The Ghost Reapers

by Jackie Ferris

  He brushed the aide away. “Not now, Pablo, I have something important I need to deal with. It’s personal. Shut the door after you.”

  I had left Husani one of his many mobiles, even though there was no signal. He must have walked miles through the bush from his African village to get a connection. He pressed “call”, hoping he was still there.

  Husani was crouched on his hunkers. Flies from the two skeletal dead cows, a hundred metres away, buzzed around him. The unbearable stench went unnoticed as he concentrated on the silent mobile. It had been like that for ten minutes. When it buzzed he almost dropped it onto the hard red, sub-Saharan earth.

  “Id? I thought you would never call.”

  He imagined the young boy crouched like a shrivelled stick on the barren savannah.

  “What is so important that you had to walk miles to call me?”

  “The community have stopped the water. The crops are dying. Only you or God can save us.” Husani stood up flicking at the cloud of flies to no avail.

  Idris glowered at the image of the Virgin Mary clutching her white child, Jesus on his desk. Beside it was a statue of the Sacred Heart. They had been given to him shortly after he arrived in Rome. At the time he had treasured them; now they were yet more evidence of the disparity between reality and fantasy. Jesus and Mary were Judaeo-Arabs. Their ancestors were born out of a history begun in black Africa.

  “Id, please get God to help.” Husani’s voice made him focus.

  “Sadly, it doesn’t mean, if we call, that God will answer. Better to believe in ourselves. We know what we can do.”

  Husani stubbed his sandal in the hard-packed earth. “I hate it when you talk like that, Id. I don’t understand it.”

  “I am not sure I do either, Husani. The community stopped the water because the aid agencies demanded it. It’s simple charity economics. If we can produce crops on our own, the aid agencies won’t support us. The community wants money. The elders need to keep their prestigious positions. Without aid money to dole out, they will lose respect.”

  “But we need the crops.”

  “It’s not about need, Husani, it’s about want.”

  Husani laughed. “Don’t be silly, Id, it’s the same thing.”

  “Not quite: want is about greed, need is about necessity; unfortunately the world has turned want into need.”

  “Id, please, I don’t understand, but I know we need water for the crops.”

  “You are right about the water. I will be there on Monday and you will have water. I also believe you want the internet?”

  “Internet? Really, Id?”

  “You will have what you want, Husani, but be careful what you wish for. See you Monday.”

  Id put his mobile on his desk, then pulled out a ragged piece of cloth from a concealed drawer. It was taken from a renovated piece of cloth from the Turin Shroud, officially dated to the early thirteen hundreds. New researchers had recently revised the fourteenth-century dating, although no one in officialdom was taking the research seriously. The new research dated the Shroud back to the time of Christ. Researchers theorised that the iconic image on the Shroud had been caused by an 8.2 earthquake in Jerusalem in 33 AD. The crushed rock had released a flood of neutron particles, imprinting an X-ray-like image on the cloth. Id laughed. They hadn’t a clue.

  He took out the ring of Nefertiti, then picked up the ancient cloth, glancing again at the statue of the Caucasian Virgin Mary. The Turin Shroud was a unique piece of evidence that could destroy the Roman Emperor Constantine’s version of Christ’s death. One thousand seven hundred years ago, his sleight of hand had transformed the story of Jesus from spiritual renaissance to corporeal resurrection to ensure his political supremacy. Id rubbed the cloth between his thumb and forefinger.

  Intent on the pursuit of power through the resurrected divinity of Christ, Constantine changed Roman society from a polytheistic to a monotheistic culture. With the traditional Roman gods destroyed, Constantine ensured his power was undisputed by destroying any evidence which contradicted the story of Jesus’ bodily resurrection. Thankfully, he did not know about the Shroud, any more than he realised that he had founded a Church that would endure for thousands of years.

  Hawwa had helped Idris to understand the Church’s need to keep the secret. His acquiescence sat uneasily on his shoulders. A Church which espoused truth and honesty, but was born out of collocations and lies, was a volatile mix to contain.

