Moon Mask

by James Richardson

  Langley felt that the old lady was letting her guard down a little but nevertheless he knew he had to tread carefully. Perching on the edge of a similarly patterned armchair to the sofa, he leaned forward and in a soft voice asked; “Mrs Braun, you said ‘after all he had seen’. What did you mean by that?”

  She looked at him, collecting her thoughts. “When the Japs dropped their bombs on Pearl Harbour in ’41, Emmett was only fifteen years old. We were childhood sweethearts, you know.” Langley smiled warmly. “I begged him not to, but he insisted on signing up. He joined the navy so that he could go off and help our boys in the Pacific. I know what you’re going to say- fifteen wasn’t old enough,” she pre-empted. “But Emmett wasn’t the only lad to forge his papers back then. Some did it in the pursuit of glory, others, like Emmett heard the call of duty. And the admissions office was willing to overlook the glaring forgeries if it meant getting troops on the front lines. That,” she concluded, “was the strength of his sense of duty, Mister Langley.”

  “Admirable,” he replied. Coming from a distinguished military background, Langley appreciated such acts of patriotism perhaps more so than the other members of the president’s cabinet.

  “In ’43,” Mrs Braun continued, “he was assigned to a brand new ship. He was very excited. Of course, he couldn’t tell me anything about it, but he did say that if tests were successful, it was going to change the tide of the war.” Darkness descended across her features, a twist of anger. “He was never the same after that.”

  “That’s when the nightmares began,” Langley realised.

  A single tear began to roll down her cheek, the memories of a lifetime ago still raw. “That’s right. He was given six months leave,” she said. “Six months, in the middle of a world war!”

  “Was he injured in some way?”

  “Not physically.” That was answer enough. The body was far easier to heal than the mind. Langley knew this well. The things he had witnessed, the things he had done, in the name of his country, still gave him nightmares. It was those things that had driven him to his post at the UN in the naive hope of helping to maintain international peace, to prevent the need for such actions to ever come about again.

  “When he returned to the navy,” she continued, “he transferred into the medical corp. Years later he was sent to Japan as part of a relief team.” She laughed bitterly. “We drop an A-bomb on their country then to appease our national conscience we sent in a few medical personnel to try and help the victims of the radiation fallout. Hah! It disgusted him, and it disgusts me!” She had an accusatory glint in her eyes as she looked at Langley. A ‘suit’, she’d called him. A policy maker. A guilty party. “He became the world’s foremost expert on radiological illnesses. A few years after the war he left the navy and continued his work on civvy street, but every few years men in suits, just like yours Mister Langley, would show up at the doorstep and whisk him off to one undisclosed location after another, for weeks, months sometimes. And each time he returned he was just a little bit sadder, a little bit . . . darker. It was like the United States government was slowly, piece by piece, eating away at his soul.”

  They sat there in silence for several long moments, the chiming of half a dozen small clocks thundering in Langley’s ears. He could have argued his own innocence, reiterated his UN credentials, but the truth was she was right. The US government had destroyed her husband, piece by piece. He wasn’t the first, and he wouldn’t be the last, and as a representative of that government, Langley’s hands had as much blood on them as anyone’s.

  “Mrs Braun,” he said carefully. “I know it was a long time ago, but do you remember the name of the ship your husband served on in ’43?”

  “Of course I do,” she snapped. “I’m old, not senile, Mister Langley.” Langley offered an apologetic smile. “You’re no spring chicken yourself, you know” she grumbled, then looked him in the eye as though the next words she said were going to be the defining ones of his life. “USS Eldridge.”

  The name immediately sounded familiar to Langley, though he couldn’t quite place why. Then again, in his military career he had set foot upon so many ships in the US Navy that he couldn’t remember all their names.

  “Now, if you don’t mind Mister Langley, your five minutes are up.” She rose and gestured him out of the door. Of course, there was no way the frail old lady could make him leave and he still had many questions to ask, but Alex Langley was a gentleman and if the lady wanted him to leave, then leave he would.

