Deadline (11 page)

“You are a poisoner,” the man said, putting his right hand on Seth’s head. “A polluter of souls. You divert those from God’s path and send them on a road that leads straight to hell.”

Seth tried to shake his head and say something in his defence, but the man’s grip was surprisingly strong and the gag was too tight.

“Today is the most glorious day of your life,” the man said. “You shall be purged of your sins. You will be pure. Today, you will see God in all his glory.”

Seth whimpered. He didn’t want to see God in all his glory. For the first time in his life, he desperately wanted to see an entire division of police officers come crashing through the front door.

The man stood up and motioned to the others. Seth felt himself lifted from behind and turned around. Now he could see what the pews were directed at.

It was some sort of altar.

In the centre was a large wooden cross lying flat and raised up about four feet off the floor on a shiny metal platform. Seth guessed that it was about eight feet long and six feet across. There were numerous holes in it, each one surrounded by an ominous-looking dark black stain. At the head of the cross was a table with a three-sided metal box with some sort of faded inscription on the side.

Seth was lifted and the ropes removed from around his arms and ankles. He looked down to see that the cross was mounted over top of some sort of grate. Underneath it was what looked like a drain. He wondered where it went, but the answer came to him almost immediately.

The well
.

Seth felt the gag loosened and removed from his mouth as the other hooded figures began pulling off his clothes.

“Uh, listen guys,” he said. “I think there’s been some sort of mistake. I’ve never poisoned anybody. I’m just a college student.”

Seth watched as one of the hooded figures picked a metal bowl off the altar next to the three-sided box and approached the well. They crouched down and lifted up the metal lid, which came up with a rusty screech. Once it was open, they reached down with the bowl and filled it up, then approached the altar again, holding it carefully in both hands.

“Look,” Seth said, panic starting to take over. “If you let me go, I won’t say anything to anyone about this, okay?”

Two of the larger hooded figures grabbed Seth by the legs and the shoulders and hoisted him up onto the cross. Splinters bit into his back and legs. He squirmed to try to avoid them, which only made things worse.

The leader took the bowl and held it up over Seth’s head. “We baptize you in the blood of the purified,” he said, and then tipped it over.

Seth tried to turn his head away to avoid the worst of it, but it still went up his nose and into his ears and eyes. It was cold and sticky and more disgusting than anything he had ever smelled in his life. He tried to sit up and reflexively vomited on his shoulder. The followers holding him on either side didn’t let go. Seth felt the sticky shower run all the way down his body from his head to his knees. He tried not to breathe it in, but it was impossible.

A wet cloth was pushed against his face, clearing the worst of it out of his eyes. He opened them and saw the leader walk to the altar and pick up the triangular metal box. The leader opened this up using a latch on the side, reached in and removed what looked like a large black railroad spike.

“Suffering is the path to salvation,” the leader said. Seth felt his left arm twisted so that it was flat against the cross and then a cold, sharp prick as the tip was positioned in the soft flesh just above his wrist. He looked across to see one of the followers pick up a sledgehammer and raise it up.

“Only in blood shall we wash away our sins,” said the leader, who then nodded to the follower holding the hammer.

Seth started screaming. He had realized that he wasn’t going to be leaving this place anytime soon.

F
orty-five minutes after he had failed to get any useful information out of Tony, Colin found himself sitting in the passenger seat of Janice’s old Corolla as they made their way north along country highway 42.

Janice had found an obscure article in an old CP wire story about a warehouse building that had burned down just outside the town of Winterburn, which was about an hour north of Westhill. The story had been originally reported in the now-defunct local town newspaper, but had made the wire because two people had perished in the fire. One was a local man who was out on bail awaiting trial for stealing $200,000 worth of copper wire from a nearby factory. The other was a homeless man whose identity was unknown.

