Dervish

The congregation was mostly white southern America, with a few misplaced blacks skirting the periphery. Clara remained at the entrance, a dull glow emanating from behind her thanks to the reflection of the moon on the thick mist that crawled across the earth. She tucked her foot neatly behind her slender calf, scratching the healing cut in her leg before swaggering into the back row. She chose a splintered crate to sit on while she listened in, and he hung back at the door, his corpse-like appearance no match for the white gloved perfection of the women and the slicked back hair of even the most burly farmer. Some of them glanced Clara's way, fanning themselves with slim hymn books, their gossiping whispering travelling across the floor of the shack.

It housed no more than thirty people, but there were close to fifty crammed within the tiny space. It was standing room only for most of those present, save for the infirm and women with small children, of which there was a high number. Destitution often bred more of itself, he had learned. The seat Clara took had been improvised from an old milk carton that had seen better days and had possibly once housed a hen. She plucked the feathers out of the splintered wood and contemplated their brown fluffiness.

"Soft and downy," she said, wistful. "I bet she tasted good."

At the pulpit, the preacher was clearly vexed that the attention of his flock had been so rudely diverted. He was of the charismatic type, prone to expensive-looking three piece suits and arms that stretched wide, a shining gold tooth proclaiming the victory of Heaven, if only people would dig deep into their pockets and give, give, give to the Lord. The same kind of preacher existed in Chicago, only they were sneakier in their workings in the windy city, their purpose more subtle as they slipped into dirty speakeasies, one hand on the Bible, the other in their pockets. "Temperance is the will of the righteous," they would proclaim, and then, with their flock's money, they would slap a bill onto the surface of the bar and push it forward. "But the Lord loves a sinner as much as He loves good wine. Give us two bottles. One has to keep the pulpit well oiled."

He wondered if they knew each other, these travelling preachers. The one he remembered had droopy eyes and a sweaty palm that left greasy imprints on his tall glasses of scotch on the rocks. This specimen was considerably more fit, his chest a wide expanse of muscle and well developed sinew, his arms strong as he held them out in a mock embrace of his congregation.

"The DEVIL," the preacher continued. "Is a mighty LIAR. He can't tell the truth when it's obvious, even when blue is blue and red is red, he will muddy up them colours, he will make them purple with his lying rage. The devil is a MIXER. He mixes people up, he grabs their truths and twists them, grinding them up, offering them back like they were SCRIPTURE. But don't make a meal of his rancid bread. His LIES crawl into the BELLY of the SOUL. They FERMENT and PUTRIFY!"

Clara eyed him from her perch on the splintered milk crate, the road map folded into a fan that did little to ease the stifling heat in the shack. "Come sit here," she insisted, but he held back, respectfully remaining outdoors where it was cooler and the threat of being mistaken for the risen dead was minimal. "When we get to Shamrock I'll have something special for you," she promised, her voice a low whisper through the slats of the shack wall. "There's a lead I've been following concerning my contact in Hollywood, and it's got connections to your target. Georgio let a few things slip when I had that little chat with him on his porch. It's a sure thing, your goal is where my goal is."

He frowned, unsure of what she was saying. He leaned against the shack, his thick, oily black blood smearing the planks in gory globs. "How can that be? Our targets are not the same, they don't communicate with one another."

"Goes to show what you know." She bit her bottom lip, her string of pearls hanging from her neck pinched between her forefinger and thumb. "Everyone wants to be seen. You should go to more of those flickers, you'd be surprised at how caught up you get. I bet you would get that need, too. The need to be seen. I bet you'd like standing up in front of people, talking and bragging about how there's no linear time where you're from. Like Heaven, only insanely boring. Nothing good, nothing bad, just one long, never-ending day of neutral."

His voice felt thick as he spilled it through the space in the wooden slat. "My target doesn't want to be an actor. You're confusing that entity's goal with your own."

"I'm not confusing nothing," she said, resolute. She tapped a pearl at her tooth, the clacking irritating the fat woman with four children sitting to the left of her. "Where you go, I go, and everything comes together. That's how it's been, right from the beginning. I got your plan in sight as much as my own, and now they are woven together, all in a neat little package. " Her eyes danced with dark mirth. "It's going to be beautiful in California. The beaches are so warm you can singe your toes in the sand if you aren't careful."

"I'll be very careful," he assured her.

He braced his stump against the outside wall. Black ooze seeped between the dry wooden slats.

She swivelled around on the crate, the pearl clasped in her fingers tap-tapping on her front tooth, all attention suddenly riveted on the preacher. He was handsome enough, if not a little on the red side, a sure sign of a man who enjoyed his liquor, and lots of it. Clara leaned towards the ugly woman with the four children, ignorant of the curious glares the woman visited on her. "He talks an awful lot about the devil," Clara said. "One would think he knows him personally."

