made of these stations. Conspiratorialists claim they have Masonic origins or are actually some sort of treasure map. None of that's true. But there are messages in them.'
Malone noticed some of the curious aspects. The black slave boy who held the wash bowl for Pilate. The veil Pilate wore. A trumpet being sounded as Christ fell with the cross. Three silver discs held aloft. The child confronting Christ, wrapped in a Scottish tartan blanket. A Roman soldier throwing dice for Christ's cloak, the numbers three, four, and five visible on the faces.
'Look at station fourteen,' Mark said, gesturing toward the south wall.
Malone stood and walked to the front of the church. Candles flickered before the altar and he quickly noticed the bas-relief beneath. A woman, Mary Magdalene, he assumed, in tears, kneeling in a grotto before a cross formed by two branches. A skull rested at the branch base and he immediately thought of the skull from the lithograph last night in Avignon.
He turned and studied the image of the last station of the cross, number 14, which depicted Christ's body being carried by two men as three women wept. Behind them rose a rocky escarpment above which hung a full moon in the night sky.
'Jesus being carried to the tomb,' he whispered to Mark, who'd approached close behind him.
'According to Roman law, a crucified man was never allowed burial. That form of execution was reserved only for those guilty of crimes against the empire, the idea being for the accused to slowly die on the cross-death taking several days and for all to see, the body left for the carrion birds. Yet supposedly Pilate granted Christ's body to Joesph of Arimathea so that it could be buried. Have you ever wondered why?'
'Not really.'
'Others have. Remember, Christ was killed on the eve of the Sabbath. He could not, by law, be buried after the sun set.' Mark pointed at station 14. 'Yet Sauniere hung this representation, which clearly shows the body being carried after dark.'
Malone still didn't understand the significance.
'What if instead of being carried into the tomb, Christ is being carried out, after dark?'
He said nothing.
'Are you familiar with the Gnostic Gospels?' Mark asked.
He was. They were found along the upper Nile in 1945. Seven Bedouin field hands were digging when they came across a human skeleton and a sealed urn. Thinking it contained gold, they smashed the urn open and found thirteen leather-bound codices. Not quite a book, but a close ancestor. The neatly written, ragged-edged texts were all in ancient Coptic, most likely composed by monks who lived at the nearby Pachomian monastery during the fourth century. They contained forty-six ancient Christian manuscripts, their content dating from the second century, the codices themselves fashioned in the fourth century. Some were subsequently lost, used as kindling or discarded, but by 1947 the remainder were acquired by a local museum.
He told Mark what he knew.
'The answer as to why the monks buried the codices came from history,' Mark said. 'In the fourth century Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, wrote a letter that was sent to all the churches in Egypt. He decreed that only the twenty-seven books contained within the recently formulated New Testament could be considered Scripture. All other heretical books must be destroyed. None of the forty-six manuscripts in that urn conformed. So the monks at the Pachomian monastery chose to hide the thirteen codices rather than burn them, perhaps waiting for a change in church leadership. Of course, no change ever occurred. Instead, Roman Christianity flourished. But thank heaven the codices survived. These are the Gnostic Gospels we now know. In one, Peter's, it is written, And as they declared what things they had seen, again they saw three men come forth from the tomb, and two of them supporting one. '
Malone stared again at station 14. Two men supporting one.
'The Gnostic Gospels were extraordinary texts,' Mark said. 'Many scholars now say the Gospel of Thomas, which was included in them, may be the closest we have to Christ's actual words. The early Christians were terrified of the Gnostics. The word came from the Greek gnosis, which meant 'knowledge.' Gnostics were simply people in the know, but the emerging Catholic version of Christianity eventually eliminated all gnostic thought and teachings.'
'And the Templars kept that alive?'
Mark nodded. 'The Gnostic Gospels, and several more that theologians today have never seen, are contained in the abbey's library. The Templars were broad-minded when it came to Scripture. There's a lot to be learned from these so-called heretical works.'
'How would Sauniere know anything of those Gospels? They weren't discovered until decades after his death.'
'Perhaps he had access to even better information. Let me show you something else.'
He followed Mark back to the church's entrance and they stepped out onto the porch. Above the door was a stone-carved box upon which words were painted.
'Read the writing beneath,' Mark said.
Malone strained to make out the letters. Many were faded and hard to decipher, and all were in Latin.
REGNUM MUNID ET OMNEM ORNATUM SAECULI CONTEMPSI, PROPTER AMOREM DOMININ MEI JESU CHRISTI:
QUEM VIDI, QUEM AMAVI, IN QUEM CREDIDI, QUEM DILEXI
'Translated it means, 'I have had contempt for the kingdom of this world, and all temporal adornments, because of the love of my Lord Jesus Christ, whom I saw, whom I loved, in whom I believed, and whom I worshiped.' On its face an interesting statement, but there are some conspicuous errors.' Mark motioned. 'The words scoeculi, anorem, quen, and cremini are all misspelled. Sauniere spent one hundred and eighty francs for that carving and for the letters to be painted, which was a sizable sum at the time. We know this because his receipts still exist. He went to a lot of trouble to design this entrance, yet he allowed the misspellings to remain. It would have been easy to repair them, since the letters were only painted.'
'Maybe he didn't notice?'
'Sauniere? He was a type A personality. Nothing slipped by him.'
Mark led him away from the entrance as another wave of visitors entered the church. They stopped in front of the garden with the Visigoth pillar and statue of the Virgin.
'The inscription above the door is not biblical. It's contained within a responsory written by a man named John Tauler early in the fourteenth century. Responsories were prayers or poems used between scriptural readings and Tauler was well known in Sauniere's time. So it's possible Sauniere simply liked the phrase. But it's pretty unusual.'
Malone agreed.
'The misspellings could shed some light on why Sauniere used it. The painted words are quem cremini, 'in whom I believed,' but the word should have been credidi, yet Sauniere allowed the misspelling. Could that mean that he did not believe in Him? And then the most interesting of all. Quem vidi. Whom I saw.'
Malone instantly saw the significance. 'Whatever he found led him to Christ. Whom he saw.'
'That's what Dad thought, and I agree. Sauniere seemed unable to resist sending messages. He wanted the world to know what he knew, but it was almost as if he realized that no one in his time would understand. And he was right. No one did. Not until forty years after he died did anyone ever notice.' Mark looked over at the ancient church. 'The whole place is one of reversals. The stations of the cross are hung on the wall backward from every other church in the world. The devil at the door-he's the reverse of good.' Then he pointed to the Visigoth pillar a few feet away. 'Upside down. Notice the cross and the carvings on the face.'
Malone studied the face.
'Sauniere inverted the pillar before carving Mission 1891 at the bottom and Penitence, Penitence along the top.'
Malone noticed a V with a circle at its center in the bottom right corner. He cocked his head around and envisioned the image inverted. 'Alpha and omega?' he asked.