  When he became the youngest African cardinal in the Church’s history, Idris wished he had been less understanding. Embraced as the heir apparent, he had taken elocution lessons to sound more European. His African Muslim birth name, Idris, was replaced by the more acceptable Cardinal Thomas of Ephesus. Publicly, his Caucasian transformation was devoured by a catholic congregation anxious for change; alone at night, Idris harboured doubts. He was privy to too many secrets.

  It was not just the resurrection. Hawwa’s explanation of the Turin Shroud differed greatly from the Church’s public take on its age and what it really was. The Shroud proved the events after Christ’s death. It was dismissed, primarily because Constantine had committed the Church to follow the path of bodily resurrection. Idris was persuaded that it was in everyone’s interest to continue along that path of duplicity, to keep the secret.

  His exemplary behaviour meant that three years after his ordination as cardinal he was enrolled into the Brotherhood of Nommo. The Brotherhood, and its secrets, made Hawwa seem tame. Like the official hierarchy of the Church, the secret organisations were layered. When each level peeled away, new revelations emerged.

  Idris pictured the image of Husani, walking miles through the heat back to his village. His ancestral past was littered with slavery, colonisation and wars. Nothing was known of their earlier, more illustrious history. Husani’s village was ostensibly run by the Catholic Church to help those orphaned during the civil wars of Black Independence. Husani was a child infused with hope, who wore the emotional scars of a life he could never shed, no matter how many therapeutic programmes he took part in.

  He picked up the image of the Sacred Heart and smashed it on the floor.

  Chapter Ten

  Vatican City: 1799, July 23rd

  Dampness mingled with the mouldy smell of unwashed clothes and filtered into the sliver of sunshine breaking through the crack in the dirt-stained window. Sister Theresa Veronica was oblivious as she pored over the manuscript in a room illuminated by two beeswax candles and a sparsely burning fire. Shadows flickered around the walls, transforming her cowl into a shroud-like image. The sinister shadow hovering over her also went unnoticed. Her eyes were locked on each word that her gnarled finger pointed to. A few hours earlier, the document had arrived in an inauspicious casket. Four different couriers had ensured its speedy arrival from the small town of Rosetta in Egypt.

  She read each word aloud, her strong Irish accent reverberating around the room. “The stone is the key the world has waited for. It is the first to display three writing systems: hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek. The final sentence of the Greek text is: ‘Written in sacred and native Greek characters’.” The words were highlighted in thick ink.

  Theresa Veronica nodded. It was common knowledge that the Greek historian Herodotus, who lived in the fifth century BC, had named the Egyptian carvings hieroglyphics, meaning “holy carvings”. He took the name from the Egyptians, who called the designs “medu netjer”: God’s words.

  Egypt was littered with stories of its history on almost every temple wall. Many of them explained how the temples were built and their purpose. Eventually someone would notice the glaring omission.

  Theresa Veronica read the text again, committing it to memory, then headed for the Archbishop’s private quarters.

  Heavy red velvet curtains blocked her way. She pulled them aside and entered a room adorned with tapestries, depicting the slaughter of the early Christians. She had seen them many times, but the gruesome scenes still filled her with horror.r />
  The tapestry displaying the upside down crucifixion of St. Peter, the First Vicar of Rome, stared down at her from behind the Archbishop’s desk.

  She pointed to it, her Irish accent spilling into her anger. “Why must you flaunt such a scene? Peter was a parochial man. He was buried in a tomb in Jerusalem. His name, Shimon Bar Jonah, was inscribed above it. When Peter was alive, Christ was barely acknowledged in Judea, let alone Rome. It’s ludicrous that this fantasy is allowed to continue.”

  “It has to – the secret depends on it.” His lifeless eyes reflected an existence spent in a morass of too many pointless arguments.

  The Archbishop stopped writing.

  “You did not come here to lecture me on Hawwa and its secrets. What news, Theresa?”

