The Second Coming

by John Heubusch

  For the sake of her marriage, she most often forced a smile for Bondurant and lived life as positively as she could. But in moments of solitude, when she had time to reflect, Domenika would often withdraw inside a shell of her former self. Counseling didn’t help. Antidepressant prescriptions didn’t work. And daily acts of kindness and understanding from her husband went only so far toward healing the wound of a lost child. In the end, she knew it was only the passage of time and the strength of her faith that might bring her peace.

  But now, like the fleeting storm of the night before, her life was only more unsettled. She’d learned that the story of the child she’d lost was even worse. She knew very little about the fabled Watchers, the kind of beings Parenti had apparently conjured up in his Easter Sunday vision. The priest’s tiny stature often belied his giant imagination, which was something Domenika might normally discount. But hearing her often skeptical husband’s suspicion, even fear, of a dark being that might now walk the earth in the form of a child was a total shock. And to be reminded that she may have given birth to such a monstrosity was for Domenika a nightmare beyond the pale.

  “Nika!” Joanna cried out.

  Domenika, lost in thought while her sister approached, was so startled that she nearly dropped her cup of tea. “Nika” was Joanna’s pet name for her. Domenika recovered quickly, rose from her chair, and hugged her sister long and close. Joanna was dressed exquisitely, as usual, in a bright red Giambattista Valli suit that struck a perfect contrast with her shoulder-length brunette hair. Once they had sat and exchanged their usual but genuine pleasantries, Domenika wasn’t surprised when Joanna got right to the heart of what was on her mind.

  “You look terrible, Nika,” Joanna said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Well, it’s great to see you too,” Domenika said. She thought she’d pulled herself together well given that she’d had so little sleep since she and Jon had arrived at their hotel across the river late the night before. Her sister always had high expectations when it came to how she looked.

  “Worry lines,” Joanna explained. “They come and go. Me too. Look. Here. And here too.”

  After her sister had pointed out the spots on her own forehead and brow where the tiniest trace of apprehension might be found, they were interrupted by their waiter.

  “I’m so sorry; if I may?” the waiter said. He set two tall champagne flutes on the table before them. They brimmed to the top with sparkling white bubbles.

  “On the house?” Joanna asked, as if she expected the courtesy.

  “No, madam,” the waiter responded. He nodded toward a table across the small dining room occupied by two graying gentlemen, perhaps in their seventies, impeccably dressed.

  Joanna, undoubtedly used to such come-ons, completely ignored the men and their gesture as she took a small sip from her glass.

  “You asked what’s wrong?” Domenika said. “I don’t even know where to start.”

  She wondered how she might possibly explain how she felt. How was it that the child she had protected in her womb for nine months, the one she would have given her own life to protect, might actually be an awful being who deserved to be wiped from the face of the earth?

  “What about . . . India? Have they been caught or punished?” Joanna asked.

  “One is dead,” Domenika said. She looked around to be sure no one could hear. “Sehgal, the scientist? He shot himself, right in front of Jon. The other doctor, Laurent, the one from France, is on the run. I’m afraid the ringleader, Meyer, the one who founded that crazy cult and organized it all, is another story altogether.”

  “Have the police found him? He deserves to die.”

  “No,” Domenika said. She looked around the room again for any sign of trouble, as she had so many times since Bondurant had rescued her in India the year before. “If fact, Jon and I have been on the run from him.”

  “You can’t be serious, Nika,” her sister said.

  “These people,” Domenika said. “They’re powerful. It’s just insane even to think what they may have in mind. Imagine a cult that believes science can resurrect Jesus, that they can bring him back from the dead.”

  “I told you, Nika,” Joanna said. “I told you. Go to church. That’s fine. But must everything in your life have to do with God?”

  Domenika and her sister had disagreed over religion years before. They’d both been raised as devout Catholics. Domenika’s faith was steady, but Joanna had left Catholicism and Poland behind. She’d dabbled in various faiths for several years but had never settled on a firm set of beliefs. In the time she’d been in America, she’d veered from Catholicism to Buddhism to kabbalah, and for the time being had left them all behind. She was now an atheist.

  “Joanna, something terrible has happened,” Domenika said. “I’ve just learned of it. And I don’t know what to do.”

  Joanna reached across the table and took Domenika’s hands in her own. “Tell me how I can help,” she said.

  “I’ve done something wrong. Maybe it’s not my fault,” Domenika said. She hesitated to go any further, as there was no way her sister could even begin to understand her predicament. “But I’m all mixed up in it, and there just has to be something I can do.”

  “What is it, Nika?” Domenika could feel her sister’s concern as she gripped her hands tightly.

  “It’s about the child. The one I was forced to have.”

  “Have they found him? The last time we talked, you hadn’t a clue where he might be.”

  “I still don’t, but he’s—he’s—” Domenika didn’t know what to say next, particularly if there was any chance that word of her incredible dilemma might find its way back to her parents at home. That was out of the question. Another interruption from their waiter spared her for the moment.

