The bottle was empty.
Groggy, the Reverend sat up in bed and reached for his saddlebags and his next coin of passage. He took out another bottle, removed the cloth, spat away the cork, and resumed his position. After three sips his hand eased to the side of the bed, and the bottle slipped from it, landed upright on the floora few drops sloshing from the lip.
The curtains billowed in the open window like blue bloated tongues.
The wind was cool-damp with rain. Thunder rumbled gently.
And the Reverend descended into nightmare.
There was a boat and the Reverend got on it. The boatman was dressed in black, hooded.
A glimpse of his face showed nothing more than a skull with hollow eye sockets. The boatman took six bits from the Reverend for passage, poled away from shore.
The river itself was darker than the shit from Satan's bowels. From time to time, white faces with dead eyes would bob to the surface like fishing corks, then drift back down into the blackness leaving not a ripple.
Up shit river without a paddle.
The boatman poled on down this peculiar river Styx with East Texas shores, and along these shores, the Reverend saw the events of his life as if they were part of a play performed for river travelers.
But none of the events he saw were the good ones, just the dung of his life, save one
and it was a blessing as well as a curse.
There on the shore, in plain sightunlike the way it had happened in a bed in the dark of his sister's room were he and his sister, holding each other in sweaty embrace, copulating like farm animals. In his memory, it had always been a sweet night like a velvet embrace, there had been love as well as passion. But this was lust, pure and simple.
It was not pleasant to look at.
He tried to look away from the next scene of the play, but his eyes remained latched. And before the boat sailed on, he watched his father materialize and discover them, and he heard his father curse them and damn them both. Then his younger self was bolting for his pants and leaping (it had been a window in real life) outwards and awayto run along the banks of the river, until his form grew dark and fell apart
like fragments of smoked glass.
And the boat sailed on.
The last year of the Civil War (a kid then) fighting for the South and losing, knowing too much about death at the age of eighteen.
The men he had slain (dressed in blood-spattered Yankee uniforms) lined up along the bank to wave sadly at him. If it had not been so painful, it would have been comical.
Other scenes: round after round of ammunition exiting through the barrel of his Navy, first as a cap and ball revolver, then later as a converted cartridge revolver, round after round until he could hit nickels tossed into the air and split playing cards along the edge by shooting over his shoulder while holding a mirror in his other hand.
The men he had slain outside of warthose who had pushed him, and those who he had eliminated for their sins against Godlined up along the bank now to smile (sometimes bloody smiles) and wave bye-bye.
(Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.)
He could not look away. He watched the dead men recede into darkness.
More of his life came up in acts and scenes along the river. All of it was shit.
He turned to look at the opposite shore, and the play there was no better. It was the same as the opposite bank.
Sail away.
And nowahead of himsurfacing from the water, as always, was the worst part of his dream.
Spidery legs broke the surface of the watertoo many legs for a true spider, there were tenwriggling. And then the bulbous body surfaced with them: a giant spiderlike thing with huge red eyes that housed some dark and horrid intelligence.
The spider was as wide as the river. Its legs brushed the banks on either side.
The boatman did not veer. He poled stiffly on.
The Reverend reached for his gun. And it was not there. He was butt-ass naked, shrivel-dicked and scared.
He wanted to open his mouth and yell, but he could not. It was as if fear had sewn his lips shut.
The spider made him tremble, and he could not understand it. Size or not. Red, evil eyes or not. He had faced men, sometimes three at once, and he had sent them all to hell on their shadows, and not once, not even for a fraction of a second, had he known true fear.
Until now, in these dreams. (God, let them be dreams.) The Reverend found that he could not look away from the spider-thing's eyes. It was as if they were swollen with all his sins and weaknesses.
The boat sailed on.
The spider-thing opened its black hair-lined maw, and the boat sailed into its mouth, and as the bow of the boat and the boatman disappeared into the black stench of the creature, the Reverend lost sight of the red eyes, and then all he saw was blackness, and that blackness closed out the light behind him and he was one with hell
He awoke sweating.
He felt cold and trembly as he sat up in bed.
Lightning was flashing consistently. It was bright enough to be seen through the thick curtains, and when the wind billowed them out, it could be seen even more clearly. The curtains flapped at him like wraiths with their tails nailed to the wall. Rain blew in the window, onto the bed and the toes of his boots. The boots glistened in the lightning flashes like wet snake hide.