The Priory of Finchelsea XVI

The home of sir Teabag Sumner was a comfortable residence on London's Gower Street. Still, the reception given to two women at some time after three in the morning was hardly friendly. After Lil had leaned on the bell for five minutes someone inside was heard cursing before the door was opened.
"Dr. Lilian Barton," Lil introduced herself to the annoyed-looking man who stood there. "This is Kathy Carlton, who came along for the ride. Is Sir Teabag home?"
The man said a very rude word, and Lil sighed.
"Please! I'm a lady, you know. Kathy's one too."
"Do you know what time it is?"
"Twenty past two in the morning. But I'll kip down on the sofa until sir Teabag turns up."
"Lilian Barton as ever was!"
The jovial cry of greeting came from behind the irritated servant. Lil's eyes widened in delight.
"Sir Richard Arcos! What in the world are you doing here?"
"Burgling the place. No, I'm imposing on sir Teabag Sumner's hospitality while taking a sabbatical in which I'm studying at Dr. Williams' Library. I saw your lecture advertised."
"Don't remind me," Lil stepped into the hall, kicked off her shoes and collapsed into the nearest chair. "I'm just about ready for suicide after that!"
"So why are you here? Surely you could top yourself quite comfortably in the privacy of your own home? Or hotel room."
"Because a man called Dr. Llewellyn Pryce-Rees-Evans-Jones got murdered in the Church of Christ the King, and he left clues that suggested I did it."
"Did you?"
"No!"
"Well then, lass," Sir Richard smiled. "We must find out who did, and why."

The Priory of Finchelsea XV

Barsabbas knocked on the door of Christchurch, Spitalfields. Not surprisingly, there was no-one inside at such an unearthly hour, so Barsabbas had to force his way in with a handy crowbar he had brought along for just such an occasion.
The 18th century church was in darkness, and Barsabbas smiled as he moved silently down the aisle.
The Hearthstone was here, he could feel it. There, by the altar, would be the clue in the stained glass, the clue that would mean the end of these despicable heretics. He laughed like a drain for ten minutes at the thought of it.
"It will be ours! All ours! The Preciouss!"he cried.
His green and yellow habit flying behind him, Barsabbas ran down the aisle. Unlike Lil, who had a hardcore Presbyterian's distain for all the trappings of ritualism, he carefully crossed himself before he stepped into the railed-off area.
There was the window. He shone a torch on it and cried out with joy.
The mystic letter 'M' was there, plain to see. In the next pane would be the second letter. Looking, Barsabbas saw it. The letter 'U', symbolic of the Holy Cup. He was close. Extremely close.
Barsabbas' 'phone rang. He answered it.
"I'm busy burgling a church," he complained. "Call back later."
"It is I, Barsabbas, the Teacher. Have you got the Hearthstone?"
"I am in the church, Master. All the clues are here. I have found two of the mystic letters, 'M' and 'U'. And the third is..." He looked. "Master, it is a 'G'. What does 'G' stand for?"
The Teacher cried out in rage and cursed loudly for a good ten minutes.
"Master?"
"Mug!" the Teacher almost choked.
"I can't get you a mug."
"No, you fool, M-U-G spells 'mug'. We've been taken for a ride! Dr. Llewellyn Pryce-Rees-Evans-Jones deliberately set you on a flase trail!
All colour drained from Barsabbas' face, and his mouth dropped open in horror.
"No! Master, we have lost!"
"No, Barsabbas. I have learned that Dr. Llewellyn Pryce-Rees-Evans-Jones left a clue before he died, naming a Dr. Barton. You must find Dr. Lilian Barton and bring her to me!"
"Yes, Master," Barsabbas replied obediently.

