The Seventh Commandment

by Tom Fox

  ‘That will do just fine.’

  Thomás motioned in the direction of home, and a moment later the three marched away from the church into the remnants of the fog that dissipated around them.

  64

  Underground

  The third plague was over. It had come and gone as it was supposed to. All the pyrotechnics had worked as intended, and the chemical mix had been just what was wanted. Annoying, but not poisonous.

  Not pyrotechnics, jackass. Bartolomeo grinned as Yiannis’s words replayed in his memory. He’d been scolded more than once for applying this term to the systems his partner had helped put in place to cause the spontaneous eruption of their makeshift fog throughout the city. No fire’s involved. Just ‘technics’.

  Fire was for the fourth plague, not the third.

  That would come soon enough. For the moment, Bartolomeo’s focus was on the present.

  ‘It’s beyond this wall?’ he asked. The long, vertical slab of concrete looked innocuous enough, with its strange, etched-out indentation that went past concrete and into metal. It was hard to believe that everything they were working for lay just beyond it.

  ‘Yeah, but getting this close to it’s been a bitch,’ one of their workers answered. A whole team had been labouring down here for months.

  Bartolomeo nodded. Everything worth having required work to obtain it.

  ‘The explosives we brought in, they’ll be enough?’

  ‘Ought to be,’ the other man answered, then, seeing Bartolomeo’s displeasure, ‘yeah, it’ll do. We’ve got far enough through already, the blast’s just for the last few centimetres.’ Then, hesitation. ‘But, you know, it’s still gonna make one big fucking boom.’

  Bartolomeo smiled.

  The other man did not. ‘I mean, the kind that’s gonna get noticed up at street level. Anyone around’s definitely going to hear it.’

  ‘There won’t be anyone around,’ Bartolomeo said with absolute conviction.

  ‘But there always are,’ the worker protested. ‘People up on the streets, and the usual security over on the other side.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Bartolomeo answered, ‘there won’t be.’

  ‘How can you possibly be certain of that?’

  ‘Because,’ he replied, ‘they’re all going to have their attention elsewhere.’

  The worker fidgeted, uncomprehending. ‘Where?’

  Bartolomeo laughed. ‘On heaven. Where else?’

  65

  The island of Pantelleria

  On the island of Pantelleria, 305 nautical miles away in the midst of the blue waters of the Strait of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea, nothing happened.

  PART SEVEN

  Destruction

  66

  Via Pausania

  Home of Thomás Nascimbeni

  It was late afternoon by the time Angelina, Ben and Thomás arrived at the unassuming entrance to Thomás’s bedsit. With the Roman housing market as overpriced as every other major European city, the tiny space was all he could afford, and that only at a stretch. A narrow sitting room connected to a tiny kitchen, a double bed and bathroom squeezed into the space behind it. It was cramped when Thomás was alone, but with two other bodies inside the place felt restrictively small.

  Thomás had decorated the apartment in simple, clean furnishings. The pale greens and off whites in most circumstances made the interior feel warm, but in the present the light colours only served to emphasise the haggard appearance of its new occupants. Thomás, the least dishevelled of the three, had blood on his hands and forearms from tending to the body of Father Alberto before the medics had arrived; but Angelina and Ben were in a far more dramatic state. Each had blood spattered and smeared across their clothes, arms, faces and into their hair. Angelina’s blouse was torn near her right shoulder, and Ben’s right trouser leg was one giant crimson smear – the remnants of the blood pouring out of Laurence’s fatal chest wound, pooling on the floor as Ben had knelt down to check he was truly dead. As a result, Thomás had taken a somewhat circuitous route to get them from the church to his home, realising that as puzzled as the populace might be by the fog receding from the city, the sight of three blood-soaked stragglers would still raise alarms.

  In the warm light of his flat, they all looked like visions out of a Wes Craven film.

  ‘I think you could do with a change of clothes,’ he said, directing his words to Ben. The latter peered down at himself. If at any other moment in his life he might have been shocked to see himself coated in another man’s blood, at this particular instant he took the vision well. An eyebrow slowly rose as he scanned his chest, his arms, his legs.

