She looked up at the man.
“Lester Bradley,” he said.
“A Lester Bradley,” she repeated for Constantine. She looked up at the man while waiting for instructions from Constantine, who had gone silent on the other end of the call. “Minister Constantine?” she asked after a time.
“Bring him back,” Constantine told her.
The girl led the man down the center aisle of the church and turned right at the altar. As he followed her, he could not help but stop suddenly and gaze up at the painting of Cristos Pantera behind the altar. After several steps, she stopped as well and turned to him.
“He’s glorious, isn’t he?” she said. “I only wish I could have seen him preach.”
The man shrugged, grunted, then turned to the girl, nodding for her to resume taking him to Constantine. After another smile, she turned and started walking.
He followed the girl as she exited the church hall and entered a long corridor, and led him to the door at the end of the hall. The door displayed a golden nameplate: “Minister Constantine.” All along the route from the lobby to Constantine’s office, gentle ballads from the late 1960s and early 1970s played from speakers spaced along the ceiling.
“Here,” the girl said with a smile as she looked back at him. She gently knocked on the door.
“Come in,” Constantine called out.
As the girl and the man entered the office, Constantine stood up. “You can leave us,” Constantine told the girl with a nod.
“As you wish, Minister,” she said, then stepped back and gently closed the door.
“Who are you?” Constantine asked abruptly. “What do you want?”
“I was sent by Chief Bradley. He wishes to speak with you.”
“Why didn’t he come himself?”
“I have no idea,” the man said. “I was ordered to come here. Here I am.”
In the next instant, the man walked over and held up a smartphone. He pressed a contact button and handed it to Constantine, then seated himself on a chair facing Constantine’s desk.
The screen on the smartphone flashed to life and Constantine found himself staring at Chief Bradley, seated behind his desk.
“Hello, Minister Constantine,” Bradley said.
“Hello,” Constantine said, frowning as he sat down. “You want something?”
“It’s been awhile.”
“Almost two years.”
“Yes,” Bradley said, thinking of all that had happened in that time. “Two years.” After a sigh, he said, “You’ve done well for yourself, I see. Your Church of Cristos is most impressive. Your congregation numbers over a thousand, I’m told. At least according to our latest reports.”
“That’s correct,” Constantine said. “Now, how can I…?”
“And churches like yours have popped up across the country,” Bradley continued. “Indeed, around the world. The one in Singapore has ten thousand worshippers.”
“Yes, but…”
“Do you know where he is?”
“Who? Pantera?” Constantine asked. “You still on that kick? Why can’t you accept his death? After all, you killed him.”
“You haven’t heard the rumors?”
“The Pantera sightings?” Constantine laughed. “You didn’t expect them? Personally, I don’t believe in them. Not a single one. Cristos Pantera is dead. But his message, his dream, lives on. I have nothing to add to these resurrection rumors.”
“So you’ve not seen him?”
“No, as I said,” Constantine confirmed, “I haven’t.”
Constantine squinted at the screen. Bradley sighed and sagged a bit in his chair. He looked tired, harried. The Pantera problem simply would not go away. The troubling rumors included that the Network had killed Pantera, but had somehow lost his corpse; that he had fooled them inside the prison and escaped alive; and, perhaps worst of all, that they had indeed killed him, crucified him, and—like Jesus—he had risen from the dead, walked the Earth for a time before ascending into Heaven.
The simple fact was, as some rightfully pointed out, nobody could say for sure what had happened to Cristos Pantera. Constantine knew that this absent variable would not sit well with the Network’s statistical and intelligence analysts, not to mention the members of the Supremacy Council and Director Margolis.
“They will use this to their advantage, you know,” Bradley said.
“I have no doubt of that.”
Bradley sagged a bit more and said, “There is another rumor—the Network director will soon be replaced. And that will also be the end for me.” He sighed and added, “But no matter, life goes on. The Council goes on. They still control the strings.”
After a time, Constantine said, “I’m sorry.”
“There is no need for pity,” Bradley said. “I will be given a reasonable pension and severance package. I am being set out to pasture. As will the director.”
He remained quiet for a time. Constantine could not entirely fathom the purpose of the call. It seemed all too philosophical for a man like Bradley, almost pathetic—as if he was lost and needed a friend, someone in the know with whom to commiserate. But, significant life changes sometimes had that effect, making them ripe for transformation, the adoption of an entirely new belief system.
“So was he?” Bradley suddenly asked. “The messiah?”
Constantine considered the question, then said, “If by messiah, you mean someone who has the answer to the true meaning of life, who can take programmed men trapped in automatic lives and transform them into authentic men, leading lives filled with genuine meaning, then yes, he was…is…the messiah.”
“And it truly works?” Bradley said after a time. “Saves you?”
“It did me,” Constantine said.
“Then you are a lucky man,” Bradley said. “A most lucky man.” He sighed again and added, “Well, thank you for taking my call.” He seemed distracted as he looked away at the far wall of his office. “Goodbye, Minister.”
The call ended before Constantine could say goodbye. He handed the smartphone back to the man, who stood and left the office without a word.
Six months later, Constantine spotted Lester Bradley among the congregation during a regular Saturday evening mass. Next to him among the worshippers occupying almost every row of the gallery in the church that evening was another man, a tall, robust-looking fellow in his early seventies. Constantine later learned that this was none other than Gregor Margolis, former director of the World Intelligence Network.