  He followed her back along the hallway and out on to the porch. But just as the old lady was about the close and lock the door without so much as another word, a question Langley hadn’t planned to ask sprang from his mouth.

  “Just one more question, Mrs Braun,” he said urgently just as the door clicked closed. He raised his voice so that she could hear him on the other side. “Did your husband ever mention anything about something called ‘Phoenix’?”

  There was a long pause and Langley thought that she couldn’t have heard and had returned to the living room, but then the lock clicked and the door swung open. Whatever frailty had been there previously had now gone. She stared at him, long and hard, deciding something, Langley realised. Then she made her decision.

  “Phoenix killed my husband, Mister Langley.”

  Langley still had no idea what Phoenix was but he played his hunch. “I think that Phoenix is going to kill a lot of other people too. And I need your help to stop it.”

  Another lengthy pause. Another decision reached. Then she opened the door wider and gestured him in. “You’d better come with me.”

  45:

  The Fires of the Phoenix

  NATO Air Base Geilenkirchen,

  Germany

  Benjamin King’s head throbbed. No, ‘throbbed’ was too kind a word. In reality it felt as if some dark minion of Satan had climbed up through his body and was now sat inside his head thrusting a pneumatic drill into the back of his eyeballs. Each time the computer screen that had sat in front of him all day had flashed onto a new page that little demon upped the power level a notch and thrust deeper.

  Now, lying with only a towel wrapped around his waist on the bed in the room he had been allocated with Sid, he lay staring at the ceiling. The sound of running water came from the bathroom where Sid showered. She had ordered him to shower first so that he could get straight into bed and sleep but there was no way he could do so. His mind kept mulling over the events of the last few days, focussing mainly on the last hour or so.

  He, Sid and Nadia had locked themselves away inside the office space they had been allocated by the base administrators, surrounded by some of the most sophisticated computer systems in the world, trawling through endless websites ranging from the religious to the fanatic to the absurd. They’d read the museum manifests of everything from the Smithsonian to small private collections; they’d searched databases of myths and legends catalogued by historians and explorers from the days of Herodotus until now, and still they had nothing. No strong leads, no hints about mysterious magical masks that could see the future or travel to it.

  They had hit a dead-end. A brick wall.

  “We’re going about this all wrong,” he had said shortly before midnight. All three of them were tired and grouchy. Other than the lead they had passed onto Langley, which in itself was weak and made too many assumptions, none of them had anything to show for the endless hours they had been hunting on the World Wide Web.

  “How so?” Sid had asked. Nadia looked up from her computer also, her eyes tired and weary.

  King turned in his seat to look at the two women. “Kha’um and his crew didn’t have the internet, no digitalised libraries or the global resources of UNESCO, yet they still managed to find the location of three pieces of the Moon Mask.”

  “Yeah, but I thought you said Emily’s diary didn’t ever explain how they found them.”

  “Sure she did- ‘Kha’um placed the
mask upon his head and his pagan gods revealed all to him’.”

  Nadia rolled her eyes and was about to respond but King cut her off.

  “Back at the U.N., you yourself said that the tachyon radiation given off by the Moon Mask, as well as making everyone at Sarisariñama sick, also had some sort of neurological effect- an increase in brain patterns which in Kha’um and Pryce resulted in some sort of a tumour or growth forming on the Parietal Lobe. An area of the brain which scientists are studying in relation to ESP. Well get this,” he’d raised his voice over Nadia’s huff of frustration. “I touched the mask. Back in Xibalba, I could actually see the city as it was thousands of years ago. Since then, I keep on seeing things, thinking about the past, but not in some day-dreamy sort of way. It’s like I’m back there again, experiencing . . .” He trailed off, unwilling to voice the painful memories of his mother and sister’s execution.

