Punish the Sinners (26 page)

The rhythm, insistent, inexorable, caught him up in its mysticism, transporting him into the same state of religious ecstasy he had experienced once before in this room. He began to lose consciousness of his physical surroundings, and was only aware of the presence of the light, and the warmth, and the spirituality of his companions. They were moving now, the circle closing in on him, surrounding him, and as the service grew more intense Balsam had the feeling of being at one with them, of joining them in an experience that was both frightening and exhilarating, as if, for the first time, the core of his soul was being touched by God.

And then the voice began.

It sounded far away at first, but it grew steadily louder until its throbbing tones echoed through the room. The glow of the candles and the heat and flicker of the fire held him but the chanting had stopped. Only the throbbing sound of a single voice filled his ears
now. And then that, too, stopped. In the sudden silence, Peter Balsam reached out to touch the priest who was closest to him. In the odd light the priest seemed to glow white as an angel, and Balsam was sure he would find the support he was seeking. He tried to speak, but his mouth refused to open. From somewhere he heard another voice:

“He is with us. Saint Peter Martyr is with us.”

And then the deep tones of the oddly disembodied voice once more filled the room, using the strange language that Peter could not quite understand. He was able to follow the meaning now and then, but only in snatches.

“You must find him for me …

“You must punish …

“They are everywhere …

“Celebrate …

“Punish …

“Sin …

“Sin …

“Celebrate … Punish … Sin … “

And then the voice was gone, and the chanting began again. And once more the strange trance came over Balsam, and he lost track of time, and of place, and of what was real and what was not. All was religion, and religion was all. And the chanting went on … and the celebration went on … and sometime during the long night, Peter Balsam felt himself slipping away, drifting in a fantasy that he had neither the will nor the desire to define.

Three hours before dawn, it ended. As before, Peter Balsam had no idea of what had happened. Only impressions, and a feeling of both exhilaration and exhaustion.

And, of course, a tape. As he left the rectory he felt
the miniature recorder, still in the pocket of his jacket, still running. He switched it off, though he knew it must have stopped recording hours earlier. But the first two hours of the meeting were on the tape. At least it would be a beginning. But a beginning of what? He hurried his step, and by the time he got home he was almost running.

Margo was waiting for him, a strange expression on her face.

   They listened to the tape together.

Margo sat at one end of the sofa, Peter at the other, and Peter was intensely aware of the distance between them. They only listened to snatches of the first part of the tape; the part that had recorded the catechism. Ten minutes after it began, Margo commented softly that whatever else was on the tape, Peter had certainly started out sounding like a good Catholic. He glanced at her, wondering what the remark meant, but her eyes were turned away from him. He reached down and advanced the tape through the rest of the first hour to the point where the chanting began.

When the first strange sounds of the almost religious music came out of the tiny speaker, Margo spoke again.

“There was a silence,” she said suddenly. “What was happening during the silence?”

“You mean when they were accepting me into the Society?”

Margo nodded.

Peter thought back to the moment, then remembered.

“Wine,” he said. “Monsignor Vernon passed a chalice of wine around.” Margo’s brow furrowed, and she fell silent

They listened to the tape, watching the cassette
player almost as if it were producing a visual image as well as emitting the peculiar sounds.

“It sounds almost like Latin,” Margo said.

“I know. But it isn’t. Not quite. It’s close, but just different enough to make it mostly unintelligible. I can pick up a word here and there, but most of it sounds like another language.”

“Like Spanish, sort of,” Margo said.

“Spanish?” Peter said. He listened more closely, and suddenly the rhythms made more sense. And then it came to him. It wasn’t Spanish at all. It was some kind of strange Italian.

“That’s it,” he said softly.

“What?” Margo asked, looking at him for the first time.

“That’s it!” Peter exclaimed. “It’s not Spanish, Margo, and it isn’t quite Latin. It’s some kind of Italian! And it makes sense, too. Not the words. I can’t understand them, but I know what we’re listening to! They’re using a language that’s between Latin and Italian.”

Margo looked confused, and he tried to explain.

