Mah Barking Spider was as big as a dinner plate and fitted the coop exactly. Ah fed him mainly on house-flies, with the occasional earwig or bluebottle, and kept the coop unner mah bed for the first day.
Ah did not leave mah room for three days and three nights.
After a time, there in the dark, ah would find and strike a match along the side of the coop, holding it up close to the perforations so that the dancing flame would cast its quivering light within.
With lungs raw from acrid fumes, ah would draw to and peer in, into the coop and into its weird orbits – those pits, those black-water wounds – unblinking, fearless…
Again! Again! Dizzy with sulphurous air. Again!
Ah believe ah could have left this life by way of those damp, drugged pits – the mires of its eyes – those onyx pools – dragged down by the pull of those dark-lit spirals. For they held me! They did! Paralysed! Numb! Blisters bubbled on fore and thumb. Little black cinders littered mah sheets. Ah listened again – again ah peered in.
It was such a truly wondrous spider. Jet-black, it was, its caudal region given over to a silky ebony hair. Only its eyes flashed, but blackly too, like raw coal or iced soot – blackly, ah say, and only sometimes. But it always shunned me. Never once did ah see it move, in the coop. Never once did ah hear it bark.
On the fourth day ah decided to shift the coop outside.
The silence of the Barking Spider was destroying me.
First ah thought it was the coop that displeased him.
Then ah thought that maybe he was just a mute like me.
Next, waking in a cold sweat on the second night, ah was haunted by another thought, a thought which hung heavy in mah heart – perhaps it was waiting for me to speak first? O lonesome spider, if only ah could have let you know…
Finally, ah took him outside, the coop in a pillowcase. Ah sat on the log near the one-armed gallows-tree and unbagged the coop. The coop shone in the sun like a silver helmet and a spear of light did flash upon it.
Ah checked for crows.
Opening the coop by way of halving it ah shook the spider from the hubcap and little strips of newspaper fluttered down like streamers, and the corpses of a hundred insects fell like wedding rice about me.
Mah Atra virago landed right side up, on his feet, in the manner of all dropped spiders, or so ah have found.
And without so much as a nod, mah spider crawled the length of the log and disappeared into the cane.
And ah sat there awhile, just so, on the log.
And then after a while or so, ah sauntered up the slope to the junk-pile, with nothing all that pressing to do.
And ah tossed the two halves of the coop over and mulled around.
Ah roasted in the sun.
BOOK THREE
DOGHEAD
Time is pressing. Yes. Time… is… pressing. Strange that, for it has never pressed before. Not once, that ah recall. Not once in mah twenny-eight years of living. Not once that ah recall. Twenny-eight years – that’s roughly ten thousand laps of a clock-face – Jesus! When ah think that ah’ve sat on mah dumb ass and listened through eighteen million ticks and eighteen million tocks of the idiot-faced clock with nothing to call mah own but a shit-load of time and now, at the hour of mah dying when ah could use a little room – what happens? It’s ‘Move along, chucklehead – wind her up, Jack.’ It’s ‘Let’s get fucken pressing!!’
Not so easy, all this dying, not so easy at all. O for a decent lungful of air. Trussed up in this mud’s crush and suck, but floating too, awash in a galaxy of constricting atmosphere, mah innards tossed by waves of nausea as they do battle with the closing fingers of mah ribs, almost as if skin and bone had married to become a fiendish corset intent on seeing me sick up mah gizzards, mah heart, mah lungs, the lot. Bile is steadily rising in mah throat, apparently in accordance with mah descent. O mah descent! O mah descent! As in life, in death, all downward spent! Blades of pain from eye to brain. Ah gag on the effluvium. Poison vapours coil like serpentine wraiths about me. But they do not scare me anymore. Not with their mutterings. Not with their fondling. Ah have survived the hauntings of more freakish beasts than these. Ah say fuck this phosphorous greensick gas! Let it roll upon me! Within me! Through me! Mah brain is a grimy sponge saturated with this piss-pond’s poison vapours! What does it matter if mah death-time reminiscences are coloured a little by the sulphurous miasma of this pit? Ah can brave it out. Ah mean, ah never asked for an easy exit.
