“Accept him? Listen to yourself, Luc Sante. You're playing God.”
“He pleaded, begged me to take him next. As for playing God, the crucifixions always remained throughout a choice my followers willingly made, and the last time I looked, freedom of religion and freedom of choice remains legal.” He indicated his flock of dwindling followers, perhaps forty, among them a number of familiar faces: the Houghton twins; Mrs. Eeadna, the secretary; Luc Sante's patients whom she'd seen coming and going; and in shadow, there stood Tatham from the RIBA, the man she and Sharpe had trusted. She half expected to see Copperwaite and possibly Sharpe step from the shadows to complete the nightmare.
“You,” she said to Tatham whose stem glare replied in silent menace.
“Don't be so hard on Tatham. He was to be next until you came this way, Jessica.”
“Me? I'm not here of my free will.”
“Ahhh, but you are. You willingly chased what you perceived to be evil to this place, and in so doing, you have instead found benevolence and a love of mankind, a cabal bent on lifting our species to the next and greatest plane, the level of pure love, pure giving, pure religious thought- Jung's overmind.”
“Put her on the cross,” said Tatham, breaking his silence. “Else, the world finds out about us and we are all stopped in our efforts, Father.”
Luc Sante solemnly nodded and simply said, 'Take her.”
Jessica put up a struggle, bloodying Tatham's nose, tearing loose, making a run for the direction in which she'd come, but she was roughly brought down when the others tackled her and dragged her back to the altar.
“I am sorry that you are fighting this so, dear Jessica,” said Father Luc Sante. “In a manner of speaking, your whole life has led to this moment, and you should actually relish it, delight in it, for you die here for the greater glory of Jesus Christ and our Lord, and for the greater glory of all mankind, my dear.”
Her lip trembling, Jessica could only pierce the old man with her sudden hatred and contempt for him. “All you stood for, all that nonsense you spouted about creating a psychology of evil, about combadng evil at the source, and who is the greater evil than you, Luc Sante? You have become the thing you despise most.”
“Then perhaps we are two of a kind. Perhaps I will join you after, and in the afterworld, we will continue this debate. But for now…” He jerked his head to one side, indicating that the others now could take her to the cross. 'Tie her and prepare the drug and prepare her for the stakes,” he ordered.
“What about the tongue branding?” asked one of the Houghton sisters, her question sounding like a curse.
“They all had their tongues branded to send them safely over,” agreed the other sister, sounding balmy in the head.
“This one don't belong… isn't a believer!” chided Tatham. “She shouldn't be branded. We're needing to rid ourselves of her, and that's all.”
“But isn't that…”
“Murder!” shouted Jessica.
“Inject her, now!” ordered Luc Sante, tired of the bandying about, not wishing to lose control of his meager following, nearly a sixth of whom had already gone over, willingly, if he could be believed. Jessica had seen the stark evidence of how powerful the cult mentality could be on her cutting room slab, and she recalled the Hale-Bhopp comet aftermath in America some years before.
Jessica saw the slight quiver of glee going through Tatham's body as he plunged home the drug that would sedate her. She tried to pull away, to physically fight them, but there were too many hands holding her, and so she fought mentally to stay sharp. She cursed herself for having come full steam ahead, and for having held so tenaciously to her faith in Luc Sante.
The drug's effect worked on her now, making her drowsy, weak and uncaring, disinterested in her own execution, but she fought, shouting at them, shouting, “This is not a willing crucifixion! This is an execution! Murder! An execu… exe… cue… cue… don.”
And Jessica's system shut down, and somewhere deep in the recesses of her unconscious mind, she knew that she would wake up dying.
Luc Sante brought her around gently, his voice breaking through the pillow clouds of her deep slumber. A throbbing pain pulsed at the back of her head, and she felt a dampness there where blood had soaked her hair. She heard Luc Sante's words as in a dream, the drug dizzying her. “This is how we intend to combat evil in the universe, my dear Jessica. First, we will annihilate it on this ground, on this holy cross.” While she could not see, could not focus her dilated eyes, she imagined his bony finger pointing to the enormous and ancient cross where Strand still hung in the throes of mortal pain.
