Two
Mark sat behind his desk, his fingers pressed to his eyes. In the room he heard the scribbles of pencils across paper, and in the back, a faint clicking of a student sending texts on their cell phone. Mark sighed and dropped his hands. He’d never been a teacher before, he’d been talked into it by Sacred Heart administration, and he had quickly discovered instructing children was as irritating and trying as he had imagined it would be.
Rising, Mark opened his eyes, revealing the milky-white stare of a blind man. He grabbed his cane and with gentle swishing, made his way up the aisle to the sound of the student on their phone. He held out his hand and cleared his throat.
“Father Roman?” came a timid female voice.
“I’m blind, but I’m not stupid. I said no mobile phones. Hand it over, or fail,” he said, his words rich with a heavy Russian accent. A moment of silence passed before the small, heavy object was placed into his palm. “You can pick this up from my office at the end of the day.” He slipped it into the pocket of his teaching jacket and walked back to his desk.
He heard faint whispers of surprise, though he wondered how these students could possibly be surprised every time he caught them misbehaving, as they’d been doing this for several months now. It was the generation, Mark supposed, and the western belief in being absolutely impervious to consequence.
Mark had come over from Russia, his accent poignant and syntax devoid of most modern slang, but he was well educated and deeply in love with literature. It was why he was pressured into taking the job as a teacher, though he’d simply come over for some respite from the cold.
He’d adjusted best he could to the westernized society of the United States, but it was difficult. Mark didn’t do well socially, most of the time, feeling a sort of distance between himself and the other professors. There was a sort of language barrier between them, and being that he’d spent an impossible amount of time quietly ensconced in the freezing tundra of Siberia with little to no interaction outside of the four monks who’d been living in the monastery for six decades, he had a hard time relating to these modern teachers.
The only person who insisted on making herself a friend was a woman named Abby. He’d met her his first week there, one of the few women teachers at Sacred Heart who was not a nun, though she might as well have been. She was definitely odd more often than not, obsessed with religious miracles and the history of the church’s dogma. When she’d found out Mark was a historian, she immediately made herself a friend, and spent hours trying to get him to socialize. She was also desperately in love with Mark, something that had become obvious over the last few months, but he refused to acknowledge that fact.
Despite being educated in the area, Mark had always found talking to others about the church’s history and the evidence of religious miracles tedious, but he liked Abby’s company and humored her. She was the only one who didn’t pressure him to talk about his past during polite conversation, and Mark’s past was something he wanted to avoid. He was the kind of man who had secrets, secrets dangerous to a lot of people, and secrets he couldn’t possibly explain.
The shrill bell startled him out of his thoughts, and he cleared his throat, attempting to be louder than the shuffling papers. “Please leave your exams on my desk and don’t forget to sign out on the attendance sheet. I will remind you that if you are signing for someone else, my sighted aid will recognize the difference in handwriting and both of you will be given failing grades for the day.” It was a warning Mark gave every class, and a warning at least one student per class never heeded.
Mark made do with his inability to see his classroom attendants, and did his best to learn this new job, a job he didn’t particularly care for, and he did what he could to approach it with some measure of pride. He listened carefully as the last footsteps exited the room and the moment the door shut, he let out a breath.
Mark had never liked being around people, having spent most of the last thirty years in a secluded monastery, and having to teach every day was staring to wear on him. Gathering up the stack of papers, Mark shoved everything into his case, grabbed his cane, and decided to skip his office hours in favor of spending his free period in his small apartment.
He lived on the grounds, so the walk wasn’t far, but as he passed by the teacher’s lounge, he heard his name called. “Mark! Wait!”
He recognized Abby’s voice right away, and paused, trying to smile despite his mood. “Hello,” he said as she walked up. “How are you this afternoon?”
“Oh it’s been the longest day,” she said with a groan. “I hate midterms. These kids get worse every year. I had to fail three today for cheating, and two of them yesterday were caught planning to sell the test to the students for next year.”
Mark grimaced. “Awful little things, aren’t they?”
Abby laughed. “Sometimes. Anyway, I thought I’d come by later to pick up the exams for grading, and maybe we can get coffee?”
“Let me think on that, okay?” Mark said, not wanting to be around more people. “I have a few things to work on and my head has been pounding for most of the afternoon.”
“Okay well, let me know,” she said, her voice tinged with disappointment.
Mark nodded and started off, feeling a little guilty for turning her down. The truth was, had the situation been different, he would have taken her up on the offer, but things were a little complicated and there was no way of properly expressing that to her.
As he made his way down the hall, his cane swishing gently in front of him, a few people called out their hellos, but he did his best to hurry along. He made it to his small apartment and with a breath of relief, locked the door behind him and let his cane fall against the small table that held his keys and watch.
His place was small, nicer than he’d been used to living in the monastery which had been freezing cold and bare. They’d furnished everything for him, and in an attempt to get him to agree to the job, the Parish office had provided an entire library of literature in Braille as a sort of bribe.
Mark realized if he wanted to maintain his quiet life, he had to accept the job, but he did so with heavy regret. Mark was on a mission, and truthfully, he had no time to be teaching children the classics.
