The Sixth Station(129)
“Filthy! Filthy fornicator. Filthy.”
I don’t know about the filthy, but, yes, he was a helluva fornicator.
Grethe then took my hand and led me out to her little altar, knelt down, and began a fevered, fervent prayer.
She got up again and said, “You took the veil? When?”
I told her the truth, that no, I wasn’t a nun, and that a friend had given me the habit to help us slip through roadblocks.
Grethe ignored me and bade me to continue my story. When I told her that Pantera had taken the scarf with Demiel’s DNA on it, she calmed down.
“He is scum. But he loves the boy.”
“But he died. In a car accident this morning.”
She seemed to shrink before my eyes with sadness. Then, regaining her calm demeanor once again, she simply said, “Sit,” and pushed me down onto the chair at her computer. “Write.”
“Write what?”
“The greatest story ever told in modern times. It will remain somewhere in cyberspace after the end of days.”
“And you are convinced the world will end?”
“Yes, yes, maybe when they kill the Boy. The Boy will be executed in the next day.”
“I don’t understand. Haven’t you been listening to the news? It looks like a mistrial. He’s safe—at least for the moment.”
She leaned down and put her face an inch from mine at the computer. “No, no, no! He will die! But he will rise again. I will make him rise again. That is the next resurrection. Now you write it down, Alazais Roussel.”
“Can I ask you something? Why does everyone call me that?”
“Because that’s who you were and that’s who you are. A Cathar. Like the first Alazais Roussel. Saved the Veil. Escaped—bless her—with the Veil, the treasure, to Italy. Yah. That is you. You come from her—carry her DNA. You remember?”
The dream. It was a recollection, not a dream.
She pushed me from the keyboard, keyed in something, and a JPEG of the tapestry I’d seen in the Restaurant Costes popped up.
“Yah. You,” she said, pointing out the woman in the foreground with the sack at her waist and the knife in her belt.
That’s why I had déjà vu when I looked at it.
She leaned back down over my shoulder and began her version of the story of the birth of Demiel ben Yusef. Her version was at once similar and yet very different from the book that was still sitting in my red satchel.
I wonder if Maureen is taking this opportunity to go snooping. Of course she is. What the hell, we’re all in this together. I guess.
“Theotokos Meryemana Bienheureux, Mother of the new Jesus, Demiel ben Yusef, had been groomed for this honor from the time of her own birth, as had all girls born into the line of Mary since the beginning,” she began.
“The Girl, Theotokos, was the right age; she had already had her first bleeding and at twelve years old was small in stature but able to bring a pregnancy to full term.”
I could feel the bile rising in my throat at what this crazy nun was saying.
Twelve? Jee-sus Christ.
“I implanted the embryonic clone of Jesus into the Girl, and when it was determined to be a success, the filthy priest, and Pantera, Theotokos, and I all moved into the Virgin’s house in Selçuk. We stayed there during her confinement.” She made the double sign of the cross and looked to heaven.
I felt a fool even asking the next question but did anyway. “Where did the DNA of Jesus come from?”
“Das Heiligen Gesicht, natürlich. The Holy Face.”
It came from the so-called Veil of Veronica!
I didn’t ask which one of the existing Veils just yet, but since she was living up the mountain from the monastery where one was kept, I didn’t need to.
“But the Girl, Theotokos. Oh, what a stubborn girl. Wild and unruly. I felt—God and Headquarters, forgive me—I thought they might have made a mistake. But I never said this aloud of course. No, no, no, no…”
She looked to me for confirmation, so I nodded my head. “Of course not, no.”
“When the blessed day came,” she continued, breathing down my neck now as I typed, “the Girl, after much hysterical crying and unnecessary carryings-on, delivered our Lord!
“It was all gloriously planned—until three intruders came during the blackout—and then soon the whole world was hunting us like we were wild beasts or monsters.”
You are.
“What about the plane you were supposed to have escaped in?”
“Oh, no, that was a drone. Yusef took the girl to live with him. I was assigned to be her guardian, but he threw me to the curb when she was but seventeen years old.”
Bastard.
I kept writing and trying to look down at the keyboard. But as crazy as Grethe was, she spotted the look of disgust on my face and said, “I have nothing to apologize to the likes of you for—you are merely the worker. The worker!