His compatriot in the crucifixions watched him, watched the emotional turmoil, and he tried to ease his friend and mentor's soul, saying, “You tear at yourself with the talons of self-recrimination and perplexity. You should not have any doubts. We are doing the right thing.”
“Self-doubt? Try self-loathing and despair, wonder and waver, ponder and stagger, vacillate and hesitate, distrust and mistrust, suspect and question every step, so unsure of the whether-or-nots, the ifs, ands, ors, nors, yets, fors, sos, and buts of self-recrimination and doubt.”
“You are the right man at the right time to perform God's work here on Earth,” replied the other. “You must not doubt yourself.”
“I doubt my ability to hold the others, to spread the word. I doubt I have any ability with fact, and whether or not I can convey God's truth.”
“Perhaps such truth cannot be conveyed to others, that truth, like God and Christ, lives beyond human understanding and perception.”
“Still we must try to penetrate the obstinate others, to show them the way. Sometimes I dare ask the crucial question: Do the others even matter? Were they really a part of the grand scheme? Were they even real in the sense of reality as being truth, if indeed reality was never the truth to begin with? Perhaps the others have even less corporeal existence than the voices in my head. Perhaps the others are the voices in my head. No one, not even those who purport to understand and follow me, my dear friend, really know what lives are led inside the Crucifier's head.” He laughed and shook his head. “That's what the London press calls me now, the Crucifier. The fools could not be further from the truth.”
The friend agreed. “None of the fools of this Earth know that you were bom fated and ordained, selected as the Chosen One. Bom an archangel, really, someday to be known as both a prophet and a saint.”
“I know this much to be so. For God, and not the many other voices of doubt and dissension, has said so.”
“Perhaps in reliving the crucifixions that have gone before, in submitting each to the microscope of your keen mind, you could then explain to the others. Let them know, bring them to the same realization we hold dear-that failure is part of the process in getting from here to eternity.”
“Well said! Not one single soul has been wasted. Every single one who has gone before us to be crucified, has cleansed his or her soul in the bargain. It has been so with the O'Donahue woman and Lawrence Coibby.”
Lawrence Coibby had been given a more potent dosage of the drug, Brevital. He hadn't squirmed or moaned or whined so much as did Katherine. She'd been a big disappointment. She'd also been half conscious when the stakes were driven in, but Coibby was better about enduring the pain of it all, the drugs having dulled the sting, the suffering discomfort, the ultimate agonizing anguish that must be part of the path toward the ultimate pleasure, delight, joy, and rapture.
The drugs dulled the mind to all fearful sense of imminent danger. Coibby had died without pain, or so they all wanted to believe.
He recalled the exact moment of Coibby's passing. Coibby had simply expired, and not with his last painful breath as everyone would wish to believe. Coibby couldn't capture a last breath to have a last breath. When die man's last breath could not be taken, at the moment when one's breath became God's own breath, that was when he died.
Everyone agreed that Coibby's was a near perfect crucifixion.
Certainly, he flailed some at the end, but he never fully regained consciousness. And the inner peace brought on by the drug-and the knowledge he must go on to a better place-helped ease him over so that his spirit might imbue the dead corpse with a renewed source of power and strength, the strength that comes from knowing Jesus and the resurrection of the soul.
But again, Jesus failed to put in an appearance, and Lawrence's body had remained still and lifeless, as inert as the cross upon which he'd been sacrificed. So there was no corporeal proof of Coibby's resurrection, as there should have been, but then God tested men in mysterious ways.
Once again the all-night vigil grew long and unproductive, and the collective-they-became further disillusioned.
As director and choreographer of the Second Coming, he had much to answer for. His constituents and followers would soon abandon him if they learned the truth about him, that he hardly knew if what he searched for could ever be found in this or another millennium.
He'd been so sure with the schoolteacher.
He'd been equally sure with the car salesman, Coibby. And for a moment, he was absolutely sure it must be Coibby. But all hope failed when Coibby's corpse could not be enticed to show signs of resurrection after death, despite all prayer and all the power and life force coming from the collective.
They had simply miscalculated. All of them, including their leader. 'Too many voices in your head?” asked one follower.
“How is it possible that the Chosen One is not to be the Chosen One?” queried another.
“We must absolutely not become disillusioned,” he cautioned the others. “We must! Absolutely must continue to look elsewhere…”
“Look elsewhere?”
“Indeed.”
“For what, exactly, pray tell?” rallied the voices.
“For answers… enlightenment, of course. Holy enlightenment, indeed… exactly… pray tell…”
The Crucifier thought of that night when Coibby had gone over. He reviewed it in his head again and again, trying to get it right. Then he thought of the third Chosen One, Burton, and he again felt the doubts crowding into his mind, as he reexamined every step, every ritualistic moment of Burton's agonizing time on the cross. He heaved with the heavy burden on his shoulders and collapsed against a natural stone chair in this dark place where they must hide away their deeds until the world should come to enlightenment. His comforting friend placed an arm around his shoulders, gave him a warm hug, and said, “You must, like all the rest, be patient. The accurate millennium marks the Second Coming. We will see Christ resurrected through our combined will.”
Jessica awakened just as the plane came in sight of what appeared to be a mammoth island lying just off the coast of mainland Europe: Great Britain-England, Scotland, and Wales. From her window seat, Jessica could make out the Isle of Wight. The coastline, jagged and steep, gave the appearance of a great plateau rising from the ocean like some bloated giant's clenched fist. Small English villages rose out of the landscape as the plane descended, each looking like the small Christmas villages found in novelty shops, Jessica thought, delighting in the beauty of this place as the plane floated over moors and marshes toward the spirals of London, making her feel like a modem-day Peter Pan.
The plane descended further, now over an area known as the Whitleyern Highlands where fertile valleys alternated with chalk and limestone hills. Jessica knew that by any standard, Great Britain's overcrowded population had begun to bulge at the seams, and that ninety percent or more of its people lived in cities and towns. She'd read somewhere that in all of Europe, only tiny Belgium had a higher percentage of people in urban areas. The lowlands, especially in southeastern, central, and northern England, by comparison remained among the most thickly populated places on the globe, and nothing bred crime and murder like overpopulation. Yet, at the same time, the cemeteries of England were filled to capacity even stacked tier upon tier and there was no more room for the dead.
Jessica's insomnia awakened her while the cabin remained dark and everyone else asleep. Her insomnia had her reading facts from guidebooks she'd shoved in her overnight bag. Now Jessica, fully “up” on the country, knew that Great Britain had 232 persons per square kilometer as opposed to France's 100 per square kilometer, the USA's 26 per square kilometer, and Australia's 2 per square kilometer.
She had found Copperwaite dozing while Sharpe, like her, sat upright, having come awake some time before her. Both of them fully awake, she engaged Sharpe in conversation, telling him bits of her recently acquired knowledge of his homeland.
He instantly wanted to hear what she'd learned, and so she plied him with the facts most tourists received every day on incoming flights. She finished with a dark twist, however, saying, “I hate to be the pessimist, but there's no doubt that England, and London in particular, will see growing crime of the heinous kind most people think reserved only for America in the coming years and through the coming decades, millennium wishes to the contrary or not…”
