Benighted (37 page)

“Who did you see?” Albin asks.

Paul doesn’t turn his head. “Lola.”

“Did she say anything about representing us?”

He starts to speak, then gives it up as if tired. A few seconds pass as he stares into space before he finally speaks. “Nada.” He says it slowly.

Albin frowns. Steven is hunched in a corner, his arms folded across his chest. He watches, his face blank with wariness.

Paul looks down, looks back up again. He hasn’t glanced at the others once since he came back down. His eyes crease at the corners and he chews his lip.

I thought he’d tell them, I’d expected conversation in a language I couldn’t follow. It would have riled Steven, made him aggressive or brought his defenses up, he’d have known he was being plotted against. I was expecting a scene.

Paul rests his head against the wall, gazing at nothing. Then he starts to sing. The others shift and look at each other for explanations for a couple of bars, and then they go still. It isn’t a tune he sings, it’s sentences that run on from note to note, rhythmical and simple. I listened to enough of his music to know what he’s doing: it’s an improvised recitative. He doesn’t have an operatic voice, and it rings glassy off the walls. There’s nothing lupine about it, none of the soft, carrying wail you hear on moon nights, but something about it makes my skin prickle, makes hackles rise on my neck as much as they ever did in response to a lune’s call.

THIRTY-SIX

I
’ve been lying. If I ever said “they” about the Inquisitors, I was lying. The word I needed was “we.” Because we were part of it, my people, my whole kind was part of it, down to the last man. We change our names, we change our methods, but this is my history. Four hundred years ago, I would have been a hooded Inquisitor, and I can think of nothing at all that excuses me now.

It’s quiet in the church. I wanted it to smell of incense, but that’s the smell of Mass, and there’s nothing here but someone sweeping, a couple of people looking at the ceiling, a middle-aged woman on her knees in the Lady Chapel. My soft running shoes squeak against the tiles. I’ve never found a church where I could walk soundlessly. The Aegidian shrine is where I remembered it, just a little place set into the wall, small enough to fit perhaps three people at a time. I stand in front of the icon. An aging man, a hind held in his arms. God sent a hind to nourish him with its milk, that’s how poor Giles was. His face is smooth, tranquil, a soft beard trails down his chest, his eyes don’t look out of the picture but off into the distance. My hands clench and unclench, and I shift my feet. I hadn’t thought about what to do when I got here, and now I’m standing before the shrine, mostly what I feel is a sense of discomfort, as of a badly faked performance.

It would be comfortable to sit down, but there are no chairs nearby. I hesitate at the opening for a moment, then step inside and kneel down. There are cushions provided, an act of kindness, and I kneel on one, hands together, looking at the painting. It’s a familiar pose, from a long time ago, and though I’m out of practice and feel uncertain at taking up such a posture, faith doesn’t go away, not altogether. I’m afraid God will strike me down for trespassing in his house when I don’t properly believe. It’s faith of a sort.

Is this what you would have wanted, I say. Giles was a mortal man once, a hermit who lived in the woods; he had a cave for meditation and such was his devotion that what he wanted most was to be left alone to pray. A hunting party shot him by accident, and the king visited him as the arrow wound healed, but Giles wanted to be left alone. A sage, a miracle worker, later on an abbot of a monastery the king built because he admired Giles so. A true holy man.

The thought of the real Giles strengthens me somehow. I’ve always believed in an angry God, but perhaps the gentle Giles, if I’d met him, might have had a kind word for me. It’s better, it has to be, that there are good people in the world. I wish I was one of them.

Is this what you would have wanted? I don’t think it can be so. A renunciate who wanted to be away from the world with his prayers couldn’t have felt much enthusiasm at the thought of a vast network of cripples taking criminals and ordinary citizens by the heels, of prisons and interrogations and acres and acres of paperwork obscuring what we do. All the forests you loved cut down for us to tell lies on.

Do you love us, Giles? We could have prayed to another saint, a saint of guards or justice, but we have you, saint of cripples. Because of our disability. The answer that my mind makes is that he must. Saints love mankind. Not because we’re good, but because they are, because saints love sinners with a boundless compassion. That’s what a saint is. It’s an apologist answer, the kind of answer I found glib when the nuns said such things, but it feels true as well. My mind finds the answer without thinking, reflexively, and I can’t think of an alternative.

Then what are we to do? Because what I know about Aegidians, I didn’t learn from the nuns. The
Summis Desidrantes Affectibus,
the Witch Bull of 1484, was a decree by the Pope, Innocent VIII, declaring the existence of witches. Thousands died because of that Bull. We don’t believe in witches anymore.

It was faith that made us. We were a holy order, once. We found witches, and we fought for God’s law on earth, and we tortured people to death. We’re still the same race, the same people now, that were able to accept such a proposition. And we tried to save people, too, we didn’t want killers laying waste around us, and that was real, unarguable, even to an atheist, and it’s still around us. How can we be so corrupt, and still try to fight the wickedness of the world?

