The Sixth Station(117)

“A nun who has devoted her life to the study of the images.”

“In Rome?”

“No, Manoppello. Up the mountain above the Monastery of the Volto Santo. But she must have gone back to Germany. No one has seen her in a few years. I understand another nun lives there now.”

He handed me a copy of his book and got up to leave. “It’s something you must see for yourself. Read the book, learn the history. You may even learn enough for your documentary for the History Channel,” he teased.

With that he got up to leave. “You may want these,” he said, handing me the cards. “You’re not with the History Channel, are you?”

I shook my head. “Good luck with whatever you’re doing. Next time try telling the truth.”

“How did you know?”

“For one thing, a researcher would have figured out that it’s much easier to go by rail than air to Perugia.”

“Then why did you show up?”

“Curiosity,” he said, clearly expecting, and rightly so, a payoff for time wasted.

“You don’t want to know,” I said. “Trust me, Mr. Badde, you really don’t want to know.”

He looked at me, saw that I was telling the truth this time, shook my hand, and quickly disappeared into the impossible crowds in the vastness of the basilica.

I looked at his thick book, with an image of the Manoppello Holy Face on the cover. The subtitle of the book? The Rediscovery of the True Face of Jesus. It was sort of the task I’d been assigned—rediscovering the real face—and, I was beginning to believe, the real meaning of God as well.

I walked to a spot where the light was better and held the cards with the images on them up to the light. One—the same image as the face on the book—was barely visible, nearly transparent, while the other, the Shroud, was totally opaque. I put the opaque image behind the transparency, and what I saw floored me.

When the positive transparent Manoppello image was laid on top of the negative opaque Turin Shroud image, they not only matched up perfectly but also formed an almost 3-D image. Every line of each face aligned exactly to the other. These were the completion of one another. How could two separate ancient images residing probably four hundred or five hundred miles apart, neither allegedly containing paint or dye, match up?

Only one explanation: At some time, these two pieces of cloth lay one upon the other and recorded the image of the man they lay upon. The napkin over the face and the Shroud then wrapped around the head and body. Astounding!

The image was that of a young man with a wisp of a beard, wounds on his nose and forehead. His mouth was open, and his teeth were bared in a scream. I put the cards down to catch my breath and held them up again. This time the young man who stared back at me had his mouth closed in a slight smile, and he bore what I can only say was a look of perfect peace. How could that be? These weren’t silly trick hologram cards with faces that change when you move them around. These were two simple transparencies made by a cloistered nun who lived alone in a house in the mountains of Manoppello.

I couldn’t tear my eyes away. I realized that the image had a hauntingly familiar face. Was it Jesus? It certainly didn’t look remotely like the face of any Jesus I’d ever seen. But I did know this man from somewhere. But where?

His calm yet imploring brown eyes took hold of me.

What do you want?

I suddenly felt so hopeless—as though I were back in that dream I’d had back at the beginning of my nightmare, in which I was the only one who could figure out the coded message on that wall.

Being so moved by these twin images was surprising, sure, but more surprising still were the tears that began to run down my face. I immediately wiped them away with my hand. They felt sticky. I looked down to see that my fingertips were streaked with blood. I touched my face. No scrapes, no wounds—nothing. I took out Sadowski’s phone and did the unthinkable: turned on the camera so I could see my face. Tears of blood were streaming down my face! Then I did the second unthinkable: I snapped the shutter icon.

Was it His blood? My blood? I didn’t know, but I knew that I knew the man in those images. “Who are you? Why do I know you?” I cried aloud to the mysterious image in the crowded basilica.

The answer that came to me was as swift and as terrifying as the blood streaming from my eyes. Yes, I did know the man in the Veil.

I had stared into those eyes before. He’d kissed me.

This man is Demiel ben Yusef.





36





If I wasn’t being played, then Jesus was going to be executed. Again.

But was I, for whatever reason, the butt of some elaborate hoax? That seemed more far-fetched than the idea that Jesus had been cloned thirty-three years earlier—a time when the technology shouldn’t even have existed. Right? Right.