With that I turned around and got the chalk out of my pocket, I quickly marked the door with a pentangle and stepped back into my spirit apartment.
My spirit apartment had seemed to grow and I was suspended somewhere in the middle of the room in height. I was wedged and stretched achingly between a row of pillars of ivory something wet and foaming pushed under my feet, giving me temporary relief by lifting them, then they fell back and I ached more, dangling. A wooden spear stabbed me in my side and I was lifted out, I pulled a piece of rotten cabbage away, that had caught over my eyes; and I realised I was suspended by my wound on a toothpick before the face of God, seated in my armchair, having been picked out of his foul grinning teeth.
I flapped my wings and I raced at him, putting in running motion my feet and arms but I did not move off the toothpick, instead my internal organs wrapped around it with the movement and I was roped there on my intestines, as by a row of sausages. God picked them off and dangled them on the giant tongue that had massaged my feet. The pain of the act was intense, burning; he swallowed my innards and grinned between closed teeth “sausages! Cumberland! You needed a shit!”
Still speared, too painful to move, he put me down pressing the toothpick into a cigarette butt in the ashtray, furiously and agonisingly I kicked out, falling over and billowing a cloud of ash that choked me and painted my face, showing him in a grimace my deadly little war mask.
God looked down at me, the veins in his eyes criss-crossed over and over until they stared back at me bright red and welling up with blood. Red tears dripped down his mask face twirling and forming symbols I had seen in the book of Thelema, before changing again into tattooed dollar signs on his cheeks deeply engraining themselves.
God took up a packet of cigarette papers from the table and tore them out one after the other, his snake like pupils looking around the room, occasionally glancing at me and grinning his too sharp teeth. He tore the papers so only thin strands with the gum on were left, then, having done this about ten times, carefully licking some of the papers with his tongue, he bound two cigarettes together in a crucifix, I meanwhile had been in too much pain to move or resist, he wrapped my small hands around the crucifix with more thin strips of gummed paper, then bound my legs to it, and propped me up and secured me in the dog ends in the ashtray.
God took a leafy, loose rolled, cigar out of the breast pocket of his wallpaper/ pinstriped business suit, he pursed his lips attentively at me as if he was going to blow a kiss, then he blew on the cigar lighting it. My nostril’s stung with the sickly burning. “You are important to me; this is what I have to offer you.” He said stretching his arm out and flicking ash on the carpet, then gesturing all around in the cigar smoke with the hand holding the cigar, at shapes of fornicating bodies that disappeared as soon as the eyes focused on them, “All this can be yours.” Forgetting myself I saw an image of me in an athletic sexual position, grinning devilishly at me and I gave the grin back, then I remembered what I was about “Not interested.” I stated “I’ve done all that, you know what I want, if there’s any hope at all I will spare Gods life.”
God stabbed me repeatedly with the end of the cigar between words, burning my body, “You-Just-Don’t-Get-It.” He stabbed at me. The holes in my body smouldered painfully, I spat a glob of spit at him that sailed through the air and lost altitude uselessly; landing on the arm of the chair he was sat in before ever reaching him.
God continued speaking but the stabbing stopped; he got up close to me so I could smell the corpses on his breath, adulterated with the perfumes of all the dead girls I knew. “Its not all one big unity you know. It’s not an atomisation of every one neither like the world I created down there. I have a use for you in the safety of my unbreachable hierarchy, surrounded by the harmony of fools, I am going now, but I will leave you with a taste of the real gifts I have to offer; to refuse or conspire is to invite on yourself the second death.”
I was back to normal standing in the living room, the cough medicine smell of heroin wafted in from the kitchen and I followed my nose into the kitchen. Some one I knew was stirring a whole pot of the dirty water of heroin with a big wooden spoon, cigarette filters floating in the mix so they could be sucked up cleanly by a syringe. Pink butterfly wings of the girl fluttered in segments of my mind which was flicking on and off, overpowered by heroin. Her silently laughing face filled the broken movie.
Jane’s proud loving face came close up to mine, then she stood back and danced in her bra and pink silk knickers, with a syringe in her hand, danced from padded foot to padded foot, then up on her toes, then grinding her hips at me, she smiled at the light bulb she danced under, reaching for the light, she squeezed the syringe off, a rainbow forming over her head in refractions of light, she did a sign of the cross with it and captured the bits of falling rainbow on her grinning face so they looked like tears of joy. I came up to her so happy, I had not seen her for fifteen years, I kissed the heroin tears then licked them off, fading in and out of heroin reverie with each kiss and lick with their powerful magical effect.
She stuck out her hands and pushed me over laughing, “Here smell this!” She shouted, straddling my face with her arse she farted and I temporarily lost consciousness in the smell of heroin. I came around and she laughed again, her face now in mine.
We got up and faced each other smiling. She smiled a mum smile and said “Hold me. ” holding out her hands. I hugged her; she said “Hold me tighter; don’t be afraid of hurting me.” I held her tighter; she told me to “Relax!”. We hugged and rocked then uncoupled and she went back to the stove, stirring intently in a stylised way that I thought served no other purpose, occasionally looking back at me and smiling.
I asked her “I didn’t know you were dead?”
She replied with a tight smile “I might as well have been dead to you.”
“So not true!” I said with conviction.
I asked her “Is cooking heroin the sort of thing you do for recreation now?”
