‘Praise the Lord in this holy Advent season. By the grace of Jesus Christ and by the power of your prayers, I believe God will deliver the world from the scourge that threatens our species.
‘During my Papacy, I have been privy to some of the most treasured documents and ecclesiastical secrets of the Catholic Church. This leads me to the Sword of Golgotha. I too had reservations at the relic’s enormous cost. The Holy Father’s silence in the face of growing condemnation, coupled with the pressure it built on the Church, was an unbearable cross for many. In hindsight, he also endured a crisis of faith while seeking to unravel the sword’s secret.
‘Prior to his untimely death, he was close to unravelling the mystery. Perhaps God Almighty spared him the burden of such knowledge and its inherent responsibility. Now I must carry that yoke and encourage all people to give earnest consideration to the opportunity it will provide them.
‘The Sword of Golgotha offers a definitive and unequivocal solution for the survival of man. Concealed inside its blade was a fluid-filled gold capsule, the surface covered in the finest filigree which under magnification revealed coded Aramaic text explaining the sword’s true importance.
‘It is both a warning and a wonderful display of God’s love for man, foretelling the coming of a plague and the path to salvation.
‘The strict parameters for applying the capsule’s liquid serve as a reminder of God’s true plan for us. I pray the world will accept the message and a conversion of heart to attain the state for which we were created.
‘The capsule’s liquid shall be mixed with altar wine, consecrated in the Mass and changed into the Holy Blood of our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Accepting this Holy Blood in Communion will restore the reproductive health of men and women. There are, however, serious provisions for partaking of the sacrament. Communion must be received in a pure state of heart. Recipients must attend confession to cleanse their souls of the stain of mortal sin prior to taking Christ into their body. This is the usual instruction of the Church. The capsule’s text warns that communicants receiving Christ without this prerequisite will not only incur sin upon their souls but will attract an added plight. Although restored in reproductive health they will also suffer great and unavoidable illness, dissolving into irreparable disease and torment of their mortal bodies.
‘The Lord knows the souls of men, and the Holy vaccine will be lethal to the unworthy. The small quantity of liquid extracted from the capsule will be enough to feed the world and work its wondrous healing powers. Its dilution will allow an abundant supply of the vaccine-altar wine mix to be distributed throughout the world for consecration in the Mass.
‘While I bring this good news, I fear the great divide of religious fervour manifest in the world at this time. The Catholic Church does not wish to incite tensions between Christian nations and countries that count Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism as the foundations of their faith. However, I must accept this revelation as the solitary path to redemption of the spirit and the saving of our species. It is not of my making but of the Father’s. I encourage all people to embrace the tenets of Catholicism not only to restore the population but to save their souls and take their rightful places in God’s eternal kingdom at the end of time.
‘In anticipation of your concerns at the viability and authenticity of the vaccine, I advise of its previous distribution to an assembly of clergy inside the Sistine Chapel.
‘The damaged genes isolated by scientists have been fully restored in all the recipients of the vaccine. The decision to analyse blood from those exposed to the vaccine, under the premise of routine health checks was not taken lightly. I convened a holy sanctum whose members swore an oath of concealment.
‘My decision to distribute the vaccine to an unknowing congregation of clergy, assumed all the communicants on the day of vaccination were in a state of grace, being fully aware of their obligations to the sacrament.
‘I pray the Church be strengthened in its desire to fulfil the word of God and attain its promises for righteous men and women.
‘The vaccine will be fully available in the Eucharist after the Papal visit to Finland when it will be distributed to the world’s parishes for consecration. The logistics of distribution preclude an earlier commencement of this timetable and will provide a window of opportunity for many who wish to commence their religious instruction for induction into the Catholic family.
‘As a precursor to the recovery of souls and the human race itself, I will distribute the vaccine in the Holy Mass to be celebrated in Helsinki prior to Christmas.
‘God bless you all.’
Pope Luke made the Sign of the Cross over the crowd and walked off the stage to pin-dropping silence.