The Priory of Finchelsea XIV

The English Chapel was deserted when Lil and Kathy reached it. The corpse was gone, and the way to the Tabernacle was open. Lil sprinted across the floor, jumped over the altar-rail and tried the doors of the tabernacle on the altar.
It was unlocked. She opened the doors and looked inside. In the dim light of the chapel she could see little.
"I've got a flashlight," Kathy offered. Lil shuddered.
"Don't remind me! What's the man got against me anyhow? Apart from my being American, of course."
"Your book The Sexualisation of Imagery. Flash is a devout Anglican, and he thinks that all the Gnostic stuff is blasphemous."
Lil groaned again.
"He hasn't read the book! I was arguing it was all absurd!"
Kathy shone her flashlight into the dark interior of the Tabernacle. Lil, who was a Presbyterian, felt a certain saisfaction in violating this piece of Popish furnishings.
There was a key there. It was an interesting sort of key, made of rock crystal with a Welsh dragon for its head. Lil picked it up and looked at it with interest.
"A key. The trouble is, I've got no idea what it opens. Try that blacklight torch!"
Kathy did. Nothing showed. Lil sighed.
"So we're stuck. Unless... shine it on the floor again!"
"But..."
"Do it!"
Kathy did. Again the now familiar words showed in the beam from the blacklight torch.
There was something she was missing, Lil thought. She, Lil Barton, brilliant college professor...
Of course!
"The second line!"
"Summer is acumen in?"
"No. we expected it to. Look at the second 'm'!"
It didn't read 'm' at all, it was an 'n'. The message actually said "Sumner is acumen in".

"Sumner!" Kathy exclaimed. "That must be sir Teabag Sumner!"
"Teabag?" Lil asked, amazed that anyone would have such a name.
"Yes. I don't know why. But he's a world expert on the Holy Grail! And he lives in Gower Street."
"Then let's get there - quick!"
Lil dashed out of the church, and Kathy followed.

The Priory of Finchelsea XIII.

Lil Barton followed Miss Carlton through the maze of passages underneath the Church of Christ the King, Gordon Square. Lil's mind was racing. What had Dr. Llewellyn Pryce-Rees-Evans-Jones meant by his cryptic messages? Was it just to implicate her in his murder, or did it have some deeper meaning?
"Kathy! What was the first clue?" she asked.
"Ha Cohen Ha Gadol!"
"Ha Cohen... Kathy, where would you expect to find the Jewish High Priest?"
"In the Temple."
"Sure..." Lil sighed. "And no temple. Unless... This building is owned by the Catholic Apostolic Church. They believed in the restoration of Apostles, but with the death of the last of the end-times apostles, they are in the wilderness... that's it! the wilderness! In the Wilderness the High Priest would be in the Tabernacle!"
"I don't get it."
"Church furnishings! I know this building, and I know the English Chapel. The people who built it, and the people who own it today, believe in the reservation of the Sacrament. It's a Romanist perversion, but it's done! And the structure in which the sacrament is reserved is called a Tabernacle. The Catholic Apostolic Church went in for big, elaborate tabernacles on their altars."
"So?"
"So it's a big box! Perfect for hiding things in!"

The Priory of Finchelsea XII.

"How are we going to get out of here?" Kathy asked Lil. Lil Barton shook her head.
"Try a window. They usually seem to work. Except this place has a sunken garden all the way round it."
"Flash put a tracker in your pocket."
"The lousy..." Lil dug in her jacket pockets. In the left-hand one she found her keys, and the right... Lil smiled.
"He must have put it in my right-hand pocket."
"So where is it?"
"On the floor someplace. There's a hole in that pocket!"
In fact, Flash was wrestling with the tracking device and cursing a blue streak. His machine was registering four different locations for Dr. Barton, one of which was a mile in the air. This new government computer system! The wretched thing just didn't work!
"Sir?" DC Jones asked. Flash just swore at her.
"So we can escape?" Kathy asked. Lil nodded.
"Sure. Let's get out of here!" Then she paused. "Sorry, I forgot why I'm here. I got lost. You'd better lead the way out. I'll try to figure out what that weird Welsh bloke was trying to tell me. If he was trying to tell me anything, and not just trying to take out his nastiness on me."
"Oh, I'm sure he wasn't!" Kathy exclaimed, sounding, Lil thought, like a dumb blonde. Well, a dumb brunette, Lil corrected herself. Lil was glad there were such things as dumb brunettes, it made her, as an intellectual blonde, feel happier.
"Okay, kid, you find your way out, I'll do the serious thinking."
Lil already had a couple of ideas.

