unemotional application of whip to skin. The speed was supersonic, the devastation cruel and specific. He could open a nick, or a slice or a gash or a hack. He could make the whip tease like a feather or bite like a lion, but he preferred what lay in between, in escalating degrees, increment by increment, with enough downtime and not too much blood loss so that the boy could understand with perfect logic and clarity that which was happening to him, that which would happen and, finally, that there was no other inevitability save the will of the whip man.
In the Whipping House, the whip man whipped. When a boy passed out, he was cut down, revived, treated tenderly, his wounds dressed, and just when it seemed he was out of his agony and removed to a more benevolent universe, he was hung again, and whipped again, harder, taken farther into pain, but not quite all the way to death.
Nobody died without talking, for that is the way of a good whip man.
The whip man knows. The whip man is brilliant, cunning, and has all the attributes of a chess player or a counterintelligence officer or a gifted businessman. He has an intuition for the psychology of weakness, he can anticipate, he knows just how close to the line he can come each time, and each time he cuts that distance in half. And there is always another half to be achieved, always. He can string you along for hours or days, take you through lifetimes of pain, so that nothing else has ever existed for you, and the only mercy is a dream of death which he is too wise to give you easily.
In this way, Ephram gave up Milton, and then Milton gave up Robertson.
Robertson tried to kill himself by biting on his tongue, piercing it in hopes of drowning in lungs a-burst with his own blood, greedily swallowed to avoid further destruction, but the whip man was too smart, and saved him, for an especially long time on the rack, with the play of lash and light and sweat across the darkness of the night, until ultimately Robertson broke and gave up Theo, who broke fast to give up Broke Tooth, who gave up One Eye, who gave up Elijah.
It was a pagan scene, with the fires bright, and the sweat shiny on the bodies of the hung man and the whip man in their intimate squalor, and the singing in the air of the lash and the crack as it struck, each crack a detonation in the flesh that transmuted in a nanosecond to the deep brain where pain is registered.
Bigboy worked Elijah hard, for Elijah was the rare enough hero and would give no man up, and Elijah fought him all through the whip man's night, filling the Whipping House with pain. But finally Elijah broke.
They all broke. There was no other possibility.
Elijah gave up 22 and 22 gave up Albert, but there was a hitch.
In the case of Albert, the man was discovered in bed, his throat cut, a straight razor in his hand.
'He knowed he was next,' said Caleb.
'No,' said Bigboy. 'Someone else knew he was next, and thought to cut the chain off before it led to him. And left the razor there to confuse us. But we will find him.'
A day was lost in that barracks, as each convict was interrogated by rough means, until at last one Yellow Ed gave up Mr. Clarence, and Mr.
Clarence broke and ran, in the old days just exactly the ticket out in the amount of time it took a guard to pump his Winchester '07 to his shoulder and ship off a.351. But nobody shot Mr. Clarence. The dogs ran him to earth, and he too went off to interrogation. The nights of the Whipping House continued. fish knew he eventually would be found out. Knowing this, he had two choices. The first would be to hand himself into the warden and Bigboy, explain that he was indeed the originator of the phrase 'pale horse coming,' and then tell exactly what it meant and why in his foolishness he had told it to but one man. That was his sin: hubris.
He had no ability to keep his tongue from wagging, and for that his brothers were paying in flesh.
He would tell all: about the white boy Bogart's secret survival, and his pledge to return in the night with men and guns, and pay out retribution in spades.
But if he did that, Fish knew also that the warden and Bigboy would take specific security precautions against exactly what it was the white boy Bogart had planned. That would doom Bogart's attempt, that would get Bogart killed. The assault on Thebes would come to nothing; Thebes, like an evil city of the ancient times, would go on and on and on. It was like a Rome, and no force could bring it down except time's slow track.
The other course demanded more belief. It was harder. It was hardest of all, because it could be construed by his own self as the cowardly way.
