I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story (21 page)

No, Marta's been a good girl. God really should be taking
better care of her. But, as is the way of it with Creators who
move in mysterious ways, He isn't.

Any other time and any other place Marta would draw
closer to the brazier for warmth. This time and this place
she's keeping all the distance she can. The idiocy of the
question is bald, even to an illiterate farmer's wife. Do you believe in witchcraft? No, and you contradict Church doctrine;
yes, and you're virtually confessing to occult knowledge at
the get-go. How long have you been in the service of Satan? I'm
not in the service of Satan. Hou' did you make your pact with
him? I have no pact. Is your unborn sired by a demon? No, by
my husband. What is the name of the demon with whom you copulated? No demon, sir. [Vero you sodomized by this demon as
well as impregnated?

Abbot Thomas, fifty-eight, tonsured and corpulent with
eyes the colour of conkers and a ferociously irritable bowel,
would rather Brothers Clement and Martin weren't here. He
has a fiery mind, does Thomas, liable to burst into outraged
combustion at the slightest provocation. Marta, naked,
shaved, innocent of all charges, already constitutes more than
slight provocation. The thou '~ht of Marta (or Wilhomena, or
Inge, or Elise or whoever), which is perpetual in the hot
pudding of his brain, is perennial provocation. He's a beautifully divided being, Thomas. A great, sane part of him
knows that the girls are tortured and slaughtered for his
pleasure and profit. A great and sane part of him knows this.
But another part of him demands moral justification.
Demands it loudly. Bellows for it. This ignites the fiery mind.
(You've phoned in sick, haven't you? Nothing wrong with
you of course. Just can't Face It today. You've prepared the
husky speech, the wobbly or frustrated diagnosis - bloody
flu - and damn you if by the time you've hung up you're not
sure you haven'tgot the flu. Humans: need a lie desperately
enough and you can take yourself in. Ditto with Abbot
Thomas. The blades slide under the fingernails and the
wretches' confessions come pouring out. My God I inns rigl:t!
Infernal bitch! You dared deceive God holy minister? Thank
Heaven I held to the odious task.')

The Pricker is called in to search for the witch's mark. Third nipple, scar, mole, pimple, freckle, wen, wart, birthmark, scratch, scab - pretty much anything in the blemish
family qualifies. The Pricker - crew-cut, long-faced, missing
an eye - who'll be well paid should he successfully detect a
sign of witchhood (100 per cent success rate so far) spends a
good deal of time examining Marta's clitoris, which he's not
sure isn't large enough to be unmasked as the witch's teat,
before noticing with relief the mole behind her left knee. ('I
make this mine,' Gunter had said to her, kissing it, on their
wedding night. `And this, and this, and this . . .') He turns
her over on her belly the better to see while I drop my
flakes of flame onto the clerical genitals and Franciscan lust
fills the ether like the odour of sweet and sour pork. The
Pricker reaches into his pocket and takes out a greasy leather
wallet. Marta's tears (I don't think there can be a God ... If there's
a God, how is it that -) wet the stone floor. The pterodactyl
shadow shudders, seems to elongate, then subsides. From
the wallet the Pricker removes one of several bright needles
of various lengths and girths. He turns his back to the now
hot-faced Brothers, brings the needle close to the mole,
does nothing for a moment, then turns. `My lords. It is my
sad duty to report that this woman is beyond doubt a witch.
I pricked this mark behind her knee and yet as your own ears
will attest she made not the slightest sound.' He hadn't had to
think about it. Long experience - that is to say years of
pricking - had taught him which blots were insensible and
which receptive. This wretched girl was practically alight
with sensitivity. Prick her anywhere and she'd yowl the roof
down. Therefore the report of pricking instead. He went in
more and more for the reporting of successfully carried-out
prickings rather than actual prickings themselves these days.
The going rate was the same either way.