The Priory of Finchelsea XI.

Christchurch, Greyfriars, London was built by Sir Christopher Wren in the 17th century. It was a perfect example of a Wren Church, with a tall, handsome tower and a long, beautifully-proportioned nave with high windows. The roof was suported by twin rows of columns, the pulpit of polished wood.
Then, as the phrase goes, 'Jerry dropped a bomb on it.' It was hit during the war by a bomb and reduced to a burned-out ruin.
Barsabbas was more than a little surprised that the Welsh professor had directed him to this place. A church he could understand, but a burned out ruin of a church was a rather odd thing. Yet the man had clearly said 'Christchurch.' And he'd mentioned a stained glass window. Surely the blasphemous order had actually updated their secrets since the Second World War?
"Christchurch?" he asked a broken-down drunk who happened to be passing. The drunk looked at the monk in his green and yellow habit.
"No."
Barsabbas sighed and began desperately to look for the stained-glass window.
His mobile 'phone rang, and he answered it.
"Barsabbas?" it was the Teacher.
"Master, I am in Christchurch, but there is no stained glass."
"You're sure?"
"Master, there is no glass at all."
"Barsabbas, haven't you considered that there might e more than one Christchurch in London?" the Teacher was being sarcastic. "I mean, it is rather a big city."
"Master?"
"A quick Google search tells me that there are two other possible candidates, Christ Church Westminster Bridge Road and Christchurch Spitalfields. Check them!"
"Yes, Master," Barsabbas said meekly.

The Priory of Finchelsea X.

"What?" Dr. Barton exclaimed in utter amazement. "Is he insane?"
"It's a possibility," Kathy Carlton admitted. Did you see the writing on the floor?"
"Sure, it makes no sense."
"But there was originally another line to it." Kathy showed Lil Barton a photograph. It showed the floor as Dr. Barton had seen it, but with an extra line. A line that horrified Lil.
1,7,2,8,3,5,9,3,6,97
Ha Cohen Hagadol
Summer is acumen in
Beware the Bat
P.S. Find Lil Barton
"Lil! I didn't even know Dr. Llewellyn Pryce-Rees-Evans-Jones, and he called me Lil and wrote my name as a clue in his own murder!" Dr Barton was not at all happy. "Boy, the man must have hated me!"
"I solved the numbers. Look," Kathy showed Lil a sheet of paper covered in numbers.
1,2,3,45,6,7,8,9,97.
"You put them in order." Lil sounded considerably less than impressed.
"It was all I could do with them. The second line is in Hebrew transliterated into English characters. 'Ha Cohen ha Gadol' is Hebrew for 'the High Priest.'"
"And the third line is from an olde English song, while the third one has something to do with Batman," Lil Barton groaned. "And Flash thinks I did it."
"He's got a chip on his shoulder about Americans."
"And I happen to be one! Would it make any difference if I told him I was born a German?"
"Yes, then he'd be sure to arrest you."
"I could lie and say I was born English."
"Flash hates the English too. He's that messed up."
"So what do we do next?"
"I have an idea," Kathy said. Lil had a very bad feeling about that.

The Priory of Finchelsea IX.

"What?" Flash demanded.
"I said le cryptogapher est arrive."
"I know you did, but you're on duty now, not in French night class. So what is that in English?"
"There's a cryptographer here, sir."
"Well, speak English, not that poncey French rubbish!"
With a dreadful accent, Dr. Barton thought.
"Sorry, sir."
"I should hope so! This cryptographer, who is he?"
"She, sir."
Well, I hope she's not another idiot bimbo like you. Go get her. Why's she here?"
"She's solved the number code, sir."
"Is there a washroom around here?" Dr. Barton asked. "I went out in a hurry..."
"Go!" Inspector Flash cried. Dr. Barton went. It wasn't until she was well and truly lost in the bowels of the church that she remembered that she had no idea what was down there, or where the toilets were.
Typical, Lil Barton, she thought. Sit down and wait for the cops to find you.
"Dr. Barton?"
The speaker was a young woman in a bright orange sweater and blue jeans. Lil smiled.
"No, Batman."
"You don't look like him..." the young woman began. Lil groaned.
"I'm Lil Barton, You can call me Dr. Barton."
"Kathy Carlton. The Carlton's spelled with a 'c'. Dr. Barton, the police suspect you killed Dr. Llewellyn Pryce-Rees-Evans-Jones. Flash wants to take you in for it."

