Downriver (50 page)

Directly in front of us was a throne, the
sedes stercorata
, the pierced chair. It rested on a circular carpet of human skulls. The penitents, attached to leather hoops, hung from the slopes of the pyramid like hypnotized studies for Dali's Glasgow ‘Crucifixion'. Lanterns were suspended from their necks: an inconstant light making the skulls glitter and grin. A muffled drumming as the exterior panels bucked and flinched from a shower of bizarre terrestrial objects hurled against them by the furious wind. We were under siege.
Agau vâté vâté. Li vâté, li grôdé
.

The voice of Fr Healy reverberating in our heads let us know that the sound system would amplify every breath from the chamber. We would not miss a whisper, a cockcrow. But we must not ourselves, on pain of death, utter a sound. The first ceremony, the sexing of the Pope, was about to begin.

A huge man was lying face down among the skulls, an oil slick on a beach of limestone pebbles. We had taken him for a ritual carpet. He moved. He was draped in ostrich feathers, monkey
fur, patches of yellow silk: prayer satchels were strapped to his massive, leopard-clubbing arms. He rose up and strode towards the throne: turned to face us. A grin like an elephant's graveyard. We were confronted by Iddo, the Hausa bookman, bathed in magnificence; his skin gleaming red in the light of lanterns. He called aloud. He bellowed the name of Agassu. He invited possession. Then he lowered himself on to the chair, let his robes cover it, offered his splendid nakedness to the crouching sexers, the dwarf twins hidden beneath the throne. Their conclusion was never in doubt. Iddo Okoli would be crowned with the triple tiara. He would be the Anti-Pope to carve an incision in time's living mantle, to glorify in all the coming madness.

The dwarf twins, the sexers, crawled out from beneath Iddo's skirts. Split kneecaps granted independent articulation. Sacred monsters; they were petted, indulged. Tortoise abortions. Honoured in their deformity. Chosen ones. Two of the white robed figures advanced on them. A challenge. Spears at the throat. As one, stitched into a single skin, they raised their free arms to parade the egg of silver and the egg of gold. All the members of the
segnatura
beat their staffs upon the ground, rattling the skulls like so many melon seeds. The masculinity of the Pontiff was proved.

A soft pattering; nails scratch on hide. It begins. Automatic writing. Forbidden transcriptions in the air. Drums.
Pititt, man-man
. The paired, married drums of
petro
ritual. Struck with the flat of the hand. A regular insistent rhythm, broken by wilder surges, trance-inducing seizures. We are locked to this nerve-pulse. It unpicks our conditioned consciousness. It speeds. Voices of rain and rushing water. The anger of prophets. The sweating drummers hammer at their maps of skin.

Now a dark figure steps out from the unknown, from behind the elevator: flapping tails of greenblack cloth. A shirtless
maître d'hôtel
, top-hatted: tramp, clown, medicine-show huckster. He limps, dragging a dead leg. He leans on a cutlass. The dwarf twins kneel before him, lick the rust from his blade.

The blade has a life of its own. It is magnetized. It boxes the compass. It hums, moving between them: an undecided pendulum. It whistles. Strikes.

The dwarf who committed the blasphemy, who dared to handle the stones of potency, was butchered. The blade drawn across his throat. Severance of larynx, trachea, gullet, carotid arteries, jugular veins, vertebrae. Abrupt, indecent termination of all signals. Darkness. The Baron holding him by the hair. An icon, a gorgon head. Life-blood bubbled, drained into an earthen cup; a
zin
. It was offered to Iddo, who drank, dipping his fingers to bless the lucky brother, the ex-twin, the survivor. Iddo kissed him on the mouth, his sanctified fool.

Baron-Samedi passes the cutlass to his master. Iddo receives temporal power, the power of forged steel, of life and death. The initiated blade sweeps over the heads of the assorted penitents, the shuffling dancers; spotting their laundered robes with visceral chutney. It red-strokes the Baron's whitewashed face. Baron-Samedi is the returned avatar of Todd Sileen. His dark side, his double. The black will made albino in its magic. The dead man.

The witnesses drew thongs from around the waists of their costumes. Each man stroked the shoulder of his neighbour with a knotted cord, caressingly, in time to the muted rhythms of the drums. Then more sharply. The tempo quickened. They scourged, they flailed. They groaned in ecstasy of pain. Soon the thin white robes were criss-crossed with dark, wire-grid patterns: relics to be cased for future interpretation, premature miracles. They howled and chanted. They writhed. They twitched like monkeys. Baron-Samedi stood silent, his arms folded across his naked chest.

