Requiem (37 page)

In a
matter of seconds bricks and stones were raining down on them. Sharon felt her
cheek sliced open by a sharp edge. Stones fell against the wall behind them. As
she raised her hands over her head she saw Ahmed felled, down on his knees,
crouching, trying to protect himself from the hail of rocks. Then he scrambled
upright, braving the missiles to throw himself around Sharon, desperately
trying to shield her with his own body.

They both went down.

The volley of stones
stopped as quickly as it had started. They heard shouting, first in Hebrew,
then in English. As they peered through the cracks between their fingers, a
tall young Hasid was charging towards them, bellowing in anger. Sharon thought
he was going to swing a kick at them. But when he reached them he stopped,
turning to face their tormentors. His hat had fallen to the dust. His black
beard was full, and his hair was thinning to baldness. He was red-faced with
exertion, and his corkscrew locks were shaking from rage. He spread his arms
wide in a gesture protective of Sharon and Ahmed, who were still crouched on
the floor behind him.

'Cowards!'
He was shouting back at his own people. 'Cowards! What are you doing? Throw
your rocks at me! Is there one of you who is good enough to throw those rocks?
Just one of you?'

No
one answered. The crowd remained silent. The bare-headed Hasid protector threw
back his head and released an almost inhuman roar of defiance. He turned and
glowered at Ahmed and Sharon. Sweat glistened on his brow. His eyes shone like
hot pitch. He turned back to the crowd. 'One of you! Is there not one of you
whom God has made good enough to throw a rock? If there is, throw it at me!' He
picked up a stick, and in a frenzy he scratched something in the dust before
hurling the stick aside. 'Go home! Go home, and let these people go!'

No one moved. The man
chased the first knot of spectators, who broke ranks and began to disperse. The
second group also broke up and began to drift away, hastened by the enraged
Hasidic Jew, who charged into them, bellowing, daring any of them to challenge
him.

Then
Tobie
was there, helping Sharon to her feet. The rescuer
was a friend of hers. Sharon was cut about the face and arm. Ahmed too was
wounded. Their rescuer came back across the quadrangle to pick up his hat.
'Don't bring these people here again,
Tobie
.'

'It was my
fault,' said Sharon. 'I brought the others here.'

'You're
Jewish,' he said. 'You know these people are like children. You provoke their
worst natures. I'm sorry. Don't come to the neighbourhood again.'

He escorted
them to the entrance to the ghetto.
Tobie
spoke
rapidly in Hebrew. 'Get them out of here,' said the man, dragging off his
spectacles and mopping his brow with a white handkerchief. 'Just get them out
of here.'

Tom entered the darkened doors.
A host of candles flickered throughout the vast church as he closed the door
behind him. Votive offerings, each burning with a soft, whispered prayer. False
prayers, thought Tom. Each light a lie.

A solitary worshipper was
kneeling at a pew close to the altar rail. The man's head rested on his folded
hands. Tom's footsteps echoed up to the vaults as he took a place well behind
the worshipper, clutching his plastic bottles to his chest, waiting for the
worshipper to leave.

The candles
of the lie burned slowly. Occasionally the flames shivered in a draught. Tom
thought of Katie, patiently waiting outside. She hadn't had to tell him what to
do. He had known.

Mary
Magdalene had shown them the truth. Mary the saint,
djinn
,
angel, demon, inspiration. Above the altar hung a Cross bearing the body of
the betrayed Christ. But it was not Judas who had betrayed him. It was Paul.
Remember, Tom thought, his own hands clasped before him in simulated prayer,
religious truth depends on the version of events which survives. Mary's version
had been written out. She had been excluded because she'd refused to recognize
the man who was not Christ in the garden outside the tomb. Because Mary had
known that the coming of the Messiah was a planned, stage-managed event,
subverted by Paul, the Apostle of the Lie, hater of women.

Stop
crucifying yourself, Tom,
Tobie
had said. Stop
crucifying yourself.

He could
atone. He could destroy the shrine of the enemy for Katie. The Usurper. The
Liar. Mary Magdalene was the truth. Paul was the Lie.