The Priory of Finchelsea VIII.

Dr. Lilian Barton looked down at the prone corpse of Dr. Llewellyn Pryce-Rees-Evans-Jones as it lay on the beautiful encaustic tiles of the English Chapel of the Church of Christ the King, Gordon Square. She stared in disbelief at the arabesques around the body's outstretched arms.
Her remark on the subject was actually unprintable on a weblog like this. And no wonder, for the arabesques formed a very large version of Batman's Bat-symbol. Beside him were a series of numbers and three lines of writing:
1,7,2,8,3,5,9,3,6,97
Ha Cohen Hagadol
Summer is acumen in
Beware the Bat

"I am going to scream," Lil Barton declared.
"What do the words mean?" Inspector Flash demanded. The symbology professor groaned.
"Gobbledygook. Inspector, the man had had a sword buried in his head. The symbolism means nothing outside of a DC comicbook."
"You were lecturing on religious symbolism in DC comicbooks last night, Dr. Barton," Flash said menacingly.
Before Dr. Barton could do what she wanted to do, which was to scream and kick the man, DC Jones announced:
"Sir, le cryptogapher est arrive."

The Priory of Finchelsea VII.

The wind whirled around the huge and lowring structure of the Cathedral. Next door was the Bishop's House.
Bishop Smith stood in the doorway, holding his geen and yellow cassock around himself. This was a very important meeting, and he was afraid he would make a very bad impression, especially if he didn't wipe the drip off the end of his nose.
The door was opened by a short priest in a patched black cassock. Bishop Smith stepped inside.
"Is Bishop Calvin in?" he asked. Bishop Calvin was popularly regarded as the most unfortunately-named prelate in the whole church.
"I'm Bishop Calvin," the shabby priest replied testily. "Due to the rising cost of sex scandals in the diocese I can no longer afford either to employ a housekeeper or maintain a cassock fund."
Strike one, Bishop Smith thought.
"I'm sorry, Bishop Calvin."
"Not half as sorry as I am. The boys at the mall make fun of my cassock. And the clergy at the mall make fun of my name."
"Bishop..."
"Of course. Come with me."
Bishop Calvin led him up the stairs to his freezing cold office.
"We can't afford fuel bills either."
"What is the word from Rome?" Bishop Smith asked, impatient.
"The word is Bananas. The Bishop who can make the largest number of words from it wins a Cardinal's hat."
"Not that word. The other one."
"Sorry. Well, Bishop Smith, you're treading on eggshells."
"I know. It's a penance."
"I mean that the situation is bad. The Pope thinks that your Order is a very bad idea. You have this one chance."
"I'm not going to bungle it," Bishop Smith answered. He hoped that the Teacher and Barsabbas had the matter well in hand.

The Priory of Finchelsea VI.

