The Demas Revelation

by Shane Johnson

  Again, the violated door loomed before them. Scorched and splintered, a portion of the once impressive barrier still hung from the upper hinge. Other fragments littered the floor, and the group cautiously stepped over them.

  Anna raised a hand, signaling a halt. Fearing a weakened ceiling, she stood in the doorway, shining her light into the room. An upward look revealed heavy supports some ten feet above, broad beams of polished cedar apparently as intact as the day they were put into place. A spiderweb of cracks spread overhead where superficial fragments of plaster had fallen, shaken loose in the blast.

  She was wary. She always was, after Qumran.

  “Oh, man,” said Neil, his eyes scanning as Anna’s light swept from side to side.

  “Okay,” Anna began. “You all know the drill. I go first.”

  She stepped forward, ancient, sundered wood crunching beneath her feet. The still, cool air smelled of time contained. The chamber was the size of a two-car garage, its pale walls smooth, plastered, and oddly devoid of the murals or other decor so common in Roman design. Its dust-powdered floor bore a wall-to-wall mosaic of swirling patterns in blues and whites, its motif that of fish being gathered into wide, sweeping nets.

  How wonderfully appropriate, Anna thought.

  And ahead, at the focal point of the room, was an ornate altar of white stone, symbolically empty.

  Anna moved forward, squeezing into the narrow space behind the altar so that she might examine the wall more closely. The plaster was mottled in a distinct pattern, a tinge of gray wrought by centuries of contact with something no longer there. A pair of jagged holes, spread wide within the irregular stain, spoke of mounts forced free.

  “They used a crowbar,” she said, indicating multiple points of damage to the wall. She knew what had been mounted there.

  A cross.

  Even in the harsh beam of her flashlight, which caught on every ripple of the ancient trowel work and cast rough shadows, it was obvious. And now it was in the hands of looters, for sale to the highest bidder.

  “Get that light stand set up,” she said, her eyes never leaving the wall as she invited her students to enter. “Over here … I need to see over here.”

  In a moment Neil deployed the tripod and switched on the lamp. Aimed upward, its quartz beam splashed the ceiling, revealing the entirety of the chamber to their curious eyes.

  “Whatever was there,” Roberto began, his gaze fixed on the painfully empty wall above the altar, “must have been a good three feet tall.”

  “And silver, I’d say,” Anna noted, taking a scraping. “There’s residual discoloration here, where metal leeched into the plaster over time. Could have been solid silver, or wooden with an overlay, or with an inlay like the stair steps.”

  “It must have been a genius,” Neil proposed, referring to the representations of protective spirits common in Rome, usually crafted in bronze. “Or a Lar.”

  “A Lar wouldn’t have been up there by itself,” Beth said. “And neither one would have been silver.”

  “Could have been,” Neil replied. “Ancestral spirits were important too.”

  “Not silver important.”

  “So what was this, then?” Craig asked, snapping a picture. “A shrine to Jupiter or something?”

  “I don’t think so,” Anna said, her attention moving lower to a point just below the discoloration. A rotas square of white marble was set flush into the wall, some two feet on a side and as sharply defined as the day it was chiseled. She pulled the glove from her right hand and lightly ran her bare fingertips along its contours.

  “Like new,” she noted, reading the Latin words carved there, precisely arranged as they were in every such square ever found:

  R O T A S

  O P E R A

  T E N E T

  A R E P O

  S A T O R

  Rotas opera tenet arepo sator—“The Creator directs in secret the wheels of the world.”

  The words, configured so they read the same from top to bottom, left to right, and backward or forward, had been a subject of scholarly debate for more than a century. Many believed that the ancient wordplay, common in Rome, had been adopted by early Christians as a way of openly glorifying God in the face of persecution. Further, a simple rearrangement of its letters into a cruciform pattern produced the Latin words Pater Noster, which mean “Our Father.” Others, less spiritually inclined, saw it merely as a good-luck symbol with no specific meaning, used by varied cultures and given whatever significance each chose to give it.

  “No furniture,” Roberto observed, looking around. “No statuary. No nothing. The room’s empty, except for what’s left of the door. But was it this way all along, or—”

  “Or did the looters take everything?” Neil finished.

  “There could have been anything in here,” Roberto said, crestfallen. “And now we’ll never know.”

  “They were in a hurry, as always,” Anna said. “Crash and burn, plunder and pillage. Thank goodness the altar’s fixed in place, or they’d have taken that, too.”

  “But who knows what was sitting on it.”

  Like the others, Anna had seen the ghosts of whatever had stood on the altar—the dust-free, dinner-plate-sized, roughly circular signatures of a pair of objects now gone.

  “There just wasn’t time for them to have taken much,” she said, trying to bolster their spirits. “I doubt we lost anything really important.”

  “Except maybe the proof we were hoping for,” Roberto added.

  “Proof?” Beth asked. “Of what?”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  Burying her disappointment, Anna took a deep breath and forced a smile for the sake of her students. “We’ve made a major find, and you can all be very proud. We have a first-century chamber here. Empty perhaps, but far from worthless. We have a pristine rotas square, which may well indicate that Christianity had taken hold within the Roman Empire only a few decades after Christ. Think about that.”

