The Stench

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Raton, New Mexico

1873

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See me, my God, and find place in me. Take me, my God, and find home in me. In places most consigned to perdition, arid and wasted, bring me water. Let the water contain Ye, and let it enshrine me with its being: You. Yea, approach me with the final water, that being Love (a word synonymous with ye) and take my stride and find it in the cracked sunbaked surface which stretches like removed skin for miles and miles and caking the tallest mountains and cathedrals to ye. That is my love, its spread, its distance. My prayer of water. Let my tongue and throat be singed with your Life, your Spirit, and your Son, in the form of that all-removing organ which colors and covers our most surfaces of the ever-watching eye of our universe. It is to ye, my Lord, which I pray, because only you can deliver them; because only you are responsible; because only You are possible.

Amen.

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There were innumerable attempts, on my own part, to assess and set an exact date for the end of the world. Such things are sins, I know, and I’m deeply ligious, but it’s the failing of Imperfection that does that—not me. We are a seventeen-head pack when we go down what Devin called the throat of the world, down there in that starless black to which our sky is stone. The sight of such black, not in light’s absence but in powder, is what originally left that Devin to begin prophesying about how things would end. I remember, he would say,

“How can this hollowed earth, black on the inside to such a degree that we are remissed to breathe, be not dead or on the verge of so. It is impossible. Earth is dead, and we harvest her teeth before our baron.”

It was coal that made it so. Coal why we’re here. Coal. Coal. It is black and can be made into carbon-heavy coke and that too is why we are here. There’s little else to find in the ancient deserts until you go underground and witness why we were put on this earth and not in to begin with. To be in is ‘tirely different even to understand. There is no up, here, and there is no down. The parallels between the surface walkers and me are like moles to the great apes; we are not the same. There are yet no stars, no light, no air, and no beginning or end to each hole we go to dig. Armijo says that it’s much bigger than we think; he calls it the crust we dig in and that even though it’s the smallest layer it goes on for miles and wraps around the ‘tire planet and then goes deeper and deeper beyond what we can imagine. It’s the kosmos, we found in that dark, breathless like water and fully effacing. We come out of it darkened.

I asked him one time why it went so deep. Groping along a tite near the wall, he said,

“Cállate, los molestas para siempre.” I don’t really know what that means.

Upon our exit during the day which I take to recording it was near-night. First thing I saw was the orange what-i-think-to-be Tupui on the bluff of the horizon, there, looking stately. I don’t know my places very well but as I pass the sign near my described throat I see it: 

PARTITION OF MAXWELL LAND GRANT

RATON COAL MINE

The sign itself is colored a near-oppressive green and caked by sand and rust all around like scars from an infection. I flick the words around my tongue and it doesn’t do much other than reveal my lack of them, bouncing around. I didn’t even know no Maxwell myself, though he must be wealthy if this is his property. I cannot properly imagine a view into the hollowed earth goes cheap.

Stepping further out I saw the rolled out bilious green carpets leading up to the foothills. We were seventeen of us coming out, each a-gazing either down to the surface which we were once under or to those mountains which I can’t say I care about too much. Their points are soft beyond any type of conviction. I don’t like soft, much less in mountain or in man. The thought-to-be Tupui down there past slanted stick houses, that sure was not soft in any kind. I took to it when I came down from the Carolinas; we remain equally destitute. High there I cannot breathe and down there I cannot breathe, the absence and crowding of light are not conducive to air in any manner. It is ‘lone, too, ‘cept it dun't need to breathe.

Wilhelm pulled next to me—we elected to call him Will most days. Down from Germany he was. He said to me: “Bad times ahead for us, I think. Meet me up ahead, later. We go.” So I remember it, anyway.

I walked along the path-harded trail up to the town, itself barely made of anything other than coal and teeth. My leg is bad, too, and I left a little lopsided ditch in the trail; I got cursed from it, now and then. It looks like a snake, that half-higher part.

