Blind Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  Again, the old man laughed. “Indeed, that would be eons ago. You catch me up.”

  “Where was your first church, Father?” she asked.

  “Small, out-of-the-way hamlet, really. Nothing to speak of. To the north and east of London.”

  “Really?”

  “Bury St. Edmunds, wasn't it, Father?” asked Martin.

  “Quite .. . quite right.”

  Jessica had heard the name of the town in connection with someone else, victim number one, the schoolteacher. A co­incidence? Great Britain was, after all, an Island Kingdom. Martin Strand was pushing the plate of crumpets before her, pleading with her to try one.

  “Really, I'm stuffed from dinner. Filet mignon is so filling,” she replied, taking only tea and sipping lighdy. For a moment, she caught the two men staring at her. Recalling what Sharpe had said of Strand's past, she blurted out, “I understand you worked hard to get to and through the semi­nary, Father Strand.”

  “I was determined, decided on the clergy at an early age, yes.”

  “Strand worked the roughest of jobs, on the docks, as a lengthsman. Mapmaker, too, weren't you, Martin?” The old man sounded proud of his young charge. “All with a single aim, a single determination. Not everyone can point to that, Martin.”

  “My word, Father, you'll have me blushing.”

  “Sorry, if I've made you uncomfortable,” Jessica found her­self apologizing to Strand. “People in my line of work are snoops. It's what we do for a living, and after so many years of experience, we get so good at it, that we upset people,” she added, smiling.

  “You're a bit off, however,” he corrected Jessica with a smile of his own. He seemed an Adonis, handsome, strong, filled with light and energy. “You see, I worked to accumulate enough to follow my ambition. I never intended any other career choice. All else amounted to a part-time thing.”

  “You did wonderful work, however, Martin. I recall that letter you showed me from the RIBA people, the Royal In­stitute of British Architecture,” Luc Sante explained. “Housed not too very far from here, actually, over on Portland.”

  “Right you are again,” Strand said to Luc Sante. “The old boys' club, and the old boys want to keep their maps and information up to date. It was an interesting job, for the most part. Got me round the city.”

  “And past many a DIVERSION sign, I'm sure,” Jessica added. “Would you know of any old mine shafts running below the city, say any ancient ones?” She pressed a meta­phorical button, awaiting his reaction, but his expression could not be read, nor his body language. He gave nothing away.

  “Just how ancient?” Luc Sante wondered aloud.

  “My territory was confined, for the most part, to the Maryle-bone area, and no, I found no shafts you'd categorize as an­cient, I'm afraid.”

  “How ancient?” again Luc Sante wished to know.

  “Roman times ancient. Anything pre-dating Christ, say.”

  “No, I don't believe so,” said Strand, laughing now. He then apologized with a compliment. “We seldom to never see anyone so smart or pleasant looking as you here. Dr. Coran, so you will forgive my staring back at you?”

  Luc Sante instantly bolstered the apology, saying, “We deal in derelicts here mostly, aside from the regular congregation, made up of the usual good, simple, caring folk and the oc­casional politician!” He stopped to stomp a foot and to laugh. “If not physical derelicts, derelicts of the soul. Most of these have given in to some form of addiction or other. Hence Fa­ther Strand's near nightly groups. So, you must forgive our staring at a whole person such as yourself, Dr. Coran.”

  She snickered at the characterization of herself as whole. Strand interrupted, “There is the matter we spoke of earlier. Father, that is still left hanging, sir.”

  Jessica's antennae went instantly up and at the ready.

  Luc Sante's face dropped in an enormous and sullen frown as he replied, “Later, Martin.”

  “It is much later now, sir.”

  Luc Sante smiled across at Jessica. “Church business,” he explained.

  “Bills,” Strand clarified. He then said in as stem a voice as Jessica had heard in the building, “With all due respect, sir, perhaps, sir, if you weren't so busy with police matters—my pardons to you, Dr. Coran—your psychiatric practice, and book writing, then the bills would be paid on time.”

