Pentecost. An ARKANE Thriller (Book 1)

by J. F. Penn

  Ben raised one shaggy eyebrow.

  “Pentecost is a grand myth, Morgan. It is a metaphor for the might of the Holy Spirit empowering the church through the Apostolic tradition. Why does he think the power of the stones is actual truth?”

  Morgan glanced over at Jake, aware that her own doubts were crumbling under the weight of the evidence showing the possibility of a latent power.

  “Something real happened at Varanasi,” she continued. “But whatever the truth really is, I need to take the remaining stones to him by Pentecost in order to have Faye and Gemma returned safely and I have to go along with what he wants for now. But this last stone seems to be the hardest one to find.”

  “Of course,” Ben said. “I’ll head to the library now. There is knowledge here that even ARKANE doesn’t know about. I’ll get back to you with what I find as soon as I can. ”

  Blackfriars, Oxford, England.

  May 24 11.53AM

  Ben logged off and gazed out of his window down onto the Blackfriars quad. There were young lay students there, as well as some of the monks in their habits and several policemen. They all seemed at a loss to understand what had happened here just a few days ago. Ben had played the forgetful old monk card and they had bought it, assuming him to be an innocent bystander caught in the cross-fire. No one else had seen Morgan, so her name was kept out of the news. Maybe he had Marietti to thank for that. At the thought of that man, Ben’s face darkened, but remembering what Morgan needed stopped him from descending into ancient memory and despair. He couldn’t let the past prevent her from saving Faye, but he was deeply suspicious of what ARKANE wanted and worried about how far Thanatos might go to get the stones. ARKANE dabbled at the edge of the supernatural, where shadows darkened at the edge of the light but sometimes they strayed too far into the grey.

  Ben had several tutorials lined up that day with bright students, all eager to study the Church and find a way for the future of faith in these dark times. Ben sighed. The same arguments raged now as they did millennia ago but these students would still debate the meaning of the trinity, the paradox of suffering and the coming end times. There were no new thoughts under the sun, but Ben continued to live for the joy of studying here. Blackfriars was his true home, where he could immerse himself in learning and teaching as well as fulfilling a lifetime vow made to a dying friend.

  Heading down into the Blackfriars library, he sat at one of the solid wooden desks so characteristic of ascetic Oxford. The chairs were hard to encourage students to get up and leave, or to choose to suffer physical pain while enriching their minds, a monastic attitude honed from centuries of learning. The windows of the library looked out onto St Giles, a busy road in the heart of the city with leafy green trees and students riding by on bikes piled high with books. The libraries in Oxford were still lending books; technology didn’t seem to change the need to physically handle these old tomes, but the project to digitize the entire Bodleian was nearly finished. The University was changing, albeit slowly in a fast-paced society and Ben knew the outside world looked at monks strangely, wondering why they made the choices they did. Part of it was the speed, for he had chosen the simple life of contemplation over the urge to be more, acquire more and yet remain unsatisfied.

  He gazed out through ornamental stained glass panels, their colorful beauty filtering the light in shades of vermilion and aquamarine. Each panel depicted the heraldic emblem of an important friar in the history of the Blackfriars back to the 14th century. This was a center of tradition, an oasis of research that both exhausted and invigorated. Here was knowledge and devotion for God, the hours eaten up by the studying of ancient truth and the adoration of the divine.

  Ben spent his free time in the many libraries of Oxford, as well as the Ashmolean Museum, a magnificent treasure trove of antiquity. He lived for new things to learn and study, no longer concerned with the physical. He had given that up as his penance and his service to the order. The only other obligation in his life was the protection of the twins and his promise to their mother. This promise now drove him to the books, hoping he could find what would help Morgan.

  Ben’s experience lent him wisdom but the overflowing bookshelves behind him were his reference library. He retained almost photographic memories of which book held what information and where the book was in his own library or that of the school itself. The Blackfriars library had tomes that were physically large and chained in place to stop the students taking them away or damaging them, so they had to be read standing at special lecterns placed for that purpose only. He stood at one of the lecterns and pulled down the library’s copy of the ‘Legenda Aurea’, the Golden Legend, a collection of the lives of saints compiled in the thirteenth century. It was a popular ecclesiastical book and one of the first to be published in the English language by William Caxton. The original gospels, both those in the Christian Bible and those considered to be heretical, didn’t contain much information about what happened to the central figures in Jesus’ life. His followers dispersed after Pentecost and went their different ways but stories and traditions were passed down and collated in the Legends, which became the first popular collection of the lives of the saints. Ben knew it was based on the Dominicans’ own books of the lives of the saints, a more extensive, but little read source. Some of the stories were based on apocryphal texts like the Gospel of Nicodemus whereas others came from histories of other saints. There were visions and supernatural occurrences, some claimed to be myth and allegory, but beneath it all was a narrative of the travels of the Apostles. Ben found it to be repetitive, as all the saints performed miracles and then died in some horrible form of martyrdom. Nevertheless it was a good place to start in understanding where the stone of Simon the Zealot might be.

