To Wallow in Ash & Other Sorrows

by Sam Richard

  Supplication. Invocation. Benediction. Worship. Sacrifice. Atonement. Penance.

  Blood.

  Fire.

  Smoke.

  Pain.

  An answer.

  The visions of her - first in dreams and then at my front door - the invitation inside, welcoming her back to the home we had made together. Her unending grey eyes, just as I had always remembered them. And finally the darkness, the nothing before our first death together.

  Her soaking lips wrapping around the muscles in my straining neck. The ominous feeling of the cold blade against my quivering flesh. The way it tears my stomach open, like wet cardboard. Her hands inside me. Her awkward, lanky form crawling inside me. The way she begins to devour me from the inside. The cold radiating outward.

  This is how we lived. This is the life we made for ourselves. My only regret is that it has to end yet again.

  THE VERDANT HOLOCAUST

  “The sinner doesn’t know it yet, but the nape of his neck is being tickled by flames so hot they burn green. Living his life – the homosexual, the addict, the prostitute, the greedy and corrupt, the atheist, the charlatan, the “well-meaning” liberal with his hands around the throat of society, the Secular Humanist, the Abortionist, those that would spit in the eye of our Lord, rather than offer themselves up to him – all completely unaware of the eternal torment that awaits them. We have women legally murdering children. Women disobeying their husbands, divorcing them so they can go to lesbian sex-toy parties. Men addicted to the vilest of pornography. These people feel no guilt, harbor no thoughts of shame, and the last time they thought of purity, it was regarding the cocaine they had just snorted.

  “We live in a world so segregated from the Lord, so divorced from his grace that we don’t even see the sin we are steeped in daily. Like the cold-blooded toad, we sit in the waters of sin, and it is far too late before we realize when we are being boiled alive. And this sin, this transgression, tears us away from the gifts that the Lord wants to give to us. He’s up there, pleading with us – looking down with wrath in His heart- calling for us to return to Him. Calling for us to take what he has offered: His rescue, His healing, His power over this evil that has infected every aspect of our lives, of our culture. All we have to do is raise our hand and say, “YES, yes Lord, I will take what you offer. I surrender myself to you, to your ways, oh Lord. Forgive me of my sins, of my amoral ways. As you accept me anew, I accept you and your precious blood into my heart. Make me a vessel, Lord; let me empty myself of transgression and fill me with your blood.

  “With these gifts, we need to take a stand. By rising up to His appointed position next to the throne, we can help rid the world of its wickedness. Clean our communities of the filth, the lies, the deception, and depravity. Let us make a pact, before one another and the Lord Himself. Say it with me now, “I will fight his righteous battle.” Louder! “I WILL FIGHT HIS RIGHTEOUS BATTLE.” Good! “I DECLARE BEFORE YOU, OH LORD, I WILL WAGE THIS WAR. MY LIFE IS YOURS, DO AS YOU WILL.” Amen!

  “Now come forth, my children. Come forth and partake of His gifts. Let us offer up to Him our sacrifices, and let His cleansing fire purify our wretched flesh. Come now, Brothers and Sisters, gather in. After we scour ourselves of the stench of this world, after we give our offerings and receive our gifts, no longer will we need live in a world of darkness; we will bring His light to the world. Bring yourselves to the Altar of Sacrifice, lay your hands on the Golden Horn of Purification, and pick up your blades. We shall begin the Harvest of the Flesh. Let us loose ourselves in the chasm of green, far below man’s modern world. Let us commune with Him, and cut off that which stands in our way.”

  ***

  There she stood, like a cleaned up Siouxsie Sioux, frantic jet-black hair fighting against an awkward comb job. Her pale extremities shooting out from the confines of a pale pink sundress; the bags that had persisted under her eyes were gone. She looked good, but death rocker as 1950’s housewife wouldn’t have been my go to style when cleaning up and trying to adult. As we embraced a flood of anger tried to boil out from my mouth. She had left me alone, to go to the middle of bumfuck, hillbilly Georgia, while I mourned for Mary. Alone.

  She didn’t come to the funeral, or even fucking call that day. In fact, I hadn’t gotten her on the phone in about two months. The joy of finally seeing her, of knowing she was ok, was replaced, in a solitary heart-beat, with all the built up frustration, anger – no, not anger – fucking rage, and abandonment that she had put me through. On the ride up from New Orleans, I had thought long and hard about what I would say to her when I finally saw her.

