THE PRIEST A Gothic Romance

by Thomas M. Disch

Their eyes met, and Clay knew, and Silvanus knew that he knew, that he had touched a nerve. He had spoken a name that pertained not to this latter-day world but to the diocese of Montpellier-le-Vieux, where Bonamico was the master mason in the Bishop’s service, a man whom he detested and suspected of heresy.

  “What has Bonamico to do with this?” Silvanus asked, feeling a deeper bewilderment.

  “I thought you said you’d read the Prolegomenon.”

  “I don’t understand,” Silvanus answered, truthfully.

  “Boscage became Bonamico, when he was in Montpellier-le-Vieux.”

  The man’s pronunciation was so barbaric that Silvanus did not at first recognize the name of his episcopal seat, as Clay’s tongue had formed it.

  Before he could invent a plausible reply, Clay continued: “And you became the Bishop. Right? Is that what happened?” He said it as one might announce that one’s opponent in chess had been checkmated.

  “I became the Bishop?” Silvanus echoed feebly. His sense of the matter was that he had, inexplicably, ceased to be the Bishop and become someone and something else.

  “Jesus,” said Clay, addressing himself and, for the moment, seeming to forget Silvanus was there. “I’ve read the book, I’ve met the man, I’ve talked with him, but somehow I never really believed it. I thought this whole fucking business going after you was a damned wild-goose chase. Jesus! Boscage really was zapped back to—” He turned to Silvanus. “What year was it, anyhow? Boscage could never quite get that straight.”

  Though he did not understand most of what Clay had been saying, Silvanus sensed that the man was in some kind of uncertainty that paralleled his own. Each of them knew something the other did not, and each was unwilling to surrender his privileged information.

  Silvanus affected to laugh. “What year was that? What year is this?”

  Clay gave him one last sideways look and then gave up. “Shit,” he said contemptuously, “you’re still stoned out of your fucking mind.”

  Clay said no more, and neither did Silvanus. The automobile, under Clay’s guidance, continued on its path until it arrived at its destination.

  “You’re home,” Clay announced. “You think you can get in the front door by yourself?”

  “No,” said Silvanus, “I don’t think I can.”

  “I figured as much.” Clay got out of the automobile, and helped Silvanus do the same. “I’ll have to keep the car to get back to my own. You got a spare set of keys?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then I’ll leave it unlocked in the parking lot of the Grand Union just down the road. The keys will be under the seat. See if your house keys are in your pants pocket.”

  There was, indeed, a ring of small keys in the pocket of his breeches. He gave them to Clay, who grimaced annoyance, but led Silvanus along a pathway of smooth mortar and up the steps of a house much larger than Delilah’s.

  “There’s no lights on,” said Clay, “but if there’s anyone who’s been waiting up for you, you can say that you were too drunk to drive home yourself, so you had to be chauffeured by the bartender. As for how you explain your absence, the best alibi is always booze. Say you were bingeing and shacked up in a motel and you can’t remember any more than that.”

  Silvanus nodded.

  Clay opened the door and handed the keys to Silvanus. “Well, so long—killer.”

  “When will I see you again?” Silvanus asked Clay.

  “I’m not at all sure we should keep meeting like this, and anyhow, the decision won’t be up to me. If you was wondering when you’re going to get your tattoo finished, I think you can safely assume that you won’t be paying any more visits to Wolf. I have a hunch he’ll be closing down his shop real soon. You want any more tattoos, you’ll have to get them somewheres else.”

  Silvanus stood in the doorway of St. Bernardine’s rectory and watched Clay return to the automobile and drive it away. Then he closed the door and stood there in a darkness that figured forth the darkness within his soul.

  Out of that darkness came a voice. “Father Pat, is that you? Thank God you’re back! I can’t tell you how worried I’ve been.”

  “I was drinking,” Silvanus informed the unseen speaker.

  “That was my fear.” There was a pause, and when the man spoke again, his tone was more subdued. “Father Pat, I hate to have to tell you this the moment you’re back, but there has been some very, very bad news.”

