Excerpt from "Holy, Holy, Hallowed"

Death came riding over a hill.

He was still miles away, invisible to anyone else, but he was approaching.
I took a breath and mounted my pony. The heel of my boot went in her
side as I pulled up on the skull, guiding her brains into the East.

I may have bothered kicking dirt into the lingering fire pit if I thought I might fain some spec of anonymity. But this was Death, He knew who I was and where I was going.

Admittedly, and in the most harshest of truths, I'm not sure where I was going; time had expired for me when the jackal spit me out in a crib.

When the dwarfed sun sat and rose again I was in Nancy crossing the border to Wurz.

Death was behind 60 kilometers or so, all the way, driving on at a steady pace. I look back once and only once, but see nothing. He is there. I've felt his lack of presence enough times to know. The magnificent beast he rides breaks through the ground like a woodchopper's ax. And this debris he sends into the air clings to its rider and I no longer separate him from gray sky or red earth. On the dustier and darker parts of the journey I often wonder if the rider disappears inside the bowels of the creature to rest, but I can only presume on these impractical reflections that journey with me.

Through and through, he sits erect like some great traveling tomb.

The two of us have met before, many times to be sure.


(Inner Set)


Dear reader, when I tell you Death is following me I don't mean to present to you a madman. There is no spit leaking from my lips. There is no eye twitching or bouncing around its cage and in these times there are certainly enough madmen to fill every sanitarium from Bordeaux to Bucharest. I have no intention of exaggerating my circumstances.

Although I speak to few others in my passage, if the subject of Death or "death" should come to bear upon the mind of strangers, they seem to accept my reality as delusion or metaphor.

But this is nothing I am striving for interpretation or analytics over. Death is that of legend and myth: a skeleton, a skull, a book and a sword. Death moves. Not unlike an expedient salesman flogging elixirs and detrimental condiments for the damned, there is much work to be done to make it to the end of a busy day. He is a reaper of lore, smiling, accustomed to his profession. This is no matter of pleasantry or wit. The answer is that Death is not the end.

Just three weeks ago I stopped in Jena for the benefit of my horse. I went to a bar, a hotel, even a surgeons office--all doors and windows were shuttered and secured. There was, in summation, life in town. This was clear to see from half-full bottles of ale and hour-old cigar butts. I wondered if Death had already been here, conquered, and held the inhabitants ransom as another display with his obsession and mockery of me. But as these pursuits came to mind I rode across a beggar, laid up against a hitch with his head down from the sun, saliva and soured liquor dripping into the whirlpool of mud he stared into.

"To where have all the people gone to today?"

The man, if that moniker would even suit such a miserable thing, didn't respond.

"Arse, where is everyone?"

He looked up toward me, grinning or straining his face from the sun. When he opened his mouth I mistook the few teeth he had for smashed pecan shells. I repeated myself a final time. A trickle of urine ran down onto his dirty bare feet and in between his toes.

No words came out, just a buzz of mumbling. I landed my boot in his face and planted him on the ground. The sky, hanging unusually low and nearly crushing down the top of my hat, broke apart as the fool started giggling and proceeded to hysterics, reaching for an empty bottle in a puddle he had probably been through a hundred times before. There was no sip of backwash to be downed, save some wet dirt and manure. He cursed me as I rode away, gripping the bottle and throwing it at the hind of the horse. "Friend, you couldn't chase a maggot of a dog's dick."

I rode up an incline over the main part of town cutting through a ravine and up over a barren hill with more dust blowing than weeds rising. When I approached the top the townspeople were gathered in the valley below. I rolled tobacco on my way down, putting the cigar between my lips and staring into the great black wide open covered in small strips of clouds following the smoke from my mouth. Even covered in hot, human sweat I felt cold, sterile and stalked by something almost certainly inhuman.

Somewhere in the center of the eye of onlookers was a casket with a little girl, no more than 8 or 9, sleeping inside. Cause of death was one of two things: disease or murder. The few faces that looked my way positioned me to take the case of murder as disgust and loss of faith seemed to be in vogue. I dropped down to finish my cigar. All around me I heard the uttering and crying to the name of Eva Waller. The priest spared no fat in his sermon, but as the rain fell and the sun went on carelessly shining regardless of the wet smell of a warm rotting corpse, all I heard were his last words.

"And as you walk through that dark and ominous Valley of Death, may you set your soft fingers in the palm of his hands, and let God do the rest. Shall you never have to fear that day, or that hour as we, the common, wounded and mortal man, will forever be, when the trumpet blows from the mouth of that mighty hunter known as Death."

The pine box was covered with dirt and lowered in.

Where ever there was an innocent life taken, there was a guilty monster, waiting in the chamber, watching the procession, waiting to be hanged, waiting to die. And most pressing to follow suit, this meant Death was in the shadows. As I crushed the cigar under foot, I noticed a figure pass through the crowd, placing a handful of white tulips on the fresh dirt. No one noticed. The tulips were wilted and the mourner's hands were finer and whiter than most refined grains of sugar cane. I knew. The procession back to town, to the gallows, had already begun and I was fighting my way going through the crowd the opposite way, I felt the vacant eyes of man in pursuit. Not a living man of blood and tissue, but that of a walking sickness. No eyes in his face, just empty sockets in their place. My wrists quickened in the reigns, bearing down on the horses back. She screamed. Inside me head, I was screaming just the same.

Chapter 136

"Shit," Basil Valentine said. "Do I have to suck the marrow from your bones or eat the lice from your hair? You bloated fuck."

I took my pants off and lay on the table. I wanted to wince but it would be of no purpose.

"Just get the metal away from my spine and out of the way of my heart old man."

"Ah yes, a real straight-shooting blowhard. You see rider, I have tasted the rotten juices squeezed from Death's brains. Don't underestimate every man as fodder for your own pathetic being.

"You faggoty cunt, just address my wounds. Death's knife is still in my skin."

Basil, finally calming, took out his instruments--dirty, rusting
scalpels and crude scissors and assorted accoutrements--bloodstained and pissed
on.

"Yes, no worries son, this will be relatively painless if you are what you say you are. An animal, no? Hunted? Prey mingling with the predator. you can't out run the blood pumping in a tiger's heart can you?"

I felt a blade go into the back flesh. I was ready to die. Anything other than Death's hand. I tasted blood in my mouth and smelt rust in my nostrils. Everything went black.

Then there was laughter.

Then there was nothing.


I awoke again, this time with more cognizance than the last 5, 6...not sure how many times. I felt a beard on my face, thick and coarse. It has been a week, maybe more. My body felt wet and when I touched hand to head, red came back in return. Gauze and assorted wrappings were soaked through and the smell of moribund hounds suffocated my sinuses. I focused on the light from the window and stood from bed, but the mind was playing tricks. I was crawling through broken glass and torn book pages. A piece of glass went through my knee and my face broke the ground. I went to the door peering into the crack before me. Basil's eye was staring back at me. But it was not attached to any end. His face was smashed and I quickly realized my face was lying in a mess of his brain parts. I wiped the matter into the beads of sweat from my mouth and rolled back to the window...my adrenaline was building now and as I moved the stains from the window with my palm, a town on fire greeted me on the other side. Dead bodies burned, buildings fell apart, but no other noise did I hear, just the break of flames against the walls surrounding in on me. I collapsed and felt another boil on my skull burst.