  Refreshing his memory with the story of Simon, Ben found that, after preaching in Egypt, the Apostle travelled to Armenia and Persia with St Jude, also called Thaddeus. They converted many people there and were both eventually martyred in Persia. In other texts he found that Simon’s relics were scattered all over the Christian empire, from the Vatican in St Peter’s Basilica, to Toulouse in France. There was little else to be found here about the movements of the Apostle, so some deeper digging was going to be required. It was time to call in some favors from the Collegium Angelicum in Rome.

  Returning to his room, Ben put in a call to the Grand Master of the Order, an old friend he had studied with in Rome many years before. He described what he was seeking. The old man on the phone became wary.

  “Be careful, Ben. These are dangerous times to be meddling with stones that hold power, whether real or perceived. Why are you helping this woman, and why is ARKANE involved?”

  “I believe ARKANE seeks to keep the stones for themselves, but Morgan and her sister Faye are like daughters to me. They’ve been marked for a special purpose and I believe I need to help them achieve it.” He paused. “I also made a vow to protect them as children and this is as sacred a promise as the one I made to the Church and the Order. I made it to a dying friend whose secrets I keep to this day. I must help them.”

  The Grand Master sighed.

  “Then I tell you this as an old friend, Ben, not as your Grand Master. I shouldn’t even be talking about this. The stones first came to our notice when they were sought by Nazi relic hunters during the Second World War. They were clutching at any myth to find supernatural weapons to help them triumph. When they came to the Vatican asking questions, the Order looked into the stones with more interest. I believe they even found some of the stones before they were lost again, but then you know all about that time.”

  Ben’s voice was heavy with regret.

  “Yes, it seems those old enemies may be rising again. I have seen the pale horse myself. An organization called Thanatos is using it as their calling card, and they are after the stones, too.”

  “Then you must take great care for these old ghosts are hungry and violent. We are too old to fight again, but I fear another clash is coming.”r />
  “I didn’t seek this fight, Enneas. It has come to my door and threatens those I promised to protect. I must do this. What can you tell me about the stone of Simon the Zealot?”

  “Our research shows that it was kept by a family in Egypt but the Keepers were corrupted over time, their faith eroded by the spread of militant Islam. The family who held it sold the stone onto the antiquities market in the early 1900s after they were stricken with poverty and disease.”

  “Do we know who bought it or where it is now?” Ben asked.

  “It’s rumored that the psychologist Carl Jung bought the stone when he was in Tunis in 1920. He collected curiosities that related to religious myth and the story apparently fascinated him. We didn’t know about the comet at the time or we would have sought it ourselves.”

  “How might that the Jung story be authenticated?”

  “We have the testimony of one of his guides from that time but it wasn’t a priority for us to investigate further. We lost track of the stone after that but perhaps you should follow the trail of Carl Jung into the deserts of North Africa.”

  Tel Aviv, Israel.

  May 24, 4.34pm

  Morgan listened to Ben talk, fascinated by the journey of the stone of Simon the Zealot. They had Ben on speakerphone, with Martin Klein also connected from the ARKANE headquarters, hoping that between them they could locate the final Pentecost stone. Ben continued his story from what the Grand Master had told him.

  “Carl Jung travelled to the oasis of Nefta while he was in Tunisia, North Africa, in 1920. He felt the land was soaked with the blood of Carthage, Rome and later the Christians and evidently it was a powerful experience for him. His memoirs say he felt an alien sense of being a European in a Moorish, desert land. He recounted a powerful dream of being within a mandala of a citadel in the desert, where he fought with and then taught a royal Arab his secrets. Morgan, you’ve studied Jung’s writings in depth. Did he ever mention this Pentecost stone?”

  Morgan frowned. “I don’t remember Pentecost being mentioned specifically, but Jung was fascinated with stones as well as being obsessed with religious mythology. At his Tower in Bollingen on Lake Zurich, he engraved stones with sacred words and images. He created from his unconscious all the time so I’m sure he would have written about this if it meant something.”

  Ben spoke again. “If he was in North Africa in 1920, doesn’t that mean he was still working on the Red Book?”

  “Of course, the timing fits,” Morgan replied. “We should look there. It’s such an outpouring of his mind at that time.”

  “What’s this Red Book and why’s it so important?” Jake looked confused. All three of the others started talking at once, and then quietened to let Morgan continue.

  “The Red Book was Carl Jung’s personal inner journey written during a breakdown in his life. It’s an oversized red leather bound book with cream artist’s paper that he filled with calligraphy of his thoughts and paintings of his inner life, visions and dreams.”

  “Why haven’t I heard of it before? It sounds amazing,” Jake said.

  “It’s only recently been published for the first time. He wrote it between 1913 and 1929 and it’s truly a work of art. His family have protected it until now.”

  “So, how could the book help us?”

  “Jung painted what he saw in his unconscious and also what affected him,” Morgan continued. “There should be signs in the Red Book if he had found something spiritually significant. Jung was a mystic, struggling to reconnect ancient myths with the modern world. He even dreamt about the coming rivers of blood in Europe, which turned out to be the Second World War. He felt his mind was broken, but that left him open to divine inspiration, ideas and thoughts that the rest of us discard in the night.”

