Chapter 9: For in this sleep of death, what dreams may come…
The man in the apron leered down at her, making sure she saw the long square iron spikes in his hand. She stared at them and involuntarily strained against the ropes binding her wrists to the crossbeam. Then he tossed two of them to the ground where they threw up a small cloud of dust.
The man settled down on his knees beside her right wrist and probed her wrist with his finger. She watched with growing terror. Real or not, she wasn’t sure any more. The sweat and dust stung her eyes. The lacerations on her back continued to burn and throb with every slight movement as she lay naked on the cross.
The man set the point of the spike at her wrist, and picked up his hammer.
“No wait!” she said, as if that would do any good.
She looked around wildly for any help. The centurion stood at the base of the cross watching. He motioned to the man with the hammer to get on with it. Then suddenly, he changed. One moment he was the tall strangely familiar man, and the next moment he was shorter, stouter, and with a small salt and pepper beard. He smiled at her grimly.
“Wait!” he barked at the man with the hammer. The man didn’t seem to notice that the centurion was a different person. He looked startled, but mainly because he had been stopped from doing his job.
She blinked, but the heavy bearded man was still there. Where did the other one go? she thought. I’m losing my mind.
“I’ll deal with this one personally,” said the new centurion.
“Sir!” said the man, and stepped back.
“Hello,” said the heavy, bearded centurion to her. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
She stared at him. None of this was right. It couldn’t be real. Was he here to help her? She was trembling in her terror now. Please get me out of here, she thought.
“No, of course not,” said the centurion. “It erases your memory. I think that was probably an unnecessary feature. You don’t know why you’re here, do you?”
“Please let me go,” she said. “I haven’t done anything. I don’t remember anything. This is all wrong!”
“Oh, but you did do something,” he said. “You tried to cheat death, to cheat God himself, by living forever.”
“I’m just a slave,” she said. “I didn’t cheat anyone.”
“When you saw me last,” he said, “you knew me as Bill, and you were a dying wreck in a stasis field. You should have been dead, but that idiot James pulled you out. He wanted to save you. He wanted to send you to another box where you could live forever, even when you had a terminal illness and God had numbered your days.”
Nothing he said made sense. She was a young woman. She was healthy, apart from being whipped half to death. Now these people were mocking her. “Please help me,” she said.
“I am,” Bill said. “We are the true path of God and we will bring life back to the way it was supposed to be, letting God decide the length of life, not some artificial intelligence. That’s why I created this box. Crucifixion will purge you of your sin and prepare you for Heaven, where you will live for eternity in God’s way. You should thank me, really.”
What box? There was only this dusty hill and the cross and the crowd waiting for her to suffer. There was this hallucination of a centurion who talked gibberish about God.
“I have nothing to thank you or God for right now,” she said.
“Yes, for stopping James from damning your soul to this empty artificial existence where nothing is real. He was all ready to send you back into the boxes and destroy my lovely virus, but I found out and killed him. He won’t be meddling with your salvation again. It seemed like he was in love with you. Funny isn’t it? You, an emaciated sick skeleton, with no chance at life. Anyway, he’s gone now.”
The centurion was mad. None of it made sense. Perhaps nothing here is real. That would explain the nightmarish quality of things. The crowd remained eerily silent, as if they were just statues, staring in her direction. Shouldn’t they be talking, chattering, urging things to continue. Their silence was out of place, adding to her terror.
“Please just let me go,” she sobbed.
“Sadly,” he said, “I can’t do that. I sent you to the English village where I could find you, but you had escaped faulty versions of my virus before, so this time when it caught you, I decided to make sure everything was working. I put myself in as the centurion to test it. I need to make sure it works, and what better way than to crucify you personally?”
She didn’t remember an English village, didn’t know about a virus. She wasn’t sick. She began to see the centurion as an evil nemesis, the focal point of her nightmare, her adversary. Like in any nightmare, she found that she could do nothing to stop him.
“This can’t be real,” she said. “It’s a nightmare.”
“Oh?” he asked, settling down beside her wrist. “It will be real enough. You need the ordeal to purify your soul, and then you go to Heaven where eternity is real. You can’t stay here. It’s all fake. You don’t even have a name.”
“Natia,” she whispered. “My name is Natia.” It was all she had.
