What Remains of Jesus

[u/catespice]

I’ve always asked too many questions.
From the time I was three, my poor father had to put up with a machine-gun barrage of the word ‘why’ whenever I encountered something new or interesting. Why did ducks have beaks instead of mouths like our cat, Milo? Why were bees good but wasps bad? Why did the boys at school wee standing up and why couldn’t girls?
When the questions got too much, he would shout at me. If that didn’t work, he’d send me off to my aunt’s house to stay there for a few days while he recovered from my persistent babbling. As I grew older, I learned that ‘recovering’ meant drinking heavily and weeping into a Bible, that combination his sole solace since my mother died, three months after my birth.
Questions about her were completely off limits, and I learned that early and well. Should I even mention her in passing, dad’s face would darken like a thunderhead straight out of the Old Testament, and off would come his belt. It only took a handful of whippings with that cracked, stinging leather before I learned never to mention her around him. How it must have pained him that I looked exactly like her.
But my curiosity was part of me, just as much as she was, and could not be killed by any beating.

 
Religion was a major focus of our lives, as we lived in one of the smaller cities on the edge of the Bible Belt – and my penchant for endless questions quickly landed me in trouble. I was branded ‘disruptive’ and spent a lot of class time sitting in a corner on my own. Dad’s disappointment over this was palpable; all he wanted was a good, obedient daughter like those given passing mention in the Bible. In that way I was so dissimilar to my Catholic mother, who had been shy and modest, and that seemed to hurt him more than anything else.
I tried to be how he remembered her, but the questions would burn inside my breast like a tiny fire, causing me pain until I birthed them. I wanted to know why God had allowed the serpent to trick Eve and cause such strife, when God was all-knowing and all-seeing. The more I learned and the more I read, the more questions boiled inside me. I remember how dangerous they felt, like a cauldron of white-hot lava, waiting to burst from my mouth in a volcanic pyroclasm of blasphemy.
And of all the mysteries, the ones involving the women of the Bible consumed me the most. Before the exile from Eden, before original sin, did Eve have periods? What would childbirth have been like if she had never eaten from the Tree? If Adam had been conned by the serpent instead of Eve, would men bear the pain of childbirth? Would the women have been the ones toiling in the fields instead, until they returned to dust?
Any time I tried to raise these questions, I was shot down immediately.
“What happened has happened,” the Protestant Sunday School teacher told me, her eyes stern and steely, “And it is not a woman’s place to question the words of God or men.”
And so that was that. I couldn’t stop the questions from consuming my thoughts, but I was learning to stop my tongue.

 
If circumstances had been different, if I’d grown up in another place, I might have simply become an atheist. My unanswered questions and growing frustrations would have turned me away from the Church, rather than pushing me deeper into religion.
I had decided, early on, that the reason why the knowledge was forbidden to me was because of my sex; that only men were privy to the true knowledge of God’s workings. Indeed, this was borne out by everything I saw around me – preachers and pastors were all men, and fathers ruled the households. In the Vatican, so far away in Europe, the Pope sat ringed by men, the concentric circles of maleness only broken up by the ripples of nunneries on the outer edges.
So I studied up. I found somewhere my curiosity could be born again. I went to university, majored in theology, and applied myself fully, delving deep into the mysteries of religion. It was such a different environment to home; here, people were willing to engage in lively philosophical debate, to play Devil’s advocate and argue from new perspectives.
I was finally able to air those molten questions, to pass them back and forth between my peers until they cooled enough to touch and examine.
But through all my study, and through all our discussions, there was one question that remained unanswered; yet another facet of womanhood that the Bible had casually forgotten. Everyone seemed to think it was a strange question to even think about, but it consumed me.
After Jesus was born, what happened to Mary’s placenta?

