The Clay Dreaming (55 page)

He has gone for too long without sleep. His belly groans with hunger. Beyond exhaustion, only instinct now impels him. He neither knows nor cares where it is he walks – he walks to keep moving.

The coin only grows heavier.

Sarah looked towards the window. The barest ray of light filtered through the filthy air. The city bled in from the outside – smoke, and a fly. What must it be, late morning?

Lambert’s body shifted and grumbled. Sarah, unsure if he was awake or sleeping, sat close by his bedside, at the old preacher’s worn writing desk; surrounded with paperwork, she made fresh notes.

Only a small child, and already Joseph Druce raged. The workhouse system was a notorious national scandal. Sarah imagined the effect of such appalling rigours at an impressionable age: character-forming, defining perhaps the wayward direction his future life would take.

Felled by a desperate fortune, Druce’s atonement for his crimes was to be a life of wandering. Under sentence of death, from the condemned cells at Newgate he was cast out of his country, not yet a man.

When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return to my house whence I came out.

And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished.

Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.

Poor Joseph Druce, mired in self-pity and self-hatred: stigma writ large in his face, he was an object of revulsion, frustrated at every turn.

Before the world began, God, that cannot lie, had promised the hope of life eternal. His immortal anger seemed to be all that survived.

Sarah arched her spine, stiff and aching. She studied the tumbling air currents. Dust came from the manuscript, laid open on her lap; from any and all of the books piled up in every part of the room; from everything, and everyone – bleeding out from the inside, the pain of a hundred years more or less. Pain, bitterness, frustration, rage: Druce was an unquiet soul crying with a loud voice, screaming and shouting yet seeming never to be heard, not by any who cared to help or were empowered to do so. In the end his screams became incomprehensible – all of his mad cries and gesticulations, only able to stir minor particles in the air.

‘In the dust, I write’…

Sarah shuddered against the awful silence. She listened harder. It was her father’s breath that stirred the dust. They were alone, just she and Lambert. Nothing else moved in the room except for motes, faintly visible, stirred by whatever currents and collisions there were – calamity and catastrophe occurring at an atomic level.

The golden coin burning a hole in his dilly bag is spent. Knocking down his winnings, Brippoki swigs from an earthenware jug of ‘Miller’s EXOTIC NEAR Neat Imported Gin (medicinal)’. So pleased is he with his purchase that he leaves the shop without thinking to wait for change.

The shopkeeper, having assured himself it is no
jeton
or brassy Cumberland Jack, is doubly happy to accept the George III guinea in payment. No longer legal tender but money of account, its value is fixed at 21 shillings.

Liquid fire, or whatever it is, sold under the name of gin, London’s own demon, serves its purpose. It takes away Brippoki’s pains by giving him new ones. If nameless oblivion is to be his fate, he will drink to his departure beforehand.

The church bells are ringing, one, two, another one. The sandstorm covers over everything. Although, overhead, it does seem a little lighter than before…

He takes another swig. The Fire of God is healing, cleansing.

Whose God, he cannot say.

Brippoki clambers over the side of London Bridge, settling clumsily onto a broad stone parapet above one of the piers. Slugging gin, he drinks on an empty stomach. Small insects dither in the air above his crown. Specks of drifting ash settle on his skin. The sky shifts around and about. He is but a tiny black speck, sitting always at its centre.

Gunyas
out on the marsh set down roots, grow in size, tree and meadow disappearing. Buried bones harden earth. Soil turns to shit, wood to stone. London Bridge is rising and falling, rising, falling.

He becomes dizzy with the unfolding spectacle – movement so rapid it approaches stillness, immobility so absolute it assumes blinding speed. Juddering steps and profound pulsations pound out the rhythms of the universe.

The Dreaming.

Breech-birthed in silence, from out of a boiling sea, the great bald head of the Piebald Giant rises. Stone fingers arrest the Great Serpent’s curling progress. A livid blot, a rash, creeps along spreading arterial veins, striking out in every direction. Flushed with darker streams, they flow with obscure energy.

Brippoki answers the call of his Spirit Ancestors, wayfarers who planted first footsteps on the World. From the Creation comes the vision, and at the end is the vision fulfilled. Lifting up his arm, he pierces a large vein, drawing forth the salve of secondary holiness. His accelerated pulse makes the ritual blood spurt.