  ‘I think you might be right,’ was all he said in the end. ‘Unless you’ve got one hell of a good washing machine.’

  ‘Only the launderette down the street,’ Thomás answered, ‘but I’ve got a few changes of clothes in the wardrobe. You’re a little taller than me, but I think they should still fit.’

  He disappeared through the kitchen into the back room, and for a moment Angelina and Ben were left alone to peer over the bloodstained apparitions they had become. Angelina looked as if she was on the verge of saying something, when suddenly Thomás re-emerged from his bedroom.

  ‘These ought to do.’ He handed Ben a folded set of khakis and a yellow top with open collar. A pair of boxers and a folded set of black socks were stacked on top of them. ‘There’s a shower back there, too.’ He motioned beyond the kitchen.

  ‘I’m not sure I want to stick around here long enough for all of us to bathe,’ Ben answered, ‘but I’ll certainly take advantage of the chance to rinse off my face and hands.’ His eyes fell down to his feet, his loafers caked in blood. ‘And maybe my shoes.’

  He took the new clothes from Thomás and walked into the back room. Angelina had already taken a step closer to the younger man.

  ‘What about me?’ she asked. ‘I can’t exactly go out like this.’

  ‘Give me a minute to grab something for myself,’ Thomás answered. ‘I can change in the bedroom while Benedict is in the bathroom. It’ll give you as much privacy as we can manage in here.’

  Angelina straightened. Hearing Ben referred to as ‘Benedict’ still startled her – she’d assumed Ben was short for Benjamin, not something as overtly pious as the name of the founder of the Benedictine Order – but she was equally startled by the assertion that she needed pampering and privacy.

  ‘It’s not my privacy I’m worried about,’ she answered back, too testily, ‘it’s what I’m supposed to put on.’ She glanced at Thomás’s attire, similar to what he’d just handed Ben and, Angelina could only assume, most of what remained in his wardrobe. To say his style wasn’t hers wasn’t so much the problem as the fact that they were nothing close to the same size.

  Thomás smiled uncomfortably. ‘I . . . my girlfriend . . . I think she left a few things in the chest of drawers beside my bed. They would probably fit you.’

  He blushed, as if the words ‘girlfriend’ and ‘bed’ were unimaginable in the same sentence.

  ‘Girlfriend?’ Angelina asked, playing off his obvious embarrassment. ‘What’s a good religious boy like you doing with a woman over at his house, spending the night?’ Thomás turned another shade of purple.

  ‘Please, don’t tell Ben,’ he said timidly. Angelina caught herself, recognising that his was a genuine embarrassment and wondering whether premarital cohabitation was a particularly nasty sin in their little community.

  Religious people, the voice in her head sounded. If it’s not a revelation, it’s a rule to inspire guilt.

  She shook her head, but calmed her features. ‘Don’t worry, Thomás. Your secret’s safe with me.’ She smiled. A moment later, Thomás re-emerged with a set of women’s clothes in his hands: a pair of fashionably faded jeans and a snug top. Not exactly Angelina’s style, but it would do.

  Twenty minutes later, all three of them had had the chance to rinse the blood from the visible parts of their bodies, clo
the themselves in Thomás’s meagre offerings, and tidy themselves up as much as the situation would allow. As Angelina had rinsed her hair under the sink’s tap and brushed it out with Thomás’s hairbrush – a kind of intimate sharing she’d never expected to undertake with a man who until a few hours ago had been a perfect stranger – Thomás had switched on the kettle and extracted a few tins of biscuits from a cupboard. By the time she re-entered the front room, three mugs of strong tea were waiting.

  Ben and Thomás were mid-conversation as she rejoined them, reaching out for one of the mugs and lifting it to her lips. God, my eternal soul for a cup of coffee. Though an interior scolding followed. The tea’s not that bad. Your eternal soul might be a bit of a high bid.

  Ben laughed mildly at something Thomás had said – the first time Angelina could think of him laughing since before they’d entered the Archives together. It seemed like a lifetime ago, though in reality it had been fewer than twenty-four hours.

  ‘We need to figure out what he meant by “them”,’ she suddenly said, ignoring their conversation and simply butting in with what was important. ‘It’s why we came here, and we need to get down to it.’

