An ember ignited, flaring quickly beyond control, softening a wall she had built stone by stone, a barrier of guilt and pain fourteen years in the making. It had forged a distance, keeping danger at bay, forestalling any emergence of the kind of oneness she had known with Sam.
For to know it again, to treasure another man, would be a betrayal.
The wall had encompassed her for so long, its presence had become a part of her, an unquestioned companion she had come to accept as the years had slipped through her fingers. But in isolating her, it had forced a loneliness upon her she had never wanted. In shutting out love, she had shut out everything.
No longer. Now, in this man’s arms, her freed heart ran as wax. For the first time in too long, it beat with purpose, with another.
The kiss was deep and all consuming, an eternity. As it finally broke, the distance between them only slowly widened, an intangible electricity still arcing the gap. She felt his breath still upon her lips, the passion lingering there. Anna, adrift, kept her eyes closed, opening them only as finally she drew air. She found his eyes fixed on her own, her hand resting lightly on his jawline.
The barrenness still was there, the pain. But now she knew she wouldn’t have to face the torment alone.
Two hours later Bonnie, having heard a car depart, walked in to find Jack gone. Her sister was on the sofa cuddling a cushion, head thrown back, eyes closed, wearing a contented smile she had allowed herself.
“Did he leave?” Bonnie asked.
“He left.”
Bonnie looked to the door, then back to the sofa. “He forgot his coat. Was he in a hurry?”
“He has an early meeting at Oldefield. We were talking, and time got away from us.”
Anna’s smile didn’t fade as she leaned forward, her gaze finding her sister’s. Bonnie canted her head, recognizing a long-lost gleam in those sparkling eyes.
You don’t mean!
Anna squealed, the respite assuming a guise of joy, and she kicked her feet in a rapid burst as Bonnie drew quickly to her side.
“Did he?” she asked excitedly, taking Anna’s hand, looking for a ring.
“Oh, stop that,” she scolded, pulling her hand away. “No. At least not yet.”
“Well?”
“He kissed me.”
And then, with the whole night before them, they were as teenagers again. And the intimacy reborn between them, that singular closeness known only by sisters, was a joy they hadn’t so fully shared in a long, long time.
Eleven
Months passed, and the initial uproar over the scrolls settled as the world again sought an equilibrium, however cynical. The sanctuary of Jerry Orsen’s Church of God’s Providence, for the first time in a long time, was almost full. A buzz rose from the gathered congregation, laced with questions and speculation. Other than the addition of a modest arrangement of Christmas lights and garlands, nothing in the room indicated a particular change worthy of note. What had they come to see?
A special mailing had gone out, inviting the entire list of recent attendees to come back to church that Sunday morning to take part in a rebirth, to witness a transformation, to experience a meaningful evolution in their personal spiritual growth. A few came hoping to find a new way of serving something greater than themselves, something real and not mere falsehood. Some, still carrying anger from their disillusionment, came in the hope that they might regain that part of their weekly social calendar they had lost. Others came only to see for themselves what Pastor Jerry had up his sleeve, for he always had something.
The drone of subdued voices sharply ceased as Orsen entered through a side door at the front of the sanctuary. All eyes were on the man as he walked to the pulpit, dressed in his usual robe, his Bible in his hand. He mounted the three steps, took position behind the dais, and silently stood looking over the crowd.
I hope this works.
“Good morning,” he said pleasantly, receiving a largely mumbled echo in reply. “I’m glad to see so many of you here with us this morning. I know the ordeal we’ve all been through has been a trying one, and I greatly admire your spirit in being open to our invitation.”
He shifted his weight from foot to foot, glancing at the notes he had prepared and left atop the podium.
“As this holiday season approaches, I thought it might be a good idea to nail down a few things once and for all. When first I heard that the man we knew as Jesus was not exactly who we thought he was, I felt betrayed. I felt angry. I wanted to just pack up and leave this church. When I sat down and realized, on top of that, that the twelve men I’d most trusted to tell me how to live my life had lied to me, I wanted to walk away from this town altogether and not look back … to say good-bye to God and get on with my life, on my own terms.”
A murmur rose. Orsen saw he had struck a responsive chord.
“But then,” he said with his usual dramatic flair, “I got to thinking. ‘Jerry,’ I said, ‘there was a God way before there was a Jesus. There was a God way before anyone ever heard of a Peter, or a Paul, or a Matthew.’” His voice grew louder. “‘There was a God who stood on top of Mount Ararat and talked to Moses from within a burning bush, who led his people out of Egypt and into the Promised Land.’”
Nods filled the chapel, punctuated by rising sounds of approval.
“The Jews, bless ’em, they knew God back when there wasn’t any Jesus.” He held up his Bible. “Do you see a Jesus in the Old Testament? I sure don’t! Do you see apostles or any other second- and thirdhand helpers out there doing God’s business? I sure don’t! All I see is God dealing directly with men … talking to them, giving them guidance, leading them with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night! I see a God talking to us himself or through first-string prophets of his own choosing.”
He scanned the crowd.
