The Sixth Station(135)

Maureen just kept steady.

What the hell?

“Please, we’ve got to get out of here before it’s too late,” I begged.

Instead, Grethe started keening. “It’s done! They’ve killed the Son of the Son!”

The room was shaking more and more violently, and I ducked and held on tightly under a doorway, as relics flew off the walls. Relic bones and a blond braid of some long-dead person flew at me like missiles.

“Mortuus!” Grethe cried out amid the noise and chaos. “Mortuus! The Son of the Son will rise again!” As the women stood in that deadly standoff, the giant chandelier broke free and knocked Grethe to the ground, missing Maureen by inches. As she lay in a heap at Maureen’s feet, Grethe mouthed the words to me, “She is Black Robe.”

Then Maureen, calmly and as though the world literally weren’t falling around our heads, said, “You are insane,” and put a bullet clean between Grethe’s eyes.

To this day, I swear—even though the crumbling room was too filled with plaster dust to see clearly—that Maureen then spat on Grethe’s corpse.





41





Maureen squatted down to Grethe’s body and fished around in the pocket of the dead nun’s habit. “What the hell are you doing?” I called out over the din.

She came back up with Grethe’s ring of keys. As I stood in the doorway, Maureen crawled through the rubble of the shaking room and picked up the frame holding the Volto Santo.

She fumbled with the keys and found a small gold one and inserted it into the crown at the top of the frame. The glass easily slid out—and she removed the image of Christ after it had for untold decades been encased in an airless environment. I briefly thought about the damage that the fresh air would cause and then realized that I had more important concerns at the moment—like somehow getting out of this collapsing church alive.

“What the hell are you doing?” I called out again, leaving the alleged safety of the doorway to climb over rubble and dead bodies to get to Maureen’s side.

“At least we can save the image if not the man,” Maureen yelled over the din, and pointed to a stained-glass window, from which we might be able crawl out. She ordered me to climb up and push it open, which I did, and immediately the darkened sky shed at least some light into the room.

“Go! Go!” Maureen yelled behind me as I began to shimmy out of the small space of the open window. I was halfway out when I smelled smoke behind me. I called for Maureen, but when she didn’t answer I shimmied back in to help her.

She’s caught in a blaze!

But in fact, she didn’t need help, and what I saw her doing instead turned my blood cold. Maureen was holding a large blazing wooden cross above the altar, where she’d laid out the Volto Santo, the Sixth Station of the Cross—the very cloth that had been laid over Jesus’s face before he rose from the tomb. It was the last and only vestige left of Jesus on this earth.

“Maureen! Stop! Stop! What are you doing?” I screeched and lunged for her.

“I am destroying the evil thing! The evil dies only when that Face of their god is destroyed! Now he can never come back!”

She easily sidestepped my lunge, and as she did so, my head hit the marble of the altar and I fell backward. Nonetheless, I got back up and lunged for the tattered Veil, but Maureen grabbed it up as the earth continued to split. The small rug under the altar caught fire when sparks from the flaming cross blew onto it.

I stomped on the flames with the soles of my boots. When I looked up, Maureen, who was still holding the flaming wooden cross, turned the Glock on me without so much as a change of expression.

“What are you doing?” I asked, not sure what to make of what was happening.

“The Son died and now you, you who think you are the savior of the Savior, you proud, stupid, foolish woman.”

“Why? I thought—”

“You thought wrong. You and those despicable heretic Cathar ancestors of yours. They preserved your line, like you could save their treasure again,” she said, lifting the Veil with the fingers of the hand that was still holding the gun. She took the Veil and rested it on the end of the gun barrel.

“I can shoot you through the Veil. Perfect justice. You can die with His DNA all over you. Would you like that?”

She squeezed the trigger and a shot crackled through the air. I felt nothing. Where was the blood? I hadn’t been hit!

Is she toying with me?

Maureen looked down at her chest. A large red stain spread over the front of her habit. “Son of a bitch” is what she said as she fell on top of me, knocking us both to the floor. The blazing cross and the Veil dropped in front of the cloth-draped altar, and the altar cloth went up immediately.