He made his way to the bathroom where he flicked on the light and stood before a rather large mirror. With deft fingers, Mark reached to his eyes and plucked out small, thick gel contacts.
His eyes instantly went from white to brown, and he blinked against the harsh world coming into focus. He put the contacts into a small container full of liquid and blinked at himself. As he stared into the mirror he tried to remember what it felt like to walk the earth without the secrets he carried with him, because not being blind wasn’t the only thing he was hiding.
Mark was not just an ordinary man. He was ageless, immortal. He had been that way for just over two thousand years. He appeared somewhere in his thirties, but looking in his eyes, they told a different tale. They were heavy with life, with living more years than any human could possibly grasp, and he was tired. He was alone, as well, which wasn’t as it should be.
Mark had traveled with a companion during most of his life, and that person had gone missing. That person was also special, weighed down with gifts that drove him mad, put the people around in in very real, very serious danger.
He’d been following the news trail of reported incidents and those incidents led him to San Francisco where the trail had finally gone cold. He went into his small living room and pulled out his laptop. It fired up instantly and he went straight to his internet browser, where he typed in the search, “Miracle healings.”
With a sigh, nothing new loaded onto his screen. He sat back and pinched the bridge of his nose. The trail had been cold for months now, and he was starting to feel discouraged and a little frightened. It wasn’t like his companion to stay away for this long, and though they’d been walking the earth, immortal, tired, and ageless for centuries, he started to worry t
hat something had truly gone wrong.
Three
The office was just too quiet, and it was in the quiet moments Ben started to panic. Silence echoed words like tumor, surgery, terminal, non-operable, metastasized, and malignant. In the quiet moments, despite his doctor telling him it was impossible, he swore he could feel the tumor pressing, stretching through the soft tissue of his brain.
Adrenaline firing, he stood up, grabbed his coat and stormed out of the office. He ignored the few hellos he received from the uniformed officers as he raced through the parking lot and jumped into his car.
It was a new car. The captain had decided it was time for one a few weeks prior. He'd been working for the department for ten years now. Anniversary gift, as it was, but the seats were too soft, and Ben never really liked that new car smell that his other coworkers raved about.
He turned the engine on and flipped down the sun visor to reveal the dimly lit mirror. His eyes were red, which only seemed to enhance the brightness of the green, and make the brown flecks inside even darker. The tip of his nose was bright, something that usually happened to him when he was stressed, and he hoped no one had noticed. The panic and anxiety were making him flush, overheated despite the cold weather outside.
Brushing a lock of brown hair from his eyes, Ben sat back and turned the ice cold air on, hoping it would distract him, or at least shock him out of his thoughts for a little while. He tapped the button, turning on the police radio, and he let out a breath.
The monotone voice of the dispatcher was soothing right then, nothing hysterical, nothing over the top. Someone had been shot, just another day. A pedestrian struck two blocks away, routine. Ben rubbed his face with his clammy palms and put his car in drive.
He wasn't supposed to be on the road at the moment. He had mounds of paperwork to finish up for his impromptu time off for surgery. He had no active cases any longer, which was good for the detective, because he wasn't sure he could focus on anything important right then.
“Terminal,” he whispered, testing the waters, seeing how he'd react to the word aloud. He wasn't sure it was terminal. No one knew yet. Not until he went under the knife and they did a biopsy to figure out what exactly the mass was.
“I’ve seen this before, and I can tell you more than likely, it’s malignant.” The doctor had been frank and crude, just the way Ben preferred his medical professionals. Only this time he wondered if perhaps he’d feel a little better had the doctor sugar coated it.
Checking his face in the rear view mirror, he pulled up to a coffee cart and rolled down his window. He was white as a sheet and shaking. The freezing air pouring out of the vents wasn't helping his cause, and he quickly switched to heat.
He ordered a double espresso, extra hot. The bitter, rich brew didn’t do his adrenaline any favors, but it tasted good. He pulled into a parking spot near the coffee cart and turned the radio up.
“Report in for the one-thousand block of California Street, Grace Cathedral. Reports of an assault, white male, long black hair, bleeding from the hands and side,” the dispatcher droned out. “Victim is a twenty-two year old male, unconscious but responsive and breathing. Squad car seven-oh-two and seven-six-four, please respond.”
Benjamin Stanford was not a beat cop. He was a veteran detective, graduated from the academy at the top of his class, a Master's degree in forensic science. Benjamin Stanford did not respond to beat-cop assault calls. However this one, he did. This call stirred something in him. Something, he didn’t quite understand.
“Dispatch this is Detective Stanford. I’m not far from the scene and heading over to check it out.”
He switched on the engine, realized he was only a block away, and he pulled out of the parking lot. Rushing down the street, Ben managed to find a parking spot on the side of the road just a hundred feet from the church where he could see an already gathering crowd.
He threw his blinking dash lights into the window, jumped out with badge in hand, and raced forward. He'd arrived faster than the ambulances and uniformed officers, unsurprised by that fact, but wondered for a moment if he should wait.
It was over-crowded and a headache was forming, the kind he was growing all-too familiar with. The corners of his vision were growing whiter, and he knew he was probably going to have a seizure if he wasn’t careful. “Keep it together,” he muttered as he pushed his way through a group of women staring at the inside of the church.
