R&D 6

Smoke clings to Abraham as his fingertips trail over the uneven stone wall of the old bakery. The coppery smell of blood rather than bread makes his stomach churn. He steps on broken glass and over shutters and quicksteps over torn prayer books where horses have turned churning up mud and leaving their own shit. His wet boots sinks into the dirt outside his home. The door yawns open. His hand trembles as he nudges it wider. His nostrils flare before he looks inside and he knows before his eyes can see that death has visited.

Abraham skulks down under its weight. He avoids stepping on broken pottery and glass.

Rivka, his mother, lay near the stove. Her dress up over her head. Her pantaloons at her ankles.

Miriam, his daughter beside her, wrapped but still. He’d called her little bird because of the way she chirruped, her dark eyes following him no more.

He sticks his fist into his mouth to prevent himself crying out. He brushes his lips against Miriam’s cheek. It’s cool and waxy. He kisses her forehead and places her back beside his mother. 

A faint whisper from his bedroom. Abraham grabs the poker from the heath and leans into the door. Shoshana’s body sagging on their wedding bed as though half asleep. A priest between her spread-eagled legs. His bloody mouth suckling their child out of her curled sleep in the amniotic sac. Chewing, with snapping jaw, like a wild dog with a black tongue and first pick over a carcass.

Abraham darts forward. He swings the poker with renewed rage and vengeance in his arm.

 He misses the priest’s bobbling head. And his body turns on itself in partnership with his dim-witted brain as the room spins and knocks his world off balance.  

The Shadow Gatherer isn’t overly tall, but his thinness makes him seem so. Dressed in a white cassock stained with soot and blood. Lips too pale for bloody red. Eyes too bright. The creature raised its hands as if giving a blessing. It holds Abraham by the throat up towards the smoky beams of their ceiling and the poker falls from his hand. 

The Shadow Gatherer drifts across the room and hangs him by the back of the neck onto the barb of Porging Hook. The creature speaks with flashing eyes and seemingly without the need to move its lips as if the words are already inside Abraham’s head.

‘Let mine enemy be as the wicked. And he that riseth up against us be as the unrighteous.’

The roof beam groans under Abahams’s weight. His eyes blind with tears. Wide with agony and the terror of twisting and turning on himself and creating a fresh hell. The dark stain on his trousers is so quickly joined by the emptying of his bowels that they becomes the same foul smell swamp clinging to his useless legs. He prays to Adonis for death—and yet, life.

 ‘Help me,’ he croaks. ‘I’ll do anything. Anything you ask.’

The Shadow Gatherer strokes Abraham’s groin. ‘For what is the hope of the hypocrite in the land of the lost? Will you give up your future wife and boy child to me?’

Abraham’s groan is like a broken stone falling across his chest. ‘Yes. I’m in such pain.’ He tries to fight his head, such a small distance nearer the impossible flight. ‘I’ll do anything. Anything... you ask. I beg you. Please help…’

The Shadow Gatherer unbuttons him with long fingers and long nails, Abraham’s soiled trousers tugged free of his legs and he pulls off his fouled pants. Tosses them into the corner of the room. ‘I’ve already taken both your first wife and child out of the broken earth like veins of silver and a place for gold. And you have already fouled the nest with your promises and circumcised penis. Go on, little man. Call on your God!’

The Shadow Gatherer lifts Abraham from the hook and sniffs the air around his neck as if searching for something it finds sweet and detestable.

Abraham’s voice is doubled and trembling with the ecstasy of his body’s release. ‘I cannot.’

The creature balances his weak neck and broken skin on the prong. ‘Cannot or will not?

He jerks away, making his suffering worse, feeling the pain, yet to come. ‘Both.’

‘I setteth an end to your darkness which is a light among us.’

Abraham threshes before and after being pinned. His renewed vows of fealty falling from his lips in the threshing of gravity and flight.

The Shadow Gatherer answers in its own strange way.   

‘There is a path which any fool knoweth. To the vulture’s eye it lies clean. Bend to me. Let me take you like a man takes his virgin bride. Let me rise up inside you and stamp my ownership with more than kindred blood.  That we might rise up and walk inside you with earthly delights once again. What sayeth you?’

Abraham’s body slumps as he’s lifted from the hook. The creature already knows his answer, but he must speak it aloud. ‘Yes.’  

The Shadow Gatherer presses its cold fingers to Abraham’s forehead. Marks him with a cold-burning sign. Presses his lips to his. Forcing his mouth open. The coldness of a dark tongue steals his voice and stores his memories in equal blackness.

The Shadow Gatherer takes him like a woman and his soul looks on from the ceiling, from the sky and the edge of the beautiful earth and enters into the darkness and infinite beyond.

They speak with one voice. Broken apart, yet together.  

‘Your soul mate, Weiss, approaches like a lion’s whelp. A man that knoweth not the price of things. Willeth you offer him up to me as a suitable bridegroom?’

‘Yes,’ whispers Abrahams. ‘Always. Forever, yes. I swear.’