Crucified (35 page)

"Vatican Exorcist Strangled."

The headline stopped Wyatt in his tracks. He'd gone off in search of two cups of takeaway tea, while Liz was out talking with researchers at her TV network on a public phone, to prevent the police from tracing a call made from Wyatt's cell. She was asking her office to hunt down any references to U-boat torpedoes salvaged from the Firth of Forth near Fife. Wyatt bought every newspaper with an article on the killing of the priest and read them after delivering a tea to Liz at the phone box. The death raised intriguing questions.

"I've loosed the hounds," Liz said, joining him. "Hopefully, we'll have an answer today."

"Here. Read the papers."

"An
exorcist
from the Vatican?" Liz said on finishing.

"What does that mean?"

"It means someone with lofty church connections thinks the Devil is at large in Yorkshire. The priest was found in the graveyard of an old Benedictine abbey yesterday, but he'd been killed the night before. Luckily, I have several witnesses to verify I was in London that night. The police suspect me of the murders of Mick Balsdon and the Sussex couple, but if their killer also killed the exorcist, it had to be someone other than me."

"Lenny," said Liz. "Whoever he is."

"Come on. I've got to think this out, and I know just the place. As I recall, North Berwick is the site of possibly the most infamous satanic mass in history."

"Auld Kirk," said Liz. "My network did a documentary on it a few years back."

+ + + 

Auld Kirk Green and its medieval church used to dominate an island just offshore. Over the centuries, the island was linked to the mainland by a series of bridges, and now it's connected by a stone causeway that shelters the harbor of North Berwick. Violent storms had crumbled the main church to ruins, leaving only its porch still standing, and waves crashing in from the Firth of Forth had eaten away the graveyard, exposing coffins and bones.

From his car parked along the beach, the possessed priest watched Wyatt and Liz walk between a towering Celtic cross and the seabird center to Auld Kirk. Through a National Lottery grant, Auld Kirk had been restored as a tourist attraction by 2005, with information boards illustrating its history from the seventh century on. Along with Roman coins, a Viking comb, and the skeleton of an old murder victim, archeologists had uncovered signs of a pagan temple beneath the church.

Lacking the bug he'd left on their car, Satan couldn't eaves-drop on what the two were saying.

He could, however, relive the night when two hundred war-locks and witches had conjured him up in Auld Kirk.

Halloween, 1590 .. .

+ + + 

St. Andrew's Auld Kirk.

The tale began, as you'd expect, with the namesake of this church. Andrew—like his brother, Peter—was a fisherman on the Sea of Galilee when he met Jesus and became his first disciple. Known as the Protocletus, or the First Called, Andrew urged Jesus to summon Peter as a disciple as well. After Christ was crucified, Andrew preached the gospel in Greece. He infu-riated the Roman governor by converting his wife and his brother to Christianity. Andrew was crucified upside down so he could gaze at heaven, where he would meet his Lord.

Legend says a monk named St. Rule was told by an angel to carry St. Andrew's remains to the "ends of the earth" for safekeeping. In those days, Scotland was about as far away as you could go, so the monk took a tooth, an arm bone, a kneecap, and some fingers from the saint's grave and sailed west. Shipwrecked off the coast of Fife, St. Rule brought his precious cargo ashore just north of the Firth of Forth, and then he built a church where the town of St. Andrews is today as a shrine for the relics.

In time, St. Andrew was embraced as the patron saint of Scotland. The X-shaped cross—or saltire—on which he was crucified became Scotland's flag. Christian pilgrims from Lindisfarne and communities to the south flocked north to worship St. Andrew's relics, but they were blocked by the Firth of Forth. So in the Middle Ages, a ferry began running from North Berwick to Fife, and in 1177, this Auld Kirk was dedicated so pilgrims could pray for a crossing safe from the storms of the North Sea.

"Ten thousand pilgrims a year," Wyatt read from the information board. "That's quite the tourist trade."

"Multiply that by the more than five hundred years of the ferry run, from the twelfth century to the seventeenth," added Liz, "and wouldn't I love to have a monopoly on these things." She showed him a picture of clay molds used for making pilgrims' badges in the shape of St. Andrew crucified on his cross.

