Moon Mask

by James Richardson

  She turned to Raine and, infuriatingly, her expression softened, a wide smile replacing her frown. “Mister Raine, thank you once again for all your help. Raphael,” she continued, guiding the native workers away and assuming a diplomatic air. “Walk with me please.” Their gabbled conversation faded as they moved away through the camp.

  There were a few moments of awkward silence in the examination tent. The four interns who had brought in the skeleton looked nervously about themselves until Nadia ordered them out. Then she turned back to the examination table and snapped on a pair of latex gloves.

  “Yikes,” Raine said, pushing away from the tent pole and stepping closer to the Russian woman, his ice-blue eyes mischievous. “I love a girl in latex.”

  Nadia’s equally cold blue eyes glanced at him for only a moment before looking down at the skeletal remains. “And I love probing around in dead bodies, Mister Raine,” she replied.

  He raised a roguish eyebrow. “How about probing something a little livelier?”

  She looked at him with exaggerated sadness. “I am afraid that my specialities are limited to human remains, not over-confident Americans with dinosaur-level attitudes towards womankind.”

  One for the Rusky! Ben thought admiringly.

  “Ooh, Nadia, you wound me,” Raine moved on, unruffled. “Is there no melting the Ice Queen?”

  “Of course,” she said, examining the skeleton’s thigh bone. “Unfortunately there is nothing hot enough to thaw ice in the current vicinity.”

  Strike two!

  Raine simply laughed light-heartedly and moved towards the exit. “I’ll see you later Sid,” he smiled and King felt his hackles rise. “Benny,” he nodded by way of a departure, and then he was gone, leaving the three scientists alone.

  “See,” Sid said under her breath. “He’s trying to be your friend.”

  “I hate being called ‘Benny’!”

  Sid was about to say something further when they both felt Nadia’s eyes boring into them. They turned to face her and saw that she had looked up from her work and was staring straight at them. “I work most productively whilst free from interruptions and distractions,” she said in her usual clipped tone.

  Sid nodded in understanding. “Point taken, Nadia,” she said, smiling and taking King’s hand. “We have our own work to do anyway.”

  King paused by the entrance and turned back to Nadia. “Can you let me know the moment you determine his race?”

  “It will take some time to pinpoint the exact area of origin.”

  “Yeah, but you should be able to narrow it down fairly quickly to give me a rough idea. All I need to know is that he was a black African male.”

  Nadia considered this a moment. “I have to make my report to Doctor McKinney-”

  “Please, Nadia,” King pleaded. “I’d consider it a personal favour.”

  Nadia hesitated a moment longer and then simply nodded once. King smiled his appreciation then stepped out of the tent.

  An unusually cool breeze drifted through the camp, stirring the canvas and making the hairs on the back of King’s neck stand on end. The setting sun cast the sky a deep blood red and twisted distorted shadows through the trees. For a moment, he fancied that he heard a whispery sound drifting through them.

  Sari . . . sari . . .

  He forced his imagination back under control and headed off after Sid.

  4:

  A Little Less Conversation

  UNESCO Base Camp,

  Sarisariñama Tepui,

  Venezuela,

  King stood alone in one of the camp’s five lab tents. Even out in the wilderness, the lab was the epitome of high-tech science. Touch-screen computers lined the sturdy canvass walls, powered by huge generators and they synced up to numerous handheld tablet computers which the camp’s scientists could carry with them, making notes and examining the enormous array of subject-relevant e-books stored in the system’s hard-drive. Ergonomic workstations were arranged around the perimeter of the large tent, equipped with state-of-the-art polarizing microscopes, a multitude of acid and lignin-free containers, a 3D-digitizer, osteometric boards, digital callipers, microscribe digitizers and x-ray scanners, as well as an array of precision conservation tools: scalpels and minute vacuums, brushes, air purifiers and dozens of bottles of cleaning fluids and chemicals.

  Wrapped within the canvass folds of the expedition’s five labs, it was easy to believe you were back in some ultra-modern European research facility rather than the hot and sweaty remote table-mountain.

  Yet, despite all the technology available to him, Ben King sat hunched over one of the work stations littered with actual books and placed the small brush and vacuum down on the table top. In his gloved hands, he reverently lifted the carefully cleaned mask to look at it in all its detail.

  While similar to the descriptions of the Moon Mask of his African ancestors, on closer inspection the Sarisariñama piece was noticeably different.

  There were no brightly coloured beads patterned in swirls around the face’s cheeks. Instead this mask was adorned in some sort of ochre coloured paint, now faded and flaking. Where the cave paintings of the Bouda mask indicated rectangular slits for eyes, the Sarisariñama one had wide, gaping holes. The benevolent ‘almost-smile’ of the African mask was replaced by jaws filled with corroded metal teeth, twisted into a perpetual, malevolent snarl.

  Despite the differences though, the similarities were undeniable, even to Doctor McKinney and her ilk. The overall shape of the mask was identical to the depictions of the Bouda’s, derived by following the curve of a piece which was out of place.

  He remembered the cave paintings his father had shown him in the Gambia and flicked now through the discoloured pages of his battered notebook to find the sketch he had made on a return visit many years later. A faded photograph had also been taped into the book and he cross-checked the two pictures.