The town’s self is about the farthest thing from God that I can see man creating, built by burrowing and coming back up new again, richer. Every house like the cocked brow of a rooster, taken at an angle and shallow. One man could shake the hand of another through the window, the size of it. Main street is perhaps the basest mockery of it all, a saloon being the only place to talk without somehow paying. I was never a talker, especially then; I couldn't get the words out from underneath the swollen tongue I got from biting it during my youth. The words set down to write much easier than to speak them, found I. We got along well after that, and that’s when I went to praying—not just on Sunday, but whenever it could be managed. I worked on a large one to be preached someday; I hope I can be a preacher, someday. We are nothing without Our word. I got to the bar quick as I could, for it was Saturday and it was surely to be crowded the greater the sun failed and scraped past the hills that night and the dark further murged with the depths I too could not trace.

I stepped in. Inside the place was covered in a ceaseless and permanent yellow haze that seemed itself to be alive with every flash of fleeting smoke and contain something awful portentous in its different yet right-at-home place amongst our tribal and night-ridden shades. Every man moving through the smoke looked to be a piece of driftwood in a polluted river of molasses—women there too. There must’ve been fifty men there. This was a time in which I would estimate the end of the world, and I begun to agree with Devin a little more: it couldn’t be too far off. Everything made of splintered wood because trees don’t grow out here.

I went to the bar looking for Wilhelm—his stature was easy to find. Tall, slender, and paler than most; not built for digging by most accounts aside from his memory which many considered to be photographic. He called out to me:

“We meet. I introduce myself to you: Wilhelm. Perhaps you may have seen me.”

I stuttered, “We’s all seen you, I think. Head taller—than everyone else—what’d you want to talk…about?”

From his look I could tell he was put off by my talk, but I had to pay no mind.

“Anyway…what is your name? I found it, down there. Before you say what, know what I mean. It is the glow, mister. And that is our freedom, friend, covered in darkness. We will find it together and be rich together.”

Yet again I had no idea what he meant; language of the talking sort was not my strong suit.

“What?” Said I.

“You may ask why I would tell you. It is a good question. I cannot get that far down. I need you to get it for me while I stay up and guide you.”

“What?”

“Gold, man. I have found gold.”

For a moment in his long, grey face I could see a flick of desperation and madness. The type of man to find death to be hilarious gazed at me from his broken-saucer eyes that moved only to scan and obtain in a not-mamalian sort of way. He didn’t find it, he couldn’t have. He was looking for it, the durn man. It is fine to look, but some things are unsearchable. Even the Lord say to call Him to find the unsearchable, though one would probably say that gold in pitch dark is perfectly searchable with our own eye and not His. A star in a clouded night, it is.

“We go tonight. After dark—nobody must see.” He said to me. His voice was not a request.

***

There was a time in my New Mexican life in which I walked around the town. I remember stumbling ‘cross the mine town in my drunken stupor, I was a-drinking, then, and I couldn’t help but walk through the steamed and mudded road across the main, back then. It was before I banged my knee. It was no good. Sometimes someone would rob me, and it was no good. By what I now call the lord I was then destitute, not a cent that I promised myself in the enterprises of the southwest. I hated the mountain.

My father had been to a church for money and seeing that sneering cross atop a shanty roof I took it to mean a bank with more words to say and went in lest I starve and die so far away. So far away I was, the coldest rock of space could not compare to how far I was. How often I tried to think of home and the readied sand could only come to mind and never home. Even my mother had her face blotched by that crushed fine, that all-consumer of my memory, it took it right away, and that was why I stayed in my cups: I could only hate the world for making me forget. 

The church was not much standing: rigid with cracks and baked pinyon that gave it a roasting smell and the Cross hanging above the tallest what-could-be-called point was more directional than symbolical. It looked to me like a bank. I went in. Back there was a man sitting before what resembled a pulpit made of recycled chairs, with nobody standing; he looked Hispanic to me and I had rarely ever seen one where I was from. My father maybe fought his father, I don’t know. 

“Sit. Lonely around this time of night.”

It is lonely all the time, I wanted to say, but my malady of hesitance grew worse with every sip and in such states I was all but equivalent to mute. Mutes communicate through eyes and so I looked at him and he looked at me and we were both reserved only to our clothes and naked in thought and I had never felt such ways towards any man. I thought about loving him like one would love any savior and destroyer of perdition but he was not those things and I knew that.

