The Armageddon Conspiracy (68 page)

Lucy went forward and collected the
spear.
As she raised it up, she realised something wasn’t right.
She didn’t get the same electrifying feeling she’d experienced back
at Cadbury Castle, yet the spearhead was glowing, looking every bit
a weapon of the supernatural.

‘
The whole spear should
be glowing, not just the spearhead,’ Sinclair yelled in sudden
panic.
‘This won’t work.’
He turned to the others and they were all
equally shocked.
‘This is the spear Hitler himself wielded.
It
must
be
genuine.’

Lucy stood there, dumbfounded.
How
could something go so wrong at this stage?

‘
Do something, Lucy,’
Sinclair shouted.
‘You’re the Chosen One.’

Lucy closed her eyes and visualised the
spear, trying to absorb its aura, trying to understand what was out
of kilter.
‘Bring me the other spear,’ she said, ‘the one I found
in the chapel at Cadbury.
The Antioch Spear.’

‘
What?’

‘
The tip of the Hitler
spear is genuine,’ she said, ‘and so is the shaft of the Antioch
Spear.
All along, both spears were authentic, at least in
part.’

Sinclair barked out orders.
Soon the
shaft of Hitler’s spear was replaced with that from the Antioch
Spear.
Instantly, the Spear glowed, all of it, shaft and tip.

‘
It’s time.’
Sinclair
raised his hands, his relief all too obvious.
‘Everything is...’
He
stopped in mid sentence, staring straight at Lucy.

‘
What is it?’
She felt
as though she had grown a new head.

Sinclair made the reverse sign of the
cross with his left hand.

‘
What is it?’
she
repeated.

‘
Your forehead,’
Sinclair said.
‘
You have the Mark of
Cain
.’

84

L
ucy held the
Spear of Destiny in front of her and stared at the glowing
spearhead, at her reflection gazing back at her from the metal
surface, a reflection bearing two serpents side by side on her
forehead.

So, it was all true: she was a direct
descendant of Cain.
For a second, the two serpents seemed to
shimmer and slither, as though they were alive.
In front of her,
the Lucifer Stone shone, a vivid, glimmering green.

‘
What’s behind the gold
curtain?’
Lucy asked, but it was a redundant question.
She’d known
from the moment she set foot inside here.
Every part of her had
sensed the strange presence.
It was the same feeling she’d
experienced several times before, but this time it was so much
stronger.

‘
You know,’ Sinclair
replied.

‘
I want to see
him.’

‘
This is not his world.
You’d see something grotesque.’

‘
He’s doing something,
isn’t he?
With his mind.’

‘
You must understand,
Lucy.
The Ark of the Covenant is right in front of us and inside it
is Jehovah himself, the Creator of this world.
The Spear of Destiny
is here too, his special weapon.
On top of it all,
you
are here, a descendant
of the last High Priest.
Do you know what that means?’

Lucy had a shrewd idea, but she didn’t
want to say.

‘
This is Jehovah’s
final opportunity to save himself.
All of his power is directed
against you, trying to bend you to his will.
If he can make you
wield the Spear of Destiny on his behalf, he’ll destroy the rest of
us.’

‘
And Lucifer is behind
that curtain trying to stop Jehovah getting into my head, is that
it?’

‘
That’s it exactly.
He’s using all his psychic energy to protect you.
But he’s in the
world of his enemy so he’s having to expend vast energy to
withstand Jehovah’s power and put a shield round you.
It’s
producing a devastating effect on him.’

‘
What do I need to do?’
Lucy took a step forward.
‘How do we make Jehovah come to us?
When
he appeared to Moses and the High Priests, everything was on his
terms.
He summoned
them
, not the other way round.’

‘
Jehovah thinks of
himself as God, but he’s just a demon – the most powerful demon of
them all, but a demon all the same.
The same rules apply to him as
to any demon.
He must come if you call him by his true
name.’

Sinclair gave Lucy a stick of ordinary
white chalk.
‘Write his name inside the pentagram,’ he said.

‘
His
true
name?
But I have no
idea know what it is.’

‘
You
do
.
Everyone does.
It’s
the Tetragrammaton.’

‘
Of course.’
T
etragrammatos
was
a Greek word meaning
four
letters
.
The Tetragrammaton was the Hebrew
name for God, consisting of the four consonants Y H W H.
That was
where the name YaHWeH came from, and JeHoVaH as its anglicised
version.
But there was another factor, one she’d never understood,
something about ancient Hebrew not having any written vowels and,
consequently, no one being quite sure how to pronounce
YHWH.

‘
Doesn’t the language
matter?’
Lucy asked.
‘I mean, don’t I have to write this in ancient
Hebrew letters instead of Latin letters?’

‘
Demons know their name
in every language.
As long as you get the name right in the chosen
language, the demon must respond.’

Lucy knelt down inside the pentagram
and wrote the letters YHWH then quickly got up and stepped
back.

