Passion Play Read online

  Copyright © 1992 by Sean Stewart.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage, retrieval and transmission systems now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This edition is published by Beach Holme Publishers Limited, 4252 Commerce Circle, Victoria, B.C., V8Z 4M2, with financial assistance from the Canada Council and the B.C. Ministry of Municipal Affairs, Recreation and Culture. This is a Tesseract book.

  Section heading detail taken from the “Triumph of Death,” attributed to Francesco Traini, in the Campo Santo, Pisa.

  Editor: Laurel Bernard

  Cover Design by Susan Fergusson

  Cover Art by Jeff Kuipers

  Production Editor: Antonia Banyard

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Stewart, Sean

  Passion play

  “Tesseract Books.”

  ISBN 0-88878-314-0

  I. Title.

  PS8587.T49P3 1992 C813'.54 C92-091311-3

  PR9199.3.S73P3 1992

  For Philip Freeman

  and

  Dennis Kelley

  and, of course,

  Christine

  Contents

  Prologue

  the first day

  One

  Two

  the second day

  Three

  Four

  the third day

  Five

  Six

  the fourth day

  Seven

  Eight

  the fifth day

  Nine

  Ten

  the sixth day

  Eleven

  Twelve

  We are made a spectacle unto the

  world, and to angels, and to men.

  I Corinthians 4:9

  When I try to write it down it dies: I find myself speaking with my father’s polished, thoughtful voice. But what I want to do is shout until my heart cracks, shout like a preacher at a Redemptionist service. I want God to grant me a voice that will shatter these concrete walls like the ramparts of Jericho. I want to speak in tongues my damnation, make you all see that this isn’t just about the murder of Jonathan Mask, but about law and God and justice.

  Shit.

  It’s a dark time and we all sound like the Bible.

  I had seen Mask’s face since I was a girl: somber and austere, his great actor’s voice like God’s, speaking the policies of the Redemption Presidency as if they were carved on tablets of clay fresh from the mountain-top.

  It seems strange to say about someone I only met after he was dead, but the better I knew Jonathan Mask, the more I hated him. O, he was a power; a philosopher, a saint…an angel burning as he fell. How he must have laughed in hell, watching his death become a televised passion play, running night after night on the flickering stage in every home. Star billing to the end.

  Rutger White was in every way Mask’s opposite: a stern white man with a soul as straight and narrow as a casket. Deacon White’s God burned in him like the wick in a white wax candle.

  He thought I was an atheist when we met and I thought he was the Devil. But it seems to me now there was a sympathy between us, a dark communion shared.

  My name is Diane Fletcher. I’m a hunter by profession, but a shaper is what I am. A shaper is bound up in the patterns of things: she has to be. Now the patterns that caught Rutger White have caged me too. Will cage me for six more days.

  From deep down in hell, Jonathan Mask is probably laughing at us both.

  And the evening and the morning

  were the first day.

  One

  It is the end of a terrible day. Angela Johnson’s apartment still rings with fear; blood lies in screams across her sheets. These are a shaper’s worst moments, when someone else’s pain or fear or madness sings through you like current humming through a wire.

  Sick with her terror and trying to hide my own I listened while a bored sergeant filled me in. The husband had been with friends. Surprisingly, he had left the door unlocked…

  The door swings open; the woman looks up—startled, afraid. Footsteps; too many. Lying in bed she reaches for the remote control, mutes the television, turns to face them. Does she speak? A stammer. Each one masked. White masks. Each carries a brick or a concrete block, square and heavy with guilt. She doesn’t need to be told; she whimpers and begins to plead. The leader speaks: “Thou hast committed adultery.” She is crying. “I am so sorry,” he adds softly. They close around the bed where she lies. The leader raises his hand, hesitates. She lifts an arm in front of her face and shrieks. The noise releases him, and he smashes down, breaking her wrist and clubbing her across the cheek with the corner of his brick. Blood streams down her face like tears. The others fall in. Nobody answers her screams. The vigilantes continue to batter her body, splintering her arms and face for thirty long seconds after she is dead, stopping suddenly at a signal from their leader. “Amen,” he says at last. Rutger White’s gaze is firm, and clear. They are all breathing heavily.

