Virgin (47 page)

"Mother,
events conspired against me. I beg your forgiveness."

"It is not
my place to forgive."

"Perhaps
it is
I
who should forgive!" Iscariot said, rising to his feet.
"Once again I have been used!
Used!"

"You are not alone in that," the Virgin said pointedly.

Iscariot's head
snapped back, as if he been struck, but he recovered quickly.

"Perhaps
not. But it is I who have been reviled throughout the Christian Era. And yet
without me, there would
be
no Christian Era--no crucifixion, no
resurrection."

"You wish
to be celebrated for betraying Him?"

"No. Just
understood. I believed in Him more than the others--I was led to believe He was
divine. I thought He would destroy the Romans--all of them--as soon as they dared
to lay a hand on Him. But he didn't! He allowed them to torture and kill him!
I
was the one who was betrayed!

And I've spent
nearly two thousand years paying for it, most of them alone, all of them
miserable. Haven't I suffered enough?"

Her expression
softened into sympathy. "I decide nothing, Judas. You know that."

Judas Iscariot!
Of course! It all fit.

The scroll's
author had mentioned being educated as a Pharisee, and of being an anti-Roman
assassin, using a knife--they were called
iscarii.
Judas Iscariot had
been all those things. And
Kesev
was Hebrew for . . .
silver!

"But you
hung yourself!" Dan blurted.

The man he'd
known as Kesev looked at him and nodded slowly. "Yes. Many times. But I
was not allowed to die."

"W-why are
you here?" Crenshaw said.

The Virgin
turned to him and pointed to Emilio.

"Because
you told him to bring me here."

"Yes-yes,"
Crenshaw said quickly, "and I'm terribly sorry about that. Grievously
sorry." He pointed at the waterspout still roaring outside the empty
window frames. "But why is He here?"

Again the
Virgin pointed to Emilio.

"Because
you told him to bring me here."

"No!"
Emilio screamed. He had a pistol--no
silencer this time--and was holding it in a two-handed grip. The wavering barrel
was pointed at the Virgin. A wild look filled his eyes; he crouched like a
cornered animal as he let loose a rapid-fire stream of Spanish that Dan had
difficulty following. Something about all this being a
treta,
a trick,
and he'd show them all.

Then he began
pulling the trigger and firing at the Virgin.

The reports
sounded sharp and rather pitiful against the towering roar from outside. Dan
didn't know where the bullets went. Emilio was firing madly, the empty brass
casings flying through the air and bouncing along the floor, but the Virgin
didn't even flinch. No holes appeared in her robes, and Dan saw no breakage in
the area behind her. The bullets just seemed to disappear after they left the
muzzle.

Finally the
hammer clinked on an empty chamber. Emilio
lowered
the pistol and stood staring at his untouched target. With a a feral whine he
cocked his arm to throw it at her.

That was when
the light went out.

Not the
electricity--the light. An instant blackness, darker than a tomb, darker than
the back end of a cave in the deepest crevasse of the Marianas Trench. Such an
absolute absence of light that for an instant Dan panicked, unsure of up or
down.

And then a
scream--Emilio's voice, filled with unbearable agony as it rose to a
soul-tearing crescendo, and then faded slowly, as if he were falling away
through space.

The blackness,
too, faded, allowing meager cloud-filtered daylight to reenter the room. And
when Dan could once again make out the details of the room, he saw that Emilio
was gone. His pistol lay on the rug, but there was no trace of the man who
owned it.

Dan staggered
back and slumped against a support column. He leaned there, feeling weak. So
fast . . . one moment a man in frenzied motion, the next he was gone, swallowed
screaming by impenetrable blackness.

But gone where?

"Oh,
please!" the senator cried, dropping to his knees and thrusting his
clasped hands toward the Virgin.
"Please!
I meant you no harm, I
meant no one any harm in bringing you here. I only wanted to help my son. You
can understand that, can't you? You had a son yourself. I'd give anything to
make mine well again."

"Anything."

"Absolutely
anything."

"Then you
must give up everything," she told him. "All your possessions--money,
property--and all your power and ambitions. Give everything away to whomever you
wish, but give it up, all of it, get it out of your life, out of your control,
and your son will live."

"Charlie
will live?" he said in a hushed voice as he struggled to his feet.

"Only if
you do what I have said."

"I
will," Senator Crenshaw said. "I swear I will!"

"We shall
see," the Virgin said.

Dan had
gathered enough of his wits and strength to dare to address her.

"Why are
you here?" he said, then glanced at Carrie. "Is it our fault? Did we
cause all this?"

"It was
time," the Virgin said. "Time for Him to return and speak to His
children. And what I say now shall be heard by all His children."

25

Kiryat Bialik, Israel

Customs
Inspector Dov Sidel sat before the TV in his apartment sipping tea while his
wife Chaya did the dishes. He was half dozing, half watching a special on the
Holocaust when the picture dissolved into the face of a woman.

Dov stared at
her and she stared back. Something familiar about her face. He felt he knew
her, and yet he couldn't quite place her.

Oh, well . . .

