Promethea

by M. M. Abougabal

  As opposed to the boundless flow of time, our journey was coming to a conclusive end. We gleefully traded the sights and sounds of the imposing Imperial City with the more familiar vistas of Lyon. And by that time we had finally made it back home, solitude was but a muffled distant whisper, one that I chose to ignore. I laid my hands gently over Adam’s stiff shoulders and ran my fingers through his lush dark locks of hair. His expressions changed. My touch, it had just the intended effect on him. My subtle gestures conveyed a more intimate invitation, one that he irresistibly yielded to.

  That night at my place, Adam approached me with much more confidence that there was just no point to resist. He showed me parts of his character that I, for one, never knew they exist. His teeth pierced deep, right through my lips, as my pulse revved up with each piece of clothes he ripped. Buttons… I heard them bounce like empty bullet rounds off my bedroom’s floor. Bodies, they fell prey like fallen victims; we had barely made it through my door. Every bit of clothes was a shackle, every stocking and every heel. My toes curled in and arched was my back as our limbs pranced feverishly, to the ground we keeled.

  An entangled mess we were; a lustful passionate wrestle. I swung my arms upwards and clinched to the bedframe trestle. I felt fuelled by his thrusts, the tingling of his cusp, as I edged closer of my conception of the divine. I clutched to him with ecstasy as my head toned down, gleefully numbed by wine. My lustful gasps turned rhythmic. My soulful moans were seismic. I had finally given in to the might of the one truly delicious earthly delight.

  Chapter twelve

  Time has strengthened us. Like a dedicated craftsman; it polished us so skilfully that eight months have now passed and our relationship was just as feverish as one could ever want it to be. The light of each passing day tore through the shadows once cast by the Vienna case. They shrank to nothing but a hollow distant memory, a dry autumn leaf blown and carried away well beyond our concern or reach.

  The search for the relic may have still persisted, however faintly, behind closed doors and in the infrequent official correspondences. Yet, there were already numerous other cases that demanded our attention. This year was already quite challenging in its own right. It was a handful of hard work and a mouthful of witty puns: I, for one, loved to call it ‘2020: the year of hindsight’. I had a gut feeling that this would finally be the year where mankind would live up to its true potential. Suffice to say, all it garnered was some playful chuckles and lively laughs from close old friends, who were very much familiar with my sense of humour.

  Adam and I may have been happy but we were far from being inseparable. We understood the value of healthy personal space, and we both celebrated our alone time in our own way. He invited his friends over for movie and video game nights, where I invested that time reading and escaping the restraints of this physical world. I was intrigued by what knowledge has yet to offer me. Everything was sailing peacefully in its intended course, serenely and uninterrupted. I was letting go, carrying fewer worries with each step I took along the way.

  Yet, like a heavy stone thrown in a still pond, so were the effects of one peculiar call that found its way to my phone. My screen blinked with an exotic name that, even if it had not been so long now, has almost been forgotten. Bauer was terrified. He requested an audience here in Lyon, claiming that yet another grave mistake has been committed in God’s name. His trembling voice paid homage to every biblical and apocalyptic tale ever written. He was caged by a deep primal fear that the damage done was, at the time, too severe to amend.

  The man of God offered to come over willingly. He believed there was nothing he held more dearly than the value of information he now carries. He had even allegedly cared little for his life. Still, the measures he now took to secure his own safety stunk of intense paranoia. He was asking for me specifically, taking a stern oath to remain tongue-tied and vowing to only break his silence exclusively in my presence.

  I paced to have an interrogation room ready in anticipation of Bauer’s impending arrival, one where only he and I could sit down and converse. But my partner saw this as a terrible idea. He smacked his lips in contention, refusing to leave us alone in the same room, even if he was to be on the other end of it. It was one of those moments where I had to pull the usual set of strings to make things happen; a gift bestowed upon each and every one of Eve’s descendants.

  Adam yielded… eventually. He gave in to his fervent curiosity and I, who both promised him quick answers to his case. He did not stop reminding me, however, that he, alongside a small crowd of faceless anonymous officers, would always be present, stationed and observing us from behind a one-sided bulletproof glass.

  Needless to say, Bauer’s marked his entrance with an unintentional spectacle. My whole department could not help but to rubberneck the fallen priest when I walked him to the interrogation room. Minutes later in the adjacent chamber, a group of men, led by Adam, watched the shivering Bauer, as he crossed his fingers on the metal table in front of him. It was a failed attempt to restrain his palms from shaking in place.

  The troubled bishop looked nothing but the shadow of the man I once met in the Austrian capital. His non-Catholic fuzzy, slightly grey, beard covered most of his face and my nose picked up the heavy smell of alcohol that reeked with every breath he was sluggishly taking. It was apparent that he no longer attended to his clerical duties, even if he had retained, and actually wore, his full religious attire. The scene was simply a burst of oddities, which would have taken me hours to discern. Bauer remained silent, doing his best to avoid looking at me straight in the eyes. He lowered his gaze in an attempt to restrain himself from wandering around.

  “Father Bauer, what happened?” I asked him fairly gently to relief some of the ensuing pressure.