Getting there …
“But you say, ‘Pastor Jerry, God doesn’t work that way anymore. He doesn’t give us miracles and signs in the sky and prophets.’ Want to know why? Because we abandoned him two thousand years ago, that’s why! We left him for a lunatic we accepted on faith … a fellow we were told, by a bunch of confessed liars, was qualified to speak for him. Well, ladies and gentlemen, now we know better!”
The crowd was with him. Orsen saw it. He shook his Bible at them for emphasis.
“God didn’t need no Jesus to talk to Adam, or to Moses, or to Abraham, and he doesn’t need one now! He’s called ‘almighty’ for a reason! And if Moses didn’t need Jesus to get to heaven, then neither do we!”
He raised the Bible high with both hands and spread it open down the middle, gripping each half.
“All we need,” he shouted, “is God himself!”
He ripped the book in two, held the sundered halves far apart before him, then tossed the second part derisively to the floor.
“This,” he said, waving the first half in front of them, “this is all the God we need. It’s all the God any of us needs, and it’s all the God any of us has ever needed!”
The members of the congregation leaped to their feet. Some held their hands out or clutched them over their hearts, shouting out praises to the God their pastor had returned to them. Others just stood in appreciation of the fact that, once again, their Sunday-morning routines had been returned to them.
When the collection plate was passed, the throng showed their appreciation in a more tangible fashion. Afterward, as Orsen sat in his office running a tally, a broad smile stretched upon his face.
Gotta give the people what they want.
“Looks like the best we’ve done since I’ve been here,” he observed. “I’d say the crisis has passed.”
He looked up to find his secretary standing in the doorway. Her brow was furrowed a bit.
“Problem, Tiffany?” he asked, punching numbers into a calcu
lator.
She stood watching him.
“Pastor,” she said, “there’s something I don’t understand.”
“Speak, my child.”
“Well, you told everyone that Jesus isn’t in the Old Testament.”
“He isn’t.”
“Yes, he is.”
“Darlin’,” he said with a grin, “you go find me his name in there, and I’ll give you this twenty-dollar bill.”
“Not by name. That’s not what I mean.” She took a few steps toward him. “I was watching this cable news show last night, and this Bible expert pointed out, like, sixty prophecies referring to Christ in the Old Testament. The Jews never realized it. The way the tabernacle was built, the things they did in their sacrifices and at Passover, and even specific dates and places for when the promised Messiah would come. All of that foreshadowed him. He’s all over that book. That’s why this whole confessions thing is so weird. I don’t get it.”
“Just a matter of interpretation, sweetheart,” Orsen said, hitting the grand total. “Not bad, if I do say so myself. This church is on solid ground again.”
“I wonder.”
“You’re beating a dead horse, honey. So was the guy on TV.”
She turned to leave. Focused on the calculator tape, Orsen didn’t notice.
“And it’s Sinai,” she said, pausing at the last moment.
“What?” he barked, with a tone one would use when shooing a pesky fly.
“God spoke to Moses on Sinai,” she said, “not Ararat.”
“Whatever.”
Tiffany rolled her eyes. “Merry Christmas,” she said with no little sarcasm, closing the door behind her.
Orsen just shook his head.
“A mountain’s a mountain,” he mumbled, rereading the figures before him, delighted with himself.
Vesuvius rumbled.
Dyson made his way down into the ruins of Herculaneum, barely feeling the movement of the earth beneath his feet. The quakes he had experienced thus far had been extremely minor, save for an isolated large event several days before, so his concerns were few.
Few, but not nonexistent.
The town, once a Roman fishing village, had shared Pompeii’s fate that August of AD 79. She lay directly west of the volcano, only four miles from its summit, but hadn’t suffered the initial, major ashfall due to strong northerly winds. Spared the heavier rains of volcanic material, she instead was buried in a series of scalding mud and ash flows, ultimately coming to lie beneath more than sixty feet of volcanic material. The flows had been so heavy, in fact, that the coastline at her shore had been completely repositioned, pushed fifteen hundred feet farther out to sea.
As time passed and an empire fell, Herculaneum was all but forgotten. The fact of its existence was all but lost to the ages. New towns rose from the rich soil, their founders and citizens little knowing of the streets and buildings buried beneath their feet.
And then, quite by accident, Herculaneum’s theater stage was rediscovered by a peasant digging a well. Soon, a network of tunnels, less-than-carefully dug, wound through the area like those of an anthill, and the ancient town began to give up its first secrets. Much was looted, removed for display in museums, or sent to the private homes of the wealthy. Statuary, wall paintings, artwork, personal possessions—all taken, many of them never to be seen again.
It had been thought, following the initial excavations of the town, that all its residents had been given time to escape and few had perished there. No bodies had been found. It appeared that Herculaneum had been completely abandoned prior to Vesuvius’s worst eruption. But eventually, excavations along what had once been the town’s seacoast revealed hundreds of blackened skeletons huddled in boathouses. Mothers cradling children, husbands hugging wives, all trying to provide a protection beyond the ability of humankind. They had perished in the first pyroclastic surges of the mountain—ground-hugging torrents of ash, rock, and mud hurtling down at one hundred miles per hour, with temperatures exceeding thirteen hundred degrees.
