John the Revelator

by Peter Murphy

  I pulled it out.

  Harper’s Compendium of Bizarre Nature Facts

  My mother had kept it all this time. I dusted off the cover and flipped through the pages. The plates and illustrations were like childhood flashbacks. The inscription on the flyleaf read:

  To John

  Phyllis Nagle

  My scalp crawled. The book’s pages felt like dead skin in my hands.

  I took the book and the crossbow and quiver outside. I placed the book on the front path and touched my lighter to the corners of the pages. A slight breeze fanned the blue and orange flames. Pages withered and blackened into cinders that lifted into the air like moths. I sat on the step with the crossbow cradled across my lap and watched them burn.

  ‘You found your book then.’

  Mrs Nagle stood at the front gate, surveying her belongings spilling out of the sack and onto the grass.

  I hauled the bowstring back along the bolt groove and cocked it. Then I took an arrow from the quiver and placed it in the breech and stood to face Mrs Nagle.

  ‘Go home,’ I said. ‘And stay there.’

  That night I dozed in the armchair until the sound of raindrops splattering the windows and plonking in the empty fireplace woke me. The drizzle swelled to a monotonous deluge, hissing incessantly against the slates. Once I’d loved to listen to that sound while I snuggled under the covers, safe in the knowledge that the fire was crackling in the grate downstairs and my mother was reading in her armchair, but now the downpour just sounded like deranged voices, the music of madness. Rain, a sound I’d always associated with my mother’s headaches, her Sunday afternoon lie-downs. The boredom, sitting alone in an empty house, trying to amuse myself. Now she was gone, but the feeling was the same.

  When the rain stopped and the sun came up, I dragged myself upstairs, feeling shivery and disembodied, and I slept right through to the afternoon, when the phone woke me.

  It was one of the nurses from St Luke’s.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ she said. ‘Your mother’s failing.’

  The sky over Kilcody was deep red, big-bellied clouds moving across its expanse like herds of woolly mammoths. I hurried towards the village, powerless to stop what was happening. It was as though all the moments that made up our lives had been set in sequence like dominoes, a succession of trigger events, each precipitating the next, the number of our days preordained and planned since the beginning of time, and we were all no more than creatures made of billions of specks of dust sucked into the collapsing stars of our fates.

  I wanted to ask those fatalistic stars for a reprieve, a pardon. Lambs bleated in the fields, the plaintive vibrato of their cries weirdly human, as though they too were appealing for mercy. But there was no going back. I propelled myself forward until I reached St Luke’s. The flowerbeds were all in bloom, white blossoms scattered on the grass like snowflakes. A sparrow perched on the trellis. I rang the buzzer and one of the nurses ushered me into a room filled with beds, sleeping women, dried-out husks, heads sunk into pillows, noses up like they were smelling something.

  The curtains were three-quarters drawn around my mother’s bed, tubes and catheters everywhere. Her chest rose and fell, each breath taking great effort. I sat beside the bed and brushed the hair from my mother’s brow and took her scrawny hand. She opened her eyes and managed a wan smile. I gave her a sip from the glass of water on her bedside locker. She tried to speak, but it wasn’t her voice, just the ghost of it, as though her own given voice had been sucked out by a succubus and this hoarse whisper was all that was left.

  ‘Remember the mixo hare?’ she said. ‘When you were small?’

  ‘I remember,’ I whispered, afraid that if I raised my voice her body would crumble like ash. She seemed about to say something else, but then her eyelids slowly closed.

  Outside, the golden evening light faded to a washed-out yellow, then twilight, then darkness. I sat by the bed and kept vigil into the early hours, paralysed by the reality of what was happening, her dying, she’s dying, that thought stuck on repeat, over and over until it became meaningless and I just wanted it all to be done, and then the opposite thought followed on its heels, I wanted my mother to stay with me, those contrary thoughts bound to each other, each chasing the other’s tail, looping in circles for hours.