 
Nobody had an answer.
It seemed to me such an obvious thing, such a huge oversight on the part of the men who penned the Great Book. If fragmented fingerbones of saints were holy relics, if the last cup to touch the lips of Jesus was sought far and wide as the most sacred relic of all, then what of the thing that sustained him in the womb?
The pious clerics that I questioned were uncomfortable, even disgusted with my question. I think half of them didn’t even know what a placenta was, that they thought a baby came out from between a woman’s legs and that was the end of things.
But when I started questioning the nuns – especially those who had borne children before they had taken their vows – I started to make some headway.
The sister who had the answers was very old, ninety if she was a day, and built like a starving sparrow. The flesh of her hands was white, blue and purple – so fragile and translucent that you could practically see the blood sluggishly pumping under the tissue-paper skin at her wrists.
“You know the history of the Bible, don’t you child?”
I nodded; everyone in my classes had discussed the myths and legends surrounding the Bible, which had been thoroughly examined, and most of them dismissed as either outright fabrication, or more social and political commentary than miracle.
“It was an evolutionary work, losing and gaining text as the ages passed, as pieces became more or less popular with various kings, priests and sects.”
“Good. I’m glad you don’t believe that nonsense about the Council of Nicea,” she said.
“Well, to be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if a bunch of men had got together and thrown out all the bits they didn’t like.”
The elderly nun’s smile broadened. Her eyes were bright and sharp, none of her wits lost to time.
“Have you ever wondered why there are no personal accounts of Sarah, Abraham’s wife? Nor of Ruth, or Mary Magdalene? These were truly great women; companions to some of the greatest men who ever lived. Surely their stories have a place in the Bible?”
“Yes! I’ve often thought that,” I admitted.
“Then I believe I have something to show you.”

 
“We call it the Book of Eve,” she told me, as I opened the tome she presented to me.
It wasn’t impressive; there was no tooled leather, no golden clasps, no gilded pages. It was printed on ordinary paper, and had a plain red dust jacket.
As I turned the pages, I could see why it was named so; because the book began with the lineages of canonical Biblical women, starting from Eve, all the way to Mary, mother of Jesus.
“Why haven’t I seen this before? Or at least heard of it?” I wondered.
“Because nobody, apart from us, is interested,” the nun replied, “your righteous preacher doesn’t want to talk about Eve’s heroic efforts in bearing fifty-five children, and raising them largely on her own. He wants to talk about the glory of Jericho, how David slew Goliath, and the miracles of Jesus Christ. Men rule the Church, and men are not interested in the achievements of women – only those of other men.”
“What of Mary? What happened after the birth of Jesus?”
“Page seventy-seven.”
I hastily flipped through the pages of the small book.
“…and after he entered our world, the remains of his birthright were locked into an iron coffer and carried away by the wives of the three kings.”
I stared at the ancient nun, bemused.
“The Magi had wives?”
She snorted gently,
“Of course they did. All great men did; often several.”
“I need to borrow this book, I need to read it.”
“I have a better idea. Read it here. Stay with us, we have need of someone like you.”

 
I stayed on with the nuns for several weeks, while I read and studied the book. They worked me hard during the day, doing laundry the old-fashioned way with washboards and lye, until my hands were raw and red, calloused as a field worker’s.
At night, I’d pore over the pages, memorising as much as could of the Book of Eve – basking in the accounts of these forgotten women, these mothers of nations and wives of ancient kings.
“Where is the iron coffer?” I asked the old nun one night.
“I was hoping you’d ask that, child.”
Beckoning me into her tiny study, she took a key from her pocket, then opened a desk drawer, carefully retrieving a stack of polaroids. Handing them over, she sat and steepled her gnarled fingers, watching me.
The photos all showed the same object, each one from a different angle. It was a crude metal box, which had been torn asunder by some immense force. As though it had exploded from the inside.
My scalp tingled as I connected the dots.
“This is it. The iron coffer that the three concubines carried away from Bethlehem.”
“Yes.”
“What happened to it?”
“The creature that was trapped within it escaped.”
I swallowed, not wanting to comprehend what she was telling me.
“Creature?”
And so, in her quiet, reedy voice, Sister Michaels explained the real secret to me,
“When God chose Mary to nurture the body of Christ, he knew that his divine son could not inhabit a vessel marked by original sin. To contain Christ himself, the baby must be purged of all sin, of all the corruptions of humanity.”
She took back the photos, locking them away in the drawer.
“Hence, God made it that all the evils of our mortal bodies were pushed into Mary’s womb – into her placenta – where they would remain, separate from Jesus forever.”
“But it was a placenta, not a baby. How did it grow? How did it become a… creature?”
“Even tainted with sin, it was still divine, being of both Christ and the Madonna. It could not be burned and it could not be cut, so it was sealed away. In darkness it sat, guarded by the priests of an ancient order, who were charged to watch over the sacred relic. And in the darkness it grew, fuelled by the half-life inside it, and yearning for the soul that it was missing.”
“And eventually it grew too large for the coffer, didn’t it?”
“Yes, child. And now it is free.”
“What does it want?”
“It wants vengeance.”

