The Devil's Labyrinth

by John Saul

  Father Sebastian clicked the remote control and the woodblock was replaced by a vividly painted image of a man tied to a post in a harbor, gray seas behind him, howling in terror as the tide came in to drown him.

  Ryan’s gaze shifted to the empty notebook on his desk. He’d heard at breakfast that since Father Sebastian had started teaching it, Catholic History was one of the most popular courses at the school, and now he knew why. The images of the Inquisition that he’d just seen had seared Father Sebastian’s accompanying words in his memory with no need for any notes at all.

  “Historians have said that the Inquisition was about persecuting Jews and Muslims,” Father Sebastian said. “But that is not the case at all. The Jews and Muslims had already been exiled by the secular Spanish government. What made the Inquisition necessary was that not all of them left. Some stayed, pretending to have converted to Christianity.” The image on the screen changed again. Now Ryan was looking at a highly realistic picture of a man in a tall red hat decorated with an ornately embroidered cross, who was sitting on some kind of throne while an executioner ran a sword through a peasant’s throat.

  Ryan felt his throat constrict as he gazed at the dying man.

  “The purpose of the Inquisition was not to persecute Jews and Muslims, but rather to root out and expel those who found it suddenly convenient to become Catholic. The subjects of the Inquisition were the hypocrites who professed our faith only to protect their worldly assets.” He paused, his eyes sweeping the small classroom as the screen went blank. “Questions?”

  Almost to his own surprise, Ryan found his hand going up.

  “Ryan?”

  “I—I was just wondering—” he stammered.

  Father Sebastian cut off his words with an uplifted arm. “This is St. Isaac’s,” he said, smiling almost ruefully. “I’m afraid we’re not like public school. Here we stand when we speak.”

  Ryan felt his face burn. He wasn’t even quite sure how to ask his question, but he got to his feet and cleared his throat. “I guess I was just wondering how they thought they could tell if a person was lying about converting? I mean, won’t people say anything at all if you torture them enough?”

  “Of course they will,” Father Sebastian said, as Ryan sank back to his seat. “As many of the inquisitors quickly came to understand. But we’re not talking about the efficacy of the methods here; merely the purity of the motivation.”

  Another hand went up. Father Sebastian nodded at a stocky red-haired boy. “Sam?”

  The boy stood as Ryan sank back into his chair. “But it doesn’t matter what the motivations were, does it? In the end, didn’t the Inquisition make the Muslims and Jews think that the Christians were out to exterminate them? Isn’t that one of the reasons they still think that?”

  Father Sebastian nodded. “Absolutely right. It’s unfortunate that the Church is still feeling the fallout of the Inquisition, especially considering how long ago it ended. Even worse, its true purpose has been all but lost to secular historians, who always seem to unfairly ascribe the darkest motives to any actions motivated by religion.” As the bell signaled the end of class, Father Sebastian stepped back behind his desk. “Read pages 147 to 176 and remember the test on Friday.”

  Ryan stared at the priest. A test on Friday? Even if he could read the whole textbook by then—which he was pretty sure he couldn’t—he still wouldn’t be ready for a test on Friday. It wouldn’t be fair—he’d only started the class this very day. Then he remembered Father Sebastian’s words about historian’s “unfairly” ascribing the worst motives to the Inquisition. The hollowness in his belly was suddenly replaced by hope. He closed his notebook, waited for most of the class to file out, then approached the priest as he was starting to put the projector away.

  “Father Sebastian?”

  The priest looked up, and Ryan instantly remembered the night Father Sebastian had come to see him in the hospital. There was a kindness in the priest’s eyes that Ryan had experienced from only one other person.

  His father.

  “Hey, Ryan,” Father Sebastian said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I—well, I was wondering if I have to take the test on Friday? I mean, I haven’t even opened the textbook yet.”

  The priest seemed to think for a moment, but then shook his head. “Everyone takes the test, Ryan. If you study, you’ll do fine. It’s not going to be that hard.” Father Sebastian scanned the emptying room, and he suddenly smiled. “How about if I give you a little extra edge?” Before Ryan could say anything, the priest raised his voice slightly. “Melody?”

