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.
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.