Tom rounded on Linda. “Happy now, you’ve exposed the kids to this?” He gestured at the old man's body.
Linda said, “The children should see the truth.”
Tom thought, The truth? You wouldn’t know the truth if it leapt up and bit you on the arse! You live your cozy life, smug in your certainty, and never think about the cost of it all.
Tom pointed at Shane who was shaking, and a tearful Abi. “People dying is too much for them to see.” He took a deep breath, and then noticed a familiar shock of hair. His heart momentarily stopped, then the woman turned, and Tom saw that it wasn’t who he thought it was. He breathed again.
They drifted; passing an old man slumped in the stocks. A despairing cry arose from the mutilation tent and the flap opened to show the Inquisitor holding up a thief’s amputated hand. They bought hot-roast rolls and munched outside a news-tent, watching the state funeral of a Klansman at the Breckinridge Memorial in Dallas; on the next screen something large, black and inhuman loped through the radioactive ruins of Reykjavik. A third screen showed the streets of The Plague Lands; volunteers in quarantine suits bearing the logo of the Fist of God coalition piled up bodies. Even bloodthirsty Abi shivered, and when Tom saw Shane staring wide-eyed in horror, he ushered them on.
A large crowd gathered around it almost hid the ducking stool, except when the suspect arched above their heads before falling back. “Mum,” Shane tugged at Linda's sleeve. “Can we watch?”
Linda gave Tom an odd look, half-pity, half-challenge. Tom shrugged. “Why not --he seems to have got over the old man’s death.”
"Kids are resilient," Linda said.
Linda took Shane's hand, and Tom took Abi's, until she snatched it away. What thirteen-year-old wants to hold her Dad's hand, Tom thought with sadness. He was losing her already.
The four of them nudged, wriggled and oozed through the crowds. The smell of frying onions from a hot-dog stand blended with the singed flesh of cauterized stumps.
The so-called stool was a strapped chair -- under the water when the family nudged their way through to the front. Tom took Abi's hand again. It was sweaty, but he kept a tight grip. “See,” Tom said. “This is the follow-up to an Anti-Social Behavior Order: When a criminal breaks an ASBO, it’s the stool for them.”
A mop of brunette hair floated on the surface, the naked woman clamped by her wrists and ankles to the stool. A thin stream of bubbles drifting to the surface was the only sign that she still lived.
When the bubbles stopped, Tom wondered if the Knights Inquisitor were going to suffer the unprecedented embarrassment of two deaths in one afternoon.
The attendants scrambled and brought her up. The woman vomited a lungful of sanctified water and took a whoop of air. Her head lolled as the attendants swung the chair around and the crowd hooted in derision. A loudspeaker intoned, “…forgive those who trespass against us.” She began to convulse, and the first-aiders pulled her out of the seat.
Even with her face hidden by the lank bundle of sodden hair, the woman’s body sent shivers of recognition down Tom’s spine. Then he heard the words “…Lord, forgive your daughter, Alice Lisle, for the sin of fornication…” and felt sick.
He looked down at the children, who watched it all, rapt, unaware. Tom caught Linda watching him, her gaze unwavering.
The first-aiders released Alice Lisle, and draped a robe around her. She leaned unsteadily against the central pylon of the ducking stool. Her hair hung down over her face in a matted shroud, but one eye peered Medusa-like through a small gap, and burned into him. He wanted to look away, but might as well have been turned to stone. She mouthed something which he couldn’t make out.
“Just as well she’s single,” Linda said. “They’ll shave her head, and tar and feather her. If she were married, kids, they’d brand her.” Abruptly, she looked away, and Tom saw her wipe angrily at her face.
Without warning, a heavy hand landed on his shoulder, and a gruff voice said, “Thomas James Goodman? Would you accompany me to an interrogation area, please?” Tom looked around into a lantern-jawed, blue-stubbled face from whose fleshy nose black hairs peeked.
Tom licked his lips and tried to protest, but his tongue suddenly wouldn’t work properly. Tears streaked Linda’s make-up. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
The constable continued, “You do not have to say anything until you meet the Inquisitor, but if you do, it may be used in evidence.”
