I walked outside a private exit of the mansion and from the belvedere on the north side caught the sunlit panorama of Rome. Tears have not been in my eyes since I was a young boy, but I cannot help this when I feel the responsibility I have to help you comprehend, for the first time, what this metaphysical space has do to us. I do not want to be evil anymore. You must understand what I suffer. It is only fair. And I am so good at being bad, of course, the old slogan. If I have not put “Hit ‘em with the Ryan,” on a T-shirt, I am going to. Actually, I really do not want to write only on T-shirts. In reality, I would like to write entire novels on T-shirts so you guys could say, “I am wearing chapter seven of Ryan Phillippe’s new book, that is my favorite; oh, I see, you are wearing chapter six–.” I have been hiding from many of you like Superman dodging into the all-American phone booth, voila! There I stand, full-dressed apparitional, in a three-piece suit once again, and I got you by the throat. We are in the vestibule of the Cathedral (where did you think I would drag you? Do you want to die on consecrated ground?), and you are begging for it all the way; oops! Went too far, meant for this to be a Little Drink, do not say I did not warn you. Come on think of it. Did I warn you? #RyanPhillippe 1 of 12

Brothers and sisters here for the first time, please do not let that shock you. I know you did not expect this because almost none of you humans have thought that maybe you were making a mistake not wondering if there was not a special religion somewhere for you—a special religion for all the humans. Well, there is such a religion. However, I am going to tell you about that later. First, we need to understand somethings about this Christianity before we can understand my answer. The Holy Spirit’s influence and power were at work before the Pentecost. The Pentecost is a Christian holy day commemorating the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the disciples of Jesus Christ, it is known as White Sunday. Christians see Pentecost as an expansion of God’s favor and care from Judaism to all peoples. Many churches celebrate Pentecost with a mass or worship on service on this day. Once our Lord was glorified in His ascension, the Holy Spirit came into the World, and he has been where ever since. We have to receive the revealed truth that He is here. The attitude of receiving and welcoming the Holy Spirit into our lives is to be the continual attitude of believers. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 12

When we receive the Holy Spirit, we receive reviving life from our ascended Lord. In 1861, American astronomer Daniel Kirkwood suggested the Pentecost as the explanation for the origin of meteor showers. A few witnesses reported that the meteors of the Pentecost “fell as thick as snowflakes.” In Boston, a number of meteors equivalent to half the number of snowflakes in a storm was estimated. A slightly less poetic and more quantitative estimate spoke of something like 240,000 meteors during the incredible nine hours of the Pentecost continued, essentially the entire night. In New York, a rate of 10,000 falls per hour was estimated, with some meteors of the Pentecost as bright as the full Moon.  Historian R.M. Devens declared the Pentecost storm of 1833 one of the most memorable events in the entire history of the United States. A number of scientist, including Denison Olmsted, professor of physics at Yale University, observed the phenomenon as well. Such observations confirmed von Humboldt’s impression that the meteors all came from the same point in the sky, in the constellation Leo and named the Pentecost Leonids. It was also confirmed that the Leonids moved through the sky along with the constellation, participating in the sky’s apparent diurnal rotation. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 12

In the Book of the Maccabees a party went to the Greek Emperor Antiochus and gained from him permission to build themselves in Jerusalem a gymnasium according to the customs of the heathen, and made themselves uncircumcised, and forsook the holy covenant, and joined themselves to the heathen, new contentions arose within the holy city, which culminated when the Greek’s, supporting the claims of an opportunistic Hellenizer to the office of the high priesthood, sacked the Temple and ordered heathen altars to be set up all over the land. For then, 168 Before Christ, in a village named Modein, that Mattahias and his five sons (the Maccabees) attacked and slew not only the first Jewish who approached the heathen altar to sacrifice according to the king’s commandment, but also the Greek officer who had arrived to set it up. Tens of thousands of meteors fell in the early hours of 13 November. Understandably, bystanders were once again awestruck. People ran to wake up their neighbors so that they could witness the scene, but many woke up suddenly on their own due to the alarming blaze of the brightest fireballs lighting up their dark bedrooms. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 12

