Blind Instinct

TWENTY-ONE

Richard Sharpe had waited for Copperwaite just down from St. Albans, scanning for any acUvity in and around the church as he did so, but the place appeared at this late afternoon hour, silent, abandoned even. No one in or out.

With Stuart Copperwaite finally joining Sharpe, they together started for the huge stone stairs and the oaken doors. Richard, familiar with the church corridors, went directly for Luc Sante's office. Not even the secretary was present. He called out several Umes for Luc Sante by name, gaining no response.

He next tried Strand. After finding a speaker to the PA system that fed into the altar and main congregational room, he called again for Luc Sante and Strand. They waited to see if this had any effect, but no one responded. Nothing moved in the enormous church.

Richard wondered about Luc Sante's patients, but then it was late. He wondered about the Gloucester twins, and as he did so, he studied the paindng of the Gloucester parish, looking

closely at it for the first dme and seeing the artist's name. It read in spiking letters: M.S.

“Could it have been painted by Martin Strand?” he wondered aloud, pointing to the painting.

“Strand, the other minister?” asked Copperwaite. “It's just possible he wants more from Luc Sante than St. Albans.”

“Where to from here?”

“Get an army in here to search through the catacombs below. There may be something afoot here, and if so, it may be in the bowels of this place.”

“But have we the right to defile the-”

“We have cause to fear for lives here, Stuart. That's enough reason alone. We're acdng under suspicion someone may be in danger of life and limb. Now do it.”

Jessica inched forward and found a small room with a Roman arch, light filtering through from ahead of this room. She found a series of such small rooms, before she came upon a wide open vault from which the firelight originated. The source of the light, torches in the walls, not unlike unused ones she'd seen in St. Albans' corridors.

No longer did the walls close in; rather, they expanded, and here a stagnant pool of water, part of a canal, similar to the one she'd seen in the company of Sharpe and Tatham the day before, lay like a fat, green, sleeping boa constrictor. Here she stood, circling, taking it all in when her eyes fell on the altar no doubt purchased with St. Albans' funds by Martin Strand, just as Father Luc Sante had said. She stood back of and behind a huge oaken cross, its front facing out to the cavern beyond. Then her eyes went beyond the wide beams of the cross to the huge, thick oaken altar, until a dull moan brought her eyes straight up to the cross. She saw first the feet, and as she inched closer, the length of the dying man's legs.

She gasped, standing now before the ancient cross-finally found-the killing ground of the Crucifier. To her astonishment, she saw someone still living, and not Jesus' carved image, squirming on the cross. He was nude and dying of his wounds, blood trickling down.

From her vantage point, below and behind the huge cross, she saw a scaffolding in nearby shadow, a scaffolding used to take the victim up to the cross. Shadow played across the writhing figure on the cross, deep shadows thrown up by the fire burning in thirteen torches and one small fire at the altar where oil and incense burned; beside the incense fire lay the hardware for the branding of the tongue. Jessica moved toward this highly important piece of physical evidence when droplets of blood from the person on the cross stained her blue suit jacket purple. Realizing this, she looked up to see the nude man's form dangling there, chin on chest, struggling to breathe in the semidarkness.

Jessica wanted to call out to him, tell him to hang on, but then that sounded foolish in this context, and she feared being found out. She dared not shout, wondering where Strand might be, if he were watching her from one of the deep shadows across the cavernous hall.

Jessica haltingly raised her flashlight to the dying victim left here on the cross, her fear rising to a crescendo she had never known before. Her flash shakily played now over the features of the dying man on the cross, and she realized almost instantly that the victim returned a familiar image, that of a blond Christ with a familiar face: the near dead man, his eyes gaping back at her before rolling back in his head, was Father Martin Christian Strand.

“Oh, Jesus! Luc Sante!” she moaned just before something hard and flinty struck her in the back of the head, sending her into darkness.

“So now what?” Copperwaite had asked Sharpe after the cathedral was torn apart in an effort to locate Jessica, Luc Sante, Strand, anyone, but Sharpe's first instinct had been right, the place had been deserted.

It was then that Sharpe said, “Back to the clapper bridge.”

“Clapper bridge?”

“Yes, I'll inform you along the way. Let's go!” That had been fifteen minutes earlier. The twosome now stood at the lip of the tunnel which Sharpe, Jessica, and Tatham had scoured the day before, finding nothing. By now, Sharpe had explained to Copperwaite what this place was and how they had come to find it.

