Authors: Angella Graff
Forcing himself to calm down, Ben drove off, but no one said anything for the first hour of the drive. Ben replayed the incident in the church over and over in his head, remembering the light, the noise, the feeling when he’d touched the man now lying in a hospital ward, comatose.
He thought back on everything Mark had said to him, from revealing the fact that he wasn't blind, to telling him the man lying in the bed was a two-thousand year old Judas Iscariot. Ben chuckled inwardly and shook his head. There was nothing on the earth that could get him to believe that the man in the hospital was two-thousand years old. Nothing.
Except...
Ben hesitated when he thought about that Greek doctor and the small information he'd gotten about the John Doe's tests. Bacteria not seen for two-thousand years. Genetic material that didn't match modern men.
Ben's brain was threatening to go into overdrive. Half of him was fighting it all, half was trying to use deductive reasoning to prove it all wrong. The half fighting went to a paranoid place where he thought it could all be a conspiracy, that Mark knew that doctor at the hospital and it was all to get Ben to... to...
To what, he wondered. What could Mark possibly want in all of this? Ben realized he hadn't gotten any of Mark's motives on anything, and that made him suddenly feel naked, and defenseless. Clearing his throat, Ben glanced over at Mark, who was watching him through the dark glasses.
“How old are you, Mark?” Ben asked.
Mark grinned and scratched his nose under the bridge of his glasses. “Well to anyone else I would tell them thirty-one. Obviously since I've revealed myself to you, I'm much older than that.”
“How old, exactly?” Ben demanded.
Mark pressed his lips together and stared out the window for a long time. “I'm old, Ben. Two-thousand and seven years old, to be exact. I was born in the spring, two years younger than the man you know as Jesus Christ was. I was thirty-one when he was crucified and passed this curse to me. I didn't know I had stopped aging until I noticed that Yehuda hadn't aged a day as we wandered, well into our fifties. One year we returned to Jerusalem and no one remembered us, our companions had all long-since died, and our faces gone from the memories of those who had known us.”
Ben swallowed thickly, his brain unwilling to accept that information as truth, but fighting the urge to believe simply because Mark sounded so sincere, without a scrap of dishonesty in a single syllable. “What do you want from me, exactly?”
Mark frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You obviously came to me for a reason, and I want to know what that reason is. What do you want from me? Why am I here in this car with you?”
“I just wanted to see him,” Mark said with a shrug. “I needed to know it was him. I'm going to get him out of there, however I can, and we'll disappear as we've done thousands upon thousands of times before.”
“No!” Abby chimed in from the back. “You can't just disappear. Why would you do that?” She leaned forward over the side of Mark's seat to stare him in the face as best she could.
Mark smiled sadly at her and reached out to pat her hand. “It's not safe, Abby. It's not because I don't care for either of you, because I find the both of you rather calming to be around. Staying with people who know our truth is dangerous. It's led to wars and bloodshed, and I can't sit back and watch another war carried out under words that are full of lies and manipulation. I just can't do it.”
“What are you talking about?” Ben demanded angrily, his fingers gripping the wheel so tightly they were turning white. “What wars? What bloodshed?”
“Have you studied much of history, Ben?” Mark asked.
“Enough of it,” Ben said.
“So you must know about all of the holy wars carried out in the name of a man who did nothing but tell the people around him how much war destroyed man. A person who preached love and tolerance, and somehow his name was used to murder thousands of people for not worshiping the way their church said to worship. The Bible, Ben, is a holy book, used to bring people pain and suffering under the guise of tough love, and it's all a lie.”
Ben looked over at Mark, who was still holding his hand over Abby's. “So the man claiming to be two-thousand some odd years old, who claims the man comatose in that mental hospital is Judas from the Bible, is also claiming the Bible is a lie?”
Mark gave a little shrug. “I claim it because I know for a fact that much of Bible was not written that way, and it was manipulated into false words to bring about the era of Christianity. What I
can't
tell you is why.”
“And how, exactly, do you know it as a fact?” Ben asked.
“Because I wrote it.”
No one, not even Ben, was expecting the laughter that erupted from the detective's mouth. Startled by himself, Ben shook his head and tried to gain control. “
You
wrote the Bible? So what you... you sat down with a quill and ink and scratched it out on papyrus or something?”
“It wasn't written on papyrus, you moron,” Abby snapped at him. “You don't need to be so disrespectful.”
Ben raised an eyebrow. “Look, I don't mean to disrespect you, but how do you expect me to take you seriously?”
“I don't,” Mark answered plainly. “Mr. Stanford, I don't expect you to believe a word I say. In fact, it's safer and better that way. I'm telling you plainly that whatever you're afraid of, whatever you think I want, I assure you, I do not. I merely wanted to identify a man who needs to be out of that hospital and out of the public eye. People will start to recognize his ability, whether he's conscious or not, and it's going to get dangerous.”
Ben felt a pang of fear stab him right in the gut. The thing was, a small part of his brain did entertain the idea that the man in the hospital had healed him at the church. A small part of his brain registered, that whether or not he was some ancient Judas, he had been bleeding from his hands until he touched Ben. And the fact remained, as improbable as it was, Ben had a potentially inoperable tumor that had disappeared overnight, and no one could explain it.