The man was a walking mountain of muscle; it would be futile to argue, Tom decided.
Linda chewed her lower lip, wiping the tears from her face. “Officer, would you give us a moment?” The behemoth nodded and the grip on Tom’s shoulder eased infinitesimally. She murmured, “I’m sorry, darling. I had to do it. One of the children at school saw you with her, and started teasing Abi. You understand?”
“I know,” Tom said, wondering how pure her motives really were. But recrimination would only make his punishment worse so. “You’d only have rung the help-line after a lot of soul-searching.” “I’m sorry, too,” he added so he kept his voice flat as well. “I tried so hard to resist temptation…” Now that his worst fears had come true, it was almost a relief. Almost, but not quite: He knew what he was due.
“I hope they break him before nightfall,” someone said behind them. “We ain't seen any adulterers branded today...”
Abi shouted at him, “Shut up, you pig! This isn't a bloody circus!”
Tom felt so proud of her then, before he remembered to be frightened. Shane slipped a hand into his elder sister’s, as Tom thought, don’t speak up. You automatically become an accomplice. Even saying that might implicate her, so he kept his mouth shut.
People fell quiet in a ripple of silence spreading outwards; in its centre, the Senior Inquisitor stood in a circle of space cleared by his mere presence. This close, Tom could see the three moons signifying that he was a full Inquisitor-colonel on his shoulder epaulets. He ran a finger down his white goatee to straighten it.
“I didn't see her for a week,” Tom said to him. “Until last Friday: She said she'd been ill. She never told me that she’d been served with an ASBO.”
“She was trying to protect you,” the Colonel said, “and comply with the ASBO. But in the end, she couldn't stay away. People like her –charged by lust—never can.”
Tom nodded, realizing that in agreeing to meet Alice on Friday, he'd condemned her to the ducking stool. He wondered what –if anything- she had told them under interrogation.
The colonel said, clapping his hand on Shane’s shoulder, “Your son tells me that you’re a master thatcher?”
Nonplussed, Tom nodded. “I can’t afford to be maimed. I know that might sound cowardly, but you need hands and feet to be whole, up there on a roof, when the wind is blowing --”
“I know, I know,” the colonel, said, soothing. “You have to think of providing for your family. But we’ve subtler methods now."
He had his men pause at one of the exhibitions, near one of the new devices, a chair with a hooded cowl that rose above it in a cobra’s head, ready to strike.
“Thought chair,” Tom muttered and at the Inquisitor’s surprised look, said with a sheepish grin, “It was in Examination Monthly recently. In the dentists’ surgery,” he added, answering the second unasked question. “Not quite what it says - but it can sense emotions, and roughly what the suspect is thinking. He can’t lie while he’s under the cowl.”
The suspect, Tom thought. That was him, however much he shied away from that fact.
“Or if you show him a naked woman, it’ll know if he lusts after her,” Linda said.
“Mum!” Both children cried.
Tom started.
He hadn’t realized that the children had followed him. Go away! He thought. He knew what the Inquisitor's game was; soften him up with a tour of the exhibits. He could handle it, but he wasn't sure he could if the kids were there.
The inquisitor said, “It can leave you unscarred - if we w
ant.”
“Why?” Abi said. “Surely the whole point is to scour the offender clean?” She doesn’t realize that this isn’t hypothetical, Tom thought, heart hammering.
The inquisitor pointed him at another exhibit, where a scrawny man writhed in agony. The man’s right hand was clamped in a vice while a junior inquisitor methodically inserted red hot needles below his fingernails, watched by a supervisor and a small crowd. Most of them drifted on, quickly bored.
“Bit old, innit?” Shane wrinkled his nose. “Hot needles went out years ago.”
“That’s just the start of it,” the supervisor said. He was a middle-ranking official whose black robes were speckled with dandruff, more experienced than the young interrogator whose victim had died, but not as polished as Tom’s captor. His eyes glinted with fanaticism. “Look at this.”