Wyatt pointed north across the waterway. "The relics of St. Andrew were over there. The Judas relics aboard the sub vanished here." His finger dropped to the waves of the Firth.

"Whatever the Judas relics are, they have meaning for
both
groups that held masses in Auld Kirk: Christians and satanists. Upside-down crosses at the murder scenes—that's satanism. Upside-down
crucifixes
indicate a satanist with a Catholic fixation. The appearance of an exorcist from the Vatican means deep church connections. Crucifixion scars suggest a person living out Christ's Passion. Put those pieces together and what do you get?"

"A priest who believes he's possessed," said Liz.

"Whatever the Judas relics are, he thinks they're worth killing possible clue holders and even the exorcist sent to drive out his demons."

"What's worth that?"

"Relics so holy that Rommel believed they'd have the earthshaking impact of an atomic blast."

"They must be from Jesus," said Liz.

+ + + 

A cow produced no milk. That was the Devil's doing. A woman couldn't bear children. An old crone used her evil eye.

Witchcraft was rife in Scotland when Francis Stewart, the Earl of Bothwell and pretender to the throne, summoned the witches of East Lothian to Auld Kirk to meet the Devil. By foot and by boat, they swarmed to North Berwick, and there, under the orange moon of Halloween, they conjured up . . .

Me,
thought the Legionary.

As the wind groaned and the surf crashed and chaos claimed their souls, the women writhed wildly among the headstones of the graveyard, plucking bones from coffins that had resurfaced. They wrapped themselves in winding sheets stolen from the corpses and carried the ingredients for their "magical cookery" into the church.

Inside, the witches' Sabbath was bubbling full boil. King James VI was sailing home from Denmark with his new wife, and the earl howled for this gathering to demolish his rival with a spell. Ringed by black candles, the Devil's disciples handed a black cat back and forth across the blazing hearth. As the witches molded images of the king out of wax, Agnes Sampson tied hand and foot joints from the corpses to the paws of the cat.

Satan bared his backside on the Auld Kirk pulpit, and his disciples took part in a black Mass by kissing it in turn.

Then they carried the black cat to the edge of the Firth of Forth and hurled it into the sea to brew up a drowning storm.

It almost worked.

The king's boat nearly capsized.

The coven came to light when one witch's master tortured her to see if she had dark healing powers. Crushing her fingers with thumbscrews and tightening a cord around her skull, he searched her body for the witch's tit and found it on her neck. She confessed to having attended the gathering on Auld Kirk Green, then told him of the spell brewed up against the king. Agnes Sampson, she revealed, was "the eldest witch of all."

Satan reveled in that.

Sampson was tortured by the king himself at Holyroodhouse, his palace. She was fastened to the wall of her cell with a witch's bridle, and a sharpened crucifix was forced into her mouth.

The prongs pressed against her tongue and the inside flesh of her cheeks. Through that mouth, Satan boasted of flying in to watch the king deflower his bride on their wedding night.

The North Berwick witch trials ran for several years. Satan smiled as hysteria spread like the Black Death. As the witch hunt swept through Britain, Agnes Sampson was half strangled and burned alive, and the king wrote a book on the threat,
Daemonolgie.

Satan could hear the fifteen hundred Scottish witches shrieking in the flames, but it angered him not that his disciples perished this way.

Their souls weren't trophies in his collection.

They were Protestants.

+ + +
 

"Sindrie of the witches confessed they had sindrie times companie with the devill at the kirk of Northberwick, where he appeared to them in the likeness of a man with a redde cappe, and a rumpe at his taill," the two read on Auld Kirk Green.

'"Double, double toil and trouble, / Fire burn, and caldron bubble.'"

"Oh no," Liz said, shoulders slumping. "He's going to recite all of Shakespeare next."

"Do you think the Three Witches in
Macbeth
were inspired by the North Berwick witch trials? Shakespeare's play was first staged shortly after the Auld Kirk mass."

