The armageddon conspirac.., p.38
The Armageddon Conspiracy, page 38
‘But you’re talking about killing the Creator. It’s impossible.’
‘Have you understood nothing? It’s impossible to kill God, but not Satan. He himself is a created being and everything that was created can be destroyed.’
‘But how to do it? I mean the actual process.’
‘It’s right in front of you. The mural shows all the ingredients, everything that must be in place before the deed can be accomplished.’
Lucy gazed at it again. ‘Anything designed to strike down God, must, in the end, strike down its maker.’
‘Precisely,’ Sinclair said. ‘It’s justice, the completion of the circle, the only way this could ever end. Satan must die by his own weapon. The first weapon must be the last. The eternal conflict will end when Rex Mundi’s own evil is turned against him.’ He grabbed Lucy by the shoulders. ‘How could you be forgiven if you didn’t do it? You’d be the biggest criminal in history, the eternal criminal, reviled until the end of time.’
Lucy stood there, practically paralysed.
‘I understand what you’re saying,’ she said hesitantly, ‘yet, at the same time, I don’t. You don’t know what you’re asking me to do.’
‘I’m asking you to end the horror. I’m asking you to fulfil the prophecy. You came into this world for precisely this reason, this one moment in time, this single action. It’s your purpose, your fate. You can’t refuse.’
‘But by killing Jehovah, I kill his Creation too. The world ends. Everyone dies. Six billion people. I can’t do it, I just can’t.’
‘Only Satan dies, and his material world. Darkness will be the only thing left to commemorate their ill-fated existence. As for the rest of us, sure, our physical bodies will perish, but our eternal souls will instantly return to paradise. It will be over in a single flash. No one will suffer. From mortality to immortality, from hell to heaven, in the time it takes for the spear to penetrate Satan’s heart.’
‘How do I know you’re right?’
‘You’ve always known this. Your book is called The Unholy Grail: The Secret Heresy. All along, you knew there were two competing religions. This struggle has gone on from the dawn of time. You understood. Not the precise details, but you intuited the big picture. The essence of your book is exactly right: two rival Gods, one of them true, one false. The legend of the Holy Grail has always been one thing and one thing only – a coded reference to the search for the identity of the True God. All those who succeed join God in heaven; all those who fail are condemned to hell, to lifetime after lifetime of despair. A never-ending wheel of human misery. Until now.’
Lucy continued to stare at the depictions of the Spear of Destiny in the mural. They were flashing, glowing with a vivid blue colour. She could almost reach out and touch them.
‘Like every Grail Quester, you’ve always been searching for the truth, Lucy. Place your faith in the one True God. Let his divine light guide you.’
‘But I’m not the first to be in this position, am I? Others have been here before me.’
‘Not exactly like this, but it’s true that Cain’s priesthood has assembled this way four times before. The first time was in ancient Atlantis. Their attempt to carry out their sacred mission went disastrously wrong and Atlantis was wiped from the face of the earth.
‘The second time was when the great Cathar families of France came together to form the Knights Templar. They went to Jerusalem to discover the ancient treasures and secrets in the Temple of Solomon that would allow Cain’s destiny to be fulfilled. The Inquisition stopped them before they could finish their work.
‘The third time was when the Freemasons came together to create the United States of America – the Templars’ fabled Merica, the new Atlantis. But too many secrets had been lost and they were unable to discover the whereabouts of the Grail Hallows.’
‘The fourth time was when the Nazis thought they had assembled all of the Grail Hallows. They carried out the ceremony in the ruins of Montségur, but nothing happened. They failed because three of their Grail Hallows, and the Ark of the Covenant, were fake.’
Sinclair explained that the Nazis were completely unaware of Raphael’s hidden mural. It was only when he himself became a senior figure in the Vatican that things changed. Rumours circulated that the Pope kept visiting the tomb of Pope Julius II. Sinclair befriended the Pope’s most trusted aide and, after years of perseverance, managed to recruit him to the cause of Gnosticism.
‘You killed the Pope, didn’t you?’ Lucy said.