  Ben’s smile broadened. ‘Why don’t you take a seat, Dr Calla.’ He motioned to the space next to him on the two-seater sofa, the use of her title an obvious josh. ‘Thomás and I have just been discussing that.’

  Angelina felt a blush emerge on her cheeks. Ever the rash one. But she sat as instructed and took another sip of her tea before asking, ‘So, any thoughts?’

  ‘Could be another religious group,’ Thomás said. ‘I just said to Benedict, Laurence only joined up with us six or seven months ago. Maybe a few more, I don’t quite remember. Came without much of a background story, but then, most of us do. Nobody’s going to make you reveal your past unless you want to.’

  ‘He always seemed so gentle,’ Ben said. ‘Devoted.’

  ‘But that’s what I mean,’ Thomás countered. ‘He was very devoted, right from the beginning. Were you like that?’

  The question seemed to catch Ben off guard. He didn’t answer, screwing his face up into a puzzle.

  ‘I mean, I wasn’t,’ Thomás went on. ‘I was totally amazed when I first walked into the church, don’t get me wrong. Its effect on me was almost instantaneous. Mama is Portuguese and Papa is Venetian, which are cultures worlds away from this, so when I walked through those doors the first time it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Nothing I’d ever felt before.’

  Ben’s head slowly rose and fell, eyes growing distant, recalling memories that apparently mirrored Thomás’s experience.

  ‘But actually getting into it,’ Thomás continued, ‘I mean, the whole praying in tongues, opening up your heart to hearing God’s voice, all that – it took me a while. It was, well . . .’

  ‘Awkward.’ Ben found the word for which Thomás was groping. ‘For me, too. My family were strongly conservative when it came to religion. Getting near this kind of thing first-hand was an entirely new world to me. I had to adapt.’

  ‘That’s my point!’ Thomás sat straighter in the lounge chair opposite the sofa. ‘Laurence never seemed to need to. He showed up, quiet and kind, and seemed to be open to the voice of God almost immediately. I remember him joining me in a rapture session just two days after he arrived.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Angelina interrupted, ‘a rapture session?’

  ‘It’s the name we use for a certain kind of prayer . . . experience,’ Thomás answered. ‘When you’re really caught up in the Holy Spirit. Like being raptured up into heaven. You feel like you’re outside yourself.’

  A decent dose of LSD will do the same thing, came an automatic retort. Angelina kept it to herself, out of respect for Ben more than the religion. She still couldn’t bring herself to understand how a rational man like him could be into this religion at all, much less a rapture session.

  ‘It usually takes newcomers a long time before they reach that level of prayer,’ Thomás continued, ‘but Laurence was right there beside me, speaking in the Spirit, after just a couple of days.’ He shook his head, disappointed. ‘Maybe that should have been a sign that something wasn’t right. It could mean he was with some other group. Maybe out to discredit us? Plenty of people are.’

  ‘But to what end?’ Ben asked. ‘He wasn’t mocking us, he became one of our most devoted members. Father Alberto held him close.’

  ‘Maybe that’s . . . maybe that’s a sign, too. Maybe Father Alberto was taken in by him.’ Thomás paled at his own words. Angelina wondered whether the younger man considered this the worst realisation of all: that the priest he admired might have been duped.

  Ben shook his head energetically. ‘I can’t believe that. Father Alberto is a visionary. He would have seen through a lie.’

  Now Angelina’s head was shaking. ‘No one’s infallible, Ben.’ What a comment to make, to two Catholics. ‘What Thomás is saying isn’t impossible. Maybe Laurence was out to discredit your church by tying it to a bunch of fraudulent miracles. Shame and disgrace, that sort of thing. It’s not like it hasn’t been done before.’

  ‘It seems like a long way to go,’ Ben answered. His emotions told him this wasn’t the right path, but even his analytical mind had its own justifications. ‘There would be far easier ways to accomplish that. To cut the power to a whole city? To mess with the sewer system and fumigate an entire population? I’m sorry, it seems like overkill.’