"It must have been quite a getup that allowed the Earl of Bothwell to pass as Satan and bare his rump to the witches from the pulpit."

"Talk about kissing ass."

'"An tae hell they a' hae gaen,'" echoed Liz.

"Speaking of disguises, let's get a room in Edinburgh so I can shed mine."

+ + +

As he followed the car to Edinburgh, the Legionary overheard his prey discussing the torpedo.

On the seat beside him, a witch's bridle rattled against the Bronze Mice Bowl.

As for Wyatt Rook, he'd die like St. Erasmus.

"To none but those who have themselves suffered the thing in the body," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, "can the gloom and depression of our Edinburgh winter be brought home." It wasn't winter yet, but Wyatt absorbed the dark mood of a city weighed down by ominous clouds that threatened to flush it away. From the window of their hotel on Princes Street, he gazed across the sunken gardens dividing New Town from Old Town, with its Royal Mile. Of all the cities in the world, Edinburgh held the tightest grip on his imagination. Above the craggy, soot-blackened mound of Castle Rock, the lit-up walls and battlements of Edinburgh Castle hovered over his view.

The oldest part of the fortress was little St. Margaret's Chapel, honoring the queen who brought the Roman Catholic faith to Scotland in 1069. There, also, was the room where Mary, Queen of Scots gave birth to the king who later produced the King James version of the Bible and burned the Auld Kirk witches on the castle's esplanade. Today, that spot is marked by the Witches' Well, a cast-iron fountain embossed with a serpent that represents the evil spawned by the Devil.

Connections?

Beyond the castle, Wyatt knew, was the Devil's work.

The gallows were fed flesh in the Grassmarket, near West Port, the hunting grounds of Burke and Hare. Those Edinburgh body snatchers had dispatched seventeen victims—most killed by smothering, spawning the verb "to burke"—to supply Dr. Robert Knox, a teacher of anatomy, with cadavers for dissection. After reading Stevenson's "The Body Snatcher" when he was a boy, Wyatt imagined the "resurrectionists" stalking him through foggy Auld Reekie—Old Smoky—a nickname for Old Town. The ghouls of Edinburgh added yet another verse to his ever-expanding collection of memorized ditties: 

Up the close and down the stair,

In the house with Burke and Hare.

Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief,
 

Knox, the boy who buys the beef.

Back there, too, was Darwin, learning anatomy so he could rock the faith to its soul with his theory of evolution. Just off the Royal Mile, which ran from the castle down to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, was Brodie's Close, the workshop of the infamous Deacon William Brodie, respected man of business by day, thief and burglar by night. The cabinetmaker gambled, kept mistresses, and fed five illegitimate kids on his ill-gotten gains, until he was hanged on a gallows he had designed.

A Brodie cabinet furnished Stevenson's home. Intoxicated by ergotine, a hallucinogenic drug he took to control bleeding in his lungs from tuberculosis, the writer explored the dichotomy between Brodie's respectable fa£ade and his inner Darwinian nature in
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
In the story, the duality of man's nature leads to regressive animality.

When
Jekyll and Hyde
played the London stage through Jack the Ripper's autumn of terror, uptight Christians fainted in the theater.

Jekyll is possessed, and Hyde wins.

Connections?

Outbreaks of ergotism most likely triggered the Salem witch trials of 1692.

Holyroodhouse, backed by the brooding bluffs of Arthur's Seat, was a murder scene. Legend says King David I went hunting on a holy day and was attacked by a stag. Grabbing hold of the antlers to keep from getting gored, the king made the beast vanish. Left in his hand was a holy rood—a holy cross. Holyrood Abbey, built on the spot where that miracle occurred, was for centuries the burial site of Scottish kings. In the palace beside it, Holyroodhouse, a gang of nobles led by Lord Darnley, the husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, set upon David Rizzio, the secretary to the queen, and stabbed him fifty-six times. Mary was six months pregnant with James, and Darnley believed the pregnancy was the result of a love affair with Rizzio. The queen was forced to watch the murder by the Earl of Ruthven, who warned he'd hack her "into collops" if she shied away.