Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  He is inside a cavern lit by ten thousand candles, sending out black smoke and yellow light equally. In crevices along the rocky walls, naked boys and girls are chained and stretched into every contortion that the body can bear and ingenuity devise. On the cavern floor, the harlots of the temple, painted in vermilion shellac from head to toe, embrace beggars, dogs, monks, apes, bluejackets, stallions. Dancing transvestites strip off their breasts with their seventh veil, then couple with hyenas. The dugs of fat brothel madams shake in their frenzy, as they whip and rack girl children for the golden coins that drop one by one from the lacquered nails of old men, feeling themselves below their paunches. Androgynes play with hermaphrodites under the benevolent kisses of eunuchs.

  Dozens of impish bare children, not more than six or seven years old, clamber over Gog, tearing off his drenched clothes, sitting on his shoulders or clinging onto his thighs, scratching and caressing. Youths with mouths of honey suck at each finger and thumb, girls with small breasts of silk brush his belly, the orange hair of whores switches at his shoulders. But Gog bursts through the teasings of the flesh, while his ears are full of the moaning of sexuality and his nostrils are stuffed with the cloying acridity of sexuality and his fingers touch the velvet nap of sex­uality and his tongue tastes the moist gelatine of sexuality and his eyes see the sag and tautness of the sexual flesh.

  The floor of the cavern rises sharply towards three thrones, set above the orgy. On one of the lower thrones sits a fat elderly man; on the other throne, a slight and younger man; both are breeched and powdered; the first flogs a naked woman with a whip and fingers at the same time between her thighs, the second fingers himself while a dwarf girl wearing only red boots dances with her heels on his thighs and thrashes his cheeks with the knotted pigtail of her long hair.

  Above Sade and Sacher-Masoch sits Magog, whom Gog sees for the first time. And Magog is as the toadstool rearing on his long stalk through the knot in the wood, as the worm moving slyly into his burrow, as the sulphurous mud boiling in the hole, as the wedge splitting the log, as the lightning cleaving the forked oak, as the frog plopping into the rain barrel, as the heron picking in the pool, as the grab of the crane dropping into the hold, as the piston thrusting into the cylinder, as the smoke-stack penetrating the swell of the cloud, as the barge parting the bow-wave, as the spire between folds of air, as the bit in the horse’s mouth, the syringe in the bottle, the pipe in the rack, the brush in the pan. As all these things, the changing shape of Magog is, so that he bewilders Gog with his continual presence and metamorphosis. He is everywhere in everything, an obsession to the sight, a ceaseless skirmish to the imagination, a sniping at the senses.

  Gog feels his rage hone him, pare him to a cold skeleton of bone, inviolate from these pluckings of the senses. He kicks to right and left, sending Sade and Sacher-Masoch and their thrones sprawling. And as they rise, he seizes each round the neck with a great hand and cracks their skulls together as if these were gongs. Sade reels screaming back, his wig awry, his hands clasped to his shaven scalp, while Masoch rolls on the ground, his mouth fixed half-way between a leer and a grimace. Sade kicks with his stacked heel into Gog’s ribs; but while Sade laughs, Gog clouts him breech over buckle, so that he stumbles over the body of Masoch and treads on the fallen man’s guts. Masoch now whinnies with trampled pleasure, while Sade boots him contemptuously in the rump, merely to hear the whinny change to a cackle of ecstasy. Then Sade leaps upwards, twining his fingers in Gog’s hair and bringing up his knee into Gog’s kidney. As Gog bows forward under this punishing weight on his back, Sade slowly twists at his hair, not wishing to conquer Gog so much as to make him feel his locks extracted slowly, root by root by root. The sloth of Sade gives Gog his chance. He reaches back, grabs Sade by his powdered neck, and dashes his foe over his shoulders onto the body of Masoch, whose last act before falling unconscious with the stunned Sade on top of him is to give a great grin as his ribs cave in like a broken basket.

  Then Gog moves forward to grapple with the stupefying, enfolding, mutable Magog.

  And Magog is a coat of wild honey, but Gog sheds him onto the cavern floor and covers him with stones.

  And Magog is a bath of warm slime, but Gog dams him up with the fallen thrones of wood and lights them to burn him away.

