Benighted

by Kit Whitfield

  “You were arrested for the murder of Nate Jensen, weren’t you?”

  “Whoever that is.” It seems to cost him some effort to put it so mildly.

  “It’s complicated. This man, Steven Harper, he’s a prowler. You know what a prowler is?”

  He nods. His long back is hunched against the wall.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I mutter. “I’ll be right back.” I leave the room, leave the prisoner unguarded long enough to get another chair. He’s turned away from the door when I return. “Here.” I set the chair down beside the bar. It’s only once I’ve done it that I notice I’ve taken hold of his shoulder and steered him down into it. His arm hangs out to the side, dangling from its cuff, but he sits better, upright. His eyes close for a moment, and I realize it’s the first time since his arrest he’s had a chair to sit on. The thought gets to me, and I turn and seat myself back at the desk before I weaken.

  “This man, Steven Harper. He’s one of three. There’s him, and his brother, and there’s a third man called Darryl Seligmann who’s still out there. We—” I stop, rub my forehead. This isn’t a procedure briefing, I can’t tell it like this. “Do you remember the night we met?”

  Paul looks at me, doesn’t answer.

  “You remember I was drinking because something had happened. What happened was that me and my trainee, Marty, the boy in the hospital, got set on by a pack of three prowlers. Marty shot one of them in the leg before they ripped his throat open. I tranquilized one and the other two got away. David Harper, the one Marty shot, he got away, and the third one, I think that was Steven, the one in your cells.”

  “You think that?” Paul’s voice is flat.

  “I think so.”

  “So the man who lost his arm, that was because your boy shot him.”

  “And because he wouldn’t go to a hospital.” I don’t look away. If I apologize, everything’s lost. “The one we caught was Seligmann. We interrogated him, but all we got was threats and curses. Don’t shrug. There was something—wrong about that man.”

  “You interrogated him.” Paul looks at his dangling arm.

  “Yes. The night we first went out, there was a bruise on my hand you noticed. I got it hitting him.”

  Paul lowers his head, shuts his eyes tight.

  “You didn’t have a problem with it at the time. You asked me, I told you how I got it. You still went to bed with me the same night.”

  “I wanted you.” He doesn’t say it with spite, he doesn’t emphasize the past tense. It’s just resigned.

  I take a breath. “Would you feel the same way now? Now you’ve been through an interrogation, and a woman you wanted told you what I did, would you still sleep with her?”

  He doesn’t look at me, he looks into space, trying to find an answer.

  I wait it out.

  “Yes,” he says.

  I look down a moment. We go after what we want and push aside whatever’s in our way. “It was my first and last serious interrogation. I was terrible at it, I was more scared of him than he was of me. Later on, he injured himself so that we had to take him to the hospital.”

  Paul almost laughs. “He injured himself.” He mouths the words, hardly speaks them.

  “Believe me, if we’d injured him it wouldn’t have been an injury that meant taking him out of the building.”

  He looks at me and I flatten my hands on the table. “Do I know you at all?” he says.

  I stop myself from rubbing my eyes. “You probably know me better than anyone.”

  There’s almost a look of wonder on his face. “I’m glad I’m not you.”

  There are too many answers to that, and all of them stray from the point. “He went to the hospital, and they didn’t guard him properly, and he just got up and walked out of there. And not long after that, the boy I interrogated him with, the boy who did a much more thorough job than me, was shot in the head when he was walking home. That’s who Nate Jensen was.”

  He keeps looking at me.

  “Two months before that, another man was killed in the same way. Johnny Marcos, the man your friend Ellaway mauled.”

  “He’s not my friend,” Paul says. “I hate him.”

  We have to keep moving forward. If we stop, we won’t start again. “They were both shot with silver bullets.”

  “Why?” Paul frowns. He isn’t looking away now, he’s paying attention.