  His eyeballs rolled slowly, trying to locate the source of my voice. He looked at me with bloodshot eyes a guilt-ridden conscience. He was weary and buckling beneath the load of a hefty burden… A burden that he was no longer able to sustain. He reached for my arm like a little baby, like a child who had just stumbled upon the ultimate form of relief.

  “They killed Russo.” He trembled, as a lump swelled in his throat, blocking his verbalised thoughts. “They brutally murdered him when we found out the truth.” He was now literally holding the floodgates to the sparkly tears in his eyes.

  Bauer’s conscious haunted him. He felt its presence with each face he preached, at every corner, every alley and each hollow speech. Everything he once stood for was far too damning and condemning. Redemption was nowhere at hand. His remorse reflected on everything he touched, on the clothes he wore, the food he consumed and even the faith he had barely lost. Gradually, the whole world had turned against him. He was paying the price for what he had wrongly committed. The past eight months were nothing short of an eternity. He was drained, pressured by emotional dread and anguish that kept on building up, looking for an outlet.

  Bauer’s tipping point was that day when Schuster broke to him the news. It was the first time ever to have felt such an overwhelming stinging sensation taking over his body. Am I having a stroke? He kept asking himself as an acute cutting pain was felt across his chest, and his heart faltered, longing to burst out of its skeletal confinement; that young surveillance man did not have to die.

  Bauer had always believed that good causes, no matter how noble they may be, could never justify a homicide. He would have never given himself the liberty to trespass the sanctity of human life. Never would he have accepted this course of action if he had truly known, if only Russo had told him. After all, he was a man of God, one that is tasked of shepherding of the flock, not to misguide them to a dark bottomless abyss.

  The grim turn of events made Bauer exceptionally wary of the situation. He began to reassess the whole purpose behind their seemingly holy mission. Not to mention, the fact whether their alluring leader was concealing his true intentions, masking behind a character that he may not actually be.

  Bauer’s shame burned li
ke rabid acid through his veins. His skin itched and his flesh ached. He was quick to confine his fears to his old friend Russo, whom he himself seemed to be deeply troubled by the news of the slain. He reassured him to tend to these matters personally in a matter of days. Yet days stretched to weeks and weeks chained into months; Russo’s long awaited feedback was long overdue. He returned no calls either, which gave Bauer the mandate to act on his own. He flew to Rome searching for answers. He needed even the faintest assurance to quell his fears, put an end to the blemishing maddening voices that whispered to him throughout his days and nights. But by the time he arrived to the Vatican, it was already too late. The Italian bishop was long gone. Russo had been brutally murdered.

  The details of the murder were exceptionally grim and violent. The gore was very much ungodly and suggestive of ancient biblical terrors. Bauer shivered and trembled as he narrated the details that scarred his very existence. He remembered feeling disoriented when he saw the photographs of the crime scene. Each photo shed a different light. Each angle was a revelation in its own right. Yet, nothing had ever prepared him to learn about happened to his old friend, who opted for seclusion in his very last days.

  In the first photo, Russo’s body was found in an old, cheap apartment, where the walls were clad with snippets of old newspaper articles, doodled crosses and apocalyptic Biblical verses. He hung upside down on two overlapping wooden rafters that formed one massively built inverted cross. It was the same way St. Peter was crucified when sentenced to death. He willingly asked to be executed in this reversed position feeling unworthy to die in the same way as his Lord. The second photograph showed Russo’s pounded skull. His face was crushed inwards, reduced to a stew of brain and bones, with the application of one swift unstoppable blow. None of his features were present; even his cheeks, teeth or jaw. The third one, however, was the most psychologically taxing. In it, the Italian’s rotten intestines stretched and wrapped like ropes around his thighs and knees from where he was gutted open with an unsharpened, dull object.

  The photos formed a collage that recounted the Italian’s demise. Together, they shaped an atrocious scene that no sane person should be able to assimilate or withstand. Bauer could not even fathom the terrors his friend must have gone through during his final moments.

  “Do you know this woman?” I pushed a closed file across the table, deliberately interrupting Bauer’s silent walk down memory lane. The file contained information gathered about Lucy, our prime suspect. Bauer’s heavy eyes moved slowly signalling to his tired hands to follow suit. He had summoned all his working senses to help him browse the contents of the file.

  “What makes you think that Lucifer is a woman?”

  Adam’s gears grinded to a complete halt. His surprise blocked his ability to even call upon his inner thoughts, especially with all the chaotic noise and loud chatter that erupted in the room following the priest’s last statements. He felt incredibly disappointed in himself: How did he even miss it? Lucy04 as a stylized form of Lucifer… He had always thought of it as some sort of hierarchal coding they used for their correspondences. It was such a major giveaway, given the religious nature of the crimes. It was a fact that was just sitting there for eight months, almost begging for their attention.

  “He approached us first, Russo and me, under a different alias. He called himself the bringer of light.” Bauer squinted.

  “This wasn’t your first encounter with Russo in the last ten years?”

  “It certainly was not.”