She looked up from the low flame on the cooker and said with a smile “No it’s the sort of thing you do for recreation. It killed you didn’t it?”
We went into the living room and she hastily slipped off her bra and panties, hopping backwards on one leg as she did it, apparently oblivious that we had never done the thing we were about to do before. I got undressed just as hastily. My clothes were rubbery but they parted from my body with a bit of peeling.
For the next two hours we made it in every position we could think of, mostly floating to the ceiling. Missionary, doggy, her on top, sixty nine; and a lot in-between and made up on the spot, a lot of architectural humping was done for the most major satisfaction. At one stage my cock hit the light bulb and burst with the heat, she captured droplets on her tongue, then she sculpted my stomach and made me a bigger, better one, smiling with complicity in my eyes as she yanked and moulded it “There that’s all better.” She said rubbing it longer between two flat hands. Then we had straight forward sex all the way one last time and as she came her face changed just a little in personality, although it was still some model of her own variables, and as she came, she shouted in Italian something I did not understand “Tu una sesso dio in piggamo”.
We floated down and she came to land on the settee and I landed in a kneeling position besides her.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I said you’re a sex god in pyjamas! You make me come!” She replied; fired up like I had never seen her before. “Grande sessualita scimmia”
I was suspicious “Who are you?” I asked.
“Guardare!” She shouted pointing at Allori’s Judith on the wall.
The picture of the unknown Judith who was not Mazzafirri was missing from the wall, Allori’s severed head was hanging in mid air.
“You tricked me!” I said “You’re her historical duplicate, a mere resemblance! God has tricked me!”
She slapped me “So I’m not good enough! You couldn’t tell the difference!”
She started to wrestle with me blushing bright red her body getting hot. She seemed to push when I pulled and pull when I pushed. Like she was guiding me to stretch her out of shape. Her arms wound around her body in the struggle. As she got on top of me and had hold of my hands, she was using my magic to mould her with my hands which just felt like they were struggling. She shrank into her carapace. Her body was now burning me and my fingers fried and sizzled. I broke away and stepped back. One. Two. Three. Four long strides.
I was face to face with a giant four legged crab, her neck less face welded on her shell. She jumped off the couch and took two steps towards me, melting my carpet into tar where ever her feet landed, which surrounded her in black toxic smoke. She spoke to me. “Magic here is will. Your will is strong so he fears you and has not risked trying to destroy you. You will need to solicit my help. I am the scarlet whore won to your side.”
Judith, whore of Babylon, turned one hundred and eighty degrees; burning a circle in the carpet; then drew a five pointed star and disappeared in an explosion of red plasma, in which one imagined or saw shapes as looking into a fire. That is magic and here to imagine is to see the real.
Some one was sitting in the corner of my room rolling a spliff. It was Jay, “Hello Monster” he said, that being my nick name from old.
I was taken aback “What are you doing here, are you dead?”
He had grown back his mop of curly hair, and had the features some one would paint him into a ‘David’ one day. He let out a breath that winded down “Hahhh” He said, “To tell you the truth I don’t know, I met a rather fetching woman of a shade of red, at the pub, and she said you might need some advice that only I could give, but she didn’t say what, if your in any kind of trouble I can still get some of the lads together”
I looked sternly “Hold that thought.” I said.
He continued rolling out a length of cigarette paper from a packet, he reminded me of a tailor sizing up a suit, but I knew he was sizing up the situation and the paper was meditational
I continued “Well the thing is; I have to kill God, but he’s much too strong.”
Jay smiled, it was home territory, the spliff was coming together and so were his thoughts, “Well you see Monster, strength is all mental, take those weight lifters, or when I fought those cops, its up here” he pointed to his head, displacing his curly hair, “when Biggles put his hands right through both sides of the door at the squat”
I butted in, “when I cracked the police handcuffs on LSD because I was scarred”
Jay looked anxious “So you said. Look Monst that had nothing to do with me. But what you did that night, that’s the sort of thing you should, change, you’re a strong bloke, but I bet if you went back to that time, and reinvented what happened, you would be a stronger bloke.”
Warmth flowed off Jay, even though I knew he was a complete psychopath, I warmed off the fire in his eyes but remained cold, so I said coldly rather than warmly, not succumbing to the heat “Yeh what did happen Jay.”
Jay had finished burning some draw into the spliff, putting thought into the careful crumbling, that was really thought about what he was going to say “We will never know, we were all on drugs, and that’s a different world, in your own line, things happened that only made sense in your line, tell me again what happened that night, up until when you left.” Having wrapped things up he wrapped the joint up, licking and sticking it down, no loose ends.
Preparing for what I had to say I asked “Do you still see APE?”
Jay looked sad “Ahh, ‘Anarchy, Peace and Ecstasy’ dead in a toilet, heroin overdose, most people we knew are dead, I hope I’m not, sounds like and adventure though, better than travelling.”
He looked straight at me “What really happened Monster, then we can change it.” He lit the spliff, and then passed it straight to me. Almost touching my hand he said “We went round to the Irish, soon after you had broke their window. Was it the Irish?”
“No. You know who it was.” I replied sternly.
Jay continued “Was it the Carters. You got some of your gear there.”
“No. It wasn’t” I looked straight at Jay, “You were going to get me a gun Jay.”
I passed the spliff to Jay, he smiled “Why did you want the gun?”