  And Magog is tongues of fire, but Gog pinches them with horny hands and stamps them out.

  And Magog is black fog, but Gog cups his hands to catch and pocket him.

  And Magog is a green serpent, but Gog knots him and squeezes the venom from the sac behind his forked tongue.

  And Magog is a springing web of vines, but Gog crushes the grapes and tears up the vines by the roots.

  And Magog is a swarm of dragon-flies, but Gog swipes at their bright bodies and snaps them between finger and thumb.

  And Magog is a tawny eagle, but Gog breaks his beak and crushes the bones of his wings.

  And Magog is a ladle of boiling pitch, but Gog pours him through a fissure into the burning core of the earth.

  And after his nine forms, Magog appears as himself, a vast rearing sceptre of ridged silver, from which golden spears protrude as hairs. At its tip, a ruby orb that swells out over the circumference of the sceptre and rises to a split point, from which black oil spurts. A crown of white gold rings the ruby orb and holds a circular spilling pool of the black oil; from the crown, manes of coarse hair curl forth, matted and sticky.

  At the sight of the rearing sceptre crowned with the ring of white gold and hair, a frenzy overtakes the multitude in the temple sanctuary. They tear, bite, wrench, twist each other’s bodies. The cavern floor heaves as a leggy sea with interlacing strands of limb and hair. There is a din, a slavering, a baiting of lust.

  The knees of Gog tremble, his bowels loosen, he begins to bow and fall beneath the mighty emblem of Magog into the fleshy swell rolling at his feet. But as he bows and falls, his hand meets the splintered timber of the leg of Magog’s throne. Oaken thorns drive into his palm, so that he screams in agony. And he seizes the stump of the throne with his free hand, and he plucks its wounding end from his pierced palm, and he smites the rearing sceptre once, twice, thrice, yea, even nine times. And the sceptre cracks in its silver sheath and its golden spears rattle upon the earth and its ruby orb splits in twain and its hairy crown of white gold topples. And Magog tumbles and lies at Gog’s feet. And Gog puts the splintered stump of oak upon the sceptre’s corpse and leans upon it.

  And the people of the temple break apart and look at one another and are ashamed. They cover themselves with their hands and huddle each in his own private modesty. And the black doors are blown open by the storm and the chill rain enters.

  Through the doors, the hairy fallen angel walks into the sanctuary, his yellow mat of hair sodden against his skin, so that he seems to be of flesh rather than fur. He passes by the bowed bodies of the multitude, and he lays himself on the earth at Gog’s feet, saying, “I’m Crook no more.”

  And Magog speaks with his voice of brass from the fallen rod of silver and gold, saying, “Gog, spare my life, and I will be a servant to you. For when the mind shall flag, I shall be the spur. And when the prayer shall fall short, I will give it wings. And when the arm shall drop, I will nerve the sinew. And when the voice shall be dumb, I will be a trumpet in the throat. And when the foot shall be weary on the road, I will be as the spring of turf. And when the land shall be empty, I will fill it with child­ren. And when the house shall be dark, I will light it with the content of wives. Harness me, yoke me, chain me, bind me, keep me within the cage of your lawful desire. But spare me, for you cannot live without me.”

  And so Gog bends to make of the silver of Magog plates for his table and of the gold of Magog bracelets for Maire and of the split ruby of Magog twin hollowed cradles. But Crook rises from the earth and speaks, his knife in his hand:

  “Kill ’im. Yer saw me. A beast, I was. A cock, an’ cock all else. ’E did it. Magog. Yer can’t trust ’im. Turn yer back an’ ’e�
�s up yer arse. ‘E made me an animal. A screwin’ beast. Kill ’im.”

  But Gog says, “Let Magog be. He is my servant. And he will be a good servant. Only as master is he evil . . .”

  “Kill ’im,” Crook says. “ ’E’s the devil.” And Crook runs forward with his knife and lets it in between the ridges of silver and turns the blade in the rent, until the black oil pours out and Magog groans. And Gog pulls at Crook’s arm and wrenches it backwards. But the knife in the wound is sunk home as deep as to the womb.

  “Fool,” Gog says. “You cannot kill Magog. You must govern him. If you try to destroy him, he will devour you even more.”

