, like some terrible plug pulled at the bottom of the world's bathtub, and everything spiraling out into the black is spinning in your guts like a firework nailed to a tree, a Catherine wheel burning in the black, the stars burning out so brief and warm in your stomach and the dark, that was before, and that will come after, the dark of dead stars, and trunks in vacant lots, of the inside of junkyard refrigerators, the dark that pools in old wells and coal mines, the undoing of everything falls across your black hole eyes like a tire iron.
Everywhere I ever lived, there was a bridge, just far enough outside of town to be a trip to get to, and the bridge was covered in graffiti, and if you parked in the middle with your lights off, you'd hear the babies screaming that were thrown over the side, or the pig faced axe murderer would come get you, or whatever. There's a headstone in the graveyard with a cherub on it, and if you kiss the cherub, the angel's eyes light up, there's a house where bloody mary lived, there's a clearing in the middle of the woods where a house appears in with all it's lights on, and if you go inside, when you come out your hair will be white,there's a church with an upside down cross, or an abandoned gas station and so on. A little local legend, a pinch of teenage slasher movies, a few car headlights, or waterfowl, and boom, you have a location for bored teenagers to go. One thing most people don't remember is just how fucking boring being a teenager is. We spent a lot of time just sitting around, or wandering the train tracks. I think part of the appeal of what we had all gotten into was that it gave us a good excuse to go somewhere, to do something. Herb had his eight million brothers all up his ass, I had my sisters beating the shit out of each other all day, my mom and my stepdad beating the shit out of each other all night, Tony had his mom with the shunt in her brain, his janitor dad..Only josh had any kind of tolerable home life at all, and his dad was a preacher who was mapping out the time left till the apocolypse in detailed charts...Still it was a little weird that he had come up with the trip to the temple as a way to alleviate our problems, for while we certainly needed some professional help, I had a feeling all we were going to find in the temple were pull offs and bingo cards, fat old white guys drinking beer.
After Tony's stunt on the tower, he swore he had seen some big head in the clouds “ Like Bardisaatva in that Conan comic” was how he described it, and showed us the image, the sacrifice with his mouth stitched shut, the face in the sky shooting lightening from its eye sockets, metal as fuck, of course, but something rang oddly about it with him, and he seemed a little different, a little less sure. Regardless, for all of his bullshit he had decided to come along with us to the temple.
Josh had described it as a church, but from his description, I knew it had to be the old convent. The nuns had moved out, probably for financial reasons, into something bland and modern. Only the bronze michael with his foot on the throat of satan gave away the fact the new convent was not a rest home, and it might as well have been. Heading up the slope to the convent was not as deep into Indian Hills as I thought it would be, so at least we were spared that, the Mcmansions, the swimming pools..at least the old convent was in the older part. We still thought it safest to stay off the road as much as possible, and cut through the woods behind the water tower. It also gave us the opportunity to smoke.By the time we got there, the sun was setting
The convent had been purchased by a private owner, and the gate was locked with a heavy padlock. I thought to myself that Josh's funeral story must have been bullshit, but I did not want to draw attention to that at the time, did not want Tony and Herb doubting him. I'd ask him later how he really knew about the church..and why he had such a hard-on to get in there. We hopped the gate, and climbed up the side of the hill, through the scrub and the ivy. The building was a crumbling, faux-norman mess. A small rounded tower with barred windows rose beside a stone covered walkway, connecting a chapel to the larger, former living quarters...we looked into the tower, and saw lawn mowers and weed whackers in a small cell. The floor was still covered in straw, and there was a smell like the old billy goat my grandmother used to keep tied up behind her house, like sex-funk and sheep shit all mixed together. The chapel was locked, and missing the lintel stone over the door, something carved had been taken down. In its place, was a wood carving of something that is either an eye or a mouth.The windows were covered heavy wood shutters, chained and locked.
“Well this was a waste of fucking time” Tony s
“fuck you, man. You didn't have to come,”
Herb, ignoring this, has been unscrewing the hinges of a window with the screwdriver from a swiss army knife. “be prepared, boys' he says, as he lifts the corner of the wooden shutter, chewing the other screw from the wood in the process. One by one, we crawl into the dark.
No comments:
Post a Comment