  “I’m so sorry to disturb you again, I really am,” the waiter said. He set a sterling-silver bucket beside their table, filled with ice and a bottle of Dom Pérignon champagne. Domenika recognized the label but not the vintage. She knew her sister would.

  “Wow,” Joanna said as she reached over and turned the bottle slowly in its ice. “Their best year in decades, 2002.”

  Joanna looked toward the two elderly men who had sent the previous round. They stared back, glad to be recognized, but both had looks of concern.

  The waiter shook his head. “I’m sorry, no,” he said.

  He nodded once more, only this time in the opposite direction, toward another table across the room, this one occupied by two other handsome middle-aged businessmen. The waiter set two business cards on the table next to the champagne, smiled uncomfortably, and retreated swiftly toward the kitchen. Joanna glanced at the cards for a moment, turned them over dismissively, and turned toward her sister.

  “Where were we?” Joanna asked.

  “Does this happen everywhere you go?” Domenika asked. “I mean, what’s next? A vineyard?”

  Joanna laughed.

  “Joanna, I—” It was no use, she thought. There wasn’t a soul on earth other than Bondurant and Parenti who might believe or understand her plight. If she couldn’t confide in Bondurant and she couldn’t trust her family with her predicament, who was there? In some ways, she was all alone, and she knew it.

  She paused, reached for her glass of champagne, and raised it to eye level, ready to give a toast. She thought for another moment about better times and her idyllic life with Joanna as a child. Those days seemed a lifetime ago. There was an old Polish saying their father often used with the two sisters when they were young that came to mind. It was apropos for the troubling time, and one her sister might recall.

  “Niech będziesz w niebie pół godziny,” Domenika recited.

  “May you be in heaven a full half hour,” Joanna said. She held her own glass high and laughed as her memory served her.

  “Zanim diabeł zna umarły,” Domenika said.

  “Before the devil knows you’re dead.”

  Chapter 11

  New Haven, Connect
icut

  Nothing had changed, Bondurant thought.

  Although he hadn’t visited the faculty offices of Yale’s Religious Studies Department in years, he could close his eyes and still find his way to Professor Tom Harrington’s disheveled basement office. He simply followed his nose. The faint smell of marijuana grew stronger as he approached Harrington’s doorway, just like it had during the days under his advisement as a doctoral candidate almost two decades before. Harrington, an aging hippie from the sixties who claimed he held the record for Vietnam draft deferments at six, was a campus radical caught in a time warp.

  An avowed socialist, he lived on a five-acre farm outside New Haven, Connecticut, where he raised llamas and chickens for reasons even he couldn’t fully explain, given that he was allergic to both. His long, graying ponytail, thick black-rimmed glasses, and wardrobe straight off the racks of a Salvation Army thrift store created the impression of a professor one step away from homelessness and life on the street. But he had two key things going for him: sheer brilliance, and the blunt truth emblazoned on the large button pinned to the lapel of his lone corduroy sport coat. It read “TBIT,” short for “Too Bad, I’m Tenured.”

  Holding doctorates in religious studies, divinity, and theology, Harrington was considered a leading authority on “angelology,” the obscure study of angels found in biblical texts. Angels were referenced in the Old and New Testaments almost two hundred times, but academic investigation into the nature of angels, their origin and purpose, and their role in the context of the scriptures was strangely sparse. Harrington had found this odd, given that the authors of biblical texts made mention of angels in thirty-four separate books of the Bible, from the first book, Genesis, to the last, Revelation. He also reasoned that angels merited study because if Jesus Christ found their legion deserving of mention, they had to be worth a look. As a result, he had written the greatest number of definitive academic works in existence on the study of angels and their worlds.

  “Tell me, Jon,” Harrington began now, as he took one last drag on the tiny remnant of his joint before extinguishing it by rolling it between his forefinger and thumb. “You’ve become famous. And famous people write famous reports. Now that you’ve publicly slain the Shroud with that book of yours, I figure it’s my angels you’re coming after next. You know I can’t let you do that.”

  “No intention, Tom,” Bondurant said as he sank into the comfortable leather sofa in Harrington’s office. All four walls were lined from floor to ceiling with disordered shelves of ancient books. Scattered among the many rows of religious texts were framed photos that documented the professor’s numerous travels, to the Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu, and a dozen other exotic or mysterious sites.

  Bondurant had bridled at the mention of the Shroud. He’d tried to put out of his mind the high-risk press conference in New York that he’d scheduled for the following week. He knew coming out of hiding even for just the moment would place him in grave danger. But he also knew it was finally time to admit error and come clean about the partial authenticity of the relic.

  “I’m actually here to learn more of what you know about the power of certain angels,” Bondurant said.

  “Two questions: Are you an alien, and what have you done with Jon Bondurant?” Harrington asked. “The Jon Bondurant I know would have said what I believe about the power of angels, not what I know. Out with it. Make my day. Tell me you’ve left the dark side.”

  “Maybe I’ve seen a little light, let’s put it that way,” Bondurant said. “You could say I have a more open mind now, depending.”

  “Okay, then. Good or bad?”