“San Francisco PD,” Ben said loudly as he pushed forward, “please step aside.” The entrance of the church was immense. Ben knew this church, had gone to Christmas mass there for years with his mother and sisters, and it still looked exactly the same.
Now, however, on the polished floor of the entrance was a long trail of blood, smearing down into the main chapel and leading to a man who was slumped beside the back pew. He was dressed in ragged jeans that looked as though they hadn't been washed in ten years. He wore a filthy army green colored coat, and his long, pitch black curly hair was matted and stiff.
The man was curled up, his body trembling, and he was holding his hands out. The centers of his wrists were bleeding hard. The sticky red fluid ran down his hands, dripping between his fingers, and rushing to the floor, soaking into his jeans.
“What's your name?” Ben asked as he bent down toward the man.
“He doesn't speak English, I don't think,” came the calm voice of one of the priests who was dressed in his less formal attire. He was an older man, nearly bald, short, and very rotund. “He came in here about twenty minutes ago. I thought he was just a homeless man looking for charity. He stopped there,” the priest paused to point at the immense cross where the figure of Jesus hung crucified, “and began to cry. Moved as I was, the moment I tried to approach the man, he began to scream in a language I didn’t understand. Charles,” the Priest pointed over to a man who was being tended to by a couple of nuns, “tried to subdue him, but the man managed to throw him over the pews. I think he's probably got a few broken ribs, possibly a concussion.”
Looking over at the victim, Ben saw the wood on one of the pews was cracked and his eyebrows went up. “And did you see how he became injured?” Ben asked. He heard the sounds of sirens and realized that the ambulance and officers had arrived.
“Stigmata,” one of the nuns said in heavily accented English. “Stigmata!”
Ben frowned. “What the hell is Stigmata?” The word was familiar, but right then the meaning escaped him.
“The wounds of Christ,” the priest said. “Truth be told, I never really bought into such things, but I can assure you this man wasn't bleeding when he came into the church. It seems rather spontaneous.”
The man on the floor began to weep. He was babbling in what sounded like possibly Arabic, or some close dialect. His wounded hands were raised to his face, matting blood into filthy hair, but he didn't seem to care.
He was now up on his knees, still staring up at the figure of Christ, and he began to rock, shaking his head, near convulsions. Ben grew concerned for the crowd watching, knowing he wouldn’t be able to control the man if he got hysterical, so he quickly leaned down and grabbed his shoulder to try and calm him down.
The moment Ben touched him something happened. It was like a bright light erupted inside of his head, blinding him, rushing down to the center of his chest where it exploded out of him. His breath rushed out in a gasp, his fingers trembling, unable to take his hand off the man's shoulder as though an electric current was holding him in place. Something was hot, flowing into him, and being drawn out, and he thought for a moment this was it. He was dying.
His head swam, his eyes rolling back, and ears buzzing. He felt sick then, and his knees buckled, though he still kept hold of the man's shoulder, unable to move away. He started to sink to the ground, but just before his knees touched the blood-stained wood, it all stopped.
It was over. Just like that. The light was gone, the buzzing over, his head stopped spinning. The wave of nausea passed, and Ben
was able to stand upright again. The man was slumped over now, his brown eyes staring directly at Ben. He'd fallen over slightly, his hands splayed palms up, and impossibly, the wounds were gone.
Ben blinked a few times, and looked over at the Priest who didn’t seem to notice anything out of the ordinary had happened. Ben cleared his throat, wiped his hand across his forehead as he tried to focus on the unconscious man.
The paramedics came rushing in, two going for the victim, and two pushing Ben aside to tend to the fallen man. They saw the blood and checked him over for wounds, but couldn’t find any. Ben cleared his throat and said he wasn’t sure what happened.
A beat-cop pulled him aside as the paramedics went to fetch a gurney for the fallen homeless man. Ben recognized him immediately, an officer named Thomas Richardson. He was older, friendly for the most part, and always got along with Ben when they worked together.
“Dispatch said you were first on scene,” he said, pulling Ben outside. “Did you see the assault?”
Ben shook his head, pinching his eyes shut a moment with his thumb and forefinger as they came to rest by the low, stone wall. “I was on this street when I heard the call and stopped. The man was already on the floor when I came in.”
“The priest told Andrews,” he said, referring to his partner, “that the man was hysterical when he came in. Did you happen to get a name?”
“Unfortunately no,” Ben said. “I took his shoulder and then...” Ben paused and tried to recall the events. Had it been a seizure of some sort? He wasn’t sure, and he knew there was no way he could explain what had happened to him. “He sort of slumped over and then you came in. He looked like he was bleeding out of his wrists, but when he fell over, his arms were fine.”
“Andrews thinks it's one of those stigmata fanatics trying to stir up religious attention,” Richardson said with a shrug. “I’ve seen in a couple times here and there.” He scratched the back of his iron grey hair with his silver ink pen and shrugged. “We'll book him for the assault and see about getting him into a facility.”
The Awakening (The Judas Curse Book 1) Page 2
