The Unhappy Medium, page 32
Others vied for a piece of the action; many a priest, cleric and confessor joined this new wave of misery and terror in search of a good time. Across the length and breadth of Spain the Inquisition grew, its nightmarish logic burning its way into the pages of history. And right in the middle of the firestorm – still a novice in many ways, but every inch the perfect Inquisitor – was Balthazar De La Senza.
Still only a mere Monseñor when his boss was murdered in Zaragoza, La Senza rushed to his masters brimming with Inquisitorial righteousness. Just as he calculated, he was propelled by his proximity to the frontline onwards and up the greasy ecclesiastical pole until by 1487, he was handed a Cardinal’s robes and assigned enough autonomy to begin a wave of Inquisitorial visits all of his own.
The newly promoted Cardinal La Senza descended like bad news upon a range of small towns and villages in northeast Spain. Now he could act on his own sick impulses, and he threw himself into the role with the kind of vigour only a really first-grade bastard can muster. In one village, he burnt everyone taller than five foot two, despite the fact that they were neither Conversos, Moriscos or guilty of anything worse than poor dental hygiene. In another town he held an auto de fe for some five weeks; it was so protracted and stressful that some of the locals succumbed to hypertension before La Senza had finished haranguing them, and the bodies had to be reluctantly torched without the satisfaction of any decent suffering.
Cardinal La Senza loved gizmos. He employed a team of technologists who travelled with him, and under his patronage they developed a whole range of nasty new ways to make people tell you whatever you wanted to hear. They boiled, they scooped. They stretched people out on racks until they looked like harvest spiders. They trapped suspects inside iron boxes and dry-roasted them until they shrank to the size of children.
La Senza laughed long and hard.
Dealing with small towns far from the city, Cardinal La Senza was able to act with near impunity. But eventually, the sadism and pointless nature of the new boy’s methods began to raise eyebrows within the Inquisition itself. Chaplain Diego Hernández de Macanaz witnessed La Senza’s abuses first hand. Horrified, he tore back to headquarters to report what he had seen. There was a mixed response to his story. The real zealots thought the imposition of mindless fear, no matter how severe, could only be a good thing, perfect for culturing a cowering obedience amongst the population. But others, mindful of the potential fallout for the Inquisition’s mandate, found such obvious applied psychosis alarming. Eventually, a cadre of slightly less nasty Inquisitors was chosen to sort the awkward matter out.
It would not be easy. Torquemada had taken a personal interest in the meteoric rise of La Senza, and to bring down this maverick could be seen as an attack upon the great Inquisitor himself. A challenge to the authority of such a man could, and usually would, result in a one-way trip to the iron maiden. The campaign would have to be subtle. Gradually, reports were gathered and Chaplain Diego was given the task of building the case.
But La Senza was not about to be stopped – in fact, he was now on a roll. Not content with mere hamlets and villages, he took a crack at a few recalcitrant towns along the edge of the Pyrenees before pushing up to the Atlantic coast near San Sebastián.
For the locals, the arrival of La Senza and his entourage was like some psychotic circus riding into town. Instead of clowns, Inquisitorial judges; instead of trapezes, the rack and the wheel. Their passage across the parched landscape of Aragón and the Navarre was marked by columns of rising smoke and the stench of burning human flesh.
Oh, happy days.
Fearful of treading on toes, La Senza halted his entourage short of the city of San Sebastián to consolidate, and while his followers enjoyed a little rest and recreation in Pamplona, the Cardinal retreated to a monastery to plan his next move. It was here that he picked up his fearsome acolyte, the dreadful, sadistic, though some say cruelly beautiful, Sister María de la Encarnación. As far from Julie Andrews as it is possible to imagine, Sister María inspired dread in the other nuns at her convent. Not so La Senza – the Cardinal was quite taken with her Gothic good looks, callous indifference to human suffering and total absence of morality.
It was love at first sight.
They became inseparable. Balthazar and María would watch the horrific proceedings unfold before them at the autos de fe, caressing each other with barely disguised erotic excitement, their eyes wild with sadistic arousal.