  The priest started to explain how the two aliases were actually synonymous; Lucifer, the biblical fallen angel widely known as Satan, literally translated to the ‘bringer of light’ from Latin. As the mastermind first approached the priests, his chosen alias certainly sounded more godly than demonic. It hinted at the divine promise he gave them: Rapture, the rebirth of light… the return of Jesus Christ.

  I bent my lips in discontent. “I suppose you expected to accomplish that by drawing pentacles on the floor? Lighting candles and casting spells? How is this connected to the spear?”

  Bauer raised his arm to remove his violet canonical skullcap and place it humbly on the interrogation table. At first, I figured him dismounting his metaphorical high horse to approach me on a more logical ground. Yet what I had later realized was that what he had no longer deemed himself worthy of any honour. His strength had finally faltered and his wary gaze studied me for the last time before he dropped the mother lode.

  “People were always motivated to look for the wrong things in that spear. What was the first thing I told you about miracles, Hélène?” He probed in an attempt to refresh my memory.

  “That only prophets knew the scientific explanation behind each and every one of them?” I answered mockingly.

  “Are you familiar with the story of creation, Adam and Eve? The first human beings?”

  “Yes, even if I find it highly unlikely.”

  “God the Almighty is omnipotent. He is able to create anything out of nothing, and so he created Adam, father of all mankind… so why would he need a human rib to create Eve?”

  I raised both my shoulders and shook my head in bewilderment. He was here to answer to our questions not to raise some of his own. Yet he came here willingly so I miserably had to play along.

  “I believe you have an answer to that?” I countered.

  “Not really.” He sighed. “It would have taken us forever to speculate the reasons behind such a decision. Nevertheless, there is certainly more to this story, which served as a motivation. It was the cornerstone to our plan. I had always believed that science and religion do not necessarily stand on opposing grounds. I told you that once… that they complete one another.”

  I was getting impatient. Father Bauer was sounding more and more crazed with each statement he was allowed to make. His attempts to weave around the truth were no longer pleasant. I knew that my urge to unearth his true intentions could no longer be contained.

  “Father Bauer, what are you trying to say?” I asked him irritably.

  “We attempted to intervene if you call that an intervention. It was probably God’s plan all along. We were just pawns in the Almighty’s grand design. He had already provided mankind with all the right tools needed to summon Christ’s second coming, through the strides we’re making in the field of…” He paused abruptly, as if trying to stop himself in the very last minute.

  “Yes?!” Signs of impatience were evident all over my face.

  “Science.” He said. “Resurrection through genetic engineering.”

  Chapter thirteen

  The interrogation room’s door swung open in full force; Adam had crashed in, furiously angry. He could no longer stay restrained in the confinements of the other room, watching the mad priest’s plot unfold without his involvement. He was somewhat a religious man himself. At least significantly more than I ever was, which is why Bauer’s radical revelations triggered this rather flashy intervention.

  I knew, for a fact, that he must have opposed the bishop’s views to a great extent. It was a time where virtually nothing could remain hidden from public for too long. And with all that what was going on in the world right now, people needed not yet an additional dent on how they viewed faith and religion. Clerics had simply lost that type of luxury: to cause yet another severe crisis of faith.

  Nowadays, conventional organized religions were on the back foot, as people indulged in every known form of earthly pleasures. Human beings needed an outlet for their constant daily struggles: terrorism, unemployment, insurance, loans, mortgages and even child support. It all led to a very real kind of hell, one that they did not have to die to bear witness to. Gradually, the lines outside of bars became longer than those outside of churches. And as opposed to lottery tickets, sales of all kinds of Holy Books’ were not exactly thriving. Matrimony was hardly ever a preference; it was all replaced with the relative comfort of non-formal relationships. Yet even when the fewer masses held and the less chur
ch bells tolled, there were still a few pockets of blind resistance in some parts of the world.

  Adam had stepped inside the all-grey, concrete finished, interrogation room. He was dragging along a black steel chair, which he slammed menacingly to the floor, adjusting it in place, before sitting on it in a backward upright position.

  Bauer, on the other hand, did not flinch. Earthly justice was no longer even his frailest concern. He had already faced all kinds of psychological horrors in the past few months that even the hint of a hundred lifetimes in prison could no longer stir the dimmest of fears within him. He had believed that real terror still awaited him later in the afterlife, where he would stand alone, addressing his maker to answer for all the crimes committed in his name. This was what had caused him real fright. This was the reason why he had stepped forward and contacted the only person he trusted. It was a frail attempt to slightly rectify what he had done. Even if he believed that any effort made to avert the forthcoming Armageddon was futile.

  “I never expected to be an accessory to doomsday.” Father Bauer murmured. He sounded both sincere and apologetic; even if those sentiments were absolutely worthless by the time he stands trial.

  “Father Bauer.” I scornfully smiled. “The spear of Vienna does not contain any traces of Christ’s DNA. In fact, it was crafted 10 centuries later, as you already know. Your fanatics have committed theft and murder for absolutely no reason.”

  Father Bauer gave little attention to my remarks. In fact, I suspected he still considered himself trapped in one of his recurring hallucinations; a truly dreadful state of mind he was in. I very much doubted Bauer’s abilities to converse, or to be even completely certain of our presence.