No sir! Fuck! Who wants to go in their sleep? Not me! Not Euchrid Euchrow, son of God. Give me a death ah can remember for the re… Shit! No! Ah say let me pop off with a bang! No bog, no bug-a-boos, no bounty hunters, no-bloody-nothing can rob me of this. Because ah know a better place awaits me. There below. O yes. There below this pit’s skin. A bliss God lays His children in. Damn! Mah skull is polluted with sickly poetry. Poisoned with sing-song rhymes. There are days when every thought that passes through mah mind will bring another, in its step, in rhythm, stress and rhyme. Listen.
‘It seems you’re inching unner, sir, inching slowly unner
But what it is you’re inching in, ah cannot help but wonder.’
O booming voice up in the clouds, to speak cuts like a knife
Ah’m simply inching into Death, while inching out of Life.
‘You’re wrong, you poor deluded boy, True Death’s up here with Me
Hell’s dungeons boil below you, child, Eternal Agony!’
O climb down off your crap-hill, O fiend hid in the sky
You’re Lucifer! The Great Deceiver! Your word is but a lie!
You will not fool me anymore with your wrath and rolling thunder
’Tis God that stands behind mah wheel and inches me now unner.
The bog it yawned and pulled me down, mah body trussed in chains
And Satan sighed and shook his head, played harp amongst the flames.
‘It’s Hell up there in Heaven too, for all that that is worth.
Heaven is just a lie of mine to make it Hell on Earth.’
As ah said, it ain’t so easy dying – but ah’ll tough it out.
Do you think ah’m hedging? Ah mean – am ah hedging? Bullshit’.
Do you think that ah don’t know what’s running through your minds? Well let’s straighten some simple truths that seem to be getting mighty twisted. Ah did not sabotage the water tower. Ah mean, for Christ’s sake, the goddamn stilts were riddled with woodrot. In any case, me and Pa were close. God rest his soul. Perhaps they crept up from town and did it? Ah can’t, in fairness, directly blame them but ah wouldn’t put it past them. Would you?
Ah’m no killer, no. Well, yes ah am. OK – so ah killed a few hobos last year. But one thing at a time and each thing in its place.
Do you know that you will be a party to mah inevitable and irreversible demise? No? Well, oil your shotguns and grease your machetes and noose up a nice fat rope, for, know it or not, you are the ones that will hunt me down – yes! Hunt me down and kill me. Hunt me down and kill me. You hate me and you don’t know why. But one thing at a time and each thing in its place. Now to return, to the grave where mah daddy lay for the rest of his days. For the rest of his days.
Ah lay and lay for days and days. The sweet and gravid earth, once flattened by the whack and the slap of mah spade’s back, now bore across its length the crooked imprint of mah body. For ah lay like some forgotten unburied, unmoving there, atop of it all, so dead. And ah swear ah heard those there beneath me, mah cheek pillowed in the soil, through the days and through the nights. A little comfort, a little crying, a little eating of the clay.
Ah simply could not leave that grave – though ah did not lie in wait, for ah expected nothing, nothing at all. For you must unnerstand that ah was possessed by a torpor of inexpectation. Ah was unable to resist that sweet, cool place upon the mound – not just because of the weird music rising from within that seemed to sap mah life-blood, mah strongness, but – and this may have occurred to you – bec
ause ah was afraid. Afraid for mahself, now that Pa had left me all alone. The junk-pile, the backyard, the burnt-out Chevy, the porch, the goddamn shack and its three rooms, the front yard, the gallows-tree, the track leading into the town, the cane, those acres on rotation – ah can’t go on. Ah can’t go on. The animate and the inanimate appeared to me in sinister collusion, as if enjoying mah weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Ah had suffered for days and for nights and mah bones waxed old and aching during mah erratic slumber. For a day and a night the rankling hand of the deviant was heavy upon me. Excruciating pain developed at mah heart, equal to kill me. And all the while that ah lay there, the hum-mutterances of the dead, the knoll’s rowdy gestation rose through, with a hundred half-unnerstood, half-relevant utterances.
‘The wicked have many sorrows.’
‘The God of Glory thundereth.’
‘We are counted as sheep from the slaughter.’
‘Destroy me not with sinners and bloody men.’