“Where did you hear that?” Bill asked. “That’s what James started calling you. That’s when I realized he would never help me. He was too involved in your case. Gave you a name and everything. That’s why I killed him.”
“You’re a monster,” she said. “You know I’ve done nothing, but you’ll crucify me anyway.” Please, let me wake up!
“You can be Natia, if you wish,” said Bill. He picked up the spike. “You know,” he said, “I programmed this, but it’s entirely different when you’re here actually doing it. More real than real, eh? And I don’t even have to worry about the morality of it, because in a way, none of it is real.”
It’s not real, she thought. That became a panicked mantra as the hammer came down. Remember, it’s not real.
He brought the hammer down on the spike. The square nail sliced down into her wrist, sending lances of searing pain up her arm. She screamed and her body thrashed. The crowd, which had been more or less silent, waiting for the show to begin, erupted in cheers, and encouragement.
“Nail the bitch!” came a voice from the crowd. Then the incomprehensible crowd noise was back at a higher volume. It was a crescendo of sound, amplifying her terror.
Bill looked slightly stunned at her reaction to the first strike of his hammer, and shaken by the blood coming from the hole in her wrist, but he set his teeth and hammered the nail home with three or four additional blows of the hammer.
“Not real,” he muttered, but he was shaking when the nail was set. She lay there as Bill rose ponderously to his feet, her breath coming in sobbing gasps as she tried to come to grips with the unrelenting pain in her wrist. It was unbelievable – a nail protruding from her wrist, fixing her arm to a piece of wood, blood welling out around the nail head.
“Carry on,” Bill said to the men in the aprons. “Finish it.” To her he added, “that wasn’t nearly as easy as I thought it would be.” He was mad, she thought, through her pain and tears.
The men in aprons picked up spikes. One of them sent one through her left wrist, while the other placed the spike at the instep of her feet and nailed them together to the upright of the cross. She howled out in confused agony, until she hyperventilated and collapsed, her entire world filled with blinding, dizzying pain.
“Pity really,” said Bill. “You are certainly more attractive here than you were outside. Maybe this is what James saw in you.” He ground the sole of his centurion’s sandal down on her exposed pubic hair, making her gasp in humiliation. “Oh well, soon you’ll be able to see him again.”
“You’re mad,” she whispered. She wasn’t thinking about whether it was real anymore. The pain was there. It was. It was everything, everywhere.
“No,” he said. “I am fighting for God’s righteousness. It’s not easy, and it may seem mad to you, but you’ll thank me when you are free.”
She just stared at him. Nothing makes sense. Please make the pain stop! There was nothing to hope for or thank anyone for now.
“Raise the cross,” Bill said.
The workmen along with four of the legionnaires lifted the cross by her wrists and her head, pushing it upright, while another guided the lower end into the hole dug for it. It rose past 45 degrees and she slid down, now having to support her weight on the three large spikes. She had a choice now of pain, or more pain. It was unrelenting, she tried to breathe, and even that was painful.
The cross slid down into the hole and landed with a soft thump that jerked her body, abrading her back against the upright and straining the nail points in her body, stretching her muscles. She wanted to pass out, stars dancing in front of her eyes, the light blinding her. She was dimly aware of activity at the base of her cross, and then she was upright and the cross was stable, and she hung there in front of the crowd.
“Please let me down,” she gasped. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Oh, but I do,” said Bill. “This is your only reality now. There is nowhere else to go.”
He walked away toward a tent pavilion set up at the edge of the perimeter and sat down to watch. Now that she was crucified, the guards relaxed the perimeter, and the crowd pressed forward to gather around her cross. People poked her, some just stared. Leering youth prodded and squeezed her breasts, if they were tall enough to reach. Someone slapped her bottom.
One young man stood in front of her, gazing at her body. She was tired, but she blushed as she found him staring at her stretched arms, her breasts, and her exposed mound.
“Go away,” she gasped.
In answer, he smiled, and pushed two fingers into her vagina. She couldn’t squirm away. He pulled his fingers out and walked away. She sagged down, willing herself to die. Tears streamed down her face. She was too tired to make any sound.
I’m not going to wake up, she thought. I will die in this nightmare, not even knowing who I am. My only memory is this crucifixion – that’s my entire life.
