2013: Beyond Armageddon (31 page)

“As you stare at yourself in the mirror, strive to quiet your mind, to remove all thought. To remove your
self
, as much as you can. At the same time, your chin will gradually lower, seemingly on its own, until it touches your chest. This creates another connection, between your heart and mind. If all goes well, the purified energy from your soul flows upward until it wipes your mind clean for…reprogramming. Ideally, as your spiritual energy becomes stronger, it should pull your chin downward, to this natural position, without you even realizing it. At that point you are fully connected to whatever forces are in the mirror.”

“Then what?”

“You watch. And wait.”

Zeke nodded.

For the first time, Unger smiled. “Very well. I will leave you alone. When you are done, knock on the door and we can take it from there.”

He nodded again and Unger walked away.

When the sound of the door being closed finally died out, Zeke sat quietly on the stone bench, crucifixes in hand, staring into his own eyes in the mirror. In the flickering candlelight, he listened to the whispers of doubt subsiding in his mind.

The Dead Sea

Mordecai’s trained gaze was scanning the bottom of the sea. Having gotten The Wall excavation off to a smooth start, he’d left someone else in charge there and joined Jack Shelby’s team at the site where the coins had been found. They’d been digging for over an hour and found nothing new. The sibilant, almost hypnotic breathing of the divers was the only sound in the preternatural silence.

A ridged outline in the mud, a few feet deeper than where the coins had been discovered, caught Mordecai’s attention. He called for the others to follow, and gently finned over to the anomaly.

One quick look told him it was something buried, not just a salt formation or the shifting of the bottom caused by waves. Shelby and Lev, the Israeli grad student who had turned out to be an excellent excavator, hovered alongside.

“Get a camera on this,” Mordecai said. “We’ve got something here.”

The videographer recorded the
in situ
location of the anomaly, while the diver with the airlift waited nearby.

The most pronounced part of the shape was a long, thin object, bent at a sharp angle, like a stick that had been snapped in two.

“If you don’t mind,” Mordecai said, “let me uncover this first one. I’ve been waiting a lot of years for this.”

“Have at it,” Shelby said.

After adjusting his buoyancy compensator to stabilize at the new depth, Mordecai very gently fanned away the silt covering the anomaly. Within seconds he knew what it was.

The remains of a human arm.

The more he dug, the more excited he became.

This was more than just bare skeleton. Puckered matter sheathed the arm in places. Unless he missed his guess, it was flesh. Flesh perhaps thousands of years old that had been preserved. Salted. Ancient Egyptians had prized Dead Sea mud for preserving their mummies. Those same preservative qualities had kept the arm in remarkable condition.

Forcing himself to remain calm, Mordecai continued fanning away silt, taking extreme care not to damage the artifact. No surgeon ever operated more delicately on their patient than he now operated on his. When he reached the wrist, yet another discovery met his eyes.

A bracelet.

He leaned close to get a better look. Gently brushing the insignia area with a fingertip, the dirt came away easily. Immediately he recognized the embossed figure of a now-familiar entity.

Baal.

He considered it for only a moment, knowing it was hugely significant, but driven by the desire to behold the find in its entirety. He glanced around, looking for clues as to the overall size and shape of the buried mass. Judging from ridges that differentiated it from the surrounding mud, it was about six feet in diameter. If this was a human being—and he couldn’t imagine it being anything else—it appeared much too big.

Only more digging would solve the mystery.

“Jack, Lev, help me with this.”

The three divers took up positions around the partially-decomposed skeleton and immediately became absorbed in their digging. Communicating in terse phrases and gestures, they made quick progress.

As more and more of the corpse became visible, the degree of preservation was astounding. Almost all of the shriveled flesh remained intact. Mordecai kept thinking of DNA and what a priceless find this would be for the paleogeneticists.

This was not a skeleton.

This was a
mummy
. In as good or better condition as any ever found.