I sat.

“It is less lonely now. Such things are miracles of God.”

Are you a preacher, I wanted to say, and yet again the stops were put and I was driven down to silence and mere groans like settling rock. Above us in soaring and diminishing circles a pack of right gnats hovered around a hanging oil lamp.

He didn’t say anything for a while, that man, and I was left to staring at his knees and my own, his dirtied and wet and mine perfectly clean. Preachers can’t be doing that kind of labor, I thought, and deduced that he was not one. He wore straw and I wore thin linen because it was all there was, no good. The floor was no floor, at all, only sand, but we sat on carpet that to me also felt of Mexico in its reptilian sense of angle. We sat alone. Alone. I cannot find a similar word.

“I know, our filths are innumerable.”

I wanted to tell him that I could not be filthy for filth was common and the dis-earthed mud around me was too pushed into the flesh of us to be anything other than the river to the ocean but I knew he wouldn’t believe me but he should. He needs to, I wanted to say. He should believe me, I wanted to say. In my patheticisms I wanted to believe that he would believe me above his God because it would mean something more than a wagon-sized rut-down church in a town gone from Rome.

In that lugubrious air we found what I would like to think was meaning in our collective miasma; we were sick, sick with money. Many have certain looks in the eye, just about the iris, to the obvious extremities of one's face, showing the condition. It is a slight stretch, a ratched and tooth-size distortion from the colored pit to the flesh that twitches enough for a close looker to see. I’ve seen it pick up there many times in my own mirror, beginning to think I had gone leprous, and for the first time I stared at a different soul and saw it moving back at me, up along the rims of the face and turning it into a sour and putrid thing that couldn’t be helped—for it was sick, that it was, and at the time it was is. 

“Mon…ney…I’s…got…to get…yer money…man!” I spat out the words because I didn’t know how to say them or speak them in a way of sense, but this place was not of sense because we were not of sense sitting on the floor when we could have done it outside with only the firmament as our roof.

“Aye. Is there life beyond this earth?

I wanted to say no because the universe must be cold and dark because all things unknown to us is cold and dark, from below to up to water to sky. It is all cold, and things dun’t live in the cold.

“We walk this earth so curious to answer the Question, but we cannot read it; be it so? Know, when the Nueces gave way to the Republican Union did we not feel the first breath of extraterrestrial life bearing down upon us, though only North they were? The Question is that of our condition about the eye that you dutifully noticed; be it you thought I would not notice? It is the mark of God’s ultimate wish, to be sick, to suffer. What earthly God is such? They were only North, and He is only up.”

I touched my eye and started down with every sudden twitch, for the womb does not seek to see and out of it I found myself giving birth to the Question and to the counting of each of my counterpart’s hairs and finding he had none and never had none. He was naked to all but flesh and even it was opaque and full of churning, the churning of Blood and Providence and the Fall through the sand and to Raton. The ultimate inspiration as I move my ink now and my eyes of that moment, sick, sick with money.  He is only Up.

The man picks me up by the hend and grasps my hands and places them unto his thighs, pulling from his deep pocket a single star-faced cent and burying it in my palms with the solemnity of a loved one, for to him it was loved and now lost. Having satisfied my desire for money I walked out of the Church unchanged and capitalized. Only Up, yes, Only Up. Perhaps I could believe that I was not sick.

***

Now with Wilhelm I saw to his order because the value of money was not in cups but in freedom, and freedom gold was. I heard from California not many years ago was gold found and the whole of the state was caught up in it, to the point that the southerner I was at the time became aware of it. We keep it for ourselves, I wanted, and then we took and sold it and could buy any carriage to far away, maybe even Albuquerque.

“Wait for dark. I will be at the sign.” Wilhelm left the bar and got away to some place. He slept and ate alone most times, today being the first I heard his voice calling to anything, much less myself.