Finally, the crowd grew tired of the spectacle and started to trickle away. She had hung on the cross now, being abused and used as an exhibit and a plaything for several hours. She had started to drift in and out of full consciousness. How long does someone last on a cross, she wondered.
At one point she had drifted away into a delirious vision of a beach, a cottage, tropical flowers, but that ended with her being chased back to a cross.
“Almost over,” said a voice. She tried to focus on the speaker standing below her. She had barely the strength to push up to breathe.
“I know how this goes, you see,” Bill said. “I created it. I’m not totally unmerciful. I think they say Jesus was on the cross for about 6 hours, so that’s what I set this for.”
“How long…” she whispered.
“How long have you been here? About 5 hours. I expect you’ll be quite weak by now,” said Bill. "Soon delirium will set in. I can’t imagine what that pain must be like, even though I programmed it. They do say the pleasure and pain reproduction in the boxes is extremely realistic.”
She just stared at him. She didn’t have the energy left even to curse him.
“I’m kind of sorry I had to do this," said Bill, "but it’s to save your soul.”
She didn’t care anymore. She slumped on the cross now, breathing in shallow gasps, trying not to move. Moving only made things worse. The less she moved, the less air she needed, she hoped. Every now and then, it got too much for her and she would try to rise high enough to get air. She knew she couldn’t keep it up much longer.
Bill watched her with interest as she began to fade. She could see him gazing up at her. I wish he’d just go away, she thought. Maybe she was ill, as he had said, and this was all part of a nightmare of a sick person, something she was experiencing in a coma. She closed her eyes. Soon the pain and shame of this would be over.
She was dimly aware of another voice at the base of the cross. She opened her eyes to see a man in a legionnaire’s armour coming from behind her cross. It was the man who had worn the strange mottled green clothes, the one who had been hit by the spear butt. The one who had called her Natia.
“You can’t be here,” said Bill.
“Why not?” asked the man.
“You’re dead!” said Bill.
“Yes,” said the man, “but aren’t you always rattling on about how the boxes let you cheat death? I’m cheating. Just like I’m cheating by making myself a legionnaire in your little place here. The others,” he motioned to the other guards standing lazily leaning on their spears, “they only see me guarding the cross.”
“I could order them to arrest you,” said Bill.
“No you can’t,” said the man. “Your scenario doesn’t allow for that. You didn’t even make a realistic crowd. The legionnaires are all programmed to be loyal – they can’t revolt. They can’t, for example, do this.”
He pulled out his short sword and in a fluid, smooth movement, drove it up under the breastplate, into Bill’s torso.
She watched with a detached indifference. Two men, fighting. Nothing they said made much sense. She was dying, and now two men were fighting over her. It didn’t matter. Nothing was real. Only her pain was real. Her death would be real.
She watched as Bill stared at the sword sticking out of his body. He feebly tried to grasp the hilt as he fell to his knees. “You…” he said.
“I wonder if this little scenario of yours will malfunction when you die,” said the man. “Anyway, I must thank you for creating the “in between” box I needed to rescue Natia.”
She woke up at the sound of the name. It was him. He was talking about her. She might die, but she would remember her name, even if it was just made up in this nightmare. She would die knowing her name, and knowing one person had cared enough about her to come back.
The man had placed a ladder behind her cross now and she was aware of him climbing up. She could still see Bill, kneeling, sagging into death, blood welling from where the sword still protruded. The kneeling position made it impossible for him to remove it. Bill had tears of anger and frustration in his eyes. She couldn’t feel sympathy for him. He wasn’t real, was he?
The man who had called her Natia was on the ladder behind her.
“Now I’ll get you out of here,” he said, “like I promised. I’m really sorry this happened. I couldn’t get in sooner.”
“Too late,” she said. “Not important.”
His face was near her head now as she hung on the cross. She looked at him dully out of the corner of her eye, hardly able to raise her head. “Hang on,” he said.
“James,” she whispered.
“Yes,” he said, “I’m James.” He was reaching around with his hand which was holding the strange black rectangle, it’s glassy surface showing a bright green button. Where had she seen that before?