The whole sky seemed to light up with heavenly rockets, there was no area bigger than three times the Moon that was not constantly brimming with meteors that only disappeared when the Sun came up. However, the Maccabees themselves then impudently assumed the titles of both the kingship and high priesthood, to which there were not by descent entitled, and there was perpetrated within that family a number of ugly betrayals and murders in subsequent struggles for the inheritance. The Pharisees, Hasidim, and others resenting these impieties rose presently in a revolt that was put own with the greatest cruelty by the reigning Alexander Jannaeus (r. 104-78), who crucified eight hundred of his enemies in a single night, slaughtered their wives and children before their eyes, and himself watched the executions, drinking their blood and publicly disporting with his concubines. It had been a perfectly clear night, brilliant stars were seen falling, scattering here and there in a manner so copious that if they had been real stars, none would be left in the sky. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 12

Upon which so deep a terror seized on the people, reported the Jewish historian Josephus in concluding his account of this atrocity, that eight thousands of his opposes fled away the very next night, out of all Judea. One meteor appeared which was so bright it made the stars and Moon disappear and left traces, in the form of small white cloud, that lasted for half an hour, it was so bright a pin lost along the road to be found. It has been suggested that this event specifically may have been the occasion for the founding in the wilderness on the Dead Sea shore of the apocalyptic community of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Its founders, in any case, foresaw the end of the World and were in all seriousness preparing themselves to be worth to survive it and to continue into eternity the destiny of the remnant of God’s people. Their expectation seems to have been that they would themselves constitute an army of such virtue that with God’s help they would conquer the World. There would be a war to be fought of forty years, of “the Sons of the Light” against “the Sons of Darkness.” #RyanPhillippe 6 of 12

All right, okay, yeah, forget about it, so what, stop the hand wringing, sure sure, knock it off, cool it, shove it, eh? I surrender. Of course we are going to revel in pure wickedness here! And who am I to deny my vocation as a Roman Catholic storyteller par excellence? I mean, the Upiri Kroniky are My invention, you know, and I am only Not a netvor when I am addressing you, I mean, that is why I write this, because I need you, I cannot breathe without you. I am helpless without you. And I am back, sigh, shudder, cackle, tap dance, and I am almost ready to pick up the conventional frame of this book and fix its four sides with the infallible super glue of sure-fire storytelling. It is going to all add up, I swear to you on the ghost of my great grandfather, there is technically, in my World, no such thing as a digression! All roads lead to me. Quiet. A beat. However, before we cut to Present Time, let me have my little fantasy. I need it. I am not all flash and dash, steak and shake, boys and girls, do you not see? I cannot help myself. #RyanPhillippe 7 of 12

Two millennia earlier the Vatican hill was a wild place, with steep overgrown ravines and clay like soil that discouraged building. It lay outside the city gates, and two roads ran around it: the Via Cornelia on the south and the via Triumphalis on the north. The ancient Roman government had allowed tombs to be built next to both roads, and the cemetery near the Via Cornelia became famous as the supposed burial place of Saint Peter. Archaeologist of later centuries would have their doubts, but the Emperor Constantine pretty well settled the question when he built the first basilica over an area that was venerated as Saint Peter’s grave. With no such illustrious tomb of its own, the Via Triumphalis cemetery had been forgotten and had come to light only piecemeal, beginning in the sixteenth century, when footings were sunk for the northernmost wing of the Vatican palaces. Then, in 1930, below the Fountain of the Galea, more tombs were uncovered but quickly buried again beneath a modern warehouse building. An archeologist had managed to excavate an additional small section near the fountain in the 1990s, revealing tombs that dated back to the Roman Empire and its first Emperor Augustus, ruling from 27 Before Christ to After Death 14. #RyanPhillippe 8 of 12