He reached
forward and turned the channel knob. The same face. He turned again and again
and it was the same on every channel, even the unused frequencies. This woman's
face, in perfect reception.

And then it
struck him. That relic, that body that had been slipped past him as a
sculpture, the one he'd reported as being on display in New York. This woman
resembled a younger version of that mummified body. In fact, the longer he
stared at her the more convinced he became.

He was reaching
for the phone when Chaya screamed from the kitchen.

Manhattan

Monsignor
Vincenzo Riccio was just finishing his lunch alone in the dining room of the
Vatican Mission when he heard a scream from the kitchen, followed by the crash
of breaking china. Then another scream. He set down his
coffee cup and hurried along the hall to see what was
wrong.

The cook was
standing by the sink, her hands pressed against her tear-streaked cheeks as she
stared at the soapy water. She was praying in her native Italian.

"Gina?"
Vincenzo said, approaching. "What's wrong?"

She looked up
at him, her eyes filled with fear and wonder, and pointed to the water.

"Maria!"

Vincenzo
stepped closer and saw a woman's face reflected in the surface of the water.
Not Gina's face. Another's. And immediately he knew who she was. He felt
lighthearted, giddy. He swung around, looking for someone, anyone to tell, to
call over and share this wondrous moment.
But then he saw the same face
in the gleaming surface of Gina's stainless steel mixing bowl, in the shiny
side of the pots stacked next to the sink.

She was
everywhere, in every reflective surface in the kitchen.

He ran back to
the dining room and there was her face again, this time in the mirror over the
hutch, and in the silver side of the coffee service.

He ran into the
next room where two of his fellow priests crouched before the television,
pressing the channel button on the remote, but on every channel, broadcast and
cable, was the same face.

Vincenzo
shakily lowered himself to the edge of a chair, and sat and waited.

Cashelbanagh, Ireland

Seamus
O'Halloran paused on his front stoop and sniffed the clean coolness of the
early evening air. He looked about his empty yard. After word spread that the
monsignor from the Vatican had found a perfectly natural explanation for the
tears, the crowds of faithful no longer flocked to Cashelbanagh to see the
Weeping Virgin. In some ways he missed the throngs on his side lawn waiting
breathlessly for the next tear, and in other ways he did not. It was nice to be
able to work around the yard without clusters of strangers
watching over your shoulder. And he no longer had those
reporter folks asking him the same questions over and over again.

Life was back
to normal again. Which meant it was time for him to head down to Blaney's for a
pint. But first he decided he'd take a look at the side lawn and see how it was
coming along. He strolled around the corner of the house and admired the grass.
Without the constant trampling of the crowds, it was filling in smooth and
green again. As he turned to go, he glanced up at his grandfather Danny's
painting of the Blessed Mother and froze.

The painting
was changing. He watched, rooted to the ground by terror, as her skin tones
darkened while her features ran and rearranged themselves into a different
face.

When she smiled
at him, Seamus uprooted himself and ran shouting for his wife.

Everywhere . . .

In the streets
of Manhattan there is gridlock. The ever-swirling schools of cars, trucks,
taxies, and buses screech to a halt as a face appears in their side- and
rearview mirrors. It is seen dimly on the surface of every windowpane and
brightly in every puddle. It is the same across the country, in the towns, in
the cities, in the fields, in schools, barrooms, and on the computer screens of
corporate offices.

And across the
world, in Sydney, Beijing, Luzon, New Delhi, Baghdad, Tunis, Johannesburg,
Bosnia, Quito, and Rome, it is the same. Every surface capable of reflecting an
image is filled with the same face.

For a moment a
fascinated world stops, gathers together, and watches.

As she begins
to speak, the billions of watchers, even the deaf, hear her words and
understand.

"I bring
you word from our Creator. The words I say are His, not mine, and He wishes all
of you to listen. I shall call Him 'He' simply because that is how we traditionally
think of the Creator, but He is neither 'He' nor 'She.' What can
those words mean when there is only one? And He is the One.

"I was one
of you, and for a short time, He was part of me. We have touched, and for that
reason I am allowed to be His voice. Listen:

"Today
marks the end of the two-thousandth year since the Creator allowed an
infinitesimal fragment of Himself to gestate in my womb and become human. He
dwelt among a subjugated people who believed in a single God and He planted his
message of kinship among all humans there.

"I feel
your shock and puzzlement as you wonder about Christmas, about December
twenty-fifth, still months away. Your dating of the Coming is wrong, wrong as
to the year as well as the month, wrong as are so many things in your Gospels
and traditions.

"One thing
is true: He said He would return and now He has, but He is not pleased with the
way His message has been distorted and manipulated and prostituted and
profiteered during the intervening millennia. You all have the same Parent,
therefore you are all kin. He did not create you so you could divide up into
warring factions. Yet you have done just that.

"You, His
children, who have so recently come through a century-long crisis of nations
that threatened your continued existence, now have a chance for a glorious
future if you can but learn to see past the walls that divide you. There is
peace between many nations now, and a chance for peace between all nations
soon. But after that there must be peace between people. One to one.
You must learn
to recognize the walls that divide you and break them down. One by one.