The Third Hour

by Richard Devin

  “Spun?”

  “Yes. Turned into something more manageable,” Senator Scott said, and raised an eyebrow. “Like the Bermuda Triangle. We couldn’t keep the knowledge of planes and ships missing a complete secret. So, instead, we developed hypotheses to possibly explain what had happened, and then we started a legend. The Bermuda Triangle is one of those legends. There actually was no Bermuda Triangle before nineteen forty-five. We were conducting a pulse energy conversion experiment off the east coast of Florida. The hope was that we could better control the electrical energy field needed to create the power to send someone or something back in time. We had assembled a small team in the waters off of Miami on a couple of Navy destroyer escorts, disguised, not very well I might add, as fishing boats. The experiment went as well as we could have expected. The generators produced a significant amount of magnetic energy and we were able to control it. A pulse of that energy was aimed at a buoy set afloat in the ocean, and then nothing happened. That was exactly what we wanted. With past experiments, the energy created was too great to be controlled and things blew up, or disintegrated, or melded into one another. This time, there was nothing. We had controlled the power and directed it where we wanted it to be. And the end result was that nothing happened.” Senator Scott looked to Tonita and then swung his eyes in the direction of Dominic. “Or so we thought.”

  FIFTY EIGHT

  BILL WAS STARTLED, nearly dumbfounded by the presence of the symbol. He knew the symbol well; Christians had begun to use the sign of the fish as a proclamation of their belief in Jesus Christ as the Son of God during the early Roman Empire.

  Early Christian churches were little more than meetings held in a believer’s house, later known as a house of worship. The devoted would come to the home, draw or signal with their hands the sign of the fish, and gain entrance. In many cases, only one of the curved lines would be drawn by a believer. The other would be filled in by another and then the eye of the fish would be drawn in by both, a gesture of their brotherhood and unity. But that practice was not initiated until years after the death of Christ. Hundreds of years later the Masons would take the eye symbol from the fish and incorporate it into their own symbol, weaving together ancient Christianity with modern politics, money, and war and passing on to unsuspecting millions the symbol of Christ the living God.

  Bill stared at the simple symbol of two parallel lines drawn by Christ into the sand. He traced each line, one curving up the other curving down, intersecting at what would be the tail of the fish. As he traced the lines with his finger, one thought kept tracing its way through his mind. Christ could not have known of the symbol as a reference to him. History would not record its use for a decade or more after Christ’s death. Why then, was the symbol here? Who was Christ drawing this for? And one answer kept screaming back.

  It could only be for me!

  He stepped around the handprint and the Ichthys, surprising himself at the reverence he gave them both. He did not believe in the Christ or in God stories. He never had. His parents were Christians, and, although, church was not a mainstay of the family’s practices, they did occasionally attend a mass during the usual holidays when suddenly everybody found religion, Bill and his parents included. He didn’t mind going to church. He had always enjoyed the pageantry of the services and there was the often good advice espoused by some priest from the pulpit. But in the end, it always led back to the same idea that those in the church were to be saved and those outside were to be converted in order to be saved.

  Soon, Bill became one of those needing to be saved, those on the outside. He did not believe in Christ as God, or anyone else as God. He did not believe in God. Odd, he thought, that even though he was very secure in his belief that there was no supreme being, no creator, he hesitated calling himself an atheist and preferred instead to label himself agnostic. It left open the possibilities, he convinced himself, and like any good scientist, he should always be open to the possibilities.

  Still, as he took another labored step up the rocky path to the hilltop, he could not help but feel there was something more here than the deaths of three men. He glanced back down the hill and the path, as the noise of several Roman guards laughing at some crude comment made its way to him. The guards’ leather clad feet trampled over the spot where Christ had fallen, obliterating the Ichthys and the handprint erasing them from history. Bill kept himself from calling out to stop them. Instead, he watched as they stirred up the dust leaving the images only in Bill’s memory. The guards pushed passed him, one saying something in Latin that Bill could barely make out as, “Move out of the way.”