  Shortly before dawn broke, she came back into herself. Her eyes were as bright as stars, fixed on an indistinct point, like those of a blind woman. She groped for my hand and asked me the time. I told her, and she seemed satisfied with my answer and fell back asleep. Soon her breathing grew more troubled and her body began to tremble. Something in me recognised those shudders, and I knew she was entering the throes. I called for the nurse. She examined my mother, became brisk and businesslike, and I realised she’d done this many times before.

  ‘I’ll go for the priest,’ she said. ‘I hope there’s time. Do you have a cigarette?’

  I took the box from my pocket and offered it to her, but she shook her head and opened the window.

  ‘Light one up. The smell might rouse her a bit. Might give her that last bit of pleasure.’

  ‘Will we get into trouble?’

  ‘Say nothing. Anyone asks, pretend you didn’t know any better.’

  I sat and breathed smoke over my mother. Her body shivered with movements like labour contractions. I thought of the night she gave birth to me, except now she was birthing herself, out of her life and into her death, and with each inhalation she drew in the smoke and with each exhalation she expelled the last of her breath. Her hand grasped my hand like it must have grasped the midwife’s as she pushed me out of her womb, and I urged her towards what lay beyond.

  The priest arrived, bleary-eyed and dishevelled. He patted my shoulder and sprinkled holy water over the bed and held up the crucifix and murmured a few words of a prayer.

  And then we watched, the three of us, as the morning broke and the sun shone weakly through the window and my mother shuddered away, and the last sound she made was like no other sound I’d ever heard, a sigh, the stuff of her life released from between her lips.

  The nurse pulled the curtains and left me alone for a few moments. I looked at my mother’s eyes, frozen open as though everything she’d seen was still preserved there in the retina, trapped in the amber of her last second on the earth. My shoulders began to shake and water streamed down my face, and I closed my eyes and summoned her every moment, dredged up all the days of her being from the centre of my body. I cried her out of me until I was dry.

  Har helped me sort out the funeral arrangements, the death notice in the paper, the local-radio announcement, the flowers, the Mass cards. I had no idea there were so many things to do. Har went into philosophical mode.

  All this stuff is for the benefit of the living,’ he said, ‘not the dead. It’s to keep people busy so they don’t have time to come apart. It’s after the funeral you have to watch out for. That’s when it’ll hit you.’

  He pressed a wad of notes into my hand. It was more money than I’d ever seen. He wouldn’t brook any argument.

  ‘Take it, son.’

  The night of the removals, I stood in the chapel yard and accepted hushed condolences and shook the hand of anyone who wanted their hand shook. Dee Corboy appeared out of the crowd. It was strange to see her all in black. She hugged me and waved her hands in front of her face, banishing invisible tears.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m useless at these things.’ She waited beside me until everyone had gone and then she took my arm.

  ‘C’mon,’ she said. ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’

  She brought me round the corner to The Ginnet. It was no bigger than a snug. Instead of Ladies and Gents signs on the toilet it had old Greek or Roman male and female symbols.

  ‘I like it here,’ Dee said. ‘It’s quiet. Mostly teachers and the drama-society crowd.’

  ‘Kilcody has a drama society?’

  ‘I was thinking of joining. I always wanted to act.’
>
  She brought me a whiskey and a glass of wine for herself.

  ‘Your health, Mrs Corboy,’ I said, raising my glass.

  ‘You’ll really have to start calling me Dee. I won’t be Mrs Corboy for much longer.’

  She held up her bare ring finger. I didn’t know quite what to say, so I just said I was sorry.

  ‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘I’m not. Me and Ollie got a flat here in the village. I’m going back to college.’

  She took a gulp from her glass and stretched her legs. She was wearing black boots that came to her knees. The heels were lethal.

  ‘Any word—’

  ‘Last night. I told him your mother was very sick. He was sad to hear it. Said he’d write. He’s been run off his feet what with everything that’s happened.’

  The whiskey glass stalled halfway to my mouth.

  ‘Everything that’s happened?’

