Reborn

Twenty-one

Saturday, March 16

"It is too much to bear!" Brother Robert said as he strode back and forth across Martin's living room. Beyond the windows, night had fallen. The hardwood planking was cold against the soles of his bare feet but he ignored the discomfort. "It is out of the question! I cannot allow it!"

"But Brother Robert—" Martin began.

The monk cut him off. "Abortion is a sin! The Lord does not want us to sin! It is blasphemy even to consider such a thing!"

The very idea of abducting this poor young woman, whoever she was, anesthetizing her, invading her most private parts to rip out the dweller in her womb, no matter what its nature… it was completely alien to everything he had dedicated his life to, to everything within him. His body shook with revulsion at the mere thought of being party to such a violent act.

"Then why was I guided to the Chosen?"

Brother Robert stopped his pacing and stared at the third person in the room—Grace Nevins. She sat quietly on a chair in the corner with her hands folded on her lap. He had sensed a buried torment in the woman since their first meeting, and yesterday he had learned what it was. Now that torment seemed to be gone, replaced by an inner peace that shone from her eyes.

"I don't know," Brother Robert told her. "But I cannot conceive that you were brought to us to commit a sin…to involve all of us in the sin of abortion."

"But surely this is an exception," Martin said. "Abortion is the taking of a human life. That is wrong. But this is not a human life. We're talking about the Antichrist, Satan himself. A human life would not be ended by this act. The only thing ended would be Satan's threat to Christ's salvation of mankind! To destroy him is not a sin. It is doing God's work!"

The argument was persuasive, but Brother Robert found it too pat, too facile. He was missing something. There was more to this than he had ever imagined. And so confusing. Was his faith being tested? Tested again?

Faith. He had to admit that his had been sorely tested during the past few years by what he had seen and read and heard during his travels. Not that he had ever been in danger of swerving from his lifelong devotion to God, but he could not help but feel that his faith had been sullied during his travels. It had always been like a pristine, diamond-clear liquid, hermetically sealed against contamination. But the secrets he had heard whispered in the darkest, maddest corners of his travels—and culled from the most deranged ramblings in the forbidden texts he had forced himself to read to their vile conclusions—had somehow tainted that fluid, briefly clouded it with doubt. He had persevered, however, and through fasting and prayer had restored the clarity of his faith. But the doubts had remained as an inert sediment. A sediment that had been stirred up by Mr. Veilleur.

Who was that man? What did he know? The things he had said, what he had implied, they echoed what the hidden others had said: that there was no God, no salvation, no divine Providence, that humanity was but an old franc's worth of booty in an endless war between two amorphous, implacable, incomprehensible powers.

Brother Robert squared his shoulders. Mr. Veilleur was wrong, as were the madmen he had met in Africa and the Orient. Satan was the enemy here, and God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were guiding them all against him. But guiding them toward an abortion? He could not accept that.

The doorbell rang then. He threw a questioning glance at Martin.

"Are you expecting anyone?"

The younger man shook his head. His expression was annoyed.

"No. It's probably that pest, Veilleur. I'll get rid of him."

He hurried down the hall, but when he returned, he was not alone. Two of the Chosen were with him. Brother Robert recognized them as an especially devout pair—Charles Farmer and his sister, Louise.

"They've come to see you," Martin said, a troubled look on his face. "They say they're supposed to be here."

"We're answering the call," Charles said.

"Call?" Brother Robert said. "But the regular prayer meeting isn't until tomorrow afternoon."

The bell rang again. Martin answered it and returned this time with Mary Sumner.

"I'm here," she said brightly.

Brother Robert turned to Martin. "Did you call anyone?"

Martin shook his head. "No one."

Brother Robert was nonplussed. What was happening here?

The bell rang again. And again, until ten new arrivals—six men and four women—were gathered in the living room.

"Why… why are you here?" Brother Robert asked them.

"We thought we should be," said Christopher Odell, a portly man with florid cheeks.

"But why did you—do you—think that?"

He shrugged, looking slightly uncomfortable. "I don't know. I'm just speaking for myself here, but for me it was a feeling… an overwhelming feeling, almost like a summons, that I should come here right now."

Brother Robert saw the other new arrivals nod in agreement. Suddenly he was thrilled. Something was happening here. The Spirit was gathering them together—Martin, Grace, these ten especially devout members of the Chosen, and himself—in one place for a reason.

But why?

He decided to reveal to them the moral dilemma with which he and Martin and Grace had been wrestling before their arrival. Perhaps they had been called here to provide him with a solution.

But first he needed Grace's permission. He turned to the corner where she remained seated.

"Grace," he said, "may I share with our brethren what we have learned about the Antichrist, and about you, and about the remedy you have proposed?"