Barsabbas opened the door of his lodgings in the back street in Queen's Park. Making sure that no-one had seen his distinctive green-and-yellow habit, the murderous monk stepped inside. He took the Samurai sword out of the carpet-bag that he was carrying, and he laid it down on the table.
He'd had to kill a man, but he had located the Hearth Stone, and now the blasphemous order was no more. Silas laughed manically.
"It's mine!" he cried out, dancing around the room, "The preciouss is mine!"
Mercifully, the telephone rang. Barsabbas picked it up.
"I have the preciouss," he said at once.
"Good." a mysterious voice said over the telephone. The Teacher! Barsabbas thought. "Is he dead?"
"He is dead, master, and we have the Preciouss."
"You have the Hearth Stone?"
"I know where it is. He sang like a bird."
"All right, but did he actually talk?"
"After he'd finished singing, yes. I will go and take the Preciouss."
"Are the police there?"
"Yes, but nasty Hobbitses will never take the Preciouss."
The Teacher sighed.
"Barsabbas, stop talking like Gollum and go steal the Hearth Stone."
"Yes, master," Barsabbas agreed. He put down the telephone, his hands trembling. He had sinned. He had killed a man. But pain could atone.
Barsabbas inserted his fingers into the wall-socket and turned it on.

The Priory of Finchelsea V.

Dr. Barton had never really met Dr. Llewellyn Pryce-Rees-Evans-Jones. She had once sat through a lecture he gave on Welsh Bardic symbolism, however, and she could imagine that anyone forced to listen to the man for any length of time might well want to split his head open with a sword. Obviously he'd made the mistake of talking to someone who actually had a sword to hand.
Lil Barton had seen the photograph, and she had seen dead bodies before, but this one was bizarre. Still fully clothed (mercifully, Lil thought), he had apparently been using his own brains to draw on the floor.
"He was a tough man," the head cop explained. "That blow should have killed him outright."
"It should have! How did he survive?"
"We don't know," DC Jones admitted.
And what had he done to himself? His body lay prone of the encaustic tiles of the English Chapel, legs together, arms extended as if in a crucifix position. So far the symbolism looked Christian, but why, then had he drawn Batman's Bat-symbol on his pristine white shirt with his own brains?
"Inspector..." Dr. Barton paused. "Inspector, no-one told me your name."
"Flash. Jack flash. Don't laugh, my therapist only just helped me to forgive my parents for calling me Jack."
Great, Lil Barton thought, here I am, in a Victorian Gothic chapel, with a man called Flash investigating a bizzare murder connected with Batman. I'm in a comic book. Next thing I know the clues will all start pointing to the Joker.
"Why did he use his own brains?" she asked.
"Only thing he had to draw with," DC Jones explained. Dr. Barton shook her head.
"So why use the Bat-symbol? Unless he was leaving a clue for Batman."
"Look in his right hand," Inspector Flash suggested. Dr. Barton looked. The man was holding what looked like a whiteboard marker, the sort of thing that she used in lectures.
"It's a pen."
"It's an ultraviolet marker. Dr. Llewellyn Pryce-Rees-Evans-Jones used his brains so that we would use certain forensic techniques. Sergeant, turn on the black light."
The sergeant turned on the light, and Dr. Barton gasped in surprise.

The Priory of Finchelsea IV.

"Let me get this straight," Dr. Barton felt like she was having some sort of weird dream. "You're saying that Dr. Llewellyn Pryce-Rees-Evans-Jones did this to himself?"
"Exactly."
"He smashed a sword down onto his own head?"
DC Jones blushed and shook her head.
"Ah... no. That bit someone else did to him. We found your name in his diary, so... Our DCI wants to talk to you."
"At two AM, when I've got no make-up on and my hair's a fright? Tell me he's kidding. You Bulls..."
"How did you know I'm a Taurus?" DC Jones reacted with surprise.
"I didn't. I'm an American, from New York. 'bull' is slang for a cop."
"Well then, you're coming with me."
Disconcertingly DC Jones didn't remove her shades at all in the car, and drove the (thankfully) short distance to Godon Square with them on, narrowly missing a cat and a gang of youths in consequence. Dr. Barton was glad to get out of the car and walk into the East porch of the church. A North Porch had been planned, but as the nave was never finished the North porch and the church had never actually met.
"Dr. Lilian Barton," the speaker had to be the head cop. He was six foot tall, nearly as wide, and losing his hair.
"That's me," Lil answered as breezily as is possible at two AM. "Where's the stiff?"
That was a mistake. Never call dead guys stiffs, not when you were the last person they were going to see."
"Through here, Dr. Barton. Steel yourself."
"I saw your friend's picture. Does she ever take off those shades?"
"No. I warn you, he looks awful."
Dr. Barton stepped into the English Chapel.