  A pretty blond girl looked up from the book bag she was packing, and Father Sebastian crooked his finger at her. She glanced quickly behind her as if to make sure it was really she the priest wanted, then picked up her books and purse, and walked up to the front.

  “Melody Hunt, meet Ryan McIntyre. He’s a transfer student, and this is his first day of classes here. How about if you tutor him for this Friday’s test, and then maybe for another week or two, at least until he gets up to speed. Okay?” He turned back to Ryan. “Melody’s a fanatic note-taker. I have a feeling she knows more about this stuff than the guy who wrote the textbook.”

  Melody blushed slightly, then smiled uncertainly at Ryan. “I’ll try.”

  “That’s all any of us can do,” Father Sebastian said as he went back to the projector.

  As soon as they were out of the classroom, Melody’s smile faded, and she shuddered. “Those pictures were just horrible,” she said. “Why did he even show them to us?”

  Ryan barely heard her words. Instead he was focusing on the tiny pearl earrings and faint lip gloss that were just enough to make Melody look completely different from any of the other girls he’d seen so far. It was hard to look different from everybody else when everyone wore a uniform, but Melody had pulled it off. Suddenly he realized he was staring at her, and she knew he was staring at her, and he mentally scrambled to remember what she’d just said. “They were gross,” he agreed, feeling a flush rising in his cheeks. “They’d never show us anything like that in public school.”

  “Lucky you,” Melody sighed. “I’ve been stuck here since ninth grade. And my parents aren’t even very religious. They just think this is safer than public school. Want to go get lunch?”

  As Melody started down the corridor in exactly the opposite direction Ryan would have gone, he fell in beside her. “What about that guy Kip? Kip Adamson?”

  Melody stopped short and looked at Ryan. “What do you know about him?”

  “Not much,” Ryan replied. “Even though everyone in my dorm is talking about him, nobody knows what happened. And I’m in his room.”

  Melody’s face paled. “I don’t think I could do that,” she breathed. “I mean, how could you even sleep?”

  “I almost didn’t,” Ryan admitted. “So, did you know him?”

  Melody started down the hallway again. “Not really,” she began. “I mean, I sort of thought I knew him until he started getting weird. It was like he turned into some kind of lost soul. You know what I mean?”

  Ryan nodded, even though he wasn’t sure he did know what she meant, and once more fell in beside her. “So what happened to him?”

  “I don’t know, and I think I must have asked everybody in school,” Melody replied, her voice hollow. “In fact, my roommate’s getting really tired of me talking about him all the time.”

  Ryan offered her a lopsided grin. “So talk to me about him. I promise I won’t get tired of hearing you.”

  Melody flushed slightly, but didn’t turn away. “At first I thought he’d just left school, like Jeffrey Holmes.”

  Now it was Ryan who stopped short. “Jeffrey Holmes?” he repeated. “Who’s he?”

  “A guy who left in November. But he wasn’t like Kip. He hated it here, and after Thanksgiving he never came back.” Her eyes clouded, and Ryan wondered exactly what it was she was remembering, but the moment passed before he could ask.
“Anyway, we all thought that was what happened to Kip, too. We all figured he’d just taken off. Even Clay thought so.”

  They walked along in silence for a moment, and suddenly Ryan found himself asking Melody the same question he’d asked Clay late last night. “Did you hear anything last night? Like around midnight?”

  Melody glanced at him. “Hear what?”

  Ryan hesitated, but then blurted it out. “A scream.” He waited for her to laugh, but she didn’t.

  Instead, she rolled her eyes. “That’s just a stupid stunt,” she said. “Someone does it to every new student. They sneak far enough away from the dorm so they can barely be heard, then scream. The new person wants to know what it is, and is told that we have ghosts. Dumb, hunh?” Ryan nodded, glad he’d asked Melody instead of giving Clay and his friends an opportunity to elaborate on the joke at lunchtime. But then Melody’s expression turned serious. “But the weird thing is,” she went on, “every now and then you hear something like that and there aren’t any new students. And some of these buildings are hundreds of years old, and there are all kinds of stories about what they used to be used for.”

