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.