Apocalypse of Jude

The music of the gorge nestled halfway up the slopes of the lone mountain sinks into Mae and Caul as they penetrate its gloomy boughs in the last light of the evening. Breathless, they both crouch on haunches alongside the clear stream that emerges here from deep underneath the mountain. Drafting from its icy freshness with scooped hands, both feel the water’s coldness burn down their insides.

Mae stands up, shaking her hands, looking around at the dark boughs and vegetation that surrounds her.

“There’s an oak tree that they’ve let stand in the centre where I work. Every morning and evening as I come and go, I brush my hand against its trunk like just to say hello, and sometimes when I touch it there is so much energy that I feel. That’s the energy I feel now.”

Caul stands up and wipes his hands on his trousers, pensive to the evening’s purpose, wondering why he decided to it at all.

“You ready to go up?”

She nods, and they pick their way up the narrow path winding along the stream until they reach a peculiarly large flat-topped rock from beneath which the stream gushes into the world from its source deep within the mountain. They clamber upon its rough-hewn two-by-two metre surface and make themselves comfortable by sitting beside each other with legs gathered up. She lights a cigarette, and Caul watches its orange tipped glow be the only light in the gloom.

“It’s going to be pitch dark soon.”

She smiles. “You want to light the candles?”

“It will get a bit warm won’t it?” Caul looks sceptically at the rock.

“Probably. We can always blow some of them out if it does. It’ll look beautiful, like a sacred rite’s meant to be.”

Caul hurrumphs. “I’m not so sure sacred rites were so beautiful as bloody and sacrificial.”

Together they place the metal-cupped candles around the square rock, letting their light diffuse the darkness and allowing an eerie glow to cast dancing shadows on the dark foliage around them.

“You want to open the wine?” She says this impishly.

“You’re going to have to drink from a plastic cup though, I’m afraid.”

His hand takes the bottle and corkscrew she offers, half his face bathed in yellow light, betraying a deeper struggle go one beneath.

Once he is done, Mae takes the bottle from his hand and holds it over the burbling stream coming from beneath, her long dark hair falling over half her face.

“On this Midsummer’s Night, we offer the spirit of the vine the blood of its harvest in thanks for your goodness.”

Caul’s mind continues its struggle with the image of offering up sacrifice to the god who has blinded his mythic Orion conception of self. Mae lets fall from the bottle’s funnel a full measure of the blood wine into the waters below. As it is done so, the water becomes as blood to Caul, and he hears the cries of slain souls calling out as if from beneath the alter on which they sit, wanting the avenging of their blood. Then there flashes before his eyes the vision of the rock upon which they sit as a winepress, pressing out in wrath the wine of the vine of the earth.

Mae finds her place again among the lit candles, their thick flames heavy in the unmoved air around them.

“This is one of the most beautiful things I have ever done.”

She pours the wine into two plastic cups, handing one to him. Both their tongues are bitten by the bitter vintage and they let it soak in. In the silence that follows, Caul’s vision continues, as he watches the air begin filling with the relentless beating of creatures wings that look like locusts coming up from an abyss. At this sight, Caul is pierced with thoughts of sorrow and revenge, illness and sad old age, fear, hunger, squalid poverty, destruction, pain, lust and deadly war. And in his vision he realises that these creatures have been tormenting him his entire life and will never let him find the death of being he so eagerly desires.

/if only there were water and not this rock/ /or this rock but also water/ /not this blood/ /but water/ /a spring to find rest in/

Coming to from his vision, Caul looks squarely at Mae. “Aren’t you exhausted from trying to find a place to rest from the dark abyss beneath us?”

Mae looks hurt and shows she has taken offence, turning her body slightly away from Caul.

“But I am finding rest Caul. I am.”

They go silent again, he reflecting on her answer, she probing his question. In Caul’s mind, the continuing sense of restive torment brings to him the thought of God.

/i know you’re the only one who can answer me adequately/ /just wish i knew from which way to approach you/

Caul’s question irks Mae though. Since her time with Jude, her spiritual waters seem to have been cursed and she has sensed their drying, along with an impending sense of plague. As if to dispel the incorporeal spirits haunting her mind, she moves suddenly to the middle of the flattened rock where she begins to reach her arms to the boughs above her, as if seeking to part them. Then, with precise fingertips stretching out from thrust-out hands, she slowly pulls in tendrils of moonlight through the boughs, her fingers then weaving them with the candle light, so that a sphere forms around her as a kind of woven protection against the spirits that assail her.

She now begins to sway rhythmically within this aura, rapt to the dance as her arms, in submission to her body’s sway, circulate the aura of her spirit while her hands move to direct its flow. Caul, unable to help himself, gazes rapturously on as she slowly brings herself to stillness.

“Now that is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.”

She laughs with her face flushed, breath rushing out, but a countenance touched by serenity.

“Come join me then.”

She is extending one of her hands. He just shakes his head resolutely, but her hand stays.

“I know you can still dance.”

“Mae, its been too many years.”

“This used to be your rest Caul. A long time ago.”

Her hand remains waiting for his. Inside of him, the wound of his failure with her a long time ago is breaking out of the cyst in his soul. The voice within him makes subtle suggestion to him that going with Mae would show him healing. Though he knows the deception, and shakes his head to dispel the temptation, yet the hurt is so great that he takes her hand, which he feels give way in submission to his leading. He awkwardly composes the coursing water of her body to flow around his unsteady body upon the rock. But gradually his arms begin to bring her body into the rhythm of his sway, his hands in hers bringing her in close, wrapping her body round him like a cloak and then unfurling her, their bodies moving in breath, the air swishing around their frames, their minds riveted to the nuance of every move; composure as he lifts her from her gravity and brings her above him to stretch out in flight, then settling her to her feet and their inertia. Both are glowing inside to out, breath tingling with the pumping blood in their breasts that lightens the dense darkness of their matter.

“I didn’t think I could still do that.”

They stand next to each other looking at the number of candles that now stand dark, the rest dancing erratically in the unstable air.

“I told you it was still in you.”

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 90