The campfires spin as the planets wheel, a whirl of beams and shadows – cool
Mityan
thick with flesh and thin in hunger, then burning Emu’s egg. Mud-summer madness; at its height comes the storm, very grievous. A blinding flash of jagged lightning, crashing bolts of thunder, not from the skies but rock to rock, a storm such as there was none like it since man was on the earth.

The storm is a shelter to him. Having created it, gladly he enters in. Brippoki rides it out, wind-walking.

Envious Old Father, hidden among clouds. His lolling tongue spills sacred, secret laws. The Great Serpent shoots venom into his veins. Whipcrack reflexes jolt with electricity, stars shooting spears of light. The black sky stone falls to earth, cracking open the heaving clay.

Flames surge from between his toes to run along the ground. Brush fire! Hot coals spill from under stairs, setting light to the many houses. Within the walls, the stones themselves cry out, and the timber, shrieking, answers. Rafters, ablaze, come crashing down. The conflagration razes. Explosions, screams of man and beast, stampede – the clashing of swords and the trampling of hooves.

Wave after wave of fire engulfs the city in flame.

The bells of a thousand churches ring in his ears, their tunes playing in reverse. Blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke, the light of the sun smothered turns to darkness. A blackened disc, outside edge blazing,
Mityan
moon hangs huge in a black sky – runs, the colour of blood.

Brippoki collapses onto the superheated stone, a thorn-devil, skin stained red. Blue sulphuric acid, the elixir refined of souls dead and dying, bubbles from his torn vein.

An eternal firestorm burns the skies scarlet, the horizon a bow of flame. The entire landscape is a furnace, and, ever-present at its core, the cool head of St Paul.

Heads, severed, driven onto spikes, line the battlements of a great stone gate. Blood streams down the walls, soaking the ground, a foaming fountain at his feet. The seething river too flows red, totemic. It rushes onward, fierce and furious, towards the lip of a bottomless drop, a howling nothing.

‘Let the past,’ frothed Lambert, ‘speak to the present. The day is come…when the present shall speak to the future.
Dies Irae!

‘“The great day of the LORD is near, it is near”,’ he warned. ‘“A day of wrath!”’

Sarah had to use all her weight to force him back down on the bed.

‘All creation awakes,’ shouted Lambert, ‘ready to answer judgement! The noise…’

‘Father?’

‘The rattling wheels…the whip and prancing horses…chariots, jumping…’

She had closed the window against the insidious air. She couldn’t do much about the noise. He grasped her roughly by the arms. His eyes, glassy though they stared directly, seemed to look right through her.

‘Look not so far away!’ she pleaded.

‘“They shall run to and fro in the city. They shall run upon the wall, they shall climb up upon the houses. They shall enter in at the windows like a thief.”’

‘W-what?’

‘“He that dasheth in pieces is come up before thy face!”’

Biblical quotes, she knew that – not any one passage, but from all over.

‘What did you –
Owww
!’ she cried.

His grip tightened. Eyes bulging as they searched her face, he held her very close.

‘You’re hurting…
Ungh
…’ Sarah managed to wrench herself free, and took a step back.

Lambert studied the ceiling, or perhaps the skies beyond, her presence already forgotten. ‘“Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision,”’ he wheedled, suddenly pathetic, ‘“for the day of the Lord is great, and who can abide it?”’

Sarah was thinking to try and engage him in conversation, when he again grew agitated.

‘“WOE to him that buildeth a town with blood, and stablisheth a city by iniquity! Woe to her that is filthy and polluted, to the oppressing city!”’

Sarah tried for calm, but any word she uttered or move she made seemed only to incite him further.

‘“The spoil of the poor is in your houses”,’ cried Lambert. ‘“Bones for bricks. Blood, the cement. WOE to the bloody city!”’ he shouted. ‘“Woe unto the wicked! It shall be ill with
you
…for the reward of your hands…the reward of your hands shall be given
you
.”’

The creases of his face became so deep, Sarah thought he would come apart.

‘“Testify!”’ he shouted. ‘“In the awful day of recompense, Repent! In sackcloth and ashes, Repent! Fasting, and with cries for mercy, Repent! Repent!”’