  “That makes the third one this year out of this congregation. Still, these vigilantes never rat,” the pink sergeant said calmly. “You’ll never make the leaders.”

  “I want you to bring Mr. Johnson here for interrogation. And leave the body here.”

  That shocked him. “Jesus! That’s, that’s not…”

  “Nice, sergeant?”

  The sergeant coloured, embarrassed and angry. “You’re going to make some fellow a fine little woman some day,” he muttered.

  Cops don’t like hunters in general. They like women hunters less.

  “We don’t have much time,” I said. “If they know there’s a hunter on the case they’ll warn the ringleader. I need his name and I need it fast. Bring the husband here.”

  Johnson was thin and nervous as a rat: his image was a jangle of broken lines, cloudy with confusion and fear. I asked him why he’d left the door unlocked. He whispered that he had forgotten. Drawn like flies to blood, his eyes circled back to his wife’s body, a lump in the bed. A few strands of Angela’s blond hair straggled out from under the sheets. I asked him why he’d left the door unlocked.

  He screamed obscenities at me, damned me to hell.

  The sergeant swallowed and looked away as I pulled back the sheet to uncover what was left of Angela’s face. I had to tug; scabbing blood made the sheet stick to her broken flesh. A few hours earlier a soul had lived there, someone who could laugh and swear and kick the TV when the reception went bad. Now her body was deserted, an empty building with bricked-up eyes.

  I asked Mr. Johnson why he’d left the door unlocked.

  “O God,” he whispered. How many times had he kissed that broken face? How many times had he stroked her bloody hair? “O God. O God. He said it was right…”

  Rutger White has been named. He is cornered now, though he doesn’t know it. The hunt will end here, in the square of Jericho Court. The vigilante leader is an old friend of Joshua Johnson; they are deacons together in a Redemption Ministry church. He is a pillar of the community, but Johnson has agreed to testify against him.

  Will he be alone? Am I taking too much of a risk by making him without a back-up? He might have a street taser wired to kill, or more likely one of the old handguns: brutal weapons with hard black mouths.

  My taser lies heavy as guilt in my jacket pocket. I run my thumb over the cold triangular wedge of its power switch, making sure it hasn’t slipped to the kill setting. The square and the triangle are both strong shapes, but the square is static—triangles must move. The switch l
eans forward, longing for the end of its track. “Use the fear of the kill charge, Fletcher,” Captain French had said. “It’s one of your tools.”

  Things are different for shapers.

  I set the taser to light stun.

  Tenements wall Jericho Court on three sides. The ghetto stinks of piss and despair; poverty patterns the broken windows and the snarls of black graffiti. A dog noses through drifts of garbage. Scattered across the asphalt like murderer’s footprints, puddles of water turn bloody with sunset as dusk falls around White’s last day of freedom.

  I am afraid, cut by thin angles of fire-glint red: I could tell you the shape and taste and colour of it. The hunt is flexing in me: my blood tingles like acid, and when I blink my eyes are hard and hot against their lids.

  God, I live for this. So often we are so numb. I love the tingle of fear, waking me into life like an electric shock. Danger makes me translucent, and I am pierced by the crumbling asphalt beneath my bootsoles; the reek; the twilight.

  A man bangs a back door open, shambles by. His cheap HomeSpun coat is Made in America With Pride. He’s been drinking. He meets my eyes. Thick—cloudy, “God bless,” he mutters.

  He is angry with someone—a woman? The shaper image of him all murky browns, reds…yes. But trapped—no projections, no lines out. Anger is a deadly sin.

  “Godspeed,” I say as he brushes past. At the end of a hunt patterning is effortless for me: no longer must I reach out with a quiet mind, folding myself around each new person. When the hunting is sharpest I run like hot wax, and patterns press themselves into me. The assumption of the stranger’s look, his manner, the way he walks and smells (of scotch and sweat, damp mattresses and dark curtains in unused rooms), and the shaper image itself: they all engrave on me the maze behind his thoughts. He’s goddamn hopeless, a dun sphere, a brown marble with a crimson inward coil. His rage roots around my heart, tearing tissue and racing my pulse until I can block it out. Harder to block now, at the end of a chase.

