“Considering the lack of brain activity, that’s a fair conclusion,” the doctor confirmed.
“If he does wake up, he's not going to be allowed to just waltz out of here of his own accord, so give me some time to see what I can do. I'm a homicide detective, so this isn't exactly my area, and frankly the only reason I'm given clearance to investigate so far out of my jurisdiction is because I have a possible witness and I was involved in the case. Either way, the moment I learn something, I'll call you.”
The doctor pulled out a business card and a pen, scribbling a number on the back. He slid it over to Ben, his face serious and firm. “Please. The moment you have any idea where he came from, no matter if it sounds crazy or not, call me.”
Ben slipped the card into his wallet and tucked his wallet back into his pocket. “I expect the same, Greg. If he wakes up and says anything at all, please call me. You have my number?”
“I do.” The doctor stuck out his hand and Ben took it, shaking it up and down firmly, and only once.
As the doctor ambled away, Ben stared down at his still trembling hands, and felt scared. He felt like something was dragging him deeper, asking him to believe in madness, and he was afraid that if he took that leap, if he peered down into this chaos, he was going to be pulled in and would never find his way out.
Fourteen
Mark didn't register Ben marching out of the room, even though the detective shoved him to the side, and nearly knocked Abby over in his haste to leave. His eyes were locked on Abby, seeing her full on and properly for the first time in the year he'd known her as a friend and colleague.
The secret was out now, and there was no turning back. The contact lenses felt like little globs of jelly in his hands. Ruined, he suspected, but it didn't matter. Leaning to the right, he tipped them into the trash bin, still meeting Abby's firm, questioning gaze without hesitation.
“Mark,” she said very slowly, taking two steps into the room, paying no mind to the fact that she was walking into a large puddle of spilled coffee.
“Abigail,” he said in response, giving her a nod.
She frowned, waving her hand in the direction of his face. “So this was... I mean... it's not, you know, like Ben?”
Mark glanced back at the still unconscious body of Yehuda lying on his back, and then sighed. “No. This is not like Ben. Were I to be injured or disabled in any way, I'm afraid that he,” Mark nodded towards Yehuda, “would not be able to heal me. No I’m afraid I…” he hesitated a moment. “I’m afraid I was lying.”
Abby licked her lips, her dark eyes narrow and though she looked confident, the trembling in her hands betrayed her fear. “So, what is going on? Who is he? Did he heal my brother? Why did you lie to me?” The more she spoke, the faster and more hysterical her words became. She brought a hand up to her pale cheek. “Mark, please tell me what's going on.”
Mark reached out for her, but Abby pulled away almost violently. He winced and dropped his hand, a little hurt, though he had no real right to be. “It's a long and very complicated story, Abby, and I wish I had time to tell it here, but I don't. Suffice it to say, this man here is not just an ordinary man. He's not a god, by any means, but he did heal your brother. Your brother’s cancer is gone and it won’t be coming back.”
Abby shook her head, her eyes teary, but she wasn't crying. “So...” she rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms. “Uhg, I'm so confused. I think I need to sit down.”
Mark quickly pulled a chair out for her and she sat down, her eyes downcast, hands clasped in her lap. Mark took a seat on the end of Yehuda's bed, one hand resting on Yehuda's leg. “I have no right to ask your forgiveness, but I'm asking anyway. I care about you, Abigail and I never meant to hurt you. If I could have told you the entire story the day I met you, I would have.”
Abby looked up, her face a mask of hurt and betrayal. “The funny thing is, Mark, whatever is going on, I probably would have believed you. For years I went rushing around the world in search of an honest to God miracle, only to face disappointment after disappointment when they turned out to be false. Now you bring me to a man who actually healed my brother, who performed one of these miracles, and… and… you could have just told me the truth,” she finished with a defeated sigh.