The Priory of Finchelsea III.

Dr. Barton, her hair having been subjected to a two-second brushing, came down the stairs of the East Bloomsbury Hotel feeling a great deal less than hospitable. She had thrown on her tweed suit and the now crumpled white blouse that she had worn at the lecture, and looked like what she was - a professor who had been woken in the wee small hours of the morning by a mysterious caller at her hotel.
The night had been a blast. Not. She'd been introduced by an English woman with what had to be the world's most annoying voice. "Ladies and gentlemen," the woman had started. Lil Barton hadn't seen any of either, just a gang of geeky students who she figured were either deeply into comic books (which was sad) or who didn't have anything else to do that night (which was also sad). "Dr. Barton lectures at St. Luke's College, Wymondham," and the annoying female had mispronounced Wymondham. She'd said it phonetically, not as it was actually pronounced, 'Windham'. "Lilian is the author of a number of books on symbology, including Angels and Apostles: The Symbolism of the Catholic Apostolic Church and The Symbolism of your Parish Church," great, Lil had thought. She wants to use my first name. I never gave her permission. And only my Mother ever calls me Lilian, anyhow.
"Right now Lilian's just a face to us, but I found an article about her in her local newspaper," the woman flourished a copy of the Eastern Daily Press, to Lil's further annoyance. That had to be from when she had been involved in a rather public mystery involving the theft of a couple of roof bosses from Norwich Cathedral. "According to the Student Union at St. Luke's, Lilian has the shapeliest legs of all the lecturers. Her male students say that she has a voice like custard..."
That had been the final straw. Not only had the irritating woman called her Lilian three times now, she was trspassing on very personal ground. If Dr. Barton had been feeling better, she would have been able to think of some witty put-down. But she wasn't, so she just screamed into the microphone. It had worked, though.

And now for the mysterious visitor. Dr. Barton made her way carefully down the stairs, into the hotel lobby.
The woman standing by the desk wore a long black raincoat and a pair of dark glasses. Which was kind of odd since it was a warm, dry night, and it was, of course, dark outside. Dr. Barton steeled herself.
"Hello?" Her voice didn't sound like custard now, she thought, or if it did it was shark-infested custard.
"Dr. Barton?" Finally, someone who wasn't going to try to be pally, Lil thought.
"Sure, that's me."
"Detective Constable Raquel Jones, Scotland Yard. So no cracks about the name. You were going to meet Dr. Llewellyn Pryce-Rees-Evans-Jones tonight?"
"Sure, but I felt so mad at life after the UCL lecture that I went out and beat up a couple of juvenile delinquents instead, then came back here and threw myself into bed. Has he reported me as a missing person?"
"No. He's dead," DC Jones took a polaroid from her pocket and showed it to Dr. Barton, who stared at it in horror.
"What sort of sick..." she began.
"He did it to himself." DC Jones explained.

The Priory of Finchelsea II.

Addendum: The East Bloomsbury Hotel is entirely fictitious, and any resemblance to any real hotel is entirely coincidental. That's my story and I'm sticking with it. We would also like to add that UCL do not, to our knowledge, but up visiting lecturers in tatty hotel rooms in dodgy hotels. So far as we know.

