by Craig McLay
Colin’s curiosity was piqued. “So what did they do?”
“Well,” Janice said. “A lot of these groups organized themselves around holy relics. They were a big deal in those days. They gave you power and attention. Sort of like Hitler trying to get his hands on the lost ark of the covenant in that movie.”
“Raiders.”
“Right. Well, the Knights claimed to have the original nails used during the crucifixion,” Janice continued. “There were a lot of pieces of the so-called ‘one true cross’ floating around, but only one set of nails. Those are the ones you see in their symbol. They supposedly kept them in a special, three-sided box. Each side was supposed to represent one part of the trinity, if you believe in that stuff.”
Colin didn’t, but she was on a roll and he didn’t want to interrupt. “Okay.”
“Now, the Knights never got an official papal charter, which technically meant that they couldn’t really call themselves a holy order. Well, that’s one story. The other is that they got one, but the church rescinded it and then denied ever having issued it in the first place.”
“Why?” Colin asked.
“There are a few theories on that,” Janice said. “The Knights preached quite actively against corruption in the church and in other, more powerful orders, which wouldn’t have made them many friends. But that wasn’t such a big deal. Practically everybody was doing that back then. I think it probably had more to do with their charter.”
Colin nodded. Janice reminded him of certain interview subjects who were filled up with so much information that all you had to do was ask one simple little question and then they sort of exploded.
“The Knights believed that sin could only be expiated through great personal suffering,” Janice said. “For them, pain was the only passage to salvation. And they made it a point to practice what they preached.”
Colin took another gulp of his coffee. It actually wasn’t so bad once you got used to it. “Sort of like the Flagellants?”
Janice shook her head. “Not exactly. The Flagellants were like holy masochists. They punished themselves for the sins of man. They walked through villages whipping themselves because they thought it might ward off God’s judgement of the plague and what have you. The Knights were more like holy sadists. They tortured anyone they considered to be wicked or even insufficiently devout. Which was just about everyone. Blasphemy, usury, sodomy, apostasy…you name it, they had a customized torture for it. They actually invented some of the torture devices and techniques that were later used by Torquemada during the Inquisition.”
“Jesus,” Colin muttered. “So what exactly is this symbol doing painted on a locker in a women’s change room almost a thousand years later?”
Janice leaned over and pulled a small notebook out of her backpack. She was so excited that she could barely sit still. “Well, I’ve been doing some research and there may be a connection. Most of the military religious orders were wiped out by the church in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Crusades were over and Rome was worried that some of them were starting to become too powerful. Even to the point where they were moving into a position where they could challenge the church itself. So it stripped them of their titles and confiscated their lands. Many of the orders disappeared, but some of them went underground and morphed over the centuries into different organizations.”
“Sure,” Colin said. “Like the Templars became the Masons.”
“Sort of,” Janice said. “The Hospitalers, for example, became the Knights of Malta. Their headquarters today are in Rome. The Teutonic Knights held quite a lot of power in Europe right up until Napoleon dissolved the organization in 1809. They were later outlawed by Hitler in 1938, but re-established themselves as a charity organization after the war. Most of the others just vanished or were absorbed into larger organizations.”
“How do you know all this?” Colin asked.
“University,” Janice said. “I majored in European history with a minor in religious studies. I actually did my thesis on the effect of the military religious orders on the formation of Europe. I focused mostly on the Teutonic Knights.”
“And you think one of the members of the Knights of the Holy Thorn is alive and well and prowling the campus of Westhill College?”
“Like I said, it’s not as far-fetched as it sounds,” Janice said. She opened her notebook and pulled out a couple of printouts. “The Knights of the Holy Thorn were one of the minor military religious orders. Not a lot is known about them. That’s partly down to the fact that they were incredibly secretive. The total number of their members at any one time isn’t really known. Estimates range from less than a dozen to a few hundred, but it’s all guesswork. It’s thought that some of them actually went to work for the Inquisition, which makes sense. That would have been right up their street. They regained the favour of the church and worked their way quietly into positions of great power.”
“Okay,” Colin said. “And from there?”
“That’s where it starts to get really interesting,” Janice said. “In 1878, a man named Aleister Slean was put on trial in London for the murder of a prominent banker who was rumoured to own or at least frequent several of the local brothels and opium dens. Slean claimed he wasn’t subject to the ruling of the court because he was a priest belonging to the ‘Church of the Holy Thorn’. He actually ripped off his shirt in the middle of the trial to reveal a large tattoo on his chest. Reporters at the time described it as a ‘crucifix surrounded by a ring of thorns’. Sound familiar?”
Colin raised his eyebrows. “A little.”
“Slean was convicted and hanged. Police tried to track down other members of the organization but came up empty. I think they just thought Slean was crazy and wrote the church off as a figment of his imagination.”
“But you don’t.”
