“Precisely. We can no longer have the luxury of simply pulling out the underpinnings, the assertions and assumptions that govern our species, but we must discuss them, notice every particular of them, the main one being that we are governed by the group mind, a thing intensely resistent to change, suggestion, addition or subtraction, a thing equipped with sacred assumptions about which there can be no discussion. Can you forsee a day when this sort of irreverence to the group mind is taught in schools? The school itself is founded on the group mind, so no-never! Yet it is through our young and those who constandy challenge the status quo that we progress, if we are to evolve at all as a species…”
He then laid out before her a series of ancient books with illustrations of men, women, even children who, for the greater glory of their god had accepted, blindly followed, and willingly stepped up to an altar of sacrifice, to be beheaded, to have their hearts torn from them, some to have their blood drained, others pinned to crosses and burned at the stake.
“Even Joan of Arc, in the last analysis, sacrificed herself to God in not recanting her faith. Our victims may have died for their faith.”
Jessica tried to imagine the five crucified victims as willing accomplices in their own torturous deaths.
“It is a possibility,” he finished, closing the book on St. Joan of Arc.
“She listened to the voice of God in her head, too,” Jessica said.
“Or her subconscious, if you wish to think in more scientific terms. Either way, she held firm to her faith, however blind it appeared to the authorities who burned her at the stake.”
Time growing late, Jessica said she must go. She hadn't eaten Strand's goodies or finished her tea, and she felt a bit woozy, exhausted from the long, tedious day and now the exhalted conversations with Father Luc Sante. He called for a cab, and she said she could find her way out, preferring to wait in the open air. She'd suddenly begun to feel claustrophobic and warm all over, feverish. She knew she'd shared too much wine with him.
On leaving, Jessica met a strange-eyed pair of creatures with gray-and-orange hair whom Luc Sante, having followed Jessica out, introduced as recent converts, a pair of twins. The twin women, up in years, perhaps in their late fifties, smiled vacantly at Jessica who towered over their twisted frames. Luc Sante gave their names as Miss Caroline Houghton and her sister, Juliana Houghton, “Both of whom do volunteer work in the church, and both of whom are repaid in psychotherapy sessions,” he explained, adding in light jest, “A bargain for both in the barter.”
The two women each stared vacuously at Jessica as if she were a wax figure in London's infamous Wax Museum of horrors.
Luc Sante, after fondly bidding the twins good night, took Jessica aside to explain that the twins had been traumatized as children by their parents, actual witnesses to multiple murders, a case involving torture and sodomy. The children had been made to watch by their parents. 'True evil,” he tells her. “Forgive them-the parents, I mean, long since dead. Dying without knowing God. That is the ultimate purgatory.”
While Luc Sante remained in mid-explanation of the strange twins, Jessica stared over his shoulder at the huge, beautifully sculpted wooden crucifix depicting Jesus mounted on the cross behind Luc Sante's pulpit. The eyes radiated a painful, suffering life, the color along the throat and torso draining before her. She imagined His death. The prolonged agony of the physical realities, yes, but even more so the prolonged suffering of realizing that he had been so absolutely and thoroughly betrayed, so ultimately alone, left there not only by His race and followers but by God Himself. Betrayed in the sense that even had God foretold the event, nothing could have prepared Jesus for the sense of abandonment at the moment of crucifixion. She wanted to crawl up onto the cross herself, right this moment, meld into the sculpted form and become Jesus, to see, feel, smell from Him, to touch and feel and hear from within Him, to fully and absolutely believe, comprehend, and embrace her faith. But that remained impossible; no one could become Jesus.
Her eyes trailed downward to the sculpted, bloody feet where Luc Sante stood every Sabbath to sermonize at the huge, gilded pulpit before an array of candles. She imagined the power and craft of Luc Sante's sermons, the sway he must hold over his congregation, wondered how different it was from the control the Crucifier held over his victims in the end. She felt compelled to tell him, “One of these days, I'm going to come to hear one of your sermons, Father.”