  Amidst the images of black men, women and children being herded like cattle onto a European ship was the man described by his father as the Oni or Great King. The mask he wore was depicted as a swirl of colour but, easily identifiable, was a triangular section of the forehead, painted entirely in startling red, completely out of keeping with the rest of the mask’s design.

  While the rest of the mask had been designed in the fairly traditional style found throughout Africa, this triangular section, his father had told him, was one piece of the shattered Moon Mask. The rest of the mask had been fashioned around it, its shape and dimensions derived from the curve of the original forehead piece.

  The Sarisariñama mask now held in his hands also had a section out-of-keeping with the overall character of it. Though it had once been coated in the same ochre paint as the rest of the mask, a roughly triangular section of it, this time its left hand jaw, tapering up to the point of the nose, was identifiable through the cracked paint. Again, it seemed obvious to King that this piece had been used as a base from which the shape and dimensions of the overall visage had been derived.

  Actually holding the mask in his hands, King was now able to completely verify what he had always believed. Unable to discern further detail from the cave painting, he could see now that, in the case of the Sarisariñama mask at least, the rest of the mask had been constructed as if to accommodate the red metal of the original piece.

  Feeling a swell of excitement bubbling inside, he hurried to the lab’s scanner and, ignoring the pounding thump of music and the sounds of laughter coming from the mess tent, he placed the photograph of the Gambian cave painting down on the glass. Working the controls, he enlarged the image to four times its original size and sent it to the printer.

  “Hey,” Sid’s gentle voice said as she pushed through the tent flap. Beyond her, the summit of the table-mountain was bathed in silver moon light, the points of the camp’s tents silhouetted against a purple sky.

  “Nate managed to squeeze a crate of beer into the helicopter’s hold. Ever
yone’s having a drink in the mess tent to celebrate our find. I think the man who made the find should be there.”

  I doubt they’d miss me, he thought distractedly, knowing he was probably the least popular member of the dig. But, he knew his girlfriend wouldn’t take no for an answer. “I’ll be there in a moment,” he replied half-heartedly.

  A drink in her hand, Sid moved inside the tent and stepped up behind him, wrapping her arms around his waist and kissing the back of his neck. In the low light of the tent his smooth features and dark African skin glowed bronze but he kept his gentle brown eyes focussed on what he was doing.

  Sid frowned as she observed him pick up a sheet of tracing paper and use it to trace the outline of the forehead from the scanned copy he had just made:

  Then he used another piece of paper and, placing the edge of the pencil against it, shaded in the shape of the original metal plate from the Sarisariñama mask:

  “You remember that McKinney said she wanted an impartial review of the mask?” she reminded him.

  “I’m simply presenting her the facts. Cold, hard, undeniable facts.” To punch home his point, he crudely folded his two pieces of paper and then brought the tracings together:

  Allowing for discrepancies in the cave painting’s portrayal, the photocopy enlargement and his own tracings, the upper edge of the Sarisariñama mask’s jaw piece met almost exactly with the lower edge of the Bouda mask’s forehead piece.

  Sid actually felt a shiver of excitement rush through her boyfriend’s body.

  “That’s it!” King exclaimed. “The proof! The proof that the Moon Mask was real and that the Black Death really existed. That he searched the globe for the pieces of it.” He smacked an excited kiss against Sid’s lips.

  “Easy there, tiger,” she said, pushing him back. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. It’s going to take more than two pieces of tracing paper to convince McKinney, let alone the rest of the academic world, that an escaped Gambian slave became a notorious pirate who scoured the earth in search of a magical mask. We don’t even know if the remains you found are African, and even if they are, how did a Gambian pirate end up in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, in a hidden temple that was built centuries before he was born?”

  He looked at her, wounded. “You don’t believe me?”

  “It’s not that I don’t believe you, baby,” she said, stroking his cheek. “It’s just that we’re going to have to put together a strong argument to convince McKinney. And I hardly think that the middle of the night when you’ve got a party waiting for the guest of honour to arrive is really the time to do that.” She kissed him then smiled, her smooth Indian features glowing with warmth. She took his hand and led him out of the tent, towards the centre of camp where the large mess tent stood.

  “Let’s go and celebrate,” she continued. “Then tomorrow we can work out how best to proceed.”

  He paused, glancing the opposite way across the table-top plateau, his mind still reeling with the possibilities presented by his discovery. “You go,” he told her. “I’m just going to check in with Nadia first.”

  Sid sighed. “Ben, I-”

  “Sid,” a voice cut in. Two of the camp’s younger girls whose names King couldn’t even think to recall, hurried past, arm in arm, giggling drunkenly. “Mister Raine is looking for you.”

  King noticed a shift in Sid’s expression then, subtle, but there nonetheless. Excitement? He chose to ignore it, too excited by his discovery to let a pang of jealousy sour his feelings.

  “I’ll see you in a bit then,” Sid said and hurried off towards the mess tent. The two girls walked off, chatting about how they both wished ‘Mister Raine’ was looking for them.