  As he speaks, the black oil flowing from the wound becomes a horde of drops, which grow legs, and lo, they are ants which scurry forth. And they grow wings and take to the air and cover the people in their swarming, so that the masses in the sanctuary forget their shame and modesty in order to scratch, then to slap, then to dance, then to laugh, then to shriek. And the winged ants of Magog drive the people into a frenzy that passes the fury of the maenads, the screeching jig of the Bacchantes, until the naked men and women and boys and girls and androgynes and hermaphrodites and eunuchs are clutching and pawing and coupling over the cavern floor, with the ants driving them on to every experiment of pain and torture of lechery.

  Squadrons of the winged ants of Magog attack and sting Gog and Crook, who are driven howling from the temple under the pillars out through the cracking gateway into the swamp and the wood. Weeping and flailing, Gog plunges blindly on through marsh and bush, losing Crook. He tries to lie in a swamp pool to drown the ants upon his naked flesh; but as he ducks himself, Magog sends hundreds of leeches to hang onto his flesh, until Gog rises bellowing with black tails sprouting from chin to toe. So Gog lumbers on. The thorns of the thickets tear away the leeches, which leave bloody kisses where their black lips have been. The stinging ants eventually drink their fill of Gog’s veins and drop off. And twigs scrape off the remnants of Gog’s skin, until he is one pulp of raw meat.

  He can run no more. So he starts to crawl on all fours towards the sunlight which begins to sift through the branches of the trees and show its yellow doors between their trunks. Sob­bing and torn, Gog comes out of the dark wood into a meadow. And there, set above him, is a giant cube of hay, kept in by wooden rails from falling. With the last of his forces Gog clambers up the rails and reaches the surface of the structure and collapses, naked and belly down on the steaming hay. Thus Gog sleeps with the hot stink of erotic decay rising into his mouth and nose.

  A shower in the evening makes Gog waken on the hay-tip. He is suffering from sunburn, which has made his skin raw. His whole body is a rash of red discomfort from head to foot. He gropes for his clothes, then remembers that they were stripped off him in the temple of Magog in the dark wood – if he has ever stirred bodily from his original sleep in the hay-tip and has not merely wandered through the forests of the night within the windings of his own skull. His clothes, indeed, are gone; but there is a small bundle beside him, and a note, which reads:

  I leve you the suit of my dead husband wot was big like you and wont need his no mor. Good luck.

  So Gog soon finds himself dressed in a clean grey flannel shirt and a red tie and a green pullover and a brown suit, shiny at seat and elbow. He has knitted socks and brown boots for his feet. The cloth burns his raw skin, but Gog is happy to wear clothes that are half-way respectable, even if the kindly widow has taken away the rest of his money from Maurice in the pocket of his old trousers.

  So Gog shoulders his pack and walks on towards Durham in the evening. When he passes the old grey houses of Corbridge, he could swear that he has already passed the houses with Crook at noon. But the grocer’s shop is closed, where they bought their lunch, and Gog cannot check whether he went inside the shop that midday. He walks on fast over the Tyne, taking the way South that does not allow him to pass again the wall in front of the dark wood. He keeps going, until his legs and the light begin to tucker out on Whittonstall Rise, where the big-rumped farmers stand at the pub door talking fat stock prices.

  Once over the hill, Gog overlooks the medieval town of Consett on its hump above the Derwent. The town seems to be on fire, its turrets and keeps blazing. Then Gog looks again and sees that there are no turrets nor keeps, only chimneys and kilns, blazing on an artificial hill with sides of slag above the black and red roofs of a workers’ town. The white smoke drifts out of the kilns, as the golden sunset goes grey and the usurious day banks the sovereigns of its light in the night vault, the gold of the light that makes men work all day in the cannibal kilns.

  Gog eats his last loaf of stale bread and sacks down in the lee of a haystack. The rain begins to fall after an hour or two. So he struggles over to a nearby haycart and spreads his ground-sheet over its cracked planks and crawls underneath, curling head on knees like a hedgehog despite the cramps in his legs, dozing in fits and starts as the rain drums and drips down. In the night, Consett is a dark fleet getting up steam to move from its berth; in the first dawn, its grey stacks stick up into a grey sky.

