F Paul Wilson - Novel 03 (44 page)

           
 
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."

           
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.

           
 
"Tear down your walls, children, and find
Harmony.

           
 
"You have become masters of your world.
You have struggled to the apex of your corner of Creation. You rule it now. But
with mastery comes obligation. The rulers of Creation become responsible for
it.

           
 
"Remember this: every living thing,
animal, reptile, vegetable, contains a spark of the Creator. You hold within
yourselves the brightest spark, but not the only spark. It is arrogant of you
to think that all other living things were put here merely to be disposed of at
your whim. They were not. A balance must be struck. It is a law of Creation
that one thing must die that another may live, a law that holds true for all
things, for the plants as well as the animals. But you fail in your
responsibility when you wantonly lay waste to the land. You dim the spark
within when you kill for sport and not for sustenance, when you kill for mere
vanity to steal another creature's beauty to wear as your own, or cause a
creature pain to test the paints and scents you daub on your bodies. All life
has value. Yes, there is a hierarchy in that value, but nothing that lives is
without it.

           
 
"And if you must respect the place of the
lower life-forms in the world around you, certainly you must cherish the
life-right of your fellow humans a thousand-fold more. You must not diminish,
must not damage, must not shorten the lives around you, for in doing so you
also smother His spark within yourself. And nothing dims that spark, nothing
hardens the human heart to the value of human life more than the ghastly
slaughter of war. You must halt all war, children, especially the unseen war:
Never shall there be true peace around you while you wage war on the unborn
lives within you.

           
 
"Respect
all
life, children, and find Harmony.

           
 
"Abolish your ceremonies, your
communions, your sacrifices, real and symbolic; discard your dietary laws, cast
off your clerical vestments, disband your sects, cease calling yourselves
Catholic or Christian or Jew or Muslim or Buddhist, for these customs, these
identifications, these sects, these labels serve only to set you apart from
your kin.

           
 
"Silence your prayers. He will not answer
because He will not listen while you call out from within walls that separate
you from your kin. Cease your worship, your kneeling, your bowing, your
prostrating, your fasts, self-denials, and self-inflicted injuries. You demean
not only yourselves but your Creator when you believe that such obeisances
please Him. Harmony is the only prayer He heeds.

           
 
"Abandon your rituals, children, and find
Harmony.

           
 
"Do not look to Him for guidance or
relief; look instead to each other.

           
 
"Close your churches, your temples, your
mosques, for these are the most tangible and obvious walls between you. Gather
instead in the streets and parks and squares where there are no walls. Try to
reach Him by reaching each other.

           
 
"Discard your Bible, your Koran, your
Torah, for each is only partly true, and they lead you into the belief that you
have found the One True Path to God, or the One True Voice that will catch His
ear. You have not. And that delusion raises another wall, a wall of
exclusivity. He did not create you to be divided.

           
 
"Forsake your beliefs, children, and find
Harmony.

           
 
"I say again, use your own lives well,
and respect each life around you. You are all kin. Touch one another. You are
all living this life together. And so you must all work together toward
creating Heaven. It is possible. You have the power. You need only find it and
use it.