“But if you've already searched it and found nothing, Richard,” moaned Copperwaite, “why the deuce are we searching it again?”

“I know no other way to go than to attempt the other corridor, the one Tatham said would only lead us away from St. Albans, and perhaps it does lead away from St. Albans as indicated on the map, but then, we found no underground debauchery in the dungeons there, so perhaps the killer's lair has no direct connection with St. Albans, at least not the place.”

“Did the RIBA guy tell you where the other tunnel led?”

'Toward Oxford Street and the tourist area.”

“Old Crown's End bazaar? Good, I have to find a gift for my nephew anyway. So let's push on through this muck,” replied Copperwaite, frowning at the horror and sludge before him. “Smells bloody awful.”

Sharpe pushed through the grate and into the pipe that led to the tunnel, the water higher today but no less filthy and stagnant for it.

Copperwaite complained as he sloshed through in his good shoes, Sharpe's mendon of three sets of Wellington boots in the back of his car not easing his suffering. “I just bought these shoes. Italian leathers.”

“Best kind. They'll clean right up.”

“But they'll retain the stench.”

Sharpe agreed as he trudged ahead of his partner, saying, “Aye, that's-struth, all right.”

“Cost me a week's pay on the black market.”

“Quit your complaining, Coppers. I'll buy you a new pair, and you can resell these to the marketman.”

“I just don't want this all to be for naught. And I'm worried about Dr. Coran.”

“As am I… as am I…”

“She is the way!” declared Father Jerrard Luc Sante, pointing at the unconscious form of Jessica Coran where she lay on the cold, coal-blackened floor of the cavem. “I brought her here because I firmly believe that we must begin with another, someone not of our community, someone yet unborn and uninitiated, you see, a child whom Christ will take as his receptacle to rise from the death throes of an unborn innocent.”

“You speak of her as if she were an unborn child.”

“She is, in our ways, she is unborn.”

“When did you decide this?”

“We've talked about it, that our selections must be younger, stronger in mind and spirit and body,” he replied to his congregation's dissenters. There were always dissenters, he reminded himself now, doing his level best to remain calm and in control. He pointed at Martin Strand, saying, “I gave you my spiritual son for this purpose, convinced him of the wisdom of going before God in the ultimate sacrifice and there he stands. Wilt not you look on your Father Strand?”

Through the haze of unconsciousness, Jessica picked up bits and pieces of the conversation going on around her.

“Strand is younger than this woman.”

“In body only. In spirit and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus, Strand is the older of the two. I bring you a person who has fought evil her endre life. Who better for Christ to blow His eternal and blessed breath into, should He fail to use Martin's form?”

Jessica half-heard the voices as they bounced about the walls of the catacomb, and she heard the work of men who, like electrical pole linemen, worked to get Father Strand down from the cross. Strand was long dead now.

Someplace in her mind, her brain began to regroup and fashion some connections in its attempt to compute how Father Strand could already be dead if he had, in fact, been only steps ahead of her coming down into this hell. The timetable felt completely off. When she and Father Luc Sante had seen Strand get into a cab outside St. Albans, she realized now that what she had seen hadn't actually been Strand. She'd taken Father Luc Sante's word that it had been Strand who dropped into the cab for the bazaar. And at the bazaar, later, Luc Sante had pointed out Strand, but again, while Jessica had followed the back of a man's head and a pair of wide shoulders, she had not once gotten a good look at Strand. It followed that it had been one of Luc Sante's disciples disguising himself as Strand to lure her here in a carefully contrived plot to isolate her.

Jessica fought the dark interior of her mind where a part of her wished to remain in hiding, but someone saw her body stir and her eyes blink, and this woman screeched a loud, “She's waking up!” Jessica's single eye opened, focusing on one of the Houghton twins of Gloucester.

Jessica saw the little hole of the business end of her own Browning automatic, stripped from her ankle holster, pointed directly at her eyes. Luc Sante snatched away the gun from the Houghton sister who held it on Jessica, frightening the woman off by pointing it at her. Luc Sante also held Jessica's. 38 revolver.

“Dear Jessica,” began Luc Sante, “it will now be your pleasure to have a role in Christ's Second Coming.”

“How could you be a part to these atrocious murders, Father? You!”

“Murder? No. It was never about murder, dear. This isn't one of your sordid, filthy serial killer cases, Dr. Coran. Look there, at Strand there”-he pointed to where others prayed over the young man's corpse-”he begged me to please accept him next, and-”

“Accept him? Listen to yourself, Luc Sante. You're playing God.”

