The Night Church Part 9

There was a whump whump and a roar. Then Jerry Cochran came into full view, tall, grim, his eyes crazy, his face so rigid it might be made of stone. In his hand was a black blowtorch gus.h.i.+ng fire. Alex turned and twisted on the rocking bed-stead. His mind swarmed with terrors. In the deep of the night when he was all alone he had sweated out the possibility of just this martyrdom, death by fire. and a roar. Then Jerry Cochran came into full view, tall, grim, his eyes crazy, his face so rigid it might be made of stone. In his hand was a black blowtorch gus.h.i.+ng fire. Alex turned and twisted on the rocking bed-stead. His mind swarmed with terrors. In the deep of the night when he was all alone he had sweated out the possibility of just this martyrdom, death by fire.

"If you answer my questions, I will first garrote you," Jerry Cochran said softly.

Alex wept openly. He already knew what he would do, he had thought all this out very carefully.

Inquisitors must understand themselves well enough to know what they will do under torture. "I'm sorry, Jerry," he said between sobs. Then he fixed his mind on the Jesus prayer, his only weapon against the agony of the flames: "Jesus, thou art with me, Jesus, thou art with me, Jesuss-oh! Oh, G.o.d! AAAHHH!"

Jerry had held the flame against Alex's chest. There was a stink of burnt hair. "You're very sensitive, Alex. I hardly touched you."

Alex felt his bladder let go. But they had prepared for that. He could feel that a towel was stuffed between his legs. "Jesus, thou art with me, Jesus, thou art with-"

The flames sent tidal waves of razor-sharp agony up his thighs as Jerry played the flame along his legs.

Skin popped and crackled. Oily smoke rose.

"We know your drinking companion is a reporter, Alex. What is his name?"

"Jesus, thou art with me, Jesus, thou art with me." Alex stopped in confusion when the next application didn't come. To his utter horror he felt Jerry pulling away the towel that had protected him.

"The Judists are celibate, I think," he said. "Well, I don't suppose it matters one way or the other, does it, my friend? No more worries about keeping your vow."

When he felt the fire this time it was as if his insides were being torn out, as if all the flaming stars of heaven had fallen on him. Wild with torment he shrieked, he bellowed until his throat cracked, he jerked and twisted on the iron bedstead.

n.o.body could hear him, not out here on one of the Night Church's vast country estates.

"Name him!"

"Qui-i-st! QUIST! QUIST!!"

"Ah."

"Stop! Jerry, I told you! Stop! Stop!"

With lazy strokes, Jerry moved the tongue of flame up and down Alex's legs from his crotch to the searing, crackling bottoms of his feet. "QUIST! QUIST! OH, G.o.d!"

Jerry gazed at him with the hooded eyes of great pa.s.sion. His face was flushed. "Now we'll get started on your belly, OK, Alex?" He smiled a little. "Maybe if you tried the Jesus prayer some more it would help.Or if you told me the names of the other sc.u.m in your cell!"

"I told you, QUIST!"

"He was a recent contact. A reporter indeed. What an amateurish attempt to harm us-attracting the attention of a reporter. I want to know the other names, Alex, all of them!"

To give up his cell was the ultimate failure of an Inquisitor. Desperate, knowing his own weakness, Alex tried to knock himself senseless by banging his head against the iron bar beneath it. But Jerry had thought of that. A leather collar restrained his neck. "Look, Alex, you're suffering so much I'll offer you another deal. I'm afraid you've been too difficult to deserve garroting, but you give me the names and I'll do your face with the torch. It'll be over very quickly."

"Jesus, thou art with me, Jesus, thou art with me, Jesus-"

When the flames came this time they pierced his belly and made his stomach boil. His bowels exploded inside him, mixing their torment with the searing of the flesh. Hot steam rushed up his throat and scorched his mouth and nose.

Jerry stopped. "You may be wondering why all this pain doesn't just knock you out. We loaded you up with amphetamines, Brother Alex. You cannot escape into unconsciousness."

That did it. He had been hoping to faint, even to go into a coma from the pain and the damage. This was just too much. Even in his worst imaginings he had never dreamed torture would be this bad. It was almost incredible that the human body could endure such agony. Sick at heart, facing his own miserable failure, Alex listed the names of the people in his cell. "G.o.d forgive me. Brother Julius Timothy is one, Brother George Yates the other."

"That's all? Why such a small cell?"

"Holy Spirit was a backwater a.s.signment."

Jerry nodded. "So we thought. That's why we use it so much."

"You're very clever."

"I know we are, Alex."

There was a moment of silence between them. Alex sought the eyes of his torturer. There was contact between the two men then, the anguished victim and his tormentor. In Jerry Cochran's eyes Alex saw so many things: hate, enjoyment, self-loathing, and deep down in the sparks and the shadows, a scared little boy who had been lost for a long time.

"G.o.d forgives you, my son, and I forgive you too."

Jerry laughed. As sad a sound as Alex had ever heard. "I ought to give you the full treatment for that."

He turned up the blowtorch until it bellowed out a great gust of flame.