Strand 's labored breathing made her wonder how long the man had been hanging here, hours, a day, more? Jessica kept her eyelids closed, struggling with how she might locate and take control of the. 38 or her Browning automatic. Then she realized that Strand's labored breathing was not Strand's but her own gasping breath. She hadn't yet been staked to the cross, but she had been drugged.
She heard Luc Sante continue for his rag-tag army of followers, all of whom were in awe of the old man with the wild eyes and unruly shock of white hair. “Place her on the cross. Do it. Do it now.”
Jessica struggled to her feet, lashing out with fists clenched at men in heavy robes and dark hoods, but two strong men grabbed her before she could get her bearings, stripping her to her bra and panties, discarding her clothing, some of it cast into the stagnant, standing water as they raped her of her identity. She now represented an object, a mere symbol, an obstacle to their continued obsession, an icon to religious fanaticism.
They dragged her, kicking and screaming, to the cross. Luc Sante's followers looked on as if in rapture. Luc Sante shouted, “Dr. Coran will now take the place of Christ.”
“What about increasing the drug?” suggested one of them, the voice strikingly clinical and familiar, she thought. But Jessica had enough trouble focusing on the fact they had drugged her to worry about the familiar voice.
Luc Sante solemnly replied to the one man who stood up against him, “This time, no high dosages.”
“But she must be willing, like the others were,” countered another follower whose cowl masked his likeness. Jessica could not be sure of her sense of sight or sound as the Brevital continued to work havoc with her brain.
Still somewhere in her mind, Jessica held on to the fact that all of Luc Sante's victims had been, as the old man himself had admitted to her earlier, willing participants in their own crucifixion deaths. She must use this fact against him here and now. It proved the one truth from Luc Sante's mouth irrefutable, and if so, perhaps his followers might question her being forced and man-handled into this role.
Jessica fought to focus on the once empty chamber now filled with people of all sizes, shapes-all below heavy cossack-styled robes and deep hoods, cowls holding their features hostage in shadow. Colorless and of one mind, she thought.
Her own mind multiplied… multiplied the crowd before her even as it spun out of control. She saw all Father Luc Sante's converts closing in around her, all wishing to touch the icon before it departed; before being sent over to the other side. Now in the crowd, she saw the visage of Chief Inspector Boulte which made her gasp with a moment's hope, until she saw J. T.'s image as well, followed by Santiva, Donna LeMonte, Kim Desinor, James Parry, Stuart Copperwaite, and there, too, stood Richard Sharpe-dear Richard-all of them fooled by Luc Sante. All of them were pleading for the man to “take me next, take me next…”
“All the others volunteered!” Jessica shouted.
Some grumblings of response came from the crowd as Luc Sante assured them that Jessica had volunteered, even if unconsciously so.
“You sisters, you Houghton sisters!” Jessica shouted. “It's your turn. You've waited years upon years for this day.”
“She's right, Father,” said one of the Houghton twins in response.
Luc Sante's stentorian voice silenced them all with a shouting sermon. “A child came to me in a dream
,” Luc Sante told his followers now, “and in this vision, the child-neither male nor female-told me what to do. And this is that prophetic dream come true. Now we all know that dreams are the word of God incarnate, so to ignore the child's voice is to ignore the voice of God Himself.”
'Tell us more of this dream,” asked one follower who dropped his cowl, disclosing his face to Jessica, who believed her mind fevered on seeing Dr. Karl Schuller staring at her.
Luc Sante continued, pleased at this reaction. “I've concluded that she… Dr. Coran… must feel the pain as Christ Himself felt the pain to truly atone for her sins of which she has many, and in order for the subsequent resurrection to take place. You will see the resurrection of the child of God, Jesus Himself in due time! You will all be witness to the miracle of miracles re bom, returned to this Earth… and to this end, no more chugs.”
A scaffolded stairway was wheeled forward. Two men pushed it into place before the cross, and they worked to take Father Strand down from his suffering. He appeared lifeless, without breath, and no sound came from him. The men holding Jessica now ascended the stairwell to the cross, guiding her into place. Meanwhile, the others, silenced by Luc Sante's words, looked on, awestruck and fascinated.
