Kicking sand in the face of Jehovah
Copyright 2015 Lee A Jackson
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The ground itself is swallowing them. It’s not supposed to be like this. Sprinting across the gravel yard, I lunge into a sliding dive across the ground, an ungraceful pebble skimming over a sea of stone. I feel each individual stone cutting into me as I scrape the surface. My hands, knees elbows are all bleeding raw, the skin having succumbed to the razor sharp gravel beneath me. ‘Forget the pain,’ I tell myself, ‘forget the pain.’ My outstretched hands reach for the flailing arms of mother. I grab her around her wrist. She is descending, slipping away into the belly of Hell.
How to describe such frantic malaise, other than that they are sinking? The ground, the sacred grounds of the Church just opened up and started swallowing people one by one. People. My friends, my family. My wedding party.
I’ve just seen my father disappear completely. Sucked into a hole that opened up beneath his feet. Down he went yelling, scrambling in futile efforts to climb out, calling mothers name desperately for help. No-one reached him in time. The mouth in the earth was too fast. Down he went, and the earth formed over him.
Solid, closed.
From my vantage point upon my belly, I just see the wrists of mother as I cling onto her. I can just see the cuffs of her olive green suit, the one she spent all her savings on, depriving herself of a holiday, just to see me wed. Now that costly suit is sinking, sinking fast with mother. The stains mother! Think of the dry cleaning I hear my mind screaming at her.
Ridiculous.
My teeth are clenched in effort. I don’t speak. I do cry. Too heavy. Too much gravity pulling down, down, down. Her French-manicured nails dig into the palms of my hands as she dies into the earth. She slips away. Before I can scramble to my feet to look down the hole, the earth reforms and leaves only a solid bed of gravel where once my mother stood.
I turn back to look at the Church. My bride-to-be stands in her white virginal dress. She is clinging onto the door-frame of the building for support, her legs no doubt weak. Her eyes are fixed in front of her, tears streaming down her face. Dark mascara trails upon her pale skin. She is pointing a trembling finger.
Out of the corner of my eye I catch the sight of another sinker. The subject of my bride-to-be’s pointing finger. A gaunt man in a grey suit. He’s going down. The bride’s father. I turn towards him ready to pounce, but the craters are forming rapidly everywhere. Everyone is going down at once. The prospective Father-in-Law, too far away to save from this absurd injustice.
My sister, two feet away, already up to her neck.
Aunt Heather, waist deep.
Uncle Sam head and shoulders above the ground.
Belle, my bride said it would probably rain on our wedding day. That would be the least of my worries right now. The skies are clear, but I wonder if it is raining on the underworld and maybe it is retaliating by looking for extra fuel to stoke its fires. Whatever is going on, Hell is being raised and the ensuing screaming and wailing collaborate to make a storm on this bright day. It’s a tornado of horrific noise.
There goes David, Suzy, Jason and Saul. Bessie, Anthea, Thomas and Paul. Goodbye all. Into the uncharted fathoms of the voids they slump.
My vision, mind and body are in a whirl. I am spinning to face each sinking person, my mind reaching out to save every one of them, but my jumbled limbs remain motionless. Soon arms and tops of heads, the last of which I don’t catch sight of who they belonged to, disappear completely. Almost slowly, almost comically.
Surreal.
Soon I stand alone in this courtyard of the Church, with only the company of Belle’s tortured sobbing reaching me from the doorway of the building. I’m the last man standing on this platter, Satan having picked the best fruit from the Lord’s garden.
For sure the Devil is behind this.
A prank of his, kicking sand in the face of Jehovah.
The vicar is nowhere to be seen. Did he go under or did he run? Did the Lord whisk his sheep to safety? I look towards the gateway to the Church. The sky all above is blue, above the gate and beyond, everything has turned black. Has the whole world outside drifted into some cosmic void, and here alone stands my bride and I? My spouse to be. My wife for life, Belle, who is now lying on her stomach pounding the cursed earth with bleeding fists, and wailing.
Why not me? Why not her? Am I not even fit enough for the underworld’s palate? Am I that rotten? But isn’t that the desired dish for the denizens below? I stare at the black sky above the Churchyard gates. I fall to my knees as of their own accord, the iron gates creak themselves open.
For sure the Devil is behind this.
Here she comes now.
She walks towards me. I watch her sashaying through the gates. A long black cape wrapped around her, head bowed, pitch black hood obscuring her face. She comes to stand in front of me and raises her long slender finger pointing at me. Slowly she lifts her head, examining me inquisitively.
I stare at the vision in black. My mind looks beyond. With taught skin of red, and eyes aglow with flames, she comes. With fang-filled mouth and razor-sharp horns crowning her head she comes.
The Devil is in the form of a woman, and man is at her mercy.
Billowing smoke swirls around her. She walks towards me, a blazing comet stepping from the black void. The Devil in a black cape is coming for me. I am on my knees, unknowing in which direction to look for salvation. I can only stare ahead of me, right at the form of the Devil. Whimpering cries I can hear behind me. My bride. I am unable to help her because I am unable to turn. I feel frozen by the heat of this temptress of man. The dark figure raises her head. Under the hood only burning orbs can be seen against the unfathomable dark canvas.
But those eyes! Those eyes red with fire I know and I am transfixed. Under the hood of blackness I can see those orbs afire. Terror holds my hand. Friendly eyes of evil? The Devil in the black cape stops a metre in front of me. She pulls back her hood to reveal the face that holds within it those caustic eyes.
I have already cowered. Already shrunken so far into myself that I am climbing my spine to find a dark chasm in my head in which to hide. But light creates shadow. With the darkness comes light.
But no grotesque visage is revealed to me as the hood is pulled back. On my knees, unexpectedly I am not before a face to be feared, but instead a figure with a countenance I know. A face I covet. A face carved with carnal arts.
Hell I’ve looked into those eyes before, yes! When they were azure and fresh. She unties the cape from around her neck and lets it fall to the ground around her ankles.
I know that face.
I know that body.
I feel myself moving, titling backwards. Startled I topple onto my side on the gravel of the Churchyard. I squirm away. Satan has breached the final sanctuary, and there is nowhere left to hide. The cape has gone, and I am left with the sight of Mephistophelene before me, but her body is not right. Not right at all. My fantasies, forbidden raptures have lied to me. The soft skin that I longed for isn’t there, reality has been warped by vermilion, leathery skin clinging to her shapely figure. Scales and fissures upon her red arms and thighs like turbule
nt veins…
…It wasn’t meant to be this way.
I squirm over onto my back. I have my back to Hell. The gravel slowly grinds away my skin as I squirm. Then, fluttering down from the sky, like acid rain, the small squares of paper come. Light, yet heavy they fall onto my supine form. Individual pictures that tell the same tale in a different tongue. Thousands of candid snaps, of me, engaged in carnal relations with the succubus before me. But I am awake in the pictures. Am I awake now?
Upon me falls photograph after photograph of Mephistophelene and I naked, entwined. Fiction caught on film. Me with Helene as I knew her then. Down they pour, my fantasies of her and I together, my dreams. A hail, a maelstrom of illicit intercourse that I had created in my head. My fancies, my longings of being entwined with her, all made real. But unlike in my head, the photographs come without emotion, without substance. They are cold, unwelcome, unloving. Mephistophelene stands above me, arms aloft, summoning more shots. I begin to feel heavier than the world. The sex shots slowly bury me.
Around me, fertilised by unearthly delights the photographs are sucked down through the gravel into the earth. Instantaneously though, there springs forth blossoms of more images of forbidden rapture. Helene and I engaged in the heated rapture that I always imagined that it would be, but