Sinclair nodded. ‘The Pope’s aide, wearing special gloves, handed the Pope a note impregnated with an untraceable poison. We needed the Vatican to be in crisis. We assassinated the American president for the same reason. Without those two symbols of temporal and spiritual power, the world would be rudderless at the moment of its greatest peril.’
‘You’ve thought of anything, haven’t you?’
‘There’s no room for error. If we don’t get it right this time, we’ll never get another chance.’
‘You haven’t told me the most important thing of all.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’ve told me what the weapon is that can kill Jehovah, but you haven’t said how you’ll make Jehovah appear. The Spear of Destiny is useless if you can’t make that happen.’
‘We have Jehovah.’ Sinclair smirked. ‘In a box.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Jehovah’s only a mile away, at our final destination.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Sinclair pointed at Raphael’s mural. ‘The Ark of the Covenant, Lucy, that’s where Jehovah lives. The Ark is waiting for you – at Glastonbury.’
Chapter 80
‘It’s time to finish this.’ Sinclair ordered his knights to collect the Grail Hallows and the head and bones of Baphomet, and take them to the trucks parked outside. Several soldiers escorted each of the knights. Gresnick and James were pushed forward at gunpoint.
‘Burn down the castle,’ Sinclair said to Morson. ‘We won’t be coming back.’
As Morson collected some petrol canisters from a storage area and doused the hall, Lucy wondered why Sinclair was so confident. It seemed ridiculous to say that he had God in a box, as though the Creator were some caged animal. Surely Jehovah could do whatever he liked. This was his world. Even Sinclair said so.
‘Why hasn’t Jehovah killed you?’ she asked. ‘Why has he let you come this far? If he were as powerful as you say, he wouldn’t let you take another step towards him. You would never have been able to trap him.’
‘Lucy, everything in this world is part of Jehovah. The law of conservation of mass-energy – the first law of thermodynamics – says that mass-energy can be neither created nor destroyed. When Jehovah created the material universe, he had to use a vast amount of his personal energy to accomplish it. All of the matter, dark matter and dark energy that physicists study is all born of Jehovah, and is imbued with his evil essence. Much energy was also channelled into the Spear of Destiny. The result is that Jehovah is feeble now, with little of the power you’d expect. Shaking the planet with his crude, spiteful earthquakes is the best he can do.
‘What the Bible keeps secret is that the Spear of Destiny was always paired with the Ark of the Covenant. The High Priest of Solomon’s Temple used the spear to direct Jehovah’s energy. Without it, Jehovah’s remaining power couldn’t be focused. That’s why he’s now lashing out so wildly and indiscriminately, causing catastrophes all over the world. But without the spear, he’s blind. He can’t see us, can’t target us with his power. While we have his spear, we’re invulnerable.’
Sinclair’s explanation made some sort of weird sense, yet Lucy remained doubtful. She wasn’t even sure Sinclair knew what the right spear was. For her, it was the one she found in the chapel at Cadbury, not the one Hitler took from Vienna.
‘Let’s go,’ Sinclair said as Morson took a candle and set the petrol alight.
Flames instantly engulfed three sides of the castle. They hurried out of the main entrance as the blaze pursued them.
Sinclair clutched the Lucifer Stone. It was an extraordinary object, but Lucy still struggled to accept that it was the real Holy Grail. Oddly, that somehow made it the perfect candidate: unexpected, elusive, enigmatic. Above all – if Sinclair was right – it was an object not of this world. What could be more appropriate as the Holy Grail?
‘What about Morson’s captain?’ she asked as they emerged into the outer courtyard. ‘You said there was something special about him.’
‘Special?’ Sinclair seemed almost amused. ‘If my name is special, the captain’s is unique.’
‘Lucius something,’ Lucy said. ‘He has the male version of my name.’
‘His name is Lucius Ferris, Lucy. When he gazed into the stone, it didn’t show his name. For him, the effect when he touched it was entirely different.’
Lucius Ferris. There was something familiar about the name. Lucy felt icy cold, despite the ferocious heat of the burning castle.
