The Turning

Chapter 1 –

The Rising

Old man Shaw’s irregular heartbeat didn’t stop him from putting on his best pair of pants and his favorite grey flat cap. His wife, Aryana, had gotten it for him last month for his eightieth birthday. He hadn’t been venturing out much the last few weeks on account of his new heart problem. As he peered out the window at the grey-stone walls that lined the twisting farm road that led up through the hills of Antrim, a strong palpitation rocked his chest. He fought it off even as the thought occurred to him that stone walls last forever, but the organs of men do not.

An old chalice would get him out the door today. Answers to his most pressing questions about it awaited him.

He’d discovered the chalice only because of the wild visions he started having weeks ago. Night after night, as his mind gave way to sleep, he found himself in his dreams moving dirt, shovel in hand, in a foggy mist near the giant oak on the back end of his farm and bringing up all kinds of treasure. Then one morning, he woke from one of those dreams and, despite his bad ticker, went out and started digging. 

And the dream came true—he’d actually unearthed something.

A valuable artifact, that much he could tell, but just how valuable? And what about that strange, indecipherable writing on the bottom of it? From what time period? How long had it been in the ground? And who put it there?

He fetched it from the china cabinet and examined it once again, for what had to be the hundredth time. It had an ancient yet timeless mystique about it. Silver, with a ring of diamonds studded around the circumference, it sparkled in spite of the bits of peat moss that still clung to it. The bogland of his farm had acted as a powerful preservative, it seemed, even against normal tarnish.

There had to be some greater mystery to it all, though, he just knew it. Today he would get some answers. Maybe that would reduce his stress level, and his heart would improve. With that in mind, he looked into Aryana’a teary eyes and kissed her on the cheek.  “I’ll be right as rain in no time, don’t fret over me.” 

She pulled him close for one last hug. “You sure you don’t want me to go with you, George?”

He flashed her a wry grin. “I’d just as well be at the pearly gates already if I can’t go anywhere alone from now on.”

“I just don’t understand why you won’t get yourself a cell phone like the rest of the world.” She looked back up at him into his eyes. “Will you at least give me a call from the store phone when you get there?”

He nodded, kissed her on the forehead, and stepped out the door.

Two hours later, he ambled toward a clerk, a pudgy forty-something chap who stood at the counter of Abby’s, one of the premiere antique shops in Northern Ireland. Devoid of any other customers, the store had just opened for the day on a crystal-clear mid-week morning. He loosened his grip on the prized relic and placed it on the counter.

A slight pucker formed on the lips of the clerk’s otherwise poker face. “What have we here?”

“You tell me.”

The clerk pushed his glasses onto the bridge of his nose. Taking the chalice in both hands, he studied its contours, then tipped it over to examine the bottom. “Did you see the inscription?”

“I presumed it to be Latin. I was hoping you could translate it.”

“Were ya now?” The clerk raised an eyebrow but never took his eyes off the writing on the bottom of the chalice. He squinted hard. “There’s the Latin word propheteia. Means ‘prophecy.’ I can say that much.”

George smiled at hearing the word prophecy. Some of the tension released from his shoulders.

The clerk continued his study of the inscription. “But the rest of it … I’m going to need to take it back to the office, examine it further.”

Before George could protest, the clerk whirled with curio in hand and hustled off through the door behind him.

As George stood there sans chalice, staring at the closed door, the regrets lashed down on him hard, like a cold rain out of the north. He should have found another way to learn more about the chalice, one that didn’t involve leaving the serenity of Antrim to make the long trip to the city centre of Belfast.

A pain flared through his chest, settled a moment, and then left. The same vexing ache he’d felt for the first time a few days ago when he’d dug the chalice from the ground. He told himself to relax. The stress was going to kill him.

* * *

With the office door closed tight and locked, the clerk set the chalice on the desk, picked up the phone, and dialed a number. On a secure line, he rang his boss.

The strange symbol on the bottom—just after the prophecy—required the call. A cross, sword, shield, and breastplate. You needed a magnifying glass to see it. But the boss had once admonished him that if it ever showed up on anything, to call.

No answer. No surprise. The guy mentioned he would be vacationing in the south of France this week.

The clerk took some photos of the chalice with his phone and uploaded it to an antiques forum and then began to search online for anything that looked similar to the chalice in front of him.

Maybe somebody would contact him who knew something about the chalice and the strange inscription with the symbol on the bottom. He withheld one thing from the old man—aside from the Latin word for prophecy, he’d recognized another word—Patricius, the Latin version for the name Patrick.

* * *

When fifteen minutes passed without any sign of his artifact, George raised a hand and flagged down a store employee from the front of the shop. “Can you bring out the gentleman inside the office.”

The employee knocked on the office door, seemed to have heard a response, and then turned to George. “It should be just another minute or two.”

A razor’s edge pain once again arced through George’s trunk. He drew slow, deep breaths as he limped around the counter toward the office. Before he reached it, the door swung open and out sidled the clerk, his face flushed, clutching the chalice.

“Please excuse the delay. I’m afraid my exam was … inconclusive. The owner would like you to leave it until someone more experienced can have a look.”

Rubbing the closed-cropped beard on his chin, George gave a slight nod. “But what do you feel in your gut about it?”

The clerk shrugged, looked away, wouldn’t make eye contact. “Not sure, but, of course, the owner will want see it.”