Not that it raised any eyebrows within La Senza’s camp, of course. The Cardinal had been careful to recruit a fiercely loyal and immoral team around him. He rewarded them with anything they wished to appropriate from their victims, be it wine, women or material wealth. The La Senza road show, as a result, became a hugely profitable and self-contained travelling nightmare. Funded by plunder and cruelty, loyalty and fanaticism grew like fungus around him and he attracted more and more devotion from his clan as the months passed.
Above all others he trusted one. Ceferino de Lupero was a mean fanatic who saw in Cardinal La Senza a force of purifying evil, something that elevated man above the mere human into something more arcane and potent. Frequently he told the Cardinal, usually on bended knee, that there was nothing, nothing on this earth that he would not do for him. Lupero pledged the ultimate in protection in this world and the next; the Inquisitor could rely on his dark lieutenant for eternity. With his fanatical henchmen in tow, Lupero provided La Senza with a state-of-the-art private army. No one could stand up to him now. In his wake he left poverty, tears and a cultural desert.
Newton lifted his pen from the notebook.
‘OK, I get it, the guy is a sadist, a creep. Nothing unusual about that though, is there? The historical record is full of this kind of thing. What’s so special about this particular monster?’
‘You’re right,’ said Jameson. ‘So far he’s just your regular, run-of-the-mill psychotic opportunist.’
‘He’s not run-of-the-mill!’ wailed Eric, his head in his hands. ‘Tell Dr Barlow. Tell him!’
‘Tell me what?’ asked Newton. His visitors shuffled uncomfortably. ‘What happened next? ’
‘The machine Diego,’ said Alex solemnly. ‘You’d better tell him about the machine.’
CHAPTER 27 – An ill win d
That same year, even as La Senza and his team consolidated their grip on the north, there was a storm. A tempest of huge magnitude slammed in from the Atlantic, first making landfall in Portugal then tearing its way up through the Bay of Biscay in a vast spiral that hurled winds and waves against the coastline from Lisbon to Southampton.
Its destruction became the stuff of folklore. Church steeples toppled in a thousand hamlets; cows and sheep were said to have been lifted into the air like kites. In Gironde, ships were found as far as fifteen miles inland while a vast brass cathedral bell in Bordeaux broke free and fell on a brothel. Even allowing for the medieval tendency to exaggerate such things until the facts are meaningless, it was one hell of a storm.
In such dire weather, the worst place to be was at sea. With no early-warning system beyond seaweed, the tempest obliterated unsuspecting fishing boats, men-of-war and trading vessels by the hundred. More than a thousand women living on the Atlantic coast became widows over the course of that dreadful day. But it was the fate of one vessel in particular that was to have truly dire consequences.
Caught by vicious storms in the Bay of Biscay, a modest carrack carrying a strange group of scholars, technologists and artisans had been blown off course and torn to pieces on the coastline of Inquisitorial Spain. The bedraggled survivors lay utterly dejected in the surf together with a curious mess of flotsam and jetsam. Thanks to the prompt action of nearby militias, they were spared from being stripped, murdered and then burnt by the friendly locals, though not necessarily in that order. Quite frankly, they’d have been better off drowning.
Stories concerning the strange survivors soon began to spread out from the wreck until finally, they reached La Senza, who was resting with his entourage after a long hard season of murder, torture and perversion. La Senza, the black-leather-clad Lupero and the fearsome Sister María saddled up and rode out.
In no time they arrived at the small coastal town to see what the tide had brought in. The poor shivering survivors were in a pitiable state and had the Cardinal and his followers been capable of pity then surely they would have shown it. No, almost as a reflex action, they set about torturing the poor wretches – partly for amusement, but also because La Senza correctly suspected the cargo of the wrecked vessel could benefit his own murderous agenda.
