Thomas M. Disch (30 page)

Silvanus nodded.

Clay opened the door and handed the keys to Silvanus. “Well, so long—killer.”

“When will I see you again?” Silvanus asked Clay.

“I’m not at all sure we should keep meeting like this, and anyhow, the decision won’t be up to me. If you was wondering when you’re going to get your tattoo finished, I think you can safely assume that you won’t be paying any more visits to Wolf. I have a hunch he’ll be closing down his shop real soon.

You want any more tattoos, you’ll have to get them somewheres else.”

Silvanus stood in the doorway of St. Bernardine’s rectory and watched Clay return to the automobile and drive it away. Then he closed the door and stood there in a darkness that figured forth the darkness within his soul.

Out of that darkness came a voice. “Father Pat, is that you? Thank God you’re back! I can’t tel! you how worried I’ve been.”

“I was drinking,” Silvanus informed the unseen speaker.

“That was my fear.” There was a pause, and when the man spoke again, his tone was more subdued. “Father Pat, I hate to have to tell you this the moment you’re back, but there has been some very, very bad news.”

The following is excerpted from chapter thirteen of
A Prolegomenon to Receptivist Science
, by A. D. Boscage (Exegete Press, 1984): What can I say of my period of incarceration in the dungeon crypts of Notre Dame de Gevaudon except that it was inexpressibly horrible! For some months after I had been transmentated back to my own temporal frame, those memories were repressed—whether because of their traumatic nature or through the agency of mnemocytes that erased those recollections and replaced them with others, I cannot presume to judge. Trauma actually seems the likelier hypothesis, since I have no recollection whatsoever of the three weeks I spent in the company of my translator, Héloise V. (or F.?), who had accompanied me to the ruins of Montpellier-le-Vieux and who discovered me there, after an absence of some four or five hours, in a kind of swoon. Waking from that trance (so Héloise tells me), I was in a state of great confusion. I knew not my own name. I could not perform simple actions, such as twisting off the cap of a bottle of mineral water. My speech was halting, and it seemed, to Héloise’s professionally trained ear, to have acquired a subtly
French

character, not so much the sound of French, but its
music
. Once I had recovered from my first confusion, I became exceedingly amorous, and Héloise (she later confided, blushingly) responded to my overtures with enthusiasm.

For the next three weeks I lived with her in a state of perpetual rut—of which, alas, I remember nothing whatsoever.

Indeed, I now doubt whether it was I who enjoyed this erotic holiday and wonder if, rather, during the five months I lived and worked as the stonemason Bonamico, he had been transmentated into my own era, for a stay of three weeks. While I suffered in the prisons of the Inquisition, had he enjoyed the favors of the raven-haired Héloise? Perhaps there are laws for the conservation of spiritual energy just as there are for physical energy, though we do not yet understand them and cannot control them.

Three weeks I lived with Héloise in unremembered bliss, and then, once again, there was an awakening. One morning Héloise discovered me curled into a fetal ball at the foot of her bed, whimpering and beside myself with fear. She freaked, and who can blame her? Her pet satyr had become a psychic jellyfish.

I was desperate to see Lorraine, and amazed to learn that she had returned to the States without me, in the conviction that I had abandoned her for my French translator, which, to all appearances, I had! Such was my desperation that I possessed the courage to return to the States by plane. My fear of remaining in France was greater than my fear of flying! Yet at that point I had no memory of my experiences as Bonamico.

Even now, as I write this in my Santa Barbara condo, my memories of that experience are erratic—sometimes vivid, sometimes imprecise. I remember the drudgery of the work, the meager rations, the sour wine. I remember being unbathed and the lice in my beard and pubic hair. Worst of all, I recall my dawning awareness that
there was no escape
from my debased condition as a conscript laborer.

Romancers write of the Age of Chivalry and the Age of Faith. Where are the books about the Age of Slavery? The Age of Penury? The Age of Cruelty?