  The images from the Inquisition lecture immediately rose out of Ryan’s memory.

  Melody laughed. “There’s also supposed to be the ghost of some old nun that wanders around the school at night.”

  “Have you ever seen it?”

  Melody shook her head. “Of course not! Nobody I know has actually seen it themselves—everyone just knows someone who knows someone who saw it. Personally, I don’t think it’s a ghost at all. I think it’s Sister Mary David—God knows she’s old enough that she should be a ghost by now.” She giggled for a second, but then her expression clouded over again. “But who knows? Who really knows anything? I mean, we don’t even really know what happened to Jeffrey Holmes, do we?”

  “Or Kip,” Ryan added softly.

  Melody looked up at him, and he had the uncanny feeling he could fall right into the depths of her blue eyes. She nodded slowly. “Or Kip,” she agreed. “Who really knows what happened to either one of them?”

  CHAPTER 21

  DETECTIVE PATRICK NORTH strode down the long, sterile hallway, looking neither to the right nor to the left. He’d spent plenty of time in both the morgue and the medical examiner’s office over the years, but he’d never quite become inured to the aura of death—unnatural death—that hung over the place.

  Today, though, he had a mystery on his hands, and if he was going to solve it, he had to start here.

  He stopped in front of a nondescript door with an engraved brown Formica plaque with lettering every bit as nondescript as the material upon which it was printed:

  BENJAMIN BREEN, M.D.

  DISTRICT MEDICAL EXAMINER

  The door was ajar, and North heard a low monologue from inside. He tapped lightly on the door, then pushed the door all the way open and walked in.

  Ben Breen’s office barely contained the man, not to mention the stacks of paper, the overfull bookcase, the boxes filled with evidence envelopes, and all the detritus that littered the desk, and had spilled over onto the floor. Even the two plastic chairs that were ostensibly there for visitors had been pressed into service to help support the Medical Examiner’s vast collection of cases, reference material, coffee mugs, snack wrappers, and just plain junk. Breen also had a penchant for medical oddities and dark jokes: a skull served as his penholder and a dusty skeleton hung in one corner with a small teddy bear inside its chest. North had never asked the significance of the teddy bear, and never would.

  Breen clicked off his recorder and frowned as he tried to place the face before him, but his mind was on the report he’d been dictating.

  “Patrick North,” the detective sighed, resigning himself to having to introduce himself to Breen yet again. You’d think after ten years the man could at least remember his name. “Detective?” Breen still looked faintly puzzled, so North offered him another piece. “The Kip Adamson case?”

  Breen brightened. “Ah, yes,” he said, pulling himself up to his full six-foot-five-inch height, and then beginning a search through a file box on top of the file cabinet. “Thanks for coming down.”

  “No problem,” North said, wondering if the M.E. was even going to be able to find the report. “Thanks for calling.”

  “Here it is,” Breen said triumphantly, looking almost as surprised as North by how quickly he’d found what he was looking for. He opened the folder and sat back down at his desk. “Just move that crap onto the floor,” he said, waving vaguely at one of the chairs. “Sit yourself down.”

  North set a stack of papers by the door, making a mental note to return them to the chair when he left. Apparently Breen was one of those people who lived amid chaos but knew exactly where to look for any given thing.

  Breen flipped through several pages of typewritten notes and lab reports, then found the page he wanted. “Here it is,” he said. “Tox screen was negative.” He peered up at North. “No drugs, no alcohol. Death by close-range gunshot to the head.” He handed North a sheet of paper.

