Passion Play

by Sean Stewart

  Delaney stands on the stage like Mephistophilis, bitter-proud, sad and mocking. “I’m afraid you’re just going to have to wait until the next time. I no longer care,” he whispers. “I can’t feel it anymore, Diane. There are very few things left in this life that can resurrect me, and they for a few seconds only. I have taken my dare. I will do so again.” He stops, just long enough to let me understand his implication: if I lose him, even for an instant…Fear wraps my heart and squeezes. Goddamnit he wants to do it again! Do I dare wait him out? What are the odds I can track him? Can I watch him 24 hours a day to make sure he doesn’t get to some innocent first? Celia? Tara? Some faceless technician, a pedestrian in a car accident? I would never have believed that of him. Even now I’m not sure there isn’t some other motive. He is more transparent now, the flow and colour of him spilling out from the warding circle of light.

  “You’re a son of a bitch,” I say. “A goddamned son of a bitch.”

  And a voice within me whispers,

  Whither shall I fly?

  If unto God, he’ll throw me down to hell.

  “Another reason I wanted Mask,” Delaney says, “is that he understood Faustus. He was a powerful hypocrite in the Redemption regime. Believe me, Diane, the damned have a fine sense of sin.” He pauses again. His fingers, held at his sides, are trembling, backlit in the glare of the spot. “What I knew, and what Jonathan realized, was that Faustus is about the grandeur of man’s capacity to sin.

  ‘His waxen wings did mount above his reach

  And melting, heavens conspired his overthrow.’

  “—The indictment of that word ‘conspired’ Diane! Faust is Lucifer; he stands apart from his fellows not only because he lost everything, but because he alone dared to gamble it, against hope, against reason, against Omnipotence, on the strength of his own will.”

  He is winning. I become aware of the taser in my hand through his eyes as he sees it and smiles. Our fear jumps through me. “There’s no point in that,” he says. “If you want me to come down and give my testimony and deny any confessions and be set free for lack of evidence, I certainly do not need to be coerced.”

  False. False words, with another motive. He is taunting me, reminding me of the situation. Perhaps I could stun him—protective custody, time to gather evidence…?

  For a moment I am paralyzed by a last doubt. I see how he has directed me. The cruel joke: “yours must be such a fulfilling profession…” Is he directing me still, here at the end? I need to know, I need to think, but it is hard, too hard. Too many sensations, blinding me with their intensity. Their perfection cuts through me.

  I have never felt anything as clearly as I feel the tiny traction ridges on the taser’s power setting. I look directly into David’s eyes, feel the intricate play of flesh and muscle and bone necessary to slide my thumb along the track, releasing the triangle.

  All things tend toward their perfect ends. Fear rises in me like a lover, insistent and demanding, opening me up to the silence, the white light and the darkness beyond.

  At last (too late) I turn the final corner of the labyrinth and see the pattern at its heart.

  Delaney’s trap is complete, the contrary lines pinning me to paradox. The Medusa froze his heart, and now he’s trying to do the same to me. To cut me off, kill me inside. I wish I could think, but the play of shapes is so brilliant. My heart is dazzled. Completely different from Angela Johnson, and yet so much the same: there are so many ways to die for love. I became a hunter that my fellows could be free. Now I must give my life for them; even that is required of me. (Yes.) Mask and Mephistophilis—spun with the unbearable force of paradox.

  Neither of us is speaking now. My hands are shaking. Nausea floods my stomach and chest; my breath is fast and shallow. Our defenses are crumbling; fear is pouring in, fear and exhilaration surging into me like the tide. Must it always come down to fear? “All the way,” David whispers, forcing the words out. Excitement fills, overwhelms me. The pattern is relentless and transcends the individuals. It demands this ending and no other. (Yes!) Delaney and I are alone, complete, alpha and omega.

  A murderer can not be allowed to go free.

  O God I’m sick to death of patterns. A shaper makes herself anew in the form of what she seeks. Tommy Scott, Patience Hardy, Rutger White, Jonathan Mask, David Delaney: all patterns tending to their perfect ends.

  A whip-crack of fear lashes through me as I raise the taser smoothly, sighting down the barrel to his chest, letting the tongues of red that coil around us rise uninterrupted, (O God yes—the pure joy of feeling), concentrating on this one sight, this single shot, this final consummation.

  At the instant I summon his death with a crooked finger, Delaney smiles. A shattering wave of exultation explodes into a million fragments of pain. His body crackles, arching toward the light as if stretching for the heart of the sun, hangs for one eternal instant, fire-crowned and robed in flame: falls back, the long drop to centre stage, limbs outflung in a perfect taser cross.

  Lies still, upon the black stage.

  I crumple to the floor, sobbing and retching, face wet with tears. Rocking back and forth, alone in the darkness of the studio.

  I was Delaney at the end.

  There passed a time for which there are no words.

  I couldn’t think to fashion a prayer, until at last I found one and repeated it, chanting and breathless, as I left Delaney’s body in the final silence of the empty stage.

  Our Father, who art in Heaven

  Hallowed be thy name.

  Thy kingdom come, thy will be done

  On earth, as it is in Heaven.

