Marc Chadbourn - The Devil in green

'Glastonbury is on a powerful ley. So they say,' James pointed out.

'Now you're being disingenuous. But your answer shows we're on the same page. Anyway, the old Glastonbury site is in ruins. What was needed was a complete structure that could focus the energy. Not a stone circle, but a massive stone building with a spire like a lightning conductor. As far as I know, there's nothing in the Bible that mentions this Blue Fire, yet somebody in the Church knows about it.'

James shook his head firmly, his lips clenched tight.

'I'm a good judge of character,' Mallory continued. 'I'm not saying this to flatter you, because I do have respect for you, but I can tell you're a good man, with the best interests at heart. And I would guess injustice probably gets you down. I would think you wouldn't want to perpetuate injustice, or misdirection, or conspiracy, for whatever reason. Not in a religion that makes so much of truth and honesty and shining the light of righteousness on the world.'

'Why have you come to see me about this, Mallory? Why do you feel that strongly about it? Most people are just concerned with staying alive.'

'Because I think this is about staying alive. I don't know why, or how… it's just a hunch. But there's something going on at this cathedral that's the root of all our problems, and I think it's linked to this.' Mallory tried to be as honest as possible, hoping it would sway James, but it wasn't something that came easily to him. 'I don't know how much you know about what's going on, but I think you have suspicions. I think you're at least uneasy. And I certainly know you want things to turn out well-'

And if you find the information you want, you think you might be able to do something that might help us?'

'I don't know,' Mallory replied truthfully.

'What could you do, Mallory?'

'At least I want to try. There aren't many out there saying the same.'

James' smile was a forensic dissection of Mallory's character. 'That doesn't sound like the Mallory I've heard so much about.'

James sat silently for a moment, then rose sharply and began to prowl back and forth in thought; he looked as if he was tearing himself apart. Finally, he returned to his seat and began speaking animatedly as if a dam had broken. 'This stays between us. I don't know you well enough to know if you do have best interests at heart, but you're right in your assessment of how I feel about the truth being hidden, or glossed over, or bent. But it must stay between us, is that understood?'

Mallory nodded agreement to his terms.

'You talk about conspiracy,' he began. 'Someone once said that the history of civilisation is the history of conspiracy. What you learn… established knowledge… is not always the truth. Secrets lie behind everything we pass down, sometimes big secrets. Everyone thinks they know something of history. The truth is, they know nothing. It is a facet of human nature that the most important actions and events are hidden away so that all we see are their repercussions or the lies designed to cover them. You know this — you can see it in the people and organisations around you all the time, and it was no different in the oldest times, in the same way that we are no different from our ancestors, although we like to think of ourselves as wiser, cleverer, more moral. We know nothing.' He took a deep breath, controlled himself, then spoke in more measured terms. 'I was part of a conspiracy myself, though a benign one. The Christian Church has been filled with them from the start… from the very earliest days. It is the nature of the structure. I was a member of a group called the Watchmen. It was our responsibility to guard certain knowledge — pre- Christian knowledge the Church had assimilated — that could be used when the Fall happened and humanity was under threat.'

'You know what really happened at the Fall?' Mallory asked.

'Some of it, yes. There are worlds beyond our own, Mallory, where strange and powerful beings live. Throughout our history, they have passed back and forth, influencing events here, becoming the source of all our myths and legends. On a previous visit they became the template for the gods of the Celtic nations. And at the Fall they came back again. Their power is unimaginable to us… the world couldn't cope. On that day, all the rules changed.'

'And they're still out there.'

'The first time they came they almost destroyed the world with their rivalries and games and wars. Humanity wasn't going to allow it to happen again. Sometime in the ancient past, we discovered that they were vulnerable to the Blue Fire… that the Blue Fire was a power above everything. That information was encoded in the landscape by many ancient peoples, not just the ones who came to be called the Celts in popular understanding. Secrets in stone, in alignments, a language that did not use words and which only came alive to us when we found the right perception through which to see it. And it was that information that the Watchmen guarded and passed down from generation to generation for whenever it would be needed. We knew about the gods, and the Otherworld they came from, and the secret history, and all the prophecies that went along with it, and we told no one. We had to wait until we were needed, when five heroes would come together to defend humanity.'

'You met the five?'

'Some of them. Good people, though they didn't recognise it themselves.'

'I would say, from a Christian perspective, that this all sounds a little like blasphemy, or at the very least non-canon,' Mallory said.

James sighed. 'Yes, contradictions abound. But not as many as you might think. You are correct in saying that the Blue Fire is not discussed overtly in the writings and traditions of Christianity, but that is not to say that it was not known of and accepted as a central tenet from the earliest times. It was, and it was kept away from general view by those conspiracies buried in the fundament of Christianity.'

'Don't let the common man have too much knowledge… the priesthood might lose its mystique,' Mallory said tardy.

'That approach was necessary when Christianity was attempting to gain a foothold-'

'And now?'

'Now we are trying to gain a foothold again.' He poured himself another cup of tea, his pleasant humour replaced by a seriousness that didn't sit well with him. 'One of the most powerful forces within the Church during its first centuries was a secret group of Christian geomancers. They were well aware of the Blue Fire from ancient traditions and linked it with the spirit of Christianity, and they were responsible for the precise position of churches around the world to take the best advantage of sites where this earth energy was at its most potent. Their greatest influence was during the Middle Ages, during the great period of cathedral building.'

'Geomancers? In the Church?'

'You see? Everyone thinks they know history, but they don't. And this has been well documented.' James went to the stacks and removed a volume. 'Les Mysteres de la Cathedrale de Chartres by Louis Charpentier. Chartres Cathedral stands on a large prehistoric mound over a buried chamber, which Charpentier identifies as a confluence of four streams of this serpentine earth energy, named by him as woivres. A very powerful site indeed, and the Christian geomancers built the cathedral there to be a massive collector of that energy, to empower worshippers and to spread it out into the local area, in much the same way that the builders of the stone circles did. And if you find that hard to believe, I should point out that the cathedral site was also the home of the great Druidic university of Gaul, where ancient wise men were initiated into the mysteries of the Blue Fire. The same place, the same potency, within different belief systems. As you said earlier, coincidence?'