“The Romance languages all stem from Latin. French. Spanish. Italian. But languages change slowly. So what would early Italian sound like? It would be somewhere between Latin and modern Italian, wouldn’t it? And St. Peter Martyr was an Italian from the thirteenth century! The Society is using the language of St Peter Martyr! That must be it. Of course we can’t understand all of it, any more than we can understand all of Chaucer’s English.”

“But where would they have learned it?” Margo asked.

“Who knows?” Peter said. Suddenly he felt much better about everything; the chanting had lost a lot of
the mystery it had held in the flickering light of the rectory.

“How much of this do yon remember?” Margo asked him suddenly.

“Not much,” Peter said. “It all sounds vaguely familiar to me, but not nearly as familiar as it should. I mean, only a few hours ago I was taking part in that chanting.”

Margo stared at him. “I thought you said you couldn’t understand the words.”

“I couldn’t. And I still can’t. But at the time I was able to keep up with it, without even trying. It was like the words just flowed out of me …” His voice trailed off as he realized that now, in his apartment, the rhythms that had seemed so simple in the rectory seemed incredibly complicated.

And then he heard the voice.

It boomed sonorously out of the recorder, resonant and compelling. He recognized it immediately, and wondered why he hadn’t known it during the service. It was Monsignor Vernon.

“What’s he saying?” Margo asked. She, too, had recognized the priest’s voice.

“I’m not sure,” Peter said slowly, trying to conceal the sudden fear that was clutching at his stomach. “I … When I was there, I thought I was hearing the voice of St. Peter Martyr. It never occurred to me that it was Monsignor. And I can’t understand most of what he’s saying. It has to do with sin, and punishment, and celebrating. I don’t know. I should be able to understand the Latin—I teach it. But it isn’t quite Latin anyway. It’s more like Italian and my Italian doesn’t exist.”

And then the booming voice stopped, and the chanting began again, accompanied now by a different sound. Slowly the chanting faded away, and the new sounds
grew in volume. They began as a series of small whining noises, but as the tape ground on, the whines turned into moaning, mixed with heavy breathing, and other sounds that seemed familiar to Peter but that he couldn’t quite identify. Occasionally a cry of ecstasy penetrated the steady moaning.

Peter knew what he was hearing, but didn’t want to admit it to himself. He listened to the tape, trying to shut it out, but at the same time fascinated. And he began to remember some of the images he had experienced in the rectory.

The angels, seeming to glow whitely in the flickering candlelight.

The closeness among the seven of them that he had thought was a spiritual closeness.

The caresses that he had thought stemmed from a religious experience.

Naked men, priests stripped of their vestments, stripped of everything, their bodies intertwined not spiritually but carnally, caressing each other not religiously but sexually.

He was listening to the sounds of an orgy, an orgy he knew he and six priests had participated in only hours earlier.

And then he heard his own voice crying out in that tight ecstasy that only comes with a sexual climax. His stomach knotted and he knew he was going to be sick. As he lunged toward the bathroom his right hand flew out, knocking the tiny recorder from the coffee table. But it didn’t stop: the sickening sounds continued as he fled the room.

He stayed in the bathroom for a long time, waiting for the nausea to subside, not wanting to go back into the living room, not wanting to face Margo. Then, as he
was beginning to hope that she might have left, he heard her rapping at the door.

“Peter?” she said, her voice quiet and gentle. “Peter, are you all right?”

All right? he thought. All right? How could I be all right? My God, what have I done? He sank to the floor of the bathroom, laying his cheek on the cool tile. He heard the click of the door opening, and realized that Margo had come in. Then he felt her touch him on the cheek.

“It’s all right,” she said softly. “Peter, it’s all right.”

He stared up at her, wanting to believe her, but sure that nothing would ever be all right again.

Darkness closed around him.

Margo’s first impulse was to call the hospital. Before she got to the phone, she had changed her mind. What could she tell them? They wouldn’t believe her. Even if she played the tape for them, she was sure they wouldn’t believe her. And besides, Peter had only passed out. She told herself that it wasn’t anything serious: he had simply been overcome by exhaustion and the emotional shock of discovering what he had participated in.