  During his last nap in the dawn, Gog sleeps waking, as if one eye were perpetually half-open. He seems to be watching an old film, grainy and scratched and silent. In it, Maire, dressed only in a black skin-suit with a silver dagger at her belt, stalks noise­less through the Paris of the Belle Epoque and Feuillade, past art-nouveau interiors and horse-drawn trams and kiosks plastered with posters of Jane Avril at the Divan Japonais and Rosa-­Josepha, entwined Siamese girl twins for ever. Maire carries in her arms a hairy porcupine of a cat, its slant eyes blazing through its soft quills of fur. She creeps up behind men in top hats and cloaks, then she slips her dagger in their backs and they fall without a whimper. Their only warning of death is the running of the porcupine cat past them. Then Maire stalks away, her body suggesting white where the black skin-suit is tauter at swell of breast and buttock.

  As Gog dreams waking, he wakes dreaming to find his mouth and nostrils stopped up with fur and his eyelids closed with claws. He chokes, then tries to brush away the animal from his face; but his palm meets the wrists of someone trying to suffocate him with the warm body of a beast. He writhes and sweeps with his arms, striking into the soft give of a breast. And then, the animal is gone in a scrabble and a scamper. And Gog rolls over to see Maire in the skin-suit and the hairy porcupine cat running over the stubble towards the open gate of the field, where the black car waits. As Gog gets onto his hands and knees, ready to jump up and pursue her, he squashes with his palms two fat black slugs, the glossy ones which crawl out with the rain and undulate as enticingly as the Queen of Sheba’s little finger. But revulsion at this sudden cold squish sets Gog back on his heels, and by the time that he has wiped his hands on the hay, Maire and the cat are in the car and away.

  Gog ponders over the attempts of Maire to kill him, that seem more threats of death than attempts at murder. They are surely warnings, not failed assassinations. And Gog dozes again, squat­ting on his haunches, until another drizzle disturbs him and sends him drowsily on his way, as heavy-headed as if he had just woken from sleep.

  The green fields end suddenly below Consett in the fluid sludge of the Derwent, which is no more than an open sewer, while above rises the first bastion of the industrial revolution which Gog has seen since Hawick. It is the Grey Country as yet, the outpost of the Black. Gog climbs slowly, until he reaches the great mine which tops the hill above Consett on the way to Leadgate. Men don’t build earthworks to defend themselves against other men any more, but they build slagheaps to rid themselves of refuse. Yet it is all the same to the weeds and grass that are already climbing over these new banks of black grit. Men dig out coal, use it, tip out its remains, which goes back under grass and slowly becomes coal again.

  Gog passes the bungalows of Leadgate with their shining wet slate roofs, which jettison themselves down the hills and straggle up the slopes in cocked rows. Everywhere, monotonous repeti­tions of plaster and
stone and slate and grime. All the way beyond Leadgate to Durham, there is nothing but the slick road and the soft hills, turning more and more grey and less and less green, petering out in allotments and red villas. And so Gog comes down the hill into Durham, drawn into its hub by the towers of the Cathedral on its mound. And Magog waits there, holding his second rod of power.

  XIII

  Gog lurches down North Street under the vast viaduct of the stone railway bridge, marvelling at the mighty Victorians, who erected arches to hail the triumph of steam and iron, arches greater than the Romans built for the baths of a conquering emperor. A train rumbles overhead and black grit falls on Gog out of a white puff of cloud, as he hears the stutter of the wheels punctuate his reveries. The noise gathers and departs along the rails over the arches, keeping to the lines of its coming and going, the iron lines that divide England even more decisively than the stone lines of the Roman roads, separating the people from their land by a skein of metal and machines that shuttle from station to station the factory goods and the labour force (no longer counted one by one as men are counted), until the roots of the villagers in earth are pulped by pistons and the desire of humans for the fruits of the soil is baled in crates for carriage and the river water hisses in boilers and the fields gape open in pits to produce coal for the fiery maws of the rolling behemoths and the patrols of the iron monsters along their beats make the people expect their regular passing so that they are missed when they do not come, as though the engines were now the guardians of prosperity rather than the seasons, as though the engines were not the sentinels on the perimeter of the con­centration camp that condemns England to toil in the sweat of smoke and grime and din and slum, to sell what she does not need to make in order that she may consume what she does not need to have.