The prophet of despair lifted up his voice and screeched; helpless, useless, hopeless, Sarah buried her head in her hands.

‘“If we repent not,”’ he sighed, ‘“verily, we shall be inexcusable.” “And the LORD alone shall be exalted in that day…when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth.”’

A dull thudding sound forced her to look up. Hands above his head, Lambert rained blows on his exposed crown with frightening violence. Sarah leapt across the gap between them, landing bodily on the side of the bed. All of her papers fell on the floor. She paid them no heed. The blows from his punishing fists she took upon herself. Sarah hugged Lambert to her.

‘Howl!’ he cried. ‘“For merchant people cut down…all they that bear silver, cut off…their goods, booty, their houses…desolation”!’

Her slim body wracked with sobs, she pleaded with Lambert to stop. One might as well have commanded the tides to stop. Determined, he brooked no arguments.

‘“This
is
the rejoicing city that dwelt carelessly, that said in her heart, I
am
, and
there is
none beside me. How is she become a desolation, a place for beasts to lie down in! Every one that passeth by her shall hiss,
and
wag his hand.”’

Forcing herself upright, Sarah took her father’s shoulders between her two hands. Her face looked directly into his – his face, gathering blackness. Furiously she willed him love, so that he might regain his reason.

‘Remember,’ she gasped, ‘remember the story of Jonah and the gourd? “Doest thou well to be angry?”’

He returned only vacant looks. ‘“There is a multitude of slain,”’ he mumbled, ‘“a great number of carcasses…no end to the corpses. They stumble upon their corpses… Their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet, and their eyes shall consume away in their holes, and their tongues shall consume away in the mouth.”’

‘No!’ she said. ‘Oh, no…’

‘“The Almighty Disposer will stretch out his hand”…“make of Nineveh a desolation,
and
dry…like a wilderness…”’

Lambert gasped and fell back.

‘“Nineveh
is
of old…like a pool of water,”’ he croaked, weakly. ‘“Yet, they shall flee away. Stand, stand! they
shall
cry, but none shall look back”…“nations,
cut off…their towers, desolate…streets, waste, that none passeth by…there is no man…there is none inhabitant. She is empty…and void…and waste.”’

Head deep into the pillow, Lambert’s tongue curled back into his mouth. He was little more than shell.

The surface of the river is as flat as mirror glass. As above, so below – the reflected city lies silent, in ruin, a cracked dome at the centre. The crown of the Piebald Giant, bleached white, is no more than a shapeless, nameless rock pile, worn by winds and the sands of time.

Pale light, weak and failing, illuminates the scene. A great many broken buildings lie half-submerged in desert sands. Dense foliage wreathes the rest. Cormorant and
gau-urn
, the bittern, nest in the cracked rafters. Their voices sing from the windows, the woodwork all exposed. The numberless flocks of summers past, the spawning fish and all the wild beasts return.

A few paces distant a stranger sits, upright on a broken arch, rubble once part of the bridge now destroyed. He pauses from scratching marks onto a stone tablet to take in the awful beauty, peace, and quiet of his surroundings, sombre-seeming in his thoughts. Brippoki dares not approach for fear he may disturb him.

Is the fellow dark? Is he white? Brippoki cannot tell. The clothes he wears are like nothing ever seen. It almost seems for one moment he looks at himself – but that is how visions are. Asleep with eyes open, awake with them closed, he might even be a stone carving, an immobile statue.

The setting sun in one last burst tinges the pale ruins red.

From beneath the depths of West Monster Abyss and out of broken Shadwell, to the east, shadow creeps. Nurtured by day in the narrow alleyways, under arches, in damp corners of hidden courtyards, the terrors of black night unhitch themselves to come sliding forth. Stretching, lengthening, deepening, they roll across rooftops and slither down stairwells, joining, meeting, growing – spreading. Run together they form pools, above which solid swarms take to the air. The windows, gathering soot, black themselves out. Stone-bark grooves of petrified tree trunks run with a liquorice-sticky juice. The same greasy filth that seeps out of the pipes flows from swollen drains. In the middle of the streets, it meets. Each and every crevice is filled in. Scurrying figures flee in vain, swallowed up whole – disappeared within. Others, crow circling, turn silhouette. The streets and houses drown. Lanes are black, the immense buildings black. The bone factories pump out black smoke.