What am I to do, Giles? Am I dragging souls down with me? When I put Steven in with the others, I had a sense of what they’d do, do for me and spare me having to do to him myself. By all laws, that’s damnable. We have to catch Seligmann before he kills anyone else, but I don’t believe that excuses tormenting another man to do it. Steven certainly won’t forgive us. I’m making people commit sins they wouldn’t otherwise have committed. I’ve read of martyrs who wouldn’t plead guilty or not guilty at their trials, who stopped the trials from going on by their silence, knowing what the penalty was: pressing. They let themselves be crushed to death with weights, sometimes for days at a time, rather than involve a jury in the sin of their execution. That’s holiness, that’s what God intended us to be. What am I to do, Giles? There are too many people caught in this tangle I’ve created, and every direction takes us nearer the pit, and I can’t see any way out. Look at them, the prisoners, ready to drag the answer out of Steven. Look at Seligmann, wherever he is, willing to hunt down God’s children on moon night. Help me, Giles. We’re all lost. We may yet have another Inquisition, but there’s no second Crucifixion promised to redeem us from our sins. We have to choose, and I can’t find a choice.

Do you love me, Giles? I say. The saint gazes out of the painting, holding the deer to his breast.

THIRTY-SEVEN

T
hey talk.

They talk about being outside, they talk of planning free-range nights and avoiding being caught, making a little war between themselves and DORLA. There are war stories they swap, furring up with injuries, fights with other groups, escaping catchers; the stories don’t sound true to me, because they’re too simple, they make life sound easy, but Steven listens to them. He listens, and sometimes he opens his mouth as if he wanted to join in. They don’t let him, they keep talking right over him, spinning tales about their dangerous lives.

They talk about the hospital, about things that happen there, all the violent cases Carla has handled, the addicts who wander in trying to steal the drugs, about how much easier it is to steal things if you’re higher up the ranks.

They wake Steven up during the night when he was sleeping quietly and ask him, “What did you say?”

We did a lot of things to people in the old days. We studied it, how to get around religious precedent, figuring out ways to get confessions without violating the laws of God. Inquisitors labored under the rule that you couldn’t torture anyone more than once. We solved that: any cessation of torture was a “suspension,” and if you torture him again, it’s just continuing the first, the only session. You weren’t allowed to shed blood: we found things to do that didn’t. There were always threats, too, and they worked. Enough people confessed on the rack before anyone started turning the wheel. It wasn’t even cowardice. They knew what the rack did, how it pulled each bone slowly from its socket, so that every other torment, hanging and dropping and crushing, was considered a lenient preliminary, and they knew they’d be torn to pieces unless they confessed.

I read about that when I was sixteen, young enough to take fright at such stories. It was in a book written for lycos; it wasn’t about us, the Aegidians only got a chapter. The author said that torture was a form of oppression that oppressed not just the victim but the general populace as well: if you know what can be done to you, you always go in fear. It’s true, it’s fair, people are afraid of us. But we’re afraid of them, too.

I don’t know what they’re planning. I don’t know what Paul said to them.

I wish I spoke Spanish.

When we couldn’t use torture—the laws of some lands forbade it altogether—we found other ways around it. Walking was a common one. You take hold of a person and march him up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down, hour after hour after day. You do it in shifts, around the clock, no sleep, no rest. It sounds gentler than the rack, but it works. Very few people withstood it. It wasn’t dramatic, but I imagined it with a sixteen-year-old’s intensity, still young enough to take everything personally, and when I thought about it, it was horrific. The body isn’t meant to do certain things. If you force it, it fights them. I found that out years ago. The pain isn’t the worst of it, the worst is the damage, the
wrongness
of what’s happening to you, and every drop and fiber of you screams, no, no, not this, until there’s nothing else in the world. Days walking,
days.
The flesh on my feet ached at the very thought.

Sarah looks white, bleached. Dark patches are growing around Carla’s eyes. They sleep when they can; they wake each other up. Always, Steven is awake. They tell him he’s talking in his sleep, they shout at him to stop it. When he’s awake, they talk to him pleasantly: Carla, skin peeling around her mouth, chats about the hospital as if she were on a coffee break, and when he sleeps, they reach through the bars and tug at him, shouting at him to stop talking.

After two days, he starts to mutter as soon as his eyes close.

The easiest, the best of all our tricks and tortures was the
tormentum insomniae.
We just kept the suspect awake until he confessed. Symptoms of sleep deprivation include: disorientation, nausea, memory loss, slurred speech, dizziness, hallucinations. That’s the medical list. It doesn’t mention the emotions, though you can list those, too: confusion, helplessness, panic. You can’t describe it, can’t imagine it if you haven’t seen it done, and even then, it’s hard to take in, how much cruelty there is in such a simple action. The truth is, after a terrifyingly short period of time, without sleep your very soul starts to disintegrate.

Witch-burners used it, and so did we. It was the peg on which the whole bloodbath turned. The clean, easy method that led innocent men and women to confess a pact with Satan. The Inquisitors discovered it, but we used it, too, often enough, because that’s what we were, back then, specialists, yes, but still witch-burners. We just found witches in one particular field. Even if they hadn’t killed anyone, back then, we pressed hard for evidence of commerce with the devil. I think, I’m certain, we really believed it might be so. We’d seen lunes, after all, and if the devil wanted to talk to a man, moon night was the time. Much easier than to believe he’d deal with a daylight, speaking, soft-skinned human being. We certainly refused to consider that maybe, amidst all the fetters and racks and textbooks of interrogation, he was whispering in our ears all along.

