by Robert Ryan
The raspy voice clutched his brain and pulled it back into a world beyond this one.
“My belief in Satan became stronger than my belief in God. I became convinced he was the more powerful one. Whatever secrets the scrolls contained were best left alone. Finally—God help me—I stole them so no one would ever see them.”
He began to weep softly, uncontrollably. “I changed my name. Turned my back on God. Since then my whole life has been a lie. I have not really lived since I got that infernal jar. In a very real sense, it has stolen my soul.”
Zeke gently grabbed the once-proud scholar’s hand and held it. Sadness welled up in him, then was swept away by anger at the realization that this poor man’s life had been ruined not by a lack of faith, but by too much of it. While Dr. Connolly regained control, Zeke tried to look at things from the old man’s perspective.
To a fallen priest, trying to rationalize his enormous betrayal of the sacred trust placed in him by the Pope, evidence that confirmed the existence of Satan might almost be a comfort. It would relieve him of the need to take full responsibility for his own unforgivable actions: The Devil made him do it.
Finally the weeping stopped. The old man wiped his red eyes and looked at Zeke for a moment before speaking. “I have long felt our fates were intertwined, Ezekiel. That destiny brought us together.”
“What do you mean?”
“I came into your life long before you came into mine at Catholic University. In 1972. I had laid low after leaving Jerusalem until all records of my new identity were flawless. By very clever maneuvers I eventually managed to become a parish priest in D.C. But my hypocrisy finally made ministering to a congregation intolerable. So I went from one hypocrisy to another: teaching others about the difference between right and wrong.”
“1972? I would have been nine, but I don’t remember.”
“You wouldn’t. You were unconscious. You had been hit by a car. I happened to be in the hospital and gave you Extreme Unction.”
Zeke stared in disbelief. “My mother told me about it later. Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“I didn’t want to bring up anything that might allow my past to catch up with me.”
Zeke couldn’t stop shaking his head. “That’s incredible. That by sheer chance I should end up studying with you twenty-some years later.”
“I don’t believe it was sheer chance.”
“What are you saying?”
“After I anointed you in the hall, I slipped into the emergency room. I wasn’t supposed to, but no one saw me, they were too busy working on you. A couple minutes into the procedure, the power went out. Just in that room, I found out later, not the whole hospital. None of their backup systems worked, but there was a glow around you that enabled the doctors to keep working. Do remember anything about it?”
“I vaguely remember hearing a voice while I was out. My mother told me about the glow later. We talked about it. Of course nobody could say what it was. The doctors told her it saved my life, that it gave them the light they needed to do their work. They also said I was technically dead for twelve minutes.”
“What do you remember about the voice?”
“It sounded profound, even to my nine-year-old brain, but I’ve never been able to remember exactly what it said. Something about being put to a test, a mention of the Messiah… Since we were good Catholics, we pretty much decided it was God telling me I’d be okay. But it was more than that. I just can’t remember.”
“I was never the most devoted priest, but I know I felt a divine presence in that room.” He made a feeble wave at the beer bottles and cigarette butts. “Perhaps this is the moment He kept us both alive for. I should be long dead. And yet here I am. Pushing ninety.”
“Oh come on. That would make you some celestial messenger and me some kind of ‘Chosen One.’ Why on earth would He choose me for this? I’m thinking that if and when such a person comes along, he—or she—is going to be from Bethlehem or Nazareth. You know, the Holy Land. Someplace a little holier than Washington, D.C., anyway.”
“Maybe that is exactly why. Maybe He has decided to go in the complete opposite direction. He tried the Holy Land before, when Jesus died for our sins.”
He glanced heavenward.
“Forgive me Lord, but that noble sacrifice hasn’t exactly been a rousing success. Evil still threatens to destroy the world. More than ever. Because now we have weapons of mass destruction instead of bows and arrows and rocks.