  She surveyed the blank look on my face.

  ‘You haven’t heard? Of course you haven’t. You’ve had enough on your mind. It was in today’s Sentinel.’

  She opened her handbag and removed a newspaper clipping and passed it to me.

  Hip-Hop Star Collaborates with Local Youth

  by Jason Davin, Staff Reporter

  A 17-year-old local youth became the talk of the domestic music industry this week when it was revealed that he has contributed lyrics to the forthcoming album by multi-platinum-selling hip-hop act Cujo aka Lewis Dillon.

  James Corboy, formerly a resident of Fairview Crescent, Ballo town, became friends with the 22-year-old Brooklyn-born rapper when they met in Morocco last year. The two subsequently collaborated on some half-a-dozen songs for the as yet untitled new album. Industry sources have speculated that the teenager’s lyrical input is likely to net him a substantial sum in royalties.

  However, in a bizarre turn of events, it transpires that local Gardai are anxious to determine the current whereabouts of the youth, who allegedly absconded from Balinbagin Boys’ Home last August, where he was serving a year on remand for charges relating to a burglary incident in Kilcody chapel last year. When contacted by the Sentinel, the youth’s mother, Deirdre Corboy, declined to comment.

  I placed the clipping back on the table.

  ‘Is this a hoax?’ I said.

  Dee shook her head.

  ‘The record company contacted me. I have to sign loads of papers because of his age. Apparently there’s uproar around the village. Can you believe it?’

  ‘I can,’ I said, and smiled.

  I handed Dee the clipping, but she waved it away.

  ‘Keep it,’ she said. ‘I bought about ten copies to send to his aunts and uncles. God, I didn’t even know he could write songs. I’m jealous.’

  She took a sip of her wine.

  ‘It’s funny, he’s only been gone a few months and I’ve almost forgotten what he looks like. I have to dig out old photographs to remember. Isn’t that awful?’

  I knocked back the whiskey.

  ‘The same thing happened to me.’

  We sat in silence. Dee looked at her watch.

  ‘Oh dear. I have to pick up Ollie from his father’s.’

  She drained her glass.

  ‘Walk me to my car.’

  It wasn’t exactly an order, but I got the feeling Dee was used to getting her own way. I guessed she was quite the princess when she was younger. Probably still was. Her new car was parked in the square.

  ‘I made Maurice buy me that the week before I left him,’ she said, neutralising the alarm with her zapper. ‘Might trade it in though. I’m not used to an automatic. I don’t know what to do with my hands.’

  She gave me a squeeze.

  ‘Don’t stay out too late. You’ve a funeral to go to tomorrow.’

  I watched her drive off and went back inside The Ginnet and sat at the bar, but no matter how many drinks I threw down my throat, I couldn’t seem to get drunk.

  The next morning I woke early and forced myself to wash and dress in the cleanest clothes I could find. The radio was forecasting storms, but still the weather held. There was a huge turn-out at the funeral. I did what was expected: walked behind the hearse and shouldered the coffin with Har and a few pallbearers from the funeral home. We set it down on slats placed over the open grave, gaping like a wound in the raw earth.

  As the priest began to say the final words, Har slipped a hip flask of whiskey into my pocket.

  ‘Medicinal purposes,’ he muttered.

  I took a swig on the sly and wondered where on earth Jamey was. At that moment, his absence was more acute than ever. I looked around at all the downcast faces.

  ‘I didn’t know she knew so many people.’

  Har chuckled.

  ‘She used to clean every house in Kilcody. These people told your mother things they wouldn’t tell a priest.’

  The breeze whispered through the leaves of the evergreens surrounding the graveyard. The priest finished with the prayers. We grabbed the straps and a couple of the men pulled away the boards. We lowered the coffin. When the pine box was settled in the pit and the straps had been retracted, I picked up a white wreath someone had placed at my feet and threw it into the open grave. As the first spade of dirt dissipated on the lid of the casket, I said goodbye, my mother among the flowers.