And – and, well, from the clamour of those smaller, lesser voices came the voice of God – and it was – it was awesome – it was – it was like Psalm 29. You know, the one about His voice breaking the cedars and shaking the wilderness.
He called me servant. He said, ‘Servant make for Me a wall.’ He told me that they would come and that ah must keep them out. He said, ‘Servant build it high, build it out of wood and wire.’ He told me to build it round. He said within would be mah kingdom and that ah would wear the crown. He told me to fill it with the faithful and make for it a name.
And ah took a bone – a skull – and called the kingdom:
DOGHEAD
Doghead. Mah fortress of refuge. Mah Kingdom by appointment.
Unner command by Him – The Great Preserver and Righter of Wrongs.
His many voices, sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted, spoke the most amazing things. Most amazing. Things mah head can barely contain. And things most terrible. Sworn secrets, so terrible, so amazing – truths of such ineffable trueness – whew! Ah say, too many, too mighty and too damn immaculate to be sullied by such a crooked ruck of cunts as you. You who will deny me more than thrice, by God. O yes, Mister! And you, Miss! You who pucker even now your traitor’s lips, your Judas kiss!
Each and every deviant thought harboured in mah head was chased from mah brains by His holy choir – His chanters. All obscenity, all the degenerate heavy breathing that for so long had wheezed and whispered its ugly air inside of here – inside mah head – was drowned in the choofing stress and metre of His command. The sure choof of a train, it was, its ictus even-handed, almost hypnotic – a train on a straight, level track, neither speeding up nor slowing, no, just the piston’s pumping fists – build-uppa-wall build-uppa-wall – on and on, in monostich again and again, then build-it-up-tall build-it-up-tall build-it-up-tall, over and over and on and on, they’re-comin-to-call they’re-comin-to-call, over and over and onward and onward.
The wall itself took a good six months to complete, ah figure – ah mean, winter followed autumn followed that bugger of a summer when the building all began. It was a big wall. It was an awesome wall. It reminded me of a saw-toothed serpent consuming its own tail or some quilled eel feigning sleep but ready, in a instant, to bite. In the winter, when the wind hit at the tin and the clappers, the great ringed beast would bark and gnash at each blusterous advance, as if the wind were not to be seen as any less of a threat than the others – the eradicators, the real intruders, the grim snuffers – you.
Standing in the turret that ah built upon the roof of mah clapboard castle, ah would turn a slow circle and run mah eyes along the great wall for clues – clues to be found in the planks and assorted timbers, the stacks of fruit crates and tea-chests, the pickets and the odd piece of trellis, the great slabs of corrugated tin and steel sheets, paint-pot lids, boarded-over window frames, the doors of the Chevy, cyclone wire, chicken wire, barbed wire, posts and pillars, scaffold scraps, ropes and cables, bottles broken and unbroken and so on. Ah could always see, even after half a year of back-breaking toil, areas there in the wall that were clearly not as sturdy as they should have been – yes, clearly weak, and hence affording the chance of a trespass, whether by a flapping picket or a buckled tin sheet, a cross-beam come loose or the fraying of a piece of rope on which, God knows, the fortitude of the entire superstructure might depend.
In fact, and it is safe to tell you this now – safe for me, that is – right up to the last few pre-terminal days the wall was not nearly as impenetrable as it appeared to be. It had a little more bark than bite, perhaps. In any case if the interlopers, or should ah say the failed interlopers, had possessed a little more pluck, they could have been triumphal in whatever it was they were up to.
Still, irregardless of the wall’s specious aspect, it did its job. It drew a line between me and mah persecutors. Yes, although ah knew they lay in wait for me beyond the wall, the shambolic and unsteady bulwark with its crown of ragged tin fins and rusted nails – a pauper’s crown, trussed in barbed wire, like Christ’s, but studded with shards of green and amber glass – prevented the treachery that festered on the outside from poisoning mah Kingdom. No! More! From poisoning their King!
It was a weird feeling that crept over me as ah looked down from mah lofty turret – a feeling of accomplishment, of pride, because first off it was a fucken mean-looking wall and that made me proud, of course. But ah guess what really brought a throb to the throat was that ah knew there was another King looking down from on high, just like me, only higher, kinglier, and He was seeing this – seeing me and nodding knowingly to himself and thinking, ‘That boy has done me proud,’ and lying back, lying back on His cloud and thinking, ‘Yes, ’tis nearly time to send him out. ’Tis nearly time to send him out.’