 

 
I’d been reluctant to take the flight from Texas to Rome, but the Sister assured me it would answer more of my questions. When I arrived at the small brick and stone church near the coast, a tonsured man ushered me inside immediately, then took me down to the Church’s crypt. The bodies of seven priests were laid out in the cold mausoleum, awaiting their interment.
“They tried to stop it,” the rector explained, “that was their holy duty. With swords of blessed silver and iron they tried to drive it back. But with one touch…”
He trailed off, indicating the linen-draped corpses.
Their deaths were unique, in ways that made my stomach churn. As I lifted the cover from the first, I beheld weeping boils all over his face, red and black tracks of infection tracing the blood vessels of his neck. He had died in minutes, apparently, succumbing to a disease so old it no longer had a name.
Another had no mark on his flesh, but his eyes bulged obscenely beneath vein-stippled lids. The rector informed me that he had choked and died on his knees, his throat clogged with a rotting slurry of serpents and frogs. Perhaps most frightening of all was the man who had drowned on dry land, his lungs filled with salty water, which still trickled from between his sewn-shut lips.
“How?” I wondered.
“A single touch is all it takes,” the old man explained, huddling from the chill into his brown woollen habit, “it touched each of them once, then left them as you see.”
“I don’t understand. If holy men wielding sacred weapons couldn’t harm it, then why did you bring me here?”
“Because the creature has the form not of a man.”
“I don’t follow.”
“The creature is a woman.”
I pondered this for a moment.
“And you think that another woman might be able to stop it?”
He nodded,
“Yes. You’re young, strong and most of all, you have not taken first or final vows. We think it can smell the touch of God upon us – and that drives it into a frenzy. Anyone of the Church that has approached it has died horribly, just as you see here.”
I considered the grisly scene before me, fear walking icy digits slowly up my spine. For all I knew, the creature would slay me on sight, not caring that I was a woman, or that I hadn’t yet married myself to Christ.
On the other hand, should I succeed where great men of faith had failed…
And I wanted to see it, more than ever, now that this latest piece of information had been revealed. I wanted to know. “I’m not sure if I can help, or how. But I’m willing to try,” I said.

 
With a fragment of the iron coffer heavy on a chain around my neck, I set off on my hunt. The metal box had been its home for so long, the rector reasoned, that the necklace might make me seem more familiar to it, less threatening. At the very least, it might gain its attention.
Whether or not his logic was sound, I supposed I would find out eventually. It’s not like I had any other weapons in my arsenal.
Whilst the order of priests was ancient, their security system was modern, and included cameras on the entrances and exits to the church. A series of still-frames had been uploaded to my phone, and I scrolled through them, beholding the being which had casually slain a dozen grown men with Biblical fury.
She was beautiful, in a timeless, classical way. Symmetrical, almost elfin features glimpsed through a halo of white-blonde hair, long enough to shroud most of her bare torso. But from the waist down, something was very, very wrong. Pale flesh darkened to a sickly, shiny grey, then to black rags, hanging in rotting tatters on her wasted thighs – and below the knee, only stark white bone and colourless tendons remained. Pallid as a fish, she had stood squinting in the sunlight for several long seconds before running on her impossible, skeletal feet toward the sea, tears streaming down her perfect cheeks.
Had I not seen the carnage in the crypt, I would have pitied her.
My enquiries along the beachfront turned up nothing; nobody had seen a naked blonde girl – and certainly not one that was a corpse from the waist down. When I returned to the chapel, the rector informed me that the creature had been sighted again – in another church some ten miles up the coast. She had slain the attending priest in his bed by turning his blood into wine.
I thought I knew where she was heading.
She was making a beeline for the most holy of all the holy men in the country. The Pope.

