‘You miss the point, Zach. Good and evil are dependent entities. One cannot exist without the other. Good is a precursor, an eternal target for evil. Evil will always be followed by good for without good in the world there is nothing for the devils to prey upon and evil will starve if it cannot infest its host. That is why we must ask forgiveness for our sins, Zach, so we are not consumed by them, to resist the infestation leading to eternal death. A single parasitic sin will divide and multiply in the soul until it chokes it to damnation. Confession is a dose of medicine, killing off the lethal worms, flushing them from our being. That is why every time we are reinfected we must take the medicine of forgiveness and absolution God has thankfully provided in the sacrament of Penance.’
‘Sounds like my first instruction in Catholic dogma,’ Rachel said.
‘Then Toby Bell is sweltering in Hades as we speak, and Venti, who vowed to save man from the brink of extinction to purge his own soul of darkness, is prowling the flames in search of a new host. That is the eternal torment of souls consigned to hell, an endless hunt for a place to deposit their hate, where none can be found. They resent the goodness of God to save them. They want to insert it with sin so the demons can transport it into the consciousness of living men, luring them to their deaths. But God designed the architecturally perfect and inescapable vault, where none that entered could ever leave or project their virulent spirits beyond its impregnable walls.’
‘It is not for man to judge another man, Zach. Only God can dispense eternal justice. Will you attend the Pope’s Requiem Mass?’
Zachary glowered at Father Stephen, drained the last of his coffee and left them.
98
Pope Luke the Second became the first black Pope, born of Kenyan parents, and raised in a mud hut on the banks of the Tana River. The road from humble beginnings to the Pontificate was a triumph over adversity. Still nothing compared with the baptism of fire he endured when he claimed no knowledge of the sword’s secret. The words of comfort and encouragement he offered his flock were no consolation, the promise of redemption destroyed with the loss of the vaccine.
With the inflexible directive of Pope Luke the First now rendered impotent, opposition to the elitist attitude of the Catholic Church resurfaced with a vengeance.
The Caliph convened a press conference to denounce the Christian ethos of the West and fortify the integrity of Islam as the true path to Allah. He emphasized the failings of the Catholic Church to fulfil its promise of salvation, decrying Pope Luke the First’s empty rhetoric.
The Caliph turned the tables on Catholicism, calling on Pope Luke the Second to provide for humanity. If those of the cloth were truly restored in the Eucharist, they must provide the gene pool to revive the human race.
Pope Luke the Second knew the horrible truth of it; a thousand men and women restrained by their vows of celibacy, of which one hundred women of child bearing age was the small analogous group from which to resurrect the species.
But every man and woman healed by the vaccine refused to deny their celibate calling and the Caliph showered further insults on the Pope because of it.
The Pope responded. The sanctity of vows was perpetually binding. Better to preserve the souls of the faithful than be concerned for souls not yet in existence. If this was God’s way of bringing man to himself, he did not expect the core truths of the Church to be perverted to make it otherwise. Perhaps this was the fate of the human race, planned since the beginning of time.
No government could deprive people of their religious beliefs, at least not in their hearts.
The world marched toward the end as it had since Adam and Eve, and with every passing year humanity receded.
99
‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It is twenty-three years since my last confession.’
Father Stephen was intrigued by the electronically modulated voice. Perhaps the penitent was known to him.
‘Have confidence in God.’
He offered words of encouragement as the penitent confessed his sins. He had heard them all before; the common sins of men; the temptations of daily living to which many succumbed with monotonous regularity and would continue to submit until the end of time.
‘Is that all, my son?’
‘There is another, Father.’
Father Stephen sensed no emotion in the robotic tone.
‘God give you strength to renounce all your sins.’
‘I am guilty of a murder.’
‘I encourage you to confess the details to me so I can direct you in your penance.’
‘Are the details imperative for forgiveness, Father? I gave no details of the other sins I confessed.’
‘The seriousness of such a crime necessitates revealing the circumstances in which it was committed.’
‘I did it willingly. If I told you I was truly sorry, could you absolve me from my sin?’
‘I need to understand more of your psychological state and the chances of you reoffending. I would urge you to give yourself up to the authorities. Murder is a crime against God and man. You must be accountable to both. Any punishment in this world would pale to the eternal pain of hell. The confessor must deny absolution without a promise of earthly reparation. It is an important part of the penance for such an act.’
‘What if the man I murdered was evil beyond compare and his death a service to all mankind.’
‘Judge not men, so that you may not be judged by God himself.’
‘Justice before God or men makes scant difference to you, Father, with respect. There is nothing to be gained by relinquishing my freedom on this earth. In fact, the opposite is true. I am an advocate for peace, the death of one man for the greater good.’
‘Who did you murder?’