  “May indicate,” Neil said. “It isn’t proof. The proof of what this place was probably walked out the door.”

  “What’s left of the door,” Beth added.

  Anna indicated the mosaic at their feet. “Look at this floor. Also pristine. A Christian theme of masses being gathered in by fishers of men.”

  “Or,” Neil said, “this place was the meeting hall of the Rome Fisherman’s Union, Local 502.”

  “Fair enough,” Anna said. “Neil’s right. Nothing we have here is definitive. So let’s get to work and find something that is.”

  She thanked her students for their dedication, and the group set about documenting the find in detail. For more than an hour, they scrutinized every square inch of the room, photographing and sketching its meager features. While Beth and Roberto took pencil rubbings of the rotas square and Neil used a laser measure to record the room’s precise dimensions, Craig put his camera to good use.

  The hour grew late. Their initial examination complete, Anna called an end to the evening.

  “We’ll meet at the café for breakfast,” she said, hugging each of her students as they passed by and headed back up the stairs. “Eight o’clock. Fine work, everyone. Get some sleep … Busy day tomorrow.”

  She turned off the work light and followed them out. Brilliant stars appeared overhead as the path wound upward, welcoming her back from the darkness. Emerging into the cool, perfumed breezes of the Italian night, she paused at the top of the stairs and watched as her team members made their way to their vehicles. Beth turned and waved a final time.

  “She’s so sweet,” Anna said, returning the gesture as Roberto walked up, flashlight and sleeping bag in hand.

  “I’m staying here tonight,” he had decided. “There may be nothing left to steal, but that doesn’t mean no one will try. At least I
can get a warning out.” He watched as the team’s vehicles roared to life and began to depart.

  “I’m so proud of all of you,” Anna said.

  “You know, you never did call the police.”

  She drew a deep breath. “I think you know why.”

  Roberto nodded. “Yeah. Because if that room down there really is what you think it is, we can’t tell anyone. Not yet. The police will leak the story to the press, and the press will inform the Vatican, who’ll immediately confiscate the site and order us away.”

  “And once that happens—”

  “They’ll build a church over it before the echo dies, and we’ll have pilgrims lined up for miles.”

  She laughed a bit at the exaggeration, but she knew it wasn’t too far from truth.

  “What about you?” he asked. “Do you have a room?”

  Anna patted his arm and peered into the blackness of the stairway. “Down there, I do.”

  “Signora Verducci said you could sleep in the house if you’d like.”

  “I’m still jet-lagged. I won’t be able to close my eyes for hours yet. Why don’t you go ahead and get some sleep up here while I look around downstairs a little more.”

  “Expecting a secret treasure room, Indy-Anna?”

  “No.” She smiled, hefting her purple gym bag. “But I would like to get a sense of the place. Just sit there and soak it in … and imagine the voices of two thousand years ago. Get to know the room and its builder a little better.”

  “Our friend, the wealthy noble.”

  “Something like that.”

  Roberto handed her his sleeping bag and flashlight. “Take these. I’ll get others from the van.”

  “Thank you, Roberto.”

  “No problem, dottoressa. Be careful on the way down.”

  “Always.”

  In a moment the coolness of the room again surrounded her. She was struck by the quiet, the stillness. No echoed whispers of awed students, no questions spoken, no shuffles of movement.

  She flipped the work lamp on and the flashlight off. Gentle brilliance bounced from the ceiling, bathing every corner of the room with soft light. She glanced around hoping to see something that hadn’t been there before. Nothing became apparent. Nothing moved or lurked in the shadows of the stairway.

  Anna dropped her gym bag and unrolled the sleeping bag in the center of the room. Her mind dancing with visions of what once had been, she sat on the down-filled pad and slipped out of her shoes and overshirt. After rubbing her feet for a few minutes, her fingers slid beneath the bra strap that had been troubling her all day, an irritant ultimately lost in the glare of bigger things.

  Speak to me, she urged the chamber, scanning the walls. Tell me who last stood in this place before the sun rose this day. Tell me whose voices you knew, whose words you heard.

  She reached into the gym bag for her hairbrush. With a few deep breaths, she closed her eyes and drew the bristles through her long chestnut tresses, recalling for a moment a time when Sam had done it for her after a hard day. Jumbled images came and went, memories of her husband, her friends, her parents, her students. Time, for that moment, seemed a cluttered singularity, a chaotic point rather than an eternal line.

  Her eyes slowly opened as she drew the purple brush through her hair again. Her gaze was unfocused, her thoughts far away. Odd things flowed into her mind—snippets, flashes, disjointed fragments of her life. Her semiformal sixteenth birthday party, the flowing pink dress she had worn. Sam knocking over a storage shelf while cleaning out the garage. A phrase in Latin, penned originally by Virgil.

  Equo ne credite, Teucri, flowed the words. Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentis.

  “Do not trust the horse, Trojans!” she whispered, recalling the translation. “Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks even bringing gifts.”

  She smiled slightly, amused at the workings of her mind.