  Martin jumped in then, keen to add his opinion. His voice crackled over the line.

  “Many of the paintings in the Red Book are representations of mandala, the circle in the square which represents the inward journey of the soul. There are images of Egyptian myth and particularly of snakes, a spiritual image of renewal and creation as well as the Christian idea of it representing the Deceiver. The snake is a powerful symbol in many ...”

  Jake jumped in, cutting off his enthusiastic oratory. “Thanks, Martin, that’s enough for now. Could we get images of it, please?”

  “Of course, I’ll send them now. I’ve seen the real thing, Morgan. It’s amazing! I was assigned to be one of the few physically present when it came out of the Swiss vault and photographed. The colors are so fresh because the family have kept it pristine for years, with hardly a soul looking at it. You’re going to be amazed when you see it.”

  As they waited for the emailed images to arrive, Morgan thought about Martin seeing the actual Red Book. She had an oversized full color reproduction, but her professional jealousy was piqued by his unique experience. Working for ARKANE certainly had its benefits. The images arrived and they opened the first file. Morgan gasped and Jake leaned in closer.

  “Is that what I think it is?”

  The image showed a square room with turquoise patterned walls and a red and black checkered floor. In the center, a man knelt in worship, his head on the ground with arms reaching towards a small grey object in front of him. From that stone a pillar of fire and flames rose up, filling the room with sparks and smoke, billowing above the man as if about to consume him.

  “I’ve seen that image many times,” Morgan said, “but never connected it with the Pentecost stones. It’s amazing. Perhaps Jung did experience something powerful, but unfortunately that doesn’t help us find the stone. Do you have any more information on where it might be now, Martin?”

  “I’ve pulled satellite images of the desert around Nefta where Jung may have seen the oasis. Perhaps the dream he describes and the painting were actually based on a real experience. There is an ancient citadel near the wadi in the desert constructed in the form of a mandala, a circle within a square. Perhaps he was taken there and had visions or an experience he chose to tell as a dream?”

  Morgan looked at Jake, her hopes colliding with doubts as they grasped at these faint possibilities.

  “We only have time for one more journey before we must head to America at Everett’s request,” she said. “He’ll give us specific directions once we’re there. We have to make a move now to get this last stone, so we need to make a decision. Ben, what do you think?”

  The old monk was scribbling on his pad, but looked up again to the camera.

  “I think you should try this wadi, Morgan. The stone was last seen in North Africa, but there are no mentions of it in Jung’s writings, only this picture which looks to be in a walled place of some sort.”

  “What about Bollingen? Wouldn’t that be a more obvious choice?” she countered.

  “Jung’s tower has been so highly researched over the years,” Ben replied. “Every stone he carved and everything he did there has been completely analyzed by his followers. I don’t think there’s anything new to be learned there, but his brief period in the desert clearly impacted him greatly and yet very little was written about it. I believe he mentioned that he saw kingfishers at the citadel in the desert and we know that had a special meaning for him. Perhaps that means it was more important than he wanted to tell in his memoir.”

  Morgan nodded, “OK, it’s worth a shot. We don’t have any better options at this point.”

  She said goodbye to Ben, his concerned eyes haunting her as they signed off the call.

  “That’s it then, we go to the desert of Tunisia.” Jake said decisively and shouted to the crew to get things moving, but Martin called them back to the phone.

  “Wait. I didn’t mention this before but it’s not deserted, Jake. The wadi is a natural fortress and our intel shows that it’s currently being used as a hideout and training facility for the local Arab Muslim extremist groups.”

  Jake sighed, “Sounds like a welcome party to me. Any chance we can slip in and out again without
being noticed?”

  “Maybe if you can draw their fire away from the citadel, but do you want me to get a backup team organized anyway?”

  “Yes, see if you can mobilize Jared Rush’s team out of Egypt. They should be able to get there about the same time as us.”

  As the plane took off Morgan closed her eyes and willed herself to Faye and Gemma, sending positive thoughts to them, wherever they were. She remembered her father teaching her from the Talmud, reading that over every blade of grass was an angel whispering ‘grow, grow.’ If God cared for each blade of grass, then surely there must be a legion of angels watching out for her family.

  The plane leveled out at altitude and the smell of strong coffee made her open her eyes again. Jake set the black nectar down.

  “Let’s go through the information again. Martin sent the intel on the groups at the wadi citadel and I want to be sure we know what we’re getting into.”

  Martin had emailed them a whole stack of research information on Jung and the North African trip as well as satellite photos of the area and demographics about the local population. He had also included more of the images from Jung’s Red Book. Morgan flicked through them and came upon the image of a mandala which reminded her of the one that had been broken during the attack on her office in Oxford. That seemed so long ago now. Her voice was wistful as she said to Jake,

  “Some scholars think that this mandala represented Jung’s internal journey in Africa. He was immensely affected by spiritual places so perhaps the mandala is some kind of clue to the Wadi citadel? If that’s right, the stone would be in the center of the mandala, as it represents the journey into self, a spiraling descent into the spirit and soul of each human life. It must be accessed through the center of the citadel tower.”