  Bill followed the same path as the guards who had just passed and climbed the few yards to the hilltop. At the top, where the hill came to a small plateau, he found himself among a mass of people. Several hundred, he quickly guessed, mostly peasants, but some wealthy merchants on horseback rode about the crowd. The Roman Tribuni mounted on strongly muscled horses, shouted orders to the many more centurions that accompanied them, on foot. There were: priests and clergy, dressed in long flowing, darkly stained cloth with ornately decorated headwear, several robed government officials, and in the slight distance, one man, perched upon a rocky outcropping, lifting him slightly above the crowd. That one man was surrounded by a Cohort of Roman centurions and hung on stanchions to either side of him, ensigns bearing the silhouette of a Roman leader.

  Pilate, Bill thought. Pontius Pilate.

  Bill stared off at the man who ruled Judea, the Roman governor who history would record as the man who offered Jesus of Nazareth up to the crowds for forgiveness or death. And those crowds had responded with a cry of death to the man called Jesus of Nazareth.

  The same Jesus that was now heaped onto the dry earth, bloodied and torn, exhausted to the point where he could barely lift his head or arm. His hair twisted and knotted into the roughly braided branch of thorns that was now imbedded into the flesh of his skull.

  Bill circled the crowd. He was at once, dazed, confused, excited and anxious. So many sights, sounds, and smells intertwined. He tried to recognize words in languages that would be dead or seldom spoken in two thousand years. And again the realization struck him; he was in a time and place that was impossible to be in.

  The experiment in the desert some two thousand years to the future of where he was now, had succeeded beyond his expectations. It dawned on him that Lynda and Commander Kupovits who were with him in the metal building that served as their capsule, may also be here or hiding nearby. He looked about at the weather-worn faces surrounding him. Most of the men were bearded and dark skinned with long shaggy curls to their hair. Most of the women ran barefoot, as did the children.

  Bill stopped, taking in the scene and the spectacle that was unlike any he had ever imagined. Where paintings and drawings by master artists in the centuries to come would show the scene of Christ’s crucifixion as a solemn, dark, and foreboding ceremony, here there were children running and clamoring about, some playing what looked to Bill to be games of tag. Several groups of children moved slowly, heads down, sweeping the ground with their eyes in a search for dropped articles of cloth, food, or coin.

  Bill closed his eyes, allowing his sense of smell and hearing to paint a mental picture of the scene before him without the distraction of sight. Immediately, he was taken back to a field that had been mown short only a week before. It was the second cutting of wheat straw and the clean fresh smell of mown grass lofted in the air. The late summer air, warm and humid, was pierced by lights strung along high poles, and neon so bright it lit the clouds above with hues of green and yellow. He was there once again, among the country carnivals of his childhood. The sounds, smells, and cacophony of images came back to him. And beneath his hooded head, he smiled.

  Bill opened his eyes and confirmed what his senses were telling him. Most among the crowd were not acting in despair. There were few that carried the pain of sadness in their eyes. No tears fell streaming down the faces of those who stood and
watched, and there were no wailing women beating their heads and chests with clenched fists crying out. Vendors, abounded, hawking their wares from the backs of small donkeys or ramshackle wooden carts pulled by men and beasts. Beggars of all sorts held out cupped hands, flat boards, or chipped wooden bowls to all who passed closely by seeking a coin or crumb. Religious men walked about chatting animatedly, ignoring the two men that already hung from the crosses just a short distance away and occasionally pointed to or nodded in the direction of the one man who awaited his fate. It was not unlike the carnivals of Bill’s country youth. Except that this was a carnival of death.

