Alex Cross's Trial

with terrible pain.

    I could not see anything. I thought my eardrums had burst from the pressure in my skull.

    But they hadn’t tied the noose right. Maybe the one who thought I was too tall was inexperienced. The rope was cutting under my jaw, but it had not gone tight. I got my hand up, somehow worked my fingers between the rope and my neck. I dangled and kicked as if I could kick my way out of the noose. They are hanging you, boy, was the chant that went through my head, over and over, like a song, an executioner’s song.

    Crack! I felt a sting on my back. Was it a bullwhip? A buggy whip? A willow branch?

    “He’s done. Or he will be,” the voice said. “We can go. Let’s get out of here.”

    The air smelled of woodsmoke. Were they going to burn me? Was I going to go up in flames now?

    That heat grew and grew. I struggled to see through the blood. It sure is hot up here. Maybe I’m already in hell. Maybe the devil has come and got me.

    “We better get out of here, J.T.,” said the voice.

    “Not yet.”

    “Listen to me. They’re still awake over in the Quarters. They’re angry.”

    “Let ’em come out here,” the other man said.

    “They’ll be looking for Corbett. He’s just like one of them.” “Yeah, he is. Just like a nigger. Wonder how that is?”

    I heard the crack of a branch. The voices began to fade. The heat that had burned me alive began to fade away. Then I was alone. There were iron hands around my neck, squeezing and squeezing. No air. No breath. No way to breathe.

    Oh, God. My mouth was so dry.

    And then I was gone from the world.

    Chapter 68

    A FEW MOMENTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS. Then I blacked out again.

    Awake.

    Asleep.

    Awake.

    The wakeful times were a nightmare of confusion.

    Terrible pain. There was something snapping at my feet, something with fierce sharp claws. Raccoons? Possums? A rabid fox? I didn’t know if I was still alive.

    I was surely dead for a while, then the bugs woke me with their biting, sucking my blood, little no-see-ums biting my neck and arms, mosquitoes big as bats sucking the blood from my veins, and then rats jumped onto my legs and ran up and down my body, squeaking, snapping at my privates.

    Then a flash of light, so bright I saw the spackle of blood outlined on my swollen eyelids.

Was I dead? Was I in a different world? In my delirium I heard something. Maybe the angels singing. Or was it a dog barking—

    Another flash, so bright it nearly shook me.

    The pain in my skull increased. I felt the blood pumping through a vein in my forehead. I imagined it bursting, the blood running in a stream down my leg.

    I tried to make a fist. My fingers are gone!

    Oh my God. Maybe not. I couldn’t feel anything on that side.

    I couldn’t taste the air.

    I could only feel my tongue swelling up in my mouth, choking me. And my fingers were gone.

    In my overheated brain I saw Mama at her desk, in that flowing white gown she wore under her housecoat. The violet inkstand, the silver pen. Mama smiled at me. “I think you’ll like this poem, Ben. It’s about you, baby.”

    I sat on my little stool in the room off her bedroom that smelled like lavender and talcum powder. I saw myself sitting there as if I were a figure in a drawing—a precise, detailed sketch of Mama and me.

    Then the pain came swelling up through my chest, through my neck, and up into my brain.

    Another flash of light.

    And once again, nothing.

    Chapter 69

    MORNING COMES TO A MAN hanging from a rope as it comes to a man sleeping in his bed—the chatter of birds, a faint breeze, the bark of a dog.

    Then comes the pain again.

    So much blood had clotted on my eyelids and eyelashes that I couldn’t open them.

    I breathed in short sharp intakes of air. The fingers of my right hand wedged into the rope had kept open just enough of a passage for a trickle of air down my windpipe. It had kept me alive. Or maybe somebody had spared me. Maybe the one who said I was too tall? Maybe someone I knew?

    The rest of my body was pure pain: so intense, so complete, that the pain now seemed like my normal state.

    “Look, Roy, ain’t no colored man. That man white.”

    The voice of a child.

    “Dang,” said another voice. “Look like they done painted him red all over.”

    A dog barked.

    “Worms!” the first boy yelled.

    I could only imagine what kind of horrible creatures were crawling on my skin.

    “Worms!”

    I felt something licking my foot. Then it barked.

    “Worms! Get away from him, he dirty! ”

    Ahhh.