The article had caught Janice’s attention because one of the tenants of the building at the time it had burned down was an organization calling itself the ‘Brotherhood of the Holy Thorn’. According to the article, it wasn’t known if the premises were in use at the time of the fire. The rest of the details were vague. There was no mention of whether or not any member of the so-called brotherhood had been contacted for comment or even any speculation as to what the organization might do.

That wasn’t surprising, in Colin’s opinion. CP had thousands of stories coming in every day. A warehouse fire in the middle of nowhere wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in the rest of the country and would barely merit more than two paragraphs. The original article may have been longer and contained more valuable detail, but both it and the paper that printed it were now long gone. The building had burned down seven years ago and the Winterburn Weekly News had ceased operation only two years after that, just another casualty of corporate consolidation.

There were no photos and no follow-up articles to indicate what else may have happened on the site or what additional investigation might have been done. Janice figured that the only way to find out what was going on was to drive up there and take a look at it for themselves. Not having any other leads to pursue at the moment she called, Colin had agreed to go along for the ride.

The car was scrupulously tidy, which Colin liked. The only things in the backseat were her laptop and her backpack. Colin was grateful that she was using a GPS and hadn’t asked him to navigate as his sense of direction was notoriously terrible. In his hands, they would probably have been coming up on the American border around about now.

He liked her choice of music, too. Monk and Coltrane live at Carnegie Hall. Colin’s last girlfriend had liked horrible, thumping club music. It was, in his opinion, one of the key reasons that the relationship had lasted less than three months.

“Nice tunes,” he commented.

“Thanks,” Janice said. “I’m kind of an aggressive driver by nature, but I find it almost impossible to get mad when I’m listening to Coltrane. Almost.”

Colin chuckled. “You seem to be doing fine so far.”

“That’s because we’re in the middle of the country,” she said. “Back when I was living with my parents in Scarborough and commuting to U of T every day, not so much. A taxi cut me off on the DVP once. I followed him for 15 clicks past my exit and practically ran him into a guardrail.”

Colin laughed. He had a hard time imagining the mousy girl who barely said a word to be anyone that had done anything of the kind. “Right. So if we find any links to these guys in midtown Manhattan, we’ll just look at them with Google street view.”

“I love cities,” Janice said defensively. “I just hate driving in them. There’s something so nullifying about being stuck for ages in some stupid traffic jam. You just sit there for what feels like forever and then you get to the front of it and you realize that the reason you just lost the last two hours of your life was because the parade of morons in front of you kept slowing down to look at a cherry picker stringing cable for a cell phone tower. I can’t wait until they invent teleportation. I’ll be one of the first ones to sign up.”

“Even if a mosquito sneaks in with you and the machine ends up blending your DNA, and you come out the other side with a strange new desire to suck the blood out of your friends when they’re just trying to have a beer on the back porch?”

Janice smiled. “Yes. Even then.”

Colin looked out the window at a seemingly endless line of red and yellow and orange trees. “You know, you never did answer my other question.” Colin had an excellent memory for unanswered questions.

Janice was ahead of him. “How does somebody who hates picking up the phone and talking to strangers end up taking journalism?”

“Exactly.”

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I don’t know. My parents wanted me to go to teacher’s college, but I don’t think I would have been cut out for that, either. Facing a room full of hormonally manic teenagers every day? No thanks. Besides, it’s like going to law school these days. There just aren’t any jobs out there.”

“If it’s a job you’re looking for, then journalism isn’t exactly blue chip stock at the moment, either.”

“I know,” she said. “I figured I could sort of make my own jobs. Online. Freelance assignments. Things like that. One thing I got studying history was a real desire to see all the places I was reading about. That sort of gave me the idea of becoming a travel writer. There are a tonne of books out there that have restaurant and hotel recommendations, but treat the history of the place as just a sidebar. I’d like to put the history more front and centre.”

“Interesting,” Colin said. “How did your parents like that idea?”

“They hate it,” Janice said. “They think I’m wasting my time.”

“And what do they do?”