  “Girl, you are all over the map,” she told herself. “Relax. Try to wind down.”

  As she continued passing the brush through her hair, she became aware that she had been staring at the rotas square above the altar. She had seen a few in her day, in various places, on various digs, in museums here and there. None had been as well preserved as this.

  R, she read, her eyes starting along the top line. O-T-A-S.

  And then she paused.

  Something was there, just barely. Dark. Shadowed in the throw of the lamp.

  She set the brush aside, rose to her feet, and went to the wall. Her fingers delicately traced the upper edge of the two-foot marble square.

  A crack in the plaster. And it was calling to her.

  She pulled a penknife from a pocket of her shorts and lightly dug into the hairline split. The thin fillet of plaster fell away.

  This is only cosmetic, she realized. It isn’t holding the square in.

  She drew the blade down, across the bottom, back up the other side, and across the top, completing the circuit.

  Sam’s words came back to her.

  Never expect the obvious.

  Anna closed the blade and set the knife on the altar, her eyes never leaving the seam she had just created.

  Talk to me, she implored the wall.

  Her fingers pressed against the center of the shoulder-high square, the ruby shade of her nails a striking contrast to the veined white of the stone. She pressed again, harder this time. Then again, in a different place. And again, and again, then in the lower right-hand corner.

  Movement.

  There’s a pivot point.

  She leaned in and pushed again in the same spot with the heel of her palm. The cold stone yielded half an inch. Harder. An inch more.

  As the right side of the square slid inward, the left edge came forward.

  A shadowed opening appeared, widening with every push. Finally she was able to slip her fingers inside and grip the rim of the stone.

  The beautifully chiseled slab was loose. She pulled with both hands. It was free.

  Suddenly, now apart from the wall, the stone began sliding downward. Its weight forced her arms to the floor, her small hands straining to maintain their grip.

  And then, finally, unharmed, it came to rest on the floor, leaning against the wall. She looked at the hard lines etched into her palms, her fingers, and shook her overstressed hands.

  She straightened and looked into the hole where the stone had been.

  There—concealed since the moment of its creation—a darkened vault awaited discovery.

  Three

  For more than five decades the old church had stood, a landmark of the community, a pillar of strength in times both difficult and serene. Its stone walls had once withstood the direct hit of a tornado, a monster that had laid waste most of the surrounding neighborhood. Its new roof, a gift from members of the congregation to their spiritual home, shone in the afternoon sun. Its white steeple scraped blue sky and white cloud, reaching up expectantly toward heaven.

  Though not so surely as once it had.

  Pastor Jerry Orsen sat in his office, his desk piled with paperwork. The burden of leadership he had assumed following the death of the former pastor—his father—had been oppressive. The unaffiliated Church of God’s Providence, under that universally beloved man, had amassed a crushing load of debt due to a withering combination of steadily decreasing attendance and mounting operating costs. On two separate occasions, the church had come perilously close to closing its doors for good, saved only by the last-minute heroics of an elderly donor whose love for the old church was surpassed only by her need for tax relief.

  Sadly, less than three months before the former pastor himself had succumbed, the old woman died, leaving her worldly possessions not to the church but to her two daughters, each of whom had then sued the other for
the entire sum.

  Orsen had been a salesman. He had left home at the young age of seventeen, bright-eyed and filled with ambition, and had found his calling in the enthusiastic distribution of superfluous goods. Hand-painted ties, porcelain animals, cheap jewelry, questionable electronics, and dozens of other such items—the silly, the tacky, the ridiculous and flashy had been his stock-in-trade, and as he spread his products far and wide, he had built a nest egg, moved from state to state, plied his trade, and spread his promotional fertilizer as thickly as the local laws allowed.

  He picked up a framed photo of his father, which held an honored place near the corner of his desk. He recalled the day he had received word from his mother of the man’s passing—a rainy Thursday, on which he had found himself on the outskirts of Tulsa, Oklahoma, selling home cleaning products from the trunk of his car. At once he had driven home, where he found not only a grieving widow but an entire community deep in mourning.

  Never had he realized the depth of the bond between his father and the flock he had led. A spark of envy burned within him.

  As he received repeated condolences from people known and unknown to him and spent day after day inside his father’s church, Orsen had finally understood what they all had lost. Their unity, their anchor had been torn from them. That moment he had decided to put down the roots he long had denied, take care of his mother, and see to the immediate needs of the people. And as he came to know them all, the old and the young, the needy and the capable, the sick and the vigorous, they had come to know him.

  And one fine Sunday afternoon, as Orsen sat at home watching the closing minutes of an overtime football game and valuing intrinsic family over earned credentials, the congregation had chosen him to be their new spiritual leader, their new shepherd.

  Pastor Jerry, as he quickly came to be known, accepted the position. He had a working knowledge of the Scriptures—he had spent a great deal of time selling Bibles to motels and truckers throughout the Midwest—and saw the profession of religion as nothing more than a sales venture.

  He used to sell goods; now he sold salvation. No difference, he felt, except the hours behind the pulpit were better, and a pastor enjoyed a respect no salesman ever could.