‘After I left the army, I got into some trouble,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t find work. I missed the routine the military had brought to my life. The discipline. So, I resorted to stealing, and I hurt some people. And after that, I deservedly went to prison.’
He glanced behind me, and then back.
‘But after I got out, I found God. I really found Him. Eventually, I even managed to get to the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. I saw the path Jesus walked on his way to the crucifixion. You gain an appreciation of what he had to endure when you visit those places.’ He paused. Dropped the scourge to his side. ‘And afterwards, you look at people differently. You look at yourself differently. You realize, if people could experience even a little of what he had to go through, they might have a greater appreciation of what they’ve been given in this life.’
I couldn’t think of anything but the pain now. Couldn’t force up any more anger. Couldn’t concentrate on his face. It felt like the skin was slipping away from my back. I lifted a hand, shaky like an old man, and touched my back. There was blood on my fingers.
‘Legion brought an idea to me one day. At first I thought it was a little… medieval. But then when I considered it some more I realized the kids we took in were exactly the sort of people I was thinking about when I visited Israel. Like me, they never appreciated what they’d been given in their first lives. The opportunity. But if they could get a taste of what Jesus went through, if they could carry around with them a reminder of that, maybe they’d appreciate life more the second time round.’
And then he turned the mirror.
I looked into the reflection.
Legion was standing in a double doorway behind me, dressed in black, like Andrew, but with a white butcher’s apron on.
I swallowed. Coughed. Hacked up saliva.
When I looked in the mirror again, Legion was a step closer, his mask up on the top of his head. He was the same man who had come up to me in the pub in Cornwall, except now he looked more manic. More frantic. As if on the cusp of something exciting. Something he had been desperate to do for a long time.
He glanced at Andrew and back to me and smiled, his tongue breaking through between a flat, lipless mouth.
His tongue.
I could see it now. Dark, almost crimson. Forked. His arms twitched and his legs spasmed, as if electricity was pumping through him.
‘Wait,’ I said quietly.
And then he stepped aside and I saw what was behind him.
Through the double doors was a small room, probably fifteen foot square, with very high ceilings. It was another fridge, but the walls were painted black. In the centre of the room, under a spotlight, almost touching the ceiling, was a huge wooden crucifix made from railway sleepers. At each end of the horizontal sleeper were handcuffs. Midway down the vertical sleeper was a footrest.
Legion stepped in closer again and grabbed the back of my chair, pouncing on it like the closing jaws of a bear trap. Then, slowly, he started to turn me around. The chair scraped across the floor, the legs catching, until I was side on to the mirror.
I turned my head and looked at my reflection.
‘What the fuck have you done to me?’
My back had been whipped with the scourge while I was knocked out, leaving thin slivers of pink skin, running in lines across my back, from the base of my neck to three-quarters of the way down my spine. The rest was just flesh.
‘He seems worried,’ Legion said, smiling.
Andrew nodded. ‘We all get like that at the end.’
Then Legion reached for the mask on top of his head and pulled it down over his face. And — as I desperately tried to move, tried to will myself to fight back — I felt a needle enter my neck again.
39
I felt the pain before anything else. From my neck, all the way down through my chest, into my groin and the top of my thighs. It felt like I’d been dropped into boiling hot water. My skin was on fire. Every movement of my chest, every expansion of my lungs, made it worse.
In the darkness, I could hear someone moving around. Footsteps, barely audible. And a squeak, rhythmic and soft, like the wheels of a trolley.
I opened my eyes.
My head was forward, against my chest. Gravity had forced it there. When I tried to straighten, to look around, agonizing prickles spread across my neck and back.
I breathed in.
I was handcuffed to the cross, five feet off the floor. The ceiling in the room was about three times as high. The soles of my feet were flat to the footrest and my arms outstretched either side of me. I was still only dressed in boxer shorts.
The room was cold. I wriggled the fingers on both hands, trying to get my circulation going. But the movement of the tendons sent a ripple all the way up my arms and into my shoulders. I sucked in as much air as I could for a second time, and closed my eyes.
Darkness. Solitude.
Then the squeak came again.
I opened my eyes. To my left, a metal trolley — the type used in operating theatres — moved into view. Legion’s fingers were wrapped around the handle. On top, in individual metal plates, a scalpel and a hammer sat next to two pencil-sized nails. Next to that was a third naiclass="underline" bigger, thicker, longer — like a rusting iron tube. It must have come from the sleeper itself.
As the trolley came to a stop, he spent a moment making minuscule adjustments to the position of the instruments on the plates, before slowly turning his head towards me. A long drawn-out movement, his eyes never blinking inside the mask.
He disappeared from view again. I tried raising my head, forcing back the pain, and could see the double doors into the next room, where I’d been sitting before. But now the doors were closed.
I looked left.
There was an aluminium stepladder leaning against the wall. Legion came back into view, picked up the stepladder and looked up at me. His eyes moved again, back and forth across my body, his tongue making a scratching sound against the inside of the mask. And then he placed the ladder underneath my left arm.
‘Why are you doing this?’ I said, looking down at him.
He didn’t respond. Instead, he picked up the scalpel and climbed to the second step of the ladder. As he leaned towards me, the mask stopping about a foot from my face, his odour started to fill the air, pouring off his body. Suddenly, he seemed more threatening. I looked down at the scalpel and back up to his eyes. The more dangerous a man, the more difficult it was for him to suppress the darkness in him. His smell was like an animal scent: a warning not to come close unless you were looking to get hurt.
‘Why are you doi—’
Lightning fast, he swiped the scalpel across my hip. I cried out, automatically trying to reach for the wound. My arm, tightly handcuffed, locked into place on the sleeper.
Legion descended the ladder again, his eyes dancing with enjoyment now. When he got down, he tossed the scalpel on to the trolley and looked up. Watched me for a moment. Enjoyed the sight of my face wincing. The pain started to spread out from the cut, across my skin, under it, into my muscles and bones.
He scooped up the hammer and the thinner nails, leaving the third, larger one on the tray. Then he started to climb the ladder again.
‘It’s amazing how much punishment the human body can take,’ he said, his voice short and sharp. More clipped than I remembered, like his mouth was full of glass. ‘The lengths it will go to in order to survive.’
At the top of the ladder, he glanced at me, lowering his head slightly. I imagined, behind the plastic, he was smiling. Enjoying this. Feeding off my pain. And I imagined his face — in that moment — wasn’t all that different to the one on the mask.