  26

  The following is excerpted from chapter thirteen of A Prolegomenon to Receptivist Science, by A.D. Boscage (Exegete Press, 1984):

  What can I say of my period of incarceration in the dungeon crypts of Notre Dame de Gevaudon except that it was inexpressibly horrible! For some months after I had been transmentated back to my own temporal frame, those memories were repressed—whether because of their traumatic nature or through the agency of mnemocytes that erased those recollections and replaced them with others, I cannot presume to judge. Trauma actually seems the likelier hypothesis, since I have no recollection whatsoever of the three weeks I spent in the company of my translator, Héloïse V. (or F.?), who had accompanied me to the ruins of Montpellier-le-Vieux and who discovered me there, after an absence of some four or five hours, in a kind of swoon. Waking from that trance (so Héloïse tells me), I was in a state of great confusion. I knew not my own name. I could not perform simple actions, such as twisting off the cap of a bottle of mineral water. My speech was halting, and it seemed, to Héloïse’s professionally trained ear, to have acquired a subtly French character, not so much the sound of French, but its music. Once I had recovered from my first confusion, I became exceedingly amorous, and Héloïse (she later confided, blushingly) responded to my overtures with enthusiasm. For the next three weeks I lived with her in a state of perpetual rut—of which, alas, I remember nothing whatsoever.

  Indeed, I now doubt whether it was I who enjoyed this erotic holiday and wonder if, rather, during the five months I lived and worked as the stonemason Bonamico, he had been transmentated into my own era, for a stay of three weeks. While I suffered in the prisons of the Inquisition, had he enjoyed the favors of the raven-haired Héloïse? Perhaps there are laws for the conservation of spiritual energy just as there are for physical energy, though we do not yet understand them and cannot control them.

  Three weeks I lived with Héloïse in unremembered bliss, and then, once again, there was an awakening. One morning Héloïse discovered me curled into a fetal ball at the foot of her bed, whimpering and beside myself with fear. She freaked, and who can blame her? Her pet satyr had become a psychic jellyfish. I was desperate to see Lorraine, and amazed to learn that she had returned to the States without me, in the conviction that I had abandoned her for my French translator, which, to all appearances, I had! Such was my desperation that I possessed the courage to return to the States by plane. My fear of remaining in France was greater than my fear of flying! Yet at that point I had no memory of my experiences as Bonamico.

  Even now, as I write this in my Santa Barbara condo, my memories of that experience are erratic—sometimes vivid, sometimes imprecise. I remember the drudgery of the work, the meager rations, the sour wine. I remember being unbathed and the lice in my beard and pubic hair. Worst of all, I recall my dawning awareness that there was no escape from my debased condition as a conscript laborer.

  Romancers write of the Age of Chivalry and the Age of Faith. Where are the books about the Age of Slavery? The Age of Penury? The Age of Cruelty? Perhaps they are summed up in the single phrase “The Dark Ages”! To my mind, even a pizza delivery boy, working for tips, enjoys a richer and more comfortable life than the nobility and clergy of the Middle Ages. As for those less fortunately situated, forget it! Their lives were a living hell. Or, more accurately, their world was their prison. Not only the serfs were bound to their lords’ property; even skilled workers—the men like Bonamico, who built the cathedrals that tourists gush over—were little better than slaves. Bonamico and his fel
low masons had come from Turin seeking work in the south of France as workers now migrate from Detroit to Dallas. But once they had found work and shown their competence, the Church decided to requisition their services, the way sailors were once kidnapped from merchant ships and pressed into the service of the British navy. The next time you look at a Gothic cathedral and have lofty thoughts about its “sublimity,” consider that its mortar consists of hundreds of men who labored unwillingly to raise those forests of chiseled stone.

  I have already described, in the chapter before this, how I, as Bonamico, led a rebellion of the conscript laborers of Notre Dame de Gevaudon, how we attempted to flee Montpellier-le-Vieux through the foothills of the Cévennes, and how, after we had been hunted down and put in chains, we were made prisoners in those very crypts we earlier had labored to extend. It was in the course of that failed escape that I became acquainted with the doctrines and aspirations of the Albigensian “heretics,” for many of my fellow masons subscribed to that faith. Indeed, the institution of Freemasonry originated in that period among workers like ourselves, who were, in a sense, the first trade unionists. There are still Republicans who reckon union workers as Albigensians, fit to be burned at the stake!