For a moment he hesitated as if undecided. He pointed the torch at Alex's chest. "Jesus, thou art with me, Jesus-"

But something had moved that hard man, and he suddenly changed the direction of the flame. For an instant Alex saw fire, then he felt a red-hot poker go down his throat, then he was all in cool. He fell away into timeless blessedness.

Jerry directed the work crew to complete the cremation and bag the body. Then they returned to Queens and entered Alex's apartment with the remains. They replaced them in Alex's bed, which they then set afire.

Twenty minutes later the fire department arrived. Ten minutes more and steam was pouring out the window of Alex Parker's apartment. Mike arrived on the scene with Terry Quist clinging to him like a baby.

When he saw the charred, wet remains of Alex Parker being carried out of the building Terry grabbed fistfuls of his own hair.

The cause of death was listed as burns and asphyxiation. The agency was a mattress fire. The means of ignition was theorized to have been a cigarette.

Officially, the martyr was listed as having died because he smoked in bed.

Terry Quist left the scene a haunted, stricken man.

Mike Banion watched him go. And he wondered.

Chapter Six.

THE PERMANENT GLOOM of Rayne Street surrounded Jona-than the moment he turned from busy MacDougal. Rayne was a narrow cobbled lane between MacDougal and Sul-livan, like Gay Street and Aldorf Mews one of Greenwich Village's hidden streets. Here NYU had placed its data storage facilities in the enormous black hulk of the house that dominated the short block. In the bas.e.m.e.nt they had found room for Jonathan's lab. He hated the place, hated its dampness, its inconvenient distance from campus, and above all, the dark gargoyled ugliness of the building itself. The sun never shone on Rayne Street, not even at high noon. It was one of the few New York streets still cobbled with the round stones that had seen carriages and wagons and had resounded to the clatter of hoofs. Jonathan's foot-falls were the only sound that disturbed it now. He looked up at the front of the house. At least the place was well kept. A small bra.s.s plaque on the door announced NEW YORK UNI-VERSITY DIGITAL DATA STORAGE FACILITY.

Under the stoopwas another door, this time with a plastic sign: PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY DEPT. LAB B.

Jonathan was expecting the lock to be stiff". He hadn't used it in three weeks, but it turned easily. The iron door opened without a squeak.

The hallway beyond was pitch black, Jonathan fumbled for the switch, found it, and turned it on.

Nothing happened.

He cursed. Here he was in the middle of a sunny morning and he was going to have to feel his way down a dark hallway because an indifferent university administration had put his lab in this hole.

The door swung closed behind him. He flipped the light switch a few more times, uselessly, then began moving along the hall, feeling for the door to the lab. Fortunately it was the only one in this wall. It led to what had once been the wine cellars and bas.e.m.e.nt storerooms of the old building.

Jonathan became aware of a curious trick of sound in the enclosed hallway. His own breathing sounded like it was coming from the darkness beside him. The effect was so realistic that he waved his arms out into the middle of the hallway. Nothing there, of course.

He began to search the wall more urgently, sweeping his hand up and down, feeling for the door jamb.

He really wanted to have some light.

Perhaps it was another trick of sound, but he heard distinct scuttlings. Rats. Disgusting. He clapped, he shouted "Hey!"

Then he heard something that silenced him. He became very still, listening. There were human footsteps coming down the stairs at the far end of the hall.

Jonathan shrank back. This was a closed facility. n.o.body worked upstairs. His first thought was that some drifter had gotten in here.

A beam of intense white light dazzled him. He s.h.i.+elded his eyes with his forearm. Fearful thoughts pa.s.sed through his mind, of death at the hands of a maniac.

"Who are you?" The voice was old and harsh. It did not sound completely sane.

"Banion. This is my lab."

"You can't come in here. The facility is closed."

Now it made sense. He was confronting a watchman. "Look, this is my lab. I'm not a student, I'm a professor. So please get that flashlight out of my eyes and s.h.i.+ne it on the door so I can see the keyhole."

The beam did not waver. Instead it came closer, until it was blazing in Jonathan's face. "Go home, young man. You mustn't come here." The voice was so old, and the tone like ice.

Jonathan knew when he was being threatened. And it infuriated him. With a single, quick motion he reached up and s.n.a.t.c.hed the flashlight from the old man's hand. There was an instant of surprisingly powerful resistance, then the old man sighed and quite intentionally let go of the light. As he did Jonathan came into contact with his hand. It was a shocking sensation. Jonathan had never felt skin so hard and cold. More like stone than skin. He imagined that a mum-my's hand might feel like that. A dry claw.

"You're mad to come here! You're putting yourself in great danger!"

Jonathan turned the light around, catching just a glimpse of the man before he turned his back. What he saw made him gasp: bright green eyes set in a labyrinth of wrinkles, a tiny slit of a mouth open in an infuriated snarl.

Then the old man was gone, his feet rat-tatting up the stairs. A door slammed.

Good riddance. The university had a nerve hiring senile old fools like that to guard the facilities. Budget, probably.

Jonathan selected the right key from his chain. Getting in was easy now that he had the use of the flashlight.