“As well you must,” he agreed.
Her eyes traveled back up to Jesus.
Luc Sante watched her stare, realizing she'd become captivated by the crucifixion art behind his pulpit. He stopped to stare up at it as well. “It was done in the thirteenth century, an obscure Italian artist… so realistic… Studied under Leonardo's disciples, but I think he went with a touch of Donatello, don't you agree?”
“Lovely workmanship, yes, and so large, overwhelming to the emotions. So… so real.”
“Indeed. Step to your right, watching the eyes the entire time.”
She did so and found the experience of Christ's eyes as depicted by the artist unnerving. They followed her.
“Now to your left.”
Again, the eyes followed her.
Luc Sante, smiling, announced, “I know what you're thinking.”
“You do?”
“That a replication such as this, seen by a madman, a maniac, such as our Crucifier, that such artwork could… Well, it could be the catalyst to move a man from merely fantasizing a thing to actually committing a horrid act.”
“Such as murder by crucifixion?”
He nodded. “And you're right. But what would you have we churchmen do? Lay a canvass across every crucifixion scene in the city? Yes, the sick mind might contemplate such a work of art and begin to hear messages from it, hear Jesus' own voice telling him to go and take lives, to sacrifice life to the Son, but can we truly blame such an aberrant reaction on the artwork itself? I think not.”
“The mind is already sick that looks on such art and takes away with it a purpose for murder. I see your point.”. “You look extremely tired, my child. There are rooms in the building, if you'd care to lie down. I could secure a blanket, a pillow. You look a bit pale.”She managed a smile. “No, no. It's not far to the hotel, and you've already called the cab. I'll be fine.”
After saying good-bye to Father Luc Sante, she left his cathedral and thoughtlessly leaned against one of the enormous stone buttresses supporting the cathedral wall, thinking Father Luc Sante right. She didn't realize how ill she'd actually felt until Father Luc Sante had remarked on her paleness. She looked down at her body, which seemed independent of her, and she realized that she'd dirtied her white evening gown thanks to the smut on the cathedral walls. The stain formed a small black bat, an awful, black smudge, like a coal smudge.
Without warning, her mind suddenly raced out of control. Ruined-forever-stained! Nothing-to-wear or be- done; you-can salvage or restrain! Relinquish-any-now-moment with hindsight's 20/20, a-hole-in-the-whole- wonder-king-think-thing, but-useless-in-last-analysis-of-performance… Art, Arthur. Yes, her-smudging-the-virginal- gown-again… Against St. Alban's coal-grimed-walls… this exhaulted-body-soul-raiments and remnants and remainders to-level-of-performance… art. Art, Arthur… King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table, Knights, night 's-Templers. She had become art…
What the hell's going on inside my head? she wondered. Why are my thoughts racing into one another, out of control?
For some reason, she felt light-headed, dizzy even, and she recalled a warning from her friend. Donna LeMonte, before traveling here. Donna warned, “Careful… Watch out for the sherry. English sherry and wine are potent indeed.”
She felt strands of her hair tickling each cheek. She'd done it up properly, and now it had come loose, and she feared she must look a fright, her long, auburn curls like snake ringlets. Then for reasons she litde understood, she recalled Sharpe's having said that half or more of the older structures in the city still used coal for heating, and that much of London's famous or infamous fog came about via the accumulation of coal dust hovering above London from the burning furnaces and destructors-incinerators-in the oldest sections of the city. She knew that St. Albans certainly fell under that category, being near Golders Green in the Marylebone district.
Still no cab. Who did the old man call? Did they have to build the cab from scratch? It's dark out here, she thought, one hand clutching the small bag she carried where her Smith amp; Wesson comfortably rested. For some reason she could not fathom, she felt a twinge of need, a twinge of fear-foolish subconscious, intuitive thread of