Its knees were drawn up toward the chest in a semblance of the fetal position. Incongruously, its hands were outstretched, as though warding something off. As they worked their way along the backside of the mummified body, they exchanged a puzzled look. It was now almost completely excavated, and yet another mass, of more or less the same size, appeared to lay buried beside it.

Mordecai suddenly realized why the anomaly had appeared excessively large. “There must be two bodies.”

He checked his dive computer. They could safely stay down at least fifteen more minutes. “We’ve got enough time. Let’s uncover the rest of it.”

They resumed digging. Mordecai could not keep the speculations out of his mind. Was this a husband and wife? A father and child? Could these be the remains of two citizens of Sodom, huddled together for protection during the last moments of its destruction?

Their suspicions were confirmed when the second mass revealed itself to be another body. They had been digging their way from the outer edges of the anomaly toward the center, where the two bodies lay closest together. It was now clear that both corpses were facing the same way, and the second one’s hands appeared to be holding onto the front one’s waist. The only area that remained to be cleared was what amounted to a few more handfuls in the middle of the scene, where the bodies were so close together that Mordecai guessed they might be touching. At this final stage there was only room enough for him to dig alone. The others hovered and watched intently from a few feet away.

In the control room of the boat above, Zeke sat enthralled as he stared at the monitor.

Mordecai fanned away the last patch of silt to fully reveal the two ancient corpses.

Aghast, he stared at the scene before him.

If these remains were between three and four thousand years old, he was looking at human beings in the best state of preservation from that era ever discovered. Unlike the sometimes difficult process of determining sex from only skeletal remains, here there was still enough flesh intact to make that determination instantly.

They were both adult males.

The thrill of such an unprecedented discovery was superseded by an urge to turn away from a scene never meant to be witnessed. And yet Mordecai could not stop staring at the rawest of human moments, frozen for all time, revealed by those last few swipes of his hand.

He realized why the hands of the first man appeared to be outstretched. Although now lying on their sides, the two men had originally been upright and on their knees. Rather than warding something off, the one in front had been merely supporting his weight.

The man in back, withered and puckered skin still visible on his penis, was having intercourse with the man in front. A portion of his male organ was still inside the anal cavity of the other and hidden from view.

Several thoughts fought for dominance in Mordecai’s mind as he continued to evaluate the bizarre tableau. Finally one word rose above the clamor inside his head:

Sodomy.

Kidron Valley

Zeke’s reflection stared back at him. From the reflections of the crucifixes he held in each hand, the eyes of Jesus also bore into him. Zeke was certain the eyes on the crucifixes he’d examined earlier had been closed, but he hadn’t looked at them all. Maybe some were open.

He couldn’t break the moment by going to check. Maybe this was part of what was supposed to happen. He forced himself to focus on his own eyes in the mirror, as Unger had instructed, probing for a connection to his soul. The effort to quiet his mind was made much more difficult by thoughts of what Jesus, if He was in there, might be finding as He stared from the mirror into Zeke’s eyes.

In the absolute stillness of the grotto, Zeke was able to narrow his focus until the crucifixes disappeared, as did an awareness of time. Thoughts of his family, Leah, and Satan continued to churn through his mind, like choppy waves on a pond. The mirror seemed to shimmer, as if reflecting this.

Gradually the thoughts began to subside. His head had been tilting downward as his chin was pulled toward his chest, where it now rested. He envisioned his purified spiritual energy flowing up and dispersing throughout his memory pond, until it was utterly smooth.

The mirror had stopped shimmering. The candles burned more steadily, so that their flickering was no longer a distraction. The stillness inside Zeke now matched the stillness of the chamber. He became one with the mirror.

As he continued to stare at his reflection, flickering in the mirror caught his attention. He glanced quickly at the candles to see if they had begun fluttering again, but their flames were steady. Looking back into the mirror, he was able to pinpoint the source of the light.

It was coming from the crucifixes he held. It was the same light he had noticed pulsating through them earlier. He focused on it.

Gradually a glow began to rise up from somewhere beneath the crucifixes. Dim at first, but gaining strength and clearly different. Reddish orange and more intense. Finally the source of the glow became visible.