Now, if nations rejected the cure based on religious belief they would be the first to suffer the effects of depopulation.
The President of the United States saw the future, imagining the giant expanse of communist China, devoid of people, awaiting plunder by the new faithful.
Loose interpretation of Church doctrine now had serious consequences for both the spirit and the corruptible body. Token membership of the Catholic family was unacceptable, any compromise impossible.
The wildness and belligerence of youth presented a worrying variable. Although the Catholic population currently numbered around a billion souls, only thirty percent were aged between fifteen and forty-five. Of these, only twenty percent attended weekly Mass. In effect, the future of mankind depended on a viable community of approximately sixty million people. Statistically, one person in every hundred could assist reproduction, with half being women. Thirty million women scattered sparsely across the planet was not a perfect recipe for repopulation, especially when the growing voids of China and the Middle East carved gaping geographical holes through the middle of the world.
Pope Luke feared his message of hope would be ignored. The world’s youth must lead the revolution of faith.
The more he thought about all the possible ramifications the vaccine introduced into the human psyche, the more it concerned him.
This was the Pope the world saw - the loving, caring shepherd to his flock. But there were the deeper, darker facets of his being. He was all-powerful, all-controlling, and the turmoil and anguish he had driven into the hearts of men was an aphrodisiac no other drug could replace. Upon the Papal throne, like God in heaven, he watched the chaos of souls fleeing the inescapable truth demanded of them. He would be lauded for showing the world the true and only path to salvation and despised by others for decrying every alternative belief system that ever existed.
There arose hate in the face of an incontrovertible reality, born from a deception imbued by the accident of birth in the guise of Allah or Mohamed who betrayed them as false gods; a hate of abandonment and loneliness when men could not bring themselves to denounce all they had ever known; unable to define themselves as they had for millennia.
Pope Luke sought to drown in the ocean of hate, for in its depths he found solace like nowhere else. He walked on the floor of love across a secret trapdoor leading to the abyss below, possessing the key to unlock it on a whim. The cool, deep-green waters of abhorrence quenched the thirsty devils writhing in his viscera. In their appeasement, he was fortified. He was the great deceiver thrust upon the world. He was the Devil and he was God. He was all things, and nothing stood between the spectrums of good and evil over which he presided.
95
‘A brilliant concoction, Steve, everything you’d expect from Venti. But since there is no capsule he must have the tarantula venom. It makes me think Professor Hyde’s death in Rome is beyond coincidence. Why else would he have travelled there unless Venti somehow knew he had the spider and then made him a grand promise in exchange for it? Any good arising from this great opportunity to save man is nothing but a sideshow to his own glorification. He’s just throwing marbles on the dance floor.’
‘Zachary, I am required in Finland to assist the Papal visit. Is there anything you need?’
‘Seriously, Zach?’
‘Steve, I am returning to my faith, a decision made long before Venti’s address.’
Father Stephen did not dwell on Zachary’s revelation. ‘I leave tomorrow at 9 p.m.’
‘Let’s get together after Christmas, Steve. Rachel and I have something to tell you.’ Zachary hung up.
Father Stephen wondered for a moment.
Helsinki was cold this time of year.
96
Never had a Papal Mass been held on ice. Disney and the Moscow Circus had ventured onto the frozen realm, but nothing as sacred as a Eucharistic celebration. It promised to be no less spectacular than the other extravaganzas, held at midnight when the Arctic sun hovered below the horizon, soaking the world in a transient dusk, backlit by the bright green swirl of the northern lights. It bade well for an historic and grandiose production that Pope Luke awaited with unbridled enthusiasm. As the rock star, the whole world would be glued to his sublime performance.
The lake was frozen thick, its surface now a hive of activity. A large square stage neared completion against a dramatic backdrop of fir trees clad in snow. An owl dropped from a high branch, casting flakes into the air as it swooped into the sky. When the Papal Mass began, the firs would be lit by spotlights in every colour of the rainbow.
