Iain Sinclair - Downriver

The ascent began as soon as Davy spoke the word ‘key’: our stomachs turned, and we shot irreversibly up towards the sanctum sanctorum . We drifted past open-plan terraces on which scarlet cardinals sat at their consoles, revising history, tapping Index-approved lies into the everlasting files, wiping all unauthorized versions. They translated agency reports into dog latin, sensually airbrushing the rogue images.

We were invisible. The clerks looked through us: an unoccupied throne in an empty elevator. We were unremarked even in the halls of the torturers. Heretics dancing in electrified baths did not turn to us for recompense. We could not smell the crackling pork flesh of the scorched sinners.

Wind demons surrounded the Magnum Tower, frantically wavering between a celebration of this latest blasphemy and the desire to tear the whole stack out of the ground. Turbulence surged and spat. A night-crow’s head on the body of a feathered snake. It shuddered the windows, uttering threats; so soon to be performed. It butted and stamped. Something had been released that could not be earthed. The Cardinals had let a virus escape from their chained units: an unripe grub was eating the Books of the Law, reproducing itself, feeding on fear, marrying the operatives to their terminal screens. Whatever they imagined was made instantly visible. The wind rippled in a wave of pandemic chlorophyll from screen to screen, floor to floor, face to face, absorbing all their attention. It gave form to their worst nightmares. Cinema-generated plagues shattered the curved glass. New rat species were conceived from forgotten bacterial formulae. Pasturella pestis : deadly creatures evolved to justify the sound of those words. And they bit like corrupted saws. White growths manacled the wrists of the Cardinals as they struggled, screaming, to drag themselves from their keyboards. Orange bile seeped from the wires: they slashed them, like so many living vines, in a fever to break free. A low apple-green radiation licked at their wrinkled eyelids: their genitals withered to worms of ash. Dead statistics and natural disasters poured, unchecked, over their masks of terror.

We were nothing. Unseen, we rose through the vertebrae of the Tower like the three Jews in Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. And the fire did not know us. If we had come so far it was because our report had no external significance. We were summoned as witnesses to confirm the validity of the event that was about to be consummated. We were here because the powers wanted us to be here.

A fourth man was with us. A disembodied voice. The euphuistic rhetoric of Fr Healy intoning his prophecies of doom. Sheep’s wool saturated in lanolin. The sky-pilot’s warning: Fasten your seatbelts, extinguish your cigarettes .

‘Brothers,’ said the voice of Fr Healy, ‘the time has come for you to leave the mundane world behind. You have been elected — for your singular qualities of imagination, courage and copper-bottomed stupidity — to be flies on the wall: the expendable, disinterested third eye at our glorious ceremony. And it will cost you nothing more than your preposterously unconvincing lives.’

The lift had come to rest. We were within the Magnum pyramid. But only as far as the line of our chests. We were stuck into the chamber like men buried in sand. No more of the lift emerged than was needed to form the surface of an altar or shrine. We could see everything, but we were powerless; we could not intercede. Neither was there any possibility of escape.

‘We have stood St Peter’s Holy City on its head and pitched our tent among the stars. The business of the world is now far beneath us. We are purified, and ready to bring forth a New Order.’ Fr Healy’s words no longer required any physical voice. We salivated obediently, like dogs wired to a bell.

VII

La-place , the master of ceremonies, stepped towards us, machete upraised, tongue like a dagger, leading a procession of white-hooded hunsi , penitents and magicians. Objects, which we could not clearly identify, were passed to him. He arranged them on the roof of the elevator: bowls, pitchers, candles, photographs tied with ribbons, live things that scratched.

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.