“And don’t forget, Ezekiel. This area is called the Holy Land of the West. Brookland has the highest concentration of Catholic institutions outside Rome.” He smiled his feeble smile. “Maybe a smart tough guy from D.C. is exactly what He needs. Knowing how skeptical people are about religion, maybe He thinks an average Joe taking on such a mission would be more believable in our cynical world, more concrete than all the preaching about a Messiah coming to save us…one of these days.”
Zeke shook his head. “People couldn’t buy into the idea of a mission to find Satan unless they knew about it. How exactly would you publicize something like that? Contact CNN? ‘Good evening. The top story tonight is the search for Hell, which will be led by D.C. gym owner Zeke Sloan.’ I don’t think so. Quite the opposite, I think you’d want to keep something like a search-and-destroy mission for Hell a secret. No, your hypothesis is intriguing, to say the least, but I don’t buy it.”
“Do you believe in God?”
Zeke shrugged. “Not as much as I did when I was a kid, but I try to. It seems like with the glow thing, and coming back from the dead and all, I pretty much have to. But it’s hard when you’ve seen innocent people slaughtered.”
“And if there is an entity behind the slaughter of innocents? An entity that could be stopped?”
His breathing was becoming more labored. He reached to turn the knob on the oxygen, but it was already all the way open. He waved it away impatiently and summoned all his remaining energy.
“Ezekiel, this is why I called you here tonight. I am going to ask you to do what I never could. Take the scrolls. Take the translations with all my notes and observations.”
“But if I do that, then what?”
“What you do then is up to you. At the very least you could sell them and make a great deal of money. I paid—the Vatican paid—fifty thousand for them in 1947, so God knows what they would be worth now. Millions, certainly.
“Or you could try to mount an expedition. No one has ever found Sodom and Gomorrah. Certainly any artifacts you found would be priceless, because finding Sodom and Gomorrah would rank with finding Atlantis.”
He leaned closer, his haunted stare making Zeke extremely uneasy. He held up a finger to emphasize the gravity of what he was about to say.
“Before you make up your mind, you must know this, Ezekiel. If you choose to do this, that will mean that—like me—you will have headed down a road that leads to a belief in Satan. In which case, you must believe in God. You must fully accept the reality of what until now has been only a man-made story, a theological Christian construct: the belief that God—or Jesus—will save us. That He will somehow help you defeat Evil, whatever you want to call it. You must believe that. Because, even if we agree that you are the one chosen to do this, I do not for one second believe that any man—any army of men—can defeat an entity whose power is—hopefully—second only to God’s. To believe that you can defeat him without divine help would be the ultimate act of arrogance. The ultimate hubris. You would be marching to your doom. Enoch says as much in his scroll. He says that a man must pave the way, but that ultimately we are too weak and that a Messiah must come to save us.
“So you must believe in what is essentially the Second Coming. Or the first for Jews and Muslims. You remember the lecture I gave about Christ’s Harrowing of Hell?”
“Pretty much. I had said the line from the Apostles’ Creed many times as an altar boy, that after Jesus was buried ‘He descended into Hell,’ but never really thought about it
until you put it into theological context. You said nobody could know if it actually happened. And if Jesus did descend into Hell, you said, nobody could know what happened down there. It always came down to faith. You either believed it or you didn’t.
“You said different religions came up with different versions of the story. The one you leaned toward was the idea that He descended…not into Hell, per se…more like Hades. Sheol. An abode of all the dead, not just the wicked. He redeemed the just and left the damned behind.”
“Yes. That was the First Coming. This time He will descend again to rescue all, but only after you—or someone—blazes the trail. The first time that person was John the Baptist. The Forerunner. Now it will be you. But only if you believe. Completely. ‘For many are called, but few are chosen.’”
His long weary exhale sounded like the final breath in the unburdening of his soul. When he spoke again, it was barely a whisper.
“Think about it, now. The Bedouin tried to warn me about this accursed scroll, but I dismissed it as superstition. Believe me when I tell you that this document has a power. Power you might be very wise to leave alone.”