  But it is written in the dream that at the end of time, the crows will regain their voices, and will praise their god, and sing.

  XI

  Blowhole Cove felt like world’s end, the last mapped part of the atlas, beyond which the sea might evaporate revealing monsters beached in the shallows, big-bellied mutations, lugworms the size of tree trunks.

  Surf roared in my ears. The sky grumbled thunder, silencing the gulls. I gazed out across the sloblands and took a slug of whiskey from Har’s hip flask, so bone-weary I feared I’d faint. The light had a brittle quality that made the eyeballs ache; fingers of blue electricity played about the glinting, flinty stones scattered on the strand.

  Hours had passed since the funeral. I couldn’t face an empty house so I took the road out of town, following my nose seaward, lulled into a sort of sleepwalk by the tattoo of my boots on tarmac. I just kept going until my feet ran out of land, by which time I was good and drunk.

  I crested the hill and stumbled down the sandy slope to the water’s edge. I stumbled over jellyfish slither and dead seaweed, following the shoreline through spits of rain and clouds of midges, and the fine white sand turned to mudflats strewn with rotten kelp. Combers foamed at the shore. That big old sea-hag bared her gums at me. The wind rippled my shirt and made panpipe sounds in the hip flask.

  I pushed on, falling forward into my footsteps, until finally I rounded the curve of the coastline and came upon the inlet.

  Sheltered from the wind and rain, I huddled in the mouth of Blowhole Cave and sipped whiskey. My chest was tight with phlegm and my ribcage ached and I realised that for the first time in days I was hungry, starving, digestive glands like thousands of hungry mouths.

  Raindrops began to mottle the sand. I pulled my coat tight and watched as the sky darkened and the drizzle intensified until the sand ran like wounds. Lightning flared and thunderclaps rumbled like kettledrums across the jagged lower jaw of the horizon. The rain became a deluge, but inside the cave was dry. The blowhole sang, and in its keening I thought I could discern strains of the old hymn, my mother’s lullaby.

  Who’s that a-writin?

  I curled up on the sand and closed my eyes and buried my head in the crook of my arm like a tired bird. And I passed out, out of myself and into the bottomless fall of sleep, my body sinking like a stone in murky water, falling until I opened my eyes and realised I wasn’t falling at all, but lying spreadeagled on the sandy floor of some silent dream, staring at the inevitable sky.

  And I saw him, winging towards me across the sea.

  The old crow.

  He glowed, huge and luminescent, moving over the waves, casting a vast galleon shadow on the sea. He dr
ew closer still, wings beating, then hovered in a holding position and glowered and his head eclipsed the setting sun; he brought the night down with his wings and set his claws upon the sand, and whiteness spread all over his body, spread until every last feather gleamed. Then he took wing again, his great beak pointed toward the mountains.

  Into the crags’ jagged shadows he soared, over barren steppes of limestone stubbled with scutch unfit for goats, where the hill-fields reared up like great green-backed krakens, up, up, up he flew through the altitudes where the stratosphere darkened from pale blue to ink-dark, and foundling stars peeped through the sky like the faces of the dead, and his wings seemed to peel the heavens back, exposing a new heaven and a new earth beneath. The black sky cracked, hatching the sun; light dopplered out towards eternity as it crowned through the waters of the sound.

  The storm had subsided. Scattered around me, streels of seaweed, bits of driftwood, jellyfish, crabs, gunk the sea chucked up.

  The tide was coming in.

  I got to my feet.

  Above in the sudden blueness, gulls wheeled and whirled, and the sound they made was like bowed wood-saws, and their feathers were many-coloured. The sea was made of sky, the sky of sea.

  Someone spoke my name. I turned and saw her walking towards me across the strand, and I stared, amazed at her face, her body restored to its fullness, her dress billowing in the wind, a single braid whipping about her shoulders.

  She unlaced her boots and stepped out of them and walked into the sea that was the sky, and the blueness pooled around her feet.