Why didn’t he get up and smack their smutty little faces? They should all be taken away to remand homes. He shut his eyes and listened to their whispers and giggles. In this village in their own secret way, they had found balance. The nearest thing to it was the Tahitians who practised Voodoo and were also Catholics. How could they mix religions like they did? They’d achieved a strange harmony of sadism and laughter, lechery and beauty. The longer David stayed in this village, the more he couldn’t understand.
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Now they were little cherubims and they knew it. They looked very different to the monsters they had been six hours ago. Dahlias, like excited torches, frothy carnations, roses, and two giant sunflowers. Pressing his forehead on a footstool and straining his neck, he discovered that all the children were armed with flowers. Peeping between the slots in the wood, David could see the girls in their white socks and the boys in their grey. They played hopscotch on the flagstones as they approached the altar. In their best Sunday clothes, the children danced down the centre aisle. Listening intently, he could make out the patter of children’s feet and their clear laughter. He ducked between the pews until he was lying on the prayer mats again. He heard the church door open behind him. How I’d love to have some buttered toast, eggs and bacon, sausages, tomatoes, mushrooms, fried bread, marmalade, grapefruit, coffee and cream, and a bloody good teeth clean. As he gazed at it, he removed the hard-grained sleep from the corners of his eyes but he didn’t take his glasses off. The sun dazzled its yellow splinters on the cross. Without getting up he peered over the pew. He knew he’d need the paper-knife today but he didn’t know what for. He had to press either side of the slit before a droplet of blood reddened. He sucked the edge between his lips and cut the top lip. Taking out his paper-knife, he sharpened the wooden blade with a penknife. Turning away from the sun, he levered himself to his knees. The pain of supreme light was indescribable. The mauve iris expanded like hot chestnuts. He lugged his sunglasses out of his top pocket and clamped them on his nose. Then, like an oxy-acetylene torch, it singed the veins in his eyelids. The sun moved fast, striping his feet, then his chest, through the gaps in the pews.
![ritual david pinner ritual david pinner](https://www.finderskeepersrecords.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Pinner-2.jpg)
The sun cut slowly across the flagstones. The living dead curled past them and flowed into their houses like a dark river. So they moved into an alley and celebrated their blindness with a pissing duet. But they knew it was unwise to see what was not there. Two policemen on patrol saw the ghosts dancing. And the beast would sleep till the next celebration.
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The sun would bring back anaemic humanity. And they livened the last steps of the dance as they approached their warrens. And the villagers ached with unreleased sperm and blisters in their minds. Tomorrow would see it stark in the sunlight. The policeman had spoiled the gift of themselves to the elements. They formed the tail to the drooping elders. When this was done they danced slowly into the street again.
![ritual david pinner ritual david pinner](https://anotherimg-dazedgroup.netdna-ssl.com/786/azure/another-prod/280/0/280202.jpg)
The children completed their respect by wrenching a couple of gravestones awry. The stones disturbed David’s nightmare but did not wake him. Then they threw all the available stones at all the available church windows. They ripped all the available flowers from all the available graves and tore them to tatters. They had become feline.Īs the elders swayed down the main street, the children led by Gilly, danced into the graveyard. Their voices whimpered like the inhuman mating cries of cats. But the children were still on heat like cats. The elders were very tired and clutched each other in fragments of the dance.
Ritual david pinner full#
They were full of hate in their tattered masks and animal skins.