  The old man grimaced at Strand and smiled at Jessica in one fluid motion of the mouth, eyes and forehead, and then he asked Jessica, “Are you aware how the British preface with that phrase 'with all due respect,' Dr. Coran?” He pushed on. “It means, when translated, 'I have lost all due respect for you!' “

  “Now that's not fair. Father,” Strand immediately defended himself. “I am concerned we do not close our doors like so many others have had to do in recent times.” The bills will always be with us, Martin. But how long will we have Dr. Coran's company?”

  “Yes, sir. If you say so, Father.” With that Strand left them alone.

  “The boy worries too much,” Luc Sante said with a spry grin. “Now, to the case. The hellhound is afoot, Watson,” he teased in his best Sherlockian tone.

  For the next half hour, he and Jessica reviewed every aspect of the case together, the old man giving her his perspective on the tongue branding, as well as the coal, the dark wood fibers, and the beetle scrappings found on the victims. He called the tongue branding a cult identity ceremony. “It likely marks her as a cult member. She may well have willingly volunteered to die for the cult.”

  Jessica thoughtfully considered this possibility. “The idea has, of course, crossed my mind that all the victims may well have belonged to some bizarre cult with strange rituals, but your confirmation means a great deal. Still, I had not, until you spoke of it, considered the victims of these serial killings as willing participants in their own deaths.... Yet it makes perfect sense, at least in theory. Still, I have trouble believing that a group of people could so easily be of one mind.”

  “The group mind is powerful, Jessica,” he countered. “We know this! In fact, we humans are in possession of so much hard evidence about ourselves on this issue, but we fail to use it to improve our institutions and our lives.”

  “Are you talking about how the underlying assumptions of our institutions, our groups, are never questioned?”

  “More than that. Nothing is acted upon even when it is questioned and found wanting.”

  “Knowing that groups control individuals, why can't we make the leap to a kind of scientific, objective stance that will allow us to ... to .. . what?”

  'To admit it—that our lives are controlled by the group mind! Examine it in all of its dynamic, and organize our at­titudes accordingly.”

  “If we understand the animal, why can't we change him?” she asked, sipping more tea.

  “Precisely. We can no longer have the luxury of simply pulling out the underpinnings, the assertions and assumptions that govern our species, but we must discuss them, notice every particular of them, the main one being that we are gov­erned by the group mind, a thing intensely resistent to change, suggestion, addition or subtraction, a thing equipped with sa­cred assumptions about which there can be no discussion. Can you forsee a day when this sort of irreverence to the group mind is taught in schools? The school itself is founded on the group mind, so no—never! Yet it is through our young and those who constandy challenge the status quo that we pro­gress, if we are to evolve at all as a species ...”

  He then laid out before her a series of ancient books with illustrations of men, women, even children who, for the greater glory of their god had accepted, blindly followed, and willingly stepped up to an altar of sacrifice, to be beheaded, to have their hearts torn from them, some to have their blood drained, others pinned to crosses and burned at the stake.

  “Even Joan of Arc, in the last analysis, sacrificed herself to God in not recanting her faith. Our victims may have died for their faith.”

  Jessica tried to imagine the five
crucified victims as willing accomplices in their own torturous deaths.

  “It is a possibility,” he finished, closing the book on St. Joan of Arc.

  “She listened to the voice of God in her head, too,” Jessica said.

  “Or her subconscious, if you wish to think in more scien­tific terms. Either way, she held firm to her faith, however blind it appeared to the authorities who burned her at the stake.”

  Time growing late, Jessica said she must go. She hadn't eaten Strand's goodies or finished her tea, and she felt a bit woozy, exhausted from the long, tedious day and now the exhalted conversations with Father Luc Sante. He called for a cab, and she said she could find her way out, preferring to wait in the open air. She'd suddenly begun to feel claustro­phobic and warm all over, feverish. She knew she'd shared too much wine with him.

  On leaving, Jessica met a strange-eyed pair of creatures with gray-and-orange hair whom Luc Sante, having followed Jessica out, introduced as recent converts, a pair of twins. The twin women, up in years, perhaps in their late fifties, smiled vacantly at Jessica who towered over their twisted frames. Luc Sante gave their names as Miss Caroline Houghton and her sister, Juliana Houghton, “Both of whom do volunteer work in the church, and both of whom are repaid in psycho­therapy sessions,” he explained, adding in light jest, “A bar­gain for both in the barter.”