‘The Holy Father, Pope Luke the First.’
Father Stephen clasped his chest in fright. His pulse quickened, pounding inside his head. He broke into a sweat, struggling for breath. His mind ran with possibilities.
‘It is a sin in itself to abuse the sanctity of the confessional. You must be contrite in your admission and speak the truth to the best of your ability. There are no allowances for flights of fancy or outlandish claims. Seeking forgiveness for sins you have not committed is also a breach of the sacred oaths of the confessional. Claiming the misdeeds of others to register infamy in the eyes of the confessor is an abomination before God.’
Father Stephen was lecturing to himself. He did not hear the penitent leave.
‘I ask you to examine your conscience and reaffirm the sin for which you aver responsibility.’
The silence lingered. Father Stephen leant closer to the curtained gap waiting for the penitent to speak. He heard the confessional door close and he slid the small window in the screen open enough to see through. A little old woman was taking her place. He resisted the urge to rush into the church to spot the transgressor, in reality a pointless exercise. The confessional seal precluded ever disclosing sins revealed to him while administering the sacrament. Knowing the sinner’s identity would only burden him further. He calmed himself and listened to the woman’s confession but did not dwell on any of it. He absolved her quickly and as she got up to leave he switched on the small red light above the confessional door, indicating his unavailability.
The old woman spoke quietly. ‘Father, someone has dropped a photograph on the floor.’
Father Stephen readied to leave.
‘Slip it under the grate, signora.’
The photograph came through face down, slightly yellowed and worn at the edges with fine cracks running over its surface. He tucked it into his missal, glimpsing the picture on the reverse side, curious even in his haste. The black-and-white photograph was creased across one corner by a thin dirty line. He took a closer look.
It depicted a woman in an antique chair, elegantly dressed in a gown that flowed to her ankles. She cradled a small baby wrapped in a shawl. A tiny face poked out from a pretty lace collar while the woman stared impassive
ly at the camera. Standing behind them, with both hands resting on her shoulders, was a man attired in priestly robes. The occasion was likely a Christening. A large statue of Jesus Christ on the cross, hung in the background above an altar.
Father Stephen shivered. He immediately identified two of the faces. The woman was Elodia Castrovaggio. The man with the ambiguous smile was a young Father Venti. He scrutinised the infant’s face but the shadows in the tight confines of the confessional made it difficult to see.
He turned more to the light, and the infant’s disparate blonde and brown eyebrows became immediately obvious.
Father Stephen slumped to the floor, letting forth an anguished cry that pierced the confessional walls and filled the chapel. His heart bled.
For patricide, Zachary Smith was denied absolution.
100
April 2115
In the aftermath of the storm the island’s turquoise waters regained their oily stillness. Savage winds had littered the lagoon with broken palm trees. Joseph stood alone on the beach. No aircraft had flown over the island for twenty years and he’d not seen another human for thirty. For all he knew he was the last person alive on Earth.
His decision to flee society as it crumbled came in early adulthood. He’d had no contact with the outside world for a generation and now he was more than a hundred years old. The ocean air and fresh foods had served his body well. No stiffness slowed his joints and he saw well enough without spectacles.
Joseph was always different, and others noticed things about him that were not entirely normal in a young child. From his first cognitive years, he knew he was adopted, the colour of his skin undeniably not of the family that raised him. The identity of his real parents was a mystery to him. His features were distinctively West African but he suspected he carried the genes of a white European since his skin pigment was somewhat diluted. His sun-bleached hair, loosely curled and shoulder length for much of his life, was now grey.
Though popular at school, he preferred the solitude of his bedroom or long unaccompanied walks in the countryside. In the schoolyard, he displayed strange abilities, difficult to attribute directly to, but somehow clearly emanating from him. He never intentionally drew attention to himself or the things people suspected him of. Intelligent, he possessed forethought and insight beyond his tender years.
In the playground, he was a calming influence, where games flowed smoothly without the conflict usual amongst children exploring their competitive boundaries. When tiny Tommy Butler trod on a ball, slipped and snapped the radius bone in his wrist, he screamed with pain. Children crowded around as Tommy clutched his arm. It quickly turned blue and swelled. Joseph reached out from the apprehensive circle of children and touched Tommy’s hand. Immediately the swelling and colour subsided and Tommy flexed his fist in delight as if the accident never happened.
Joseph often mended cuts and scrapes, unnoticed for the most part. One morning when a car hit and killed a small dog outside the school, Joseph was first at the scene. The terrier had blood trailing out the side of its little jaw. He picked it up and carried it to the kerbside where he laid the limp body on a patch of verge lawn. As the shocked woman driver got out of her car, the terrier jumped up and scampered off over a low fence. He explained to the relieved woman that the dog was merely stunned, and hoped it would stay away from roads in future.