Iddo led them. He was their voice. They were his echo. This was his place. This was where he surfaced. As Amin hid among the Arabs, the hereditary slavers, and Hercules among the women, so Iddo faded from sight among these colonists of Christ, the huntsmen of aboriginals. He was the only diamond of life in the swamp island, the last redoubt of a dying faith. The white
eyes of the dancers revealed his glory. He roared his latinate responses. He was on fire. The lanterns polished his flesh to leather. He was varnished in man-sweat. He was worshipped.

But the red wind was angry. An irreversible prediction. The deck of limey birdsnot screens warned of falling markets, collapse, disaster; and the markets obeyed this failsafe logic. Sell, sell, sell! The wind screamed out of a tumbling fiscal vortex. Unload wheat. Get out of coffee. Dump rubber. Shaft property. Hailstorms of alphabet glitch. The spook tornado swept up everything in the world that was not chained to the ground. Bread loaves, umbrellas, grandfathers. Wounded branches bleeding resin, gale-torn limbs, whole forests thrashed against the armoured walls: in opposition to this trashy exploitation of a primal power. (Slash and squirm novels, gut-bursting orgies of special effects!) In the black dome the stars threatened to shake free from their fixed positions. The wires were snipped on the abacus of time. Professor Hawking, directly beneath us, was building his argument to its climax. And when those radiant connections fused… light would become truth, truth light: it would stretch, bend,
warp
. We would be damp spaghetti-vests hanging from a tree.

The surviving dwarf crawled down a sandy avenue that penetrated the carpet of skulls. He held out twin bowls for Iddo's inspection: a bowl of salt and a bowl of sugar. All feeding is a search for essence. Food is never more than a disguise. Exercise for unhealthy bowels. Iddo revolved a thumb in the sugar, withdrew it without tasting. He drove his tongue – to the root – deep into the crystals of salt: a fluorescent fish, a crusted poignard. He bared his teeth. The choice was made. The sugar bowl was smashed with a single blow. Sticky grains scattering on to the skulls; sharp-edged slivers of porcelain falling without divination.

Bearers advanced on the throne. Iddo settled himself; accepted, from Baron-Samedi, the Papal crown. Placed it upon his own head. Three times the throne was raised. Three times the trumpet sounded. Ancestors acknowledged him. His title was made
known. The Pope whispered his new name to the dwarf. And the dwarf announced it.
Cephas Agassu Ogu
. The penitents kneeled to receive their communion.

I was beginning to have some slight misgivings about my oft-stated policy of witnessing anything and everything, taking whatever was put in front of me. Those excuses would stand no longer. They were a cop-out, the hyena journalist's justification for paddling in horror. We have to take full responsibility for what we choose to see. My choice of action, on the other hand, was strictly limited. I could observe or I could shut my eyes, block my ears; refuse all belief. Claim the privileges of the condemned cell. We were very close to the edge. It might be prudent to accept zombie status, give up our souls – before we slid helplessly across the border and became participants, or even sacrifices, in the abomination that was about to occur.

The light shared my doubts. It drained from the sky in cracks of rust, rivulets of morbid purple. No longer the irradiating waves of our familiar sun but a sulphurous heart-scum, the memory of an exiled planet: sullen heat from a core of apostate metal. The pyramid chamber had loosed itself from its host, the Magnum Tower.
We were floating free
. The glass shields started to sweat, to melt, turn back to water. We were at the mercy of pre-human transactions between excommunicated elements. Wind had captured the Island. The Wild Hunt ravaged the sky fields, romped unchallenged; the red-grey Dogs of Annwfn,
Cwn Wybr
, howled to the dead in us, bringing the ghosts out of our skin: a procession of lost fathers. The flooded river covered all trace of the drowned lands. The Isle of Doges had nothing more to say. It had served its purpose. It was deleted.

Davy kicked at the door of the elevator, aiming his blows at the crossed keys. He pedalled in air, lashed out. There was not the faintest rattle of submission.

Imar had never feigned an interest in the climax of this video nasty. He rejected it. It was not happening; fast-forwarded to oblivion. He hunched his shoulders against the whole performance.
He squatted in a corner, plaintively calling with his penny whistle on the wisdom of snails. Tracks of luminescent gum oozed from his jacket and across the glass, a filigree of unresolved impulses; but the beasts themselves, the guides, would not appear. Neither martial arts, nor the quaint visions of primitive molluscs, could aid us. Some action, too fictional to command belief, nagged at the extreme limits of my consciousness. It refused to come any closer.
Trust me
, it said. Only the imagination itself can rescue you from this labyrinth of mirrors. You have willed it,
you
must break it.

