Iain Sinclair - Downriver

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.