Things We See

“I don’t believe it.”

“Don’t, or won’t?”

“Is there a difference? No, don’t tell me; I can hear your sermon coming. This isn’t a matter of will. I can’t believe.”

“Why not?”

“It’s contrary to reason.”

“That’s why it is a matter of faith, not science.”

“How are you using that word?”

“Which? Faith, or science?”

“Both.”

“Rosa, you know, as well as I, that there can be no true knowledge aside from tautologies. Everything has to be taken on trust.”

“Why do you find it so necessary to speak to me as if I were one of your First Year students?”

“Because, after fifteen years, you still fall into the same traps.”

“It’s sixteen – and the only trap I fell into was consenting to be your wife.”

“Sixteen. Is it really?”

Rosa nearly succumbed but, instead, reached out her hand for the side plate and loaded the dishwasher. Henry stuck out his bottom lip and, making a fist, circled his chest. It was their way of apologising to each other when a joke had been taken far enough.

“Will you come?” he said. He needn’t have asked. Rosa had already packed their cases for a hotter climate.

*

It had been all over social media before any serious journalist had set foot in the region, let alone the academics, scientists, and theologians who, now, were pouring in on the hour, it seemed, every hour: hashtag secondcoming; hashtag endoftheworld; hashtag fakenews?

Six days ago, on a farm many hundreds of metres from the sight of a basilica, an elderly couple had been disturbed by a blinding light emanating from their barn. The couple had retired a good decade ago and, even before then, the ramshackle shed was not used for anything except target practice for the passing birds’ fouls. So when David traipsed out to the barn in his old, green, oilskin jacket, he found he had to raise his arm to his head to shield his eyes from the light that was coming from inside.

Yet, as he stopped in his tracks, uncertain as to whether to return for his shotgun, the light dimmed and the door opened.

A man – bearded, mid-thirties, with a broad smile and leathery, olive skin – stepped out. He was wearing white jeans and a bleached T-shirt. He held out both hands as if expecting to be embraced, and walked towards David, exclaiming something he could not decipher (it was neither Hebrew nor English).

“Who are you? And why are you trespassing on my land?”

The figure seemed to pause for a brief moment and then, smiling again, announced, in English:

“I am returned.”

This is the story that David repeated to every juvenile, journalist, or official who asked him in the ensuing days. It was embellished, of course, but this was understandable, considering what happened next:

Others had seen the light and they came from far and wide.

They had been scouring the neighbourhoods for three days in search of a missing girl who had vanished on her way home from school. The farms had all been searched. David and Rebecca had led three parties themselves which was why, when they saw the light coming from the barn, David had half dared to hope it might be the missing girl, coming to her senses, after running away from home.

It was why, only minutes after the Stranger had uttered his ambiguous greeting, David was joined by a dozen others with torches.

“Welcome,” said the Stranger. “I’m sorry I’ve been so long.”

Incredulous, the crowd began to ask him what he was on about (or on) and then, where he had hidden Hannah. Several pushed past him and ran into the barn.

They came back out, hanging their heads.

“This Hannah, you say, is missing?”

“For three days. Where have you put her?”

“Yeah – who are you?”

“I reckon he’s taken her! Quick – don’t let him get away!”

“Put your hands up, go on!”

The well-meaning volunteers soon turned into a jeering mob.

“Children,” said the Stranger, peaceably; “only believe, and she shall be returned.”

“What d’ya mean?” shouted a voice. “If you’ve taken her…”

“Peace, friend,” said the Stranger, “Do you not know me, yet?”

He took a step closer and raised his hands. In the gleam of a torchlight, the crowd could make out a hole in each wrist. The man who had just shouted out fell backwards, dropping the phone he had been using as a torch onto the ground.

“It…it…you…can’t be!”

“Only believe,” said the Stranger, kindly.

A woman stepped forward and prostrated herself the Stranger’s feet.

“I believe,” she said. “At least, I want to. Only, I’m afraid.”

“It’s all right, child. Go home and you will find Hannah sleeping peacefully in her bed.”

The woman rose to her knees and, as was about to stand when another said:

“Hold on, we’re not just gonna take his word for it, are we?” Murmurs of assent ran through the assembly just as their phones all vibrated.

“It’s Hannah’s parents,” said one: “She’s been found.”

He turned on his heel and walked back towards the barn.

By dawn, a crowd of dozens had become hundreds. David had just buttered his toast when a loud voice made him drop his knife. It was coming through a loud PA system.

“My children, I have come to claim my own.” David rushed to the window: the Stranger was standing in the doorway of his barn. Speakers were suspended from the windows (and likely to fall. The wood was rotten right through, and the building shook with the reverberations from his speech). A swarm of people were sat, cross-legged, as if in a school assembly, with their attention rapt. Only some were filming on their phones but even they were looking at the Stranger, not their screens.

He spoke for several hours. If you asked anyone, they couldn’t tell you whether it was a history lecture, a political speech, a set of fables, or moral admonition.

