by Stan Mason
‘And what about the final effort?’ Hamilton searched their faces to test their reaction.
‘Simple!’ uttered Reilly, seemingly taking charge of the operation. ‘We snatch our adversary from his home, put him into the back of a van, and drive him to Trigger’s Marsh. We’ll need a ladder to help us place him on the cross. One of us will have to nail his hands and feet to it.’
Brown almost reeled when he thought of having to drive nails through the man’s flesh. ‘Who’s going to do that?’ he asked fearfully knowing that he lacked the courage to do it.
‘I will,’ declared Reilly with the bit between his teeth. ‘All you’ll have to do is to hold him up. It’ll only take five minutes to secure him to the cross. We return the ladder to the van and throw our adversary’s clothes away near to the cross before disappearing into the night.’
‘There’s one thing you haven’t thought of,’ cut in their host bluntly. ‘Our adversary is bound to put up a fight. He won’t let us take him without some kind of resistance. You haven’t accounted for that.’
Reilly thought for a moment before responding. ‘Ah, well we’ll take a baseball bat when we go to his home. One hard strike on the head will put him out for about twenty minutes. He’ll be out like a light.’
‘What if he’s not along when we go to his house?’ enquired the photographer, visualising all kinds of horrors in advance. ‘What if he’s not alone?’
Reilly smiled momentarily. ‘We’ll be wearing woollen masks. The element of surprise will be enough to counter any resistance, especially if we all carry baseball bats.’
‘You sound very confident,’ uttered Hamilton inhaling deeply. The seriousness of the situation and the definite designs of their plans began to loom large and they sent a spasm of fear racing through his body. Talking about assassination was one thing, carrying it out was another. They were Christian people discussing plans to end another person’s life... to murder someone with whom they disagreed! It went very much against the grain, against the conscience... against the faith! Yet they were planning it and they intended to carry it out. He swallowed hard, plucking up courage to ask one last question. ‘When do we do it?’
‘Tomorrow,’ stated Reilly astutely. ‘I’ve got the wood we need so I can erect the cross at the old barn this evening. I’ll also fetch the ladder, the nails and the hammer. We’ll meet here at eight-thirty and go to our adversary’s house. I presume you can both find woollen masks.’ The other two men stared at him bleakly, neither one of them wishing to be involved in the project, yet bother of them were committed despite their unwillingness to compromise their religious principles. Reilly looked at them inquisitively. ‘Is this plan acceptable to us all? There’s no point in ranting on about it if we can’t arrive at some agreement.’
‘I agree,’ responded Brown, trying not to show his reluctance although his ulcer had started up at the mere though of his participation in the plan.
Hamilton nodded slowly. ‘I suppose it’s the only option available to us at present. Of course we could employ someone else to kill him.’
‘Strike while the iron is hot, David,’ pressed Reilly feeling anger welling-up inside him. ‘We’ve already had two people who tried their hand at it and both failed. They tried to do it on their own. This time there’s three of us. We’ll do it together.’
Despite further questions and a slight degree of opposition, the die was cast. Brown and Reilly left the house intending to return at eight-thirty on the following evening.
The next day was filled with doubt and indecision for Hamilton and Brown. They considered their plight to be self-inflicted and both felt that they had been pushed into it by their colleague. They contemplated on what had induced them to agreed to crucifying a man in cold blood and leaving him to die out in the cold. There was no sense in it for anyone who followed the Christian faith but that was how it had been left!
They arrived at Hamilton’s house at the appropriate time. Brown strolled almost two miles to get there believing that if he walked he wouldn’t have to take his vehicle. Therefore no one could ever trace his car to Hamilton’s house by CCTV or otherwise. He was determined to be extremely cautious. Reilly drove up in his van without such concerns. Then the three of them climbed into the vehicle, with two ladders tied to the roof-rack which was driven directly towards Warrior’s home. They climbed out of the van, put on their woollen face masks and carried their baseball bats to the front door. Reilly knocked on the door and, within a few moments, Warrior appeared. Reilly swung the baseball bat in his hand swiftly with force, striking the messenger a hard blow to the temple. Warrior collapsed in a heap and the three men carried him quickly to the van, bundling his body inside Hamilton and Brown climbed into the back with him while Reilly dived into the driver’s seat, staring the engine and driving off at speed. It had all been so quick... so simple... without any resistance... and no one else to see them. They had accomplished the most difficult part of the plan with comparative ease. Their adversary had been knocked out and was laying prostrate in the van with them. The two men began to strip him of his clothes and by the time they reached Trigger’s Marsh he was naked. Warrior appeared to be in a very poor state as they carried him out of the van. His breathing was shallow, his face extremely wan, and he was still unconscious.
