The Hand of Christ Read Online Free Page A

damage he had caused to it. The pen had been presented to him as a gift when he had been named Pope, and was a clearly expensive one.
    On that day three months ago, he had lowered himself slowly to one knee to inspect the broken tile and took caution while doing so: at 78 years of age, every movement must be thought out carefully.
    Leo remembered that day and all of its details, as if it were playing out like a staged production in front of him. He could see and hear himself quite clearly as if he had traveled back in time and was watching the events play out once more.
    He saw himself bending lower to the broken tile and saying, “Joshua, too many of your peers find themselves with broken hips.” This had made him chuckle out loud; he was clearly not yet accustomed to referring to himself as Leo.
    Staring at the tile, he saw himself fingering the slightly misshaped marble’s edge; the slab had seemed a bit loose. It was loose. He saw himself scratching at the slightly raised corner of the tile with a bit of fervor. He remembered how the mortar connecting it to the adjacent slab had easily broken free.
    When he was Joshua, he had always been a curious man, and becoming Leo hadn’t changed that; he had been unable to pull himself away from his destructive doings. He remembered thinking, as he had dug out the tile’s mortar, that perhaps the workers had simply not given this tile enough attention.
    But the floor didn’t need repairs; they had only cleaned it.
    Leo sat at his table and just stared.
    That day flashed through his mind. When he couldn’t dig away the mortar with his fingers he had used his pen, damaging it.
    And then the tile had shifted.
    It was only after the marble tile had moved that he had looked at the pen and had become aware of the damage he caused to it. He had become flush with shame and quickly had set the magnificent pen down on a nearby shelf and next to a large golden crucifix; he had realized that he should not have used the expensive gift as a tool and hoped that Geoffrey, his faithful assistant, wouldn’t notice.
    Reliving those vivid moments from three months ago, and just like then, one bead of sweat from the many now attached to his brow trickled down the side of his face. He felt his heart race as he continued to recall that day.
    The marble had been too heavy for him to lift, moving only slightly from the floor when he had tried.
    Sitting at his table, Leo looked across his private studio to the shelves where the large golden crucifix sat. Leo had eagerly grabbed it from the shelf and used it as a lever to pry the marble tile from the floor.
    Shaking himself from his thoughts, Leo was suddenly compelled – he didn’t know from what – to stand up and walk over to the cross. Rising gingerly to his feet and without pause, Leo scampered across his studio and toward the shelves where the cross rested.
    Once there, he stared at the cross for a moment and then picked it up from the shelf. He kissed it more so as an apology than as a blessing or for respect. With the cross in his hand, he looked down at the tile and then with care he knelt to the floor. He felt a slight tremble in his hands; unlike that moment three months ago, this time he knew what was underneath the tile.
    Leo inserted the crucifix into the space he had created, and, with a bit of effort, lifted the marble slab once more. He lowered himself closer to the ground. With his left eye near the newly opened chasm, he squinted and looked into the dark space. The Pope could make out the faint tubular shape of the parchment.
    Leo reached into the hole; grasping the parchment, the Pope slowly extracted it from where it had rested – up until three months ago – for nearly a century.
    Eighteen inches in width and wrapped tightly in a deteriorating rag, the parchment was calf-skin vellum. In use nearly two centuries before Christ, vellum was washed, limed, and stretched for writing, but did not always stand the test of time. This