  He had to fight to keep his tongue silent. He wanted to scream out, to make the priests and peasants and Romans understand the gravity of what they were about to do. Their act would change the years to come in ways they could never imagine or understand. It occurred to Bill that the people who were here upon this hilltop did not care if the man, who still lay on the ground panting heavily, was the Son of God or simply a lunatic. The gathered crowds didn’t understand and they didn’t care to. What they did know was that the man called Jesus Christ was not good for them and their lives. He made times difficult in many ways, agitating the Romans and the priests by disrupting the long established beliefs and the daily practices of life. He put them all at risk. To the many congregated here, the crucifixion of Jesus would make their lives simpler. Crucifixion was not an unusual event during Roman rule of Judea and many other lands. The death of Christ and the two others, especially now, only days before Passover, was, to most in Jerusalem, a celebration of order and the end of a heretic’s ranting.

  There was a quick parting of the crowd, as several Roman soldiers rushed from their station—near the man Bill believed to be Pilate—toward the man Bill knew to be Christ.

  Four centurions surrounded Christ, picking him up by the arms and dragging him toward the upright timber post that had already been secured and sunk several feet into the ground. Christ did not struggle or argue with the centurions. His body was limp, unresponsive. Bill watched the man, waiting for some sign of struggle, of resistance, that would prove that Christ was still alive. He suspected that Christ may have died while on the ground long before being tied and nailed to the cross, and watched the man for signs of life.

  He turned his attention to the many gathered here. Some eyes looked away as Christ was dragged to the base of the stake. Some had tears. Most did not. Those that dared to cry did so silently, as they feared the wrath of the Romans more than that of a man who called himself the Son of God.

  Bill studied their faces and that of Christ. His hair fell upon his face, knotted and twisted, caked with the dried blood and entwined into the twigs of thorn placed upon his head. He remained silent and still, despite the jeers and tormenting spat upon him by the crowd.

  The crossbeam that Christ had carried through the city and on the path up to Golgotha had been placed in front of the longer, stationary post. The centurions stopped a few feet in front of the crossbeam and dropped Christ on his side.

  A commotion behind him caught Bill’s attention and he turned to see the man he thought to be Pilate circling through the crowd in a small chariot. He screamed at them, then charged off, making his way down the hill toward the gate, following the same path Christ and the crowd had on their way up to the sight of crucifixion. The man in the chariot yelled out in a gruff voice at the crowd, in Latin, “Illic is exsisto jesus talea abbas. Vos certus!” There he should be. Jesus bar Abbas. Bar Abbas. You decided! “Vos certus!

  You decided!” Pilate entered the city through the gate and was soon out of sight. Only a bit of dust, kicked up by the horse and wheels of the chariot remained.

  A moment later the centurions were back at their task, working together, as they had done many times before, with hundreds of others condemned to the cross. The centurions laid Christ onto his back. They pulled his arms upward, above his head, and stretched them out to the sides. Christ’s hands were set atop the wooden crossbeam and bound into place with strips of animal skin that had been tanned into leather. One of the centurions reached into a satchel that was strapped around his shoulder and removed from it an iron spike about seven inches in length, and an iron headed hammer. He felt with his fingers for the position between the bones on Christ’s wrists and readied the spike. He glanced toward Christ, who did not turn and recoil to the pending pain that was sure to sear through him, but, instead, looked directly to the sky.

  Bill watched in silent horror as the centurion raised the hammer above his shoulder and brought it down with force. He struck the spike, two...three...four times, before it was firmly implanted through the wrist and into the crossbeam of olive wood.

  Some in the crowd turned from the scene unable to bear witness to the gruesome task, but most watched, mesmerized. Bill closed his eyes briefly, but the sound of cracking bone and wood, and metal against metal, as the hammer was brought down again and again, was more horrific without sight, than it was with. He quickly opened his eyes.

  The two thieves, that had already been placed upon the crosses, spat at the crowd, ridiculing them and the centurions. A sign had been nailed into the wood post of the cross above the head of each man that read: “Brigand”—thief. A few among the crowd spat back at the thieves. And a group of children, none more than ten years of age, tormented the thieves by throwing small stones and sticks at them, until a centurion took a step in their direction and ordered them to stop.