She nodded, then lowered her eyes to gaze at her folded hands.

Brother Robert told them then about Carol Stevens's pregnancy, that she carried the child of Dr. Hanley's soulless clone, and about what they believed to be the true nature of that child. He saw the fear and wonder in their eyes as they listened, then saw it turn to revulsion when he told them what Grace had revealed about herself.

Murmurs of "No" and "It can't be true" slipped through the room as they rejected the thought that one of their number could have had such a past.

Grace's voice suddenly cut through the babble.

"It's true!" she said. She had risen from her chair and was now moving toward the center of the room. "I told myself I was helping those girls, saving them from shame and disgrace, saving them from someone else who might butcher them or even kill them with infection. And maybe that was true to some extent. But I was also doing it for the money, and simply for the thrill of doing it!"

The ones who had been called here backed away from her, as if mere proximity might taint them. But Brother Robert saw the pain in her face as she poured out the secret she had locked up for so long.

"I didn't think of the consequences to those unborn children, those tiny souls. I simply thought of myself as a courageous problem solver. It never occurred to me how many lives I was destroying. But there came a time when my perspective changed. I became unable to dehumanize them any longer, to reduce them mentally to mere bits of tissue by calling them embryos and fetuses. I saw them as children—and I had murdered them! I returned to the church… and I've been atoning for my sins ever since." She sobbed. "Please forgive me!"

"It's not up to us to forgive you," Juan Ortega said softly. "That's in God's hands."

"But perhaps," Grace said, "I am already in God's hands. Perhaps I am to be his weapon against the Antichrist. That is why he brought me to you. Because I have the skills to prevent his enemy from being born! I can abort the Antichrist while he is small and helpless. And I can do it without harming the innocent woman who harbors him!"

A shocked babble of voices filled the room. Cries of "No!" and "Never!" Louise Farmer turned and started down the hall toward the front door, saying, "I'm not listening to any more of this!"

As Brother Robert raised his hands to quiet them he felt the hardwood floor ripple under his feet.

And somewhere on the second story of the brownstone a door slammed with a sound like a shotgun blast.

Everyone froze in place and listened in awed silence as, one by one, every door in the brownstone slammed shut.

Brother Robert felt the floorboards ripple again. The others must have noticed it, too, for they all looked down at their feet. Suddenly the air seemed charged with electricity. He felt his face tingle, felt the hairs on his arms and legs stand up. The tension in the room was building quickly, inexorably.

Something was going to happen! Brother Robert didn't know whether to cower or to open his arms and accept it.

And then there was a light. It hovered in midair for a moment in the center of the room over Grace, a flickering tongue of flame, and then it began to expand. And brighten. There came a silent explosion of brightness, filling the room with an intolerable, staggering brilliance that spiked into Brother Robert's eyes, making him cry out with the pain.

And as suddenly as it had come, it was gone.

Brother Robert shook his head and tried to blink away the purple splotches swirling and floating before his eyes. Finally he could see again. He saw the others squinting and stumbling around the room. Some were crying, some were praying. Brother Robert too felt the urge to pray, for he had just witnessed a miracle… but what did it mean?

As he folded his hands together he noticed that they were wet. He looked down. Blood. His hands were slick with it, both palms and backs smeared with red. Shocked, wondering where and how he could have cut himself, he turned to look at the others and felt his foot slip.

More blood. Both his feet were bleeding.

And then he knew. Brother Robert felt the strength go out of him like the air from a ruptured balloon. He dropped to his knees.

He examined his hands closely. There, in the center of each palm, was an oval opening, oozing blood. He touched the right wound with the little finger of his left hand. There was no pain, not even when he probed it. He felt his fingernail slide between the edges of the skin. He pushed it farther through the warm, wet flesh within until it emerged on the other side. He stared dumbly at the red, glistening fingertip protruding from the back of his hand.

He snatched his finger free and fought a wave of nausea. Then he pulled aside the scapular and ran his hand over the left side of his chest, not caring that he smeared the fabric of his robe with blood. Yes! His skin was wet under there! He had the chest wound as well.

A nail hole in each hand and foot, and a spear wound in the chest! All five wounds of the crucified Christ!

The Stigmata!

He struggled to his feet to show the others, and that was when he became aware of the bedlam around him. There were cries and prayers and chaos. And blood. He was shocked to see the blood on all of them. All of them!

Amid the panicked cries and wondering murmurs, Grace Nevins stood straight and still, her rotund figure an eye of calm in the center of the storm. She held out her punctured palms to him as her voice cut through the clamor.

"The Spirit has spoken," she said. "We know what we must do."

Filled with wonder and unable to find another explanation, Brother Robert bowed his head in devotion and accepted the will of the Lord.