That was to say nothing, and let Bigboy work his way through the convict population, hunting the disease of hope, until at last, depending on the courage of those who fell under his lash, it reached himself. This way played for time, and in that time the gamble was the white man Bogart would assemble his forces and smite the evil, wipe them off the face of the earth, and that he, Fish, would be here to see it. It was a coward's way, for the first path surely guaranteed that he would himself get the lash, for even if the warden and Bigboy believed he was telling the truth, they'd take him to the last drop of blood to as certain if what he said was truth. He would avoid that, but he would, live with the screams of the whipped in the Whipping House, that anguish that floated every night damp and heated on the gentle breezes, so that all could hear and all could fear.
That is, if Bogart the white boy came. For many a man speaks powerfully when full of wrath, and makes great promises of what will come. Yes, and just as many a man forgets his pledge in the light of day after a woman's soft caress or the numbing blur and comfort of whiskey, or the purr of a satisfied child cuddling with its daddy, and the warmth of a blazing hearth. These things, and a million or so others, will make cowards out of most men, who will not give them up to come back to muddy hell and set things right. They forget quickly, their memories erode, and after all, the men of Thebes were lost al ready. Maybe the white boy Bogart would be like that. What white boy, after all, would risk his neck to save a passel of niggers? Never happened before, maybe never would after.
But god damning himself to hell, Fish decided at long last, after many a bitter and sleepless and scream-filled night, to believe in the white boy. That fellow had something, for sure. Something in the way his eyes blazed with death's promise, and he took all this righteously, as if personal. He would ride that pale horse back with God's mighty scythe and cut down the wicked of Thebes. That's what Fish concluded.
It was his only faith.
So he would give the white boy Bogart another week. He would give him till dark of the moon. Then he would stop the hurting and the dying by taking it on himself. Until that time, he would be hard of heart while yes sing and shuckin' and smilin' and crawling' before the white demons.
He hoped it earned him one thing: not a dispensation from hell, for he knew that was where he was going, but only the knowledge that certain others would be arriving at that destination first, or at least soon after. through these long nights of screaming, the warden slept soundly. He had taught himself from long practice not to be affected by the grim necessities of power. Power is what it must do, and if it lacks the will to do it, it will not remain power much longer. That is the rule of history, as written by the Romans and the Spanish and the British.
He had made peace with it.
He slept soundly, for he knew that whatever had to be done, he was a truly good man. it seemed to take forever. Sam stood there, transfixed, caught up in the utter fragility of it. His fingers, not ideally distributed against the tension of the ribbon, nevertheless held it taut, and with his other hand he pinned the cardboard box flat. He had very little room to move, not without disturbing his hands and somehow altering the tension on the ribbon which, if he had figured this thing out correctly, could release the firing pin of what had to be an Ml Pull Firing Device, or something similar, which would allow the spring-driven striker to plunge forward against whatever primer was in the package, and the whole thing would go ka-boom. End of house. End, more to the point, of Sam.
He tried to recollect the thing. The Mis were ubiquitous in the war, standard equipment for rigging booby traps in defensive positions, but common to any artillery or mortar unit as well. For if you were in danger of being overrun and didn't want your guns to fall into enemy hands, you could unscrew the fuse of a shell, screw in the Ml, pull out the safety pins (two of them), and run a cord from the big ring at the end of the device to your position under cover. One pull on that ring, and the dance began and ended one second later with that big ka-boom.
No guns for the Germans to turn against us, as they were wont to do.
Sam forced himself to concentrate. In that way, he drove from his imagination the fear and the discomfort. The discomfort, however, was not so easily vanquished. It refused to obey his will and insisted on manifesting itself in the cramps that had begun to spread through his awkwardly splayed fingers, in the itchy sweat catching in his hairline, in the sudden weight of his glasses, which had slipped down his nose and were pinching his nostrils and clotting his breathing, in the needles that had begun to prickle in his feet as the blood collected there, and in the dryness of throat and mouth as his throat grew raspy. It seemed as if the atoms of his clothes were increasing in