“You just have to press this button,” said James earnestly. He smiled grimly as he seemed to realize that her arms were fixed, stretched out on the cross. She had no control over any of her body anymore. She was just trapped in it now, part of the cross.
He leaned out over the crossbeam. “It’s over,” he said, and touched the glassy surface of the black tablet to her hand, so that her thumb touched the shining green button.
It was dark. She was tangled in something soft but restricting, and she couldn’t breathe. I’m dead, she thought. They’ve killed me and now I can’t feel anything and I’m hanging and suffocating. She thrashed her legs in panic. This surprised her, because she could definitely feel her legs, pressing against the binding softness, and there was no pain from her ankles.
Her head broke free and she gasped for air, still terrified that the pain would start again, that someone would have new tortures for her. She cried out for help.
“Natia!” said James, his arms coming around her to hold her close to him. It was James. She remembered James. James was her husband, wasn’t he? She remembered them getting married in the little stone country church. Was that only last week? Then they moved here. They had this little cottage with a garden. She had met Jamila and Mr. Hounslow, the butcher. It was all suddenly so familiar. “What’s the matter?” James was asking gently. “It’s okay. I’m here. You’re safe.”
“Can’t breathe,” she gasped, breaking into tears and crying with relief that she was in her own bed, she was with James.
“Well, you are a bit tangled up in the bed clothes,” said James. “That must have been a hell of a nightmare.” He started pulling the blankets, untangling her from them.
“Nightmare,” she said. Her arms came free. She looked at her hands. There were no marks, no holes, no scars. She could almost feel where the nail had gone. “It was real,” she said.
“No,” he said,“ pulling the blankets away from her body. She was naked. She blushed, as he pulled her against his naked body. She felt the roughness of his chest against her breasts, her belly pressed to his. “Are you still shy after a whole week of marriage?” he asked playfully.
“Don’t joke,” she muttered. “It was so real,” she murmured. The thought of it, the possibility of it being real made her press closer to James. He seemed real too.
“It was a nightmare,” said James. “Tell me about it. It’ll get it out in the open.”
So she did. She told him about waking up in the cell, not remembering anything. About the sham trial and the flogging, and the long walk with the patibulum. She told him about the nails, and Bill, and hanging exhausted. She told him about the searing inescapable pain.
“And then you showed up, and you killed Bill, and you rescued me,” she said.
“Ah,” he said happily, “there you are. Your knight in shining armour, at your service, even in your dreams. How did I save you?”
“You were dressed as a Roman, and you had an electronic tablet, and on the screen was a green button. You made me press it, and then I woke up.”
“Hmm,” he said. “Doesn’t seem very heroic.” As she had been telling him about the crucifixion, it had taken on more and more of an unreal nature. Now that she had recounted the actual “rescue” she laughed at his assessment. He was still holding her and she smiled as he kissed her forehead.
“It doesn’t sound very realistic, does it?” she said. “In my dream it was so vivid, but I recall telling myself it wasn’t real, and that I would wake up. I wonder if it means anything.”
“What? The nightmare?” asked James.
“Yes,” she said. “They say dreams mean something.”
“Maybe,” he said. “I’m just happy it wasn’t real and you’re here, and I’m here, and we’re in this lovely village with our lives ahead of us, and more importantly…”
“What if it was real, like an alternate universe thing,” she said.
“You read too much science fiction,” said James. “Anyway, Roman soldiers with electronic tablets?”
“It does sound odd,” she said. “In my dream, you talked about a box. Are we in a box?”
“It doesn’t look like a box,” he said toying with her nipple, and smiling at her.
“What did you mean just then?” she asked, squirming under his touch, “when I interrupted you?”
“About what?”
“You said, “more importantly…””
“Oh,” he smiled, and pressed himself against her, rolling her onto her back. “I meant, what’s more important than our future whole life is that I’m going to do this…” He parted her legs, and she looked up at him mischievously as he slid himself into her, “…right now,” he sighed.
Afterwards, as she decided whether she wanted to stay until he tried it again, or if she wanted to get up and find some tea, he said, “That was real.”
“It did seem quite real,” she smiled as he pulled her into a spoon position.
“I don’t expect you’ll be bothered by that nightmare again,” he said.
“No?” she asked.
“I’m sure of it,” he said.