Jessica felt her body rising from the scaffold as the men lifted her to the cross, Strand's blood still wet at the extremities. Jessica felt a wave of uncaring and disinterest in her own death flood over her. Who cares, she told herself, the drug having firm control now.
They had now lifted her onto the cross by way of a scaffold brought to face it. When did they do that? When did they take Strand off the cross? she wondered. She found herself in a new perspective now, a new point of view, staring down on the congregation from on high where her hands and legs had been lashed to the cross, and she saw Strand once again. They had placed his body on a natural outcropping of rock on one wall that formed a stone bed. He looked for all the world like a blond Jesus Christ; he'd been wrapped now in linen. Only now did she realize that Luc Sante had won, that she had replaced Strand on the cross. Jessica felt sensations, numb and distant as her arms, forced to each side, stretched outward to touch the ends of the crossbar, each wrist tied securely by leather tongs. She was here, on the cross. She felt cold hands on her ankles, felt her ankles likewise being lashed together with rough rawhide lines. She cried out for help, for mercy, but no one responded. Her cries might as well be silent screams of nightmare. No one above on the busy Crown's End bazaar streets could hear her, and no one down here could either. Here in his dark, underground pulpit, they only heard Luc Sante's voice.
They were a group mind listening to a promise, each in search of a hope that only Luc Sante might fulfill. The dying Burton, the old schoolteacher from Bury St. Edmunds, all of them had been filled with fear so great that facing an execution by crucifixion proved inviting by comparison. More than inviting, in fact, since Luc Sante's world held out an otherworldly hope to them. This hope came on the heels of hopelessness, and it proved a hope that extended to an afterlife in which they might touch God. And so dying like this, in Luc Sante's insane game of hide-and-seek with Christ, meant the greatest hope of all. True of Strand, of Tatham and of Schuller-people from all walks of life, anyone who'd lost all faith and hope only to discover Luc Sante's dream his or her dream.
Karl Schuller, yes. He stared grimly up at Jessica, his features imprinted on her mind as being real and present.
She saw the spike placed at her right palm, the other at her left, as each man in dark robes and cowls held firm to a thick hammer, readying to strike each spike simultaneously. She could not distinguish if it were dream or reality. This confusion proved short-lived, however, when the first blow of the hammer striking the stake, resulting in the stake striking through her flesh, startled her into a more conscious state, and she screamed, “What of my being bathed in oil and blood! What of my branding!”
This outcry halted the hammer wheelers. The desired effect.
“I demand it of you, Father!” she cried, thrashing on the cross like a pinned butterfly. “If you crucify me, I demand the ritual be followed to the letter.”
Jessica knew this would slow the process, perhaps give Sharpe and Copperwaite time enough to locate her final movements in aboveground London, but she feared her hope a mere fantasy. They had no way of knowing where her last footfalls had brought her, now had they? She cursed herself for being a headstrong fool.
Her pitiable outcry for the ritual branding had stopped the spike to her feet. However, the blood rivulets dripped with each pulse now from her right and left palm over the stakes and onto the crossbar where each hand had been pinned. She felt no sensation to her hands, but she felt the weight of hanging there, felt the pressure on her lungs already building, and she felt the leather straps cutting both her wrists and ankles.
The collective debated the branding.
To brand or not to brand. The arguments flew. And in this simple act of calling for the ritual branding, Jessica had indicated her willingness to turn convert, to join the cult body and soul-to turn herself completely over to Luc Sante, to Jesus and thereby God for reconditioning, and the convert capable of standing before him and accepting the hot iron on the underside of the tongue had, up till now, she guessed, been the next to attempt to merge with Christ on the cross and die for his or her trouble.
It was how Martin Strand and all those who preceded him on the cross had lost their lives.
It all made perfectly logical, sound religious sense to everyone in the room-all Father Luc Sante's converts to this extreme devotion. It was, after all, a cult built on the faith they could hasten Christ's return in the new millennium. At the urging of his followers, Luc Sante stopped the crucifixion process long enough for the branding. “Heat the iron and get the oil,” he told his followers, who now went about doing so.