  “I don’t know. Symbolism, maybe. Seligmann really hates DORLA. Now, you were arrested partly because of Ellaway and partly because of the Oromorph, but there were only three on that night. We have two. Seligmann’s missing, and we need to find him before someone else gets hurt. Steven probably knows where he is.”

  “That’s what you want me to find out? Where this Seligmann is?”

  I look back at him. “You’re going to do it, aren’t you?”

  There’s only a second’s pause, but in that time we both know what’s happened. Later, perhaps, when we’re free, we’ll blame each other, we’ll throw accusations or say them silently. But neither of us can claim innocence, ever again.

  Down in the cells, the guards lock him in. They check him over, his friends, looking to see what was done to him, and there’s nothing to see, no bruises or cuts, he’s still wearing the same worn clothes, and no one speaks till the guards leave. They’ve become very quiet in the presence of DORLA workers, playing invisible by going still, like birds hiding from a hawk overhead.

  The door closes and leaves them alone, and they start moving again, press toward him as best they can. There’s a tangle of “What happened?” and “Are you all right?” and “What’s going on?”; as they hear their voices clash, they all subside at once. Paul sits against the wall, looking straight ahead.

  “Who did you see?” Albin asks.

  Paul doesn’t turn his head. “Lola.”

  “Did she say anything about representing us?”

  He starts to speak, then gives it up as if tired. A few seconds pass as he stares into space before he finally speaks. “Nada.” He says it slowly.

  Albin frowns. Steven is hunched in a corner, his arms folded across his chest. He watches, his face blank with wariness.

  Paul looks down, looks back up again. He hasn’t glanced at the others once since he came back down. His eyes crease at the corners and he chews his lip.

  I thought he’d tell them, I’d expected conversation in a language I couldn’t follow. It would have riled Steven, made him aggressive or brought his defenses up, he’d have known he was being plotted against. I was expecting a scene.

  Paul rests his head against the wall, gazing at nothing. Then he starts to sing. The others shift and look at each other for explanations for a couple of bars, and then they go still. It isn’t a tune he sings, it’s sentences that run on from note to note, rhythmical and simple. I listened to enough of his music to know what he’s doing: it’s an improvised recitative. He doesn’t have an operatic voice, and it rings glassy off the walls. There’s nothing lupine about it, none of the soft, carrying wail you hear on moon nights, but something about it makes my skin prickle, makes hackles rise on my neck as much as they ever did in response to a lune’s call.

  THIRTY-SIX

  I’ve been lying. If I ever said “they” about the Inquisitors, I was lying. The word I needed was “we.” Because we were part of it, my people, my whole kind was part of it, down to the last man. We change our names, we change our methods, but this is my history. Four hundred years ago, I would have been a hooded Inquisitor, and I can think of nothing at all that excuses me now.

  It’s quiet in the church. I wanted it to smell of incense, but that’s the smell of Mass, and there’s nothing here but someone sweeping, a couple of people looking at the ceiling, a middle-aged woman on her knees in the Lady Chapel. My soft running shoes squeak against the tiles. I’ve never found a church where I could walk soundlessly. The Aegidian shrine is where I remembered it, just a little place set into the wall, small enough to fit perhaps
three people at a time. I stand in front of the icon. An aging man, a hind held in his arms. God sent a hind to nourish him with its milk, that’s how poor Giles was. His face is smooth, tranquil, a soft beard trails down his chest, his eyes don’t look out of the picture but off into the distance. My hands clench and unclench, and I shift my feet. I hadn’t thought about what to do when I got here, and now I’m standing before the shrine, mostly what I feel is a sense of discomfort, as of a badly faked performance.

  It would be comfortable to sit down, but there are no chairs nearby. I hesitate at the opening for a moment, then step inside and kneel down. There are cushions provided, an act of kindness, and I kneel on one, hands together, looking at the painting. It’s a familiar pose, from a long time ago, and though I’m out of practice and feel uncertain at taking up such a posture, faith doesn’t go away, not altogether. I’m afraid God will strike me down for trespassing in his house when I don’t properly believe. It’s faith of a sort.