  Give us this day our daily bread

  And forgive us our failures

  As we forgive those who fail us…

  For thine is the kingdom

  And the power and the glory

  For ever and ever,

  Amen.

  Twelve

  Rolly came for me just after seven the next morning; I had left a message for him at Central. I wanted him to have the honour of taking me in. Besides, I wanted him to give Queen E to Jim.

  By the time he came, the fear had blunted, and numb grey exhaustion had followed it deep into me, cooling my blood, shrouding my heart. I would be tried for murder. The moments I spent with Rolly, trying to break it to him gently, had a ghastly comic quality. His tie was plain grey, and tied too tight; it cut into the folds of his neck.

  None of my evidence against Delaney was of the blunt, factual kind the Law demands: a knife with fingerprints, an eyewitness account, a hank of hair clutched in the dead man’s fist. As Rolly had told me so many times, intuition is not enough in the eyes of the law.

  I did what I was called to do, what had to be done. I thought my reasons were good, good enough to die for. A murderer—like me—may not go free. Society can’t allow it. And knowing this, I had to do what was right, whatever the consequences. The Law is only a crutch for the conscience. That was the lesson Rutger White had tried to teach.

  Do not mistake me: I am more sure than ever that he had to hang.

  No—I lie. I am not sure. The uncertainties remain. I distrust any logic that the Deacon would approve.

  But to tell the truth, after the shock wore off, I found I was resigned to dying. The world was filming over. After that one moment of transcendence, that light-pierced passion, the greyness came on again, and faster. Delaney had shaped me, directed me, made me his instrument: when I killed him I killed my God.

  “There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion.” Well, I had made my deductions. What would Mask say? I was one who hunted not wisely, but too well…

  Without God, there is no faith. Without faith, there is nothing.

  No patterns, no mysteries for me any more. I will not walk the labyrinth again. Like Samson blind and bound I have pulled its pillars down upon my head.

  I am less fearful now. Death can’t be as bad the second time round.

  They’re ta
king me to the old jail on the west side of town. I can’t complain: it isn’t luxurious, but I wouldn’t want my tax money spent on criminals. The floors are old, and once a week they are filmed with wax. There is a relentless symmetry in the layout: each room exactly 10 x 10 x 10. The rooms form large quadrants, four of which make up the perfectly cubical building. The tired smell of the concrete sickens and disheartens me. I miss Queen E.

  The time approaches; my hearing has passed in the glare of a thousand stage lights. On my evidence I will be hanged by the neck until dead on national TV. No appeal will be made. I am glad I have been able to finish this before the end, but now I approach the last period reluctantly. Today is Sunday; tomorrow is the day. Jim asked to come visit me, but I refused. Now I understand what my father saw, years ago, as I stood above the arsonist in his back yard. There are two paths: Jim’s, and the one that I have chosen.

  So I told Jim not to come. Better I be soon forgotten.

  And…and I can’t bear to feel again. With Jim I found a part of myself I had almost forgotten, a part not of fear but of touch and love and life. It wasn’t his fault that it was too little, too late. I am comfortable with the greyness now: nobody can bear to weave their winding sheet twice.

  Are the shades of those I killed watching me from heaven, redeemed by the grace of Mary Ward’s God? Or will they, like the victims of Troy, come clamouring one last time from hell at the smell of my blood?

  This cell is so very god damned bare; even Rutger White would want a potted plant or a piece of the True Cross for decoration. It is a tiny cube whose geometry is marred only by a toilet. And the last room, the execution room, will contain an irregularity only when the trapdoor swings. They will attach, I believe, a lead-weighted belt to ensure the proper outcome. I will drop into a tiny square of darkness, beneath one burning white bulb.

  How different the light may be elsewhere! If I close my eyes, it is easy to imagine other places, other ways. A woman, her eyes soft and polished with the love of her parish, sits in her study in a small chapel downtown. Sighing, she moves to light a candle to the memory of loved ones lost, and to the hope of those yet to come. My hope goes with her. The warm tongue of light glimmers unobtrusively, a small point of focus in the daylight that wells through tall windows.

  Mary Ward, pray for me.

  I must stay in my cell. As through a darkening glass I can also see (will see for one more day) the dim cubicle of Faust’s study. Its only light comes from a single gasping red candle, melted down almost to the nub, surrounding its holder in skeins of blood. The figure at the desk sits still. His head is bowed. Though his time is not yet up, the horror is in Faust. Time is closing in on him, but he can neither struggle nor flee. Only wait.

  The candle gulps more painfully. Faust begins a prayer, but before he can reach the end, night falls. The wick glows for an instant in the darkness, and then goes out.

  O God, my God—the waiting is the worst.

  Sean Stewart was born in Lubbock, Texas and moved to Edmonton when he was five. He spent his formative years waiting for the number 41 bus in the freezing cold. Since then, he has been a roofer, theatrical director, busboy, computer specialist and research assistant. He has also written live interactive fantasy games and acted in shopping mall promotions.

  He lives with his wife and young daughter in Vancouver, B.C. Passion Play is his first published work; a second novel has recently been accepted for publication.