PRAISE FOR ROBERT KLOSS AND THE REVELATOR

"Robert Kloss is quickly building a blazing reputation as a literary perfect weapon: he is a sentence architect like Gary Lutz, yet at the same time, he’s also able to spin intimate, oddball yarns in the vein of William Gass and Shelley Jackson. Revelator showcases these unique skills. Go all in on Kloss now before he’s buffing his Pulitzer."

—Joshua Mohr, author of All This Life

Robert Kloss writes with the passion of a young Cormac McCarthy, fearless in both scope and the possibilities of language, and blessed with an innate ability to parse the light from any darkness. It’s rare such an eagle eye emerges among Americans. He should be savored.

—Blake Butler, author of Three Hundred Million

"The Revelator leads us through the life and times and beyond of its title character, from orphan to prodigal to itinerant preacher to prophet (and purveyor of dirty jokes), in a narrative that reads like the gospel of an alternate universe, but as awash in fury and carnage as our own."

—Eugene Marten, author of Layman’s Report

"The Revelator carries traces of Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and the rattling bones of Bill Faulkner…I felt transported mind, body, and soul to some weird liminal space where a prophet can emerge from the dirt and speed of things, from the darkness in us all brought forth by a ready-made zealot who can turn on a dime. Read it and weep—because this novel turns us inside out in the best way."

—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Small Backs of Children and The Chronology of Water

The Unnamed Press

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Los Angeles, CA 90041

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Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.

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Copyright 2015 © Robert Kloss

Cover Art and Illustrations Copyright 2015 © Matt Kish

eBook ISBN: 978-1-939419-64-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015945877

This book is distributed by Publishers Group West

Designed by Scott Arany

Cover design by Jaya Nicely

Cover illustration by Matt Kish

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to info@unnamedpress.com.

To Karissa

I had a dream,

which was not all a dream.

—LORD BYRON,

DARKNESS

Death is a house inside the forest.

Come. I am made of many doors.

—CLAIRE HERO,

THE NIGHT WAS ANIMAL

CONTENTS

Prologue: The Days of Man

Book I: His Black Mountain

Book II: Widows & Sons

Book III: The General

Book IV: The Book of Samuel

Epilogue: The Ancient Beast

Acknowledgments

The Author

PROLOGUE

THE DAYS OF MAN

THEY DRIFTED FOR MONTHS ABOARD A SHIP THEY CALLED THE Spotted One, locked between the vast, merciless blue and the withering sun. Their faces blistered and their minds bleached and weary. They conspired in the shadows, drew plans in the sawdust. They grew confident and foolhardy. Finally, the Admiral consulted his god and ordered them shot through the skulls, their bodies weighted with lead and dropped to the depths, with neither forgiveness nor prayer.

And the sun swelled red, and the sky shimmered, and the gulls swirled, screaming. Soon the black mountain jutted from the horizon. And some considered it a mirage, and some named it the Finger of the Evil One, and some called it a tower of soot, dreamed it an ancient citadel misshapen by flame, the horror of all trapped within. The Admiral alone crossed himself and raised his book to the winds, saying, Father, I see you now.

For the sun’s unrelenting sheen, the men remained below-decks, ladling their chests with green water. The games they played with dice, with lice, these men in the shadows, nude but for their leggings, their laughter as they gnawed salt pork. Ever echoing upon the deck, the Admiral’s leaden pacing as he regarded the nearing shore, calling the Almighty’s name, and those names he gave the black mountain ever upon the horizon.

Each day ever as the days before, until the exhilarated call of the lookout announced the vast wilderness before them. And the Admiral with all the maps and books of his knowledge, their descriptions of the Orient, its towers and merchants and treasures, turned to his crew and said, By morning we will be dressed in silks. We will smell of spices and our bodies will glisten with oil. Now fires lit the evening shores, and the night was born into heathen drums, screams and whoops, and within this cacophony the Admiral announced, Sleep with your muskets readied.

Soon the natives ventured forth, bodies painted blue or black or red, bones impaling their noses, their brows, their cheeks. How the lines of their canoes drifted the waters. How the dawn sheened with their arrows aflame. The Admiral and his crew waited in armor with horsehair plumes, their swords and muskets readied, and when he commanded, the explosion of musket fire, the acrid punch of gun smoke. And natives leapt from their canoes and natives sloshed in blood, while gulls investigated the cooling bodies, consumed the eyes, the cheeks, and soon the bloated and rotting rest.