“In March of 1889, Scotland Yard records show that a man calling himself Jakob Hultz came to police claiming to have information related to the murder of several prostitutes in Whitechapel. His wife worked as a charwoman in a local boarding house, the basement of which, he said, was being used to peform bizarre rituals and human sacrifices. Police didn’t take him seriously. It was just one of thousands of tips they had received, this one only slightly more ridiculous than most. Two months later, Hultz’s body was found in the alley behind a slaughterhouse. His eyes, ears, tongue and nose had been removed. When police finally got around to checking the boarding house, they found that it had burned to the ground only the week before. According to the records, the basement space had been rented to an organization calling itself ‘The Church of The Knights of the Holy Thorn’.”
“Holy shit,” Colin said, barely able to believe what he was hearing. “You’re talking about Jack the Ripper.”
“Exactly,” Janice said. “The Masons are usually the ones singled out by the conspiracy theorists because a lot of the high-ranking people of the time were Masons, but the Knights are actually far more likely suspects. They would have seen the sudden flood of poor immigrants into the Whitechapel area and the drugs, prostitution and other problems that followed as a situation ripe for precisely their kind of corrective action.”
Colin went for another drink of coffee and was surprised to see that there wasn’t any left. He got up to make himself another and asked Janice if she wanted one. She declined.
“Unbelievable,” Colin said as he started the machine and grabbed a cup out of the cupboard. “So what makes you think they’re here?”
“Well,” said Janice. “One of the men rumoured to be involved with the Knights was a former priest named Angus Crowley. Whether he renounced the church or was defrocked isn’t known. This is the only known picture of him. Check out his right hand.”
Janice pushed across a copy of an aged and slightly blurred black and white photograph of a severe-looking man in a black suit. His right hand was raised to clutch his collar to his throat. The image was fuzzy, but Colin could still make out the image of the
cross surrounded by thorns on the back of the right hand.
“Crowley’s name appears on the passenger manifest for the RMS Athena, which left Southampton for Halifax in September of 1908,” Janice said. “His cousin Peter had a farm somewhere here, in Westhill County. I haven’t yet been able to find out where.”
Colin finished making his coffee and sat back down. “Impressive,” he said, and meant it.
“Crowley had a reputation as a fire and brimstone preacher,” Janice said. “He and his brother briefly ran a church somewhere in a town near the farm, but I haven’t been able to track that down yet, either.”
Colin studied the picture. Crowley really did look like a man with fire coming out of his eyes. “For some reason, I’m getting the impression that you haven’t told the cops any of this.”
Janice looked guilty. “No.”
Colin sipped his coffee. It was much better than his first cup. “So why are you telling me?”
Janice shrugged. “It’s probably nothing. Just a crazy theory. The connections are so tenuous that there’s probably zero chance that any of it will bear out…”
“…But?”
“But if it is true,” Janice’s eyes lit up again, “it would be huge. Can you imagine? A trail of conspiracy and murder going back almost a millennia? The police haven’t released any pictures of that symbol to the media, so right now, we’re the only ones who know about it. Even if I did tell them about it, how would that help? The trail went cold over a hundred years ago. They’d probably just dismiss me as another nut like they did Jakob Hultz.”
“Yeah,” Colin admitted. “And things didn’t turn out so well for him, either.”
“Exactly,” Janice said. “Look, cards on the table. I think this could be a huge story—a lot bigger than the front page of some crappy college newspaper. If we told the cops now, our advantage would be gone. I think the Knights survived. Maybe in a slightly different form from when they started, but I think they’re still out there. And, for some reason, one of them has taken an interest in this school.”
“You still haven’t answered my question,” Colin said. “Why are you telling me all this?”
“Research is my thing,” Janice said. “I like locking myself away in a little room or a library or an archive and digging things up. I’m pretty good at that. Not so much with the interviewing and the rest of it. You’re one of the best reporters I’ve ever seen. Plus you know things about the investigation that the general public doesn’t. What I’m proposing is that we work together on this. I’ll dig up the past, you try to figure out what’s going on in the present. I think we could get a book out of this. Maybe more.”
Colin paused. What she was proposing did sound a lot more interesting than covering varsity sports for the rest of the term. Janice seemed to interpret his slow response to some sort of moral objection.
“If it gets to the point where we feel we have to tell the police what we know, then obviously we’ll do that,” she said hurriedly. “Until then, I think it’s better if we keep it to ourselves. Like I say, it’s a crazy idea. Probably a dead end. But I’d like to give it a shot. What do you think?”
Colin smiled. There was really no doubt in his mind what his answer would be.
-20-
Seth’s supplier was late.
The guy had promised that he would be there by 7 a.m. Now it was almost 10 and there was no sign of him. Even with all the extra police attention on campus lately, the delay was unusual. He usually dealt with a guy named Carl who worked out of a warehouse in St. Catharines and had a connection with some motorcycle gang that operated out of New York. The stuff usually came across the border in the first three days of the month and found its way to Seth within a few days. Carl was almost always on time because that was when he picked up his share of the revenues. Seth liked to get these things out of the way early. The transaction always made him uneasy and he didn’t like having it hang over the entire day.
