Prologue
Prologue
The door closed softly behind the departing visitor. Once again the tiny, dimly lit monastic cell was empty save for its occupant, who lay dying on the narrow bed. Dying, and in distress of soul.
Father Pellegrino Ernetti, Ordo Sancti Benedicti, sighed. The young man who had just left was, by blood, only the son of a distant relative. But ever since his childhood he had called Father Ernetti “Uncle Pellegrino” and delighted in the lute that the Benedictine priest—one of the world’s leading authorities on archaic music—had fashioned for him. Later he had poured forth his adolescent troubles into Father Ernetti’s patient ear. Even as a young adult he had come for visits whenever he was here in Venice, although the visits had grown less frequent during the last ten years, since he had married and had children. But the special relationship had endured, and Father Ernetti had never lost his fondness for the onetime amateurish little lute player.
He also knew him to be a bit of a blabbermouth, congenitally unable to keep a secret.
Which was the real reason why, knowing he would not outlive this spring of Anno Domini 1994, he had telephoned the young man, imploring him to come to the Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore without delay, one last time. And why, when the young man had arrived, he had made a confession to him, knowing that sooner or later the confession would become public property.
And now his meager bed was like a rack on which his soul was stretched by his conscience. Partly he was tormented for making such calculated, almost cynical use of one who felt nothing for him but trust and affection. And partly because the confession was a lie.
But it was a lie which had had to be told, and which must come before the world carrying the conviction of a deathbed declaration by a man of God. Only thus could he, Father Pellegrino Ernetti, O.S.B., complete his decades-long work of discrediting himself so thoroughly that no one would follow in his footsteps.
It had called for subtlety. For him to have simply blurted out a claim that everything he had been saying had been a fraud and a hoax would have seemed suspicious. Those who insisted in seeing a conspiracy in everything (understandable, in this sad century) would have instantly assumed that pressure had been brought to bear on him by the Church hierarchy, or by whatever vast, all-powerful and probably imaginary conspiratorial organization was the currently fashionable secular substitute for the Adversary. Therefore, more indirect means had been required. He had made claims that were easily discredited. (The patently fake “photograph of Christ” had, he thought sorrowfully, been his masterstroke . . . but ah, what he could have shown them!) He had given talks to crank organizations of paranormal faddists that no one took seriously, in order that he himself would not be taken seriously either. And now, in a final bit of indirection, he had not actually denied to his young relative that his experiments had taken place, but only made the false assertion that they had failed.
In short, he had taken infinite pains to make sure no one else would ever build another machine like the one he had built and later destroyed.
He had known in his soul that it must be destroyed as far back as the early 1970s, for he had come to see that it could be the instrument of a dictatorship beyond the dreams of the most godless tyrants of history. But even then he had been weak, and listened to the poisonous whisperings of the Adversary. In his weakness he had not been able to draw back from the pathway once travelled by Faustus, and it had led him to Hell-mouth, where he had stared into an abyss compared to which his earlier fears had been as nothing. And he had finally understood that he had, in fact, built an engine of universal damnation. What he had learned would destroy men’s faith. He knew this, for he knew how closely it had come to destroying his own.
Indeed, in his darkest, most tortured moments, a stubborn honesty forced him to ask himself whether he was merely indulging in self-deception in believing he had any faith left.
If he did have any shred of it to cling to as he faced death, it was probably owing to the men from the future.
Not all of them, of course. Some, indeed, only demonstrated the lengths to which human evil (and, he was convinced, demonic possession) could be carried, for they were men who had sought to become more than men . . . and, of course had succeeded only in becoming less, because that was the way the Adversary always worked.
But then, there had been Jason . . .