  With the Killing Joke s/t tape cranked, with the cold, harsh synths washing over me, dub bass thundering below, manically tribal drums, warm guitars – oh my god that tone, I had tried for months to hone in that warmth for the last Wolf’s Blood album, never quite made it - and Jaz’s menacing growly voice, I rehearsed and edited and re-edited what was to be my impassioned speech to her, over and over, until I had it down word for word. As she stood in front of me, like a cartoon version of a bastardized old American sitcom cliché, all that I managed to spit out was, “You fucking left, you fuck. How in the fuck could you do that to her, to me, to everyone? You didn’t even come to her funeral, and you left me alone to deal with it – what the fuck is wrong with you?” She stared at me.

  “We fucking finished her album, Karen. We finished Mary’s fucking record. Jen, Mike and I took her roughs and recorded the other parts around them. You should have fucking been there. We had to call in some fucking bleach-blonde surfer looking punk-rock drummer from New York that Jen knows, all because you took off. It should have been you. You didn’t even call me to let me know where the fuck you went…”

  She continued to stare at me, tears building in her eyes, her body softly swaying in the humid breeze, and she said nothing. She just stood there, like the weight of the world, the reality of Mary’s death, of her abandonment – and what it meant – only just now came spilling over her. Eventually, she struggled out a solitary, “I’m sorry,” and we embraced. My flames in my stomach were temporarily subdued and I recognized that for how wrathful I felt, I was still ecstatic to see her, to know that she was ok.

  I had been too fired up to realize that we weren’t alone. Behind here stood a thin man in a grey linen suit. He walked forward after I acknowledged his presence, his skin hung loose from his bones. His labored movement shown across his face as he came towards us, a talon-like, skeletal hand reaching to meet mine, “I’ll let you ladies catch up, but I wanted to introduce myself, I’m Reverend Damasus; but call me Fred, or Rev. Please come, let’s get out of this sun, where you two can talk, and have ourselves some sweet tea.” I was too livid to feel any shame for screaming at Karen in front of a stranger, much less a Priest, but I tried to put on the old Southern charm, crack a smile, and get to a place of privacy where I could get some goddamn answers.

  Silently, we walked for a few minutes as the Reverend showed me the grounds. Towering river birch, sugar maple, and black walnut trees surrounded us; the fresh scent of under-brush decay wafted towards us with every step. My engineer boots sunk into the soft, damp ground. It was like some kind of green paradise - no holier temple. The only interruption from the beauty of the natural world took the shape in a handful of small, rustic shacks scattered about the grounds, and at highest point in the clearing stood the derelict remains of an abandoned church, with a massive forest of green behind it.. The structure was holding, but not for lack of trying, with a few parts of the roof partially caved in and the whole thing looking like it would collapse in on itself at any moment. Someone had also gone through the trouble of climbing up the chapel, traversing the treacherous path to the steeple, and not only removing the cross that once stood there, but replaced it with the flayed carcass of a horse. The flesh on its skull had rotted away and swarms of flies cloaked its skeletal features in a blanket of moving, shiny blackness. Occasionally, they would chaotically dance around,
exposing the perfectly cleaned scalp underneath, before regrouping and again shrouding the skull in black. Just the skull was picked free. The body, while also covered a blanket of flies, appeared to still be dripping rot and innards. I didn’t know what to say, so I just didn’t. If Karen had gotten herself wrapped up in some bizarre Pagan group that wasn’t not my problem; it wasn’t why I was there.

  We entered large wooden doors and entered the temple; where we were met with a rush of damp, cool air. It felt like a thirty-degree difference and I realized just how hot I had been. We walked down a set of stairs, into the earth and the air continued to get cooler. By this point the Reverend had stopped talking about the church and we fell into an awkward silence. I knew I would have to pull at Karen to get answers, so I would have to be the one to initiate the rest of our conversation. We reached a heavy wooden door built into the stone and dirt walls of the basement, “I’ll leave you two to catch up, I trust that you’ll find this meeting room comfortable.” He left quickly, before I had a chance to ask any questions or thank him. As soon as his footsteps had faded into the distance and we were in the room, it all came out, “What the fuck is this place? Who the fuck is the Reverend? Why in the motherfuck is there a rotting horse carcass on top of this church? And, why in the fucking world are we here?”

