James Craig - Time of Death

Every so often, a group of sailors would appear and three or four people would be taken away for interrogation in the cabins which had been turned into torture chambers on the decks below. It was impossible to tune out the yelling and screaming that came up through the floor as the electric shocks were applied. The sessions could last twenty minutes or they could last ten hours. Afterwards, some of the victims came back, others didn’t.

The first time he was tortured, Pettigrew shat himself almost before the cattle prod tickled his balls. His interrogators laughed and then made him eat it. They laughed even more when he immediately vomited the shit back up. They told him to eat it again. He tried, but this time he could not even manage to get it into his mouth. After some curses and some punches, they hosed him down.

More electric shocks, this time to the anus. He started shitting blood, bright crimson splashes on the floor rapidly darkening in the heat. That caused more hilarity. They hosed him down again. By now he welcomed the water jet. If nothing else, he could be clean.

The questioning was random and perfunctory. This was not sophisticated intelligence-gathering, and they were not interested in any answers. They had a lot of people to get through and could only waste so much time on each individual. No one cared about anything he had to say. No one recorded anything. No one took any notes. He was like a fly having its wings pulled off by a bunch of sadistic schoolboys.

It was all a charade. Emotionally, Pettigrew had closed down. He could feel the pain, but he didn’t have any thoughts about it. There was nothing he could say that could make him useful to these people, nothing to hang on to that could fire a determination inside him to live. It wasn’t a question of trying to survive. It was just a question of seeing it through.

Their only question was what do you know?

‘I know nothing,’ he would say, as calmly as possible.

‘What do you know?’

‘I know nothing.’ That was true enough, even in the beginning. By the third or fourth time they asked him, he could barely remember his own name.

They would give him a few slaps, maybe another shock, and ask again.

‘What do you know?’

Slap.

‘I know . . . nothing.’ Pettigrew couldn’t even think straight enough to make something up. Names? By the time that they finally got round to him, who was left? Who could they not have possibly rounded up already?

‘What do you know?’

Slap.

‘Nothing.’

Pettigrew didn’t want to make anything up. He knew that if he started giving them any kind of ‘information’ that it could only prolong things. By now he just wanted it all to be over as quickly as possible.

‘What do you know?’

Slap.

‘What do you know?’

He had nothing more to say. There were no more words. He was on a journey back to a time before language, before words; to a time when all you could do was howl.

After his second torture session, Pettigrew was told that he would immediately be shot because he was a fucking Communist whore – both a traitor to the Church and a traitor to the country.

They blindfolded him and pushed him up against a wall. Someone stepped in front of his face and said softly, ‘It’s over for you. The good priests are coming back now. The ones Allende stopped from teaching; the ones who were banned from hearing confessions; the ones who had to work as taxi drivers to make a living. I mean the priests who defended the Supreme Court and the Constitution of the Republic of Chile and opposed the creation of a Communist state. The ones who love the Church and don’t want to see it destroyed by faggot perverts like you.’

Pettigrew said nothing. All he could think was, It’s finally over.

‘Understand this: the Marxist invasion of the Church is at an end. The theology of liberation is dead.’

He could sense the excitement in his beating breast. Thank you, God .

‘You are dead.’

The voice stepped away and there was silence for five, ten, fifteen seconds. The safety-catch of a pistol was flicked off.

Someone cried, ‘ Fire! ’

A gull squawked overhead.

He stood there, shaking, refusing to still be alive. It should have been all over by now.

On the way back to the hammocks, someone clipped him round the ear, mistaking his sobs of frustration for sobs of relief.

His torturers soon became bored. After his fifth session, they left Pettigrew chained to a metal bedframe with a muslin hood over his head. At some point, he heard shouting. The sounds of people running around. General activity of men doing their jobs. Slowly, the ship’s anchor came up.

A little later, he heard the door to the cabin open. Excited youthful voices gathered by the door. Then they brought in a woman and he heard them chain her to the bed next to his. Then they argued over who should go first.

Apart from a few shadows moving across the bottom corner of his field of vision, he couldn’t see anything because of the hood over his head.

But he heard her screams.

Maybe he had died; died and gone to Hell. The sounds were bad, but the smell was worse. He lost count after the fifth time they raped her. Most were quick about it, but one man seemed to take an eternity. ‘Hurry up, Julio,’ one of his companions squealed. ‘We’ll find you another one later.’

‘You can do him ,’ someone else said, kicking Pettigrew’s bedframe so hard that it bounced off the floor. ‘Just flip him over, you won’t know the difference.’ There was laughter and he felt spittle spray across his chest.

Another voice, closer this time, said to him: ‘How would you like that, priest? You can be next. If you’re still tight enough, that is.’

Finally they left. After the cabin door slammed shut, he listened to her sobs.

And then her whimpering.

And – finally – her silence.

Much later, he moved his head in the direction of the woman. Their beds were less than six inches apart. She was nearly close enough to touch. If he flexed the fingers on his left hand, he imagined that he could almost brush her right forearm. He tried to ignore the beating of his heart, the rasping of his breath and the buzzing in his ears, and instead concentrated on listening. There was nothing to be heard. Maybe it was his hearing – they had hit him on the ears many times. It was a torture technique called ‘the telephone’ and perhaps he had taken one call too many. Either way, the silence was a blessing. He hoped that it meant that his unknown companion was gone. That Death had finally shown her its soft heart. And he hoped that he would soon be shown the same mercy.

The hours passed with his body encased in a gentle rhythm of pain. At some point Pettigrew imagined that he was floating on the ceiling, looking down on the two beds: their bare frames, no mattresses, no blankets, no pillows; nothing else in the room but their naked, bloodied, bruised pulps.

He wanted to cry, but no tears came.

He wanted to scream, but no sound came.

He wanted to leave this place, but he could not move.

After a while, he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to see a messenger from the celestial court close by. Dressed only in a loincloth, he had the concerned expression of a man. With a warm, sincere gaze, he looked deep into Pettigrew’s eyes as he hovered above him.

‘I am Dismas, your guardian angel,’ said the vision.

The priest smiled. He knew that Dismas was the Good Thief who had been crucified with Christ on Calvary, and then accompanied Him to Paradise. Dismas was the only human to be canonized by Jesus. He was also the patron saint of condemned criminals.