8 The Pentacle

HE WATCHED her smile at him. Oh, how she had such a pretty smile with her short dark blonde hair and those wide brown eyes. She was in a 'Pocahontas' costume, a black weather with a white tip sticking out  at the back of her hair which kind of confused him. Why was she dressed like that?  She approached him slowly and he could feel her warm breath causing his face to flush but he felt different this time. He felt confident. She touched his hand, making him to look down and could see the shadow cast on the ground where there was a picture of a lion's head—Barnstable High School logo. He savoured the moment, raising his head to look into her eyes which sparkled under the moonlight. He noticed the small white reflection of the moon in her eyes begin to loose its color and darken. The moon began to turn red and the warm feeling in him waned and was replaced by fear and terror. The ground beneath him was shaking, shaking slowly then violently until the lion's head on the ground cracked open and he saw the huge black snake rise up from the opening, its enormous jaws wide open, ready to devour the girl...

"Shit!" Jake cursed after finding himself lying on his bed.

Another dream!

He sat up and threw his head back before taking in a deep breath. His eyes later landed on the book lying on the desk next to the bed.

About time he got some answers.

Jake headed out to the kitchen to get some milk after saying bye to her mom who had just left.

His dad was in the dining room reading a tabloid while drinking coffee. That week had him going to work quite later in the day.

"Hey, dad, seen the milk? "

"I think I saw your brother take some from the fridge... Ryan! " he called out.

As always, his brother took a century to answer, pretending to be doing something important.

He appeared with the gallon.

"Do you mind? Some of us here have don't have all day!" Jake scoffed, reaching out to take the milk.

Ryan held on to the gallon, causing Jake to apply force.

"Let go, I'm not interested in another one of your ridiculous games!"

Ryan gave him a sinister grin and suddenly let go of the gallon which hit his brother in the chest before the top came off and Jake's shirt  was drenched with milk.

"Dad, Jake spilled milk all over himself!"

"Argh! You little..." Jake stopped himself, preserving the little dignity he still had left in him, which was still way bigger than his brother's brain—so he said to himself.

"Sorry, pal, I'm not going shopping again, " came his dad.

One of this days, Jake swore he would kill his brother.

Studying the book, Jake still hit a dead end with it after trying to decipher the strange markings on it throughout the day and in between periods, the strangest thing being that the large book only had two pages inscribed—the rest was blank.

He ended up knocking on the head of the History department's door. The book was tucked away safely in his bag.

"Well, if it isn't my favorite History student! " Mr. Henry Crawford began upon opening the door for Jake.

He was a tall man in his late thirties with dark hair and a beard, trimmed of course. The African-American was quite a very formal man as Jake never saw him without a suit. He always wore suits and that day he was in a grey one.

The formality was mostly for show as Jake would catch him sometime letting out how he was underpaid and should've become a university professor instead.

"What can I do for you? "

"I was...uum... " Jake began and realised he hadn't actually thought this through.

"I was working on an essay about symbology and I recalled that you mentioned something about it in an earlier class. "

Ha!  That wasn't so bad!

"Yes, which part, exactly? " Mr. Henry asked while going through a magazine which Jake managed to see the cover with the headline, How to Run an Empire .

"I was thinking about the pentacle. "

That got his full attention as he stashed the magazine down a drawer in his desk.

"Ah, religious symbology. I never took you to be the religious type, Jake. "

"I'm not. "

"Well, there's a lot that falls under that topic, especially how to define and distinguish between the pentacle and the pentagram."

"Tell me all of it. "

"Oh, okay. Don't mind if I do," Mr. Henry went on, "see, a lot of people tend to confuse the pentacle and the pentagram, similar to how people confuse the leopard with the cheetah which is very silly if you ask me. I mean, the tear marks are right there. What kind of idiot can't see them? "

He stopped, noticing that he had digressed.

"Sorry... "

Jake smiled and nodded, urging him to go on.

"The pentagram is a five-pointed upright star, same as the pentacle except that the pentacle has a circle around it which symbolizes white magic and good. The pentacle itself represents intellect and good unlike its counterpart, the pentagram, as Eliphas Levi wrote in the late nineteenth century; the pentagram signifies domination of the mind over the elements, and the demons of air, the spirits of fire, the phantoms of water and ghosts of earth are enchained by this symbol, hence you may behold the infinite through the medium of that faculty which is like the soul's eye and you will be ministered unto by legions of angels and hosts of fiends. "

"Ok, so the pentagram possess dark power..

"Oh no, " Mr. Henry corrected, "it is not an opposite of the pentacle but more like an enhancement. An upgrade which brings me to the next part which is the inverted pentagram or pentacle. Over the years, this symbol has been used to represent dark power."

He went ahead to make a sketch and Jake noted the book had the inverted pentacle. What did that mean?

"Many occultists and people believe this to be the symbol of evil or Satan, if you like, resembling a goat's head when you make out all the five points but it is merely a misconception created by the human mind, similar to the upright pentacle and pentagram, all of which when looked up in the right way through a proper historical marathon all out to be protective symbols created over the years. There's also the Eye of Horus  which I'm sure you've read about and even the Triquetra and the Hexagon of Solomon—not to be confused by the Star of David, having its lines go over each other just like the pentacle and pentagram unlike the star of David, whose lines cross each other's paths. "

Jake's mind drifted back to when he saw that (or imagined?) strange drawing in his History the other day and the Eye of Horus was there.

What did this all mean?

Well, according to everything that was going on, he could not put aside that he had a book with an inverted pentacle on it.