Pentecost by J.F. Penn Page A

of Christ’s tomb after the resurrection, plain at first, but over time each had been shaped and carved with words of power. The twelve had wanted to remember that unique time and to bind themselves together in faith, so the stones had been hung on strips of leather, silver chain or metal rings to be carried on missions to the ends of the known world.  
    There were clues to the locations in the notebooks his father had made over the years but nothing concrete, so he had given Morgan Sierra the notebooks with the best information as he knew she would find what he sought given the imminent threat to her sister and the child. Even if he couldn’t get all the stones in one place to recreate the power of Pentecost, maybe he could somehow increase the power of the stones he did have with a sacrifice. The diary he was reading contained some of the experiments his father had carried out after noting that the power of the stones could be increased by the energy transfer of death. This section was dog-eared and smudged from multiple readings.  
    He searched for those pages again today, for a reassurance that his plan would work. He read of a recovered scrap of a Gnostic gospel containing tales of healing that occurred with a stone after the martyr’s death of an Apostle. There was a note about life force and what might possibly empower the stones further. Originally it seemed the resurrection of Jesus had given the stones their power, a residual force of life overcoming death. The stones were intimately connected with the balance between life and death, a latent power to be used for good or evil. Certainly the nun’s death at Varanasi had resulted in miracles.  
      Joseph pulled out one of the loose leaves from the book he was reading. It was a page from a diary in Latin script with a translation beside it. From the Middle Ages, it described a brother in the church murdering another for one of the stones. At the moment of death, the stone was charged and miracles occurred, like those in the book of Acts - healing, speaking in tongues and mass conversions to the cause. It was as if the life force of one could be the energy that moved into others with the stone as a conduit. Joseph had seized upon this idea and he thought back to when he had decided to test the theory.
      After his father’s death, his mother had sat in the kitchen, dressed in funeral black, the author of their misery squatting like a toad over their lives. The hem of her skirt was too high and the bulging blue veins in her thick legs revolted him. She slurped from a cup of tea and he flinched. He hated the sound of her drinking, the sound of her living.
      “Now you’re the man of the house, Joseph, I expect you to earn money to support me and your brother. You owe me that,” she had said.
      That night he had slipped the cord of the stone around his neck, gone to her room and held a pillow over her face. When she started awake, unable to breathe, he held her down, resting his body weight on top of her until the struggling stopped. Then he held the pillow there for another hour to make sure it was done. He had wept then, for the end of whatever it was people called family. Now it was just him and Michael against the world, but then perhaps it had always been this way.  
    Joseph had brought Michael to the funeral, sedated in a wheelchair because he became anxious when they took him out of the facility. He had gently hung the stone round his brother’s neck then but nothing happened, nothing changed. He was angry then and confused. Perhaps God had not seen his sacrifice or he had his back turned in heaven as his earthly father had on earth. Or perhaps in Varanasi it was the death of the Keeper which had caused the miracles that night, he mused. Maybe that was the missing link.  
    Joseph sat back in the chair and stared out of the window to the roseate Catalina Mountains. Michael was the half of him that had almost died to protect him in his childhood.