I turned to the chamber, hoping that my heretical qualms would have tempered the action. Shut your eyes and it'll go away? Bishop Berkeley was comprehensively refuted: the unthinkable was the only channel still in play. The dwarf was riding towards the Papal throne on the neck of a goat. He was supported by two penitents. He bowed to his kneeling followers. He gestured, and blessed them. He flicked droplets of water into their faces from a large leaf. Baron-Samedi halted his progress, grasping the goat by the horns. He spoke to the animal. It reared up, as if struck with a crop. It stood on its hind legs, a man in furry jodhpurs; it boxed the air – tipping the dwarf down among the appreciative skulls.

Rumpelstiltskin, the bruised pet, grew whimsical; cavorting among the penitents, lifting the skirts of their robes, pinching them, or darting his tongue at their buttocks. The drummers allowed their rhythms to ape him in his eccentric flight: their fingers creeping across the hide, then rushing in a crescendo of excitement as the sanctified fool… reamed hairy vertical smiles.

The dwarf sprang to loosen a belt, rip open a habit that revealed the body and sex of a woman.
Voduû-si
, a consort of the gods. No stalk-legged hireling, painted, and shaved to the taste of fashion; she stood firm – strong bellied, scarred by life, shockingly real: her blue vein clusters, her creases, her thick black thatch of curls. Her breasts were full and heavy, not exercised into some pneumatic mode. She
was
. Neither virgin, nor victim. She
participated here as an equal partner. There were demands she wanted to articulate. She stood naked before them, as they were naked before her. The only indignity was that her face, her identity, remained hidden within a conical hood.

La-place
lifted his snake staff and crashed it against the ground. The whole congregation followed his beat. And they chanted.
Cephas
,
Agassu
,
Ogu
.
Cephas
,
Agassu
,
Ogu
.
Cephas Agassu Ogu
.
Cephas Agassu Ogu
.
CephasAgassuOgu
.
CephasAgassuOguCephas-AgassuOguCephas
… Faster, faster.
Faster
. It became a single sound. A manifestation of the wind. In that long rush of breath the wind gained access to the chamber. Curled itself familiarly around the upraised staff.

Cephas rose from his throne, lion king, priest-emperor, flung out his arm. He opened wide his mouth and roared with mad laughter. Roared and shook. Roared until the congregation grew silent and trembled in fear.

Baron-Samedi, saluting in turn the woman and the goat, threw back his tailcoat and drew out, with a showman's flourish, the severed head of the dwarf, the arbitrarily remaindered sexer. He held it over the prostrated white-robed figures, like an owl lantern. They twisted their faces deeper into the sand.

The skull had a tongue in it, and spoke. A liquorice teapot: its jaws clattered. Baron-Samedi played ventriloquist to the mesmerized flock. The skull jabbered: the morse of castanets. ‘Beware, Cephas – bathed in glory. King and martyr. Arch-impostor. Beware, Agassu. Blood god, patron of waters. Beware, Ogu – of the Beast who is coming. The
dajjal
killed by Jesus at Lud. Mahdi, false redeemer, speared on the twelfth step of the staircase. Believe in nothing, deny nothing. Neither omens, nor portents. I am a prophet foretelling a prophet.'

This mock-Cawdor millennial rap was terminated when the dwarf-fool snatched his brother's head and carried it away upon his shoulder, setting his own face into a mask of alabaster, letting the skull speak for him. Or yelping with the bloody egg in chorus, duetting, chanting; reverberating like an oracular cave.
He wore a strange apron sown with a sporran of lead, the kind of self-constructed garment that early x-ray technicians adopted to protect their gonads. He bowed before Cephas, and placed the head – as a trophy – in his emperor's capacious hands. But, as soon as the great man was occupied with silencing the loquacious caput, the dwarf opened the jewel-crusted Papal robe and tied it behind Cephas's back with a silver tassel.

The goat is sprinkled with water. The woman feeds him with palm leaves. Baron-Samedi conducts the wedding. Now the extent of Cephas's urgency is evident to his shocked subjects. Time is repulsed, withdraws. Faces appear on the surface of the woman's crisply ironed hood. Dreams that the dead dream. Snatched moments. Suspended memories. Illusory frames promising more than they can deliver. ‘This is me. Now and for ever. This is the truth.' All the ages of the woman in a flicked concertina of static images. Mary Butts in London. A party face, flashing with laughter. Red-gold hair. Illusion of movement. Cocteau's Paris: surrounded by gulls, the ghosts of her young men. They perch on her lap. The Abbey. Heat. Scorn. Solitude. The light drowned in a western ocean. Sennen. Ignoring the camera's tired inquisition. Lifeless, without interest. Edith Cadiz. The face in performance. Face of terror. Well Street. Fire-window. The park. Face of death. White linen. Earth crumbling into her open mouth. Alice.