The Implacable Hunter by Gerald Kersh

executioners to lay the scourge on hard; his back was pulp, and still dripping when they stripped him. They had wrapped a wreath of thorns about his head, and that was dripping too. Also, the crowd had been at him. Somebody had torn out a handful of his beard, which, by the bye, would probably have washed out to a rusty-black sort of colour, and there was a bleeding patch on his jaw where some skin had come with it. He had a black eye. The open one was bright – feverish, of course – but it’d most likely cool down to a clear brown, I should say. They had smashed his nose, but by the way it was broken it was most likely one of those thin, bony noses: the thicker, fleshier ones swell up much more. I don’t imagine he could ever have been very much to look at, in point of stature or physique. He wasn’t looking at his best, needless to say – it was hard to tell where the hair ended and the blood-clots began. He was going bald, but his hair was long at the back and sides – black,streaked with some grey. I remember an old Jew saying to a young one: “You see what comes of breaking the Sabbath, Jacob?” A woman said to another: “So where’s the miracle-maker already? A genuine miracle-maker wouldn’t be in such a position.” A man with them said: “Leave the poor bastard be – he’s got enough.” Then the soldiers nailed him up.
    ‘One of Jesus Christ’s rich followers – and he had plenty of them, surprising as it may seem – must have slipped the executioners a good bribe, because I noticed they drove the nails in at the heel of the hand with the points slightly back, to cut the big veins in the wrists. The bandits got it through the bones of the palms, and that way one can hang alive for hours. The record, I believe, is two and a half days. But Jesus Christ started to bleed at once. You were asking about his appearance. That is all I can tell you, except that his belly stuck out – but so does everybody’s, as you know, when the cross jolts into position. I think that right up to the end, some of his supporters really expected him to work a miracle and step down. I saw one of them who had been weeping suddenly shake his fist and spit out of sheer disillusionment .
    ‘His voice I heard only once. He cried out that he had been forsaken, I think. It sounded thin and hoarse – but so would yours or mine in the circumstances, I fancy. The bandits tried to die game, and exchanged dirty badinage, to the delight of the crowd – until the cramps nipped them, and then they howled as they all do in the end. Jesus Christ was past that. He just hung limp and died fast. I was sorry for him. I never saw a man more alone in the world. His mother and some others were waiting at the foot of the cross. I threw her a few coins. She didn’t pick them up. So the Jews dispersed to celebrate their deliverance, and I went about my business. His mother had very fine brown eyes, incidentally: perhaps he resembled her. What do I know?’
    ‘Unsatisfactory,’ I said. ‘And were the heavens darkened?’
    ‘Darkened?’ said Afranius. ‘Not particularly. It was heavy weather, but what do you expect in Jerusalem at that time of the year?’
    ‘Everybody agrees that the heavens were darkened,’ I said.
    ‘No more than they would have been otherwise. What do you expect of people? A man will say, portentously: “The night when I was born, believe it or not, Vesuvius smoked!”’ Afranius said: ‘But there was an unpleasant atmosphere in the city. The Nazarenes didn’t dare to mourn their leader openly, especially while all the Orthodoxy was holding high festival. There was therefore a tension in the air. The Nazarenes are also Jews, remember – they would have pulled knives first and argued after. So Diomed would have put out double and triple patrols …
    ‘And there is all I can tell you about the individual who influenced history to this extent – that now, hundreds of miles away, an orthodox Jew spits in the beard