Many development projects were held hostage to relics of the past. The most important finds, however, were made in the 1950s during excavation for the Vatican’s first underground parking lot. A small section of the graveyard was preserved, hinting at much more than that still lay belowground to the north—precisely the territory that Technical serviced had earmarked for the new parking facility. The engineers had promised to call the archaeology office if they discovered anything interesting. That was a polite way of saying, “Get lost.” Now, as the archaeologist approached the construction zone, he could see that the area had been thoroughly torn up. The bulldozers were turned off today—which was odd, he thought. He walked through a fence gate and saw Mr. Buranelli and the foreman waiting for him, along with officials from Technical Services. They all looked nervous, and the archeologist Mr. Spinola soon saw why. Lying in a pile, heaped casually to one side, were several Roman funerary markers. Next to them was a marble altar decorated with rams’ heads and birds; one of the rams’ heads had been clipped, and the altar edges bore the fresh scars of a bulldozer’s blade. #RyanPhillippe 9 of 12

His heart sank, in the western corner of the excavation, there were stumps of marble tombstones that has been strewn across the site, scattered by the earthmoving machinery. In the muddy tire tracks he could see small remnants of mosaics and terra-cotta urns. Despite the upheaval, he could make out a vague topography: a ridge that ran up a hill, broadened in areas to accommodate family tombs. At the bottom of the incline was standing water, where everything looked destroyed; higher up, perhaps, they could still salvage something. This was not just a small cluster of graves; it was extensive, probably four thousand or five thousand square feet. In the center were the brick walls of what looked like a columbarium and other small mausoleums, shorn off at an angle by the bulldozers. Mr. Buranelli was arguing with the foreman vowing to halt the work. Mr. Spinola wondered bitterly: “Why did they not stop? Why did the engineers call us?” They had sliced through a city of the dead. The reporting going on around was the bulldozers had unearthed some ancient graves. The hint of scandal was that some of the artifacts might have already been carted off and hidden somewhere in Rome. #RyanPhillippe 10 of 12

It sounded like a case of tomb robbing on a large scale, right under the pope’s window. Where are my remains? I do not have any. My entire body has become relics, scattered all over the World, bits and pieces of dried flesh and bone and hair put into little gold cases called reliquaries, some fragments fitted into the hollowed-out backs of crosses, some in lockets that can be worn on chain around the neck. I can feel all these relics. I can slumber in the awareness of their influences. Like many suspected scenarios involving the Vatican, this one was too clever by half. It did not seem to occur to people that developers inside the Vatican, like developers everywhere, had no interest in stealing old inscriptions and did not really care if a bunch of ancient tombstones ended up in a landfill. I remembered a similar discovery a few years earlier, when the Vatican had decided to allow construction of a five-story underground parking lot on a historic hill near Saint Peter’s Square. Technically that site was outside of Vatican City, but access was through the grounds of a Vatican-owned college. #RyanPhillippe 11 of 12

One evening Slovakian Cardinal Jozef Tomko, who lived at the college, took me to see the excavation hole. It was vast and deep and looked like the entry to hell.  I later learned that bulldozers had cut into an ancient Roman villa on the hill, with frescoed paintings of birds, masks, and monsters. Archaeologist speculated that it might have belonged to Agrippina, the mother of the Emperor Caligula. We could see several half-buried sarcophagi and what looked like many other smaller artifacts sticking out of the ground. After much debate authorities decided that the parking facility was too important to sacrifice; the artifacts were cleared out, cataloged and forgotten in the back room of a Rome museum. They had gone from one form of oblivion to another. I adorn myself with my old human personality, you might say, but I am still a great saint, and I am totally geared for an apparition. And where do I go? Where do you think? Vatican City is dead quiet, the smallest kingdom on Earth. I go down the stairs to the Sistine Chapel. It is empty and dark, of course. It is chilly too. However, never fear, my saintly eyes are as good as my upir eyes. By the way, the Earthquake in Amatrice RI, Italy, on 25 August 2016, was a magnitude 6.2, killed more than 247 people, sank the city 8 inches and was as power as 20 atomic bombs.  And I can see the swarming magnificence. #RyanPhillippe 12 of 12