Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set

So here sit I, alone, a filthy cave for a home and only locusts, wild honey, a few goats, and figs for sustenance. I who once dwelt in luxury, who once wore the striped blue sleeve and had free access to the Temple.

I am alone and mad. And sometimes I imagine I am not alone. Sometimes I see her walking. Sometimes she speaks to me. But it isn’t her. Only a fever-dream of my madness.

I pray that each day is the Last Day, but each ends like the one before it. When will it end? Dear Lord, when will you allow it to end for me?

--from the Glass scroll

Rockefeller Museum translation

TEN

Manhattan

Dan awoke with a start—bright light in his eyes and an excited voice in his ear.

“Dan! Wake up! Wake up!”

He blinked. Carrie...leaning over him...dark hair falling about her face...bright eyes wide with excitement. God, she was beautiful. She made him want to sing though he knew damn well he couldn’t carry a tune. How had he spent his whole life without this woman—not any woman...this woman? Celibacy was an unnatural state for a human being. He didn’t care what the Church said, he was a better person—a more compassionate, more understanding, more fully rounded man—and therefore a better priest because of Carrie.

He’d never been in love before. Grade school and high school puppy loves, sure. But this went beyond physical attraction, beyond infatuation. If Carrie were a lay person he’d leave the Church for her—if she’d have him. But Carrie had no intention of leaving her order. Ever. So he’d have to settle for things the way they were.

Of course, if she’d been laity, the relationship never would have begun. He wouldn’t have let her within arm’s reach. His guard would have been up, his defenses primed at all times when he was around her. But Carrie, being a nun, being a member of the club, so to speak, had slipped past his guard without even trying.

That first afternoon in her brother’s condo had awakened a long-dormant hunger in him. Along the course of his years as a priest he’d learned to structure his life without regard to sex. Excruciatingly difficult at first. He’d found it went beyond avoiding thoughts of sex. It meant avoiding thinking about avoiding thoughts of sex. You did that by cramming your days full of activity, by hurling yourself headlong into the never-ending hustle and bustle of a downtown urban parish, by sublimating your own needs to those of your parishioners. After all, that was what it was all about, wasn’t it? That was why you joined the priesthood. And if you did your job right, at the end of the day you collapsed into bed and slept like the dead until dawn when it was up and out for early Mass and back again into the parish whirl.

After a while you got pretty good at it. After a while, the lusty parts of the brain atrophied and became too weak to bother you with much more that an occasional, feeble nudge.

Unless something kick-started them with a steroid charge and pumped them up to strength again.

Something like making love to Sister Carrie.

Now he was like a randy teenager. He wondered where the guilt had gone. Overwhelmingly awful at first, especially when she’d told him about her father and what he’d done to her. Dan had almost despaired then, wondering if he might be aiding and abetting some dark, self-sabotaging compulsion within Carrie. She’d run to the convent to escape a sexually molesting father; she’d become a model nun, a paradigm of virtue and saintliness except for the fact that she was having a sexual relationship with her parish priest...a man everyone called “father.”

Dan had always been skeptical of facile parlor psychoanalysis, but the doubts nagged at him when he was apart from Carrie. When he was with her, however, they melted in the warmth of her smile, the glow of her presence. Carrie seemed perfectly comfortable with their relationship; it had taken him a while, but now he was just as comfortable.

Dan loved her as he had never loved another human being, and that love let him see the world in a whole new light, brought him closer to the rest of humanity. How could that be wrong?

He loved Carrie completely, and he wanted her—all the time. Every moment they were together at Loaves and Fishes was a struggle, a biting agony to keep his hands off her. He’d learned to freeze his emotions at those times, confine his thoughts to the instant, force his brain to regard her as no more than a pleasant coworker and to leave her clothes on whenever he looked at her.

But God, it was hard.

But more than wanting Carrie physically, he wanted her emotionally. Just being near her was a thrill. But being near her in bed was Heaven. Like now...

He noticed her bathrobe hanging open, exposing the rose-tipped globe of her left breast. He reached for it but she brushed his hand away with a sheaf of papers.

“What is this?” she said, shaking them in his face.

“Wha—?” Dan propped himself up on his elbows and stared at the papers in her hand.

“Where did you get this, Dan?”

He couldn’t remember ever seeing Carrie this excited.

“Oh, that. Harold’s back from Jerusalem. It’s the translation of a scroll that somebody turned in to the Rockefeller Museum over there. He gave it to me as part of a little gift.”

She laughed. “A gift? He gave this to you as a gift? But this is fabulous! Why hasn’t the world been told?”