“He pleaded, begged me to take him next. As for playing God, the crucifixions always remained throughout a choice my followers willingly made, and the last time I looked, freedom of religion and freedom of choice remains legal.” He indicated his flock of dwindling followers, perhaps forty, among them a number of familiar faces: the Houghton twins; Mrs. Eeadna, the secretary; Luc Sante's patients whom she'd seen coming and going; and in shadow, there stood Tatham from the RIBA, the man she and Sharpe had trusted. She half expected to see Copperwaite and possibly Sharpe step from the shadows to complete the nightmare.

“You,” she said to Tatham whose stem glare replied in silent menace.

“Don't be so hard on Tatham. He was to be next until you came this way, Jessica.”

“Me? I'm not here of my free will.”

“Ahhh, but you are. You willingly chased what you perceived to be evil to this place, and in so doing, you have instead found benevolence and a love of mankind, a cabal bent on lifting our species to the next and greatest plane, the level of pure love, pure giving, pure religious thought- Jung's overmind.”

“Put her on the cross,” said Tatham, breaking his silence. “Else, the world finds out about us and we are all stopped in our efforts, Father.”

Luc Sante solemnly nodded and simply said, 'Take her.”

Jessica put up a struggle, bloodying Tatham's nose, tearing loose, making a run for the direction in which she'd come, but she was roughly brought down when the others tackled her and dragged her back to the altar.

“I am sorry that you are fighting this so, dear Jessica,” said Father Luc Sante. “In a manner of speaking, your whole life has led to this moment, and you should actually relish it, delight in it, for you die here for the greater glory of Jesus Christ and our Lord, and for the greater glory of all mankind, my dear.”

Her lip trembling, Jessica could only pierce the old man with her sudden hatred and contempt for him. “All you stood for, all that nonsense you spouted about creating a psychology of evil, about combadng evil at the source, and who is the greater evil than you, Luc Sante? You have become the thing you despise most.”

“Then perhaps we are two of a kind. Perhaps I will join you after, and in the afterworld, we will continue this debate. But for now…” He jerked his head to one side, indicating that the others now could take her to the cross. 'Tie her and prepare the drug and prepare her for the stakes,” he ordered.

“What about the tongue branding?” asked one of the Houghton sisters, her question sounding like a curse.

“They all had their tongues branded to send them safely over,” agreed the other sister, sounding balmy in the head.

“This one don't belong… isn't a believer!” chided Tatham. “She shouldn't be branded. We're needing to rid ourselves of her, and that's all.”

“But isn't that…”

“Murder!” shouted Jessica.

“Inject her, now!” ordered Luc Sante, tired of the bandying about, not wishing to lose control of his meager following, nearly a sixth of whom had already gone over, willingly, if he could be believed. Jessica had seen the stark evidence of how powerful the cult mentality could be on her cutting room slab, and she recalled the Hale-Bhopp comet aftermath in America some years before.

Jessica saw the slight quiver of glee going through Tatham's body as he plunged home the drug that would sedate her. She tried to pull away, to physically fight them, but there were too many hands holding her, and so she fought mentally to stay sharp. She cursed herself for having come full steam ahead, and for having held so tenaciously to her faith in Luc Sante.

The drug's effect worked on her now, making her drowsy, weak and uncaring, disinterested in her own execution, but she fought, shouting at them, shouting, “This is not a willing crucifixion! This is an execution! Murder! An execu… exe… cue… cue… don.”

And Jessica's system shut down, and somewhere deep in the recesses of her unconscious mind, she knew that she would wake up dying.

Luc Sante brought her around gently, his voice breaking through the pillow clouds of her deep slumber. A throbbing pain pulsed at the back of her head, and she felt a dampness there where blood had soaked her hair. She 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.

It was how Martin Strand and all those who preceded him on the cross had lost their lives.

It all made perfectly logical, sound religious sense to everyone in the room-all Father Luc Sante's converts to this extreme devotion. It was, after all, a cult built on the faith they could hasten Christ's return in the new millennium. At the urging of his followers, Luc Sante stopped the crucifixion process long enough for the branding. “Heat the iron and get the oil,” he told his followers, who now went about doing so.

Jessica wondered now what she had gotten herself into: She was about to have her tongue branded, and to become the next crucifixion victim.