The Armageddon Conspiracy (53 page)

‘
Hold on,’ Gresnick
said.
‘Are you saying that to find the Ark is to find
God?’

‘
According to the Jews,
yes.’

Gresnick rubbed his head again.
‘The
Ark and the Spear of Destiny are both said to possess massive,
unimaginable power, the power of God himself.
Is that what this is
really all about?
The Gnostics are going to do something with the
Spear and the Ark to unleash the power of Creation.’

‘
It looks that way,
doesn’t it?’
Sinclair said.
‘Maybe these Gnostics are planning
something so sacrilegious it will bring the final wrath of God down
on us.’

‘
What kind of
sacrilege?’
Lucy asked.

‘
That’s what we need to
work out.
But don’t kid yourself, Lucy.
Morson is determined to
make you part of it.
You must prevent it.
If you fail, the world
will end in a matter of hours.’

69

J
ames trudged up
a stony path.
He couldn’t believe Lucy had refused to come with
him.
Was she deliberately torturing him?
Always, he was supportive,
understanding, loving, and all he got in return was to be treated
like this.
When he reached the summit, he turned and looked back.
A
frozen landscape stretched before him.
It looked like the land of
the dead.
He could imagine millions of male ghosts as wretched as
he was wandering through this snowlocked land, their hands
trembling with misery, playthings of faerychildren like Lucy.
All
of them had the same story to tell, the tale Keats told so
chillingly:

I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they
all;

They cried – ‘La Belle Dame sans
Merci

Thee hath in thrall!’

I saw their starved lips in the
gloam,

With horrid warning gaped wide,

And I awoke and found me here,

On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here

Alone and palely loitering,

Though the sedge is withered from the
lake,

And no birds sing.

That was exactly where
he was – on the cold hill side, with no birds singing:
Lucy’s world
.
An
impossible word entered his head and for a second it took his
breath away with just how absurd, how shocking, it was; a word he
couldn’t possibly associate with Lucy.
Yet the word refused to go
away, and he realised something inside him had changed in the most
disturbing way.
A switch had been flicked, an irrevocable switch.
The word was so bold in his mind it might as well be written in the
sky for everyone to see.

Evil
.

Kruger was right – Lucy was the Chosen
One of Lucifer.
One of the ancient signs was a blazing, destructive
light in the sky, just as they’d seen less than an hour ago.

With his mind harbouring ever-darker
thoughts, he resumed his walk and found a small rope bridge
crossing a chasm, with a river far below.
Next to the bridge was
one of those old telescopes he used to find at the seaside as a
kid, where he could put in a coin and look at passing ships for a
minute or two before a shutter came down and everything turned
black.

On a summer’s day, the view from here
was sure to be spectacular.
For a second, he longed to be a kid
again, blissfully unaware of creatures like Lucy.
He squinted
through the eyepiece and was astonished to find that it was working
perfectly.
Someone must have jammed the mechanism.

He swung the telescope in the direction
taken by Lucy and the others.
It didn’t take him long to locate
their carriage.
As he gazed at the terrain just ahead of them, his
mouth fell open.

Jesus Christ, he
thought, what the hell is
that
?

70

‘
L
ook how
spooked they are.’
Gresnick fought to control the horses as they
struggled to turn away.

‘
What
are
those things?’
Sinclair couldn’t hide his alarm.

They were confronted by
a vast field full of strange upright pointed structures that
resembled flower buds or seed pods.
Each was bright green and
taller than a basketball player.
It was like a scene from
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
.

‘
I saw one of those at
Kew Gardens a couple of years ago,’ Lucy said.
‘They come from the
rainforests of Sumatra.’

‘
So what the hell are
they doing in England?’
Gresnick was still struggling to pacify the
horses.

‘
I can’t remember their
proper name,’ Lucy said, ‘but their nickname is
corpse flowers
.
When they bloom, they
make an appalling stink like the odour of rotting flesh.
It can
take these things up to six years to flower, and then they keep
their bloom for only a couple of days.
That’s why people are so
fascinated by them.
Nearly every Botanic Garden in the world has
one.’

‘
Look, all the snow is
melting round the flowers,’ Gresnick said.
‘How did it get so hot
all of a sudden?’

Lucy was trying to remember all the
things she’d learned about these bizarre flowers.
They could
metabolise sugars to accelerate vaporisation and help spread their
stench faster.
The amount of energy they generated allowed them to
produce a temperature several degrees above air temperature.

The horses didn’t want to go anywhere
near the flowers.
They were snorting frantically, shying away,
trying to go back the way they’d come.

