It was almost time. The orange lights of the abbey could now be seen clearly on the other side of the bridge as the lights of dusk got dimmer. I had one last puff, took my shirt off and put on the grey jumper without too much thought on which side is front or back. The air grew heavier and colder and as a worrying demeanour fell over Jason, I could not help observe that one of the bottles was missing. 

“Fuck! we’re missing a bottle”. The vapour from my breath rolled out like plumes of clouds going about aimlessly through the night sky. “What the fuck are you talking about?” Jason exclaimed, his face now turning from concern to panic. “I don’t know. I know we pulled out thirteen in all from the casket and now I see only twelve.”  “Are you sure there was thirteen?, he said.  “Fuck yeah I’m right, you were there and we put them in the box one by one. I’m sure I counted thirteen. Maybe we should go back and make sure we didn’t leave it there.” 

“Are you fucking serious? They will be here in a minute and anyway someone would have noticed by now that we broke into the abbey. It’s too dangerous to go back”.  I looked at my watch and kicked off some grass. “What are we gonna do? If they find out that one of the bottles is missing we might get in serious shit here. I’m not gonna die by the river bank like some forsaken bastard.” 

“Well neither am I but we need to think of something fast.” Jason retorted, "Quickly help me look whether it fell on the grass when we stumbled on that stone on our way down.” 

We put on the flash lights and quibbled whether we should go straight or slightly to the right. We split and Jason took the path to the right. I started climbing on the foot of the bank when suddenly I saw something reflecting light some six feet away. “Quickly here, I think I found it.” I turned round to see whether Jason has heard my call but he was not there. “Where the fuck are you?”, I whispered as loud as I could without letting off a scream. I pointed back the light to where I saw the thing just two seconds ago. “Jason! What the fuck….”. My body went suddenly numb. I couldn’t feel a thing aside from a tingle on my neck. It just felt like a presence breathing down my neck. I couldn’t make a whole out of it. I stared at it all but my mind is still not registering what I am experiencing. Jason is not there or at least I can't see his outline through the dark cloud. The sound is maddening pitch unlike anything I have heard before. I do somehow liken it to a massive swarm of insects, like in the hundreds of thousands all buzzing around at tremendous speeds. The sound stops all of a sudden and I feel a blast warm air passing right next to my feet a few inches off the ground. I try to focus on somewhere but it is happening too fast. I see something forming where we left the crate. Two figures appear next to each other. They were very tall, greyish skin colour and what looked like strange-looking glyphs covering their bodies. One of them looked at me with large eyes that had what felt like a deep orange glow. I hear like a loud hum. My head starts spinning and suddenly it’s all dark.

14th August 1957 (4 days earlier), Wiltshire, England 

The pub is filled with the usual cacophony and familiar musty smell of tobacco and spilled stout on wooden floors. My watch read nine o’clock on the mark. I sat at the far end of the pub on a cushioned victorian style bench and a small round table where usually the late O’Brien spent most of his evenings. I took out the last cigarette from the half crumbled packet and looked at the door as it flung open. It was Jason in one of his rare moments of punctuality. He passed a quick order to the barman while walking towards me. “You look like you could do with some sleep mate” he said with half a grin as he sat down. 

“Screw you, there’s no time for this shit. The Finn was here last night.”  

“What does he want? You’re not buying into that crap are you? I told you we should talk to seargeant Jones and get these bastards out of town. This is all a fucking bluff. Nothing but false threats. How can you take someone who claims to be from this secret Lodge of the Levantine Arch  seriously?. ”

“False threats my arse. They know everything about us and about Julia. These people are not some faggots playing pub tricks for Christ sake. They are as serious as fuck. They asked me to help them out with one thing and they said I won’t hear from them. At least for some time” 

“Do what exactly John? Kill some some fucking lunatic Persian mystic by the Thames or rob the Queen’s jewels? What are you on about?”. I could see from his burrowing forehead that he was shifting from light concern to deep worry. 

“They want some bottles hidden away in the abbey’s cellars. They know I had done some work there years ago when I was a student so they assume I know my way around. This is how fucking seriuos it is Jas…they actually know all of my life history including who I shagged years ago. Damn it!” 

“They seriuosly want you to steal some monks' booze? Is this what it is about?”. This is the part where he usually breaks out in a hysterical laugh but didn’t. Instead he just did something totally unexpected and out of character. “I’m kind of getting intrigued by this weird monk ass shit and secret lodges bullocks. Who knows we might get on the tabloids, get behind bars for a month but still pave our way out of this town riding on the wave of fame or notoriety. We might even get some lucrative offers and some dirty crumpets up our street."

I didn’t know what to answer at that exact moment. I wasnt’ sure if he could understand the gravity of the situation or whether it was partly his way of dealing with some heavy shit. I left him on that train of thought as I continued. “They gave me four days to get the bottles out of the cellar. There are thirteen of them. Six in the main cellar and the rest tucked away in some medevial crypt nearby. At first I thought this was an old story full of bullocks. I had heard so many different versions of it when I was a boy. You know phantoms and demons kind of shit. But there might be more than some truth in it.”
I paused to light up the cigarette as Ruth, the pub-owner’s wife, brought Jason’s pint. “Hello boys”, she said in a half-cynical tone as she quickly scanned our eyes. “Hope you’re not into something totally stupid again. We have more trouble than we can handle here. Just take care” She quickly turned and walked back towards the bar. 

“I talked to Dr. Keeley this morning about this. You know he’s into local history and mythology so I popped a few questions at random pretending I’m just interested into local heritage. I then mentioned the legend and stories about the Abbey’s cellars. He told me that there is a lot of controversy but there is more fact to the legends than we like to give credt for. He said he read a medievial manuscript once that was found in another abbey but in Ireland. Somewhere around the early thirteen hundreds. It mentions how there were some mystic monks at the abbey here who had some exceptional knowledge about plant medicine and herbs. You know like alchemists and herbalists kind of shit. But these blokes were doing something entirely off the church’s agenda and totally underground. The Irish monk who visited the abbey won their trust and they had shared some of the mysteries with him. He manage to escape back to Ireland and tell the tale when the abbey was burned down by some marauders a few years later. He wrote cryptically about some of the stuff going on in the abbey and about the concoction they were doing using metaphors and alchemical language of the time. Now here is the sauce. What they were brewing wasn’t some medevial alchemical elixir or salve sort of thing. They were creating some very potent psycho-active substance that the manuscript hinted could make one peep into the mind of God.” 

I could tell Jason was following intensely as he was slowly sipping his beer instead of gulping it down as he usually does. “So what you’re saying is that these monks were doing some crazy potion that would give you super powers or something?”. 

“Not exactly super powers but close. Dr. Keeley mentioned that some of the monks at the abbey were believed to be part of a larger network, an order of some sort that spread throughout parts of Europe and beyond. They were interested in achieving enlightenment through the use of plant medicines and spread the covert knowledge among their peers with the ultimate goal of counterbalancing what they perceived were the growing dark forces of the time. The potion gave them some kind of connection with the spiritual world and beyond, entering into union with the divine and understanding deep knowledge of how the universe works.”

                                                          <End of Part 1> 

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