FIN
The man in the apron leered down at her, making sure she saw the long square iron spikes in his hand. She stared at them and involuntarily strained against the ropes binding her wrists to the crossbeam. Then he tossed two of them to the ground where they threw up a small cloud of dust.
The man settled down on his knees beside her right wrist and probed her wrist with his finger. She watched with growing terror. Real or not, she wasn’t sure any more. The sweat and dust stung her eyes. The lacerations on her back continued to burn and throb with every slight movement as she lay naked on the cross.
The man set the point of the spike at her wrist, and picked up his hammer.
“No wait!” she said, as if that would do any good.
She looked around wildly for any help. The centurion stood at the base of the cross watching. He motioned to the man with the hammer to get on with it. Then suddenly, he changed. One moment he was the tall strangely familiar man, and the next moment he was shorter, stouter, and with a small salt and pepper beard. He smiled at her grimly.
“Wait!” he barked at the man with the hammer. The man didn’t seem to notice that the centurion was a different person. He looked startled, but mainly because he had been stopped from doing his job.
She blinked, but the heavy bearded man was still there. Where did the other one go? she thought. I’m losing my mind.
“I’ll deal with this one personally,” said the new centurion.
“Sir!” said the man, and stepped back.
“Hello,” said the heavy, bearded centurion to her. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
She stared at him. None of this was right. It couldn’t be real. Was he here to help her? She was trembling in her terror now. Please get me out of here, she thought.
“No, of course not,” said the centurion. “It erases your memory. I think that was probably an unnecessary feature. You don’t know why you’re here, do you?”
“Please let me go,” she said. “I haven’t done anything. I don’t remember anything. This is all wrong!”
“Oh, but you did do something,” he said. “You tried to cheat death, to cheat God himself, by living forever.”
“I’m just a slave,” she said. “I didn’t cheat anyone.”
“When you saw me last,” he said, “you knew me as Bill, and you were a dying wreck in a stasis field. You should have been dead, but that idiot James pulled you out. He wanted to save you. He wanted to send you to another box where you could live forever, even when you had a terminal illness and God had numbered your days.”
Nothing he said made sense. She was a young woman. She was healthy, apart from being whipped half to death. Now these people were mocking her. “Please help me,” she said.
“I am,” Bill said. “We are the true path of God and we will bring life back to the way it was supposed to be, letting God decide the length of life, not some artificial intelligence. That’s why I created this box. Crucifixion will purge you of your sin and prepare you for Heaven, where you will live for eternity in God’s way. You should thank me, really.”
What box? There was only this dusty hill and the cross and the crowd waiting for her to suffer. There was this hallucination of a centurion who talked gibberish about God.
“I have nothing to thank you or God for right now,” she said.
“Yes, for stopping James from damning your soul to this empty artificial existence where nothing is real. He was all ready to send you back into the boxes and destroy my lovely virus, but I found out and killed him. He won’t be meddling with your salvation again. It seemed like he was in love with you. Funny isn’t it? You, an emaciated sick skeleton, with no chance at life. Anyway, he’s gone now.”
The centurion was mad. None of it made sense. Perhaps nothing here is real. That would explain the nightmarish quality of things. The crowd remained eerily silent, as if they were just statues, staring in her direction. Shouldn’t they be talking, chattering, urging things to continue. Their silence was out of place, adding to her terror.
“Please just let me go,” she sobbed.
“Sadly,” he said, “I can’t do that. I sent you to the English village where I could find you, but you had escaped faulty versions of my virus before, so this time when it caught you, I decided to make sure everything was working. I put myself in as the centurion to test it. I need to make sure it works, and what better way than to crucify you personally?”
She didn’t remember an English village, didn’t know about a virus. She wasn’t sick. She began to see the centurion as an evil nemesis, the focal point of her nightmare, her adversary. Like in any nightmare, she found that she could do nothing to stop him.
“This can’t be real,” she said. “It’s a nightmare.”
“Oh?” he asked, settling down beside her wrist. “It will be real enough. You need the ordeal to purify your soul, and then you go to Heaven where eternity is real. You can’t stay here. It’s all fake. You don’t even have a name.”
“Natia,” she whispered. “My name is Natia.” It was all she had.