The lake stretched out in front of the stage, its surface covered in tons of yellow rubberised matting. Snaking electrical cables ran around the frozen shore to supply the stadium-sized banks of lights and the speakers forming mini skyscrapers either side of the altar.
The weather forecast predicted still and clear conditions, enhancing the acoustics, enabling the lights to shine to full effect. Five thousand people would be seated on the ice, with a further thousand standing within a cordoned area. The Mass would commence under a tight security blanket, the surrounding forest scoured like a counterfeit banknote, nothing left to chance. A village of small ice-fishing shacks were pushed together into a distant corner of the lake, out of sight, far from the stage where Pope Luke would preside over his Nordic flock. No one would get close to the Pontiff without authorisation.
An hour prior to Mass, the paying worshippers entered the arena of snow and ice as news helicopters skirted the air space around the no-fly zone.
Just on midnight an iron bell tolled thrice, followed by a silence brimming with anticipation. A three-hundred-strong choir started quietly, building to a tumult of joyful praise accompanied by an orchestra laced with horns and bells that smacked of Christmas.
Pope Luke walked a red carpet to the stage, accompanied by two cardinals. Security guards lined the way. Loud explosions shattered the night and startled screams came from the audience as synchronised fountains of white sparks shot up out of the ice at regular intervals along the aisle until the Pontiff reached the stage. He kept his head bowed, like a heavyweight boxer entering Caesar’s Palace, stony-faced in concentration for the task ahead.
Resplendent in gold-and-white robes, he was more excited than the audience he came to wow. At the foot of the stage, he felt for the Kwarx bottle under his vestments and ascended the stairs to the altar. Carved from a single block of ice, the thick translucent slab sat on top of four frosty pillars, and was covered by a cream silk cloth that hung to the ground on all sides.
Pope Luke observed the seated crowd of five thousand - not an accidental number. He had insisted on the amount, symbolizing the feeding of the multitudes on the shores of Galilee with five loaves and two fishes. And they that did eat of the loaves were about five thousand men. On the surface of a Finnish lake he would feed the masses, to satisfy and restore their minds and body. The act of standing on water, albeit solid, was not lost on Pope Luke.
He raised his arms to the heavens in a choreographed signal. Two muffled booms, like cannon, preceded shrill whistles that trailed up into the darkening sky. The fireworks exploded high above the stage, where intense dots of light expanded into golden chandeliers, illuminating tree tops, reflecting in the whiteness, then raining down and evaporating. A bank of spotlights shot into the fir trees behind the stage creating a wall of snow, stained in every vibrant hue.
The extravagance would surely attract criticism from the conservative arms of the Church. However, as the world moved into a critical new age, Pope Luke saw the display as a celebration of the dawn of Christ’s acceptance by man. The fireworks ended. Pope Luke welcomed the crowd in their native tongue and promised to deliver his sermon in Finnish.
‘In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we are gathered on this sacred frozen ground, consecrated in God’s name, to celebrate the gift of the Mass in this Holy Season of Advent. May the coldness in our souls be thawed by Christ’s promise of new life in Him, and help us soar to greater heights of devotion on the wings of the Holy Spirit.’
Pope Luke, impeccably polished, deflected any suspicion of the state of his heart or the intent in his soul. He was a Pope for the people, progressive but steadfast in applying the laws of the Church. Several in the audience knew what lay behind his shiny skin. Five Jupiters were seated together in a row of seats far from the stage, Pope Luke unaware of their presence. They had met together after the news of Monique Zambeel’s death, realising the tabernacle’s contents had somehow been released without consultation, permission or consensus. Paris Vanderock was absent from the meeting.
They were betrayed. Pope Luke had usurped their vast resources to gain the ornaments, stealing what was due to them, the power they so longed for, the intangible tool to mess with the minds of men.
