Chapter 28.1

 

The mantle shifts again, pulling like a curved finger against her G-spot, so that her whole vaginal canal contracts, less like an orgasm this time: more like an intense period pain from an exceptionally heavy flow. This is not pleasurable. This is more like the yanking on a vibrator that’s become stuck thanks to her vaginal canal contracting after orgasm. The pull starts deep in her ribs and radiates outward, threading through her bones, her breath, her vision. The kitchen blurs at the edges. The air thickens. The world tilts.

Roisin gasps, grabbing the edge of the table. The congealed remains of the untouched meal on the table shifts sideways, off the plate and onto the Formica surface, though neither the table or the plate have moved at all. The peppered cabbage on the third plate has remained motionless. She hardly has a chance to steady herself when another pull comes, dragging at her vaginal walls like the tide though a geyser. If the first imbalance was comparable to gentle masturbation in a warm bath, this one is more akin the being taken doggy-style hy a heavyweight boxer.

The mantle opens inside her like a barn door blown open by a tornado, and she sees another point of contention in the fate of the world.

A city skyline trembles, barely stable from the emotions rising from the people stepping on the crowded feet of its skyscrapers. There is a pressure in the air that is almost physical, as if the chants and jaunts at street level are lit tapers among a parliamentary cellar full of dynamite.

As her viewpoint draws closes, she sees a broad overview of the crowd, banners held high, divisive arrows of blue and white held in a sea of Caucasian faces, and to either side of them a singe line of police, some with riot shields and batons, some mounted and, in vans parked in parallel to the streets the crowd flows like a raging torrent along, unmarked vehicles containing Armed Response Units ready to deploy. On the other side of the Thin Blue Line, counter protesters of all nationalities and ethnicities flow at a different rate to the crowd, creating rapids and eddies where they run into conflict with vehicles, bystanders and minimum wage workers trying to do their jobs and steer clear of the opposing mobs.

At the intersection of the roads stands a large roundabout with a war memorial in the centre, where a stage and podium have been erected. The flags flapping from all the surrounding lamp posts suggests that this is the destination of the marchers, and the figures on the podium are watching the progress from satellite feeds on the mobile phones and workpads. A banner along the front of the stage carries the slogan Make England Great Again.

Closer still and Roisin can see the armed security surrounding the stage, guns hidden in shoulder holsters and their dedication to the man of the podium displayed like neon on their faces. At the edge of the roundabout, on a small, concrete island between lanes of traffic, an ambulance crew tends to a teenager bleeding from the head, while several others dressed in a similar fashion stare at the stage with open hostility. Two police officers are trying to take statements and calm them down but if the incoming crowd were like lit tapers, these lads are shouldering flamethrowers. One of them carries a broomstick flying a home-made flag; the symbol of a raised fist painted on an orange field, and the police officers have not noticed the sharpened metal of the painted pole

This is not the despair of a single family. This is the collective despair of a hundred, or a thousand. Perhaps tens of thousands, and this is just one city, and not even the capital.

This is a moment that could call to War, Pestilence, and Death all at once.

Roisin’s knees weaken as Astaroth’s voice echoes like the last cry of a slaughtered swan. “Balance begins small, but expands like maggots on a three-day corpse." A low, resonant pulse moves through her pelvic area — the mantle inside her reacting to the scale of what she’s seeing.

Roisin inhales sharply as the pain there grows; pulling on her like Lust in the film Se7en, ripping through her insides as the urgency pressures her toward the podium; towards the man in the thousand-dollar suit who decries the current government’s spending whilst carefully hiding the profits from all his directorships in offshore accounts.

The mantle pulls harder.