‘Why are you blocking it?’ Sinclair asked. ‘You already know the significance of the captain’s name.’
Lucy shook her head, but the name was pulsing in her mind like a strobe, burrowing into her unconscious. Lucius Ferris. My God, it was so obvious. It was one of the oldest names of all, a name from before time. When the captain held the stone, it didn’t show his name for one simple reason. The stone was his. Lucius Ferris – Lucifer.
The stone was designed to transform Lucifer into a human. It could do the reverse as well – turn a suitable human into Lucifer. It had changed the captain into an angel, a dark angel, the most famous angel of all. All along, that was the presence she’d sensed, first at Tintagel then at Cadbury and finally Cheddar Gorge. Lucifer was walking the earth.
‘He’s waiting for us at our final destination,’ Sinclair said. ‘He’s at Glastonbury Tor with the Ark of the Covenant.’
Lucifer at Glastonbury? It seemed insane. The early Christian leader Tertullian was famous for saying: It is certain because it is impossible. Lucy had always found it a mad statement. Now it seemed the cornerstone of logic.
The two trucks were waiting at the far side of the courtyard. They now had huge Skull and Crossbones emblazoned on their sides: white on a red background, the sign of No Quarter to the enemy. Pirate trucks, Lucy thought, making the journey to the end of the world.
As they climbed into the trucks, Lucy caught James’s eye, but he turned away and scrambled into the other truck. Gresnick bowed his head and also headed for the other truck. It seemed no one wanted to look at her: not Sinclair, not Morson, nor any of the soldiers or knights. No one.
When she took her seat in the back corner, she felt as though she’d been branded an Untouchable. Maybe they were right to avoid her. What Sinclair was proposing was beyond comprehension. As far as she could make out – Sinclair had carefully avoided spelling it out – she was expected to stab the Spear of Destiny into the Ark of the Covenant. Just as it had killed Jesus Christ, the spear would somehow kill God, or, at any rate, what most people called God. To the Gnostics, the god inside the Ark was Satan, but it was impossible for Lucy to shake off the beliefs she was raised with. For her, she was being asked to slaughter the God, the one, the only, the Creator. It seemed an inconceivable act, yet Sinclair was certain it could be done.
She didn’t share his confidence. She suspected it would be a ceremony that ended in failure like all the previous attempts – like her life. Like love? The only person on earth who would never betray her was James, yet he had. The unthinkable, the unimaginable: yet it happened. That was the truth of life. Humanity’s Holy Grail was never anything but an unholy Grail.
She couldn’t make up her mind. One moment the idea of the world ending at her hands seemed absurd. Even if she could do it, she wouldn’t. A moment later, she could imagine nothing better than ending this atrocity exhibition once and for all. Rimbaud said: Life is the farce which everyone has to perform. Was it her role to bring down the final curtain on the grand farce?
When the blood ran down her legs at Cheddar Gorge, it was as if her own body had turned against her. Did it understand what she was being asked to do? The material world was full of suffering. Look at all the poverty and pain, the lies, cruelty and violence, the endless wars and madness. It deserved to end. Its greatest benefactor would be the person who put it out of its misery. Did it really fall to one person to end it? To her? Was she like one of the leaders in the Cold War with all the apocalyptic nuclear codes in his briefcase, his finger poised over the red button ready to unleash the final destruction?
Those old politicians were prepared to do it. Why not her? But, if she did, she’d be killing billions. She’d be the greatest homicidal maniac in history, the ultimate pariah. Would anyone want that to be their epitaph, even if there was no one left to care?
The trucks motored slowly along the snow-covered roads leading to Glastonbury. Lucy tried to block out what lay ahead. Sinclair, who’d been sitting near the tailgate of the truck, made his way up to the back to sit with her.
‘I know it’s hard for you to come to terms with all of this,’ he said. ‘The truth is, everything collides in you, all the forces of history.’