If that man could cure Ben, just by brushing up against him in a church, he could probably do it again. If someone else noticed that, Ben realized, it could get ugly, and public. The last thing Ben wanted was for the man to be traced back to Ben, for records to show that Ben was cured of a tumor after interacting with this man, and for a new, psychotic religion to sprout up from this nonsense.
“I can't get him out,” Ben said after a moment.
Mark looked at Ben, the relief in his face very apparent. “I realize this, Ben, I'm not asking you to break the law or do anything outside of your power. I simply wanted to know where he was, and how to get to him.”
Ben bit his lip and glanced in his mirror back at Abby, who was now sitting back, her arms folded across her chest. She was angry at him, that was obvious, but making amends with her was far down on the list of his priorities at the moment. “Look... just... just say that it's true, that he has some weird freaky power of healing. How long before it happens again? I mean--” Ben trailed off, shaking his head. “This sounds so crazy.”
“It does, yes, but it is what it is, Ben,” Mark pressed.
“How does it work, exactly? I mean, anyone with a disease or disability just comes and touches him and bam! Cured?”
“No, not quite,” Mark said with a small smile. “The universe works in a very bizarre way, outside of mortal comprehension. I've been around two millennia and I still don't quite understand it. What I do understand, however, is that some people are meant to die, and some are not. Yehuda might lay hands on one hundred people, and sometimes one hundred will be healed, and sometimes only one will be. Those who are meant to suffer, suffer. Those who are meant to die, will die. Some, however, are meant to live, to fulfill a greater purpose, and so they are healed, and they move on.”
“So running a string of ill-stricken patients by him, they won't all be healed?” Ben asked.
“No, but don't imagine that such a thing hasn't occurred before,” Mark said in a dark tone. “Don't imagine that he hasn't been overpowered by those who sought to steal his healing for money and fame. And please don't assume it doesn't have an ill effect on him. Even in the Bible, when Yeshua possessed the powers, it drove him mad.”
“Yeshua?” Ben asked.
“Jesus,” Mark clarified simply. “The power took a toll on him mentally as well.”
“The fig tree?” Ben asked a little sardonically. The fig tree incident had been a passage Ben had hung on to, something to show others who challenged his Atheistic beliefs, that at one point, Jesus was a man. A crazy man. A man who would have been a lunatic on the side of the street holding a sign and screaming about hellfire.
Mark shrugged. “It's best to assume that most of what appears in the Bible is more of a fable than a fact, however yes, that would be evidence of the price Yeshua paid for that gift.”
“So if Judas is somehow still alive, lying in a hospital, possessing the same power that Jesus had, why isn’t Jesus walking the earth as an immortal?” Ben asked, thinking he'd gotten Mark on an inconsistency.
Mark smiled. “That was not Yeshua's path, I'm afraid, nor was the gift his. It was passed on to his brother, and this is the price he's paid for it.”
“His brother?” Ben asked. “You're trying to tell me that Jesus and Judas were brothers?”
Mark sighed and turned to look out the window. “The story is long and complicated and dangerous. I can't convey the danger of the details, Ben, so forgive me if this is where I stop. I'm going to research what I can in an attempt to remove Yehuda from the hospital, and as I bring him around to a sound mind, we will disappear. I appreciate everything you've done for us, though, and I owe you many thanks.”
The conflict waging war in Ben's head was giving him a migraine. He pulled over to a small cafe attached to a gas station near the coast as they drove towards San Francisco. There was outside seating, and the little cafe sold southwestern style shrimp tacos, fish filets freshly caught off the dock, and steaming bowls of soup.
As they got out of the car, Mark with his cane extended, Ben stopped him. “Look, we know you're not blind, so you can cut the act for a while.”
“This is for your sake as well as mine,” Mark told him, and took Abby's arm as they went to the outside window to order.
Ben stood by the car, fingers running through his hair. He was upset; he was no closer to understanding what had happened to him, and what had happened at the hospital, and not having answers was the worst form of torture for the detective.
With a heavy sigh, Ben knew that all he could do was take the information Mark was giving him, and do his best to pull from it threads of truth, to try and solve the most complicated mystery he had ever faced.
Chapter
Fifteen
Mark exited the car with Abby close at his heels as Ben dropped the pair of them off at the curb near Sacred Heart's staff housing. Though he had his glasses on, Mark was anxious to get inside before anyone approached him and noticed any differences with his eyes.
He didn't protest when Abby followed him into his apartment, but the one thing he wanted to do right then was be alone. It was late and he knew everyone was very tired.
Abby
closed the door behind them and locked it, and Mark finally removed the glasses. “Thank you for seeing me inside,” he said, trying to convey his desire for her to leave.
Abby shook her head and crossed her arms. “You're not getting rid of me that easily, sorry,” she declared. She flopped down on his sofa, kicked her legs up on the table and stared at him until he took a seat in the chair across from her.