Chapter 1: The Skeptic's Humiliation
Alistair Finch ran a finger along the rough-hewn wood of the pillory. A fine gray dust coated his skin. Up close, the thing was less a relic and more a piece of crude carpetry, an oversized stocks for the head and hands. The local legends, repeated by breathless tour guides and drunk villagers at the pub, were patently absurd. That this object could “channel the suffering of the condemned” was pure gothic romance.
“Total rubbish,” he muttered to the empty, cold air of the dungeon.
His voice echoed slightly, swallowed by the thick stone and the oppressive silence. The castle above was a tourist trap, but down here, in the preserved punishment block, the air felt different. It tasted of damp earth and something else, something faintly coppery, like a coin held on the tongue. Probably rust from the endless chains bolted to the walls.
He’d published three papers debunking the so-called “magical” artifacts of the British Isles. This would be his fourth. A concrete, first-person account of experiencing nothing but cramped wrists and a stiff neck would be the final nail in the legend’s coffin. The academic glory was a nice bonus.
The wooden hinges groaned as he lifted the upper beam. The holes for the head and hands were dark, waiting. He felt a juvenile thrill, the kind he hadn’t felt since he was a boy pretending to be a knight. Now, he was a professor of fifty, in a tweed jacket that smelled of pipe smoke and old libraries, about to stick his head in a tourist attraction to prove a point.
Just a quick in-and-out, he thought.A sensory experiment.
He ducked his head, sliding it into the larger center hole. The wood was colder than he expected, grainy against his ears. He fumbled his hands into the two smaller holes on either side. The fit was snug, uncomfortably so. He reached up with his fingers, found the latch on the outside, and pulled the upper beam down.
CLUNK.
The sound was definitive.Final.
Darkness, closer and more absolute than the dungeon’s gloom, enveloped his upper senses. His world shrank to the smell of old oak, the chill on his neck, and the awkward, forward-leaning posture. He waited. A minute passed.Two.
“See?” he said aloud, the wood muffling his voice. “Nothing. Just wood and psychology.”
He shifted his weight, his lower back protesting. He’d take some notes on the physical discomfort, maybe make a witty remark about medieval chiropractic care. He tried to wiggle his fingers. A splinter dug into his left wrist. He hissed.
That’s when the whispering started.
Not a sound in the air, but a pressure in his mind, a rush of images that weren’t his own. A flash of freezing mud under bare knees. The stench of unwashed bodies and dung. A raw, animal fear that clenched his gut. He shook his head, blinking in the dark. Autosuggestion. You’re too suggestible, Finch.
But the images intensified, hardening. He felt a rough rope bite into his ankles. Cold stone beneath his thighs. He wasn’t in the pillory anymore; he was kneeling on a rough-hewn floor, a damp sack over his head. Panic, pure and electric, shot through him.
“Where is the book?” a voice snarled, close to his ear. The language was an older English, coarse and guttural, but he understood it. A fist connected with his kidney. The pain was a white-hot star, so vivid he gasped, choking on the sackcloth.
“I have no book!” he heard himself plead, in a voice that was both his and not his. “I am a teacher of God’s word!”
“Your words are poison. You read what is forbidden.”
Another blow. This time to the side of his head. The world spun and went gray at the edges. He was dragged, his heels scraping over stones. The sack was ripped from his head. Blinding daylight made him wince. He was in a courtyard, surrounded by a sea of filthy, leering faces. Peasants, merchants, soldiers. Their eyes held a hungry, carnival light.
He was forced against a post. His hands, his own pale professor’s hands, were bound above him with coarse hemp. He felt a strange detachment, a part of his mind screaming that this was impossible, even as another part, the part that was living it, was drenched in a terror so complete it was like drowning.
He looked down. He was naked. Exposed to the jeering crowd. The humiliation was a physical burn, worse than the chill of the air on his skin.
“Heretic!” a woman shrieked, her face contorted with rage.
Something soft and wet struck his chest with a sickening splat. A rotten tomato. The smell of decay filled his nostrils. Then a barrage followed. A clump of mud, a rotten egg that oozed down his thigh, a rock that glanced off his shoulder and made him cry out.
“Burn him!” someone yelled.
“Show us your learning now, devil’s scholar!”
The crowd’s roar was a living thing. He saw a man step forward, not a soldier but a burly townsman with a thick leather belt doubled in his fist. The man’s eyes were flat, bored. This was a chore.
“For the corruption of minds,” the man intoned.
The first lash was a line of pure, stunning fire across his shoulder blades. Alistair’s body jerked against the ropes, a scream tearing from his throat that was lost in the crowd’s cheers. The second lash crisscrossed the first. The pain wasn’t localized anymore; it was a system-wide shock, a bright, shattering agony that reset his entire universe. He lost count. The world narrowed to the whistle of the leather, the impact, the searing bloom of pain, and the raw, scraping sound of his own screaming breaths.
This isn’t real this isn’t real this isn’t—
With a jolt that felt like falling backward through ice-cold water, he was gasping in the dark, cold silence of the dungeon.
His head was still locked in the pillory. His hands were numb. He was trembling violently, every muscle clenched.A dream. A hallucination. A panic attack brought on by claustrophobia and an overactive imagination.
“Christ,” he breathed, the word ragged.
With fumbling, clumsy fingers, he groped for the latch. His hands felt foreign, unreliable. He found it, pushed. The upper beam lifted with a reluctant groan.
He pulled his head and hands free, stumbling back, his legs weak. He braced himself against a damp stone wall, sucking in deep, shuddering gulps of the dungeon air. It still smelled of dust and age.Normal. Safe. He was Alistair Finch again. Professor.Skeptic. He ran a hand over his face. It came away wet with cold sweat.
His body ached. A deep, phantom throb across his back and shoulders. Psychosomatic, he thought fiercely. A powerful mind can create powerful sensations.
He needed light. He needed his notes. He needed to get out of this bloody, dank hole.
Fumbling for his phone in his jacket pocket, he swiped it on. The artificial glow was blinding. He opened the camera, switching it to selfie mode. Just to see his own face, to ground himself in the present.
His own wide, bloodshot eyes stared back. His hair was disheveled. But his gaze drifted downward, past his chin, to the open collar of his shirt.
A dark red line, raised and angry, sliced across the base of his throat.
His breath hitched. He shoved the phone back in his pocket, his fingers now trembling with a new, more profound urgency. He turned, presenting his back to the stone wall, and began to shrug out of his tweed jacket, then his sweater, then the plain white cotton shirt beneath.
The dungeon’s cold kissed his skin. He twisted, trying to see over his shoulder in the poor light. He saw nothing. But he felt the skin there, tight and hot. With a sickening sense of dread, he lifted the back of his shirt with one hand and used his phone’s camera as a mirror, pointing it behind him.
The screen showed pale skin marred by a lattice of violent, crimson welts. Some were already darkening to a brutal purple. They crisscrossed his shoulder blades and the small of his back in a pattern that was sickeningly familiar. The pattern of a whip.
He let the shirt fall. He stood very still in the cold and the silence. The ancient wood of the pillory loomed beside him, just a shape in the gloom now. The whispers in his mind had stopped. All he heard was the frantic drum of his own heart and a single, clear, undeniable thought that cut through every rationalization he had ever built his life upon.
It was real.