“Where did you hear that?” Bill asked. “That’s what James started calling you. That’s when I realized he would never help me. He was too involved in your case. Gave you a name and everything. That’s why I killed him.”
“You’re a monster,” she said. “You know I’ve done nothing, but you’ll crucify me anyway.” Please, let me wake up!
“You can be Natia, if you wish,” said Bill. He picked up the spike. “You know,” he said, “I programmed this, but it’s entirely different when you’re here actually doing it. More real than real, eh? And I don’t even have to worry about the morality of it, because in a way, none of it is real.”
It’s not real, she thought. That became a panicked mantra as the hammer came down. Remember, it’s not real.
He brought the hammer down on the spike. The square nail sliced down into her wrist, sending lances of searing pain up her arm. She screamed and her body thrashed. The crowd, which had been more or less silent, waiting for the show to begin, erupted in cheers, and encouragement.
“Nail the bitch!” came a voice from the crowd. Then the incomprehensible crowd noise was back at a higher volume. It was a crescendo of sound, amplifying her terror.
Bill looked slightly stunned at her reaction to the first strike of his hammer, and shaken by the blood coming from the hole in her wrist, but he set his teeth and hammered the nail home with three or four additional blows of the hammer.
“Not real,” he muttered, but he was shaking when the nail was set. She lay there as Bill rose ponderously to his feet, her breath coming in sobbing gasps as she tried to come to grips with the unrelenting pain in her wrist. It was unbelievable – a nail protruding from her wrist, fixing her arm to a piece of wood, blood welling out around the nail head.
“Carry on,” Bill said to the men in the aprons. “Finish it.” To her he added, “that wasn’t nearly as easy as I thought it would be.” He was mad, she thought, through her pain and tears.
The men in aprons picked up spikes. One of them sent one through her left wrist, while the other placed the spike at the instep of her feet and nailed them together to the upright of the cross. She howled out in confused agony, until she hyperventilated and collapsed, her entire world filled with blinding, dizzying pain.
“Pity really,” said Bill. “You are certainly more attractive here than you were outside. Maybe this is what James saw in you.” He ground the sole of his centurion’s sandal down on her exposed pubic hair, making her gasp in humiliation. “Oh well, soon you’ll be able to see him again.”
“You’re mad,” she whispered. She wasn’t thinking about whether it was real anymore. The pain was there. It was. It was everything, everywhere.
“No,” he said. “I am fighting for God’s righteousness. It’s not easy, and it may seem mad to you, but you’ll thank me when you are free.”
She just stared at him. Nothing makes sense. Please make the pain stop! There was nothing to hope for or thank anyone for now.
“Raise the cross,” Bill said.
The workmen along with four of the legionnaires lifted the cross by her wrists and her head, pushing it upright, while another guided the lower end into the hole dug for it. It rose past 45 degrees and she slid down, now having to support her weight on the three large spikes. She had a choice now of pain, or more pain. It was unrelenting, she tried to breathe, and even that was painful.
The cross slid down into the hole and landed with a soft thump that jerked her body, abrading her back against the upright and straining the nail points in her body, stretching her muscles. She wanted to pass out, stars dancing in front of her eyes, the light blinding her. She was dimly aware of activity at the base of her cross, and then she was upright and the cross was stable, and she hung there in front of the crowd.
“Please let me down,” she gasped. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Oh, but I do,” said Bill. “This is your only reality now. There is nowhere else to go.”
He walked away toward a tent pavilion set up at the edge of the perimeter and sat down to watch. Now that she was crucified, the guards relaxed the perimeter, and the crowd pressed forward to gather around her cross. People poked her, some just stared. Leering youth prodded and squeezed her breasts, if they were tall enough to reach. Someone slapped her bottom.
One young man stood in front of her, gazing at her body. She was tired, but she blushed as she found him staring at her stretched arms, her breasts, and her exposed mound.
“Go away,” she gasped.
In answer, he smiled, and pushed two fingers into her vagina. She couldn’t squirm away. He pulled his fingers out and walked away. She sagged down, willing herself to die. Tears streamed down her face. She was too tired to make any sound.
I’m not going to wake up, she thought. I will die in this nightmare, not even knowing who I am. My only memory is this crucifixion – that’s my entire life.
