The Armageddon Conspiracy (55 page)

Lucy shrugged.

‘
For fighting so well,
the angel gave Jacob the name
Israel
, which means
One who struggles with God
.
Ironic, huh?
I mean, how can the Israelites, the Chosen
People, be the ones who struggle with God?

‘
Gnostics reached what
to them was an obvious conclusion.
The Israelites are the Chosen
People of the False God and it’s the True God with whom they’re
struggling.
The very name of their nation proclaims the
truth.’

‘
How did the Gnostics
interpret the story of Jacob’s ladder?’

‘
They thought the
descending angels were souls being lured to the earth by Satan.
The
ascending angels, on the other hand, were the souls who’d achieved
Gnosis and could at last return to heaven.

‘
According to Jacob, he
had his famous dream at a place called Bethel.
The stone he rested
his head on was known as the Bethel Stone.
Legend says that the
Bethel Stone eventually found its way to Ireland and then to
Scotland, where it became known as the Stone of Destiny.
The kings
of the Scots were crowned on this sacred stone.
The English king
Edward I seized it during a war with the Scots and took it to
Westminster Abbey, where it was then used in the coronation
ceremony of English monarchs.
But Scots believed that Edward was
given a fake and the real stone never left Scottish soil.
A
prophecy said that if the true Stone of Destiny should ever leave
Scotland, the world would end.’

‘
It’s bizarre to hear
Ireland and Scotland being mentioned in all of this.’

‘
Not really.
For one
thing, the Scoti, the people who gave their name to Scotland, were
actually an Irish tribe.
Apparently, it was common for ancient
Egyptians and Israelites who found themselves in trouble in their
countries to flee to Ireland.
It was a welcoming country, far from
the reach of their enemies.
And from Ireland it’s only a short way
to Scotland.

‘
The Scoti were
supposedly named after a pharaoh’s daughter called Scota, who left
Egypt at the time of the Jewish Exodus.’

‘
Where did you hear
this story?’

‘
It’s in an ancient
manuscript called the
Scotichronicon
.
I’ve heard that the
reason so little is known about Jesus between his teenage years and
the ministry of the last three years was that he wasn’t in the Holy
Land at all.
He was somewhere in the British Isles – Glastonbury
perhaps, or Tara in Ireland.
In Dunvegan Bay, off the Isle of Skye
in Scotland,
there’s a small island called
Eilean Isa, meaning
Island of
Jesus
, where Jesus was said to have stayed
for a while.
The Outer Hebrides in Scotland have many local
traditions claiming that Jesus, his mother and uncle, all spent
time there.

‘
It doesn’t end there.
My grandfather found Gnostic documents claiming that many of the
survivors of Atlantis made their way to Scotland, and that Scotland
became the Ground Zero of Gnosticism, the epicentre from which
Gnostic beliefs radiated across the world.’

Lucy smiled.
The Scots
she’d met in her life didn’t strike her as the great, lost race of
Atlantis.
They seemed rather too keen on the
water of life
.

‘
You have a lovely
smile,’ Gresnick said.

‘
What?’

‘
You have no idea of
how beautiful you are, do you?’

Lucy felt blood rushing to her face.
‘Don’t say that to me.’

‘
Why not?
It’s true.
I
can’t help it.’

‘
But…
James
.’

‘
Come off it.
James is
a married man with a child.’

‘
James is
married
?’

73

‘
T
here they
are.’
Gresnick pointed his torch at Sinclair and James as they came
trudging along the track towards the lookout tower.

‘
Give me the torch.’
Lucy snatched it from Gresnick, and led the way down the steep
steps of Jacob’s Ladder.
Married
!
She kept saying the word,
until she barely recognised it any longer.
In all the time she was
with James, he never once lied to her.
How could a man deny his own
wife and child?
But there was another emotion – jealousy.
She ought
to have been James’ wife.
Only now did she realise how lonely she
was.
In her stupidity, she’d driven away the only person who still
meant anything to her.

As for Gresnick, what did he think he
was playing at, saying those things?
How could he think she had any
strong feelings for him?
She liked him and thought he was handsome,
but that was as far as it went.
It would take her the rest of her
life to get over James.

‘
It’s six p.m.,’
Gresnick said.
‘You know what that means.’

Six hours, Lucy thought, before 30
April 2012 – the most fateful day in human history.
Could all the
mistakes of a lifetime be repaired in six hours?
Were people all
over the world praying, screwing, screaming?
Did it matter?
She
thought weeping was the right response.
Six billion sets of tears
on the last midnight of humanity.

No one spoke as they reached the bottom
of the steps and set foot in Cheddar’s great gorge.
They made their
way along the base of the limestone cliffs towards the entrance to
the main cave that nature had painstakingly carved from the
rock.