You'll excuse me if I don't dwell. The same questions, this time with torturous inducements to answer differently. For
two minutes and eight seconds Marta holds out. There are
precisely two minutes eight seconds' worth of faith in her
tank. But, understandably, after they've broken the second
finger and the crucified Christ has shown no sign of superheroically coming down to her rescue, nor the Virgin of
surrounding her with an impenetrable corona of maternal
protection, Marta starts to blab. Not that that helps, since the
Inquisitors' agenda has nothing to do with her admission of
guilt. The two younger Brothers, Clement and Martin,
know it's me. They know, deep down, it can't really be God's
work to tear off a .vonian's nipple with pincers. They know
it's me - but to Hell with it anyway, since it feels better than
anything they've felt before, since there's nothing, nothini like
it on earth (nor, they'll wager later, over the rough local
wine and peppered fish, in Heaven, either). Abbot Thomas,
on the other hand, manages on and off to wrap mutilations
in psalms. There are flashes of doing God's will like patches of
blue in an otherwise dirty and flocculent sky. He can't quite
give himself over to the truth of himself, and his absurd
oscillation between bloodlust and bogus rationalization is
piquant to me, vastly to be preferred over Clement and
Martin's white bread surrender.

You might wonder, by the way, what God and the angelic
host in Heaven are doing while all this is going on. Wonder
no more. I, Lucifer, can tell you. Nothing. They're doing
nothing. They're watching. The infinitely merciful part of
His nature swallows a sob or two, it's true, but the infinitely
indifferent part keeps its gaze steady. There is a tradition,
established by those blathering early martyrs and all but vanished in modern times, of offering one's suffering up to
God. The winkled out eyeball, the screwed thumb, the
plucked tongue and toasted hot - the right disposition can lift them from the body and send them floating up to God
like exquisite perfumes. The Divine nostrils inhale them and
sweet indeed is their odour. (You might think there's something obscene about it, but it will get you into Heaven.) So
should you find yourself under vexatious interrogation one
day, offer your shocked bollocks up to God. Next time your
hole's rudely invaded by a red hot poker lift your eyes to
Heaven and say: `This one's for you, my Lord.'

Marta, I'm sorry to say, isn't offering her sufferings up to
God. Marta's providing her Franciscan hosts with confirmation that the other names they have on their list (Bertolt's list,
complete with colour of hair, age, vital statistics, and likelihood of intact maidenheads) are those of her sisters in
witchcraft. You should hear her description - or rather her
endorsement of their description - of the Sabbat. Christ, I
wish I'd been there. Butchered babies, bestiality, coprophilia,
necrophilia, paedophilia, incest (Abbot Thomas is looking
forward to interviewing those twin Schelling sisters),
sodomy, desecration of holy objects, blasphemy - a five-star
knees-up if ever there was one. When this confession is read
out publicly in three days' time the good people of
Uffenstadt are going to see Marta in a whole new light. (It's
going to put some pep back into stagnant boudoirs, too, so
that's nice.) In three days' time, Marta, or what's left of her,
will state that this is her true confession, given freely, without compulsion of any kind (else there'll be compulsion all
over again, of a by now familiar kind) shortly before they
march her up to the stake. Gunter, restrained by civic officers, will watch, screaming, while they cut open his wife's
womb and rip out the foetus - redundantly, since mum's
going up in smoke anyway - to keep the niob happy and
their crowd-pulling clout intact.

This is a Big Picture operation. Three hundred years, quarter of a million dead, all in God's name. After about
1400 I barely needed to put in an appearance. The System
was up and running. Everybody (apart from the innocent
victims) won. The sadists got a piece of ass, the Church
increased its loyalty to Manlnlon, the liars got paid for their
lies, taverns groaned under the weight of drawn crowds, and
the mob - the name-and-shame mob basked in righteous
relief that it was her (bloody witch) and not them. Tell me
that wasn't an achievement. Not a patch on what I was
warming up to, but you know ... proniisint. I really think
God was annoyed with me. What with it being His Church
and all.

There. I've dwelt, in spite of myself.