  “None that is good. Napoleon should never have taken his troop of scientists to Egypt. The Rosetta Stone will prove our uncoupling.”

  “Why? It tells the story of Egyptians. They were fishermen and farmers.”

  “How could fishermen and farmers build great temples to the gods?”

  “The temples were built millennia after the Visitation. The translation of the hieroglyphics strengthens the people’s view of the Ancient Egyptians. The carvings laud their construction and engineering prowess. Sketches are already appearing of Napoleon on horseback peering at the Sphinx drowning in a sea of sand. It looks like a magical ancient land.”

  Theresa folded her arms. “My point exactly: armed with information, people will question how farmers and fisherman built such monuments.”

  “The answers lie in the hieroglyphics. No one will go beyond that. Only the construction of the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx remain unexplained; the other temples carry no such mysteries. During the turbulent Reformation, our predecessors worried that people would doubt God, not merely the Catholic Church. It did not happen. The plethora of temples built by the Egyptians will disguise the truth.”

  He stood up slowly, and looked around, as if trying to orientate his eyes. Finally, he fixed his gaze on the fire, then shuffled towards it. His back, stooped from poring over documents and scripts, reminded her of a large question mark.

  She watched as he warmed his arthritic hands and then slowly turned away from the heat towards her. “Their disbelief was in the Church, not God.”

  “Who could blame them? The Church traces the bishopric of Rome back to Peter, a man who never visited it. In those days it was the seat of Roman deity, not Christendom – that was yet to be invented.”

  He smiled. “People are tied to their belief systems, not facts. The Roman gods were in the ascendant when Peter lived. The Jewish religion was all but obliterated. Christianity was merely another branch of Judaism. The Turk, Paul, was brought to Rome because he claimed a Roman genealogy. Rome was not a Christian city then; it had no bishops.

  “In the fourth century BC, the geocentric model of the earth orbiting the sun was developed. Aristotle changed all that, and the Church kept it that way for almost two millennia, until Galileo’s famous telescope and the heliocentric model developed by Copernicus. They are historical facts which the world ignores. It accepts Peter as the first pope. Look around you: the images confirm it. The world will do the same with the Rosetta Stone. It will accept what it thinks it believes in.”

  She clenched her hands together under her scapular. “Have you forgotten that the Reformation led to the birth of the Reformers? They broke away from Hawwa to pursue more secular aims, and took much of our power with them.”

  He sank into the tall oak chair behind him, and flinched; it was hard on his back. “Their secularism was spawned by our spiritualism. They broke away from us because they no longer thought we were relevant. We are sworn enemies locked together in perpetual turmoil promulgated by the secret. We believe religion is the way to keep it safe, they believe it is politics.”

  Theresa felt a droplet of blood drip from her knuckle. She wanted to scream; instead she glowered at the religious icons plastered around the room.

  “None of this makes sense. Hawwa and the Reformers are holding the secret together in a morass of hatred and distrust. It is a runnel of lies.”

  “The lies were originally designed to protect the truth from the unscrupulous Egyptians; no one could have predicted what they spawned.”

  “Why not? Ancient Egypt survived on a similar runnel for three thousand years to keep their gods alive.”

  “When Nefertiti brought the secret out of Egypt no one could foresee the religious side-effects. After her death, Hawwa’s concern was to keep the secret safe not create new religions.”

  “Side-effects!” She dug her nails deeper into her knuckles. “Look around you, we have spawned a monster.”

  “A benign monster named religion, that established a value and belief system that’s been preserved through the millennia. It is our duty to ensure it stays that way. The people can never accept the truth; their beliefs and ideals will crumble.”

  “But we don’t believe it. We are nothing more than pawns in a lie responsible for the procreation of litanies of religions.”

  He shivered. “The secret was never about religion. We kept the Visitation secret out of fear. The Egyptians were afraid that if the truth came out they would be destroyed. Hawwa is an innocent victim of circumstance. Our intention was never to create three different religious movements. We are rooted in an unintentional fictitious past which we must preserve. We derive our wealth, which protects the secret, from religion.