The bar’s crowd was beginning to diffuse out all sides and every man still inside found himself to be involved in businesses nefarious, which I strayed away from. Noticing the decay, and the slowing of the ever-murmuring yellow fog present, I decided to step away and wait for the pitchest of dark. Returning to the front lip of the place I saw the stepless ghosts and shadows of those passers and keepers going through, faceless and motionless yet imbued with momentum, scant leaving footsteps in the mudded-sand. Occasional oil lanterns, too, though they were only the more vividly swallowed in fragments by the ever-growing night. It was upon me to see that the snuffing of this flame was another indication of what I now wanted to call the end of the world. Finnywigin to reckon with the truth, I enlisted in the tacit agreement of finding the signs wherever they appeared, which was everywhere from the sickness to the yellow; yellow being the worst of all. In the visage of fevers and money the denses of smoke and rotted teeth, I only found suffering in that color, that color.

Along this second Sodom I elected to go back to my dwellings and recoup myself, for the erring day was beginning to draw its last breath; with each inhalation it drew gusts from zephyrs and sturred each appendage of the earth like hair in the wind, there. Each twist and pull towards nautical direction loose yet irresistible and undeniable in its larger pull, like a laughed yet serious strong-armed pull into the sea when one did not know how to swim, which I did not. Everything tugged East, now, back towards home; someway it was not for me to be pulled back there, though, back home—I stayed hooked here in the ground; ‘deed, there is no gold in Fairfield.

Ere a man could pass a wink I was to the residencies, lined up shanties in rows not too distant in resemblance to the tentacles of some larger beast in the deep. Each nearly the same: a malformed and rusted cuboid shaped by corrugated steel and occasional planks of wood. It looked like a ravaged mouth missing too many teeth and replaced by scabbed gums, each and every one, ruined by something gingival. From each side peering fields of eyes focused upon my form like laid-by aisles of cotton, each from a broken-in hole-to-window orifice in the structures. I paid no mind, and found mine, nearly identical ‘cept for the reviled ᙬ I marked with pigment close to the entrance, which my mother told me was like a sailboat, so it stayed.

Inside was so barren that I would be fain to note anything of significance, my woolen cot picked out from what the merchant told me was Santa Fe, though I hesitate to believe any man touting where his cloth is picked from; my shrinked pocket Bible, a contrivance I bought far before my Lord God had aught presence in my life through any means outside implicit; my oil can, solidified in wax. Aside from those it was a floor of much-dirtied earth, and walls occasionally warped and rusted by the wills of the elements alone, be it rain or shine. I bent down and took a match from under the cot, feeling an unusual weight and sag; a certain batedness present in the structure which I was not familiar with—could only ignore it. I used myself as the breaker, for my dried-out and coal covered belt made a frictuous surface with which I could make light. Lighting my room so I spread it to my canister and left it alone, turning to my bed—today being the day I could glean scripture, at hopes.

There he was; laden in sweat, frantic, with streams pouring from his mouth—his often hirsute form reduced to a broken-down hindrance befitted for only rambling idiots having turned stupid in them streets they walked from. ‘Twas Devin that met my gaze there, setting on my cot like he owned it; his prophesying must’ve corrupted his essence—either he believed his words or they were true outside of any written shell that we could pose to mark them, and thus I then estimated the end of the world.

“It’s gone, Montrose.” He said to me, “It’s all gone and done for.” He could hardly keep his hands out of his long-greased combover.

“What brings—brings ye about here? What do I gots to be…concerned with?”

“God help me, Montrose, you know what I mean! We lost it!” He said, his eyes pulsating like their own two hearts and arteries.

“I couldn’t know, man—you, you just gotta tell me.” I backed to my single window, though even trying to leap through it would only cut me clean in half against the galvanized metal, wholly jagged and cross.

“The coal, you idiot, the coal!” Devin spat, gesticulating wildly as if a swarm of hornets were upon him; “We…” He slumped down.

“Well, what!” With so few words I couldn’t think to hesitate.

“We got nothing for it, we can’t even eat it. Durn useless as a rock.”

“You’ve got to…explain yerself. Y’ain’t making sense, Devin” I tried to be soft, I did.

“We can’t even eat it.”

“It’s not for eating, you know. Not for us.”

“We can’t even eat it. Trains gobble it up and spit out the rest.”

“We sell it—and then, then we eat after we sell.”