Mark felt the sting of her words, because what she said was all true, and he knew it. The problem was, he had no idea how to express the danger to her, the danger he faced in telling people the whole truth of who he really was, and who the unconscious man strapped to that hospital bed had once been. “You aren't wrong,” he finally said to her. “I could have told you and you would have believed me. But Abby, people who believe me eventually pose a danger. Not just to me, but to everyone.”
“I would never hurt or betray you! You know that! I wouldn’t hurt anyone,” Abby said fiercely.
“I know,” Mark said in a rush. He shook his head. “The story is so long, and so complicated.”
As Abby's fear and anger began to subside, the trembling in her hands calmed, and after a minute, she stood up. Mark watched as she took a few steps toward him, staring at his face intently, and then she peered around him at the man lying in the bed.
“Are the restraints necessary?” she asked, reaching out to touch the buckle on the one holding down Yehuda's wrist.
Mark looked down at the restraints and sighed. “Probably not, but he did hurt a man, though I'm sure it wasn't intentional. He's not in his right mind at the moment. More than likely he won't wake for some time.”
“Is it because he healed my brother?”
Mark shook his head, giving his friend a soft smile. “Healing people exhausts him, strains his mental capacity, but the state he’s in now comes from years of wandering alone. This isn't the first time he's gone off on his own and ended up some place like here, restrained and comatose. He'll recover, and he'll be okay, but it's going to take some time.”
“So um... who is he? This man? How can he heal people?”
Mark shifted off the bed, standing over Yehuda, staring down at him. He reached down, brushing a stray lock of hair from Yehuda's forehead and he smiled. “He's family, the only family I have left, really. Not blood, we met when I was a child, when my mother and I lived in Alexandria.”
“Like Alexandria, Egypt?”
Mark smiled and nodded. “Yes. His family were living there and we met by accident, and from the moment I met him and his brother, I knew my life would never be the same. His family took me in after my mother died. I was just a boy when it happened, and I would have been sent far away. They took me in like I was one of their own. Sometimes I wonder, if I had known what my life was going to become, would I have just gone to Rome with my grandfather? Then I realize if I had done that, he would have been alone today, and I can't bear that thought.”
Mark stopped and looked at Abby again. He realized she wasn’t following a word he was saying, so he answered her question as simply as he could. “His name is Yehuda, the name I'll always have for him. The Roman Catholic church, however, took it upon themselves to villainize him and bastardize his name, so you know him as Judas Iscariot.”
Abby gave the smallest gasp, her hand flying to her mouth, fingers pressing against her lips. She stared down at the pathetic figure in the bed and then up at Mark. “I don't... I mean...”
“You think I’m crazy, and rightly so,” Mark said to her with a nod. “The story you know of this man, of Jesus Christ, and of me, Abby, is wrong.”
“Who are you?” she breathed.
Mark hesitated for a long time, terrified to say the words aloud because it had been so long. Over the course of the last two thousand years, many people had asked that question, of both himself and Yehuda.
Mark could count the number of times he had revealed his own identity on one hand, and each one of those times led to a particular form of religious disaster, death, war, and pain. Abby asking now, terrified Mark beyond all reason.
However, something about this time felt diffe
rent. Something about this time made Mark want to tell her. A sense of relief threatened to wash over him, if he just said the words to her. If he just opened his mouth and revealed his story in its totality, for the first time in two thousand years.
Abby took his hand suddenly, as he stood there, his head bowed, eyes fixed on the straps holding down his ancient companion. “If you can't tell me, it's okay. I just want to understand.”
Mark was startled by the words, open and honest. For the first time since Mark received this curse, someone had told him that his secret was okay to have, and he would not be betrayed or pushed away.
“My name is Mark, once known as Markus by Romans, and by the Hebrews called Makabi. I was half-Hebrew, half-Roman, and I...” he hesitated, unsure he could just say it aloud. Taking a breath, he looked her straight in the eye and said, “I wrote the gospel.”
fifteen
It was about an hour later when Abby and Mark came downstairs. Ben had gone through his entire pack of cigarettes, two soft drinks from the vending machines, and was now drinking a tepid, bitter coffee from the little cart vendor patronizing the entryway of the hospital.