“There’s nothing to tell, Carrie. The scroll is a fake.”

She stared at him in silence, the glow of excitement slowly fading from her eyes. She shook her head.

“No.” Her voice was a whisper. “That can’t be.”

“It’s true. Hal said the carbon dating showed the ink is twelve years old tops.”

Carrie was still shaking her head. “No. There’s got to be a mistake.”

Dan leaned forward and kissed her throat. “What’s so important about it? It’s paranoid, jumbled, and seems deliberately obscure. The forger was probably some nut who—”

“It’s about Mary.”

Now it was Dan’s turn to stare. “Mary? Mary who?”

“The Blessed Virgin Mary.”

Dan knew from Carrie’s expression that he’d better not laugh, but he couldn’t repress a smile.

“Where on earth did you get an idea like that?”

“From this.” She held up the translation. “The dead woman he’s talking about, the body he’s supposed to guard—it’s Mary’s.”

“I guess that means we’re tossing out the Glorious Mystery of the Assumption.”

“Don’t be flip, Dan.”

“Sorry.”

And he meant it. He knew of Carrie’s devotion to the Blessed Virgin and didn’t want to tread on any of her vital beliefs. But even though he was a priest, Dan had never been able to buy the Assumption. The thought of Mary’s soul re-entering her body after her funeral, then reviving and being carried aloft to heaven by a host of angels was pretty hokey.

That sort of fairy tale stuff was all through the Bible, Old Testament and New, and had nothing to do with Dan’s idea of what the Church was all about. Nifty little stories to wow the kids and get their attention, but sometimes fairy tales only served to distract from the real message in the Gospels: the brotherhood of man.

“But you’ve got to admit,” he said cautiously, “that the Assumption is a bit hard to buy.” Carrie didn’t react; she simply stared down at the papers in her hands. So he pressed on. “I mean, we can agree, can’t we, that Heaven isn’t a place. It’s a state of being. So how could Mary be ‘assumed’ into Heaven body and soul when Heaven is a spiritual state? Her body was a physical object. It couldn’t go to Heaven. It had to go somewhere else. And I doubt it’s in orbit.”

A vision of the space shuttle passing the floating body of the Virgin Mary popped into his head. He shook it off.

Carrie looked up at him, her eyes bright again.

“Exactly! And that’s what this is all about. This tells us where she really is!”

Uh-oh. He’d backed himself into that one. “Now wait just a minute, Carrie. Don’t get—”

“Listen to me, Dan! Whoever wrote this was assigned the task of guarding the body of a woman, a very important woman. ‘Twenty years and five after his death they found me.’ Tradition holds that Mary died twenty-two years after her son’s crucifixion. The timing is almost perfect.”

“But Carrie, the guy never says whose death. In all the Gospels and letters and other texts, Jesus was called by name or referred to as the Master, the Lord, the Son of Man, or the like, and the Dead Sea scrolls referred to the Messiah as the ‘Branch of David’ or a ‘shoot from the stump of Jesse’ or as the ‘Prince of the Congregation.’ I’d expect the writer to use one of those terms at least once if he was referring to Jesus.”

“Maybe he wrote the scrolls for himself. Maybe he feared mentioning Jesus by name—there were all sorts of persecutions back then.”

“That’s possible, of course, but—”

“But I get the feeling from this that he didn’t feel worthy to speak Jesus’s name.”

A rather melodramatic interpretation, Dan thought, but he said nothing. Carrie’s intensity impressed him. The translation had really got to her. She was inspired, afire with curiosity and...something else...something he couldn’t put his finger on.

“And here,” she said, tapping one of the pages, “this part where he refers to ‘his brother.’ Who else can that be but Saint James the Apostle, the brother of Jesus.”

“His brother or his cousin, depending on which authority you believe.”

But he sat up straighter in the bed and took the page from her. As he scanned the passage it occurred to him that she had a point. The recent publication of some obscure Dead Sea scroll fragments suggested a link between the Essenes of Qumran and the Jerusalem wing of the early Christian church, or “Nazarean movement,” as it was called. The Jerusalem Church had been led by St. James. King Herod Agrippa martyred his share of early Christians, and even the High Priest Ananus was after them. So they were periodically fleeing into the desert.

“You know,” he said softly, “I never saw it before. I mean, the writing was so disjointed and cryptic, but the timing fits. If we assume that ‘his death’ refers to the crucifixion, and that ‘his brother’ arrived ‘two decades and a half’ later, that would date the Glass scroll somewhere around 58 AD” Dan felt a tingle of excitement in his gut. “James was still alive in 58. Ananus didn’t have him killed until 62.”