  The two women each stared vacuously at Jessica as if she were a wax figure in London's infamous Wax Museum of horrors.

  Luc Sante, after fondly bidding the twins good night, took Jessica aside to explain that the twins had been traumatized as children by their parents, actual witnesses to multiple mur­ders, a case involving torture and sodomy. The children had been made to watch by their parents. 'True evil,” he tells her. “Forgive them—the parents, I mean, long since dead. Dying without knowing God. That is the ultimate purgatory.”

  While Luc Sante remained in mid-explanation of the strange twins, Jessica stared over his shoulder at the huge, beautifully sculpted wooden crucifix depicting Jesus mounted on the cross behind Luc Sante's pulpit. The eyes radiated a painful, suffering life, the color along the throat and torso draining before her. She imagined His death. The prolonged agony of the physical realities, yes, but even more so the prolonged suffering of realizing that he had been so absolutely and thoroughly betrayed, so ultimately alone, left there not only by His race and followers but by God Himself. Betrayed in the sense that even had God foretold the event, nothing could have prepared Jesus for the sense of abandonment at the moment of crucifixion. She wanted to crawl up onto the cross herself, right this moment, meld into the sculpted form and become Jesus, to see, feel, smell from Him, to touch and feel and hear from within Him, to fully and absolutely believe, comprehend, and embrace her faith. But that remained im­possible; no one could become Jesus.

  Her eyes trailed downward to the sculpted, bloody feet where Luc Sante stood every Sabbath to sermonize at the huge, gilded pulpit before an array of candles. She imagined the power and craft of Luc Sante's sermons, the sway he must hold over his congregation, wondered how different it was from the control the Crucifier held over his victims in the end. She felt compelled to tell him, “One of these days, I'm going to come to hear one of your sermons, Father.”

  “As well you must,” he agreed.

  Her eyes traveled back up to Jesus.

  Luc Sante watched her stare, realizing she'd become cap­tivated by the crucifixion art behind his pulpit. He stopped to stare up at it as well. “It was done in the thirteenth century, an obscure Italian artist... so realistic ... Studied under Le­onardo's disciples, but I think he went with a touch of Donatello, don't you agree?”

  “Lovely workmanship, yes, and so large, overwhelming to the emotions. So ... so real.”

  “Indeed. Step to your right, watching the eyes the entire time.”

  She did so and found the experience of Christ's eyes as depicted by the artist unnerving. They followed her.

  “Now to your left.”

  Again, the eyes followed her.

  Luc Sante, smiling, announced, “I know what you're think­ing.”

  “You do?”

  “That a replication such as this, seen by a madman, a ma­niac, such as our Crucifier, that such artwork could ... Well, it could be the catalyst to move a man from merely fantasizing a thing to actually committing a horrid act.”

  “Such as murder by crucifixion?”

  He nodded. “And you're right. But what would you have we churchmen do? Lay a canvass across every crucifixion scene in the city? Yes, the sick mind might contemplate such a work of art and begin to hear messages from it, hear Jesus' own voice telling him to go and take lives, to sacrifice life to the Son, but can we truly blame such an aberrant reaction on the artwork itself? I think not.”

  “The mind is already sick that looks on such art and takes away with it a purpose for murder. I see your point.” . “You look extremely tired, my child. There are rooms in the building, if you'd care to lie down. I could secure a blan­ket, a pillow. You look a bit pale.”She managed a smile. “No, no. It's not far to the hotel, and you've already called the cab. I'll be fine.”

  After saying good-bye to Father Luc Sante, she left his cathedral and thoughtlessly leaned against one of the enor­mous stone buttresses supporting the cathedral wall, thinking Father Luc Sante right. She didn't realize how ill she'd ac­tually felt until Father Luc Sante had remarked on her pale­ness. She looked down at her body, which seemed independent of her, and she realized that she'd dirtied her white evening gown thanks to the smut on the cathedral walls. The stain formed a small black bat, an awful, black smudge, like a coal smudge.