He saw the pair coming out the front doors from his little stone bench, Abby looking like she'd been crying, Mark on her arm with dark glasses on his face, and his white cane swishing from side to side in front of him.
Ben rose and approached the pair as they came to a stop. “Still doing that thing, are you?” Ben asked, gesturing at the cane.
“We thought you were leaving,” Abby retorted, her voice hard and angry. “Isn’t that what you said? You were so done?”
Mark squeezed Abby’s arm, silencing her. “It's a necessity for the moment. I do appreciate you not leaving us here, so thank you for that. Believe me when I say I'm not asking you to accept anything I've said today. I’m only asking that you not reveal my little secret.” He gestured to his glasses for emphasis.
“Look, if you want to stumble around as a blind man wearing creepy contacts, that's your business. I'm just going to ask that you keep that hokey, religi-nut healing crap to yourself. This trip has been a complete waste of time and I'm not in the best mood. You’re both very lucky I didn’t leave you here.”
Mark bowed his head in acquiescence, but Abby's face flared up, angry eyes boring holes into him. “You're such an ass sometimes, Ben,” she snapped. “You didn't bother to let him explain a single thing to you, and I'm not sure what, exactly, was such a waste of time about today!”
“How about driving all this way only to have your crazy friend here tell me the man lying in the bed up there is Judas Iscariot! What the hell am I supposed to tell the department when I get back? Oh yeah we found out who the guy is! He's a two-thousand year old Catholic bad guy who apparently is still roaming the earth knocking people out. Oh and by the way, he heals cancer.”
Ben stormed off without waiting for a reply, feeling irritated by the sound of Mark's tapping cane as they followed him into the parking garage. Abby climbed into the back, so Mark accepted the front seat once again, saying nothing as he folded up his cane and buckled his belt.
Forcing himself to calm down, Ben drove off, and to his relief, no one said anything for the first hour of the drive. Ben replayed the incident in the church over and over in his head, remembering the light, the noise, the feeling when he’d touched the man now lying in a hospital ward, comatose.
He thought back on everything Mark had said to him, from revealing the fact that he wasn't blind, to telling him the man lying in the bed was a two-thousand year old Judas Iscariot. Ben chuckled inwardly and shook his head. There was nothing on the earth that could get him to believe that the man in the hospital was two-thousand years old. Nothing.
Except...
Ben hesitated when he thought about that Greek doctor and the small information he'd gotten about the John Doe's tests. Bacteria not seen for two-thousand years. Genetic material that didn't match modern men.
Ben's brain was threatening to go into overdrive. Half of him was fighting it all, half was trying to use deductive reasoning to prove it all wrong. The half fighting went to a paranoid place where he thought it could all be a conspiracy. Maybe Mark knew that doctor at the hospital and it was all to get Ben to... to...
To what, he wondered. What could Mark possibly want in all of this? Ben realized he hadn't gotten any of Mark's motives on anything, and that made him suddenly feel naked and defenseless. Clearing his throat, Ben glanced over at Mark, who was watching him through the dark glasses.
“How old are you, Mark?” Ben asked.
Mark grinned and scratched his nose under the bridge of his glasses. “Well to anyone else I would tell them thirty-one. Obviously since I've revealed myself to you, I'm much older than that.”
“How old, exactly?” Ben demanded.
Mark pressed his lips together and stared out the window for a long time. “I'm old, Ben. Two-thousand and seven years old, to be exact.”
Ben snorted. “Looking pretty good for your age.”
“Your sarcasm is so not necessary,” Abby snapped from the back, her arms folded tightly over her chest. “Just because you can’t accept it doesn’t make it untrue.”
“Whatever you say, Abbs,” Ben replied dryly. He was already so done with this entire mess, but he had to get more information out of Mark. He had to have some motivation for all of this. “So what? That makes you the same age as Jesus, right?”