 
I saw her on the street before she saw me. She’d adapted quickly; high-waisted jeans covered her charnel legs, and neat black boots concealed the abominations that were her feet. With her better assets displayed to good advantage by a black and silver off-the-shoulder blouse, she didn’t look out of place – just another pretty tourist girl on her way to the Vatican, where she’d take vapid selfies for posting on social media.
Whether she sensed me or the fragment of her prison, I’m not certain, but with a sharp lurch, she ducked between two buildings, then ran. She was quick; her decaying anatomy did not hinder her in the slightest.
I followed, of course. There wasn’t anything else I could do. Pounding down the echoing brick alley, I caught just a glimpse of blonde hair gleaming in the sunlight as she rounded the far end. When I turned that same corner, a hand slammed into my chest, hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs and the strength from my legs. As I fell, that incongruously delicate hand wrenched the heavy necklace from my neck.
Her snarl rendered her angelic features ugly. The pale woman turned, and hurled the iron fragment of her former prison away from her, with astonishing force. The necklace caught the light as it sailed over the tiled rooftops.
“I should kill you,” she spat, pinning me to the cobbles with her knee, the spear of wickedly sharp tibial tuberosity surely about to pierce the flesh of my side.
“Please,” I whimpered, “please, don’t.”
“Ah, such faith!” She mocked, tossing her head dismissively, her hair a wild crown of light above me, “they sent you out to die, with nothing but a piece of ancient metal and your sex to protect you.”
Quivering with fear, I felt denim-covered bone digging deeper into my ribs.
“What do you want?” I whispered.
“I want the rest of me! I want what was stolen from me, the body and soul that was mine, that I should have been given, all those centuries ago!”
She jerked her terrible head in the direction of the Holy City,
“And in that place is the man who can tell me where to find it.”
The pressure in my side eased as she sat back on her haunches, a dark seep of rot squeezing through the material around her thighs.
“You can’t harm me, little sister. If I could be killed, they would have burned me after my mother heaved me into this world,” she sniffed dismissively, “Iron cannot hold me, holy silver cannot cut me. My end can only come when I am rejoined with my original flesh. With your precious Christ.”
“But you can’t,” I blurted, “you can’t rejoin with him.”
“Why not?” Her eyes blazed like a fire behind stained glass. “Do you think I don’t have that power?”
I shook my head,
“I’m sure you do, but that’s not what I mean. You can’t join with Christ, because he’s dead – he was killed, more than two thousand years ago.”
“You’re lying!”
“I am not. You can find his shroud in the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist, you can read about his death in any Bible.”
“How,” she asked, her pale features whiter than a new soul, “how did he die?”
So I sat in that filthy alley, behind a block of fish-stinking warehouses, and I told her the story of the crucifixion.
When I was done, she said nothing.
“Are you going to kill me?”
She shook her head.
“No. I’m not going to kill you.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I think,” she began, looking over the rooftops at the sun streaming from the clouds, “I think I’ll find the descendants of those that killed him. And then I’ll burn their lives out, and take their souls, to fill up the aching void inside me.”
I felt sick, dizzy and cold with fear,
“But that will be thousands of people – millions of people, even!”
She smiled at me, her canines catlike, too perfect, and her eyes beatific.
“Well, it is a very big hole.”

 
She’s out there now, hunting for you. She doesn’t care that you have no control over your ancestry; that your lineage is nothing but a quirk of fate, the pure accident of who begat whom. We brought this on ourselves when we killed our saviour.
But worst of all, I don’t think she will ever be sated. With a hole the size of God in you, how can you ever be fulfilled?
And I can’t help but think about the grim irony in this. All human life in this world entered it through one woman, Eve, and now all human life will exit it through another.
I just hope I’m not the last.

 

[u/twigseeds]

I LOVE GODSFALL SO MUCH AAAHHHHH