Finally, the crowd grew tired of the spectacle and started to trickle away. She had hung on the cross now, being abused and used as an exhibit and a plaything for several hours. She had started to drift in and out of full consciousness. How long does someone last on a cross, she wondered.
At one point she had drifted away into a delirious vision of a beach, a cottage, tropical flowers, but that ended with her being chased back to a cross.
“Almost over,” said a voice. She tried to focus on the speaker standing below her. She had barely the strength to push up to breathe.
“I know how this goes, you see,” Bill said. “I created it. I’m not totally unmerciful. I think they say Jesus was on the cross for about 6 hours, so that’s what I set this for.”
“How long…” she whispered.
“How long have you been here? About 5 hours. I expect you’ll be quite weak by now,” said Bill. "Soon delirium will set in. I can’t imagine what that pain must be like, even though I programmed it. They do say the pleasure and pain reproduction in the boxes is extremely realistic.”
She just stared at him. She didn’t have the energy left even to curse him.
“I’m kind of sorry I had to do this," said Bill, "but it’s to save your soul.”
She didn’t care anymore. She slumped on the cross now, breathing in shallow gasps, trying not to move. Moving only made things worse. The less she moved, the less air she needed, she hoped. Every now and then, it got too much for her and she would try to rise high enough to get air. She knew she couldn’t keep it up much longer.
Bill watched her with interest as she began to fade. She could see him gazing up at her. I wish he’d just go away, she thought. Maybe she was ill, as he had said, and this was all part of a nightmare of a sick person, something she was experiencing in a coma. She closed her eyes. Soon the pain and shame of this would be over.
She was dimly aware of another voice at the base of the cross. She opened her eyes to see a man in a legionnaire’s armour coming from behind her cross. It was the man who had worn the strange mottled green clothes, the one who had been hit by the spear butt. The one who had called her Natia.
“You can’t be here,” said Bill.
“Why not?” asked the man.
“You’re dead!” said Bill.
“Yes,” said the man, “but aren’t you always rattling on about how the boxes let you cheat death? I’m cheating. Just like I’m cheating by making myself a legionnaire in your little place here. The others,” he motioned to the other guards standing lazily leaning on their spears, “they only see me guarding the cross.”
“I could order them to arrest you,” said Bill.
“No you can’t,” said the man. “Your scenario doesn’t allow for that. You didn’t even make a realistic crowd. The legionnaires are all programmed to be loyal – they can’t revolt. They can’t, for example, do this.”
He pulled out his short sword and in a fluid, smooth movement, drove it up under the breastplate, into Bill’s torso.
She watched with a detached indifference. Two men, fighting. Nothing they said made much sense. She was dying, and now two men were fighting over her. It didn’t matter. Nothing was real. Only her pain was real. Her death would be real.
She watched as Bill stared at the sword sticking out of his body. He feebly tried to grasp the hilt as he fell to his knees. “You…” he said.
“I wonder if this little scenario of yours will malfunction when you die,” said the man. “Anyway, I must thank you for creating the “in between” box I needed to rescue Natia.”
She woke up at the sound of the name. It was him. He was talking about her. She might die, but she would remember her name, even if it was just made up in this nightmare. She would die knowing her name, and knowing one person had cared enough about her to come back.
The man had placed a ladder behind her cross now and she was aware of him climbing up. She could still see Bill, kneeling, sagging into death, blood welling from where the sword still protruded. The kneeling position made it impossible for him to remove it. Bill had tears of anger and frustration in his eyes. She couldn’t feel sympathy for him. He wasn’t real, was he?
The man who had called her Natia was on the ladder behind her.
“Now I’ll get you out of here,” he said, “like I promised. I’m really sorry this happened. I couldn’t get in sooner.”
“Too late,” she said. “Not important.”
His face was near her head now as she hung on the cross. She looked at him dully out of the corner of her eye, hardly able to raise her head. “Hang on,” he said.
“James,” she whispered.
“Yes,” he said, “I’m James.” He was reaching around with his hand which was holding the strange black rectangle, it’s glassy surface showing a bright green button. Where had she seen that before?
“You just have to press this button,” said James earnestly. He smiled grimly as he seemed to realize that her arms were fixed, stretched out on the cross. She had no control over any of her body anymore. She was just trapped in it now, part of the cross.