Carrie clutched his arm. “And tradition says Mary died 22 years after Jesus’ death, which is pretty darn close to two decades and a half.”

Dan could tell Carrie was getting pumped again. It seemed to be contagious. His own heart had picked up its tempo.

“But who wrote this? If we can trust the little he says about himself, I would guess he was a scribe or a Pharisee, or both.”

“How can you tell that?”

“Well, he’s educated. Hal told me the scroll was written in the Aramaic of the time with Greek and Latin words and expressions thrown in. The striped blue sleeve he mentions, and his former free access to the Temple—he’s got to be a Pharisee.”

“He talks about the inheritance he left behind.”

“Right. A rich Pharisee.”

“But weren’t the Pharisees proud? This guy’s wearing rags and he says even the lice won’t bite him. And he tried to drown himself.”

“In the Dead Sea, apparently—it was called the Sea of Lot back in those days. Okay. So he’s a severely depressed Pharisee who’s fallen on hard times and suffers from a heavy-duty lack of self-esteem.”

Carrie smiled. God, he loved that smile. “Sounds like he’d fit right in at Loaves and Fishes. But what’s this about Hellenists?”

Dan reread the passage. The pieces began falling into place. “You know...he could be referring to Saint Paul’s wing of the early church. The two groups had a falling out.”

“I knew there were disagreements, but—”

“More than disagreements. A complete split. James and his followers remained in Jerusalem as observant Jews, sticking to all the dietary laws and customs while they awaited the Second Coming of the Messiah, which they assumed would happen any day. Paul, on the other hand, was out in the hinterlands, working the crowds, converting Jews and Gentiles alike to his own brand of Christianity. His father was a Roman and so Paul had a different slant on Jesus’s teachings, one that sacked the dietary laws and most Jewish traditions. It mentions here ‘the brother’s’ fear of the ‘Hellenists using the mother’s remains for their own purposes’—the scroll has got to be referring to James’s rivalry with Paul’s movement.”

Dan stared at Carrie, his heart pounding, his spirits soaring. Good God, it all fit! The scroll described an encounter with James and the remnant of the Jerusalem church shortly before James was martyred.

“Carrie, this is incredible! Why hasn’t anybody else—?” Then he slammed on the brakes as he remembered. “Wait. Just wait.” He shook his head to clear away the adrenaline buzz. “What am I doing?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Everything’s wrong. The scroll is a fake, Carrie. The ink is modern. We’ve got to remember that. A damn skillful job, but a proven forgery. Almost had me going there, wondering why nobody else had put these pieces together. Then I realized why: Nobody bothered to try. Why waste time interpreting a fake?”

“No,” Carrie said, shaking her head defiantly. “This is true.”

“Carrie,” he said, stroking her arm, “somebody tried to pull a fast one on the world.”

“Why? Why would someone want to do such a thing?”

“Maliciousness. Like calling in a bomb scare to a concert and watching everybody scramble out. Malicious mischief on an international scale. If the scroll had been released to the world as authentic, someone would have come to the same conclusion as we. The liberal and fundamentalist sects of the Christian world would be up in arms, the Vatican would be releasing encyclicals, the Judean Desert would be filled with expeditions in search of the remains of the Mother of God. There’d be years of chaos. And all the while, our forger would be sitting back, giggling, knowing he caused it all.”

“But to what end? I don’t get it.”

Dan looked at her. No, Carrie wouldn’t get it. This sort of maliciousness was beyond her comprehension. That was why he loved her.

“A power trip, Carrie. Pure ego. The same loser personality that creates a computer virus. The Christian world is in chaos, all because of some lame-o’s clever forgery. All I can say is it’s a damn good thing the Rockefeller Museum did a thorough testing job.”

“I don’t care what the tests say,” she said, tapping the sheets on her lap. “This is true.”

“Carrie, the ink—”

“I don’t care! I don’t care if the ink’s still wet! This man speaks the truth. Can’t you feel it? There’s real pain here, Dan. Whoever wrote these words is isolated—from his friends, from his family, from his God. The loneliness, the anguish...it seeps through in every sentence.”

“Then how do you explain the carbon dating?”

“I can’t. And I’m not going to try. But I am going to prove the truth of these words. And you’re going to help.”

Dan had a sudden bad feeling about what was coming.

“I am?”

“Yes, dear. Somehow, some way, you and I are going to Israel and we’re going to find the earthly remains of the Virgin Mary.”

Dan smiled, humoring her. She was simply a little crazy now. She’d get over it. Besides, there was no way they’d be able to get away to Israel together.