John Fowles - The Magus

He looked to his left. Lily took off her glasses, stepped round the table and came and stood at the foot of the dais in front of me, with a bowed head; the white woolen dress, a penitential. Even then I was so stupid that I saw some fantastic new development; a mock wedding, some absurd happy ending… and I thought grimly what I would do if they dared try that on.

“She is your prisoner, but you cannot do what you like with her, because the code of medical justice under which we exist specifies a precise type of punishment for the crime of destroying all power of forgiveness in the subject of our experiments.” He turned round to Adam, who stood near the archway. “The apparatus.”

Adam called something. The other people behind the table stood to one side; in a compact group, facing the “students,” with the old man at their head. Four black-uniformed men came in. They quickly moved the sedan-coffin and two of the tables, so that the center of the room was left free. The third table was lifted in front of me, beside Lily. Then two of the men left and returned carrying a heavy wooden frame, like a door frame, on bracketed legs. Six or seven feet up, at the top of the uprights, were iron rings. Lily turned and walked to where they set it, some halfway down the room. She stood in front of it and held up her arms. Adam handcuffed her wrists to the rings, so that she was crucified against it, with her back to me. Then a kind of stiffened leather helmet, with a down-projecting back piece that covered the nape of her neck, was put on her head; a protector.

It was a flogging frame.

Adam then left; returned in two seconds.

I could not see what he was holding at first, but he swung it loose as he came towards me. And I understood; I understood the incredible last trick they were playing.

It was a stiff black handle ending in a long skein of knotted lashes. Adam unraveled two or three that were tangled, then laid the foul thing on the table, handle towards me. Then he went back to Lily—everything was carefully planned to be in this sequence—and pulled down the zip in the back of her dress to her waist. He even unhooked the bra, then folded it and the dress carefully aside, so that her bare back was fully exposed. I could see the pink lines on her skin where the strap had crossed.

I was the Eumenides, the merciless Furies.

My hands began to sweat. Once again I felt hopelessly out of my depth. Always with Conchis one went down, and it seemed one could go no further; but at the end another way went even lower.

The Smuts-like old man came forward again and stood in front of me.

“You see the scapegoat and you see the instrument of punishment. You are now both judge and executioner. We are all here haters of unnecessary suffering; as you must try to understand when you come to think over these events. But we are all agreed that there must be a point in our experiment when you, the subject, have absolute freedom to choose whether to inflict pain on us—and a pain abhorrent to all of us—in your turn. We have chosen Dr. Maxwell because she best symbolizes what we are to you. Now we ask you to do as the Roman emperors did and to raise or lower your right thumb. If you lower it, you will be released and free to carry out the punishment as severely and brutally as you wish, up to ten strokes. That is sufficient to ensure the most atrocious suffering, and permanent disfigurement. If you raise your thumb in the sign of mercy, you will, apart from one last short process of disintoxication, be free of us forevermore. You will equally be free if you choose to punish, which will also demonstrate the satisfactory completion of your disintoxication. Now I ask one last thing of you: that you think carefully before you choose.”

At some unseen signal the “students” all rose. Everyone in the room stared at me. I was aware that I wanted to make a right choice; something that would make them all remember me, that would prove them all wrong. The charade, the masque, had become a situation in which I was fully involved. I knew I was judge only in name. Like all judges, I was finally the judged; to be judged by my own judgment.

I saw at once that the choice they were offering me was absurd. Everything was fixed to make it impossible for me to punish Lily. The only punishment I wanted to inflict on her was to make her cry forgiveness; not cry pain. In any case I knew that even if I put my thumb down, they would find some way of stopping me. The whole situation, with all all its gratuitously sadistic undertones, was a trap; a false dilemma. Even then, through all my seething resentment and anger at being so mercilessly exposed in the village stocks, I had a feeling that was certainly not forgiveness of them, even less gratitude, but a recrudescence of that amazement I had felt so often before: that all this could be mounted for me, could happen to me.

Not without hesitation, thinking, gauging whether I was free to choose, and feeling sure that this was not a preconditioning, I turned my thumb down.

The old man signed to the guards and then went back to the group. My wrists were freed. I stood up and rubbed them, then tore the gag off. The tape ripped at the stubble on my chin, and for a moment all I could do was blink foolishly with pain. The guards made no move. I rubbed the skin round my mouth, and looked round the room.

Silence. They expected me to speak; so I would not speak.

I went down the wooden steps and picked up the cat. It was surprisingly heavy. The handle, of plaited leather over wood; a knop end. The thongs were worn, the knots as hard as bullets. The thing looked old, a genuine Royal Navy antique from the Napoleonic wars. As I handled it, I calculated. The most likely solution was that they would put the lights out; there would be a scuffle. The four men and Adam were by the door and it would be impossible to escape.

Without warning I picked up the cat and swung it down on the table. A savage hiss. The thrash of the lashes on the deal tabletop sounded like a gun. I began to walk towards where Lily was. I never expected to get to her.

But I did. No one moved, I was suddenly within hitting range and the nearest person was thirty feet away. I stood as if measuring my distance, first with my right foot forward, then with my left. I even gave the beastly thing a little shake, so that the thongs touched the middle of her back. Her face was hidden by the head protector. I swung the cat back over my shoulder, as if I was going to swing it down with all my force on that white back. I half expected a shout to ring out, to see or hear someone dash for me. But no one moved and I knew, as they must have known, that it would have been too late. Only a bullet could have stopped me. I looked round, half expecting to see a gun. But the eleven, the guards, the “students,” all stood immobile.

I looked back at Lily. There was a devil in me, an evil marquis, that wanted to strike, to see the wet red weals traverse the delicate skin; not so much to hurt her as to shock them, to bring them to a sense of the enormity of what they were doing; almost of the enormity of making her risk so much. Anton had said it: Very brave . I knew they must be absolutely certain of my decency, my stupid English decency; in spite of all they had said, all the bandillera they had planted in my self-esteem, absolutely sure that not once in a hundred thousand years would I bring that cat down. I did bring it down then, but very slowly, as if making sure of my distance again, then took it back. I tried to determine whether once again I was preconditioned not to do it, by Conchis; but I knew I had absolute freedom of choice. I could do it if I wanted. Then suddenly.

I understood what I had misunderstood.

I was not holding a cat in my hand in an underground cistern. I was in a sunlit square and in my hands I held a German submachine gun.