The worshipper
at the front shifted position. He's not going to leave, thought Tom. He looked
again at the man hunched over in prayer, and began to sense something wrong.
Something about the man's posture, leaning at a slight angle, alerted him. He
began to get a bad feeling: a dead weight, a lead sphere, swelling in the pit
of his stomach. The feeling began to escalate.

The door
opened behind him, admitting a draught of air, triggering a moment of hysteria
among the moth white candle flames before it closed. Someone else entered the
church and sat in a pew behind him. When he looked around, his perspective had
changed.

He no
longer found himself seated at the back of the church. Now he was crouched in a
pew under the altar rail, in the position of the solitary worshipper. As he
looked over his shoulder to the back of the church, his original position was
taken over by the figure who had just entered. Hugging his bottles of petrol to
his chest, Tom failed to make out the features of the shadowy newcomer now bent
over a pew. Tom's gaze returned to the altar. The church began to sweat. Stone
slabs oozed. Wooden benches seeped. Altar cloths, plaster saints, the golden
Gross, all began to weep sticky malevolence. The lead sphere inflated inside
his stomach. He wiped his eyes with the ball of his hand.

His
perspective suddenly switched again. A blink of the eye whisked him back to the
seat at the rear of the church; he was gazing once more at the solitary worshipper
by the altar rail. He got up and took a few steps towards the altar, slowly
approaching the hunched figure there. A taste of metal coated his mouth as he
drew up behind the figure. There was ringing in his ears. He swayed under a
momentary giddiness. Beneath the pew in which the grey worshipper sat hunched,
Tom saw something fat and coiled, glistening with oily lustre. The thing
gleamed darkly in the shadows. It flicked lazily, snake-like.

Tom
stepped back. The thing moved again, extending to full length before recoiling.
Now he could see it was no snake. The thing looped through the back of the pew
and was joined to the worshipper's body at the base of the spine. It was a
tail.

‘
The
jinn,’
he breathed

.Struggling
against the horror rising in his gullet, Tom heard something behind him. He
darted a look over his shoulder. Near the entrance to the church another grey
figure was rising from the pew he himself had occupied moments earlier. The
tailed creature beside him had gone.

Somehow
they'd reversed positions again. The figure from the back of the church approached
him, its black tail clearly visible, swishing lightly against the carpeted
length of aisle. The advancing demon carried something close to its chest. Two
plastic bottles of sloshing yellow liquid.

The creature
in the aisle was closing in on him, breaking into a run. Backing away, Tom's
perspective switched again; this time the
djinn
pursued him from the altar-end of the church. Each time Tom's mind
registered and resisted the change of perspective, the perspective switch was
thrown again, until he was sandwiched, hunted from both ends of the church
simultaneously.

He was being
propelled into a collision with a
djinn
which
had his own face. The double-demon ran at him, bearing down.

At
the moment of impact, all sound was stilled. The candle flames stopped burning
without being snuffed out. Each light was like a tiny white flower, blossoming,
expanding its halo until the individual bulbs of white blotted into each other,
forming a single wall of blinding light. Behind the wall of light was a distant
screaming, gradually amplifying, growing to occult pitch, the sound at first
splitting the wall of white light with hairline cracks before shattering it, so
that time poured through the breach and the candles began to burn again with
individual light. Tom felt the scream issuing from his own throat. The
petrol-filled bottles tumbled from his grip and rolled across the floor. He
staggered into a wrought-iron stand bearing a dozen burning candles. It toppled
on to the plastic bottles of petrol.

Tom stumbled
outside the church, holding his throat, gasping for air. No one was around.
Katie had gone.

'It was you,
Katie,' Tom said to the thickening darkness outside the church. 'It was you
all along.'

There
was the sound of riot emanating from the direction of Damascus Gate. Tom heard
gunfire, one, two shots. Smoke was coming from inside the church through the
open door. He scrambled down the steps, dragging himself to his feet. No one
was around to notice the conflagration from inside the church. Tom ran off towards
the commotion at Damascus Gate.