  Is this what you would have wanted, I say. Giles was a mortal man once, a hermit who lived in the woods; he had a cave for meditation and such was his devotion that what he wanted most was to be left alone to pray. A hunting party shot him by accident, and the king visited him as the arrow wound healed, but Giles wanted to be left alone. A sage, a miracle worker, later on an abbot of a monastery the king built because he admired Giles so. A true holy man.

  The thought of the real Giles strengthens me somehow. I’ve always believed in an angry God, but perhaps the gentle Giles, if I’d met him, might have had a kind word for me. It’s better, it has to be, that there are good people in the world. I wish I was one of them.

  Is this what you would have wanted? I don’t think it can be so. A renunciate who wanted to be away from the world with his prayers couldn’t have felt much enthusiasm at the thought of a vast network of cripples taking criminals and ordinary citizens by the heels, of prisons and interrogations and acres and acres of paperwork obscuring what we do. All the forests you loved cut down for us to tell lies on.

  Do you love us, Giles? We could have prayed to another saint, a saint of guards or justice, but we have you, saint of cripples. Because of our disability. The answer that my mind makes is that he must. Saints love mankind. Not because we’re good, but because they are, because saints love sinners with a boundless compassion. That’s what a saint is. It’s an apologist answer, the kind of answer I found glib when the nuns said such things, but it feels true as well. My mind finds the answer without thinking, reflexively, and I can’t think of an alternative.

  Then what are we to do? Because what I know about Aegidians, I didn’t learn from the nuns. The Summis Desidrantes Affectibus, the Witch Bull of 1484, was a decree by the Pope, Innocent VIII, declaring the existence of witches. Thousands died because of that Bull. We don’t believe in witches anymore.

  It was faith that made us. We were a holy order, once. We found witches, and we fought for God’s law on earth, and we tortured people to death. We’re still the same race, the same people now, that were able to accept such a proposition. And we tried to save people, too, we didn’t want killers laying waste around us, and that was real, unarguable, even to an atheist, and it’s still around us. How can we be so corrupt, and still try to fight the wickedness of the world?

  What am I to do, Giles? Am I dragging souls down with me? When I put Steven in with the others, I had a sense of what they’d do, do for me and spare me having to do to him myself. By all laws, that’s damnable. We have to catch Seligmann before he kills anyone else, but I don’t believe that excuses tormenting another man to do it. Steven certainly won’t forgive us. I’m making people commit sins they wouldn’t otherwise have committed. I’ve read of martyrs who wouldn’t plead guilty or not guilty at their trials, who stopped the trials from going on by their silence, knowing what the penalty was: pressing. They let themselves be crushed to death with weights, sometimes for days at a time, rather than involve a jury in the sin of their execution. That’s holiness, that’s what God intended us to be. What am I to do, Giles? There are too many people caught in this tangle I’ve created, and every direction takes us nearer the pit, and I can’t see any way out. Look at them, the prisoners, ready to drag the answer out of Steven. Look at Seligmann, wherever he is, willing to hunt down God’s children on moon night. Help me, Giles. We’re all lost. We may yet have another Inquisition, but there’s no second Crucifixion promised to redeem us from our sins. We have to choose, and I can’t find a choice.

  Do you love me, Giles? I say. The saint gazes out of the painting, holding the deer to his breast.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  They talk.

  They talk about being outside, they talk of planning free-range nights and avoiding being caught, making a little war between themselves and DORLA. There are war stories they swap, furring up with injuries, fights with other groups, escaping catchers; the stories don’t sound true to me, because they’re too simple, they make life sound easy, but Steven listens to them. He listens, and sometimes he opens his mouth as if he wanted to join in. They don’t let him, they keep talking right over him, spinning tales about their dangerous lives.

  They talk about the hospital, about things that happen there, all the violent cases Carla has handled, the addicts who wander in trying to steal the drugs, about how much easier it is to steal things if you’re higher up the ranks.

