heard Luc Sante's words as in a dream, the drug dizzying her. “This is how we intend to combat evil in the universe, my dear Jessica. First, we will annihilate it on this ground, on this holy cross.” While she could not see, could not focus her dilated eyes, she imagined his bony finger pointing to the enormous and ancient cross where Strand still hung in the throes of mortal pain.
Strand 's labored breathing made her wonder how long the man had been hanging here, hours, a day, more? Jessica kept her eyelids closed, struggling with how she might locate and take control of the. 38 or her Browning automatic. Then she realized that Strand's labored breathing was not Strand's but her own gasping breath. She hadn't yet been staked to the cross, but she had been drugged.
She heard Luc Sante continue for his rag-tag army of followers, all of whom were in awe of the old man with the wild eyes and unruly shock of white hair. “Place her on the cross. Do it. Do it now.”
Jessica struggled to her feet, lashing out with fists clenched at men in heavy robes and dark hoods, but two strong men grabbed her before she could get her bearings, stripping her to her bra and panties, discarding her clothing, some of it cast into the stagnant, standing water as they raped her of her identity. She now represented an object, a mere symbol, an obstacle to their continued obsession, an icon to religious fanaticism.
They dragged her, kicking and screaming, to the cross. Luc Sante's followers looked on as if in rapture. Luc Sante shouted, “Dr. Coran will now take the place of Christ.”
“What about increasing the drug?” suggested one of them, the voice strikingly clinical and familiar, she thought. But Jessica had enough trouble focusing on the fact they had drugged her to worry about the familiar voice.
Luc Sante solemnly replied to the one man who stood up against him, “This time, no high dosages.”
“But she must be willing, like the others were,” countered another follower whose cowl masked his likeness. Jessica could not be sure of her sense of sight or sound as the Brevital continued to work havoc with her brain.
Still somewhere in her mind, Jessica held on to the fact that all of Luc Sante's victims had been, as the old man himself had admitted to her earlier, willing participants in their own crucifixion deaths. She must use this fact against him here and now. It proved the one truth from Luc Sante's mouth irrefutable, and if so, perhaps his followers might question her being forced and man-handled into this role.
Jessica fought to focus on the once empty chamber now filled with people of all sizes, shapes-all below heavy cossack-styled robes and deep hoods, cowls holding their features hostage in shadow. Colorless and of one mind, she thought.
Her own mind multiplied… multiplied the crowd before her even as it spun out of control. She saw all Father Luc Sante's converts closing in around her, all wishing to touch the icon before it departed; before being sent over to the other side. Now in the crowd, she saw the visage of Chief Inspector Boulte which made her gasp with a moment's hope, until she saw J. T.'s image as well, followed by Santiva, Donna LeMonte, Kim Desinor, James Parry, Stuart Copperwaite, and there, too, stood Richard Sharpe-dear Richard-all of them fooled by Luc Sante. All of them were pleading for the man to “take me next, take me next…”
“All the others volunteered!” Jessica shouted.
Some grumblings of response came from the crowd as Luc Sante assured them that Jessica had volunteered, even if unconsciously so.
“You sisters, you Houghton sisters!” Jessica shouted. “It's your turn. You've waited years upon years for this day.”
“She's right, Father,” said one of the Houghton twins in response.
Luc Sante's stentorian voice silenced them all with a shouting sermon. “A child came to me in a dream,” Luc Sante told his followers now, “and in this vision, the child-neither male nor female-told me what to do. And this is that prophetic dream come true. Now we all know that dreams are the word of God incarnate, so to ignore the child's voice is to ignore the voice of God Himself.”
'Tell us more of this dream,” asked one follower who dropped his cowl, disclosing his face to Jessica, who believed her mind fevered on seeing Dr. Karl Schuller staring at her.
Luc Sante continued, pleased at this reaction. “I've concluded that she… Dr. Coran… must feel the pain as Christ Himself felt the pain to truly atone for her sins of which she has many, and in order for the subsequent resurrection to take place. You will see the resurrection of the child of God, Jesus Himself in due time! You will all be witness to the miracle of miracles re bom, returned to this Earth… and to this end, no more chugs.”
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.