  The shaper high crests. Elation shudders through me as I start for White’s apartment, squeezing tiny plastic sounds from the garbage underfoot. Skwee, skwee. Skrowch. The seconds break around me like water. I wish I could hold this instant forever, an eternal sacred moment.

  I knock at #7. Chains rattle, locks slide back; the door opens (a last hush, a curtain rising on a stage) to reveal the murderer.

  Deacon White is tall and heavy-set. Like a mail fist wearing through a velvet glove, his hard soul is wearing out his body, cutting deep lines around his mouth and eyes. His face is open and guiltless; his eyes are lit with a terrible sincerity: a bright, unsteady flame. “Yes? Well met, by His will. May I help you?” A preacher’s voice, stern yet kindly. A faint scent surrounds him: a memory of faded rosewater.

  “God bless. My name is Diane Fletcher,” I say, flashing my hunter’s license. The light jumps in his eyes. He is not easy to read. Slender—a glowing rectangular wand? So smooth, so few informative irregularities. I don’t trust him.

  “You are with the police. Come in.”

  I step inside as if walking onto rotten ice; fear cramps my chest and belly. There is no reason for me to take this risk, but I always do. Most hunters would shoot him on the doorstep and sort out the loose ends in safety later. I have to be positive before I make a suspect. Maybe it’s part of being a shaper: you have to follow a pattern out, right to the end; the symmetry is inevitable, unavoidable.

  The light is on in the bathroom on my right; the main room opens to my left. The air is stale with the smell of old carpet, sterile sheets, the thin aroma of pancakes and sausages. Deacon White’s apartment is as barren as a monk’s cell: no pictures, no computer, no CD player, no TV. The Reds distrust technology: the sin of pride, they say. Man trying to challenge God. At least White is no hypocrite: he lives the Red creed to the letter. No doubt he beat Angela Johnson to death with complete integrity.

  The apartment is scrupulously neat; the Deacon could no more leave a faucet dripping than he could fly to the sun. No taste for the outer world: isolation. No: apartness. Distance, surrounded by the dark. Casting a light upon the darkness…A candle? Yes! Tall and slender—a pale white candle, faintly scented and devotional.

  I feel a quick burst of satisfaction at getting the image right: that’s it, that will do.

  A single bare bulb lights the main room. The carpet and the couch are the colourless beige all computers used to be. The only other furniture is a straight-backed plastic chair and a small cot, neatly made, with crisp white sheets and no pillow. A crucified Christ hangs on the wall above the cot, limbs twisted in smooth plastic agony. The circles of blood at His palms and ankles are the only spots of colour in the room, shocking against His synthetic godwhite flesh.

  The kitchen is as clean and sterile as an operating theatre; on the wall a ceramic plaque proclaims “In God We Trust” in twisted gothic script.

  White sits in the plastic chair and waves at the couch, but I remain standing, with my left hand still curled around the taser in my jacket pocket. I feel a sting of excitement from him, sharp as iodine on a lacerated thought. Why nothing else, why no fear? It has been less than twenty-four hours since Angela Johnson’s death; he must guess why I have come. My skin crawls at the feel of him: waxy-slick, heavy and sure and a little mad. Wide open at the end of a hunt I shiver as he runs into me, filling me up with his certainties, making it hard to think. The air seems hot and it’s hard to breathe. “Are you Mr. Rutger White, Deacon of the Rising Son Redemption Ministry?”

  “That’s right, Miss Fletcher.” He lingers over the diminutive. “I hope there isn’t any problem with the Ministry.”

  “Not with the Ministry.”

  On cue his eyebrows rise. “Oh?” He is a hard-edged candle with a diamond flame.