He abruptly fell silent and collapsed into his chair, closing his eyes as if for the last time.
Zeke thought about the enormous amount of forgiveness involved if Jesus did descend into Hell to redeem all those souls. Souls who deserved to be there. Millions perhaps, including monsters like Hitler. Would they—could they—all be forgiven? He couldn’t see ever forgiving just one: Michael Price, who had ruthlessly murdered that Vietnamese family.
He wondered about forgiveness itself. To forgive sounded noble, but in his experience humans neither forgave nor forgot. He yanked his mind back from that worn philosophical path that never led anywhere. He looked at his dying mentor and spoke softly, choosing his words carefully.
“I don’t doubt that these scrolls have a power over you, I can see that. But it just doesn’t make sense. All we know about Lot are those few chapters from Genesis. He escaped the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah with his wife and two daughters. His wife turned back to look and turned into a pillar of salt, everybody knows that part of the story. Then Lot went into a cave with his two daughters. The cave where he wrote the scroll and where the Bedouin found it. Fine. But if the scroll somehow became cursed—never mind how much that sounds like the oldest horror-movie cliché in the book—we have to ask: who would have cursed it and why?”
“Very good questions. Ones I have asked myself a thousand times. You’re right about the Bible being our primary source of information—on Lot, the Devil, everything these scrolls talk of. It was my primary source for trying to reason my way through all this. I finally decided that the scroll was cursed, based on the Bedouin’s statement and my own experiences with it. By whom? Satan. Lot says the Archenemy followed him.”
Zeke seemed to have fueled Dr. Connolly’s old passion for lecturing. His breathing became regular and his withered frame found a reserve of strength that, a moment ago, seemed impossible. Zeke was a rapt student in his classroom again.
The professor licked his lips. “Get me a beer, please, Ezekiel.” It sounded like the last request of a man preparing for his execution.
Zeke quickly got the beer and returned, stealing a glance at his watch. Past six. He needed to get going. Leah and his family were waiting.
“Your second question is harder,” the professor said after taking a long drink from the beer. “Why?”
“Yes,” Zeke said. “If Satan is this superhuman entity, second in power only to God, why would he be worried about Lot or anyone else? And why put a curse on the scrolls? Why not just destroy them? For that matter, why be worried about them at all—pieces of writing sitting in a cave?”
The old man set his beer down.
“Good questions, all. I can give you my reasoning, but it is no more than an educated guess. Perhaps Satan knew there would one day have to be a reckoning between he and the Lord. But according to the Bible—and Enoch—God would not show up for Armageddon until the people had been warned. In the Bible He mentions a ‘watchman’ who would blow the trumpet when he sees ‘the sword’ coming. If the watchman sees the sword and doesn’t blow the trumpet, the blood is on his hands.”
He looked at his own frail hands, then to Zeke.
“If the scroll is Lot blowing the trumpet—and he says as much—then cursing it would be Satan’s way of keeping it from being heeded. Certainly I did not heed it. So passing the scroll on to you is me trying to get the blood off my hands. Satan might also have enjoyed the potential for inflicting suffering on anyone who defied the curse.”
It sounded like a stretch. Zeke tried to keep the skepticism off his face.
“By the way,” the professor went on, “that passage about the watchman is in the book of Ezekiel. I know you said your name had something to do with being an athlete, but the coincidence is interesting, don’t you think?”
“Sure—‘coincidence’ being the key word.”
“I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it. Have you read the book of Ezekiel?”
“Being a Catholic with that name, I almost had to.”
“Then as you know, it’s essentially a conversation between God and Ezekiel. Ninety-three times He refers to Ezekiel as the Son of man. He does that in no other book except Daniel, and then only once. Of course, in the New Testament, Son of man refers to Jesus, while in Ezekiel, many Biblical scholars say God is only emphasizing the prophet’s humanity. Still, it’s quite compelling, don’t you think?”