Waiting in the night for help that never came, these people of Herculaneum had died instantly, touched by a searing violence they could never have understood. Now, another scorching blow, initiated this time by human hands, had struck the vulnerable site. Damage estimates had placed the blast at six kilotons, which had left nothing but a respectable crater where a mile-long stretch of the A3 had once been.
The confession of an Iranian national, extracted through the persuasion of Jordanian police officials, had provided information that the nuclear device had been brought ashore at the Port of Salerno and loaded onto a truck for delivery to the chosen target area. It had been a smaller weapon, one whose stated yield had been ten kilotons, but whose age had apparently diminished that yield by almost half. Its detonation, it now seemed, had been accidental.
Its intended target had been the Vatican, in retaliation for a perceived slight leveled against the Muslim people by the pope two years earlier. It hadn’t been the first time such an “attack” by the Christian leader against Muhammad had occurred, but an incensed few were determined to make it the last.
“Islam,” he simply had said in an interview discussing the world’s religions, “is what it is.”
Instead, the weapon had detonated one hundred twenty-five miles southeast of Rome, on the flanks of Vesuvius. The resulting firestorm, swept by erratic ocean winds, had destroyed hundreds of structures and killed thousands of people—close to seven thousand, one estimate had stated. Most of the buildings still standing were deemed unsafe, and the possible fallout and radiation hazards had yet to be dealt with. The Italian government had instituted a widespread evacuation of the entire coastal region south of Naples and north of Torre del Greco. In the span of a week, the whole area—including the municipalities of Ercolano and Portici—had become one massive ghost town.
Some had speculated that the slumbering volcano had been stirred to life by the nuclear detonation, resulting in the tremors now being felt in the area. Others, pointing to the data continually streaming from sensors on the volcano’s slopes and to the fact that such minor quakes had been occurring for centuries, drew no such conclusion.
Dyson had returned to Italy to help in the survey of blast and quake damage at the treasured site. In the months since the blast, radiation levels had dropped well below the point considered safe, prompting Italian officials concerned with tourism and the well-being of their national historic sites to investigate and restore any damage done.
“‘You owe me one,’” he mockingly quoted in good humor, imitating the native accent of Gianni Valerio, who had insisted that Dyson be part of the assessment team. “‘Who got who shot?’ I mean, how low is that? Hey, I got shot too, you know. Dragging me halfway across the world … and at Christmas, yet.”
He climbed over a partially fallen wall, pausing then in the middle of an ancient Roman street to compare the current state of the ruins with survey photos from the year before.
“Lost a whole wall right there,” he moaned. “Going to take a lot of work to get this place back to its normal two-thousand-year-old ruined shape.”
Dyson moved from area to area within his assigned coordinates, snapping comparison photos and detail shots and making notes. The blocks of structures, referred to as insulae, Latin for “islands,” were divided by three cardo—north-south streets—numbered according to their position within the excavated portion of the city. Some buildings, to his delight, seemed virtually untouched. Others, the worst of the lot, had collapsed altogether and would require major restoration. A structure known as the House of the Deer had lost most of its tile roof, but its walls had come through intact. Another known in modern times as the House of the Neptune Mosaic, along with its adjoining wine shop, had suffered heavy damage, including the collapse of an entire interior room.
He
turned down a side street and headed toward the southern portion of the city, which remained buried in volcanic soil because of the modern construction above. With the overlapping town of Ercolano above it, most of Herculaneum might never see the sun again. He mourned for the treasures never to be uncovered.
Dyson paused at an intersection, seeing in the near distance an odd play of shadow that hadn’t been there before.
What in the world?
Moving forward, his heart beat faster. Exhilaration rose, tightening his throat as he realized what he was seeing.
He pulled his walkie-talkie from his belt.
“Gianni,” he called, “get over here.”
“Where’s ‘here’?” came the reply.
“Just south of Cardo V, a little east of the House of the Relief of Telephus. Hurry.”
He stepped forward, leaning in, laying his hand on something no one had touched since the reign of the caesars.
Man, I love this job!
Carols filled the air. Twinkling lights dotted trees and trimmed doorways throughout the mall, announcing the most wonderful time of the year.
For retailers, that is.
The secularized version of the holiday being showcased bore no mention of Christ, or of his birth, or of the fact that he had ever existed. Carols sang of snow and mistletoe and flying reindeer, but all spiritual significance had been sterilized away. Finally, after years of working toward the goal, the secularists had been given the ammunition they needed to erase the Christian Lord from the public consciousness forever.
Or so they hoped.
The recently swollen ranks of other religions had brought about a response from retailers, whose marketing strategies for the holiday season had expanded to include Hanukkah- and Kwanzaa-related merchandise as never before. Many converts applauded the newfound diversity, ignoring the purely financial motives upon which it was based as they embraced God, family, and culture in ways foreign to them.
The Demas Revelation Page 18