His underling yanked the captive’s hand into to an opaque glass box, with wires protruding from one side. The man pressed several buttons. The box hummed and lit up, and for several minutes they watched. Bored, the children wandered away, and his junior switched the machine off and pulled the suspect’s fingers clear, holding up perfect, unscarred fingertips. “We can heal them as if they’d never been tortured,” dandruff-man said proudly. “It’s a step nearer to a Lazarus casket.”
“A what?” Tom asked.
“Something to bring the sinner back to life, so that they can be scoured again,” the supervisor said. “We can resurrect the worst recalcitrants over and over again. At the moment we lose a little quality each time -- the wounds hardly heal at all after ten or twelve operations, but it’s only a matter of time before we graduate from healing flesh to restoring life. Then there’ll be no sneaking away from God’s retribution by dying.” He wiped his mouth. “Some of Satan's agents have lived ordinary, mundane lives for years. Some were even born Godly, before backsliding into the arms of the forces of darkness. They’re clever; they could pass for decent folk to any ordinary test. Not now.”
A trickle of sweat ran down Tom’s spine. God help any resistance then, he thought. Between the thought chair and the Lazarus casket, any insurrection will be doomed before it can start. In his mind, he heard the ticking of a giant clock.
The senior inquisitor said, “So many times we almost disbanded our order during the years of False Harmony. There are fools who say we could have peace and prosperity without our order’s protection. But when times get hard, the secularists show themselves for what they really are: Satan's Spawn.” He smiled thinly at Linda as the children returned. “You understand the need for order, Tom; the value of every piece of straw in its place; every piece of reed laying the same way.” He strode away, and Tom wondered if he was going to prepare the equipment himself.
Tom looked down. He relaxed, emptied his mind of all anger, and leaning forward, kissed Linda on the lips.
“Forgive me,” she said. “It's for the children's sake.”
“I know,” Tom said. Poor Linda, he thought. Poor Alice: “I know what I’m doing, fornicating with a married man,” she’d said, proud of her defiance. No, you didn’t, he thought.
Tom continued, “They should be able to grow up innocent. It's I who should beg forgiveness -- of all of you.” If only you knew just how much I need your forgiveness, he thought. There are worse sins than adultery, he wanted to tell her. Better your children’s father is branded merely an adulterer than you bear a darker stain, of sedition.
His knees trembled and his guts knotted with the knowledge of what was to come. He would confess the adultery, but he'd still have to endure stretching and flogging to convince them that he was innocent of anything more heinous, before they would brand him an adulterer and pronounce him shriven.
Better to let them flush out a small crime than root around in his head for deeper secrets. The Inquisition used only basic techniques for petty sins -- but if they caught a whiff of sedition, the Thought Chair would be wheeled out.
The others would know when he didn’t attend the Friday meeting that something was wrong; as long as he could keep silent and not give his interrogators any leads. Unless Alice had already betrayed him. Were the Inquisition playing with him? He caught sight of one of his accomplices, and stared a warning at the man as best he could.
Then the constables dragged him away from Linda and the kids, Abi biting her lip and trying to be brave, holding Shane’s hand. Tom waved, and pointed up at the shining silver disc of the moon. The clouds had scurried in from the west, nearly occluding it, and the wind spat large raindrops horizontally across the fairground. Several people raised umbrellas.
He took one last look at the moon, before the clouds gnawed away its perfection. Even at night it obscured the orbiting Valhallas that twinkled like tiny beacons of freedom, but he was glad of that in a way. Sometimes, he thought, you have to hide your light to do what’s right.
Despite his fear, the sight of the moon uplifted him, filling him with love and steely determination. He too would do the right thing, and when he had paid his punishment, and returned home to the loving arms of his family, he would do his utmost to ensure that the Knights Inquisitor rooted out any minor wrongdoers, whatever the cost. Until the real Day of Judgement, when it would no longer be necessary.
Better to sacrifice a few pawns, so that everyone could be free. Alice understood that.
Linda and the children would understand, in time.