‘
Something’s near,’
Lucy said.
‘I’ve felt this before.
Something terrible
.’

‘
I feel it too.’
Sinclair gripped the crucifix hanging round his neck.

Lucy expected to see the darkness of
the past and future, darkness itself, rising up from behind the
flowers.

As they watched, the structures began
to open.
They were like weird, organic chimneys belching out hot,
putrid stenches into the air, vapours that would attract carrion
insects.
In seconds, the soil around the flowers came to life.
The
fetid odour had brought every insect from miles around.

‘
Listen
,’ Gresnick yelled.

There was an extraordinary buzzing
sound, as if the air had an electric current flowing through it.
The sky darkened as a cloud of flies appeared over the flowers.
The
whole area now smelled of putrefying flesh.
Hundreds of thousands
of flies, millions maybe, were heading from all directions towards
the flowers – huge, rancid beacons of hell.

The odour was unbelievably foul now, as
if the air were turning to poison.
Lucy held her hand over her
mouth and nose.
The horses reared up.

‘
Jump off,’ Gresnick
shouted.
‘I can’t hold them any longer.’

Lucy and Sinclair both leapt off.
Gresnick had to throw himself to safety as the horses stampeded
away.

‘
Shit!’
the colonel
grunted.
‘I think we’ve lost them for good.’

While he and Sinclair stared at the
disappearing carriage, Lucy walked forward towards the nearest
corpse flower.
Black beetles were swarming over her feet, but she
scarcely noticed.
She gazed, transfixed, at the amazing structure
with its velvety maroon interior.
Reaching out, she touched the
fleshy yellow upright stem.
Without warning, it collapsed, as
though its immense weight was suddenly too much for it.
All across
the field, other corpse flowers did the same, withering and
dying.

Gresnick came over and put his hand
round Lucy’s arm.
‘Come away from here.
This place is
dangerous.’

As he spoke, Lucy heard a scuttling
sound.
Tens of thousands of cockroaches emerged from the collapsed
insides of the corpse flowers and swarmed towards her.
Black rain
lashed down, probably an after-effect of the asteroid
explosion.

‘
Run
!’
Sinclair bellowed.

They sprinted away from the seething
mass of insects and didn’t stop until they’d put hundreds of metres
between themselves and the corpse flowers.

Sinclair was exhausted.
He vomited into
a snowdrift at the side of the road.
Lucy bent over too, gripping
her knees.

Gresnick hauled her upright.
‘Are you
OK?’

She nodded.
The stench of the corpse
flowers clung to every part of her.

‘
Don’t go off like that
ever again.’
Gresnick wrapped her in his arms.
‘You’re the most
precious thing in the world.’

Lucy pressed herself against him and
kissed him.

71

J
ames turned
away from the telescope, shaking.
No doubt
now
.
Lucy was mocking his love for her.
She’d cast a new spell; found a fresh victim.
He recalled a
Biblical injunction: ‘
Thou shalt not suffer
a witch to live
.’

His mind worked fast.
The others would
have to use this path to get to Cheddar Gorge.
He would go down
shortly to meet them then bring them back up here.

Staring at the rope bridge, he knew
what he had to do.
Clutching the penknife he found at the abbey, he
walked towards the bridge.
He carefully frayed the undersides of
the main supporting ropes, trying to judge how to ensure it would
collapse when someone got halfway across.
He would send Lucy across
the bridge first.
And that would be the end of it.

A hard frost had
descended as the sun started to go down.
Everything was slippery.
It would be dark by the time they were ready to cross so no one
would notice the damage to the ropes.
He stared at the narrow,
winding river far below.
Lucy would topple down there, the child of
the Devil falling into the abyss.
It was the right – the
Biblical
– ending.
And
then the birds would sing again.

****

I
t was a
pitch-black night and the temperature was falling
rapidly.

‘
A rope bridge?
You
didn’t say anything about that when you told us about this track.’
Gresnick stared incredulously at the flimsy structure, as he swung
his torch from one end to the other.
‘It doesn’t look
safe.’

‘
We don’t have a
choice,’ James said.
‘This is the only way to the Gorge.
It’s a
tourist trail, so it should be OK.’

‘
It’s either this or
trekking for miles to find a ford or a proper bridge over the
river,’ Sinclair said.

‘
We don’t have time.’
Lucy had lost patience with all of this talking.
She stared down
into the chasm.
The rushing water made a rumbling sound that echoed
off the steep cliffs.
The thought of crossing over that narrow
bridge terrified her.