  But we were not destined to be burned at the stake. For us a more terrible fate was reserved, a fate so unspeakable that even now, as I struggle to put these words on paper, I am tempted to stay my hand from the keyboard. No one will believe you, I tell myself. You will be reviled! Denounced! Held in derision! Dismissed as a madman!

  But what of that! I have been denounced, derided, and dismissed for what I have written already concerning my UFO experiences. I cannot help supposing that these later experiences of transmentation are somehow related to my abduction experiences. Surely it is not inconceivable that Entities who have mastered Interstellar Flight might also have mastered the Fourth Dimension of Time? It is not for me to judge or to speculate about such Entities’ darkly veiled motives. Assuming, always, that they are the same Entities!

  The Shroud of Turin…

  There, I have written it! Must I now spell it out? The moment I began to read the book about it—The Mysterious Shroud, by Ian Wilson and Vernon Miller (Doubleday, 1986)—the memories I had so long repressed were reawakened. I’d found the book on a shelf in the Anaheim home of my first ex, Barbra Boscage, née Drummond. I was visiting my daughters, Lesley and Artemisia, after a court-mandated absence of many years. Finding myself with time to spare (my daughters and their mother had gone to the mall, that cathedral of the twentieth century), I picked up the book in a spirit of idle curiosity, but the more I read, and the more closely I examined the seventy-seven black-and-white and thirty-five full-color photographs, the more vividly I realized that I had chanced upon the key to my erased memories.

  For those readers who may be unaware of the significance ascribed to the Shroud of Turin, I will offer a brief résumé. The Shroud “surfaced,” scandalously, in the late fourteenth century, when it was denounced as a forgery. It continued to be venerated, and held in suspicion, until late in the nineteenth century, when the new science of photography discovered unsuspected aspects of the Shroud that suggested it could not be, in any ordinary sense, a forgery; the forgers, had they painted the image on the cloth, could not have known to paint the authenticating details that were, centuries later, revealed by photographic negatives. The Shroud seemed to be an accurate photographic representation of a well-proportioned human male who had been crucified, scourged, and crowned with thorns. It was as though the Shroud had been placed upon the body of the newly crucified Christ and a rubbing had been taken, as nowadays art students make rubbings from the incised brass memorial tablets in English cathedrals. No artist of that period could possibly have accomplished a forgery so perfect in all its anatomical detail.

  However—and this is the however that has made the Vatican pause in finally affirming the Shroud’s authenticity—the fabric that bears this “miraculous” imprint has been shown, by scientific analysis, to date from a time no later than the thirteenth or fourteenth century and is, therefore, a forgery. But even so, a forgery so well contrived it must be marveled at.

  Certainly, when I beheld the photographs in The Mysterious Shroud, I had to marvel, for what I saw there were my own features—the photographic record of the tortures I had endured and my eventual crucifixion. As I studied the book, the memories returned: the thorny branches twined about my forehead, the whips that imprinted my flesh with their arcane alphabets of suffering, the crude iron nails that were, at last, hammered into my wrists, where they would support the weight of my crucified body, as nails through the flesh of my hands would not—as my torturers, like the Roman legionnaires before them, had learned by trial and error.

  Nor was it myself alone who suffered so. Indeed, I am not sure that it is my own features that are represented by the Shroud of Turin. The forgers of the Shroud were perfectionists. Just as later engravers were not satisfied with the first impression of their handicraft, so the creators of the Shroud took pains to ensure that their final image should seem suitably noble and pathetic. They took many impressions, for they had a limitless supply of canvas. The creation of some of their work I witnessed.

  The last I felt.

  27

  “Think of the nails,” Alison read aloud, “that pierced His wrists. For Christ was not crucified, we know now, as he has always been represented, by driving nails through the palms of His hands. No, the Roman centurions who did the deed were experienced in the craft of crucifixion. They knew, by trial and error, that the weight of the victim might be too great to be supported by the bones and ligaments of the hands. Those engineers of torture drove the nails through His holy wrists!”

  “Stop there,” said Hedwig, placing her bony hand over the pages of the book, a paperback edition of The Mysterious Shroud of Turin by Monsignor Francis O’Toole. “And think, for a moment, that here, just above us, in the reliquarium, we have a relic of that very Shroud, which wrapped His body.”