Jessica wondered now what she had gotten herself into: She was about to have her tongue branded, and to become the next crucifixion victim.
TWENTY-TWO
While I see many hoof marks going in, 1 see none coming out.
— Aesop, The Lion, the Fox and the Beast
Between St. Albans and the Clapper bridge, Inspector Richard Sharpe had radioed in for a quick, factual background check on Dr. Donald Wentworth Tatham, asking dispatch to contact him immediately with where exacdy Tatham hailed from. It was just a hunch, but it scored big, for the man had originally hailed from Bury St. Edmunds. Sharpe had run the background check on a hunch and out of habit. As a Scodand Yard inspector, he had learned always to know with whom you were dealing, and he passed this advice along to Stuart, who, now, trudging through the muck of this underground world, asked Sharpe one pointed question: “What else do you know of this chap at the RIBA who walked you to a dead end in the canal?”
“Are you asking whether or not Tatham knew it would be a dead end before we began?”
“Perhaps, perhaps not. Worth a look to see if he's any record when we get back, if we ever find our way out of here.”
“A computer search should reveal if he's had any prior arrests or any problems in the past.”
Inspector Richard Sharpe, having now litde doubt that something strange was afoot, and that it centered around Luc Sante and St. Albans, felt extreme fear and frustration at having been unable to locate Jessica for the past several hours. He hoped and prayed that this search would not again become just another termination, another dead end. They trudged onward along the unfamiliar, bleak avenue that Tatham had called a useless waste of time.
It was but a thread to go on.
They concentrated their search here. Sharpe raced ahead of the others, Copperwaite having radioed for assistance. Sharpe found himself now in a winding corridor out of a nightmare, and from it radiated any number of mine shafts. The array of choices proved both frustrating and cruel. He must slow down, weigh each detail, and give orders to the men, give each his own detail. He did so, finishing by ordering them to “Report back to Copperwaite and me, should you
locate anything the least suspicious. Do not attempt anything alone.”
“Stuart, you stay with me. You other men are to remain in pairs, taking each tunnel,” Richard ordered the others. Sharpe then watched the others disappear. He and Copperwaite now stood alone, their flashlights the only light here. “We'll take this avenue, Stuart.”
“Lead on,” came Copperwaite's ready reply. Once again alone with one another, the two Scotland Yard investigators felt the darkness claw at them, gaining in power like ink over ink with each step forward in this pit, when Sharpe suddenly stopped. Holding up a hand, he cocked his head to one side.
Copperwaite, too, suddenly made out the sounds of people ahead. Next they saw light, faint at first but growing as they inched forward. They doused their own lights.
Sharpe's ears detected clear, animate sounds and words now, voices chanting Mihi beata mater over and over, welling up like the sound of uneasy ghosts. Placing a forefinger to his lips, Sharpe called for silence and caution. “Careful. They're just ahead. We've hit some sort of pay dirt,” Richard assured Copperwaite. “Go find the others. Bring reinforcements.”
Copperwaite spoke under his breath, trying to keep their presence a secret, saying, “But Richard, I-”
“Do it! Do it, now,” whispered Sharpe. Stuart Copperwaite sighed and nodded before racing off after the other men. Sharpe condnued, guided by the sound of the voices. Soon, he located a stone stairwell that must be the way taken by the Crucifier and any victims he or they might have forced down into these awful catacombs-like the bowels of an ancient Stonehenge, an underground cathedral.
Sharpe thought of Jessica at the lab, about the CID building, at St. Albans, at her hotel, at his apartment, and his anxiety rose like a knife in his throat. He sensed Jessica near; sensed her, this very moment, in grave danger.
Now, Sharpe heard Jessica's voice, shouting and in pain, saying something about rituals. Now he knew most certainly that Jessica stood in harm's way, and he knew she was just beyond the next catacomb, just beyond the light, filtering from ahead, beyond his sight and reach, but the tunnel split again, two separate directions here, and he could not be sure which led to Jessica.
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