Lil Barton woke with a start. She woke like that because she had conditioned herself to do so, and the conditioning had been triggered by the telephone in her hotel room ringing. And the telephone did ring, it was an old-fashioned one with a dial and a real bell. She fumbled for the bedside lamp, missed and fell out of bed.
Feeling distinctly annoyed, Dr. Barton got to her feet and turned on the bedside lamp. She looked around the hotel room, the cheap and tatty furniture, the curtains that were different colours, and sighed.
Trust University College London to put up a visting lecturer in a dump like this! Still, it was better than her American University of Paris lecture, where she had been put up in a complete dump that rejoiced in the decidedly dubious name of 'Mister Bed City.'
She picked up the reciever of the 'phone and said, in her most annoyed and just-woken-up tones: "Hello? It's after midnight!"
"I know, Dr. Barton, but there's a man here to see you..."
"I hope you told him that this isn't the sort of hotel where ladies have male visitors after hours. Or is it?"
"Well..."
"I see. I'll tell UCL that I am not happy about the accomodation they provide. They probably won't do anything about it, but it'll make me feel better. The visitor is a man, right?"
"Woman."
"Oh well, that's different. One of my fan club?"
"No. She wants to see you down here right away."
"Tell her that right away isn't an option. Like most normal people I was sleeping, and like most normal people I don't sleep in my clothes. I have to dress first."
"Of course, Dr. Barton."
Lil Barton put the 'phone down savagely. She picked up a flyer from beside the bed.

University College London

Prodly Presents

An Evening with Lilian Barton

Professor of Symbology at St. Luke's College, Wymondham

Dr. Barton groaned. The whole trip had, in her opinion, been a colossal mistake, and that printing error confirmed it. For one thing, hardly any of the students had heard of her, despite her having published about a dozen books on the subject. For another the UCL symbology department had decided to fit her up, with the result that she had spent an agonising hour giving a joke lecture on religious symbolism in DC comic books that she had originally prepared for an after dinner session at an international conference. That had not been funny. For a third thing (as if the first two weren't enough), she had proved too short for the lectern provided.
And now this mysterious night-time visitor. She probably wanted to argue with her about the symbolism of the Flash's costume or something.
Well, there was only one way to find out

The Priory of Finchelsea. I.

Note: This post is part 1 of a parody series. All characters not obvious parodies of Da Vinci Code characters are the intellectual property of the Free St. George's Blog group. The plot has been lifted blatantly from The Da Vinci Code.

Fact

All descriptions of places, artefacts, ancient monuments, London tube stations, buses, and even taxicab interiors are entirely accurate. Except for a number of glaring errors that are the result of poor research, and internet research done while trying to listen to James White or Albert Mohler at the same time. All descriptions of secret codes, concealed doors, mirrors and gateways into other dimensions are, of course, completely made up.

I

It was a dark and stormy night. Lightning flickered across the London skyline, lighting up the dark and sinister shape of the Church of Christ the King, Gordon Square. Although the building would have looked a lot more sinister if it had been made of a darker stone, and if it had ever been finished. That it was not finished was a mercy, since the building was intended to have a 150-foot spire, which would just have looked wrong.

Dr. Llewellyn Pryce-Rees-Evans-Jones clung to the altar rail of the English Chapel as if his life depended on it. Which, in fact, it did. Behind him a huge figure in a yellow and green monkish habit towered over the quivering professor.

"let go of the rail!" the monkish figure hissed menacingly. "Let go and let me kill you!"

"No! So long as I hold on to the rail I have sanctuary!"

The Monkish figure, a sinister bloke by the name of Barsabbas, paused, holding the huge Samurai sword above his head. He was a monk, after all, a member of the mysterious Catholic lay order of St. Delia (see note). All right, I know that lay orders can't have monks, but this is my story, and I say that Barsabbas was a monk.

Barsabbas had not always been a monk. In his youth he had been a tough, nasty petty thug roaming the mean streets of Aberystwyth, looking for tourists to beat up. One day, however, he made a serious mistake. The bloke he thought was a wimpy tourist turned out to be a senior Druid, who had the young man roughed up and thrown out of town lashed to an iron spinning-wheel and wearing a stovepipe hat made from a real stovepipe. Barsabbas had wandered, confused and wounded, until he had one day, having forgotten his name (due to an otherwise kindly pub landlord giving him a whole keg of Double Dragon beer to drink), stumbled into a small shack in the Brecon Beacons to find a Catholic priest being roughed up by a couple of tough guys from the local Baptist Church who had overdosed on Jack Chick tracts. Using his prodigious strength, Barsabbas saw off the zealots, then sank to the floor exhausted.