‘I think he’s dead,’ wailed Brown, his body shaking with fear.
‘Nonsense!’ spat Reilly sharply. ‘He just took a knock on the head, that’s all! He’s all right.’
They stumbled with the body across the rough ground as they carried it to the cross. Hamilton switched on a powerful torch while Reilly placed the first ladder against the cross and climbed up it.
‘Hold him up which I nail his hand,’ ordered Reilly to the photographer.
Brown struggled to lift the body as high as he could with the help of Hamilton. There was the sound of the hammer striking metal and then Reilly climbed down the ladder before moving it to the other side. He climbed up it again and within a few moments managed to secure the other hand. Then he dropped to the ground to do the same to the messenger’s feet. When he had finished, they all moved away and shone the torch on the body to examine their work. Warrior was well and truly impaled on the cross... his hands and feet nailed securely to it exactly the same as had happened to Jesus Christ. A trickle of blood appeared where the nails had been driven home and the messenger’s head fell forward on to his chest as he remained in a state of unconsciousness.
‘Well, gentlemen!’ declared Hamilton triumphantly, ‘we’ve done it! We’ve eliminated our adversary. And there’s no woman around to burn us to death!’
‘We should have done this at the start,’ retorted Reilly. ‘Come on! Let’s get out of here! He ought to be dead by morning if he’s not dead now. The first cars will see him in the morning and then someone will contact the police.’
They removed Warrior’s clothing from the van and tossed them aside, returned the ladder, the hammer and the nails to its interior, and then climbed into the van to drive off.
‘What about fingerprints?’ enquired Brown in hindsight as they sped down the highway., angry at himself for having thought about it after the crime had been committed.
‘I’m wearing gloves, you fool!’ snapped Reilly. ‘You didn’t think I’d forget something like that, did you?’
Brown looked at him sheepishly. ‘No... of course not!’ he replied, his heart beating at a rate of knots. He mentally thanked God that it was all over.
Early in the morning, the police received a telephone call from a motorist who had seen the body fixed to the cross at Trigger’s Marsh. The police sent two officers in a car to investigate the report to find Warrior crucified on the cross. He was stone dead having died from the effects of a fractured skull received from the baseball bat which had struck him. The police were completely baffled by the crime, never having experienced anything
quite like it before.
Parraduine rued the loss of his suspect. He had hoped to be able to pin some crime on the man in due course. Paramedics removed the body while forensic scientists tested the cross for fingerprints however none could be found. The only marks visible were footprints but they were too general to be able to provide any clues due to the dry dust which existed there. The police came to the conclusion that some high-minded Christians had taken umbrage at Warrior’s message and his ultimate success and they had taken the law into their own hands to eliminate him. There had to have been a group of them to be able to hold up the body while the nails were hammered in to his hands and feet. In the absence of any evidence and without anyone coming forward to admit their participation in the crime, or to point the finger at someone else who was responsible, there was never any chance of finding those who had murdered the man. It was clearly a religious killing of an ultimate kind... one which would never be solved!
There was no one else to take the messenger’s place. Maidley and Guildenstern were more than dismayed when they heard the news. They could hardly believe it. Stephen Warrior was dead... crucified on a cross exactly the same way as Jesus Christ! They were determined not to give up the cause even though they were not privileged to receive the visions. They intended to continue the message in the same way that Christ’s disciples had done, and they departed to spread the word elsewhere. Rebecca was absolutely distraught. Her lover had been deliberately murdered in a most cruel way. She had been sitting in the lounge with him when someone had knocked on the door. Warrior had insisted on answering the call and that was the last she saw of him. All she could say was that she heard the sound of a vehicle being driven off. She was puzzled by his disappearance and had waited all night for him to return. It was only when Parradine visited her on the following morning that she learned of his fate. After a while, she went into a deep shock. She couldn’t cry... no tears came to her eyes. His death was something she would never overcome. There were few men like him in the world... able to carry their convictions through to the end despite all opposition.
