“What on earth are they doing?” Ben shook his head.
“I don’t know, but my guess is they’ve got something unpleasant planned.”
The crowd milled, shouted. There was a sense of excitement now. A sense of revenge.
Over the next half hour the eager crowd saw plenty more activity. All of it mysterious, if not downright weird. A truck arrived piled with house bricks. After that an ambulance pulled up right by the stage where the table now stood.
OK. I’d got the picture now. Finch would be marched up onto the stage. A firing squad would assemble. Bang, he’s dead. His corpse gets dumped into the ambulance. Show’s over folks. There’s nothing more to see.
But they’d got something far worse planned.
Miss Bertholly neatly climbed up the steps onto the stage. She went to stand by the table. As if ready for the funeral that would take place any time now, she was already dressed in black. Another member of the Caucus (who I recognized as Crowther senior) handed her a microphone that was attached to the bullhorn he carried.
There was still a buzz of voices in the crowd. It fell silent the second she began to talk.
“Listen to me, please… may I have everyone’s attention? Thank you. Today is a black day for Sullivan. It’s going to become darker still. But this afternoon we must perform an act that will be burnt into our memories forever. Because we must have no repeat of the crime Charles Finch has committed. If it happens again, if strangers are admitted into this, our place of safety, it will probably spell the end for us all. We can’t allow this to happen. No one wants to see their wives, their husbands or children die. Let this be recorded, then. Finch has been found guilty of endangering our lives by bringing threat of the disease into our community. Those strangers might have been infected; there was a clear risk they might have infected us. Fortunately they never left the boat, so the chance that the disease will manifest itself here is slight. At a meeting of the Caucus in which the presiding officer, Justice Abrahams, was present, it was decided that the penalty for this terrible crime against our people could only be the most severe at our disposal. Death.” She paused to scan the crowd with her cold eyes, perhaps looking for any dissenters. There were none. People nodded. A man shouted, “Hear, hear.”
“However,” she continued, her amplified voice echoing from the buildings, “for Finch to be executed has been deemed insufficient punishment. After all, if Finch dies this afternoon he has in effect escaped the remorse he should feel for his crime.”
Ben and I looked at one another. What the hell was she talking about? Had she gone crazy?
“Therefore-” Her voice rang out loud enough to scare the doves from the rooftops. “Therefore, the penalty of death will be applied to the daughter of Charles Finch, one Lynne Margaret Wagner.”
The madness had started. I moved toward the stage, my heart pumping like fury, my fists clenched.
“It is the will of the Caucus that the penalty be executed now.”
I was hearing the words… I heard them loud and clear, but somehow they no longer made sense. I felt as if I’d broken loose from the real world. That this was some vicious nightmare that had erupted into wide-awake daytime.
The woman continued to speak in that ice-cool lawyer voice. “It is also the will of the Caucus that each person here will be a party to the execution.” She looked down at one of the police officers within the cordon. “Sergeant Marsh, please discharge your duty.”
The crowd packed in toward the stage. I felt myself hemmed in by men and women who strained to see what was happening there. The heat from their bodies came through their clothes; they panted, their eyes blazed. The smell of their perspiration spiked my nostrils-hell, they were so close I could smell unwashed hair. There was something feverish about them. Like they’d been gripped by sheer passion. Something they had no control over.
Something like the passion that gripped me when I killed. But I was immune to this. Their hot bodies pressed hard against me from every direction, but all I felt was this cold, cold vacuum inside me.
“Lynne…”
I saw Lynne brought from the back of the ambulance to be led up the steps. For the first time I thought of her as “my Lynne,” the beautiful woman who’d slip into my cabin to make breakfast once in a while. The same woman with the hip-swaying walk who I’d once held in my arms.
Blinking at the sudden sunlight, she shielded her eyes. The n she looked ’round as if confused, or maybe wondering if this was anything more than a weird practical joke. A momen t later she saw her father. He’d been brought from the courthouse to watch.
The cops sat her on the table. Then, before she even seemed aware of it, they pushed her down; there was something gentle about the action… they pushed her until she lay flat on her back, like it was some kind of weird outdoor operating table.
More men moved forward with the door, which they placed across her chest. From above it must have looked like the figure of a cross, like so: + Lynne’s head and throat lay clear of the door, as did her legs. Two guys held each end of the door so it formed a seesaw across her chest, with her torso as the pivot.
“No… ” I heard her voice plainly enough. Like she was waking u p from a dream, she started to struggle. “No, let me go. What do you think you’re doing?” She turned her head to see her father, who stood cuffed to two security guards. The man’s face had an engraved look to it. As if his head and face had been carved from granite that had the word HORROR written all the way through it.
Cool as ice, Bertholly explained. “Each adult man and woman will be hande d a house brick. Once you have the brick you will form a line at this end of the raised dais, where Mr. Crowther junior is standing. When instructed to do so, you will walk up here and place the brick on the door. This will continue until the door cannot contain any more bricks.”
An electricity of excitement crackled through the crowd. They surged forward, eager to be first. No way did I want to go, but I was carried along with them. As the tidal wave of people shoved me forward I saw Lynne begin to struggle, her head twisting from left to right, her legs kicking. In a second men and women pounced on her to hold her still.
I yelled. In some way I thought I’d yell myself awake. This had to be a nightmare.
But with remorseless momentum events rolled forward. Men and women were handed bricks, they stood in line, they climbed the steps, they walked up to where Lynne lay on the table, her long hair hanging down. There, they placed the bricks on the door that the two men balanced on her chest.
To me, in that shocked state, the procedure didn’t make sense. Why were they doing that? Why weigh the door down on Lynne’s breast?
By the time the tenth brick had been placed there I heard her scream. “Take it off! It’s heavy. You’re hurting me. Do you hear? It’s hurting!”
So, that was it.
Brick by brick, the door lying across her chest would become heavier. Neighbor after neighbor would play his part in her death.
My God, yes. Miss Bertholly the lawyer would be right. Everyone would remember this. They’d remember when bit by bit they crushed the life out of the mother of two children. The beautiful woman whose crime it was to be the daughter of Charles Finch.
Shouting in fury, I forced my way through the crowd to the stage. Lynne’s face had flushed red. Her eyes narrowed with pain. Her head turned, slowly now, from left to right as the crushing pain made her squirm. She was no longer screaming; she was whispering. “No… please… stop it. Stop it.” Already she found it hard to inhale. Her lips appeared to swell with the pressure. I saw her tongue emerge to lick the dry skin.