Lucy was astonished by what Sinclair then told her. Her mother was a Jewess who could, he said, trace her bloodline all the way back to Seriah, the last High Priest of Solomon’s Temple. That meant she was descended from Aaron, brother of Moses. It was essential for her to belong to that bloodline because the Ark couldn’t function properly unless one of Aaron’s descendants was present. The Gnostics’ attempt at Atlantis had gone catastrophically wrong because no such person was there. The Nazis failed too, and one of the reasons was that they refused to have a Jew amongst them. This time, the Invisible College had ensured everything was done properly.
‘Are you saying my father didn’t marry my mother for love? It was arranged?’
‘As it turned out, your father did love your mother, but he wasn’t supposed to. All that was required of him was to have a child with her. Your father can trace his line back to Cain. We have unbroken records dating back ten thousand years, with Cain’s name the very first. Your bloodline could not be more illustrious – with Cain on your father’s side, and Aaron, the patriarch of the Levite priesthood, on your mother’s. You were raised as a Catholic in an attempt to disguise your true heritage.’
Lucy shook her head. No wonder she was at war with herself. Her blood was practically fighting itself. A Catholic, a Jew and a Gnostic all in one. If the legend were true that Lucifer was Cain’s real father then she had supernatural elements in her blood, an innate hatred of Jehovah, yet she also had the blood of Aaron, one of the most revered figures of Jehovah’s Chosen People. And she was a Catholic, the religion that was the historical enemy of both Jews and Gnostics.
‘The final side-panel of Raphael’s mural is the summary of this ancient struggle,’ Sinclair said.
Lucy pictured it instantly: the one that showed the city of Rome in a mirror with the Vatican displayed upside-down in an egg timer.
‘The proper name of Rome is Roma,’ Sinclair said. ‘Roma in a mirror spells Amor. Amor is the Cathars’ word for love. The Cathars regarded Roma as the symbol of temporal power, of Satan’s kingdom. Amor was the antidote, the opposite of everything Roma represented. Amor was spiritual power, the kingdom of light. Roma versus Amor is the eternal war.
‘Amor can be split into a mor meaning without death in the Cathars’ language. That’s the prize Amor offers – immortality, deathlessness, the final release from Satan’s hell. All of us must decide which side we’re on: Roma or Amor.’
The truck stopped. ‘We’re here,’ Sinclair said. ‘It’s time, Lucy.’
The others got out of the truck, leaving Sinclair alone with Lucy. For a second, he held his hand against her cheek and she trembled. Her father used to do that too.
He climbed out of the truck then helped her down, never taking his eyes off her. Was he imagining what he’d do if he were in her position? But he wouldn’t hesitate, would he?
They had parked outside Glastonbury’s famous Chalice Well gardens. Lucy could scarcely believe she was here, just a few hundred yards from her convent. Beginnings and endings – always the same. Scientists said the universe began with a Big Bang. Was that how it would end too? She would pierce the Ark of the Covenant with the Spear of Destiny and it would cause a second Big Bang to reverse the first. With that apocalyptic explosion, hell would end forever.
Let there be light. Perhaps those were the words said before the original Big Bang. Did Satan say them? Jehovah? Allah? God? Yahweh? Christ? Did these names mean anything any longer? Through a dazzling explosion, the material world was born. Through a matching explosion it would die. The eternal symmetry. The perfect circle. As you raced forward, you simply get back faster to where you started.
Morson pushed open the wrought-iron gates of the gardens and everyone went inside. Although the rest of Glastonbury was snowbound, the gardens were untouched by a single flake. As at Carbonek, blue floodlights lit everything.
They walked over a cobbled stone path beneath a living archway of ivy entwined with great oak beams, past two great yews – trees sacred to Druids, Lucy remembered – then past a summer house and a couple of benches overlooked by a sculpture of an angel.
They reached one of Glastonbury’s most frequently visited sights – a Holy Thorn hawthorn tree. Automatically, Lucy recalled the legend. Joseph of Arimathea, it was said, drove his staff into the earth at Glastonbury, and it miraculously took root and blossomed into a Holy Thorn tree. The tree standing here now was a direct descendant of that sacred original and famously flowered at two special times each year – Christmas and Easter. The perfect Christian tree.