Nothing happened.
Not a thing.

Lucy stared at Sinclair.

‘
This can’t be,’
Sinclair said.
‘The Devil must come to us.’

‘
He’s not the Devil,’
Gresnick bellowed.
‘He’s God, and he’ll never do your
bidding.’

Sinclair was white-faced, his hands
starting to shake.
Lucy noticed her father’s old ring glinting on
his finger.
When she was a child, her dad told her the ring had
special powers that made him as wise as Solomon, giving him mastery
over God himself.

‘
I know what to do,’
she said to Sinclair.
‘Give me your ring.’

Sinclair removed it and thrust it at
her.
She held it in the light of the Lucifer Stone and carefully
examined it.

‘
Don’t help them,
Lucy,’ Gresnick shouted.
‘You can stop this madness right
now.’

‘
Wipe those letters
away,’ Lucy said to Sinclair.

Straight away, the grand Master got
onto his knees and, with the edge of his mantle, cleaned the
letters ‘YHWH’ away.

Lucy breathed in hard.
She sensed the presence of her soul-line, all the previous lives
she’d led in her endless cycles of reincarnation.
She sensed too
the ancient bloodline on her mother’s side, taking her back to the
last High Priest who stood in the Holy of Holies of Solomon’s
Temple before its final destruction.
And she felt too the blood of
her father coursing through her, the blood of countless generations
stretching back to Cain himself.
But there was one stage beyond
that, wasn’t there?
Cain’s mother was Eve, and his father the Angel
of Light himself.
Lucy: the offspring of Lucifer.
Her ultimate
ancestor was standing behind the curtain just a few feet from her,
the chief of the seraphim, the highest of the nine choirs of angels
of the Angelic Host.
‘Seraphim’ came from
saraph
, an ancient word for serpent.
The seraphim were the serpent angels, hence the serpents branded
even now on her forehead.

She knelt down once
more with the chalk.
Now, she carefully started to write a new set
of letters – those inscribed on her father’s ring.
They formed the
words
Shem ha-Mephorash
.
They were the magic words, her father had told her, that
gave Solomon command over demons and spirits, that allowed him to
summon the arch demon Asmodeus to help him build the Temple, and
that allowed golems – false men without souls – to be created.
They
were the very words that Moses pronounced to part the Red Sea.
By
invoking those words of power, the ring bearer might also glimpse
the future.

Lucy’s father was keen to tell her one
other fact about Solomon, one that now seemed astounding: Solomon
had turned his back on Yahweh and become an apostate.
How could
that be?
The very man responsible for the great Temple ended up
denying Yahweh and died unreconciled, full of hate for Yahweh.
The
Temple itself was given over to the worship of Yahweh’s enemies.
Yet everyone knew that Solomon was the wisest of men.
Did that
wisdom finally lead him to Gnosticism?

Lucy was halfway through writing the
letters when Sinclair told her to stop.

‘
No,’ he snapped, ‘that
can’t be right.
Shem ha-Mephorash
means “the explicit name”.
It’s an epithet for
Satan’s true name, but it’s not the name itself.’

Lucy shook her head.
‘You’re wrong.
This is the name that was written on the underside of the
foundation stone.’

Sinclair stared at her, momentarily
horrified, but then he started to smile.
‘Yes, what else but
deception would you expect from the Prime Deceiver?
What better way
for him to conceal his true name than under the guise of an
epithet?
Who would ever guess the epithet was the actual name?
It’s
genius.’

Lucy began to write again, but tears
clouded her eyes as startlingly vivid memories of her childhood and
her father overwhelmed her.
Lifting her sleeve, she tried to wipe
them away.
Noises erupted behind her.
Shouts, a scuffle.
She heard
Gresnick’s voice.

‘
Don’t do it, Lucy.
You
can’t let it end like this.
You mustn’t.’

She twisted round to see what was
happening.
Gresnick grabbed a sword from one of the knights and ran
towards Sinclair, holding the blade double-handed.
Morson snatched
out his pistol and fired at Gresnick.
Two bullets slammed into
Gresnick’s legs and he sprawled forward, his hands flailing in
front of him, his sword clanging onto the floor.

‘
Shall I kill him?’
Morson raised his pistol and took aim again.

‘
No, I want him to see
this,’ Sinclair said, ‘while he bleeds to death.’

Lucy watched Gresnick’s blood spreading
over the floor.
When it reached her hands, she lifted them up,
staring at the blood.

‘
I can’t bear this,’
she said.

‘
Don’t destroy us,
Lucy.’
Gresnick’s voice was already growing weaker.
‘We bleed, we
suffer, but we love too.
I beg you, don’t kill
love
.’

Lucy hated those words.
She’d spent so
much time in the last few months trying to avoid feeling anything.
Now feelings were crowding in on her from every direction, driving
her mad.
Lost love, grief, abandonment, loneliness…everything she
dreaded.