In the chamber of the upper storey, high on the under-hide of the roof, there is light above your head, here inside the Black Gate,
here you are not alone, here in-presence-d …
You climb again, you stop again, and now you see –
In the upstairs chamber, in an occult circle –
Twelve candles and twelve shadows –
In the Occupied City, beneath the Black Gate, in its upper chamber, in this occult circle of these twelve candles,
now you are on your knees.
Suddenly, the ceiling of the chamber is illuminated by a flash of lightning. You look, you listen. You hear a peal of thunder, the fall of rain hard upon the roof of the gate. You listen, you look –
In the light of the candles, you see and now you hear a hand-bell being shaken in the air; hear and see a bell and a hand –
The red bell and the white hand, the white arm and the red sleeve, the red robe and the white face of a woman –
The woman, a medium, before you –
In the centre of the circle of the candles,
in their gutter-ring, she stands –
Her hair and her robes now flailing within a sudden tempest, for the laden wind has found you here again, again the haunted air,
as the medium rattles the bell again and again, and again –
The bell, and now the sound of a drum beating slowly,
as the medium begins to dance, to spin and to turn –
Madly, the bell clattering and the wind howling,
the drum beating, on and on, over and over –
Feet moving through the splintered wood,
dancing, spinning and spinning, turning –
Suddenly she stops, suddenly still now,
frozen, the bell slips from her hand –
Abruptly, she faces you now, to say:
‘Let the story-telling game begin…’
Then she tears towards you,
in this Possessed City –
The medium falls to the floor before you, now she sits upright, taut and still, and now her mouth begins to open, to speak. In a disembodied drone, it speaks. It speaks the words of the dead –
‘We are here because of you,’ they whisper. ‘Because of you, our dear sweet, sweet writer dear, because of you …
The First Candle –
The Testimony of the Victimo Weeping
Because of you. The city is a coffin. In the snow. In the back of a truck. Parked outside the bank. In the sleet. Under the heavy damp tarpaulin. Driven through the streets. In the rain. To the hospital. To the morgue. In the sleet. To the mortuary. To the temple. In the snow. To the crematorium. To the earth and to the sky –
In our twelve cheap wooden coffins –
In these twelve cheap wooden coffins, we lie. But we do not lie still. In these twelve cheap wooden coffins, we are struggling. Not in the dark, not in the light; in the grey, we are struggling; for here is only grey, here we are only struggling –
In this grey place,
that is no place,
we are struggling all the time, always and already –
In this place, of no place, between two places. The places we once were, the places we will be –
The deathly living,
the living death –
Between these two places, between these two cities:
Between the Occupied City and the Dead City, here we dwell, between the Perplexed City and the Posthumous City –
Here we dwell, in the earth, with the worms,
in the sky, with the flies, we who are no longer in the houses of being. Beyond loss, flocks of birds fall from the sky and shower us with their bloody feathers and severed wings. But we still hear you. We who are now in the houses of non-being. Beyond loss, schools of fish leap from the sea and splatter us with their bloody guts and severed heads. We still see you. We want to breathe again, but we can never breathe again. Beyond loss, herds of cattle run from the fields and trample us with their bloody carcasses and severed limbs. We listen to you. We want to return again, but we can never return again. Beyond loss. We watch you still. Through our veils –
The veils which no longer hang before our eyes, these veils which now hang behind our eyes, their threads spun by our tears, their webs woven by our deaths, these veils which replaced our names, which replaced our lives –
Through these veils,
still we see –
Still we watch, we watch you …
Our mouths always open, our mouths already open. But we no longer talk, we can no longer talk, here