“Not really. Ezekiel was a prophet, for God’s sake. I can’t even handicap a horse race good enough to cash a show ticket. And you still haven’t answered the question.”
“I don’t have the answers, Ezekiel. Just a hypothesis, which I think is a good one. The only way to get definitive answers is to undertake this quest. And succeed. Then you can ask Satan, Lucifer—whoever, whatever he is—face-to-face, and you will have paved the way for His return. Remember the famous passage from Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament? It was another of my lectures: ‘Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me.’”
“I do remember that passage. Most Biblical scholars think Malachi was talking about John the Baptist.”
“Perhaps. They’re guessing like the rest of us. Their guesses are just more educated.”
The old man collapsed into his recliner again, sorely taxed by more talking than he had probably done in months, maybe years. After several deep breaths he went on.
“I see your skepticism, Ezekiel. And I don’t blame you. The idea of a literal Satan skulking around, responsible for the evil that men do. It flies in the face of everything we know of human nature, of all the theories so carefully worked out by demigods like Freud and Jung. But factor this into your thinking. The safe, the easy thing to do is dismiss the idea as hogwash. Believing is much more difficult. It will bring you scorn. But if we do not believe there is such a thing as evil we are doomed. Beaudelaire said it best: ‘The Devil’s deepest wile is to persuade us that he does not exist.’”
Dr.—Father—Connolly closed his eyes. Zeke looked at the jar looming by the door, then around the room at the devastation it had caused. The priest’s most chilling words echoed inside Zeke’s head:
“Satan himself was warning me…he would keep my soul in Hell…keep my soul in Hell…keep my soul in Hell…”
Father Connolly had never been one to accept any idea without subjecting it to rigorous intellectual scrutiny. But shut up like this for years, alone, tormenting himself over a stolen scroll… Zeke couldn’t imagine a person not hearing voices in this hellhole.
He shook his head, an involuntary twitch against the professor’s theory. He couldn’t spend the rest of his life on a patently absurd wild goose chase. But what if Father Connolly were right? Zeke forced himself to at least consider his notion that some divine destiny had brought them to this moment.
His mind went immediately to the voi
ce he’d heard that day in the emergency room. Had it been God reaching out to him? Was the scroll his way of reaching out again through Enoch? God’s messenger? Zeke closed his eyes and tried to conjure up those lost twelve minutes. A few words bubbled up from the depths of his unconscious.
“…bless and keep you, Ezekiel…supreme test…Messiah…”
Voices. He stared at the jar.
That night in the jungle, Price mentioned hearing the voice of God. “Not your god,” he had said. Zeke had wondered about it ever since. Had Price heard the voice of Satan?
A feeling deep within him stirred. It was the compressed ball of rage he kept locked away in the darkest chamber of his heart. The memory of that night was its fuel.
He had felt a shadow stalking him that night. Had the Archenemy pulled the trigger?
The question couldn’t be answered. Even if it could, he saw no way to launch an archaeological expedition. He would be getting married soon. And Leah couldn’t get that kind of time off—not that she’d want to. Zeke focused on the essentials of the situation.
To refuse would be to deny his friend’s dying wish. He owed Father Connolly this much. Just taking the scroll wouldn’t hurt anything. He wouldn’t make any promises, that’s all.
“I will take the scroll. And I will look into it.”
The man who called himself James Connolly opened his eyes and smiled, a much more pleasing and contented smile now. A peaceful smile. “I have known for years that if anyone could do this, you were the one.”
Zeke wasn’t about to get into a drawn-out debate about Fate and Destiny and being Chosen. For both their sakes this conversation needed to be ended. The priest’s failing body and Zeke’s brain had been pushed to their limits. The hot stale reek of tobacco and beer and death was like a hand jutting up from the grave to smother him. He needed fresh air badly. But now that he had agreed to take the scroll, there was one more crucial bit of information he needed to help him decide what to do with it later. He didn’t want to tax Father Connolly any further, but as much as possible he had to know what he was getting himself into.