George was done here. Some other source would have to deliver the information he sought. Maybe another place in Belfast would be able to examine it today. He mustered the strength of years long past and wrested the chalice from the hands of the clerk who’d probably never suffered a hard day’s work in his life. “I’ll be on me way. Thank you for your time.”

“Wait a minute,” the clerk said. “I placed a photo of the chalice with an online forum. Maybe somebody will respond with some information. The store closes early today, one o’clock on Wednesdays, you know. Six p.m. the other days of the week. You could go to lunch, return later. Come through the rear entrance. I’ll be in the office down the hall, doing some work for about a half hour after closing. The front door will be locked. Maybe I’ll have something for you then. Or you could just leave me your number, and I could call you?”

George simply turned away without a word and angled out the front entrance. He crossed the street, passed his beat-up, former-British-army-issued Land Rover parked at the curb, and headed into a pub called O’Devany’s House. Once inside, he sat at the bar and ordered a pint and a stew. A rugby match already streamed on the piped telly above him.

The pain left his chest with his first sip of Guinness. And the time passed easily. He asked around the bar if there were any other antique shops nearby. Everyone said the place across the street was the best. It did have a solid reputation, the reason why he had chosen it in the first place. And he really didn’t know where else he could get his answers. Perhaps he would check with the clerk one more time after lunch as suggested and maybe he’d even bring the chalice back again sometime with the owner present. When he finished eating, he called Arayana and told her not to worry, but he’d be a wee bit later than anticipated.

“Just be careful,” she said. “You’d put the heart in me crossways if you were to have an accident on the way home.”

When he hung up, he left a wad of Irish pounds on the bar next to his check and headed out into the sunlight. A few minutes shy of one-thirty. No doubt the clerk was still there.

The shiny black SUV parked behind George’s old land rover barely registered as a concern on his radar as he came to the front door of the antique shop. The store was locked with a closed sign in the window, just as the clerk had said. George slow-walked around the building to the back-alley entrance and went inside.

Voices from the office way down the hall echoed off the walls. 

Gingerly, George crept forward down the long corridor.

Something about, “unlocking the hidden prophecy.” Those words came out clearly.

Were they talking about his chalice?

George stopped, listening at the partially closed door.

An angry voice asked, “Who else did you talk to about it?”

The sound of a hand smacking flesh.

George peered around the corner of the doorway. Two large men in suites stood over the clerk whose eyes were swollen and bloodied. One of the large men had a jagged scar on his forehead and a neck as thick as a wooly sheep.

“No one, I swear!”

Another slap. “Where’s the old man now?”

“I don’t know. Please.”

I gotta get help. Now.

The old man moved down the hall as quietly and quickly as he could, the pain in his chest returned with malice. Almost at the exit, he stumbled into a garbage can.

Had they heard it?

They had to have. No time to look back.

A muffled gunshot sounded as the door close behind him. A gunshot from a silencer?

This was bad.

George bee-lined for his rover, the pain stabbing his chest. Where was a police station? Or a policeman for that matter?

The next thing he knew he was at his vehicle, opening the door, plopping down in the seat, firing the ignition.

He pulled out into the street and saw them coming. They headed for their black SUV.

Down the street, he accelerated. 

Have to lose them. Quick.

He turned wildly to the right down one street, then left down another, then right down an alley and out onto another street. A check of his rearview mirror showed no black SUVs.

What should he do now? That crucial question vexed him. He had no phone, and his hands were shaking so wildly he could barely keep them on the steering wheel. If he saw a hospital, he’d turn in and get his heart checked. But what if the SUV showed up on his tail? What then?

Panicked and confused, he found himself heading out of Belfast, away from the city, toward home, toward Aryana. She’d help him, tell him what to do, if he could just make it to the farm, to the hills of Antrim. To home.

* * *

He didn’t notice it following him until he was well over an hour outside of Belfast meandering his way through the hills of Antrim.

When George slowed, the SUV slowed, keeping itself almost out of sight. The game continued until his rover crested a deserted, sinuous stretch of rippling country road. The SUV blurred in the old man’s rear-view mirror as it sped even with him in the lane for opposing traffic.

A jolt of high-octane fear slammed him hard. Foot to pedal, pedal to floor, he bolted to a lead. But only for a few feet before the SUV matched him again. With the realization that he wasn’t going to shake it, two thoughts swarmed his head in rapid succession. First, he wished he were as well-armed as his friend Finn, who was now a commercial fishing boat captain but in a past life had smuggled guns for the IRA. Second, his mind leapt to the dream that had caused him to dig for the chalice. He could have sworn that it foretold of his grandson, Ian, making a trip across the ocean from the States to help him with the mystery the artifact posed.

Had God led him this far only to have it end like this?

He looked to his right and saw the man with the scar.

A spasm of pain seared George’s chest, and everything went black as his rover careened over a hill and toward a ravine.

* * *

“Do you want me to put a bullet in his head?”

“Is he dead?”

“Not breathing, no pulse, yeah, I’d say he’s dead. But he doesn’t seem injured much. He’s an old man, I think he had a heart attack.”

“Perfect.”

“Uh huh, nice and clean this way.”

“The main thing is we got the chalice. Lorcan will be flying high when we give him the news.”

The man with the scar laughed as he reeled off a string of profanities. “Let’s get out of here.”