“I’m two years younger than the man you know as Jesus Christ. I was thirty-one when he was crucified. When I became cursed, I didn't know I had stopped aging until I noticed Yehuda hadn't aged a day as we wandered, well into our fifties. One year we returned to Jerusalem and no one remembered us, our companions had all long-since died, and our faces gone from the memories of those who knew us.”
Ben swallowed thickly, his brain unwilling to accept that information as truth, but fighting the urge to believe simply because Mark sounded so sincere, without a scrap of dishonesty in a single syllable. He was getting nowhere with this line of questioning, so he became blunt. “What do you want from me, exactly?”
Mark frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You obviously came to me for a reason, and I want to know what that reason is. What do you want from me? Why am I here in this car with you?”
“I just wanted to see him,” Mark said with a shrug. “I needed to know it was him. I'm going to get him out of there, however I can, and we'll disappear as we've done thousands upon thousands of times before.”
“What? No!” Abby chimed in from the back. “You can't just disappear. Why would you do that?” She leaned forward over the side of Mark's seat to stare him in the face as best she could.
Mark smiled sadly at her and reached out to pat her hand. “It's not safe, Abby. It's not because I don't care for either of you, because I find the both of you rather pleasant to be around. Staying with people who know our truth is dangerous. I can’t put either of you in that kind of danger.”
“What are you talking about?” Ben demanded angrily, his fingers gripping the wheel so tightly they were turning white. “What sort of danger?”
“Have you studied much of history, Ben?” Mark asked.
“Enough of it,” Ben said.
“So you must know about all of the holy wars carried out in the name of Jesus Christ. He was a person who preached love and tolerance, and somehow his name was used to murder thousands of people for not worshiping the way their church said to worship. The Bible, Ben, is a holy book, used to bring people pain and suffering under the guise of tough love, and it's all a lie.”
Ben looked over at Mark, who was still holding his hand over Abby's. “So the man claiming to be two-thousand some odd years old, who claims the man comatose in that mental hospital is Judas from the Bible, is also claiming the Bible is a lie?”
Mark gave a little shrug. “I claim it because I know for a fact that much of Bible was not written that way, and it was manipulated into false words to bring
about the era of Christianity.”
“And how, exactly, do you know it as a fact?” Ben asked.
“Because I wrote it.”
No one, not even Ben, was expecting the laughter that erupted from the detective's mouth. Startled by himself, Ben shook his head and tried to gain control. “You wrote the Bible? So what you... you sat down with a quill and ink and scratched it out on papyrus or something?”
“It wasn't written on papyrus, you moron,” Abby snapped at him. “You don't need to be so disrespectful.”
Ben raised an eyebrow. “Look, I don't mean to disrespect you, but how do you expect me to take you seriously?”
“I don't,” Mark answered plainly. “I don't expect you to believe a word I say. In fact, it's safer and better that way. I'm telling you plainly that whatever you're afraid of, whatever you think I want, I assure you, I do not. I merely wanted to identify a man who needs to be out of that hospital and out of the public eye. People will start to recognize his ability, whether he's conscious or not, and it's going to get dangerous. Honestly, Ben, what do you think is going to happen if people can discover his healing abilities?”
Ben felt a pang of fear stab him right in the gut. The thing was, a small part of his brain did entertain the idea that the man in the hospital had healed him at the church. A small part of his brain registered, that whether or not he was some ancient Judas, he had been bleeding from his hands until he touched Ben. And the fact remained, as improbable as it was, Ben had a potentially inoperable tumor which had disappeared overnight, and no one could explain it. Not even his doctors.
If that man could cure Ben just by brushing up against him in a church, he could probably do a lot more. If someone else noticed that, Ben realized, it could get ugly, and public. The last thing Ben wanted was for the man to be traced back to Ben, for records to show that Ben was cured of a tumor after interacting with this man.
“I can't get him out,” Ben said after a moment.
The Awakening (The Judas Curse Book 1) Page 9