However, if Warrior had a question to ask before he died, it would have inquired what happened dot Xantha Vesta when he really needed her protection. She was nowhere to be seen at the moment he had died. She had let him down and, without her assistance, he had perished!
Chapter Seventeen
As a strange light shone brilliantly through the celestial kingdom, a number of Gods and Goddesses were invited to the main hall by Magester. After they arrived, the ruler of the Gods sat at the head of the table looking quite terrifying as he perched on his magnificent throne to stare fiercely at those is attendance. The large seats around the polished table were the Gods of the Sun, of War, of the Earth and the Wind, as well as the Goddesses of Flora, of Hope and of Faith. When everyone was seated, the ruler of the Gods smashed his fist hard down on the table and waited until the echoes stopped reverberating around the hall before he began the meeting.
‘I’ve called you all here to discuss the matter of Planet Earth,’ he boomed out in an austere voice which rang throughout the hall. ‘It’s a thorn in our side! We’ve let it slip away over the past two thousand years. It was negligence on our part but far too late to apportion blame now. We sent the God of Architecture to the planet many aeons ago and he reported that the people were in an early form of development. After that we lost sight of our position.’
‘It’s only to be expected,’ cut in Zolicus, the God of the Sun. ‘There are so many galaxies it’s practically impossible to attend to them all.’
‘We have worlds without end in the firmament,’ expressed Aramenta, the Goddess of Fauna. ‘How can we be expected to cope with them all?’
‘We are Gods with great enormous powers!’ Magester reproached her coldly. ‘The fact that we serve worlds without end is not the issue here. We’re talking about the Planet Earth. Many aeons ago, Merimara, our Goddess of Faith, taught them to pray to us. They were praying to us and we protected them. And then we took our eye off the ball. There came various prophets who claimed that there was on single God and this has prevailed over the past two millennium. Now most mortals pray to that one single God even though he doesn’t exist in the celestial kingdom. We appointed a messenger to advise the people to start praying to us but his life has been taken and he is no more.’
They all fell silent for a short while and then Ornorius, the God of the Wind, reopened the proceedings. ‘What do you suggest we do?’ he asked in a quiet voice staring directly at the ruler of the Gods. ‘Do we appoint one or more messengers or should we destroy the planet? They’re advance substantially in weaponry sufficient to destroy the planet themselves, especially with the help of the God of War..’
Kaledhon, the God of War, nodded his head. ‘I’d be delighted to do so,’ he told them flatly. ‘If that’s what you want.’
The ruler of the Gods pulled a face which showed how indecisive he was about the matter. ‘They murdered our messenger. If we sent more, they would murder them too.’
‘I understand there are eight billion people living on that planet,’ ventured Heladia, the Goddess of Health. ‘Can we afford to ignore or lose all those people if we destroy it?
Magester stared at them grimly. He clasped his hands together, deep in thought, and then came to a decision.
‘Very well!’ he boomed finally. ‘We’ll give the mortals one more chance. I’ll permit the two henchmen of the messenger to witness our visions and expect them to transfer the message to the people on Earth. If not, the matter passes to Kaledhon for him
to deal with and, as we all know, there’s nothing worse than to face the wrath of the God of War.’ He rammed his fist down on to the table so that the room echoed after the blow and shouted: ‘The Gods state it shall be so!’
That’s how the matter ended in the celestial kingdom. It was left to the people on Earth to decided their own fate. They he the option of praying to the Gods and Goddesses or not to do so if they wished. However, if they failed to comply, it was at their own peril. There would be war, doom and destruction conducted by the God of War and everyone would perish. It would happen in time and only time would tell!
Also Available
