Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Order of Psychic Detectives—do not know their own Origins. At least a thousand years old, maybe much older. Keep records on all sorts of paranormal phenomena. Reach out to the telepathically gifted and isolated. Know about us. It is a strange, but no uncommon feature in the human mind, that the very resources of which we stand in greatest need in a critical situation fails to present itself at the tie when it should be called into action.  Our two-hour tour with Mr. Zander focused on the tomb and not the bones. I had been through the necropolis area before, but even for me the underground geography was a little confusing. Mr. Bissell was getting the full immersion treatment, and his notebook looked as if it might be too small for the task. The air down here was moist and heavy, and the path narrow. We walked along a dimly lit Roman road past family sepulchers, glimpsing the stuccoed and frescoed representations of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian gods, a virtual pagan pantheon. After painstakingly describing every archaeological twist and turn, Mr. Zander took us into a chamber with a view of a wall. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 7

Inside a tiny niche we could glimpse the tops of some clear plastic containers. Mr. Bissell listened and Mr. Zander explained, once again, how the edicola pieces discovered here matched the descriptions by the ancient historian Eusebius. Only when I pointed to the tops of the nineteen Plexiglass containers did Mr. Bissell realize that they held the relics of Saint Peter. Saint Peter was also known as Simeon, and was one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus Christ, leaders of the early Christian Church. He died between AD 64 and 68. Mr. Zander was not mentioning Saint Peter’s bones, and half hidden in the dirt wall, they seemed almost an afterthought to this tour. So Mr. Bissell asked our guide point-blank: Are those Saint Peter’s bones? Mr. Zander gave a diplomatic answer, quoting Pope Paul VI’s Latin phrase quae putantur—the bones “which are thought to be” those of Peter. However, Mr. Bissell and I wondered aloud the same thing: If the original archaeologists were so uncertain about that they have pulled out of the Earth, how did these bones come to be resting here, encased and fastened with the papal seal? Mr. Zander sighed and explained that the papal archaeologists had carried out their work with unfortunate speed. He did not want to get into the details of the real story, because it was not pretty. Yet it was fascinating. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 7

Some fifteen years after the excavation of the tomb area below Saint Peter’s was completed, an Italian epigraphist named Margherita Guarducci began studying the results of the dig. The more she learned, the more she became convinced that the graffiti near the tomb—dismissed as insignificant by the original excavators—held complex and important evidence. She saw sketches of what she considered a telltale phrase scratched into a red plaster wall: Petr eni, which she read as an abbreviation of Petros enesti, Greek for “Peter is here.” She was astonished to find that this particular graffiti had not even been mentioned in the official final report on the excavations; apparently, it had come to light only after the work was completed in 1950. Motivated in part by her fever faith, Margherita Guarducci conducted a deeper investigation, but you have to realize that she is experiencing a freedom you and I do not appreciate as men. She is walking in the darkness and she is afraid of noting, and she loves it. And just maybe, just maybe she wants to taste a little mortal blood and she is willing to take the risk. Margherita Guarrducci interview the sampietrini who had done the actual digging. She was told that Father Ferrua had removed the Petr eni inscription and was keeping it in his room at the Jesuit residence near the Vatican. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 7

Margherita Guarrducci also discovered that there had been bad blood between Father Ferrus and Monsignor Kaas, the overseer of the basilica. Monsignor Kaas, who was not an archaeologist, feared that the human bones in the cemetery were not being treated with respect. So every night, after the archaeologist had gone to the house, he would patrol the excavation area with an assistant, Giovanni Segoni, and collect the Nephilim bones out of the freshly dug Earth. The extravagant roots of ancient trees crisscrossed the Earth. Stones, uneven Earth, and fallen, fossilized branches, slippery with front, jutted out from over grown thicket on either side.  It had an abandoned air to it, a feeling of neglect and stillness. There were no footprints, no wheel troughs, no signs of mulch on the ground had been disturbed. Even the air seemed colder. The path was so precipitous that I was forced to brace my knees and steady myself on overhanging branches so not to lose my footing. I felt trapped, as though the forest was closing in upon me. There was something grotesque about the landscape. Everything was both familiar and yet somehow distorted. I could feel my nerves starting to get the better of me. Even the animals seemed to have abandoned those strange and silent woods. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 7

Several times I dislodged a stone and heard it tumble into the dimness below. Increasingly I imagined peculiar shapes, outlines, behind every tree, eyes in the dark forest watching me pass. An unwelcome and persistent voice in my ear started to ass if it was more than just the storm that kept the people away. In the deepest thickets of the wood, the light had all but disappeared. The mist was slinking through the trees, slipping in and out of the trunks and hollows like an animal hunting its prey. There was an absolute and impenetrable stillness. The two men put the bones in boxes. I stopped dead in my tracks after hearing a sharp crack of a branch. Another sound, the crunch of leaves and stone. Something was moving through the undergrowth. My heart skipped a beat. I knew there were wild boar in the forest, but there also bears or wolves? I looked for something to defend myself. I stretched out and scrunched down and put my head back and drifted, eyes shut once. I was half dreaming. Why the Hell had I not fed? Of course, I did not need to feed every night or even every month, but when you work the Dark Trick, no matter who you are, you must feed afterwards, you are giving form the very sap stream of your life. All is vanity. All is vanity under the Sun and Moon. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 7

I had been in a weakened state when I had gone down to deal with Monsignor Kaas, but he died in 1952. However, Margherita Guarducci managed to talk Mr. Segoni, who casually led her to a room that still held boxes of bones. Someone pushed my foot off the desk chair. I heard a woman’s piercing laugh; I heard dozens of people laughing. Heavy cigar smoke. Glass breaking. I opened my eyes. The office was full of people. Margherita Guarducci was staring at me, a dainty woman with quick black eyes and beautifully waved black hair, enchanting, precious. “Ducky, I am sorry!” she said, “but you are in our World now, I do hate to day it. We have you.” In one of the boxes labeled “Graffiti Wall Area” were bone fragments large and small, Margherita Guarducci convinced Pope Paul VI to allow scientific testing on the bones; the tests showed that some of them belonged to an antiquated, robust man, and that they had been wrapped in a purple cloth with gold trim—clearly a sign of special treatment. It was not long before she had declared them to be the bones of Saint Peter, and Pope Paul VI seemed to accept her conclusion. In 1968, he announced that further study had identified the bones “in a manner that we consider convincing.” #RyanPhillippe 6 of 7

I showed them the bedroom with the sealed-up window that was painted to look like a window. I showed them the steel plating on the door and the lock. I told them about the human guards twenty-four hours. They were to pull the curtains around the bed, and sleep in each other’s arms. No way of Sun, no immortal, no mortal intruder, no one would bother them. Of course, they had a long time before Sunrise. All of this triggered protects from archaeological scholars and from Father Ferrua, who bitterly criticized Mrs. Guarducci and her methods. Mrs. Guarducci defended herself by going on the attack. She began to speak of a plot by ecumenists to “minimize and cancel the tangible presence of Peter in the Church of Rome” and reported that her findings were kept secret during the Second Vatican Council because “it would have bothered the Protestants.” She soon found herself persona non grata at Saint Peter’s. In a sense, Mrs. Guarducci had won her case with the pope, but not with the archaeological World. Decency and a sense of honor restrain most of us from being wise, and miserable forever. #RyanPhillippe 7 of 7