She went back to the bathroom, and started moving Peter Balsam’s unconscious body toward the bedroom. She would put him to bed, and then she would lie down on the couch and wait for him to wake up. Under the circumstances there just didn’t seem to be anything else to do.

He didn’t stir at all as she pulled and shoved him into his bed, but he looked so uncomfortable that she decided to undress him.

The first thing she noticed were the marks. The same marks that had been there a few days earlier. They were back, and they were identical to the earlier ones, standing red and angry all over his torso. She pulled his trousers off, then his underwear. The last garment seemed damp, and at first she thought he had simply been sweating profusely. But there was more. From Peter
Balsam’s body an odor emanated. The sweet muskiness of semen.

Margo Henderson buried her face in the soiled undergarment and cried. As the tears came, she realized that she had still been hoping. She had been clinging to a hope that the evidence of the tape had been false, that what she had heard was something entirely different from what she now knew was the truth. She had stumbled into a mess. And yet, even as she lay on the bed next to Peter, sobbing softly into the pillow, she realized she was not going to walk away; she would not—could not—leave him.

It wasn’t Peter’s fault, she told herself, forcing back the sobs. He didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t know what they were doing to him. You watched his face as he listened, and he was shocked. So don’t blame him; help him.

Margo rose from the bed, then pulled the covers up over Peter’s naked body. She looked down at him, and realized how vulnerable he must be right now. When he woke, she must be close to him. He mustn’t feel that she had abandoned him.

She went out to the living room, and stretched out on the sofa. The first glow of dawn was beginning to light the sky outside as Margo fell into a fitful doze interrupted by dreams that took all the peace from her sleep…

She was outside the rectory, and she knew what was going on inside. But she couldn’t stop it. She could only crouch in the darkness outside, listening to the sounds, hearing first the chanting, and then the moaning, knowing that Peter was inside, that he was in the middle of that group of six strange priests, and that they were seducing him. Their hands were touching him, and their lips kissing him in a way that only her hands should
have touched him, only her lips should have kissed him.

Then she was suddenly inside the rectory, inside that oddly lit room, watching the naked priests, their wrinkled bodies glistening sweatily in the candlelight as they stripped Peter’s clothes from him, their fingers greedily playing over his smooth skin, their tongues clucking away in that strange language. And then they were holding him down and Monsignor Vernon, grown suddenly to a towering height, stood over Peter, his monstrous organ thrusting toward Peter’s gaping mouth. The priest began advancing toward Peter, and Margo looked on in horror. She wanted to scream, but couldn’t make any sound escape her lips. She tried to lunge forward, tried to rescue Peter from the grasp of the old men, but she couldn’t make her feet move. They seemed to be mired in heavy mud. All she could do was look on in mutely fascinated horror as Monsignor Vernon, suddenly enveloped in a halo, forced his penis into Peter Balsam’s mouth. And finally, as the immense glans disappeared between his lips, she screamed.

Margo woke up to the sound of her own scream, and felt her body shaking uncontrollably. She could feel a clammy sweat covering her like a wet sheet. And then she felt a hand touch her, and her eyes snapped open. Peter Balsam was bending over her. She stared silently at him for a second or two, suddenly unsure whether she was awake. And then she realized she was awake, and he was real, and she threw her arms around him.

“Oh, God, Peter,” she cried into his ear. “I saw it all. I was there, right there in the room, and those priests—those six awful priests—they were naked and they were—they were doing the most disgusting things to you. And then the Monsignor—Monsignor Vernon—he—he—” She broke off, unable to continue.

“It’s all right,” Peter said softly, holding her closer. “It was only a dream. You had a bad dream.”

She lay still in his arms for a moment, and her panic passed. And then she remembered. He should have been in bed. She had put him to bed, then lay down to doze, only a few minutes ago. What was he doing up? How could he be up already? She wriggled free of his arms and sat up. The sun was pouring brightly in the front window.