He must have been, though. It was never about luning. How else could it be, when five ordinary people—a little wealthier than most, a little better educated and better spoken, but normal children of God, born healthy and raised in civilization—can, by themselves, with no guidance or prompting, discover and use the mainstay of the Inquisition?

They let Steven catch a few minutes’ sleep. All of them sit with their backs against the wall, covering their eyes. Paul’s head hangs down between his knees, his legs are folded up, and he slumps like a dropped puppet. They don’t say anything to each other.

Steven turns his head, mumbles something. Paul looks up, lets a hand fall off his knee. He reaches out for Steven, and as he does, Albin says, “Wait.”

Paul looks at him, expressionless.

Albin’s voice is dry, hoarse. “See what he says.”

And Steven speaks.

At first, it isn’t words. He speaks in phrases, sentences. There’s pause and emphasis as though he was talking sense, but it’s just sounds, the syllables are right but they don’t link up; it’s like listening to a foreign language.

Paul blinks, his eyes close, his eyes open, and he reaches for Steven again. As he does, Steven turns a little and says, “Darryl, where’ve you been?”

Paul’s hand stops.

“Why won’t he help? He’s a doctor.”

“No, no, not a work-related dream after all this time,” Sarah whispers, hands to her eyes like a child.

“Parkinson should know I’m here.” He sounds like he’s arguing.

If it wasn’t for the creches I’d think he was faking, the calm, reasonable voice, hardly slurred, almost like he was talking awake, but I heard a lot of sleep-talk for eighteen years, and that’s how it sounds.

Then I think—
Parkinson?

Carla sits up. “Parkinson? Did you hear that? Wake him up, wake him up.”

“Who’s Parkinson?” Paul mumbles, reaching through the bars to shake Steven, and I think, Parkinson? The doctor at St. Veronica’s? The one who delivered Leo? The one I talked to—the one who was in the hospital the night—the night Seligmann…escaped.

Walking out of the hospital under the eye of security would have been next to impossible. I thought at the time they must have turned a blind eye because he was one of them and they didn’t care for DORLA. It wouldn’t have happened that way. DORLA or not, no security man worth his salt would let a charged criminal with a bitten wrist walk off. If someone in the hospital distracted them, if someone with authority created a window…

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Carla is smiling, her voice is almost friendly. She’s been keeping a man awake for almost four days. Whatever her motives, that smile is one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen.

Steven thrashes, kicks at Paul’s hand, yelling to be let alone.

“No, no, listen, I’m trying to help you. Look, I can’t get out of here yet, but I think I could get word to someone, only I didn’t know who to ask. But if you know Dr. Parkinson, well, I do too, a little, and he knows lots of people, I bet he could help if I got word to him.”

Parkinson was there. And he was visible, he talked to me, he got a good look at the team. Was he on the right floor for his department? I don’t remember, but maybe it was more than chance that I met him. It’s a big place, St. Veronica’s, a big place and a busy one. The odds of just bumping into someone are not high. If he heard someone from DORLA was coming, though, and made a point of being out in the major thoroughfares, keeping an eye on things, that would make it possible. A man brought in from DORLA with a bitten wrist wouldn’t be his department, but doctors and nurses and patients talk. It would be all around the hospital within minutes. Parkinson would have known Seligmann was there. I struggle to explain further, but that’s it, my brain blurs, I need sleep, I’ll never get though this without some more sleep.

“Just leave me alone,” Steven says, his voice drunk with fatigue.

“Don’t you know Parkinson? I’m sure I could get word to him,” Carla says, cracked lips stretched into a smile.

Steven stares at her, and he can’t make her out, he’s sick and confused and tired to death. “He—prolly know I’m—he wouldn’t—” He pushes at the air, as if shoving away a ghost, and collapses back into the straw.

“Won’t you let me help you?” Carla’s eyes are glazed like a doll’s.

All right, I say, it’s enough. I’ve got a name, it makes no sense he’d be involved but I’ve got a name, you can leave him alone. I say this in my head, desperate, I mean it so hard there’s a moment of surprise that she keeps talking to him before I remember she didn’t hear me.

I pull myself to my feet, swaying. I’ve had more sleep than they have, and even so, I’m tired enough to sit down and cry. I don’t, though. I press my hand to my throat, and walk out, up the narrow stairs, my hand still resting there. It’s a minute before I recognize the gesture: an old one, from when I first started to work here. There used to be a pendant there, a medal of St. Giles I was given at school. It got taken off and thrown away when I was twenty-two, but all of a sudden, I want it back.

I make it all the way up the stairs, into the containment department. Nobody’s much surprised when I go in and give orders.

Steven is separated from the others, put in a cell by himself, monitored. The rest of them go upstairs to A block, are given mattresses, blankets, pillows. I don’t wait around to watch it happen. I will not take the credit for that gift.