At a party to celebrate the paperback release of Bodies in
.Motion, Bodies at Rest, Penelope stands in the shadows with
her arms folded. She's not drunk, not reelin' drunk, but she
is blessed now whether she wills it or no with that grim,
fifth-glass perspicacity. Nor is she deliberately not adding
her own contribution to the applause for Gunn as he makes
his way to the tiny, elevated stage with its lone reader's
microphone; it's just that her entire consciousness is given
over to watching him, the length of his stride, the tilt of his
shoulders, the pulled-in corners of his deeply satisfied
mouth. She's watching, standing with her weight on one leg
and her left hand cradling glass six at an about-to-spill angle,
while Gunn does his best, through gesture, movement, and
facial expression, to appear exactly as he is not: unprepared,
bemused by the attention, shy of the limelight, and incapable, actually, of taking any of this nonsense seriously. There
has been a flattering introduction from Sylvia Brawne, his editor, to which Gunn has listened with his head down and
his eyes glued to the floor, as if - Penelope knows - he is
hiding chronic blushing. Then the applause, his faux exasperation at the ridiculousness of Sylvia's hyperbole, and the
back-slapped, Christ-how-embarrassing-but-let's just-getit-over-with journey to the stage.

I'm there. I'm always there. Well, invariably. Not specifically for Gunn - there are other works-in-progress at the
club: first-time smack for the eighteen-year-old rent boy in
the bogs; the HIV transmission a philandering journalist is
going to take home to his missus (who's at her wits' end
already, and who stands a good chance of forgetting her pill
tonight - having softened the blues with Dusty Springfield,
a joint and a bottle of Bull's Blood); the waitress who knows
that if she goes home with the guy in the muslin-coloured
suit it'll be her first trick, that she'll have capitulated, made
use of what she can make use of (but Elise has done it, I
keep reminding her, and says she's never looked back - the
holiday in Antigua, the two-bedroomed garden flat in West
Hampstead, the money, the money, the fucking money she's
sick Qfpretending she doesn't want ...); the dear, muddled,
bull-necked and swede-headed bouncer, who, as far as the
rest of the world knows, is single, but who in fact has an
imprisoned anorexic wife whose mere existence - plus her
inability to quite absorb all his fear and rage no matter how
many times he beats it into her - drives him like a disease
into sudden, focused strikes, while the horror and claustrophobia and hatred and rage clash like warring gods in his
skull, until he's spent, and falls to his knees babbling apologies and promises between sobs (it's limitless, his pity, as
long as he himself is its object: Wiry does she make me do this
to her? Why? Why? Why?) - so Gunn was hardly my priority. But I've tended, over the years, to keep an eye on Penelope, to rootle, now and again, through the clutter of
her life in the hope of being able to throw something
together. Never say die, that's my motto. And never throw
anything away, that's another. Honestly, I'm like a Womble,
I am. Anyway, here is Penelope, and there, on stage, is
Gunn. Are you goin,q to say auything? Penelope's asked him,
earlier. No, he's said. It's all bollocks. I'll just read and ,E'et out of
there.

'You always hope,' he begins, trying to find that elusive
middle air between the devil of over-orchestrated diction
and the deep blue sea of his childhood's dusted-down
Northern vowels, 'that the person who introduces you
won't make you sound overly intelligent or talented.'
Pause. It's a small audience, politically hand-picked by him
and Sylvia. 'Otherwise the reading's guaranteed to disappoint.' Some friendly titters. Penelope grinds her teeth.
Gunn is speaking in a voice she's never heard before.
Accent, depth, pace: none of them has hitherto belonged
to the nun she loves. Loved. Loves. (Who said 'loved'?)
Nor, for that matter, have the occasional grimaces of wry
self-effacement. 'Unfortunately,' Gunn continues, 'Sylvia
has rather foolishly made me sound both intelligent and
talented. Therefore my apologies in advance.' Polite laughter, the general nnu►'oaaah sound of an audience saying,
Oh don't be so amusingly modest, you old thin,'. 'Anyway,'
Gunn says, taking a calculated last drag on his Silk Cut and
stubbing it out on the boards, 'I thought I'd read the
beginning of the book, so's not to give the game away to
any of you rotters who've had the good sense not to bother
reading it yet ...'