Perhaps they are summed up in the single phrase “The Dark Ages”! To my mind, even a pizza delivery boy, working for tips, enjoys a richer and more comfortable life than the nobility and clergy of the Middle Ages. As for those less fortunately situated, forget it! Their lives were a living hell. Or, more accurately, their world was their prison. Not only the serfs were bound to their lords’ property; even skilled workers—the men like Bonamico, who built the cathedrals that tourists gush over—were little better than slaves.

Bonamico and his fellow masons had come from Turin seeking work in the south of France as workers now migrate from Detroit to Dallas. But once they had found work and shown their competence, the Church decided to requisition their services, the way sailors were once kidnapped from merchant ships and pressed into the service of the British navy. The next time you look at a Gothic cathedral and have lofty thoughts about its “sublimity,” consider that its mortar consists of hundreds of men who labored
unwillingly
to raise those forests of chiseled stone.

I have already described, in the chapter before this, how I, as Bonamico, led a rebellion of the conscript laborers of Notre Dame de Gevaudon, how we attempted to flee Montpellier-le-Vieux through the foothills of the Cévennes, and how, after we had been hunted down and put in chains, we were made prisoners in those very crypts we earlier had labored to extend. It was in the course of that failed escape that I became acquainted with the doctrines and aspirations of the Albigensian “heretics,” for many of my fellow masons subscribed to that faith. Indeed, the institution of Freemasonry originated in that period among workers like ourselves, who were, in a sense, the first trade unionists. There are still Republicans who reckon union workers as Albigensians, fit to be burned at the stake!

But we were not destined to be burned at the stake. For us a more terrible fate was reserved, a fate so unspeakable that even now, as I struggle to put these words on paper, I am tempted to stay my hand from the keyboard.

No one will believe you, I tell myself. You will be reviled! Denounced! Held in derision! Dismissed as a madman!

But what of that! I have been denounced, derided, and dismissed for what I have written already concerning my UFO experiences. I cannot help supposing that these later experiences of transmentation are somehow related to my abduction experiences. Surely it is not inconceivable that Entities who have mastered Interstellar Flight might also have mastered the Fourth Dimension of Time? It is not for me to judge or to speculate about such Entities’ darkly veiled motives. Assuming, always, that they are the same Entities!

The Shroud of Turin…

There, I have written it! Must I now spell it out? The moment I began to read the book about it—_The Mysterious Shroud_, by Ian Wilson and Vernon Miller (Doubleday, 1986)—the memories I had so long repressed were reawakened. I’d found the book on a shelf in the Anaheim home of my first ex, Barbra Boscage, née Drummond. I was visiting my daughters, Lesley and Artemisia, after a court-mandated absence of many years. Finding myself with time to spare (my daughters and their mother had gone to the mall, that cathedral of the twentieth century), I picked up the book in a spirit of idle curiosity, but the more I read, and the more closely I examined the seventy-seven black-and-white and thirty-five full-color photographs, the more vividly I realized that I had chanced upon the key to my erased memories.

For those readers who may be unaware of the significance ascribed to the Shroud of Turin, I will offer a brief résumé. The Shroud “surfaced,”

scandalously, in the late fourteenth century, when it was denounced as a forgery. It continued to be venerated, and held in suspicion, until late in the nineteenth century, when the new science of photography discovered unsuspected aspects of the Shroud that suggested it could not be, in any ordinary sense, a forgery; the forgers, had they
painted
the image on the cloth, could not have known to paint the authenticating details that were, centuries later, revealed by photographic negatives. The Shroud seemed to be an accurate
photographic representation
of a well-proportioned human male who had been crucified, scourged, and crowned with thorns. It was as though the Shroud had been placed upon the body of the newly crucified Christ and a rubbing had been taken, as nowadays art students make rubbings from the incised brass memorial tablets in English cathedrals. No artist of that period could possibly have accomplished a forgery so perfect in all its anatomical detail.