  My turn to go on. We are driven by the pattern, each of us plotting our points, guessing at what the final shape will be. Ah! Yes—this is the sense of the apartment. Every item in it is connected by taut, invisible lines. Even I am bound into the pattern that chains the cot to the counter-top, the plastic chair to the sad blind eyes of the tormented Christ. Threads like the lines of a mystic pentagram. I want to cut those lines apart like Alexander slashing through the Gordian Knot. “Angela Johnson is dead.”

  White shrugs. He is a large man, and his shoulders are eloquent. “The mills of God grind slow, Miss Fletcher—but they grind exceeding fine.”

  I tighten my grip on the taser.

  “Angela Johnson was not a virtuous woman. I grieve for souls, Miss Fletcher, not bodies. I mourned Angela’s loss long ago.”

  White’s grief mixes with my horror at her murder. Sadness seeps through me, memories soft-edged and gentle. A flush of melancholy as he remembers her as she once was, faithful and innocent…

  I am sliding off balance, feeling White’s emotions mingle with mine, losing my ability to tell them apart. The shaper blessing, to get drunk on another person’s joy. The shaper curse, to feel another person’s madness take root within your soul, and bloom.

  “She was stoned to death!” I shout, scared into fury. Struggling to back away from him. How can the bastard be so calm? Why isn’t he scared of me? He is too damn confident, too sure. “Mr. White—Deacon—I think you were the leader of the vigilantes that killed Angela Johnson.”

  The accusation has the shock of an unsheathed knife, naked now between us. He hisses, inhaling sharply.

  The hungry flame dances in Rutger White’s eyes. He is fearless as a saint looking forward to his martyrdom, but there is a slyness in him too, as if he savours a secret I do not know. “It’s all over. Three others have confessed,” I lie, bluffing. “Joshua Johnson is turning state’s evidence. It’s over, Mr. White.”

  White laughs. “Would you like a cup of coffee? Tea? No?” His plastic chair creaks as he leans toward me. “Do you care for your fellow men, Miss Fletcher?”

  “Ms.,” I snap. Cool it, Diane. Be cool. “Yes I do.”

  White nods, satisfied. �
�So do I. And for our fellow men to be saved, they must live under the Law. No man living respects the Law more than I, Miss Fletcher. Obviously you must feel the same, or you would have found a different profession…But you and I both know it is the higher Law which must be obeyed. And we both know that there are some crimes which the police, faithful though they are, are unable to avenge, because they lack time, or money, or evidence sufficient to warrant an arrest. Against these criminals the Lord must use other servants to work his will.

  “Angela Johnson was such a criminal. She had broken the commandments of the Lord in committing the sin of adultery. In so doing she lured her lover to damnation and set an example sure to lead others astray.” White opens his hands, putting his case as forcefully, as earnestly as he can.

  As he speaks, the candle burns more brightly. The wick is charred black; fragments of ash pollute the pooling wax. At the top, near the flame, the corners twist and buckle, disfigured by the rising heat. Droplets form, beaded white blood. “Ms. Fletcher, I know the responsibility I have undertaken. But with the souls of my brethren in peril, souls that might be lost if some strong lesson were not delivered, I knew what I had to do.”

  I feel the weight of his thoughts pressing down on me, and heavier still the weight of my old sins, the dead I have delivered to the Law. The guilt I feel for all of them: Tommy Scott, Red Wilson. Patience Hardy, executed only three weeks ago. The Higher Law. Obviously you must feel the same, or you would have found a different profession.

  God I hate Rutger White for raising their grey ghosts.

  His smooth hands twist as if in pain. “…Lucky are they not called to serve the Lord, Miss Fletcher, for His tasks are seldom easy. But the Lord cannot be ignored; His call must be answered, if it comes. Sometimes a man must obey higher principles, whatever the cost to himself.”

  “‘Thou shalt not kill’ was still a commandment last time I looked.” A spasm of panic struggles deep inside of me. Not since my mother died, when I learned to block my father’s grief, have I been so open, have I felt so overwhelmed by someone else. Rutger White is spilling over me, clotting my pattern with his own, changing my shape. Without my willing it his image turns, and for the first time I see the back of the candle: molten wax crawls down it. White worms, blind and seeking.