He leaned out over the crossbeam. “It’s over,” he said, and touched the glassy surface of the black tablet to her hand, so that her thumb touched the shining green button.
It was dark. She was tangled in something soft but restricting, and she couldn’t breathe. I’m dead, she thought. They’ve killed me and now I can’t feel anything and I’m hanging and suffocating. She thrashed her legs in panic. This surprised her, because she could definitely feel her legs, pressing against the binding softness, and there was no pain from her ankles.
Her head broke free and she gasped for air, still terrified that the pain would start again, that someone would have new tortures for her. She cried out for help.
“Natia!” said James, his arms coming around her to hold her close to him. It was James. She remembered James. James was her husband, wasn’t he? She remembered them getting married in the little stone country church. Was that only last week? Then they moved here. They had this little cottage with a garden. She had met Jamila and Mr. Hounslow, the butcher. It was all suddenly so familiar. “What’s the matter?” James was asking gently. “It’s okay. I’m here. You’re safe.”
“Can’t breathe,” she gasped, breaking into tears and crying with relief that she was in her own bed, she was with James.
“Well, you are a bit tangled up in the bed clothes,” said James. “That must have been a hell of a nightmare.” He started pulling the blankets, untangling her from them.
“Nightmare,” she said. Her arms came free. She looked at her hands. There were no marks, no holes, no scars. She could almost feel where the nail had gone. “It was real,” she said.
“No,” he said,“ pulling the blankets away from her body. She was naked. She blushed, as he pulled her against his naked body. She felt the roughness of his chest against her breasts, her belly pressed to his. “Are you still shy after a whole week of marriage?” he asked playfully.
“Don’t joke,” she muttered. “It was so real,” she murmured. The thought of it, the possibility of it being real made her press closer to James. He seemed real too.
“It was a nightmare,” said James. “Tell me about it. It’ll get it out in the open.”
So she did. She told him about waking up in the cell, not remembering anything. About the sham trial and the flogging, and the long walk with the patibulum. She told him about the nails, and Bill, and hanging exhausted. She told him about the searing inescapable pain.
“And then you showed up, and you killed Bill, and you rescued me,” she said.
“Ah,” he said happily, “there you are. Your knight in shining armour, at your service, even in your dreams. How did I save you?”
“You were dressed as a Roman, and you had an electronic tablet, and on the screen was a green button. You made me press it, and then I woke up.”
“Hmm,” he said. “Doesn’t seem very heroic.” As she had been telling him about the crucifixion, it had taken on more and more of an unreal nature. Now that she had recounted the actual “rescue” she laughed at his assessment. He was still holding her and she smiled as he kissed her forehead.
“It doesn’t sound very realistic, does it?” she said. “In my dream it was so vivid, but I recall telling myself it wasn’t real, and that I would wake up. I wonder if it means anything.”
“What? The nightmare?” asked James.
“Yes,” she said. “They say dreams mean something.”
“Maybe,” he said. “I’m just happy it wasn’t real and you’re here, and I’m here, and we’re in this lovely village with our lives ahead of us, and more importantly…”
“What if it was real, like an alternate universe thing,” she said.
“You read too much science fiction,” said James. “Anyway, Roman soldiers with electronic tablets?”
“It does sound odd,” she said. “In my dream, you talked about a box. Are we in a box?”
“It doesn’t look like a box,” he said toying with her nipple, and smiling at her.
“What did you mean just then?” she asked, squirming under his touch, “when I interrupted you?”
“About what?”
“You said, “more importantly…””
“Oh,” he smiled, and pressed himself against her, rolling her onto her back. “I meant, what’s more important than our future whole life is that I’m going to do this…” He parted her legs, and she looked up at him mischievously as he slid himself into her, “…right now,” he sighed.
Afterwards, as she decided whether she wanted to stay until he tried it again, or if she wanted to get up and find some tea, he said, “That was real.”
“It did seem quite real,” she smiled as he pulled her into a spoon position.
“I don’t expect you’ll be bothered by that nightmare again,” he said.
“No?” she asked.
“I’m sure of it,” he said.
FIN
On the other hand, the fear did keep me focused. 
I'm glad she got some supper in the end. 