  “Good or bad what?” Bondurant asked.

  Harrington cocked his head sideways and wheeled his squeaky antique office chair across the worn tile floor to get within whispering distance of Bondurant. He slid his glasses down to the tip of his nose and stroked his ponytail several times as if to soothe himself while he pondered the question.

  “Good angel or bad angel, Jon?” he said.

  “A Watcher, I’m told. Tell me everything you know about Watchers,” Bondurant said.

  “Bad.”

  “Bad?”

  “Really bad.”

  “That’s it? You’re the leading authority on angels, and that’s all you have to say?”

  “I mean, a Watcher is a type of fallen angel,” Harrington said as he reached toward the bookcase behind him. He pulled down an oversize text bound in old leather. “You used to laugh at me when I would try to interest you in this stuff. You sure you want to hear this?”

  “Very sure, Tom.”

  “Okay, here’s the short course. As you know, the Bible is a little vague on the history of angels. Before God created man, he created spirits a great deal more powerful than man could ever hope to be. More intelligence. More power.”

  “Superior to man. Inferior to God,” Bondurant said.

  “That’s right. An entire army of them. Soldiers, born before man, who exist to carry out his will. God’s will. There are several ‘super’ angels—archangels—like the famous Michael, a general of sorts in God’s army. Then there’s Satan,” he said as he mimicked horns on either side of his head with both forefingers. “Satan was once an angel who became enraptured with his own beauty, and in trying to place himself above God led a rebellion. He and a great many of the angels fell out of grace with God. It’s the stuff of Revelation twelve. Some were banished from heaven to remain in the abyss until a thousand years after the Second Coming. They’ll be judged again. See here?” Harrington pointed toward a vivid medieval painting of deformed creatures writhing in the fires of hell. “Here they are, bound by chains, awaiting final judgment, just as depicted in the passage from Revelation.”

  “You said ‘some,’ Tom.”

  “Yes, well, this first group is essentially locked away to live forever in a painful lake of fire.” Harrington pointed to another hideous illustration in the book on his lap. “Think Dante’s Inferno. We need not worry about them. Out of sight, out of mind.”

  Harrington reached for another book on the shelf behind his visitor and held it so that Bondurant could get a good look at its cover.

  “Now we turn to the pseudepigrapha. Stories left out of the Old Testament and deemed by the Church to be false. The books of Enoch, Daniel, and some others. Stories about Abraham, Moses, Noah, and the like. They were mostly left off the hit parade because of the angel stories. The early Church founders believed the stories these writings told about angels—how they came to be, how they ended up on earth, and how some were the source of evil in our world—were too far-out and too contradictory to be included in the Bible as we know it today. But here they are, as credible as Genesis and the beginning of the world, if you ask me,” Harrington said.

  Bondurant looked on as Harrington ran his thumb across the tome he held and stopped at a section in the middle.

  “The book of Enoch?” Bondurant asked. Harrington had clearly marked every book with a tab.

  “That’s right. Enoch. The son of Cain. They say he lived for three hundred sixty-five years.”

  Bondurant began to chuckle.

  “Be polite,” Harrington said. “This is my house.”

  “I remember the story now,” Bondurant said. “Enoch’s tale of how angels fell is a lot different from what Christianity believes today.”

  “That’s right.” Harrington gently set the ornately bound collection of writings on the coffee table between them.

  “There’s the traditional biblical story about Lucifer and the fall of the angels, the one everyone knows,” Bondurant said. “The great Battle of Heaven. Satan’s loss. The casting down of hundreds of other ‘fallen’ angels who inhabited the earth. The source of all evil in this world. Have I got that right?”

  “On the nose,” Harrington said. “But not according to Enoch. His version is a wild one—a lot sexier, as far as I’m concerned. One that’s more revealing about the Watchers you have in mind. And while you haven’t ex
plained your interest, you would do well to avoid them.”

  “Avoid?” Bondurant said as he folded his arms.

  “Watchers are a special breed, Jon. They’re also called the Grigori. I suppose if one wasn’t a believer in fallen angels but did believe in good and evil in the abstract sense, then here is where there’s common ground. They’re the personification of evil. They’ve lived here on earth among us at times, and even intermingled among the human race. They’ve been left with the power and freedom to carry out the will of Satan himself on mankind.”

  “Where did they come from?” Bondurant asked.

  “There’s the rub,” Harrington said. “And that’s why few have heard much about them before. The way Enoch tells it—Daniel too—angels didn’t fall from grace when they lost the great war of heaven. Rather, hundreds of them were placed on earth by God as ‘shepherds.’ ”

  “To watch over mankind?”

  “Right. The earliest humans. Watchers are defined as ‘those who are awake, those who do not sleep.’ Part of God’s plan to mind us. But the plan went awry,” Harrington said.

  “How so?”

  “These Watchers were only supposed to watch over mankind. Look but don’t touch, God said. He posted signs everywhere. But, as the story goes, these Watchers couldn’t resist the temptation of mankind, especially beautiful women. You have some experience in that department.”