  Karen sat at a stone table and poured us each a glass of tea. I joined her and sipped at mine, waiting for her fucking answers. “If you’re done fucking yelling at me, the Reverend is my Uncle. This is his congregation and their land, it’s some sort of communal religion based off nature, or some shit, I don’t really know. It’s creepily dark and homophobic, anti-sex, and weirdly antagonistic towards the poor. I hate it, I fucking hate it, but until you showed up I was trapped. I wanted to get clean, to forget all the misery of the city, all the shit,” her eyes welled with tears, “I needed to clear my head after Mary…well, you know.”

  “No,” I scoffed, “Fucking say it. I need you to say it. I dealt with her suicide while you came up here to fucking live with a bunch of back-woods, nature worshiping Nazis. You fucking say it, or I’ll leave you here.” The rage was back.

  “After she fucking killed herself, ok. Christ, you can be such a cruel bitch. You don’t think it didn’t hurt, that it didn’t fuck with me as much as it did you? Well get off your self-righteous soapbox for a fucking minute and realize that she meant the world to me, too. And I fucking hate her for it, as much as I hate myself for leaving, so don’t come at me with that ‘holier than though, I dealt with it while you ran to the woods’ bullshit.”

  I wanted to scream. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to hug Karen. Fuck, I really wanted to hug Mary. I wanted the three of us to get in the goddamn car and drive 10,000 miles and start new lives. Lives without the misery, without the addiction, without heroin and aids and alcohol taking our friends away, without the intermittent homelessness, and the having to sell my body to medical science, just to pay for food, shelter, and the occasional cost of recording a goddamn 7” that twenty-five people might buy. I just wanted us to be together, to be alive, to be in one piece. It wasn’t going to happen again, but a gal can dream, right? I wanted to tell her all of that, but I could no longer feel my mouth. My arms felt like they were missing, but my hands were still attached by thought. I could breathe the universe through my pinky nails. I had four phantom arms and the insides of my ribs tickled from their sudden growth. I heard the door creak open and the whole world went brown. I wasn’t exactly out, but I certainly wasn’t ‘in’, either. I could feel hands around my non-existent arms and legs; I was floating deeper into the cool. The smells became sweeter and more rotten. I really had to pee, and then my pants were damp. The world spun around me at a different rate of speed than I was spinning, but things would occasionally catch up to each other. I felt sticky; floral and earthy aromas filled the room, and the cloud I was floating on brought me further into the earthen darkness.

  Flies, their deafening buzzing blocked out hope of hearing. They caked my face like a mask, layers and layers thick. I tried to push them away, but there were always more. I could feel them, writhing, trying to penetrate my every orifice. I peeled them away from my eyes. I was covered in something else, and they were stuck to it. The smell hit and I wretched. Like rotting blood, this sweet iron smell was wafting off me; it was sinking into my pores, permeating my flesh. I was marinating. I did my best to scrape the blood and fly layer off of my face, taking special care to expunge it from my mouth. I was nauseous from the smell, but the taste was truly something abhorrent; below the flies, below the blood, below the grit and filth, I was coated in honey, and now that I had scraped down to the bottom layer, releasing the sweet, floral aroma, the swarming flies descended as one flock towards my mouth. I batted at them and rolled on the ground, hoping to squish all that were caked to my body. After a few minutes, the buzzing had softened, and many of those that weren’t dead or stuck to me had found more interesting piles of rot to inhabit.

  I took special care to work the mess from off my eyes, and the surrounding area. Everything stung, and reeked, and fought back; and all I sought was a way out, an answer, or some explanation as to what the fuck was going on. I stumbled around the small, cave-like room. There were piles of bones, the remains of several dead animals or people or both – I couldn’t exactly tell in the low light. One corner had, what I first thought was a pile of rugs or fabric or something textile, but as I got closer the smell informed me that it was something rotting, something that had once been alive. But then it moved. This writhing mass of rotten, this fleshy pile of fetid meat stood up and tried to grab me. As I noticed a large, shimmering knife in its hand, I fell back, upon a pile of spines and rib cages. As it tossed it’s weight on me, I rolled off the pile and the mass crushed upon the bones. A loud crunch echoed in the room, and the fleshy mass let out a violent shriek, as several ribs had pierced into its body.