Bradley and Margolis bowed their heads as the worshippers recited the prayer Cristos Pantera had taught them:
I accept God and vow to seek and enter His Kingdom on Earth.
I dedicate my life to quest for God’s true nature.
I accept the eternal sanctity of the human spirit
and the value and dignity of each human being
as the way to a meaningful life.
Amen.
Constantine smiled, pleased to see that Lester Bradley and the man with him were also reciting the prayer.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Son of God
In the days that followed Bradley’s call, a website called CRISTOS-SON-OF-GOD.ORG, boldly claiming that Pantera was the Son of God, was brought to Minister Constantine’s attention. A brick-and-mortar church espousing the claim had also been established in an abandoned storefront in small, nondescript strip-mall outside Houston, Texas. Soon, other similar churches were popping up across the country. Not long after that, a tabloid ran a story about the man behind this new Cristos “Son of God” Church, a former Roman Catholic priest named G. Paul Wells.
The article reported that according to Wells, one Sunday afternoon a few months before, shortly after he’d said mass for the congregation of St. Luke’s Roman Catholic Church in a suburb of Houston, the spirit of Cristos Pantera appeared to him, interposed on the large statue of Jesus-on-the-cross behind the altar. Wells further claimed that Pantera’s spirit compelled him
to leave the priesthood and start what he later called the Church of the Divine Cristos.
A few weeks later, after another Saturday mass at the Church of Cristos in Kissimmee, Lester Bradley, now a “retired” Network agent, approached Constantine. He had been attending mass at the Church of Cristos regularly by then, having settled after his retirement in a gated community in Davenport, Florida, about fifteen minutes away.
“Have you heard of this new church?” he asked Constantine. “This Church of the Divine Cristos?”
“Yes, I have.” He shrugged. “Many churches have opened in his name.”
“Yes, but this one,” Bradley said. “This one is different. This one has the earmarks of the Supremacy all over it.”
Again, Constantine shrugged and said, “That does not surprise me. Should it concern me?”
Bradley nodded and said, “Yes, it should.” It was a warm day in early autumn. The equinox had just passed and Bradley imagined the Network director who had replaced Gregor Margolis giving his first report on the status of the Church of Cristos and, perhaps, on the new Church of the Divine Cristos. After a moment, he laughed to himself and added, “How shameless they are. And obvious, to use a man named Paul to start this church.”
“So was Paul of Tarsus a plant of the then-Network?” Constantine said.
“That very well may be,” Bradley said. “And he had the same purpose as his modern-day counterpart—to establish a church in the name of a self-proclaimed messiah that the Supremacy can control.” Bradley sighed, then said, “Yes, this has the Network written all over it.”
He thought another moment, then looked up at Constantine.
“They must now see your church as a threat to them,” he said. “It presents a new variable, causing their statisticians to adjust their equations. To counter it, they had to create a negating variable. So, they make Cristos Pantera the Son of God and build a church around a superstition rather than truth. The hope, of course, is that one day, that church will overcome yours.”
Constantine sighed and thought a moment. Then, he looked at Bradley and said, “Well, that is something we must work to prevent. The Church of Cristos must prevail in spreading the true word of God.”
“Yes,” Bradley agreed. “We can’t let history repeat itself. We mustn’t let Cristos’ message be obscured by superstition, as Jesus’ was.”
Constantine’s eyes widened after a time as he internalized the grave importance of this quest.
“No,” he told Bradley with all the force of will he could muster. “We must not!”
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About the Author
Vincent L. Scarsella is the author of speculative, fantasy, and crime fiction. His published books include the crime novels The Anonymous Man (2013) and Lawyers Gone Bad (2014), as well as the young adult fantasy, Escape from the Psi Academy, Book 1 of the Psi Wars! Series released in May, 2015. Book 2 of the series, Return to the Psi Academy, is slated for publication by IFWG Publishing in the summer of 2016.
Scarsella has also published numerous speculative fiction short stories in print magazines, such as The Leading Edge, Aethlon, and Fictitious Force, various anthologies, and in several online zines. His short story, “The Cards of Unknown Players,” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has been republished by Digital Science Fiction (an imprint of Digital Fiction Pub).
Scarsella’s full-length play, Hate Crime, about race relations in the context of a legal thriller, was performed in Buffalo on September 13, 2016 and is scheduled for a reprise in late May of 2016. The Penitent, about the Catholic Church child molestation scandal, was a finalist in the June 2015 Watermelon One-Act Play Festival.
Scarsella has also published non-fiction works, most notably, The Human Manifesto: A General Plan for Human Survival, which was favorably reviewed in September 2011 by the Ernest Becker Foundation.
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Copyright
The Messiah
Written by Vincent L. Scarsella
Executive Editor: Michael A. Wills
Editor: Christine Clukey Reece
This story is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in the story are either the product of the author’s imagination, fictitious, or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or deities, living or dead, would be coincidental and quite remarkable.
The Messiah. Copyright © 2017 by Digital Fiction Publishing Corp. and Vincent L. Scarsella. This story and all characters, settings, and other unique features or content are copyright Vincent L. Scarsella. Published under license by Digital Fiction Publishing Corp. Cover Image Adobe Stock: Copyright © 77394740. This version first published in print and electronically: January 2017 by Digital Fiction Publishing Corp., LaSalle, Ontario, Canada. Digital Fantasy Fiction and its logo, and Digital Fiction Publishing Corp and its logo, are Trademarks of Digital Fiction Publishing Corp.
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