The crew went ashore firing muskets, the red sun tinting their armor until they seemed born in the fires of another world. And the natives fled into the forests while others fell to their knees, the whites of their eyes and teeth outlandish against their bodies rubbed black with soot. The crew took these stragglers by the clumps of their hair, held them down, bound their wrists and ankles with rope, and before these hostages they waited, until at last those who had fled slowly returned. And they returned suppliant, pressed their brows to the sand and offered the smoked meat of many colored birds, and fruits, orange and hideously spiked, their yellow flesh dripping with sweetness. They called the Admiral and his crew a word the Admiral translated for the others as gods. He said, They call us ‘lords from the sky.’ He said, I have gestured across the waters, and they believe we have come from the heavens. And when the Admiral indicated the black mountain, asked of its genesis, its distance from where they stood, the natives gazed at him as if he were mad, as if he were pointing at nothing at all.

To follow were days of bounty. While the Admiral trekked the lands, his crew lounged in beds of rope strung between palms, and now the ladies of the island cooled them with the waving of palm fronds. What lovelies are these, wrote one sailor, voluptuous and wild and totally submissive to the whims of man. And in the nights they feasted on smoked birds and barbecued lizards, and when the broken open skull of a monkey was offered none of the crew resisted scooping the brain. And in the nights they drank of a fermented root brew, each man singing and dancing in the manner of his civilization, calling out the songs and melodies of his home. In the firelight all men were as brothers before one another and all men were as husbands unto the women. And many coupled without struggle and with great pleasure on the sands of the beach, the surf licking their feet. How they lay together, breathless and silent, having already spoken the only language they held mutual.

Alone on his vessel rocking with the surf, the Admiral wrote by candle flame, Perhaps we have not arrived at the Orient. So much of the innocence of the people—their unashamed nakedness, their inability to comprehend guile and vanity and greed—indeed, so much of this world, the beauty and splendor and plenty—hints at some far deeper significance, and later he wrote, I have sometimes wondered if we are not at the threshold of Paradise.

At midday next the chief returned from the forest, with feathers ragged, and blackened face streaked by tears. His people watched as he wept and beat the ground before the Admiral. Their anguished silence as he reached to his captors, and whispered a word the Admiral translated as brother. Now the Admiral took the chief’s jangling bracelets in hand. This metal, the Admiral asked, there is more?

And in his journal the Admiral wrote, I have wondered, Father, what is your purpose in leading me here? Perhaps I now understand.

Now the natives foraged for gold at their chief’s commandment, their shadows silent in the forests, their muddy figures sifting near the rivers. Those who brought nuggets were rewarded with pretty glass and tin bells, and those who returned with nothing were thrashed. A man’s face as he bellows in the dirt, coughing blood. A man’s eyes as his wife watches him from the door of their hut, as his son observes from behind his mother, as he is spat upon. In the days to follow these men were discovered slouched against trees, their jugulars sliced with spear tips, their life drained to the soil.

And in the early days of these labors the natives were allowed to freely move about their camps, for if one man fled his friend would be shot, or his wife and children would be slaughtered. And the Admiral addressed those who worked the hardest, saying, You will make wondrous workers back home. He clapped them on the back and he gave them bells, while in his journal he wrote, The king will be pleased to learn these heathens are quick to labor and vigorous in their duties.

And while the native men sought the forests for gold, the Admiral’s men gathered the comeliest of the native women—their round hips and bare, ample breasts—and brought them to the ship. And when the women fought back, when they gouged and drew lines of blood in the sailors’ backs, across their throats and faces, when they bit and tore and gnashed, they were tied down and thrashed with rope until lips were mashed and teeth spat into a bloody muck and eyes made fat and purple. These shameless bitches, wrote one sailor by candlelight, his native woman pummeled and asleep in his bunk, go about attired in leaves or in nothing at all, such is their lustiness, and yet they act as uninitiated as nuns when brought to our quarters. However, I can assure you, after a thrashing or two they all take to the act with such vigor and skill you would think even the youngest of them were raised in a brothel.

