The Armageddon Conspiracy by Mike Hockney

said in Latin.
    Lucy knew those words
too well. Out of the depths I have cried to
thee, O Lord – the opening words of Psalm
129. Sometimes, she thought they’d been branded on her heart. They
were the cry of everyone annihilated by grief.
    As more gunshots sounded, Sinclair’s
voice grew more desperate. ‘Vanitas vanitatum,’ he said, ‘et omnia
vanitas.’
    Lucy bowed her
head. Vanity of vanities, and all things
are vanity . How often had she thought that
since her parents died? Life had no point now. How could it when
the Creators were dead, when love had been ripped from her
forever?
    She left the pews and tiptoed to a
side-door hidden behind red velvet curtains. As quietly as
possible, she eased the door open and slipped into the corridor
outside. A shot rang out in the next corridor, the one leading to
the refectory. A soldier in a black uniform staggered into view and
slumped forward into the middle of the intersection of
corridors.
    Lucy stared at the
man’s head. Blood was pouring from a gaping hole in his lower jaw
and spreading over the floor. His eyes were wide open, but there
was no life there. She tried to move, but couldn’t. All is vanity . She wanted
to curl up, lie on the floor, and hope no one would hurt
her.
    In due course, the soldier’s poor
parents would learn of their son’s death. His brothers and sisters
would be devastated. His girlfriend, maybe pregnant, would never
recover: love destroyed just when it was needed most. A whole tree
of suffering, branches sprouting in scores of places, pain
squeezing through the roots and spreading. Broken hearts falling
like autumn leaves.
    Out of the
depths .
    Feeling sick, she crept
into one of the toilets. A bucket of dirty water had been pushed
into the corner, with an old mop sticking out. She poured some of
the water over the floor in front of one of the cubicles then stuck
an ‘Out of Order’ sign from the cleaner’s cupboard on the cubicle
door, and locked herself in. Perching on top of the toilet seat,
she pulled her knees up to her chin and tried not to make a sound. She shut her eyes. Minutes passed. No noise. Nothing .
    Her mind flitted back to Raphael’s
painting. Everything about it was wrong, or too right – and maybe
those amounted to the same thing. When she tried to mentally
reconstruct the mural, she found all the details were somehow
imprinted in her memory, as though they had been with her forever. More and more, she was convinced she’d seen this mural before…but
she had no idea how that could be.
    God, the delusions were coming back;
how else could she explain it? The more she concentrated, the more
vivid the painting became. It turned into a 3-D representation that
she could rotate and flip, see from every angle. Why did she feel
she knew it so well? In many ways, it was like a smaller-scale
version of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco. It had
much of the same religious iconography and told a similar story of
Creation. Except there was something subtly different, some
ambiguity. Perhaps it was a mirror image, or not quite in focus. What she didn’t doubt was that buried in these images was a
radically different history of mankind from the one she’d been
taught at school.
    She brought the top left-hand panel to
the forefront of her mind and studied it as though she were back at
Oxford University. Rusty thought processes cranked into gear.
    The panel showed a dazzling lightshow,
full of rainbow lights swirling like the wind, but in one corner
was darkness; a thick, ominous murk. This must be a depiction of
the separation of light from darkness described in the Book of
Genesis.
    Moving clockwise to the next panel,
Lucy felt uneasy, but wasn’t sure why. God was shown sitting on a
throne made of diamonds, surrounded by a host of glowing,
translucent angels. But again there was an unsettling ingredient –
a dark angel about to throw a spear at God. Lucy assumed this was a
depiction of Lucifer’s rebellion