  They wake Steven up during the night when he was sleeping quietly and ask him, “What did you say?”

  We did a lot of things to people in the old days. We studied it, how to get around religious precedent, figuring out ways to get confessions without violating the laws of God. Inquisitors labored under the rule that you couldn’t torture anyone more than once. We solved that: any cessation of torture was a “suspension,” and if you torture him again, it’s just continuing the first, the only session. You weren’t allowed to shed blood: we found things to do that didn’t. There were always threats, too, and they worked. Enough people confessed on the rack before anyone started turning the wheel. It wasn’t even cowardice. They knew what the rack did, how it pulled each bone slowly from its socket, so that every other torment, hanging and dropping and crushing, was considered a lenient preliminary, and they knew they’d be torn to pieces unless they confessed.

  I read about that when I was sixteen, young enough to take fright at such stories. It was in a book written for lycos; it wasn’t about us, the Aegidians only got a chapter. The author said that torture was a form of oppression that oppressed not just the victim but the general populace as well: if you know what can be done to you, you always go in fear. It’s true, it’s fair, people are afraid of us. But we’re afraid of them, too.

  I don’t know what they’re planning. I don’t know what Paul said to them.

  I wish I spoke Spanish.

  When we couldn’t use torture—the laws of some lands forbade it altogether—we found other ways around it. Walking was a common one. You take hold of a person and march him up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down, hour after hour after day. You do it in shifts, around the clock, no sleep, no rest. It sounds gentler than the rack, but it works. Very few people withstood it. It wasn’t dramatic, but I imagined it with a sixteen-year-old’s intensity, still young enough to take everything personally, and when I thought about it, it was horrific. The body isn’t meant to do certain things. If you force it, it fights them. I found that out years ago. The pain isn’t the worst of it, the worst is the damage, the wrongness of what’s happening to you, and every drop and fiber of you screams, no, no, not this, until there’s nothing else in the world. Days walking, days. The flesh on my feet ached at the very thought.

  Sarah looks white, bleached. Dark patches are growing around Carla’s eyes. They sleep when they can; they wake each other up. Always, Steven is awake. They tell him he’s talking in his sleep, they shout at him to stop it. When he’s awake, they talk to him pleasantly: Carla, skin peeling around her mouth, chats about the hospital a
s if she were on a coffee break, and when he sleeps, they reach through the bars and tug at him, shouting at him to stop talking.

  After two days, he starts to mutter as soon as his eyes close.

  The easiest, the best of all our tricks and tortures was the tormentum insomniae. We just kept the suspect awake until he confessed. Symptoms of sleep deprivation include: disorientation, nausea, memory loss, slurred speech, dizziness, hallucinations. That’s the medical list. It doesn’t mention the emotions, though you can list those, too: confusion, helplessness, panic. You can’t describe it, can’t imagine it if you haven’t seen it done, and even then, it’s hard to take in, how much cruelty there is in such a simple action. The truth is, after a terrifyingly short period of time, without sleep your very soul starts to disintegrate.

  Witch-burners used it, and so did we. It was the peg on which the whole bloodbath turned. The clean, easy method that led innocent men and women to confess a pact with Satan. The Inquisitors discovered it, but we used it, too, often enough, because that’s what we were, back then, specialists, yes, but still witch-burners. We just found witches in one particular field. Even if they hadn’t killed anyone, back then, we pressed hard for evidence of commerce with the devil. I think, I’m certain, we really believed it might be so. We’d seen lunes, after all, and if the devil wanted to talk to a man, moon night was the time. Much easier than to believe he’d deal with a daylight, speaking, soft-skinned human being. We certainly refused to consider that maybe, amidst all the fetters and racks and textbooks of interrogation, he was whispering in our ears all along.

  He must have been, though. It was never about luning. How else could it be, when five ordinary people—a little wealthier than most, a little better educated and better spoken, but normal children of God, born healthy and raised in civilization—can, by themselves, with no guidance or prompting, discover and use the mainstay of the Inquisition?