  “The world is moving on; the divine power of kings and popes is over. Power lies with politicians; the future will see power come from money, not birth right. The secular Reformers will snake their way through that world, taking more power and wealth. They will use the suppression of the secret to achieve it. Hawwa’s one hope of survival is to ensure that religion carves out a role in that new world. For the people’s sake, the secret must be kept, and, along with it, their religions.”

  Theresa glanced at the tapestry of Peter’s crucifixion. “It frustrates me. If I did not believe in the cause I would not be here. The Rosetta Stone is Pandora’s box, not because of what it says or even what it represents.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Go on.”

  “People will look for other stones to decipher the past. It will be a new Holy Grail. They will wonder why there is no mention of the Great Pyramid’s construction, no matter how many papyri and temple walls they search.”

  She turned as she felt a draft from the curtain swinging open behind her. A tall man with long flowing black hair and a hawk-like nose bowed.

  “Good afternoon; I come directly from Rashid. The place is swarming with Napoleon’s soldiers; they are the ones who uncovered the stone. Everyone knows that it’s the key to the hieroglyphic language and Egypt’s secrets.”

  The Archbishop shook his head. “Not the real secrets, Adil.”

  “It will take time to assimilate the new information. Once people have it they will ask questions about what isn’t written.”

  Theresa opened her mouth, about to interject, but was given no chance.

  “You forget yourself, Adil. Arabs have read hieroglyphics for centuries; no one has asked questions.”

  “I am aware of that, Your Eminence, but the possibility remains that someone will piece together the missing evidence. That’s why we searched the site of Nekhen, which the Greeks later renamed Hawk City. The artefacts there suggest a different, much earlier Egypt. The serpopards, the mythical creatures with long necks and lionesses’ faces, are a small part of the Ancient Egyptian penchant for mixing animal with human bodies or other animal bodies. The Sphinx is a notable example, and there are others like the ammit and the taweret. These mythical creatures are a throwback to a very different age, when human forms mixed with animal. It is clear that a written language system existed in Egypt long before the dynasties of Ancient Egypt were supposed to begin.

  “We left some objects at Nekhen. To hide them would arouse more suspicions in the future. My expec
tation is that someone will wonder why, if writing was invented around 3,100 BC, they used it to record taxes and economic transactions. They called god’s words. Not many gods, but one god. You can also translate medu netjer as Divine Writing. Surely Divine Writing was not first used for taxes and economic transactions? The Kemetan who created the language were black people, not Ancient Egyptians. Someone will reason it out, once they translate the hieroglyphics.”

  “I am aware of the Narmer Palette and the Scorpion Mace head, and, indeed, the Scorpion King. They won’t be discovered for centuries. When they are, it will be assumed that they are part of the same story, Adil.”

  “The Caliph disagrees. He wants us to take them and put the objects in safe keeping. I am here to ask permission.”

  The Archbishop nodded. “He is a wise and cautious man, but we must look beyond the present to the future. Whatever our descendants find, they will evaluate them within the limitations of their own parameters. It is far better to leave the remaining objects in their resting place; omission leads to mystery.”

  “My point exactly.” Adil bowed. “I will convey your instructions to the Caliph.”

  “And some of my fine wine. It may soften the blow of my refusal. He must drink it quickly; the desert sun will destroy it.”

  They watched him leave in a swirl of cloaks and indignation.

  Theresa returned her gaze to the old man withering in the chair by the roaring fire.

  “Do you think it was wise to be so blunt? He will go to the Reformers.”

  “He will report back to the Caliph. The Caliph knows the importance of maintaining Islamic beliefs.”

  “True; but future generations might not. Adil has younger eyes, he sees the future more brightly than us. He could go to the Reformers once he has spoken to the Caliph.”

  “He is a servant; and you, Theresa are a woman. Your jobs are to obey those who know better, not to think. It would be well if you remembered that.”