His power to heal was unconscious and he was unaware of why and how it occurred. He had no sense of divinity or superiority over others. The ability stayed with him throughout his life. He did not seek to exploit or profit from it for fear of attracting attention. If he ever focused on curing a particular ill or mishap, the healing ability abandoned him. He could not heal on demand. It transpired in insentient moments of love. Joseph never used the gift in a furtive manner, always content for it to flow and disseminate in the normal course of his life.
When he left his home in the hills of Rome at the age of twenty-one, he wandered Europe surrounded by the despair of man. Many had abandoned hope in the grip of the unconquerable plague.
At this realisation, Joseph sought out an island in the French-Polynesian chain of Tahiti. He lived with the locals who accepted him into their small community. There were instances of healing that in the confines of an island population did not go unnoticed by the more perceptive elders. Humble and reticent, he filled his days swimming, fishing, tending the tropical fruit crops, and soaking up the sun. He buried the last islander thirty-one years after his arrival. From then on, he kept no record of time, living in the seasons as they unfolded, losing count of the years.
Joseph maintained his faith, praying daily, a ritual begun as a child, nurtured by his foster parents and never a formal duty. He thought of God at any time, engaged him in candid conversation about his hopes and fears and thanked him for his wonderful life.
One mystery remained unanswered. After researching the plague, he knew the precise time it cast its pall over the earth. His parents told him he was born a few months before its effect was first noticed. His next-door neighbour, old Mrs Delsanti, begged to differ, and she told him as much. She said he arrived in the cover of night, a newborn left on the doorstep, more than a year after the plague struck. He pressed his parents for an explanation, and although a mystery they also sought to solve, they conveniently dismissed poor old Mrs Delsanti’s recollection of events as a product of her dementia.
If Mrs Delsanti told the truth, how had his biological parents been spared the corruption of their reproductive chromosomes?
The Mass of Favours was one possibility. But there was no record of any of the communicants forming a procreative union. Pope Luke the Second and his celibate flock had rebutted the Islamic Caliph’s demand for the restored Catholic clergy to restock the human race.
The question would bug him until the end, and today the end would come.
Joseph walked slowly along the beach, scouting for interesting objects washed into the lagoon. There were items of the natural order - small mountains of weed, fish, shells and an extraordinary number of purple starfish. A giant dead turtle, half covered in sand, its beak ajar, attracted flies’ eager to drop their maggots. Mixed amongst the putrefying debris were hundreds of coconuts, their husks splitting in the sun.
Joseph spotted a plastic yellow duck perched high on the shore. He picked it up, and at arm’s length read the raised imprint on the underside: Made in China 2015. The duck might have bobbed around the ocean for the entire century before taking rest on his island. A larger word, handwritten in black, crossed the toy’s flat bottom, the lettering partially erased. He pushed the duck, head first, into the sand and stood back to determine what it said. Clearer at a distance, he made out Mad Hatter, recalling the fictional character from an ancient children’s storybook. He pulled the duck out of the sand, dusted it off, walked back to the turtle and sat it on top of its shell.
Joseph stepped on the Stone Fish buried in the sand and knew immediately it wasn’t broken shell or glass. An intense fire shot up his thin brown leg as the poison rose through his groin into his chest. His old heart galloped against the excruciating pain.
A younger man might have resisted for longer. He prayed, not for deliverance from agony, but for his soul, for he knew his time was up.
Joseph died on Good Friday, rigid in the sand with only the elements to return his flesh and blood to the ground from which it had sprung.
The earth took rest from man.
On Easter Sunday, a coconut tree floated into the lagoon, nestling against the shore. A long green frond scraped against the sand and dozens of spiderlings filed off it onto the beach.
They came across Joseph’s body drying in the sun, and swarmed over his skin, their dotted abdomens moving like crazy dice on the darkening flesh. One spiderling settled on Joseph’s bloated tongue, another in a nostril. Two more crossed the exposed beach into thick jungle, burrowing under the leaf litter. In the months to come, eight purple tarantulas reached maturity without goats or mites
to blind them.
Three days after Joseph died, a large object carved across the sky in a fiery arc above the Australian continent. It landed softly in the dark red dunes of the Great Sandy Desert, trailing five enormous silk parachutes that deflated over the hot sand. A hopping mouse scurried between Spinifex bushes to avoid the scorching sun, then dived into its burrow and followed a labyrinth of tunnels into the cooler earth.
Late in the day the object emitted a soft hum and a panel folded from its side, down to the ground. A shaft of white light speared from the opening as the last sunbeams surrendered to dusk and the infinite sea of sand and sky stood still…
The Jesus Germ Page 43
