chance did it have psychotropic properties? Might the children have chewed its leaves or, perhaps, inadvertently inhaled its pollen? Alas, even were Suzy open to such an approach, Sister Francis would likely have a Sacred Heart attack, in which case an A-grade might be out of the question.
When, however, they learned that the Fatima children had twice in the previous year been visited by an angel, Switters couldn’t keep quiet. “No television, no radio, and they were illiterate. Kids sometimes have to provide their own entertainment. It was always Lucia, the eldest cousin, who saw these holy apparitions first, and it was with her that they spoke. Maybe little Lucia had an active imagination, a fantasy life fueled by Bible stories, the only extraordinary material to which she’d ever been exposed, and she pulled the younger kids into her fantasies, much the same way that Tom Sawyer pulled in Huckleberry Finn.”
Suzy protested. “I don’t know why you have to be so negative. Don’t you believe in miracles and stuff?”
“Well, I know from first-hand experience that the universe is a very woo-woo place, and that so-called consensual reality is not much more than the tip of the iceberg. But my credibility alarm starts to jangle a bit when the Virgin Mary shows up speaking flawless Portuguese and looking like a Roman Catholic Sunday School portrait instead of the Middle Eastern Jewish matron she was at the time of her death. If I remember it correctly, rosary beads weren’t introduced until more than a thousand years after Christ, so why—”
“Hello? God’s time isn’t the same as our time.”
She had him there. Certainly he wasn’t going to argue on the side of linear time, not after what he’d been through. Today
“Anyway, like, what about all the people who saw the sun dance in the sky and stuff? On October thirteenth. They weren’t Huckleberry Finns.”
“Hmmm,” hmmmed Switters. “That’s interesting in itself. Of the seventy thousand people who joined the children in the Cova da Iria pasture for the Lady’s farewell performance and prophecy session, roughly half claimed to have witnessed a meteorological light show of staggering proportions. The other half saw absolutely nothing. What does that tell us, darling? That fifty percent of humanity is susceptible to mass hallucination?”
“Or that fifty percent are pure enough to see God’s miracles and the rest are like you.”
“Fifty percent purity? Man, I wish the figure was even a fraction that high! As for me personally, I witness a divine miracle every time you enter the room.”
“Oh, Switters!”
When she tucked him in a short while later—he wasn’t tired, but he didn’t object—she loaded a full package of tongue into their good night kiss.
Asked in an interview in 1946 if the Lady of Fatima had revealed anything about the end of the world, Lucia (by then Sister Mary dos Dores, a lay nun) responded rather like a CIA officer with cowboyish leanings. “I cannot answer that question,” she said through tight lips. Lucia did not, as far as has been reported, add, “for reasons of national security.”
Whether or not the Lady had been forthcoming about a possible final curtain ringing down on the Homo sapiens revue—and none but Lucia had actually heard her prophecies—she was not exactly a bubble of optimism in regard to our planetary prospects. For example, that spectacular celestial cha-cha that thirty-five thousand people claimed to have observed, along with Lucia and her cousins, on October 13, 1917, was executed, she said, not by the sun but by a preview of a flaming comet, a fireball that according to the Lady (and disputed by astronomers everywhere) would return someday to dry up oceans, lakes, and rivers and shrivel a third of the earth’s vegetation. No, not precisely a planetary death sentence, but considerably more severe than a stiff fine and a hundred hours of community service.
If it was doom that intrigued them, however, the Fatima faithful got their money’s worth. The white-clad apparition predicted straightaway that a plague would fall upon the land soon after the Great War ended and that two of the shepherd children would be among its victims. In 1919, first Francisco, then Jacinta succumbed to the influenza epidemic that killed twenty million people in Europe and North America. The Lady had hit a chilling bull’s- eye with that one, and she was only slightly off center with her prophecy of approaching famine: almost on cue, a vine fungus spread through Europe, lasted more than three years, and left no grape unspoiled.
Her forecast in the second set of predictions that Russia would “spread its errors” throughout the world could probably also be considered a hit. Strongly disposed toward threats and scoldings—the Lady repeatedly warned that if people didn’t amend their lives, beg forgiveness, and run marathons on their rosary beads there was going to be hell to pay—she was particularly hard on Communists, obviously viewing Communism as something more amplitudinously evil than a mere inherently flawed economic system.
It was Thursday afternoon, and Suzy, a shade less reluctantly than the day before, had come straight home from school. The two of them were in the den, sorting through the printouts of their Internet research, concentrating, at Switters’s urging, on the Fatima predictions and warnings. Suzy had wanted to change into jeans and a sweatshirt, but at his request she remained attired in her school uniform. Whether his aim was to reduce temptation or to torture himself with it was probably debatable. In any event, he ceased counting her pleats long enough to wave a sheet of paper in the charged air that separated them. “This!” he exclaimed. “Right here. It’s the only tidbit of information we’ve uncovered in three days that could spike the punch at the teddy bears’ picnic.”
“Hello?”
“Right here.” The printout, which he now handed her, concerned Our Lady’s third and final prophecy. At the time of its delivery, the children would say nothing of this last prediction except that it was of great consequence and would bring joy to some and sorrow to others.
Around 1940, some twenty-three years after it was supposedly issued, the nun formerly known as Lucia Santos wrote down the secret prophecy and sealed it in an envelope with instructions that it be opened in 1960, or upon her death should she die earlier than that date. The envelope was locked in the office safe of the bishop of Leiria in Portugal, where Church sources said it remained until 1957, when Pope Pius XII had it brought, under tight security, to Rome. Pius was itching to rip it open, but Lucia was still alive. In fact, Lucia was still breathing in 1997, whereas Pius XII died in 1958 without ever satisfying his curiosity.
While the Church would neither confirm nor deny it, highly placed Vatican sources claimed that at some point in 1960, Pius’s successor, Pope John XXIII, did, finally, open the mystery envelope—and wept for three days over the “terrible news” it contained. Throughout the remainder of his life, John XXIII adamantly refused to discuss it with anyone, and the message was reputed to rest in a vault at the papal palace, unread by a soul save that sobbing pontiff nearly forty years in the past.
“Yeah,” said Suzy. “That’s pretty wild. But you know, how could I write about it when, like, I don’t know what it says.”
“We could speculate.”
“You mean? . . .”
“I mean, extrapolating from her two published predictions, we could try to guess the content of the final and missing one. Might be fun. What possible prognostication from a controversial source could set a modern pope to blubbering for three whole days?”
“But bring joy to some.”
“Exactly. Think about it.”
From the way Suzy screwed up her face, she was thinking hard about it. “You’re cute when you frown,” said Switters.
She seemed daunted, perplexed by her stepbrother’s proposal, and eventually she vetoed it. “No, I just want to tell the story. You know, tell about the children and Our Lady and all the stuff that happened. Even Sister Francis doesn’t know much about it. She said she didn’t. And the class is, like, clueless. It’s kind of a beautiful story, so I just want to write it down for everybody. Okay?”
Switters shrugged. “It’s your party. I’ll help you organize the material if you’d like, and you can take it from there.”
She lowered her eyes. “Switters? Are you disappointed?”
“Nein,” he lied. “Only thing that disappoints me is that the authorities haven’t locked you up somewhere. You’re too damn cute to be at large. You’re a public menace.”