When he came around, he was being nursed by the priest, who told him that he was an English priest called Henry Smith, sent by the Order of St. Delia to establish a mission in the village. Since Barsabbas could not remember his name (it was actually Misael Evans), the priest named him after a figure in a Bible passage that he happened to be reading at the time. It was therefore unfortunate that the passage happened to be Acts 1, and that Father Smith had been rather taken with the name of Barsabbas.

Father Smith set Barsabbas working at the mission, and after a while they were recalled to England, thus narrowly avoiding being characters in a Malcolm Pryce novel.

And now Barsabbas had to get the mysterious Hearth Stone. And Dr. Llewellyn Pryce-Rees-Evans-Jones had the secret.

"Tell me!" Barsabbas hissed.

Quickly Dr. Llewellyn Pryce-Rees-Evans-Jones began to speak. He was telling the pre-arranged message, the one that he had to tell if death was imminent. Barsabbas listened intently, nodding his head inside the sinister green and yellow habit.

"Thank you," he said when it was finished. "That's what the others said."

The others, thought Dr Llewellyn Pryce-Rees-Evans-Jones. How had he got them? But he had, and that meant..."

"Goodbye." Barsabbas raised his sword and brought it down on Dr Llewellyn Pryce-Rees-Evans-Jones' head. Barsabbas wiped the sword on the man's coat and left.

Dr. Llewellyn Pryce-Rees-Evans-Jones had seen men have their heads split open before, in Patagonia. It was nasty. He had a couple of minutes to live. He had to work quickly.

The Joy of Conspiracy Theories, By Sir Richard Arcos

Reading Dr. Barton's little post on conspiracy theories prompted me to post the following link on this blog:
http://www.experiencers.net/delooze/Heat/HeatIsRising.htm

In my opinion (which is worth a great deal, at least according to my senior deacon, who is admittedly senile), this is the absolute, biscuit-taking, breath-taking, apoplectic fit-inducing high point of conspiracy theories. It has everything, Freemasons, Knights Templar, Illuminati, serpent cults (if you look elsewhere on this site you will find that THEY (meaning serpentine aliens from outer space who are secretly sapping our will to resist when they land in their flying saucers) are behind the serpent cult), symbolism galore. Dr. Barton was incapacitated for several days after I showed her this site. Fortunately she has a sense of humour.

Read it. If you can't open the page, try the following Google image search: http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=Bedlam+London&hl=en click on the first picture of the outside of a building. London readers will recognise it as the Imperal War Museum. Formerly known as Bedlam, the world's most famous loony bin. Which is where the author of the article belongs, if you ask me. I mean, talk about raving blue-based baboons with claw-and-ball feet! Why haven't the friendly blokes in white coats taken the fellow away yet?

New Age Twaddle. Dr. Barton

Following my encounter with Dr. Langdon at the Londer Symbology Conference, Let me say a few words about what actually happened there beyond my stepping on Dr. Langdon's foot with a high heel. First of all, Dr. Langdon knows I'm a symbologist now. He had to sit through my paper on the Victorian Romantic appropriation of Medieval symbolism, and I got a lot of serious questions. Dr. Langdon, however, asked me how I could say that the Romantics 'appropriated' certain symbols, when those symbols had been in use for centuries.
I explained to him that the Romantics very often made up history. Levi's 'Baphomet' and the Pentagram are perfect examples. Von Hammer had made Baphomet into a 'gnostic god'; Levi went one further and identified a radom gargoyle in Paris as 'Baphomet'. Instead of doing serious historical research, they built their own fiction on top of other people's fiction. This is just what Dr. Langdon does, I'm afraid. I spend weeks on end in libraries all over the world, reading up on symbolism, chasing clues. I have spent hours in dusty archives, even completely ruining my clothes sometimes (I've learned that old jeans and an olive-green t-shirt is the best outfit to wear in some libraries). When I read a book, I make sure it is by a proper academic, not by some conspiracy theorist. I wish Dr. Langdon would too. I also wish he'd been able to sit at my table in the bar after the Conference, but you can't have everything.