However—and this is the however that has made the Vatican pause in finally affirming the Shroud’s authenticity—the fabric that bears this

“miraculous” imprint has been shown, by scientific analysis, to date from a time no later than the thirteenth or fourteenth century and is, therefore, a forgery. But even so, a forgery so well contrived it must be marveled at.

Certainly, when I beheld the photographs in
The Mysterious Shroud
, I had to marvel, for what I saw there were
my own features
—the photographic record of the tortures I had endured and my eventual crucifixion. As I studied the book, the memories returned: the thorny branches twined about my forehead, the whips that imprinted my flesh with their arcane alphabets of suffering, the crude iron nails that were, at last, hammered into my wrists, where they would support the weight of my crucified body, as nails through the flesh of my hands would not— as my torturers, like the Roman legionnaires before them, had learned by trial and error.

Nor was it myself alone who suffered so. Indeed, I am not sure that it is my own features that are represented by the Shroud of Turin. The forgers of the Shroud were perfectionists. Just as later engravers were not satisfied with the first impression of their handicraft, so the creators of the Shroud took pains to ensure that their final image should seem suitably noble and pathetic. They took many impressions, for they had a limitless supply of canvas. The creation of some of their work I witnessed.

The last I felt.

“Think of the nails,” Alison read aloud, “that pierced His wrists. For Christ was not crucified, we know now, as he has always been represented, by driving nails through the palms of His hands. No, the Roman centurions who did the deed were experienced in the craft of crucifixion. They knew, by trial and error, that the weight of the victim might be too great to be supported by the bones and ligaments of the hands. Those engineers of torture drove the nails through His holy wrists!”

“Stop there,” said Hedwig, placing her bony hand over the pages of the book, a paperback edition of
The Mysterious Shroud of Turin
by Monsignor Francis O’Toole. “And think, for a moment, that here, just above us, in the reliquarium, we have a relic of that very Shroud, which wrapped His body.”

“We do?” little Janet Joyner asked politely. Young as she was, the girl had a canny way of saying just those things Hedwig Ober wished to hear. Alison had sized Janet up at once as a people-pleaser. But was she any different herself? Didn’t she do everything she could to suck up to the old frump?

“Yes, indeed, we do,” said Hedwig. “It was given to the Monsignor in 1949 by His Holiness Pope Pius the Twelfth, when this Shrine had just begun to be built. Your mother, Janet, would have been no older than you are now when that precious relic was given to the Monsignor. Actual threads from the Shroud—just think! Why, it makes this Shrine, in a very real way, a more significant center of pilgrimage than the National Shrine in Washington, D.C.

Or it would, if there were any justice. That may seem boastful of me, and it would be, but they are not my words. They were the words of Monsignor O’Toole himself, spoken beneath the dome that stands above us, on the day this Shrine was consecrated. Oh my, how long ago that seems now! How much the world has changed since then!”

Hedwig fell silent, and Janet had no further prompting.

“Shall I go on?” Alison asked.

“Yes, please,” said Hedwig, and then, at once, “No, no, our time is up.

It’s so wonderful that we’ve been able to meet like this, here, together, the four of us.” Hedwig cast a significant glance at the fourth member of their party, Raven Peck, in whose cell they had come together for this little celebration.

It was Raven’s eighteenth birthday, but Raven was not disposed to greet the occasion in a spirit of celebration. Indeed, she had become very abusive when Hedwig led the two other girls into her cell, Alison carrying the birthday cake that Hedwig had baked, with its eighteen candles already lighted, and Janet bearing the present she’d made for Raven and wrapped in Happy Birthday paper from Hallmark (which she then unwrapped, because Raven could not be trusted to have her restraints removed).

“What is it?” Alison had asked, on Raven’s behalf.

“A macrame plant hanger,” Janet had explained. “It’s the first piece of macrame I ever made.”