Pentecost by J.F. Penn

closer to beating his father to the stones he had sought in his lifetime. He bent down, placed the ruby pen on the floor, and firmly crushed it underfoot. He ground the pieces into the carpet, purple ink staining the cream color, spreading out like a bloodstain. Joseph smiled and thought back to when this search had begun.  
    Five years before, when his father had learnt he was dying of lung cancer, he had called Joseph to his bedside. The bedspread was stained where his father clutched it while coughing up blood and bile. The air smelt of vomit and death crept around the walls, waiting for the inevitable end. His father was weak and could hardly talk, but Joseph hated the man and didn’t care if he died. His father had taken the stone from around his scrawny neck and given it to Joseph. He had whispered, his speech halting.
      “This is a Pentecost stone ... powerful ... protect it from those who ... it belongs to you now.” The dying man had broken off in a coughing fit, then spoke again, his words even fainter. “There are more stones ... increase in power together ... complete the circle ... Death increases their power, Joseph, remember that.”  
    He had slipped into a coma soon after, and Joseph had held the stone, feeling the warmth from his father’s body leave it. He didn’t know what the words meant then. It was just a piece of rock, but it was the only thing his father had ever given him. The next day he rifled through his father’s study and began to read his diaries and papers. One of the journals had revealed the hypothesis that the stones held a power of God that could be harnessed and made stronger by the twelve being together. Joseph had copied the passage from the book of Acts about the healing miracles, speaking in tongues, and the power to convert people. All he could think about was Michael. Two were stronger together. Could these stones restore his brother?
      Joseph opened another of his father’s diaries, as he did every morning before his business day. Each was dated in the front and contained only a month or two of notes. There were hundreds of journals stacked into the large bookcases that covered the walls in his study, all brought from the old house, filed in chronological order as his father had been a meticulous man. Joseph searched every day for information on how to energize the stones when they were together in one place.  
    It was in these pages that Joseph had found vital knowledge about the estimated dating of the comet elliptical and how it would come again on Pentecost this year. It had given him a timeframe to work to, but he hadn’t thought it would take so long to achieve his goal and now time was short. As he read, he also delved into the other research and the life his father had led. It seemed he had hardly noticed his children, or his wife as they were never mentioned. The books were concerned with discovery and research about the religious relics he had sought throughout the world. They were filled with scraps of cuttings and articles he was proud of, most of which were in obscure and fringe publications. These were not diaries in the confessional vein, but more the chronology of a mind over years of immersion in the subjects of arcana.
      This morning, Joseph was re-reading a notebook that mused on the power of the twelve and whether it was enhanced when the stones were together. There was mention of the physicist Wolfgang Pauli and whether the stones could even change matter itself. There were lists of people in history who might have owned the stones, based on documentation of their spiritual and physical gifts including great artists as well as scientists and political figures throughout history. Joseph noted the mutterings of a driven, raving man amongst the occasional clarity of the scholar but he learned more about his father from these books than he had ever done when the man was alive.  
      His father had written that the stones had been cut from the rock