These women returned to their husbands hobbled and bruised faced and bite marked and impregnated, and their husbands would not look upon them. So now the beaten bodies of abandoned women lay in the mud at the farthest edge of camp. And when the children called out for their mothers they were told the women they observed in the distance were not living women, but the spirits of the dead. Call not to them, said the fathers in their heathen tongue, for the souls of the dead long to devour the living.

And when the chief refused the ravishing of his wives he was beaten with musket butts and accused of treason. And when the charges were read the chief wept and waved his hands, while the Admiral informed his crew, The chief has plotted against us. He means to see us murdered in the night. So the chief was imprisoned within his hut and forbidden any interaction. And the Admiral confiscated his possessions: his casks of fermented root, his huts and feathers and spears, and his wives too were confiscated and made to lie with the crew. From the Admiral’s ship they never returned, save those who washed ashore.

And while many of the crew played, the Admiral strode amidst his toiling natives, their knees sunk into the mud. The baskets of woven grass they filled with sludge and glinting nuggets. How he ordered the natives thrashed when their vigor waned. The way their faces slouched into the blood-blackened mud when they toppled, and how they wept for the world newly born about them. And when one native fled the Admiral ordered him destroyed, the natives hollering for the musket roar. And when the balls sailed harmless overhead the Admiral ordered another volley, and when this missed save for vines and tree trunks and a monkey blown out of its skin, the Admiral ordered the native tracked through the brush. He was found in the shadows, shivering, and his ankle broken. They beat him with musket butts. And when the ghost had fled they carried him through the overgrowth and tossed his corpse to the Admiral. So the Admiral ordered the native’s ears removed, and these were strung yet dripping around the Admiral’s neck. There they dried and shriveled. Ever outward, they listened.

And when the rivers and forests no longer offered their riches, the Admiral sent his natives to unknown depths. And when they returned with mere tufts of cotton or berries or nuts or clumps of mud, the Admiral ordered the chief’s ears also removed. His screams at the cut of the blade. How these appendages dripped from their crescent around the Admiral’s neck.

And the Admiral ordered the chief hanged upside down, his face purpling, the drip of his ear caverns, and soon the mad gust of flies, creeping his flesh. To the assembled natives the Admiral said, Let this be a lesson to you all. And they did not speak or move and they could not even weep. They merely sagged. Now only at the show of musket fire did they slowly disperse.

And when the natives no more rose from their huts they were thrashed until they gathered their baskets and returned to the jungle. And soon they refused to rise, no matter the beating. They took their beatings limp and they no longer wept. Nor did they cover their faces when the rope lashed. Nor did they cry out. Only the dull thump of the rope against the meat of their bodies, the savage grunts of their torturer. And when they refused food, when their ribs bulged against their paling skins, when their eyes sunk into caverns, slowly now their bodies piled against huts, in the forests, on the beach. Their heartbeats imperceptible and stilling and then done. And when all the natives lay fly covered and bloating, or made the meal of the horned lizards and squawking birds, now the Admiral, his nose covered with rags, said, The Almighty has come to me in a dream. He has said this land is not the Orient. And the Admiral gestured to the black mountain on the horizon, saying, There is the land we seek.

So they pulled on their armor and plumes. So they readied their muskets and gathered what smoked meat and fruit and water they could heft. They stepped over putrid corpses and touched torches to the huts. From thatched roof to roof went the blue-orange of flame, and black smoke coughed and wrapped the sky. The sound such fires make, the booming and crackling of voices far older than the earliest utterances of man. Soon the native bodies gone to char save those bodies on the beach. There the crabs inspected and plundered, there the surf washed over, there the weeds tangled and the gulls did feast.

BOOK I

HIS BLACK MOUNTAIN

I. Your mother lay pale and bleeding in the tangled sheets when in the flight of her soul you announced yourself wailing into the world. The women in their bonnets and housedresses crossed themselves and muttered prayers while your father called out from his sorrow. He could never again gaze upon this woman, or say her name but with a strangled sound, and he commanded her body removed. They wrapped and carried her in those very sheets, blood matted and sticky with viscera, fly gathered already, to the edge of what was considered the yard. And so with all images and possessions of this woman, carried in bedsheets and set afire. Now your father regarded you from the edge of the room, saying unto his sister, What shall I do with this one? And the spinster, stern and manly, said with gray lips, I will tend after him. I will tend after the both of you. How in the brief years to follow your aunt was carried off in a