  “No drugs?” North pressed. It hardly seemed possible. He glanced at the copy of the official coroner’s report, but didn’t take the time to try to sort out all the technical language. “Did you test for all the new designer drugs? Is there something you could have missed?” Breen’s left eyebrow rose a fraction of an inch, a sure sign that he was not pleased at having his judgment questioned. “I mean, the thing is that this kid’s behavior was just so totally out of character. He’d gotten in trouble a couple of times, but as far as I can tell he was never violent. So unless he’d started using drugs, nothing makes sense at all. Can you run those tests again?”

  Breen dropped the file to the desktop, folded his hands on top of it, and looked directly at Detective North. “We’ve run the screens three times. We test for every known substance. The kid hadn’t eaten in probably twelve hours, but that’s all. Whatever was going on inside his mind, his body was squeaky clean when he attacked that woman.”

  North leaned forward slightly. “Then what the hell happened?”

  “Well, some people get a bit cranky when they’re hungry,” Breen observed. Then his tone changed, and he spread his hands helplessly. “Okay, I doubt it was the low blood sugar. Frankly, it looks to me like he just flipped out. It happens. Have you checked with his family doctor? Did he have a shrink?” He opened the file again to the front page. “He was at St. Isaac’s. Have you talked to his priest?”

  “No prior history, no shrink, priests won’t say much,” North said.

  Breen returned the file to the stack on his desk and leaned back in his chair, a sure sign that the interview was coming to an end. “Whatever happened to this boy stemmed from a disease of the mind, not the body,” Breen said. “Sorry I can’t be of more help.”

  North rose to his feet and shook hands with Breen across the desk, then left the office. He could hear the Medical Examiner resume dictating even before he’d closed the door, and remembered too late that he’d forgotten to replace the stack of papers on the chair. He paused for a moment, then continued down the hall, unwilling to have to reintroduce himself to Breen twice within ten minutes. Let him find his own damn files.

  As soon as he was back in his car, North called Kevin Peterson. “Well, so much for that,” he said when his partner came on the line. “No drugs—nothing. Which means we’re back to square one.”

  North hated square one.

  CHAPTER 22

  ABDUL KAHADIJA CLOSED and locked the door behind him. The simple act of escaping his daily ritual, setting aside this time for prayer, filled his heart with peace.

  He pulled down the window shade against the afternoon sun, and drew the heavy curtains, shutting out much of the city noise.

  Yes. Better.

  Much better.

  Quiet. Peaceful.

  He opened the closet, retrieved a box from the top shelf and set it on his bed. Slowly, reverently, he unpacked
his kufi and thobe, laying them out on the bed, then carefully put the ancient prayer rug on the floor, orienting it precisely toward Mecca.

  Next, he stripped off his clothes and entered the bathroom. With no time to bathe again completely, he began the cleansing ritual he followed five times each day.

  “In the name of Allah,” he said, then ran warm water over his hands.

  When cleansed three times from head to foot, he slipped into the gray, floor-length thobe and settled the white knit kufi on his head.

  He stood for a moment, facing Mecca, ready to offer his prayers to Allah. But he must still his mind first.

  The mission—the mission of ultimate vengeance—was at last approaching fruition, and the excitement of it interfered with his concentration.

  But it must not interfere with his prayers.

  He must not risk angering Allah, for this week at the mosque he would ask Allah to guide him to the one who could provide the last bit of information he required.

  His heart rate increased as he visualized it, standing silently, eyes closed. This quest was his: only he understood all the myriad details that made the plan possible.

  He must be infinitely careful, make not even the slightest mistake. Just one inappropriate word, a single glance or gesture, and years of planning would go to waste.

  That could not happen.

  He would not let that happen.

  Abdul’s left hand began to curl into a fist.

  He relaxed his hand. The moment for retribution had yet to come.

  This was the time for prayer and worship.

  This was the time to escape from the pain of life and sink into the arms of Allah and the blissful anticipation of all that Allah promises to the faithful.

  Taking a deep breath and putting all worldly matters aside, Abdul began. “I intend to offer two Rikat of Faird, Fajr prayer for Allah.”

  He assumed the qiyam posture, hands to his ears, and all thought vanished except the all-encompassing, fierce love for his god.

  “Allah u Akbar,” he whispered.