  “We do?” little Janet Joyner asked politely. Young as she was, the girl had a canny way of saying just those things Hedwig Ober wished to hear. Alison had sized Janet up at once as a people-pleaser. But was she any different herself? Didn’t she do everything she could to suck up to the old frump?

  “Yes, indeed, we do,” said Hedwig. “It was given to the Monsignor in 1949 by His Holiness Pope Pius the Twelfth, when this Shrine had just begun to be built. Your mother, Janet, would have been no older than you are now when that precious relic was given to the Monsignor. Actual threads from the Shroud—just think! Why, it makes this Shrine, in a very real way, a more significant center of pilgrimage than the National Shrine in Washington, D.C. Or it would, if there were any justice. That may seem boastful of me, and it would be, but they are not my words. They were the words of Monsignor O’Toole himself, spoken beneath the dome that stands above us, on the day this Shrine was consecrated. Oh my, how long ago that seems now! How much the world has changed since then!”

  Hedwig fell silent, and Janet had no further prompting.

  “Shall I go on?” Alison asked.

  “Yes, please,” said Hedwig, and then, at once, “No, no, our time is up. It’s so wonderful that we’ve been able to meet like this, here, together, the four of us.” Hedwig cast a significant glance at the fourth member of their party, Raven Peck, in whose cell they had come together for this little celebration.

  It was Raven’s eighteenth birthday, but Raven was not disposed to greet the occasion in a spirit of celebration. Indeed, she had become very abusive when Hedwig led the two other girls into her cell, Alison carrying the birthday cake that Hedwig had baked, with its eighteen candles already lighted, and Janet bearing the present she’d made for Raven and wrapped in Happy Birthday paper from Hallmark (which she then unwrapped, because Raven could not be trusted to have her restraints removed).

  “What is it?” Alison had asked, on Raven’s behalf.

  “A macramé plant
hanger,” Janet had explained. “It’s the first piece of macramé I ever made.”

  “And it’s lovely,” Hedwig had declared.

  “Well, you can’t really tell until there’s a plant in it, but I followed the instructions. It’s not like we could go shopping for something.”

  “Handmade presents are always the best,” Hedwig stated primly, without otherwise responding to the girl’s veiled criticism.

  At this point the candles had burned down very near the chocolate frosting, but Raven couldn’t be expected to blow them out, since Hedwig had taped her mouth shut when she’d refused to stop screaming, “Fuck the birthday cake! Fuck all of you! Fuck the Church!” Hedwig proposed that Alison blow out the candles on Raven’s behalf, which Alison did, though not all at the first blow, so that any wish that Raven might have been making wouldn’t be coming true anytime soon.

  Alison was pretty certain she knew what Raven would have wished for. It was what she wished for herself—getting out of Birth-Right. Because for all that it was as comfortable as could be, Birth-Right was more like a prison than anything else, and until you’ve actually been put in a prison, you don’t realize what it means to be free. Alison wondered whether when she’d been here as long as Raven, she’d be just as crazy. So far she’d managed to put on a good front when she was with Hedwig, but that’s all it was. On the surface she pretended, as Janet did, to go along with the situation, reciting the rosary along with Hedwig whenever the old lady felt like a rosary, or reading the books that Hedwig supplied her with, which were all about religion and mostly very dull. As a result, she was allowed a little more space to move around in. Not freedom, but a slightly longer leash.

  But in her heart she was in hell. It was a hundred times worse than sitting in a classroom waiting for the bell. Because there wasn’t any bell. She couldn’t leave until she’d had her baby, and that wouldn’t be for months. She couldn’t phone anyone, even her mother. She could write to her, but she was certain that whatever she wrote would be read by one of the Obers before it was mailed, if it was mailed, and if a letter did get to her mother, she probably wouldn’t do anything to try to get Alison out, because Father Cogling would be able to talk her out of it. So she was really and truly trapped. Sometimes she got to feeling so desperate that she actually thought about attacking Hedwig physically, old as she was. But then what? She would still be down here in this sub-subbasement, in a maze of corridors and locked doors that didn’t unlock with keys but with a thing that looked like a pocket calculator. You had to know the right numerical code to open the doors, and only Hedwig and Gerhardt knew the code numbers. And suppose she managed to get up to ground level? This place was in the middle of a forest and was guarded by German shepherds, and Alison suspected that the dogs weren’t there so much to keep people out as to keep the girls in.