Now they were tired and remorseful for what they had done to try and right the wrongs of man. Pope Luke owed them a chance at forgiveness for their sins. But only Bianca was a Catholic among them. Presently, they could not receive the healing grace of Christ in Communion. They feared losing their souls; souls they previously denied existed; souls with no place in heaven on account of their disbelief.
Father Stephen sat in a chair next to other members of the Vatican delegation, dismayed by the world’s blindness to the man behind the Papal mask. Venti was a master of deception, the only possible explanation for his rise to the Papacy, deceiving God himself, ill chosen by men of virtue and intelligence who appeared to have misread the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Father Stephen hoped God would triumph in the end, as the Holy Catholic Church promised. But the icy pit of his stomach harboured a disturbing foretelling. The ever-unfathomable enigma of Pope Luke haunted him like a ghost.
Father Stephen knelt in fervent prayer, offering up the Mass for good intentions rather than dwelling on the shortcomings of the Holy Father. Through the rubber matting the ice chilled his knee bones.
The first reading was delivered by a young girl standing at a pulpit of sculptured ice. A red light cast an ethereal glow onto her face so she might have been an angel if only she had wings to rise above the world.
A seated man stared up at the altar. He was unrecognisable to any who knew him previously; reconfigured courtesy of a Thai surgeon. Though not as handsome since the operation, his scars had healed well; perfectly concealed in the angles and lines of his face and scalp.
When the bandages around his head were first unwrapped, he was swollen and grotesque but as the weeks progressed he transformed. His fingerprint pattern, altered by replacing the skin on the tips of his fingers with skin from the bottom of his toes, meant only DNA could supply his true identity.
He spent six months recuperating in a luxury bungalow above the Tapi River as it flooded into the Gulf of Thailand at Bandon Bay, his every need tended by a roster of house servants until he was well enough to leave with a perfect set of documents and a brand-new name. His passport identified him as Eramaeus Best, an American citizen, electrician by trade, resident of Las Vegas. The forged entry and exit visas were officially stamped, though he had entered Thailand illegally. It was strange to see the photo of his new self, difficult to reconcile the image that on
ly time would eventually resolve.
‘The word of the Lord.’
‘Thanks be to God,’ the congregation responded as the angel stepped off the pulpit and returned to her seat in the front row below the stage.
Eramaeus Best tapped the breast of his jacket.
The Land Rover rolled quietly over the white forest floor, weaving through trees to arrive in a clearing near the edge of the lake.
A man got out of the vehicle and trod through ankle-deep snow to the rear, opening the tailgate to a pile of equipment. From the roof, he lifted off a lightweight aluminium sled, loaded up his kit and fastened it with an elasticised net.
At the lightest point of a Helsinki winter’s evening, his watch read midnight. From the far end of the lake he heard explosions and glimpsed sparks above the forest. He towed the sled beside a waist-high fence and through a flimsy wooden gate down to the ice. The sky turned gold as two enormous fireworks exploded against the purple sky.
Dozens of wooden fishing shacks with brightly painted walls were crammed together on the ice like discarded fairground furniture. Their tiny pitched roofs were heavy with snow, and the man imagined nasty little elves pouring forth to whisk him away into the deep forest. There they would tie him to a stake and dance around a bonfire while deciding his fate.
He singled out a red shack with a solitary window. When he walked onto the ice the sled ran at him and he turned in time to avoid it careering into his heels. He pulled the sled inside the shack and positioned his torch on a shelf with its beam aimed at the middle of the floor, checked his watch at 00:10 and sat on a stool to unpack his kit.
The air temperature sunk below zero. The water below the ice would seem infinitely colder. A naked man might last a minute before his heart arrested.
He set aside a case, and donned a dry diving suit over his clothes, ensuring the neck, wrist and ankle seals were tightly fitted. He opened the valve on the single air tank, tested the regulator he’d pre-attached to save time then laid out a pair of flippers, a face mask, knife, diving belt, gloves and a Xenon head lamp.
The Jesus Germ Page 41