“My father’s an investment manager and my mother’s a real estate agent,” Janice said. “My father’s originally from Shanghai. To him, everything’s just another asset waiting to be monetized. He thinks travel is a waste because it has what he calls a low ROI. You spend all that money and don’t get any of it back. If you want a vacation, it’s much better to buy a cottage, he thinks. Then fix it up and rent it out. Then do it again. And again. Which is where my mother comes in. For me, life is about the accumulation of experiences, not equity. I could give a shit about money.”

“It does come in handy when it’s time to pay the rent,” Colin joked.

“True,” Janice said. “But I don’t want it to rule my life. If that means I’m not in the top one per cent, then so be it. I’d rather see the pyramids than a killer IPO.” She turned on the windshield wipers as a soft rain had started to fall. “Shit. I don’t think I remembered my umbrella.”

“I
s that it?” Colin asked.

They had pulled up alongside a blackened hulk of rubble that reminded him of some of the ruined castle sites he had seen on a tour of Scotland when he was five. The stones rose up to the west like a wave that was never going to break, reaching a maximum height of maybe eight feet. He could make out the bottom outline of what might have been a couple of windows and a door, but the rest was gone.

“I think so,” Janice said, peering through the foggy windshield. “According to the GPS, the town is about two clicks east.”

“It looks like Dresden after an air raid,” Colin observed. “What else used to be in there?”

“As far as I can tell, it was originally owned by an appliance company that went broke,” Janice said. “After that, they couldn’t generate much interest in the place. The main floor was supposedly rented by a hat company, but I couldn’t find any record of them at all. The church was in the basement.”

Colin shifted his gaze from the charred hulk looming up out of the ground to the equally grey sky overhead. The rain had momentarily slowed from a steady thrum to an intermittent trickle, but the clouds looked like they were ready to let loose at any moment. If they were going to go exploring, he figured, there was no time like the present.

“Well, we did come all this way,” he said, throwing open his door and stepping out onto the soggy ground.

“Colin, wait!” Janice said. “What are you doing?”

“Might as well take a look,” Colin said, peering down the road in both directions. The last thing they had passed was a custom trailer business that looked like it hadn’t seen a customer since Caesar crossed the Rubicon. He doubted that there was much chance they would be observed out here. He pulled open the back door and grabbed the flashlight that Janice had brought along. It was a clunky white one with a square bulb that looked like it had come out of a road emergency kit from the seventies, but at least it seemed to work.

“Are you crazy?” Janice said. “That place burned down almost ten years ago! It’s probably not safe!”

Colin shrugged. “Well, it’s not getting any safer. Come on. Let’s go.”

He closed the door and trudged up the hill without waiting for Janice to follow. His legs were stiff from sitting so long in the passenger seat and it was nice to stretch them a bit, even if they were carrying him towards what looked like a cave-in in the making. He heard a thunk as Janice got out and closed her door, running up the hill behind him. He didn’t blame her for not wanting to be left alone behind the wheel. To somebody used to the city, this was as close to
Deliverance
country as they probably liked to get.

Colin stepped over the rusted metal fence with the faded ‘Danger’ and ‘No Entry’ signs attached.

“Pretty good starter space for a cult,” he said. “But I don’t know. If you’ve been around for almost a thousand years, you’d think they’d be in the market for something a little more grand. You know, like the Vatican or maybe even Westminster Abbey.”

Janice scanned the ground and saw a few dozen broken beer bottles and a few used condoms.

“Ugh,” she said. “Who’d want to have sex in a place like this?”

“Well, it does have a certain rustic charm,” Colin said. “Add a few more broken beer bottles and some people in period costume and it’s just like colonial Williamsburg. All that’s missing is a few hundred stores selling butter churns and Quaker hats.”

“I have a friend who did her thesis on period recreations,” Janice said. “She specialized in those wild west shows. You know, like the OK Corral and all that stuff? She would probably have shared your low opinion of the historical value of re-enactments.”