“Can’t eat money neither. We can’t even eat it.”

At some points one must recognize the dangers of a body clearly distressed, for like a broncho anyone can kick if pushed to it, and pushed to it Devin was seeming. We’ll have to send him by train somewhere, hopefully somewhere quiet. There are places like that, for people who can’t go much farther, and they’re quiet.

“Well, I must get going—going, things got to get going, and you too, Devin.” 

“God, you can’t!” Devin rushed up and lighted to me by that window and grabbed my already tired and loose collar, “Don’t leave me, please, it’s so dark up here and only worse down there, below. Please!”

I lookt around: “Alright, it’s more important than that. We got something down there—Devin, something to sell, and it’s valuable. Once we git it…out we can go free, out of here. Maybe up to Colora—”

“I know about it! I know about it! Three cheers for Devin, he knows! You can’t! Don’t leave me, don’t leave me there, it gets to me here, you can’t go!” I put my hand over his mouth and clasped it tight. He wrestled his neck wildly and broke my grasp: “It gets evil down there. I’m begging.”

I wanted to say it was his own damned fault that we were left gripping each other like mad men in this here room because he couldn’t control himself, and that was because he couldn’t exist without talking and professing against the Lord who had now cursed him with insanity; to watch another man disapprove.

He let go of me, finally, and fell down to my floor. Light beads of sweat, reflected by my fire, radiated ‘cross his face as if his forehead were itself the unpolluted sky and his creases the milky way formed by melting and downward stars. I gestured to pick him up but I didn’t because he set there like a salmon with his eyes moving all about, his fingers twirling wildly against some figmentary loom, and his feet twitching like he tried to run from something. I left.

It was yet harder to see now, somehow, for even the dwellings around me were not spared; everything gone save the surface ahead of me, and the stretching road to the throat of the world. The vague murmurs of moving people and the tugs of wind were gone: all I could hear circling through my skull was his words: “Don’t leave me here don’t leave me here don’t leave me here don’t leave me here, it gets evil down there.” I don’t understand how he knew before even the Nine Worthies exactly what I was talking about; men of crazed states are not prescient, certain am I, that he was in no position to be—wasn’t in the bar with us either. There is no evil down there, it is just rock. There is no evil down there, it is just rock. Only up and down, that’s all I needed to worry about. Just git that mineral, just get it out and buy a horse and go to Colorado and become a preacher there, they’re always needed; we don’t need anything else.

Stumbling through the night I reached that preeminent sign indicating the first change to rot that would be spread throughout the world, engulfing and swallowing it in black tar. About its foremost letter, R,the tip of a longer head stood in front and obscured it. His face was sunken, the scaffolding holding it together had collapsed and the tarp of skin lay there, flapping in a breeze yet altogether sagging; his sockets filled with green cue balls rolled lazily. Worst of all, his corpusant-familiar pallor was visible at all times of day, more like a retainant scrap of quartz than flesh—with no assistance one could see it gleaming and mistake it for some phenomenon of electrical wind and take it for an omen. He was wearing delicate and unworn overalls with buttons and pockets in every nook and a silk shirt, not yet white as he, tracking me from far away with a neck not altogether human. The night revealed things about people, perhaps exaggerated the innermost parts of their stature: in him I saw an alien, some sort of creature I had not ever seen when rays shone on him; now that they left him, so did all Grace and sorts of amiability.

Ambling closer I was all the more concerned to see him grow taller, past the sign, with each step I took under his equidistant and monocolored shadow, until he felt almost a whole head-and-shoulders higher than me. He looked down and spoke.

“Glad you are here? See this misted night we stand in the midst of?” He let out an overcrowded smile, each egg-hued tooth almost with a grin of its own, his breath smelling much the same.

I said nothing, nor did I wish to; we don’t always have to talk, I think. I didn’t outright deny him, and that’s all he needed to know. 