  Without warning, her mind suddenly raced out of control. Ruined-forever-stained! Nothing-to-wear or be-done; you-can salvage or restrain! Relinquish-any-now-moment with hind­sight's 20/20, a-hole-in-the-whole-wonder-king-think-thing, but-useless-in-last-analysis-of-performance... Art, Arthur. Yes, her-smudging-the-virginal-gown-again ... Against St. Alban's coal-grimed-walls. .. this exhaulted-body-soul-raiments and remnants and remainders to-level-of-performance. .. art. Art, Arthur. . . King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table, Knights, night 's-Templers. She had become art.. .

  What the hell's going on inside my head? she wondered. Why are my thoughts racing into one another, out of control?

  For some reason, she felt light-headed, dizzy even, and she recalled a warning from her friend. Donna LeMonte, before traveling here. Donna warned, “Careful... Watch out for the sherry. English sherry and wine are potent indeed.”

  She felt strands of her hair tickling each cheek. She'd done it up properly, and now it had come loose, and she feared she must look a fright, her long, auburn curls like snake ringlets. Then for reasons she litde understood, she recalled Sharpe's having said that half or more of the older structures in the city still used coal for heating, and that much of London's famous or infamous fog came about via the accumulation of coal dust hovering above London from the burning furnaces and destructors—incinerators—in the oldest sections of the city. She knew that St. Albans certainly fell under that cate­gory, being near Golders Green in the Marylebone district.

  Still no cab. Who did the old man call? Did they have to build the cab from scratch? It's dark out here, she thought, one hand clutching the small bag she carried where her Smith & Wesson comfortably rested. For some reason she could not fathom, she felt a twinge of need, a twinge of fear—foolish subconscious, intuitive thread of unreasonable fear. Yet as Luc Sante said, the subconscious knew all.

  She couldn't stand still. She felt an enormous energy bat­tling a desire to lay prostrate here on the darkened church steps where she might easily sleep. Between the insomnia and the case, she hadn't been getting must... no much ... no any rest, and toss, no turn, no push, no pile on the red, red wine ... the blood of Christ... the crumpets ... the wafer ... the body of Christ...

  Holding firmly to the stone stairwell, feeling the eyes of the army of gargoyles atop St. Alban
s like so many birds of prey, waiting for her to stumble and become theirs, Jessica forced herself down to street level where she paced catlike, fighting her sudden disorientation and enormous desire for sleep, until her pacing left her standing before an alleyway. A noise in the alley alerted her. A look down the alleyway beside the cathedral and the small noise became a train rum­ble, and then the pounding of mad hooves. In the cloak of black shadow, a half block away, at the back of the cathedral, a huge coal truck downloaded its contents onto a rattling metal conveyor, the cathedral literally eating up the tons of coal fed it. “My God,” she exclaimed aloud, her mind still at racehorse speed, “the killers could be in any underground cellar in the city. It's virtually impossible to pinpoint the actual murder site. Certainly not without more clues.” Now the bastards have me talking to myself, she thought. Further had her ask­ing, Just where in St. Albans does the coal bin lead?

  Her mind suddenly settled, but her stomach felt a quivering nausea. A cab turned a comer and slowly made its way toward her. She mentally chastised herself for even momentarily sus­pecting Father Luc Sante and his grand cathedral of hiding the darkest secret in recent English history along with its coal.

  She felt a surge of unremitting self-hatred, the disgust tak­ing on a brilliantly red hue; she couldn't help being angry with herself for being so damnably cynical. Hadn't she for­merly suspected Richard?

  The cabby's sudden barking question, “Do ya want a ride or not, lass?” broke her from her reverie. She hurriedly climbed into the cab, inhaled its stale, cigarette-sodden inte­rior, and asked to be taken to the York.

  “Aye, just down from the Savoy,” muttered the heavyset driver to himself as if to re-familiarize himself with the area into which he must forge. She looked back at St. Albans as the cab pulled away. In the darkness, the gargoyles had gone from their appointed posts, no doubt wandering purposefully in search of their enemies.

  In the lonely backseat of the musty, smelly cab, even as she rolled the window down, catching London's damp night air, she recalled what Richard Sharpe had told her about paranoia: Sometimes a healthy dose of paranoia was called on by the subconscious for good reason; that sometimes those you thought were out to get you, were indeed out to get you. For some reason, this night, she had felt as if a thousand eyes had watched her, or one huge eye, the eye of some unknow­able, mysterious, inscrutable god.