Under the unsubtle pressure of Sister María’s nipple clamps and Lupero’s water boarding, the three survivors soon divulged enough to give the sinister gang the story they required. One was an Englishman, an alchemist from London, who specialised in base metals and complex powders that could blast, blind and intoxicate. A Dutchman, after a few hours with the tongs, confessed that he was a maker of machines for war and entertainment. This ingenieur was fresh from the courts of France and the Low Countries where he had been in the employ of eccentric barons and the military. Several examples of his wonderful automata were discovered in the wreckage, but they were damaged beyond operation by the disaster that had befallen their ship. Though broken and sand-blasted by the surf, they were still a wonder of gears and carving. After much incentivising with head clamps, a third survivor, a German, admitted to being a necromancer, skilled in magic that could be used to connect one with the dead for fun and profit. It was he who had foolishly brought on the voyage an extraordinary book.
Given to La Senza by a terrified fisherman, the book had been found floating off the coast in a sealed box. Which was unfortunate, because if its bizarre contents had made contact with the sea, then the water-based instructions and weird incantations it contained would have been lost forever and out of La Senza’s foul clutches. As it was, for the evil, twisted mind of the Inquisitor, it was an absolute gift. Sensing its import, La Senza led the party back to the monastery to continue their interrogations, the poor foreigners slumped over the donkeys like saddlebags.
Realising just how deep in the brown stuff they really were, the three survivors bravely confessed everything. They gave a good account of their travel plans, namely to proffer their unique services to the authorities in Bordeaux. There, they had hoped to find a willing market for their peculiar skills, just as they had done with much success in Calais, Liège and Amsterdam. The brutal storm had caught them as they rounded Brittany. Driven far south by mountainous seas, they floundered on possibly the worst coastline in Europe if you were hoping for tea and sympathy. Having heard the nightmarish rumours of the Inquisition, they buckled like cheap deckchairs. Soon they were grovelling pitifully before the evil Cardinal, desperate for mercy, wailing compliments, promising favours and generally offering a small target in the hope that La Senza would spare them a hideous death. This, much to their surprise, they were granted. Realising how potentially useful they might be, La Senza whisked his captives further into the mountains and away from prying eyes. He rolled up at a remote monastery, promptly evicted the resident monks and made himself at home. The alchemist, the technologist and the necromancer were duly thrown into cells and Cardinal Balthazar De La Senza, by the light of a roaring fire, settled down to read the book.
And what a fantastically odd book it was – one vast volume, its words inscribed upon a thick vellum that looked suspiciously like it was made from pale human skin. There were instructions for the destruction or preservation of souls, incantations for making reluctant lovers passionate and spells that could cause friends to become foes and vice versa. But what really interested the coal-black, devious heart of La Senza were the full descriptions of the real nature of heaven and hell.
These were not the usual goblin-filled terror texts so popular with the impressionable medieval mind. No, these were extremely factual outlines of the true nature of Purgatory, written by a genuine authority on the subject. Now, through the twists and turns of wicked fate, they had fallen into the hands of what can only be described as the enemy.
For this necromancer, sadly, was an agent of the organisation. Recruited by Eric the Greek back in the early days, he’d been told explicitly that he should never, but NEVER, write anything down. Sadly, for personal gain or because he had a lousy memory, that is exactly what he had done. La Senza, who knew a bad thing when he saw it, understood immediately what he was holding. Excited, he showed himself into the cell where the poor necromancer hung from the wall like a barometer. Wanting to keep his prey fresh, La Senza had the necromancer taken down and he was given normal quarters, reasonable rations and a reduced torture regime. Over the next few months, under the threat of a slow agonising death, the necromancer told La Senza everything he knew about life, death and Purgatory. He told him about how the spirit could be preserved or destroyed with the use of reliquaries. Finally, after many long months of detailed interrogation, he was hung back on his wall, this time upside down, while Cardinal La Senza, now thoroughly in the know, wondered how best to use the revelations.
But this long sojourn in the mountains had not gone un-noted by the Inquisition. Diego and his team managed to locate the maverick Cardinal and they made a point of visiting him before the first snows of winter. La Senza, contrary to his natural persona, presented a cheerful reassuring air, affecting to be resting and contemplating all things biblical in preparation for a return to the day-to-day grind of Inquisitorial mayhem in the spring. But Diego was not convinced. He correctly assumed that the Inquisitor was up to something. Choosing his moment, he proffered gold pieces to one of La Senza’s less fanatical entourage. With an agent deep inside the La Senza clan, the Chaplain retired to Zaragoza to deliver his report.