  Angelina wasn’t ready to dismiss Laurence’s potential religious motivations, but she had to admit Ben had a point. ‘What, then, if not another religious group trying to discredit yours; what would an outside motivation be? Terrorism? Some power-hungry sectarians?’ The words sounded strange on her tongue, but Angelina was groping for answers.

  ‘I was thinking of those options as well,’ Thomás answered, ‘but I can’t figure out how these particular plagues work as terrorist acts. Okay, they’re obviously disruptive, but they haven’t actually hurt anyone.’

  Angelina’s stomach rumbled. She took a bite out of a biscuit to try to calm it.

  ‘The river water wasn’t poisonous when it went red,’ Thomás continued, ‘at least that’s what they told us on the news. And a power outage across the whole city is dramatic, but most places where it could result in killing people – hospitals, that kind of thing – have generators for back-up. So again, not deadly. And the fog . . . I’ve never heard of a group of terrorists hell-bent on making the whole world cough a bit and rub its mildly itchy eyes.’

  Angelina couldn’t stifle a laugh, which she managed to snort around a mouthful of biscuit and tea. Good lad. Some wit behind that zeal.

  ‘So all the “plagues”, as you call them,’ she finally said, wiping the residue of her laughter from her lips, ‘have been symbolic. They’ve grabbed attention, but nothing else. What’s the point?’

  ‘It all comes back to the prophecy,’ Thomás answered, automatically. ‘We must be interpreting it wrong. Missing something important.’

  ‘Enough with the prophecy!’ Angelina barked. Her humour left her swiftly, annoyance quick to take its place. ‘Haven’t the two of you figured out yet that the whole “prophecy” is a fraud? Christ’s sakes, by now we all have to acknowledge that that tablet is obviously a fake. How, and who, I don’t know, but someone faked it, and your former custodian obviously had something to do with whoever they were. This “revelation” you say you all received – he could easily have drip-fed it to you. A whisper to one woman in the right context, and voilà, the next day she has a vision about a river. Talk to a man in just the right voice and spirit a day or two later and surprise, he has a vision about fog. Christ! Even your priest said it was Laurence who “received the vision as a whole”. What more evidence is really necessary? The two of you need to wake the hell up!’

  She could feel the flush in her face and knew she’d gone red. Do you always have to be so harsh, woman? she scolded herself, and she could see from Thomás’s pained expressio
n that her words had hurt him.

  Ben, however, didn’t look wounded. He looked focused.

  ‘I think Thomás is right,’ he finally said.

  ‘Oh, hell, Ben I’m too tired to—’

  ‘Fraud, no fraud, that’s up in the air, I’ll acknowledge that,’ he countered abruptly, ‘but right now, it’s not the most important question.’

  Angelina pinched her eyebrows together. ‘It isn’t?’

  ‘Do we have a translation here?’ Ben asked. He edged forward in his seat, a transformation of enthusiasm firing through his body. ‘Of the whole text?’

  ‘Hold on,’ Thomás answered. Without saying more, he rose and walked to the back room, reaching into the pocket of the trousers he’d been wearing earlier in the day. He re-emerged with a sheet of paper held between three fingers of his right hand.

  ‘We got copies this morning at stake prayers.’ He passed the folded page to Ben, who promptly opened it and scanned over the printed lines. He nodded, as if what he was reading confirmed the idea forming in his mind.

  A moment later he shoved the tray of biscuits to the edge of the small coffee table between them and laid the page down flat.

  ‘We all know the opening words,’ he said, sliding his finger past the first lines, ‘that the discoverer will die, which he did. That the river will turn to blood, which it did – figuratively.’ His finger kept moving. ‘The darkness . . . the fog . . .’

  Angelina edged closer, gazing over the translation as Ben spoke.

  ‘But here, these latter revelations,’ he continued. ‘We haven’t been paying close enough attention to these.’

  Leaning down towards the page, Ben read aloud.

  ‘And in the fourth place, a cross of fire shall consume their holy things, the seat of the Mighty See at its head.

  ‘And then shall come the moment, at the hour of first light on the third day after these things have begun, when above the resting place of the Rock dawn itself shall be stopped and the sun shall be blotted out of the sky.’