CAUGHT IN THE SHADOW
by
VINCENT HOLLAND-KEEN
Wayne Todd, aged nine and three quarters, lay on his back staring at the sky. The heavens above were an endless pristine blue, save for a solitary white cloud. This cloud might have been interesting if it had bothered to form itself into suggestive shapes – maybe a face, maybe an animal, ideally a comedy penis – but it did not. Wayne’s imagination could just about transform it into ball of cotton wool, or, at a stretch, a sheep with its legs chopped off, but even that was an effort. It’s just a boring cloud, he told himself. He would continue to believe that for another six minutes.
Around him, the picnic crisis had already lasted twelve minutes and showed no signs of abating. Wayne’s father accused his mother of forgetting to bring napkins, while his mother charged his father with failing to remind her to bring napkins. Either way it didn’t matter; they argued and Wayne tuned them out.
He couldn’t tune out Levi. Wayne’s brother was aged zero and three quarters – a lifetime spent practising the scream currently knotting Wayne’s insides.
“Wayne, get Levi’s nappies from the car,” said his mother.
He ignored her.
“Wayne, your mother told you to get Levi’s nappies from the car,” said his father. “Of course, this assumes your mother remembered to bring them.”
She sighed. “Unfortunately we have to rely on the vagaries of my memory when the man of the family refuses to take responsibility for remembering anything.”
Wayne made a big deal of getting to his feet. He huffed loudly and stomped over to the car. He fetched the bag of soon-to-be-soiled underwear from the back seat and returned to the picnic. Levi’s face was bright red and screwed up – angry lines replacing eyes, with a gaping, toothless hole instead of a mouth. Wayne wanted to take one of the nappies and shove it in there, muffling the cries until a deathly peace stole over the baby’s face. But he knew he couldn’t do it. His parents would probably shout at him for a whole year if he did, because they didn’t understand how rubbish life had become since Levi turned up.
Wayne petulantly threw the bag of nappies at his mother’s feet. She was too busy attending to his squealing brother to notice, while his father was too busy trying to work out which cellophane-wrapped pack of sandwiches didn’t contain those evil cucumber slices that caused him to break out in hives.
Wayne wandered off.
During the drive to the remote picnic site, his father claimed this was God’s own country. Wayne could see no sign of God here, just verdant meadows and purple heather carpeting gently rol
ling hills. Maybe God had been in attendance, once upon a time, a long time ago, but then got bored; forsaking this land to go home and play video games. Wayne wanted to do the same. Trudging across picturesque peak and dale was no match for shooting monstrous invaders and fleeing explosions in a brown and gray industrial dystopia. The only game played here was by competing breezes that sent rippling waves chasing back and forth across the oceans of grass.
“We’ll be eating in a minute,” called his father.
“Yes, don’t go too far,” added his mother.
Wayne started walking again. He crested a rise and continued down a slope until his family was lost from view. Levi’s cries grew fainter.
A dry stone wall lay at the bottom of a valley. Wayne headed toward it, intent on dismantling the masonry until he saw a flash of light just beyond. He held up a hand against the glare and squinted. It was a puddle reflecting the sun, except… it was moving.
He cantered down the hillside and scaled the dry stone wall to stand on top. Some fifty feet distant, a small pond slid slowly across an unkempt field. It left no sign of damp in its wake. The bumps and mounds of the terrain disappeared as it passed over them, only to reappear once it had moved on.
Wayne looked around for an explanation. There was no sign of life; the wind whispering in ears drowning out the distant Levi and any birds that may have been singing. There was no sign of mirrors or machines or anything made by the hand of man in the last hundred years. His only company was the solitary white cloud drifting overhead.
Wayne stared up at it, then down at the itinerant pond. They looked to be moving at the same pace. It was as if the water lay in the shadow of the cloud and as the cloud drifted across the sky…
He jumped down from the wall and walked cautiously after the peculiar shadow. It approached a hillside. Wayne half-expected to see the water flow upwards, but instead steel-grey rocks rose up the slope, while the water remained on the flat, becoming grass once more when the shadow moved on.
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