Seth sat in the kitchen of his condo sipping an orange juice. A stack of bills totalling just under $75,000 was sitting on the white quartz countertop in front of him. This represented the organization’s share of the revenues from the previous month. Seth kept his share locked in a custom-designed floor safe in the walk-in closet upstairs. Once a month, he would take the majority of that money and divide it between three separate safe deposit boxes, two of which were in town and one at a bank in Toronto. That way, even if somebody did break in or tried to rip him off, he wouldn’t lose it all. If someone put a gun to his head, he could give up one of the boxes. No one, he figured, would know that there were more. That way, assuming he lived, he would still have a nice cushion to land on while he figured out what to do next.
His parents had no idea what he did. He told them he had gone in on an online business venture with a nonexistent friend in the technology program and that it had paid off. They knew nothing about tech or finance, so it was an easy bluff. Last winter, he had sent the two of them on an all-expenses-paid cruise through the Mediterranean. They got a first-class cabin with a jacuzzi, all-day buffet, complementary drinks…the works. His mother still talked about it. She had loved Italy and Greece, but was a little put off by all the swarming “entrepreneurs” in Morocco, hawking their souvenir shirts, pots and snake dances.
In a way, his cover story wasn’t entirely a lie. One of his regular customers had been Terrence Devane, who did run a for-profit online business of a sort. Seth sold him all of his roofies, pot, meth, tranquilizers…even the odd half-kilo of cocaine, which was making something of a comeback. Seth had been secretly relieved when Devane’s body had shown up shortly after the girl’s. After all, if Devane was nabbed and started blabbing to the wrong people about the full scope of his operation, it could put a serious crimp in Seth’s retirement plans.
Seth was nothing if not meticulous about how he worked. He always wore gloves and was careful not to leave even the slightest fingerprint or fibre on any of the materials that went out the door. He knew that if any of it were ever traced back to him, his supplier wouldn’t be happy. And if his supplier wasn’t happy, he might think that it was safer to just remove Seth from the organizational chart rather than take the chance that Seth might say something damaging. It had happened before. Seth knew not to ask questions.
There was a soft knock on the back door. Seth had a ground floor corner unit and liked to conduct most of his business through the back door as the front one was far too visible to the main parking lot and the road.
Finally, he thought. He glanced nervously at the drawer containing the small .38 calibre semi-automatic he kept for emergencies. He had never fired the gun once in the entire time he owned it and wasn’t even sure if it worked. His supplier had given it to him. Since he didn’t have a licence for it, Seth couldn’t exactly take it to a range for target practice. It would also be pretty hard to explain what he was doing with it if he took it out into the forest somewhere and some park ranger happened to come strolling by. So he had put it in a drawer under some fast food flyers. Sometimes he brought it along in the glove compartment when he made deliveries. On a couple of occasions, he had even tucked it into the back of his pants the way he had seen crooks do it in movies. He didn’t dare stuff it down the front waistband because he was convinced he would trip and the gun would go off unexpectedly and blow his balls off. Mostly, it stayed in the drawer.
He had a moment’s hesitation. Bring it or not? It was probably just Carl with the monthly shipment. He was probably just taking some extra precautions because of the whole Devane thing. Still…
The knock sounded again. Seth left the gun where it was and opened the back door. Standing on the back porch was not Carl, but a man Seth had never seen before. He was tall, with greying hair cut in a childlike fringe. He was wearing a full-length black coat that hung loosely, almost like a robe. Seth’s first thought was that the guy looked like a monk.
The man smiled and Seth relaxed slightly. This guy was about the same age as
his father. He was probably just collecting for some charity. There had been a lot of those around lately.
“Hi?” Seth said, taking a half step back. The guy had unusually bright eyes. Seth re-evaluated his initial assessment. Maybe the guy was a Jehovah’s Witness or something.
“Good morning, brother,” the man said. “I have come to show you the pathway of light.”
Bingo, Seth thought. Religious nut.
“Uh, no thanks,” Seth said. “I’m actually kind of expecting somebody, so if you could—”
Seth took a step back and tried to close the door. Before he could, the man leapt forward with alarming speed and jammed something under his jaw. Seth felt a paralyzing blast as the Taser went off and then everything went black.
-21-
Colin pushed open the door and entered the main campus security office.
After Janice had left, he’d gone back through his notes on the original Devane story. This wasn’t something he did often after a story was done, but something had triggered in his memory—a minor detail that he hadn’t thought much of at the time but now might prove useful. It had taken him only a few minutes to find it.
When he had interviewed Shalene Nakogee, she had told him that Devane was supposed to be in the automotive program, but had been kicked out because of an incident involving a student in the repair bay. She didn’t know what it was and Colin hadn’t thought it was relevant to the story he was writing at the time, so he hadn’t pursued it, but now it was pretty much his only lead.
If whatever happened had been enough to get Devane kicked out of the program, it was probably serious. Which meant that there was a good chance the other student, whoever he or she was, had probably been injured.
Which meant that security would have been required to investigate and write up a report.
Colin figured that if he could get his hands on a copy of that report, he might at least have a place to start. It was a slim chance, but it might at least yield another name or two he could approach with questions. In the early stages of an investigation, it was especially hard to determine which pieces of information were useful and which weren’t. All you could do was grab as much of it as you could and try to piece it together later.