He entered his lab, making a mental note to call the university's maintenance department and complain to them about their watchman. Obviously unbalanced, not to men-tion being far too old for the job.

Jonathan had come to his lab in the quiet of a summer morning to try and discover once and for all if he had done that terrible thing to Patricia. He couldn't bear to name it. He simply could not accept the idea that her hurt and his dream were a coincidence, not even with the vindication of the police polygraph. He needed his own instruments to tell him if there was some hidden corruption in his soul.

Was he an unconscious psychopath?

He imagined the demon's loom clicking eagerly as strand by strand it pulled his life apart. He had come to think of Satan as a sort of neurological shadow, a speck of dark potential in the electrochemical bath that floats the soul. He could no longer be sure that the shadow was not an actual, outside force. Evil for its own sake seemed increasingly to him to be a real power in the world.

Certainly when it was abroad, when the owls and jackals announced Lilith wandering, those she caressed could not resist her beauty-nor fight her talons.

He moved among the covered instruments. During the term he had been making the first really detailed map of microvoltages in the human brain. His work was highly technical, but beneath all the statistics were the mystery and romance of pure science: he and others like him were cracking the code of the mind.

The room was full of galvanic sensors of various kinds, but mostly there were computers: Apples and small IBMs to handle the statistical work, terminals connected to the big Cray 2000 at MIT that was his main tool. He used the Cray to do the sensitive high-speed signal recognition that was needed to separate the various brain waves into their hundreds of component parts and a.n.a.lyze each in isolation from the others. This gave him a virtual electronic window on the mind, vastly more sensitive than any that had been devel-oped before.

There were also racks of Petri dishes, used for culturing microorganisms, lined up against one wall. He stopped. He ran his fingers along the edge of one of the racks. Strange. He didn't remember authorizing anybody to install such equipment here.

In the middle of the wall, what had been a closet door was now marked in block letters: VECTORSTORAGE. It was locked.

He didn't do work on bacteria. He didn't even know how. As he looked around him he could see evidence of another's recent presence. There was a lab chart with annotations dated only yesterday. On the floor was the cover of a coffee container. Somebody had been working here within the past twenty-four hours.

The university must have allocated unused s.p.a.ce to an-other project. Odd. Was it like NYU to do something like that and not bother to tell him? He couldn't seem to remem-ber.

He stood in the center of the dim, warm room, wondering. That persistent, distant clicking was the sound of footsteps on the sidewalk above this end of the bas.e.m.e.nt. Demon's loom. His was a gothic soul.

The clicking died away. Maybe they had had told him about this biology equipment. Not remembering something like this fitted with a theory of amnesia. If he didn't remember somebody installing a bacterial experiment in here maybe he didn't remember other things either. told him about this biology equipment. Not remembering something like this fitted with a theory of amnesia. If he didn't remember somebody installing a bacterial experiment in here maybe he didn't remember other things either.

Somehow he must uncover enough of the mechanism of his mind to determine the truth.

He had come to realize that horror and disgust were not his only reactions to the rape. His body vibrated eagerly at the thought of it. It was awful, repulsive. And yet, when he remembered her lying there in that hospital there came over him a sneering, hateful contempt that was at odds with everything he believed and loved about himself.

Off in the corners of his mind there were also violent bits of memory that seemed to go beyond the rape-a screaming face, a closing coffin, thuds and howls . . . long marble staircases, lines of chanting nuns, the garrote and the strap-pado and the rack. . . .

Was it another life, some horrendous past? Unlike Patricia he did not discount reincarnation just because it was against Catholic doctrine. Had he at some time in the past been a victim of the Inquisition, suffered in the dungeon of some elegant Spanish palace?

No, that wasn't quite right.

"Inquisitor." He whispered the word as he might the name of a present danger. "Inquisitor." Mother had uttered the word early this morning, then waved away his question about it.

Inquisitor. His hands were shaking, his legs seemed about to give way. The old man's lunatic warning sounded again in his mind. He went to the door, flipped on all the fluorescent lights, then locked it securely to the outside.

He remembered.

A priest, walking smartly across an airport lobby, his hair neatly parted on the right, his well-fed face mixing self-a.s.surance and contentment, his shoes clicking on the floor.

Then the face turns, sees Jonathan, changes. Hate re-places contentment and the face becomes terrible, relent-less, and cruel. But this time the Inquisition is not success-ful. A tall young man, a man Jonathan admires, grabs the priest and forces him into a car.

Next memory: the priest is naked, chained to the wall of a cellar. Questions are coming, one after another: Who is your Inquisitor-General? How did you find us? Who is your Inquisitor-General? How did you find us? On and on, while the tall man removes strips of skin from the naked priest's body. On and on, while the tall man removes strips of skin from the naked priest's body.

Jonathan is hiding in a corner, behind some shelves full of empty Petri dishes.

From the priest's mouth a ceaseless prayer: Jesus, thou art with me, Jesus, thou art with me, Jesus, Jesus, thou art with me, Jesus, thou art with me, Jesus, thou art with me. thou art with me.

Help the priest! I side with the priest!