  Bill moved in as closely as he dared, examining the body of Christ from a distance. He was still unsure if Christ was drugged, dead, or unconscious. He stared at the blood-streaked, scratched, and cut chest of the man, looking for movement. But he turned away after a moment concerned that someone in the mob would notice him. Despite the covering of torn cloth and rags, he was concerned that his curiosity made him stand out, and that those around him would see that he was a man not of their own, and that he would end up like the two thieves and Christ—hung upon a cross.

  The centurion finished the task of nailing Christ’s wrist to the crossbeam, then moved to the other side to repeat the process with the other wrist. The sound of cracking bone and splitting wood assaulted Bill and he almost lost the contents of his stomach. He fought back the urge to throw up, and the urge to turn his head from the scene that no one in his time could imagine. He did neither.

  Having secured Christ by the arms to the crossbeam, the four centurions lifted the crossbeam, together with the man upon it, and placed it on top of the post that had been seated into the ground.

  Bill moved his eyes from the top of Christ’s head, down his torso to his legs and the earth below them. He was suddenly taken aback as he realized that the crosses were not set high above the ground, but were, instead, not much more than six feet tall in total. He had always imagined, and had seen paintings and drawings depicting Christ hanging high above the ground, towering above the heads of those who gathered to witness the crucifixion. But here the three crosses were only slightly taller than a man’s height, and one was certainly shorter, as the thief’s feet barely missed touching the ground.

  The same centurion, who had nailed Christ’s wrists to the crossbeam, mounted a small ladder that he had leaned against the back of the post. The centurion climbed to the top rung and nailed the crossbeam into the post, forming an upper case “T”. Christ’s body and weight were supported by a small wood, shelf-like seat as the crossbeam was secured. But that could not stop the jolt of every hammering blow from pulsing through the stake. Christ’s body shook with each strike, causing his head to fall to one side.

  Bill was nearly certain now that Christ had already died long before being hung from the cross. He couldn’t get close enough to see if he was breathing, or to feel for a pulse. But from his casual observation of the man, he was coming to the conclusion that what history had recorded was truly just a story told by a few men who were themselves seeking glory and fame.

  Having secured the crossbeam to the post, the
centurion nailed into place the titulus cruces bearing the crime of Jesus Christ, Iesus nazarenvs rex ivdaeorvm, in Latin, followed by the same wording in Greek, and then one more line, the last line, in Hebrew. They read: This is Jesus, King of the Jews.

  At once there was a roar among the crowd. Bill could not make out the words, as most spoke in Aramaic, but he could understand the words in Latin and the tone of all the voices. The crowd was clearly unhappy with the titulus and railed against Jesus for the crime of calling himself the King of the Jews. The crowd turned on the centurions, taunting them, demanding that the titulus come down, that the words King of the Jews, be scratched away and replaced with “He said that he was King of the Jews.”

  The centurions pushed back at the crowd and threatened to strike any who ventured too close. There was a task to be finished, and by their demeanor, the centurions clearly intended to complete it.

  The centurion who had just nailed the titulus above Christ’s head stepped down from the small ladder and came around to the front of the stake. He pulled from his satchel another long iron spike, and with the assistance of two other centurions, pulled the legs of Christ to one side of the stake, bending them at the knees. One centurion held Christ’s legs in position, gripping them at the calf of each leg, while the other swung back and hammered a spike through the heels of both feet and deep into the wood of the post.

  The thieves to the sides of Christ had now been hanging from their crosses for several hours and the strain of the crucifixion was beginning to show. In panting breaths they taunted Christ to save himself and them, if was truly the Son of God. They mocked him, cursed him, and then in desperation, begged him. Christ paid no heed to the thieves, the crowd, or to the centurions. He remained silent, head bowed.