Upon closer lookings his sockets were more filled with red than anything else, his otherwise purity now being contaminated. Bloodshot he was; the kind only found in those who either do not sleep, or take no joy in an act they find reluctant. Those saucers, now spilled with it, were rusted. A certain squint arose from the lids as well, one that perpetuated and incessed in all hours; I could have brought a light or the sun itself, and that contraction would not have lifted or changed in any way—’twas static as some earthen dam from the Chimayo pass. In them, however, I noticed a squalling melancholia about the humors, not far removed from some type of poor bile. He didn’t want them to stay that way, his eyes, he didn’t want them to be red anymore. He didn’t want to be here anymore, to be erased to the extent that he himself could not reflect, and to rotate through the center thrice to the utmost pole, away, alone. Such would be his final legacy, to be entirely blasted out of existential canon in a way hitherto done many times before and since. An aching, throbbing pain sent through his vessels and finally showed in the cracks of his eyes, the final desolation of Wilhelm, lost for a long time and clawing out of his own skin. It was the grace of God that allowed me to see such things, to find a trench in his soul from this momentary glance, his evil, repulsive teeth—draping the world away. From His act of giving me such prescience I could only further anticipate that we were nearing the End, now, into the rotted pit at the center of Earth’s cherry, where we stood, selling it. We would now find the glint of juice in this deliquesced hunk of matter and we would sell it for ourselves because ourselves was all that was important; I need to go to another place on the hunk of matter so I can tell people how to appreciate it in the name of Him. Wilhelm had not known love, methinks, nor had he known an inch of companionship in the eyes of anything sacred. He was simply the individual: I was gazed into the consequence.

***

We descended. It was in a body, farther we went down, each exhale only revealing the finest beetle-colored dust that enveloped us and dove into every part of us and stuck to the walls. We stuck to the walls. A drape of obsidian went over me: we were blind, the both of us, our faces and necks hugged by the hard and by the cold. No less could I see the pines of Yukon from here than I could my own hands. Utterly deprived, casting around our digits like beheaded ants with no guide to the stars or moon which were now completely absent in all of their light. To cock the neck meant nothing, to squint or rise meant nothing, and most futile was blinking and coming back, for they was indistinguishable. The air was still, and when I inhaled I felt nothing but the own contrivance and expansion of my lungs absent from all movement and variable change of oxygen, and thus I gripped my own shirt and skin like I was with gills, entirely foreign to all things deep. The surface did not exist—Raton did not exist. We had forsaken the petty digs above for the true earth dwellers, Our true children.

In the first profundity I found Wilhelm’s back and held with one hand and the other went to my chest. He tugged me with his walk and he seemed assured with each step, each stride over a foot long with his needle legs. It was all I could do to be near-lifted fully off the ground with each tug, though the ground and the air here held little meaning.

I thought about Armijo, now dead to me as any President or unmarked tomb, for I could not see him, could not feel him, could not think him, and that the crust was small: I believed his words, though I could barely even remember a word to be what. Every image-producing quadrant of the mind that I called my own was entirely filled with the retch’s most gouted foot and extremity, every orifice infiltrated with what I could only purport to be an infection that too would turn my mind black. Wilhelm kept going, and I only followed.

Posthaste (a word I recalled from the Storm in ‘68) the silence started. We were huffing, the two of us, and the occasional tumble or crack was found on all sides; wood, sometimes. Even the sweat from my palm slipping past or the fabric pull I produced. ‘Ventually, it was gone. We still moved, and yet there were only the muted throes of death and the vacuum of crackling, incessant crackling with every joint moved and the grinding of my bones. A line of hemp grew in the back of my neck and I could feel it near-snap with every imperceptible gyration towards some direction. I could no longer feel myself. Wilhelm kept going.

Wilhelm gave and went down over a jagged part of coal. So did I and with a sudden pike like a butte sound came back, fleeting. I lay on top of him and him groaning for his mother in some Germanic tongue I did not understand he rolled around like a pig in mud made for cars. I felt scraped and I could taste it, me still atop him being flung around; even then I could see some inkling of white covered in dirt, his face now poked with all wild muscle and tendon grasping. 