  King headed across the camp, scouting through the alleyways between tents. The camp was set back about thirty feet from the edge of the plateau. A cordon of red and yellow tape marked the inner boundary and a bright red one marked the outer one, just five feet from the sheer drop beyond. A warning to venture no further.

  Nadia Yashina’s lab lay on the far side of the camp, near to the gaping black hole that was the Humboldt Sima. He could see lights inside and knew that the Russian woman would be far more interested in examining the human remains they had found than celebrating their discovery.

  He trekked over to the lab and ducked inside. He froze just inside the flap as he saw Nadia standing over the skeleton, discussing her findings with Juliet McKinney.

  The Scottish woman looked up at him, her curls of copper hair hanging about her face. Nadia, for her part, did her best to disguise a guilty expression.

  “Doctor King,” McKinney began, a fake smile curving her lips. “Your timing is impeccable.” She turned and nodded at Nadia. “Doctor Yashina, perhaps you could reveal to Doctor King the results of your examination?”

  Nadia shot him an apologetic look before indicating the human remains lying on the osteo-board in front of her.

  “My analysis of the remains,” she began in her normal detached tone, her Russian accent rolling off her tongue, “has led me to the conclusion that what we are looking at here is a . . .” she hesitated for just a second. McKinney’s eyes gleamed triumphantly. “A Caucasian male, one hundred and sixty two centimetres in height, approximately forty to fifty years old at time of death.”

  “Caucasian?” King repeated, his voice hollow.

  “Continue,” McKinney ordered Nadia. The Russian frowned but nevertheless complied.

  “Based on gas residue, the level of decay and erosion as well as the fragments of clothing found with him, I suspect he died at some point between 1700 and 1750 Common Era, although this is only an initial estimate and more detailed study is required.” She indicated the skull. “There are signs of damage to the subject’s skull, possibly the result of a sword or cutlass wound to the face, though I do not believe this is what killed him. There are a number of other injuries on the subject’s remains, suggesting a somewhat violent death. Also, I noted a deformity in the brain cavity, possibly caused by a growth or tumour-”

  “Thank you Doctor,” McKinney cut her off, noticing King’s gaze becoming distant as his mind absorbed all the information he had just been fed. “I think Doctor King has heard all he needed to hear for the time being.”

  King’s eyes shifted at the sound of her voice, locking angrily on her as she finished her conclusion.

  “I think it is safe to say that this unfortunate gentleman was not an African pirate, least of all an entirely fictional one.”

  King was silent for a moment. He had tuned out almost immediately, as soon as Nadia had declared the remains to be Caucasian, not African. His mind struggled to catch up, focussing on McKinney’s final, sarcastic comment. A flash of anger erupted somewhere deep inside. His hands gripped the pieces of tracing paper they held, scrunching them. His moment of triumph seemed to be slipping away.

  “Fictional?” he snarled, glancing from Nadia to the human remains - as though the dead man himself had betrayed him - and then back to McKinney.

  “You’re lying!” he accused her. “You told Nadia to say those things, to destroy any view that doesn’t fit in with the status quo of archaeology.”

  “My words are my own, Ben,” Nadia said. “I give only the facts, though I confess that further study is needed.”

  “The Moon Mask is real,” he told McKinney, ignoring the Russian. “Whether or not these are the remains of the Black Death, the mask I found today proves that the Moon Mask is real. And if the Moon Mask is real, it proves my father’s theories.”

  “Oh, not again,” McKinney sighed, turning her back to him. “More King fantasies about little green men seeding civilisation or survivors from Atlantis? You’re supposed to be a scientist, Ben! As was your father. Look at where his outlandish ideas got him. Dead, in some godforsaken cess-pit in the middle of Africa!”

  His anger erupted. King’s face twisted into a violent snarl and he stepped towards McKinney.

  “
Ben,” Nadia warned.

  He forced his anger under control and thrust his tracings at her. “Part of the mask I found today matches perfectly with part of the Bouda’s mask as depicted on the cave paintings near to the Wassu Stone Circle in Gambia.”

  McKinney snatched the tracings from his hand and casually glanced at them. “Cave paintings,” she scoffed. “If archaeology was to believe that everything drawn on the walls of caves and tombs were real events then we would live in a world full of dragons and sea monsters and giants. These prove nothing!” She threw the two sheets of paper back at him.

  King let them flutter to the ground. “They may not be concrete proof,” he admitted. “But they at least suggest that my father’s theories were correct.” He bent and picked up the drawings, turning them to face the Scot. “Two pieces of the same mask, both incorporated into newer facades, scattered across two continents that didn’t interact until the days of Columbus.” He waved the papers at her. “What these prove is that, in some distant period, a race of people, perhaps known to history, perhaps not, had the technology and the navigational know-how to cross the Atlantic Ocean.”

  “And scatter the separate pieces of a smashed mask that let an ancient king travel through time?” McKinney laughed. “You truly expect me, or any respectable scientist, to believe that?”

  “You mean, do I expect you to believe that an ancient legend could be based in fact? Like Troy? Shangri La? How many historical sites around the world, once scoffed at as nothing but legend, are now being seriously studied?”

  “But you’re not talking about an ancient fortress long forgotten. You’re talking about time travel!”