"You don't go talking like that about Preacher Joe!" The woman heaved a crying infant onto her breast, the cotton flowered print of her dress pulled tight by the effort. She had thick jowls and a large mole on her left cheek that had sprouted four hairs. One for every child. "He's saving our souls, don't you forget that. God Himself talks through him. Preacher Joe knows when the end is coming, he's gonna line our path with gold and lead us up into Paradise before this awful world buries us in its cracked soil."

Clara glanced back at Preacher Joe, who was as red as a cherry in a whiskey and water. She let her pearls drop, her hand held up to stifle a yawn. The infuriated woman beside her muttered 'Heathen' and packed up her children, the baby lost inside of her cleavage, and shuffled them all off to the opposite corner of the shack.

Clara looked on her abandonment with bemusement. "Seems I know how to clear a pew."

"People are easily offended here," he observed.

"Regardless of what they say, people always are." She scraped her crate closer to where he was listening in, the black ooze, now a thick puddle at the centre of the wooden slats. The heel of her shoe dug into it. "When someone tells you 'I'm never angry' or 'I'm not one to judge', facts are they are exactly both of those things. They say things like that to make you feel at ease and let down your defences, so when you have a moment of weakness they can fire off a fist at you, or dismiss you as unworthy. It's all about power and screwing the next guy over. Never trust a man who says he's honest, never believe a man who says 'I never judge'. These things are on their minds when they claim to not care about them. A truly trustworthy man wouldn't have to convince you, and a non-judgemental man wouldn't feel the need to stake claim to moral integrity. It's on their minds, all these good things they can't do, that's why they have to tell you all about it."

He thought on this. "That's an insufferably confusing ethos. It suggests people don't understand themselves."

"That's because they don't."

The ugly woman cast a glare at Clara over her shoulder before turning her face with its wart and four hairs back in rapt adoration of Preacher Joe, who was now lighting the tips of his fingers on fire, an old magic trick done with alcohol that any twelve year old knew how to do. "See," Clara said, nodding back at the woman and giving her a big smile. "She's a good follower of Preacher Joe, here. She's all tolerance and light, not a judgemental bone in her body."

He rested his head against the dry, creaking wood, the outside wall so fragile in construction it could blow over with too loud a whisper. "We should leave."

"Let me just hear the rest of this guy's bullfrog. With all that Heaven and Hell talk I'm thinking he's gong to be a real croaker."

Preacher Joe stood away from his makeshift pulpit, which was made up of haphazard bricks and a large hand-carved cross bolted into the centre, a gift from some talented parishioner. Large vines intertwined over its surface and in the centre were the crude figures of a nude man and woman, their nakedness in stark, disturbing detail. They were not young, and the carver had given them tortured, diseased faces, full of pockmarks. The eyes were misshapen, their limbs elongated and alien, with spidery branched fingers reaching up not to heaven, but to the slender snake that wound its way all around the cross. They seemed to be in worship of it, the woman holding up a round object, two large bites taken out of it, a used offering to their slithering god.

"The DEVIL knows well how to LIE."

"Amen!" a burly man in the back row shouted out. There was a wave of murmured agreement.

"The minions of the DEVIL. They are his key keepers!"

"They are!" the mole faced woman proclaimed.

"They burrow into the SOUL and ROT it from within with the DEVIL's LIES."

"Hallelujah!"

Clara turned to him again, her voice an impassive whisper. "We need a new vehicle to get us into Shamrock."

He ignored her, his attention riveted by Preacher Joe and his graceful movement at the pulpit, his arms swaying upward to an invisible source of power that seemed to be filling him with its supernatural grace. Or so he claimed in his exclamations, the congregation cheering him on, begging for the end to come nigh and take them all with him into the land of honey and riches.

Where he came from was no Heaven, and yet the people here were convinced that a non linear life was an easy one, where there would no longer be any worries of right and wrong, of an act not yet committed influencing a past that never happened. They strove to become a part of the complex without having a clue how to understand it. The end of life and death to wander into the miasma of decades that pass by them in shadowy waves, all possibilities happening at once–these simple people couldn't handle such a truth. For them to realize that Heaven was just as hard and incongruous as this world would break every tired spirit in that destitute shack.

Only Preacher Joe would remain standing, his arms wide, his lips curled back over a winning smile that beckoned all to know the glory he alone had found. "The DEVIL's LIES are the worst kind of lies–because in every heart that listens his words sound like TRUTH!"

His outstretched arms shook violently, the clean, three piece tailored suit he wore wrinkled into thick lines as his back twitched and tore at him at odd angles, pulling him into an otherworldly trance that only he could fight off with success. His eyes bulged and rolled white, his head jerked back and then side to side, the movement so fast it was difficult to see his features. He frothed at the mouth, his tongue purple as he tried to spit out the demon that had so viciously begun its attack.