When Sharon, Ahmed and
Tobie
arrived at Damascus Gate via the Ha
Nevi'im
road, a near riot was in progress. A throng of
demonstrators was being pressed back under the Crusader arch of the gate by a
small detail of beleaguered soldiers. The crowd was forced back across the
bottleneck of the concrete rampart spanning the dry moat. Meanwhile more Arabs
were pouring into the crush from the street under the battlements of the wall. The
sweating faces of the throng were illuminated by the ropes of fairy lights
strung from the battlements, and the young Arabs arriving at the rear of the
crowd began funnelling Ahmed,
Tobie
and Sharon in
towards the arch.

'This is bad,' said Ahmed. 'This is bad.'

'Something's
on fire,' said
Tobie
, pointing at coils of smoke
issuing from the church of St Paul. 'They've set fire to the church.'

They heard
some people talking. A demonstration by
Hamas
supporters in East Jerusalem had resulted in the killing of a soldier. The
soldiers had returned fire, shooting dead a young girl.  The people were
in an angry mood, jostling the line of uniformed Israeli conscripts trying to
hold the gate.

'Let's get out of here,' said
Tobie
.

'There!'
shouted Sharon jubilantly, pointing at a figure pressed against the wall
beneath the Crusader arch. 'Is that your shirt, Ahmed?'

Ahmed nodded
his head in dismay. It was Tom, wearing Ahmed's silk shirt, his head shaved.

'We've got to pull him out of this,' said
Sharon.

But there
was no way of making progress through the crush. Rumours began to sweep through
the crowd. The Jews had set fire to St Paul's to blame the Arabs. The
Christians were burning a mosque in retaliation. Ahmed began to panic. 'I can't
stay here,' he hissed. 'Look at these people. One in five of these people is a
djinn
.’

Tobie
took his hand. 'Stay close.'

'I'm afraid of the night,' said Ahmed.

'Me too,' said
Tobie
.
'Me too.'

Suddenly
the cordon of soldiers gave way, and there was a roar as the crowd breached the
line. People fell to their knees under the crush. Two men jumped down into the
dry moat to escape the press of bodies. Fighting broke out to try to make room
for those who had fallen underfoot. More Arabs came up from behind, enclosing
the three of them in the melee. It was hot. Tension and incipient violence hung
over the crowd like smoke from a burning tyre. There was a clatter of boots
from overhead as a fresh detail of soldiers took up positions on the wall above
them, training machine-guns on the crowd through the battlements.

Sharon
grabbed
Tobie
, who was still holding Ahmed. She gave
them a tug. 'Come on.'

They
followed the flood of people through the gate. The first cordon of soldiers had
retreated inside and was backing up into the Arab
souk
,
followed by the demonstrators, who were chanting now, crying the name of
God, fisting the air, bellowing slogans, ululating. The three of them were
flushed through the gate into the square inside the old walls.

'God
is great!' a young Arab screamed into
Tobie's
face.

'Not on days like this!'
Tobie
screamed back.

Ahmed held his head in his hands.

'There!'
shouted Sharon, seeing Tom swept around a corner, away from the
souk
.
'He's broken free. Come on.'

But a cohort
of troops jogged up towards them from the direction of Herod's Gate, bellowing
at them to get back. They pressed themselves against the wall as the soldiers
pushed past, herding the crowd back into the arch of Damascus Gate. Sharon
abandoned the others, running towards the spot where she'd sighted Tom.
Tobie
and Ahmed followed.

Tom was frightened. He'd
joined the crowd in the bottleneck of Damascus Gate to hide, to get away from
the burning church. He'd found himself pressed inside the Old City when the crowd
had broken through the soldiers' cordon. Swept along in the hot, chanting press
of the crowd, he'd seen in the darkened, sweating faces of the throng that one
in every five or six people was an ugly
djinn
in disguise, urging the people on to violence, swishing their lustrous
grey-black tails in excitement. The
djinn
,
he’d
discovered, could make their tails appear and disappear, retracting them at
will when anyone trying to inspect them at close quarters, like himself, came
too near.