  With labored breathing, the pile of rotten flesh moved awkwardly off of the frame of a young man. He had been wearing a suit made of various rotting bits of flesh and organs; some human and some, undoubtedly, animal. He tried to speak – I imagine he was going to cry out for help – but before he had a chance, I grabbed a large leg bone, possibly from a horse, and struck at his face until the light had gone from his eyes. The blood began pooling on the floor below him, sinking into the dark earth and creating a dark red mud. Over the course of my attack, the bone had splintered in two, creating one sharp end with a handle, of sorts. Grabbing his knife, I searched for a light, water, clothing, food, or anything else that might help me, but came up empty in this chamber of the macabre.

  Knife in one hand, bone in the other, I gently opened the solitary door. I knew I wouldn’t be lucky enough to waltz out of here with ease, but I hoped that I could find routes of sneaking and evading sight. This hope was smashed upon the rocks of reality as I peeked out from behind the door and heard shrieking cries the likes of which I had never heard before. Startled by the harrowing aural violence, I stumbled forward and into a massive forest clearing, but inside of a cavernous, dirt walled, echoing chamber. We were in surrounded by thick, dense, ancient growth, but also underground still. Fear made way for awe, which then made way for abject terror as I focused on what was going on around me.

  Primitive stone altars littered the opening, and upon some of them were the skinned, bloodied remains of people and animals. Atop others, however, were people being skinned to the bone. The collective blood poured inwards, towards a stone crevasse, where some were bathing in the pooling sanguine fluid; the holy blood. I watched many of these brutal cultist cut pieces of flesh and meat off of a person and then eat it, right off the blade, with blood running down their faces and clothing. Some were feeding the remains to their victims; a few who seemed to fully enjoy this maelstrom of cannibalism and sadism, while others begged for it to all be over, begged for mercy, for the taste of death.

  There was an inner circle of altars immediately surrounding the blood pool. Must sickenin
g of all, the people atop those altars were cutting into their own flesh and devouring it with a most primal hunger. More than one had no more meat left on the bones of their legs, which hung limply as the gorged on themselves. At the center of this temple of madness, this shrine to cannibalism, murder, and autosarcophagy, resting atop a column in the center of the blood, sat Reverend Damasus, feasting upon the body of a young child that he held in one hand. His face shimmered with rich, dark blood as he buried it in the torso of the limp baby. In the other was a golden horn, sparkling the reflection of all the candles in the room. After he had satiated himself on the flesh and blood, he dropped the body, took his blood soaked hand, and rubbed it all over the horn, emitting a slow melody as he made sure to cover every inch of the gold with red.

  With no other way of getting out of there, I headed right toward the closest wooded area. In my way, a giant woman covered in the blood of the man she has killed and was devouring. As I tried to sneak by – an impossible task given the lack of structures to hide behind – she spotted me, and a snarling grimace appeared over her face. Her lips coated in blood, fatty tissue, flesh, honey and flies. Black specks of the chewed up combination of all of these things launched towards me as she goes to scream, but I’m too quick for that. I managed to get the sharp end of the bone jammed up into her throat, where more blood and masticated chunks came pouring out. She robotically reached up, with a look of utter confusion in her green eyes, and tried to figure out what the fuck just happened. She attempted to pull the bone out and does a half-turn dance with herself. As he shoulder passed me, I lunged and slid the knife into her back, immediately between two spinal columns. Her gasping and wheezing came to an end and I removed both bloodied weapons.

  As I pushed closer to the woods just beyond reach, the cavern abruptly went black and the cries of the victims and cultist vanished from the air, even the echoes silenced in a moment. From the center of the room, approximately where Rev. Damasus was standing, a glowing green mist seeped from the golden horn. It grew more dense and thicker as a low green glow began to radiate from the forest around us. Transfixed, I stopped and gawked, my brain too mystified to be able to read what is happening. The glow grew stronger and more vibrant, and as quickly as the screaming stopped, blinding green flames grew from the glow. The trees and plants swayed in the inferno, not succumbing to it but as part of it. As the blaze grew to fever pitch, the cultists, victims, Reverend, and even Karen, was now atop the same column as Damasus, began tearing at themselves and tearing out chunks from their bodies and consuming them. If the prior madness could have been considered ritualistic, this would be considered utter bedlam.