There were no lights, apart from Lucy’s
torchbeam.
The world was lowering the final curtain and turning off
the stage lights.
There would be nothing left but void.
Did anyone
have the right answers to what life was all about?
The Catholics,
the Jews, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the Hindus?
The Gnostics?
Or
any of the rest of the ranting voices proclaiming the absolute
truth without a shred of evidence.
At midnight, someone would be
proved right, or maybe no one would.
In a way, she thought that was
the just outcome.
Humanity wrong to the bitter end, still lying to
itself as it exited the stage it had disgraced for so long.
No
curtain call required.

The Cheddar Gorge ticket office was
abandoned, every door left open.
Cheap souvenirs – guidebooks,
crystals, precious stones, beads, miniature models of the Gorge –
were scattered everywhere.

Lucy searched for a control panel and
flicked a switch.
Lights came on.

‘
Good, the generator
still works,’ Gresnick said, taking his torch back from
Lucy.

They made their way to the entrance of
the cave and prepared to go inside.

‘
Is this wise?’
Sinclair asked.
‘We could get trapped in there.
If the entrance
gets blocked, there’s no escape route.’

‘
The third of the Grail
Hallows is inside,’ Lucy said.
‘I’m going in.’

Sinclair put his hand on her shoulder.
‘But we don’t have the other Hallows.
What’s the point in
continuing with this?’

‘
I have to do
it.’

The opening in front of Lucy looked
like a gaping hole in the earth – a hellmouth – but she strode
forward, the others scurrying after her.

When she found herself
in the dreary, grey entrance chamber, she remembered how
disappointed she was as a child to see nothing but ordinary cave
walls.
You’ll see stalactites and
stalagmites
, her parents had promised her.
She’d seen those mysterious things in books and she was expecting
to be instantly greeted by a host of wonders.
Luckily, they were
just round the corner.

She felt as though she were walking
over her own footsteps of twenty years earlier, her present self
haunting her former self, or the other way around.
It always
spooked her to retrace the steps of her past, ghosts colliding in
the dark.

They went past a railed-off pit where a
9000-year-old skeleton was found in 1903, belonging to a man who’d
been ritually sacrificed and buried.
A fissure going deep into the
ground was filled with dark water.
As a kid, Lucy was convinced a
monster hid in that water.
It seemed more likely than ever.

On the right was a
cluster of musical stalactites called
Ring
o’ Bells
that made chiming sounds if you
struck them with a rod.
They enchanted Lucy on her last visit, but
now she barely glanced at them.

She led the group up a flight of steps
then through a narrow tunnel.
As they reached the end, a white
stalagmite cascade known as the Frozen Waterfall confronted them.
From there they emerged into a chamber called St Paul’s because it
reminded the man who discovered it of St Paul’s Cathedral in
London.
Breathtaking when Lucy first saw it, it was no less
impressive second time around.

Iridescent stalagmites, glinting in the
artificial light, covered one wall.
Then came a feature called
Aladdin’s Cave, like something from a fairyland, with its
stalactites enchantingly reflected in an artificial pool.
It was
the sort of pretty grotto that, as a child, Lucy wanted to take
back to her house so that she could crawl into it every night and
soak up its magic.

She twisted round and saw that the men
were all gazing, awestruck, at the spectacles within the chamber.
But she got no sense that the third of the Grail Hallows – the
enigmatic dish – was nearby.

The dish had an
uncertain status.
For a few experts, the gold, jewel-encrusted dish
on which John the Baptist’s was paraded in front of Herod was the
true Holy Grail.
Chrétien de Troyes, the first man to mention the
grail, described it unambiguously as being held by a beautiful
young woman using both of her hands.
Graal
, the precise word de Troyes
used, was an old French word for dish.
How could a dish be confused
with a chalice?

‘
It’s in the next
chamber,’ Lucy announced, her words echoing as though she’d thrown
her voice from somewhere else.
‘The chamber is called King
Solomon’s Temple.
I think that’s the right place to find a sacred
object.’

She led the group along a short
passageway and into the chamber.
They went past another fabulous
stalagmite cascade, and encountered three more striking formations
known as A Pillar of the Temple, The Archangel’s Wing and The Organ
Pipes.

They came across a second frozen
waterfall, much bigger than the previous one, this one known as
Niagara Falls.
Nearby was a feature called the Frozen River.
Lucy
stopped.
Her fingers tingled, just as they did at Tintagel and
Cadbury.

She remembered
Nostradamus’s cryptic words about this panel of Raphael’s
mural:
Bring me his head on a plate.
The
wrath of God.
The hard path to paradise.
You must go under the
earth to find the truth.
Beneath the water that freezes.

Those final
words:
Beneath the water that
freezes
.

No mystery now.
She stepped past a
guardrail and clambered up onto the Frozen River, standing several
feet above ground level.
It was incredibly slippery and she was
glad her army boots gave her a good grip.