The Seventh Candidate Read Free Page A

in
purely physical terms, was the Church of the Holy Cross at the
corner of the street. His mother had prayed there mornings and
evenings to no avail and finally had been prayed over one rainy
afternoon sixteen years before, to no avail either, Lorz imagined.
He hadn’t entered the church, that or any other one, since the
ceremony. If there’d been a public garden available he would have
gladly gone there instead. It would have had to be gigantic,
though, to fend off the city. He imagined himself, impossibly, on a
green bench under great oaks, with a deer drinking at a nearby
stream.
     
    The leather-padded door swung shut on him. He
got the silence and immobility he craved, but with it gloom,
dankness and the odor of rancid piety. The church was empty except
for a shabby old woman with a big plastic shopping bag seated
before the altar, head bowed. She was as motionless as the statues
of the saints in their niches. Nothing had changed. He could
believe that the old woman had been sitting there for sixteen
years. The only sound was the whisper of his soles on the
flagstones.
    Out of old habit he sat down on the side
aisle seat he’d once occupied between his mother and father. To his
left was the familiar sarcophagus with the eroded noseless effigy
of the recumbent Warrior Bishop who had upheld authority with sword
and gibbet in the time of the Child Kings.
    Soaring foreshortened above was the savage
mutilated black Christ that had terrified Lorz long ago. He was
three times life-size, stark and fissured, hewn out of
indestructible heart-wood blackened with time, as black as his
father’s uniform. The original polychrome was gone except for faded
flecks of color in the grain of the wood. The gouts of blood that
streamed from the barbed iron crown, the four nails, and the
open-lipped flank-wound were very visible, having been periodically
freshened up at later periods of weakening faith to assert the
reality of redemption.
    He bore other wounds, bloodless axe wounds
dealt by the Integral Iconoclasts during the late sixteenth-century
Time of Disorders. His chin had been partly lopped off. The
desecration had gone unrepaired except for the sectarians
themselves: reparation by disembowelment and molten lead. His
gaping chinless mouth was twisted in what seemed a mute cry for
even greater vengeance.
    Below that Christ, to the left, hung the
large oil painting of Jesus healing cripples. The two juxtaposed
images left Lorz indifferent now as everything in the church did.
He dimly recalled, though, his wonder, at perhaps five or six, on
learning that they were the same Person. It was another Mystery,
like the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, Three in One, but a
Mystery the priest never talked about: how the beautiful figure in
the painting with his gentle face and pure blue eyes and golden
hair spilling over his immaculate gown could be the same Person as
the black mutilated giant on His cross. Both were Jesus Christ, his
mother had explained.
    But for a long time young Lorz had
dissociated them in his mind. The gentle Person in the painting he
knew as “Jesus,” the Other as “Christ” perhaps because “Christ”
sounded like “cry,” not the cry of tears (tears were for blue-eyed
Jesus) but the cry of fury. For the child, only Christ, exclusively
that giant Christ, wielded power. He’d been secretly convinced that
the black snarling figure was no mere representation of Christ, but
Christ himself, so the only Christ, excluding the thousands of
imposters bearing the name, like the one in the painting. With
their blond hair and blue eyes they were pastel and powerless, even
when depicted performing miracles as in the painting. They suffered
meekly on the cross. They were jesus, not Christ.
    This one authentic Christ had repeatedly
pursued him in dreams for transgressions that had escaped his
father’s vigilance. Sometimes he’d prayed, without belief, to the
healing blue-eyed jesus on the picture to intercede and make