Of course, La Senza was contemplating nothing other than triple-distilled evil. In his dark imaginings, he plotted something so hideous, so vile and senseless that all other vile, senseless things would look pleasant and sensible by comparison. The three shipwrecked foreigners were dragged up from their damp cells and as Lupero heated a series of ambiguous metal objects upon a portable barbeque before them, La Senza gave them an offer too horrific to refuse.
‘Build me something if you wish to live,’ he told them. ‘Build me a machine of wood, glass and metal – a machine that takes the living, as it takes the dead, and removes them utterly from this world – and the next! Make it big, make it mobile and make it strong. Give it the power to function wherever it may be and make it much afeared by all who see it, smell it or hear it. Build me this and I will spare you a fate so mind-blowingly nasty that merely telling you about it in advance would probably result in your premature demise. The choice, gentlefolk, is yours.’
What else could they do? As the first snows fell across the western Pyrenees, the three fearful foreigners began their bizarre project.
By now, La Senza was rich beyond his wildest dreams on the spoils of his ghastly enterprise, and able to acquire every item on the shopping list with ease. Couriers were dispatched far and wide in search of rare metals, the finest clock mechanisms and precision tools. The automata maker toiled long and hard into the nights, his chisel carving diabolic forms upon the machine’s outward surfaces and internal fittings, while the alchemist, working from detailed descriptions within the book, mixed foul-smelling chemicals that often rendered part of the monastery uninhabitable for several days. And the necromancer, he inscribed with his own hands the horrid medieval software that would operate the behemoth. Sitting upon gigantic cartwheels, it finally shrugged off its scaffolding just as the snows began to recede up the mountain slopes. With spring now reclaiming the high pastures, the three exhausted men went to the Cardinal to inform him that the device was ready.
To this day, no one knows exactly how the machine worked or how it was operated. But we can be sure that its operation was explained to La Senza and Lupero in great detail, and that by the end of their instruction, they decided it would be somewhat remiss not to test it.
First in was the alchemist. He fought and he struggled, but tied up in a bag there was little he could do and he disappeared inside the machine to face a processing so terrible that it cannot be imagined. Diego’s agent was not present in the workshops, but even so, he heard the screams and pleading through the monastery’s thick walls. The alchemist’s final awful seconds were heard only as a pathetic echoing rattle that ended none too soon. When all was done, mere dust puffed out from the rear of the horrible contraption, and the alchemist, who’d once been a huge fan of powders, was now one himself.
Next in was the ingenieur. The ornate beastly carvings and the diabolic cogged and barbed machinery, made with his own skilled hands, dragged him deep within the man-made tube of terror and in time, he too had gone, a mere gust of dust the sole sign of his passing. Finally, inevitably, in went the necromancer, his soul and body brutally separated and his total being shredded like crispy duck at a Chinese restaurant. Nothing physical or spiritual remained.
La Senza, of course, was delighted.
This machine would give him the ability to judge on an industrial scale, to rip through a town like a vacuum cleaner on an anthill. He could hoover up a population faster than they could confess. Now, he could judge both the living and the dead in equal measure. He could destroy the saints, kings and queens; he could wipe out any opposition on his road to total control. Those who came before and those present today, all would crumble before him into inert, helpless dust. He would rule the Church, the country, and he would rule the world .
Over the next few days, La Senza amused himself enormously by feeding all sorts of wastrels and strays into the machine. He ‘processed’ the poor, the rich and the elderly. He processed animals, furniture and food. He shovelled in relics from the catacombs and paintings from the walls. It was a multidimensional bloodbath, both on earth and in Purgatory, and it caused panic in both realms. This was merely a prelude. With the Inquisitorial season imminent, La Senza began to plan his activities with a new glint in his murderous eyes.