Then came the second miracle:

“I expect you didn’t think to bring a packed lunch,” said the Stranger. “Never mind. I have enough for you all.”

He spread his arms and gesticulated behind him to the empty barn. A few people laughed, in nervous anticipation.

By now, David and Rebecca had joined the crowd and made their way to the front. He could see inside his barn: it looked just as damp, and just as empty – save for the PA system which seemed to have come from nowhere.

David watched the Stranger intently. As a child, David had wanted to be a magician and made his mother take him to all the greatest shows in town. That was, until he realised the magicians were merely illusionists. He could tell a slight of hand trick from a hundred metres away. The Stranger was barely twenty.

Turning his back on the crowd, the Stranger looked up to heaven and said:

“Father, bless this provision for these thy children. May they know that I am the One you sent, and sent again.” Then he bowed down, recited a Hebrew bracha, and kissed the ground. As his lips made contact with the earth, there was another flash of light, and the barn was filled, instantly, with fresh sandwiches and drinks – as if a great supermarket had simply teleported its stock straight into the barn.

The next five days brought more miracles – equally inexplicable – equally scrutinised by replays of phone footage and livestreams: multiplications of food and money, people cured by touch; predictions made; lost people, pets, and purses restored.

There was mania.

*

All this, Rosa and Henry had heard, seen, and read. Perhaps because Rosa had been brought up in the Catholic faith, she found it so hard to believe.

“But your bible says this second coming will be seen across the sky, doesn’t it? What else do you call the Twitter storm we’ve seen this week if not lightning from the East seen in the West?” said Henry.

“Something doesn’t feel right,” said Rosa.

“That’s why we’re going to see.”

Somehow, over the past few days, the Stranger had got himself a security team. They were stationed in the barn, now, and “events” were ticketed, “to prevent mass crowding.” Rosa and Henry, internationally renowned as they were, were being granted a private interview, on record, before the main "event" that evening.

The Stranger shook their hands. The holes in his wrists felt real.

“What should I call you?” asked Rosa, as she pressed record on her app.

“What would you like to call me?”

“Oh, I don’t know . . . charlatan? False messiah? Con artist? I’m sure there are a hundred epithets.”

The Stranger smiled and sipped a glass of water.

“Perhaps you’re just a cheap conjurer,” she added. For an instant, she thought she saw the flicker of a snarl on his lip.

“Hardly cheap – were it all a trick,” he said, quickly.

“Well then, what’s it all for?” asked Henry.

It was a question he did not seem to expect.

“For? It’s all for you.”

“No. I don’t buy that,” said Rosa. “Why stay here? Why hasn’t the world ended? Why these ‘events?’ You’re building up followers. You’re trending. You haven’t moved. What’s so special about this place?”

His eyes looked about, nervously. One of his security guards took a step closer but he shook his head.

“I was born here,” he said, quietly.

“Here, in this barn?”

“The stable beneath it.”

Rosa looked at the Stranger and then at the floor. She had always supposed the Church of the Nativity did not really stand over the true site of Christ’s birth.

“You don’t believe me,” he said.

“Well, it’s just that I happen to know this piece of land was reclaimed from the river only three hundred years ago,” said Rosa. She was bluffing.

“But that’s impossible! I researched the period meticulously!”

His expostulation was quite uncontrolled and, as soon as he had uttered it, he gave a look of terror – the terror of a murderer caught with a bloody knife.

At that moment, there was another flash of light and three figures appeared, dressed in black armour, and with the initialism ICDTC emblazoned in red down their arms.

Seizing the Stranger by his wrists they shackled him.

“Jordan Montgomery, you have been found guilty of multiple counts of Temporal Crime. Especially, but not limited to: theft of an advanced Chronosphere; corrupting the timeline for personal gain; cultural and fiscal damage. You do not have to speak, but you are being recorded. You will now be escorted back to the Present to answer to these charges.”

Only then, did the newcomers take notice of Rosa and Henry.

“We’ll have to do a re-set” said one. “Go see if you can determine point of origin.”

Rosa had read enough science fiction to understand what was going to happen.

“Wait!” she said; “I assume you are going to do something to change . . . all this? So none of us will remember the last week, or something? Well, in that case – please, won’t you tell me what’s going on?”

“Inter-Company Department of Temporal Crime, ma’am. Just doing our job. Another religious nut – member of a group called The Parousia. They use advanced technology to impersonate the Messiah. They always seem to mess up sooner or later.”

“I see,” said Rosa. Tremulously, she opened her lips to ask a question she wasn’t sure she wanted the answer to:

“And two thousand years ago? Was that another . . . member?”

“Not for us to say, ma’am. Never gone back that far myself. Something funny about those spacetime co-ordinates if you ask me. Think there’s some sort of shield. Still, Jordan was right about this barn – there is something underneath it all right. Some secrets of time are beyond even us, though.”

The last thought that went through Rosa’s mind before time reset was of a new-born baby boy, lying in a damp barn, or cave, on a bed of straw.