Flames. Growing stronger. They engulfed Zeke’s hands in the mirror, but despite the burning sensation he held fast to the crucifixes. The flames continued to rise until they were licking the faces of Jesus. Zeke felt an instinctive urge to pull the crucifixes away, but forced himself to let the scene follow its own course. Movement in the mirror near his face caught his attention.

Another face had materialized in the mirror beside his own. The face of Jesus from the mural in the Shrine. Scary Jesus.

Beneath the face His body began to appear. As it became more solid, Zeke’s reflection waned and was pulled into the image of Christ. Zeke experienced an epiphany, at last understanding the name by which Jesus had called both Himself and the prophet Ezekiel.

Son of Man. Jesus and Ezekiel were in some sense one. The Savior, and the human He had chosen for his message of Salvation.

The flames at the bottom of the mirror died out. The burning sensation in Zeke’s hands stopped.

The jagged scratch in the mirror ran from the top to the bottom along Jesus’s left side, dividing the mirror in two. Another image came into view on the other half.

Hands. Being washed over a large golden bowl. A man’s hands.

The image dissolved and was replaced by another.

Jesus on the cross. He hung dying on a rocky hillside, beneath a stormy sky. Golgotha. Zeke felt His agony while his own eyes remained riveted on the scene in the mirror.

Two fiery red dots appeared behind Jesus’s left shoulder. Eyes.

A face slowly materialized around the eyes. A familiar face. The demonic face from the television. A reptilian body took shape beneath it, standing on two muscular legs. The demon floated upward, drifting closer to the cross until its shadow began to eclipse Jesus. Taloned fingers opened, as if preparing to clamp onto his throat. Jesus ripped one of his impaled hands free and pushed the Devil all the way back to the distant edge of Golgotha. For the first time since he had been alone in the room, Zeke noticed sound.

The voice of Jesus.

“Get thee behind me, Satan.”

The reptilian body slowly disappeared until only the red eyes remained, blazing more intensely than before. Scary Jesus became larger until He blotted out the scene on Golgotha. His arms extended from the mirror until his hands were only inches from Zeke’s face. Turning his palms outward to show the wounds from the Crucifixion, He held them there for a very long moment, giving Zeke ample time to be sure of what he was seeing. Finally He pulled the hands back into the mirror. Zeke’s eyes followed until he was looking into the face of Jesus. He spoke again, his words penetrating to the core of Zeke’s soul.

“Help me, Ezekiel. Pave the way and I shall not forsake you. As you must not forsake me. This is my hour of need. When yours comes, I will be there for you. Together we can defeat him. Man alone, even the Creator—my Creator—cannot. The strength Lucifer has gained from the millions of souls he possesses has made him too strong. You are an army of one. The Righteous against the Wicked.”

In a flash of white light the intense face erupted from the mirror and came to within a foot of Zeke’s.

“I will leave you now. Choose wisely, Son of Man. And be ever vigilant. Lucifer will seek to destroy you at every turn. Beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing.

“Put your trust in the Lord.”

His image gradually disappeared until only the face was left, the face of Scary Jesus. Just before that, too, disappeared, Zeke thought he saw the scowl soften into a smiling, loving expression.

The candles went out, leaving only the faint illumination that made its way in from the main chamber. Zeke sat unable to move until his senses brought him back from his hesychastic state. Even then he remained still a long time, thinking about all he had seen.

Could he accept Unger’s provenance of the relics at face value, or did he need further analysis?

I’d have to take his word for everything he showed me. Except the crucifixes. There had definitely been lightning inside the crucifixes.

Could they have been rigged? Could the mirror?

No. With a twinge of annoyance he banished the questions that would always arise about relics associated with Jesus: no amount of analysis could ever prove their authenticity. Much of what passed as scientific knowledge was based on premises that could never be proven beyond all doubt. The very existence of the universe was based on a theory—the Big Bang—that was constantly being revised. It always came down to the same thing: faith.