His head shook ever faster, until his face was nothing more than a smudged blur, a blank slate upon which no human features existed.

Clara let the pearls at her mouth drop. Her eyes were wide when she looked back over her shoulder, willing him to come into the worshipper's shack. At the pulpit, while Preacher Joe continued his unnatural, motion blurred dervish, the piano player began banging out a Southern hymn, one which the congregation latched onto with gusto. Feet clad in worn shoes and hands calloused from overwork kept time in a steady rhythm. Other members of the congregation began twitching and fainting, arms outstretched upwards to an unknown Heaven, terror transformed into exultation. One of the children of the ugly woman ran up to the pulpit, his tiny head shaking side to side in a mock impersonation of the frightening vision Preacher Joe presented.

Clara glared at him, her eyes seeking him out through the slats in the shack's wall. She was paid no mind by any of the congregation around her, their stomping feet a roaring crescendo that threatened to tear the structure of their makeshift church apart. "He's like you," she said, angry. "Just my luck to find another alien babbler."

"It's not possible," he assured her, but he knew he was lying. There was no mistaking that misshapen warping of space and time, the amalgamated effects of an indulgence in motor oil. It sped up engines and thoughts and time, morphing them into this blurred chaos that sent a rush of awe through those who witnessed it. Clara laughed as Preacher Joe spun around, a mini-storm brewing around his ankles as space and time were tied into circular knots and forced to dance with him.

"I'll give him this–he's more entertaining than you. All you do is leak black ooze and mope."

"I don't care about your silly observation."

"Yes, you do. Look at that, moping already."

He looked on, impassive at the spiralling display of tornado limbs and flesh, a storm that was comfortable in its chaotic dance. He'd been like this once, he thought. As he watched he felt a sudden longing for those days where the past didn't have to be relegated to fleeting glimpses in his mind. He'd been this whirling devil that held onto all possibilities, the ends tied so tightly on each that he had known no such thing as worry, no questions burrowing deep inside of himself. Nothing mattered but the ebb and flow of one's existence.

Perhaps these people were right, and that was a sort of Heaven. But even alien angels like himself could take such assurance for granted.

He had to wonder who this Preacher Joe was, who spun and pulled upon the heartstrings of all who lived in this tiny ransacked community, their belief so keen on his message they had forgotten the world existed outside of this shack. All eyes were riveted upon the preacher's dance, the men holding their chins with dirty hands, concerned faces knowing they were looking upon the supernatural workings of some incomprehensible God. Only Preacher Joe wore a fully tailored suit, the rest of his congregation eking out a life in overalls, what suits were present a threadbare affair of patched elbows and arms that were far too short for long limbs.

As suddenly as his spinning trick had begun, Preacher Joe abruptly stopped, his arms held out to balance himself, not a tremor to be found anywhere in his stance. He stood to his full height, his head held high as his eyes rolled skyward, to the holes in the tin roof of the shack. "When the day comes we will be AWARE!" He shook his shoulders, his head slumping to his chest. "The DEVIL will not have his snare on us."

"No, Sir!"

"Amen!"

"He won't catch us!"

"We will RISE into the FUTURE. We will lay down into the PAST. We will embrace the PRESENT." He closed his eyes, his lips breathing a beatific sigh at the very thought of it. "We will go HOME."

It was Clara who broke the rapturous spell. "There's no such thing as home. There's just a place once in a while you can tap your feet to and have a drink." She ignored the scandalous glares sent her way and motioned to her companion that they were leaving. "Come on," she said to his curious, secretive onlooking. "There's nothing for us here."

"But that man, that preacher. He's another being, he's one like me." He hesitated in following her, his bleeding stump sloshing his liquid stomach into it, making him feel ill. "I don't understand why he's here. He's not my target, and there are strict rules against going onto foreign planets, especially linear dimensions such as this one. I was not informed there were others of my kind working here."

She shrugged as she let the crudely constructed door to the alien's church slam behind her. "Don't ask me, I don't even get what you're so worried about. I say we light a match and let the lot of them burn up. It's not like they aren't looking forward to Heaven and they figure they're shoe ins." She cocked her head to one side as she looked on his shocked expression. "Don't go getting all high and mighty again, we both know better. These people don't appreciate the life they have, and they're content to spend it in utter misery while they figure something better's got to be around the corner. There isn't. It's just a discarded gift, this life, that's all their suffering is for."

He cast a glance back through the slats of the shack. Hungry, miserable faces looked upon Preacher Joe with expectant wanting, a starvation of soul and body apparent in every hollowed out stare.

He shook his head at Clara's observation. "It's not that simple."

"Of course it is," Clara snapped. Her pearls clacked against each other as she gingerly stepped through the bush, veering to the left and away from their motor crash. "They're wasting their time listening to his rot. He says nothing but lies."