The Judas Rose Read Online Free PDF Page A

where the cross was raised and Christ’s banners flew a beachhead against Hell, an occasion for rejoicing in Heaven, and an occasion for screams of frustration and impotent rage from Satan and all his legions.
    â€œHear me, Heykus Joshua Clete!” the angel had said again at the very last, when Heykus had been so weak with terror and awe that he had been fighting not to lose consciousness where he knelt on the hard plastic dormitory floor. “Listen well! You will do as you are bid, for you are chosen, and this is your sacred mission! But you will tell no one what you have seen and heard this night! You will guard this as the most holy of secrets, Heykus Joshua Clete, for so long as you shall live!” And then it had gone as suddenly as it had come, and he had lost consciousness, not coming to himself until the sun was already beginning to rise over the roof of the building across the courtyard. He had gone shuddering and trembling to bathe himself and change his sweat-drenched clothing, and even to take some nourishment . . . he had not been able to remember when he had last eaten. And everywhere he went that day, the message had roared and surged through him till it seemed to him that people roundabout ought to have been able to hear the pounding of it in his blood.
    Heykus had been the Lord’s agent all his days, and had kept his secret just as he had been told, although there had been times when it had been a burden of loneliness almost too heavy to bear. He had gloried in every world won for his Lord, and mourned over every world lost to the Antichrist, and kept his own counsel. And he had waited. Waited, and lately begun to wonder. Who had been appointed to carry on the work when he was gone? Or was it up to the missionaries to continue, with no one at the helm? Was there to be no one who would take his place? He kept reminding himself that if there was a successor that man, too, would have been sworn to secrecy, so that the factthat Heykus did not know who or where he was meant nothing at all. Still, it seemed to him that he had earned the right to know. That the two of them, he and his successor, sharing their miraculous secret, should have been able to exchange knowing glances over a prayer breakfast some morning.
    He kept close watch, hoping. Like Samuel, in the temple. Hoping that before he died he would have reason, as Samuel had had reason, to feel that he could depart in peace.

CHAPTER 2
    â€œUnto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children . . .”
    ( Genesis 3:16)
    It was already day when the woman’s labor began, and the nuns were grateful for that. Not that it would be unusual for the screams of a laboring woman to be heard by night from the Convent of Saint Gertrude of the Lambs; any woman pregnant and in disgrace might be sent here by her outraged family, and those screams were as much a part of the convent sounds as the tolling of bells. But what they attracted under usual circumstances were the attentions of a priest, hurrying to be present in case there should be a need for last rites. Which was absurd; no convent of the Sisters Of Genesis had lost a mother in childbirth in more than fifty years. But you could not tell a priest that he was superfluous and a nuisance as well. Ordinarily, the Fathers were given to believe that their attentions were welcome.
    This time, however, the nuns were deeply thankful that the sounds of daily life both inside the convent and on the grounds outside would mask the woman’s cries. They had taken her down to an old cellar storage room, a full week before the baby was due, and they were reasonably certain that nothing could be heard upstairs. For extra insurance they had set the choir to rehearsing Easter madrigals in the corridor most nearly overhead. If it had been the middle of the night they could not have done that, and they saw the combination of fortuitous