“I am nothing i am nothing i am nothing please help me,” he said, my lids trembling and my hands searching for something to grab and pick; I found his straps and lifted him wholesale back to standing—standing was all we had left to tether us. I brought him up and he leaned into me like a broke bovine and pushed me against what I felt to be solid. His form was marred by the little specks and dots that orbit perception when there is none to be found: I tried to make something of nothing and in that vain effort I formed a mouth and lips from noise and saw it talking and wheezing about nothing. It was all he would say. He knew where to go, he told me, he knew where to go. I dragged him but an inch farther, then another. I tried to lessen my pinch on his overalls but he would only further wince and fail back down: leg was broken. For the final time I drove him down.

“I can’t go, please don’t make me go,” He said, for it was all I could sense; “Don’t make me. Not far, not far!” Gripping me in a frenzy.

Through the impenetrable and final darkness I wiped his face and felt his flesh, scrubbing away a layer itself of pulverized anthracites and found his curtained, bark face in which only terror resided. Through the eigengrau I once again saw his bloodshot eyes, now wide and darting around like search lights now caked in thick vine, and in them there was a child, and in that child there was a growing splinter from the wheel of some chariot, a chariot covered in the fury of burning forests artificially distinguished by man. His mouth puffed out smoke and he gasped for air, telling me that it wouldn’t move that air, that stubborn air like a beast of burden that I could not control as we sled down into the second profundity, and the third, and the fourth, in an effort to penetrate only the first cell of the earth’s infinitely deep layers, moved by primordial dreg in a time which the first follicles of Abraham could not even have realized, so far removed in years they were, farther removed than us from any sensible path.

“Yes, yes, down, down, down!” He said, clapping, each contact like a musket in undisturbed regions. 

So we went.

There it was. It stood alone, embedded in a wall. Even its simple contrast gave light. It was yellow, that it was, and in its appearance I could think again about worldly things like money and preaching. It was in front of me, Wilhelm turned away; it was too bright for him. Like that guided north star, ready for me to look, durn near unmissable in every capacity. It was then His reward to place it here for us to find it, as are all things. He was looking for it.

The stench: wholly putrified yolk baked on the most oppressive mountain-top, for days and days until it had evaporated into only the purely distilled aroma of disgust, of saccharine pus, of reviled hatred, of the blood on the Nail, of the wrested image, of my face, of Devin’s sweat, of the corpse turned to raisin, of blacked lung exhumed from a tomb of ribs, of all the princes of Hell preeminently led by the lord of the flies, and of rocking terror, baby-like terror, infantile and stupid terror. I went closer—I wanted to get closer, each inhalation losing another limb, another tether. I felt it, felt it again, and at last found its repugnant peak: it was stone-hard. It wasn’t soft. It wasn’t gold it wasn’t gold. I don’t know why I am repeating myself. I pulled my hand away in ostensible fear. The rocks behind me move. Wilhelm moves. I turn around.

“No, no no no no no. No no no no.” He tried to pull out his hair but he was too weak, every part of him arched in pure panic and I could see his vertebrae through that now-black shirt of his. I turned back to it and it sneered at me quietly like a trick played on me. My head hurts. My left nostril hurts. It is a speckled tooth in the mouth of Devin, who says, “Please, don’t leave me, it gets evil down there.” But it’s so nice here, so quiet, I’m so happy.

I am dragging Wilhelm.

“Did we get it? Are we free?”

Yes Wilhelm yes we did, we got it.

“No, we didn’t. Schwefel, der schwefel.”

Yes Wilhelm yes, sulfur for us.

I tripped.

Barley Montrose is dragging Wilhelm and he trips upon the mounds of sweet sweet coal and he fills his mouth with them. He can eat them all he likes.

Tumbling tumbling down we go

Oh so deep into the crust thrown

Down and down

Round and round

We have stopped falling. We lie still at some end. My eyes are gone. Wilhelm gropes my arm and I wince.

“I love you.”

I know.

Devin loves me too.

Only Up, he said, Only Up, and he was right. My bloodied, coal-infused and blind body was in that church now, up on that there surface:

“Is there life beyond this earth?” He said.

“No, it—is,...,inside.” I knew.

Upon this I was in the infinity-bound profundities and holes dotting the earth, and lost we are. Lost lost, again lost. We will never starve.

Lost, lost, Wilhelm—right here—all together now: