The Shroud Codex (14 page)

The paramedic riding in the back with them tightened the straps on the stretcher to hold the priest down. There was nothing in Bartholomew’s medical history to suggest he was an epileptic, but Castle almost instinctively checked to make sure the priest was not swallowing his tongue. Still, Castle was concerned to see Bartholomew’s eyelids begin fluttering. Then, suddenly his eyes opened and he began looking here and there, his eyes darting with the type of rapid eye movement associated with sleep disorders.
What is going on?
Castle wondered.
Is Father Bartholomew hallucinating?
Next, the priest screamed out a string of incomprehensible words and his face contorted in fear.

“Is he having an epileptic seizure?” one of the paramedics asked Dr. Castle.

“I don’t think so,” Castle answered. “I know the symptoms look like that, but there’s nothing in his case history to suggest he is an epileptic.”

“What’s going on, then?” the paramedic asked urgently.

“It’s hard to explain,” Castle answered. “I’m his psychiatrist as well as his physician. I know it looks like an epileptic seizure, but I don’t think it is. How far are we from the hospital?”

“Five minutes tops!” the driver shot back. “I’m doing the best I can!”

B
ARTHOLOMEW
’
S MIND WAS
tripping in time once again.

In a jolt, he was back in ancient Jerusalem, this time being roughly led by a group of Roman centurions into a courtyard. His hands were bound with a rope the centurions used to
force him forward against his will. After a few steps, he gave up struggling, realizing it was to no avail. He was headed to wherever the centurions were leading him. Once inside a small inner courtyard, the soldiers used the rope to fix his bound hands to a round iron ring that had been driven at about waist height into a small marble pillar ominously positioned at the courtyard’s center.

A dozen or more soldiers poured into the courtroom, fighting with each other for position to get the best view from which to enjoy the intense beating they knew was about to take place.

Bartholomew could feel his robe being torn violently from his body. In an instant he was stripped naked, shamed to be standing there, completely exposed and totally vulnerable in this company of rough men.

“So this is the King of the Jews,” the soldiers taunted, bending in mock bows before him as if he were on a throne, taking turns to approach him and spit on his naked body, aiming squarely for his face and genitals.

Struggling to recover from the insult, Bartholomew filled with fear as he saw two centurions with bulging arm muscles take up wooden-handled whips. Each flagrum consisted of three leather straps with lethal-looking, dumbbell-shaped lead weights attached to the ends.

Bartholomew froze in terror as the two centurions positioned themselves on each side, ready to get at his back, positioned out to them from the pillar. The centurion on the right was slightly taller than the centurion on the left, but both were impressively strong and had legs that looked like tree trunks.

The soldier on his right extended his left arm and flagrum above his head to get his full weight and force behind the blow he was about to flay across Bartholomew’s back. Bartholomew buckled upon the impact. He cringed as the metal dumbbell ripped
into his skin, then tore away tissue as the centurion forcefully pulled the flagrum away. In tandem, the second centurion lifted his whip with his right arm and repeated the scourging from Bartholomew’s left side.

I
N THE AMBULANCE
, Castle and Morelli could not comprehend what was happening. Even though he was strapped tightly to the stretcher, Bartholomew’s body twitched violently every few seconds. He screamed in pain and his head thrashed from side to side. Castle concluded that Bartholomew was experiencing some inner agony that was yet another manifestation of his neurosis, but Morelli was simply mystified. He took out his prayerbook and stole in preparation to give Father Bartholomew extreme unction, the final rites given by a Catholic priest at the death of one of the faithful.

Right then, Castle became alarmed to see that Bartholomew’s shirt was filling with blood. He quickly loosened the stretcher straps around Bartholomew’s shoulders so he could unbutton his black priestly shirt and examine him.

Exposing Bartholomew’s chest, Castle could not believe what he was seeing. Accompanying every violent movement of Bartholomew’s body, new wounds were appearing as if from nowhere. Castle’s mind raced. It almost looked like Bartholomew was being wounded from the inside, especially since no one in the ambulance was striking him and there was no outside explanation for why new wounds were showing up right then before Castle’s eyes.

Bartholomew looked as if he were trying to escape by violently twisting this way and that on the stretcher. It occurred to Castle that Bartholomew was desperately trying to turn his body completely around, to flip over from back to front, or even to position himself on one side or the other. Every time Bartholomew managed to twist around enough to expose a new section of his body,
fresh wounds began appearing there, inflicted from some mysterious and unseen source.

Castle had never seen anything like this happening ever before, but his mind flashed to Bartholomew’s description of how he had suffered the stigmata. While Castle discounted the possibility it was real, his immediate intuitive reaction was that Bartholomew was suffering a severe scourging, and the thought of ancient Roman whippings came to his mind. Castle’s mind flashed on the scourging Jesus had received at the pillar as part of his torture leading up to his crucifixion and he began to worry that Bartholomew’s neurosis was pushing him even deeper into personally experiencing the passion and death of Christ. Could it be possible that here in the back of the ambulance, Castle and Morelli were watching the scourge wounds appear on Bartholomew’s body, adding the injuries of Christ’s scourging at the pillar to the stigmata in Bartholomew’s wrists?

To stop Bartholomew from thrashing about, Castle quietly injected a second dose of the tranquilizer, again to apparently no effect. Bartholomew’s body continued twitching in spasms of pain, as if he were being beaten.

W
ITH HIS MIND
back in the ancient courtyard, Bartholomew felt like a trapped animal. There was no escape from the repeated blows that drove him to his knees. The instant he fell, the centurions taunted him to get up. “What kind of man are you?” they jeered. “Can’t even take a little beating?”

Since he was unable to get back to his feet, the centurions with the whips stopped long enough to kick him, then grabbed him by his arms and lifted him back to his feet. Once Bartholomew was upright, the beating resumed.

Bartholomew struggled to twist around to expose his front to the whips, thinking the soldiers might not beat him on his chest
and genitals, but he was wrong. While he saved his back for a moment from further injury, the centurions whipped his forelegs and chest, not sparing his stomach and abdomen. No matter which way Bartholomew twisted, front or back, he suffered the continued blows of the flagrum, the lead weights tearing his skin away. With his wrists bound to the short marble pillar, there was no escape from the torture. For what seemed like more than an hour, they beat him, the centurions with the whips and the soldiers in the courtyard seeming to get an almost sexual pleasure from his suffering and pain.

“Why can’t you save yourself?” the soldiers taunted, mocking his agony. “Where’s your army now, King of the Jews? Why have your legions abandoned you?”

They laughed as he fell to his knees or fell to the ground, his upper body hanging from the metal ring, his bound hands suspended back above his head by the rope that held his wrists to the ring. “You cry like a woman!” they jeered. “This is the way a child would die. Do you want your mother? Stand up and take your punishment like a man.”

More than once in the throes of his passion, Bartholomew’s mind froze with alarm, realizing how the goal of his torturers was to bring him as close to death as possible, but not so far as to actually kill him, just prolong his agony and intensify his pain. Bartholomew knew this was a beating from which he would never recover. Somehow, he comprehended that this scourging was just the first act in a prolonged drama of death that would have several acts. The soldiers would beat him to a point where the injuries would cover every inch of his body, but he was by no means the first victim these brutes had tormented and he would by no means be the last.

In his horror, Bartholomew realized that these Roman centurions dressed in their military garb, with their wine-red tunics
and tight-fitting leather bindings, were not savage beasts. To the soldiers this cruel courtyard was their temple of pain and Bartholomew their victim, with his hands bound by leather to their short marble altar of cruelty.

What they wanted was to intensify and prolong his anguish so as to intensify and prolong their pleasure at watching him suffer.

Even in their most sadistic impulses, these Roman centurions weren’t so foolish as to allow their victim to die, lest they themselves be beaten for ineptitude. Prolonging the scourging was essential to the torment.

Bartholomew’s entire body throbbed, but every time his mind threatened to go blank, the soldiers doused him with water, reviving him for more punishment.

The centurions paused only when it was time to pass the whips to fresh hands. The soldiers competed for the privilege of beating their bound victim, pushing one another aside as they lined up to be the next man wielding the flagrum.

A
S THEY ARRIVED
at Beth Israel, Bartholomew’s bloody body went limp.

The paramedics moved quickly, fearful that Bartholomew might die before they could get him inside the emergency room. The paramedics moved Castle and Morelli aside respectfully as they pulled the stretcher from the ambulance, lowered the gurney’s wheels, and rolled the injured man forward as quickly as they could.

Once he was inside the hospital, the ER team took over and went to work immediately. Stripping Bartholomew of clothes, they were shocked to see his body was severely injured front and back by hundreds of small cuts.

Pushing his way into the emergency room station, Castle was equally shocked to realize Bartholomew’s injuries crisscrossed
virtually every square inch of his body, from his shoulders down to his ankles. Trying to stay in the background so he wouldn’t be thrown out, Morelli pushed himself into the ER right behind the psychiatrist.

Looking closely at Bartholomew’s back as the ER doctors turned him over, Castle could see that the back wounds were about twice as numerous as the wounds Castle had suffered on his front side. Trying to estimate the total number of wounds, Castle picked a small area below the shoulders and counted. He could see dumbbell-shaped wounds clustered in groups of three. Taking into account that the injuries were fewer on his front side, Castle extrapolated and made a quick estimate that Bartholomew had suffered possibly as many as one hundred groups of what amounted to some three hundred separate dumbbell-shaped wounds.

Each wound was nearly identical—less than a half inch in length, with two small circles of injury defining the ends of each wound. Looking closely he could see what looked like lash wounds connected to each dumbbell-shaped wound. His mind envisioned a whip of three thongs that had a dumbbell-shaped weight tied at the end of each thong. He recoiled when he imagined that Bartholomew could have been hit by as many as one hundred different scourge blows. He wondered how anybody could survive a beating that brutal. What he was seeing of Bartholomew’s naked body in the ER explained the anguish he had observed in the ambulance.

Standing in the background behind Castle in the ER, Morelli was coming to the same conclusions. Looking at Bartholomew as the doctors and nurses worked frantically to identify and treat his wounds, the thought flashed through Morelli’s mind that here was the live image of the scourged man of the Turin Shroud.

Moving quietly forward, Father Morelli finally had the chance
to begin administering extreme unction. Praying in a whisper, Morelli blessed Bartholomew’s forehead with the sign of the cross and began bestowing on him the Church’s last rites.

For several minutes, the doctors and nurses did the best they could to contain the bleeding. Then Bartholomew suddenly relaxed. His breathing became more normal and his vital signs, measured on the monitors, were strong.

“We need to send him to the burn unit,” one of the ER doctors advised Castle. “His wounds cover his body. There’s too many to stitch and we have to stop the bleeding. These wounds have to be cleaned out carefully to prevent further injury. Then his entire body will need to be sterilized to prevent infection. These aren’t burns, but the burn unit has the kind of advanced treatment facilities and wound dressings he needs. He’s suffered massive fluid loss in addition to loss of blood. He could go into shock at any time.”

Castle agreed. Bartholomew would need intensive care for several days. He had the priest admitted to the burn unit and ordered monitoring of his circulatory system and heart. Castle was concerned Father Bartholomew’s obvious trauma would cause hemodynamic instability, with the possibility that the priest’s blood circulation might simply collapse. He also ordered twenty-four-hour monitoring for cardiac arrhythmia. For when Bartholomew could be transferred out of the burn unit to intensive care, Castle requested a private room, or a room in which the second bed would not be occupied. Castle wanted to maintain privacy for the priest and he was worried that a second patient or that patient’s family would begin asking too many questions.

This time, the psychiatrist planned to keep the priest hospitalized for whatever time it took to figure out what was going on. If these injuries were psychosomatic, then Bartholomew’s subconscious
might continue inflicting serious injury on his body. Could this mental illness be stopped before Bartholomew’s subconscious inflicted a fatal injury on the priest? Castle was not sure. The wounds he was seeing were so similar to the wounds of Christ’s passion and death—the scourging at the pillar in addition to the stigmata on the wrists—that the prognosis could not be good.