The Magus - John Fowles [227]
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 unravelled 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 symbolises 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