Ah did other things in that time of building up. Other things, such as tearing down. After Pa left me alone, the shack’s interior became insufferably repellent to me. The killing-walls of the living-room repulsed me. Nor could ah enter mah own wretched coop, the dying-room, the blooding-hutch. And the dread ah felt toward their room, the master room, consumed me.
One brave day ah managed to open its door but an inch, only to recoil, mah mind swimming in hideousness, even though the despot, mah Ma, had been dethroned and done away with so very long ago. That piss-eyed sow, you know, she wasn’t gone – not completely, not in total. No. Not at all. Her putridity remained. There in the rank and rot of her room. The trapped air, that was hers. You could taste it. You could smell it. You could feel it. There in that one quick whiff was enough sensory information to jog a shitload of ugly re-runs, flickering through mah head in all their posthumous repulsion – pictures of Ma – mind-sadists dealing brutal brain-slaps. Ah recoiled, like ah said, lurching through the front room and out the screen door, mah guts heaving as ah slumped across the rail to gurgle a thin rope of bile across the thistle, the sweet pea and the periwinkle.
Slumped across the rail, ah let mahself hang, jack-knifed at the waist, arms dangling inches above the pearly trickle of gall before me. Mah face flushed at the first faint fill of blood, pulsed hotly as the seconds passed, and ah remained just so, allowing mah head to throb and to ache. Ah, the blood-beat of life, and a solution slowly growing.
That same afternoon ah bashed out all the plank walls of the shack’s interior. By nightfall neither mah room nor their room existed and ah sat exhausted in the middle of a clapboard shell. Large now and different. Nothing remained of theirs – the bed, her armchair, the planks, all part of the outer wall now. Even the bad air had moved out, all fusty and fumid, moved out as good air moved in.
Only the trunk that belonged to Pa remained. Ah had dragged it into the middle of the shack and it sat at mah feet, heavy with its unknown quantity, mumchance of its inner mysteries, padlocked at the lip.
The key to the chest was not to be found amongst the rubble of the day’s demolishing, ah knew that, for the key was with Pa, unnerground, deep in his pocket somewhere, lost
for ever of its lock. Ah mused to mahself as ah took a crowbar to the chest’s lock-plate. Where was mah key? In whose pocket did it sleep? Was it above ground, up here, or was it lying beneath the surface, down here? Am ah, at this moment, leaving it or joining it? Surely joining it, for ah have not come across it above ground, nor it me. What about this truant key, that could turn the mechanism of mah facility of speech? Where is it?
With a protracted groan the lock-plate gave way and the padlock dropped with a thud to the hard sod floor. O, if it were only that easy for me.
From the hills came the eerie bay of a wild dog and ah sat a minute, in silence, listening to it and staring into the chest.
A label on the inside of the lid told me that the chest had originally belonged to a Captain Theodore Quickborn, and this chest, this old discarded junk-pile relic, judging by the hundred faded badges that it boasted, had travelled to ports east and west, north and south, far and wide, along raging latitudes and unending longitudes, to wind up its uncertain journey here, in a remote inland valley, on a mountain of trash so many miles from the sea.
Captain Quickborn’s all seemed to be contained within this chest. Why its active life had ended here, a hundred miles from the sea and the sand, became clear to me the moment ah began sifting through his salty belongings. Ah gave thanks.
First ah removed the Captain’s jacket, wrapped in flakey, age-stained paper. It was navy blue with gold buttons and heavy golden epaulettes, shaped like keyholes or fantastic padlocks, each fringed in a rim of gleaming tassels – two great, gilded chips squatting heavy on each shoulder. A weave of gold and silver braid adorned cuff, lapel and collar. It was spotless, as if it had been cleaned and pressed especially for the term of its redundancy. ‘Why?’ you ask. ‘Exactly!’ ah reply. Because the jacket’s real life had only just begun. It lay, in wait, for me! Me! ME! MEEEE!
A little roomy, perhaps, but with the cuffs rolled up and a leather belt pulled in tight to the waist, the bone of mah chest pushed out, cock-like, it fitted me fine, as God knew it would.