The jailers moved in and trussed up the prisoner the same way they had before. The pulley began its grisly song, halting after the prisoner’s bare feet had cleared the floor. One of the jailers left the chamber, returning immediately with a smoking bucket of red-hot coals, which he placed under the victim’s filthy, dangling feet. He knelt, took hold of the prisoner’s legs, and nodded to his partner, who gripped the rope and leaned backwards against the prisoner’s weight. Gradually, he eased off on the rope. The hanging man slowly descended. His feet went down into the bucket. Skin and fat sizzled and smoked.
The pitiful screams and wails, the squeak of the pulley, the thrum of the rope abruptly halting the body’s fall, the sickening crack of the dislocating of shoulder joints-all amid the nauseous stench of burned flesh-mingled to form a new definition of hell.
III
DISEMBODIED SCREECHES coming from somewhere above drew me away from my nightmare. I lay in my bed, wincing with each sharp cry. I stared at the ceiling, focused on the cracks in the plaster, willing myself to take hold of reality.
I looked out the window into a blue sky. Seagulls wheeled past, shrieking.
The morning sunlight washed away some of the dread in the wake of the dream. Think about it, I told myself. Don’t run away from it this time. But what could I conclude-besides that I had seen a man tortured a second time, and that the dream told me, the way dreams do, it was the same man? I had not seen his face, but I knew. Who was he? Who were the shadowed men behind the table presiding over the atrocity? Who were the jailers who had administered the torture with the detachment of clerks stocking grocery shelves? I had no answers.
All right, then. If not who, when and where? There were no clues as to location other than the stone construction of the damp cell. There was the smoky candle, the table’s rough-hewn planks, the men’s clothing, barely discernible in the three-quarter darkness. I recalled images of the men. Leather jerkins on the jailers, a long coat and soft hat on the man who reset the victim’s shoulders, hooded robes on the silent three. Whatever I had seen, it had happened long ago.
And there was the method of torture.
It was a place to start.
But did I want to start? If I began to investigate the dream, where would it lead? Nowhere good, I was sure. But I was-morbidly, it was true-curious. I felt like a kid sticking his head into a darkened cave just to see how big the dragon is.
MY STOMACH, still knotted by the nightmare, rebelled at the idea of breakfast, but I forced down a piece of toast and took a second cup of tea to my room and powered up my laptop. Before long my tour of online encyclopedias led me into a house of horrors offering lots of gruesomely illustrated techniques human beings have used over the centuries to inflict degradation and pain on each other.
There seemed to be two main reasons for torture-to force a confession or to extract information. “I confess to being a witch-or unbeliever, or terrorist, or heretic” was almost always followed with “Tell us the names of other witches-or unbelievers, or terrorists, or heretics.” Politics, war, and religion were the main theatres of torture. I had assumed that torture was a thing of the past, but it was still performed. Everywhere. And, I was shocked to learn, by everyone. Even the good guys. I didn’t want to think about where the churches and prisons and army camps recruited their torturers.
There was a grimly realistic pencil drawing of the grisly technique I had seen in my dream. It was called the strappado-Italian for “tear” or “rip.” The picture showed a woman accused of witchcraft hanging from the ceiling like a damaged moth, her arms up and behind, her feet weighed down by a heavy chain wrapped around her ankles. The strappado had been busy for centuries-in the Roman Catholic Inquisition, the Puritan Salem witch trials, the North Vietnamese prison camps in the 1970s, and today in the hunt for terrorists. The references said that the strappado was almost as “effective” as waterboarding, where the victim is tied to an inclined plank, head down, and water is poured into his mouth and nostrils, making him think he is drowning.
I logged off in disgust before I lost what faith in humanity I had left, and called Raphaella. Her voice was like spring water on a dry throat.
“I’ll pick you up in five,” I said. “Bring a smile with you.”
IV
WHEN I TURNED THE CORNER of her street, Raphaella was standing on the curb outside her house. Dressed in a mauve T-shirt and sky blue jeans, she was a bright splash of colour in a depressing morning. She climbed into the van and dumped her backpack on the floor. As I pulled away, I felt her eyes on me.
“No good-morning kiss today?” I asked.
“What’s happened?” was her reply. “You’re giving off vibes like a radar tower.”
“I’m fine. Hey, you look great.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“Mrs. Indeed will be impressed.”
She continued to fix me in her gaze. “You’ve had another dream,” she said.
“Yeah.”
She nodded. “Okay,” she added, as if we had come to some kind of decision. “Anything different this time?”
“A few more details. About the torture.”
“Let’s stop here for a bit.”
I slipped the van into one of the shaded parking spaces near the Champlain monument in the park. We got out and strolled to a bench on a grassy patch by the lake. Across the water to the north, Wicklow Point, densely cloaked in maples and willows, hooked into the bay like a claw.
I told Raphaella the dream and described the research I had done.
“So what do we know?” she began. “To me, the most significant fact is that you can’t see anyone’s face clearly, especially the four most important characters in the story.”
“The prisoner and the three people supervising the torture.”
“Men,” Raphaella corrected. “They’re men. Women don’t torture.”
I nodded. “I think the victim’s male, too, judging by his voice. And the clues point to the past. The strappado is still used, but the candle and the clothing go back centuries. Besides, in a dream you just know things, without needing a reason.”
“Strappado. Sounds Italian. That’s what this kind of torture is called?”
“Right. It means ripping and tearing-in this case, the shoulders.”
“Since nobody says anything, we can’t figure out the reason for the torture,” Raphaella went on.
“Wait! The victim does say something, but it’s like words all mixed up with cries and groans. Not in English, though. And it sounds like…” I jumped to my feet. “A prayer! I think he was praying.”
“Who wouldn’t?” Raphaella said. “But that’s good. It’s not much, but every clue helps.”
I sat down again, shaken. “When I feel ready, I’ll go over the nightmare again. Maybe a few details will come to the surface, but I’m pretty sure there’s much more to remember.”
Raphaella put her arm around me and laid her head on my shoulder. Her hair smelled of flowers and soap-fresh, like spring. There was a time I would have rejected the conversation we were having. What’s around us, I would have argued-the lake, the sky, those kids on the playground over there-is real. Dreams aren’t. Now I knew different.