  He cleared his throat and continued. “For days now, I’ve been experiencing the oddest sense of déjà vu.”

  “We have all been under a lot of stress since this all began,” Nadia argued, keeping her tone flat and even. It held a condescending tone to it. “The two of you were taken hostage and had your lives threatened. Under such conditions it is ordinary for the mind to . . . play tricks on you.”

  “And yet that whole time, when Bill held us hostage, it felt like . . . like I knew what was about to happen. Like I’d already seen it, lived, it before.”

  “In times of stress, the brain pieces together fragments of your memories, your past experiences, to help you cope with such terrifying circumstances.”

  “But I can tell you now, Nadia, I’ve never been held hostage before-” He cut himself off, realising his own lie. Of course he had been held hostage before Bill Willis. That afternoon with General Abuku was one of the most defining moments of his life. He felt the circular scar on his forehead burn anew and his cheeks flush, a mixture of embarrassment and anger.

  “Down in the mine, with Nate,” he offered a different argument, though he knew instantly how flimsy it would be under Nadia’s scathing scrutiny. “I felt sure that we were going to be betrayed.”

  “That was nothing more than paranoia stemming from what, at the time, you felt was my betrayal. It doesn’t mean that since touching the Moon Mask you have become a psychic.”

  “Ben,” Sid had added, “you yourself said that the most plausible explanation for the legends about the Moon Mask being able to predict the future is the hallucinogenic compounds ancient cultures used in their rituals. The famous Oracle of Delphi was one of biggest con-artists of all time without even realising it. The prophets and seers of the ages, you said, if they were alive today, we would call them druggies and smack-heads. The practise is still in use with shamans and witchdoctors and Native American tribes today who use hallucinogenic compounds to induce trances and when they wake up they say they’ve seen the future when in fact they’ve just had very vivid dreams.”

  “But what if I was wrong?” King asked, glancing from Sid to Nadia. “What if some of these people had ESP?” Nadia moaned and ran an exasperated hand through her hair but King spoke over her protests. “Kha’um found three pieces of the mask, by doing nothing more than wearing the mask. If it was just superstitious mumbo jumbo, visions brought about by drugs, then how did they lead him to the pieces of the mask?”

  “Kha’um was the keeper of the mask for his tribe,” Nadia said. “He would have had access to all the lore surrounding it, clues written by whomever originally distributed the pieces around the globe, for surely someone, perhaps even your Progenitors I’ll concede, must have done so. Unless you now expect us to believe that the gods shattered it and in a flash of light sent it sprawling across the globe, like the Xibalbans believed?”

  “Damn it!” he had snapped. “It’s worth a goddamn shot, isn’t it!?” King had slammed his palm down on the computer desk and rose to his feet. Frustration had turned to anger- anger at his own inability to solve this final piece of the puzzle. “This is getting us nowhere,” he gestured at the computers. “For all we know the Chinese, or the Russians or Bill’s people have already located the final piece and are about to turn it into a bomb!”

  Sid had ignored his last few words, instead focussing on her fiancées first statement, a sense of dread dropping through her gut. “What’s worth a shot, Ben?” she’d asked cautiously.

  King turned and looked at her but Nadia answered for him.

  “Wearing the mask,” she realised. “You think that if you put the mask on then the ‘pagan gods’ will reveal all to you?”

  “But I thought you said the tachyon radiation caused gross abnormalities in anyone who touched it extensively?” Sid clarified with Nadia.

  “Edward Pryce’s remains, after being in close contact with one piece of the mask, as well as physical abnormalities, was riddled with evidence of tumours . . . as was Kha’um’s.”

  “No,” Sid fired vehemently at King. “I won’t allow it.”

  “Nadia, you said I was immune to the tachyon radiation.”

  “In relatively close proximity to one piece of the mask, your body does seem to have developed a resistance to the radiation. But that resistance, as I stated previously, is most likely hereditary, stemming from your ancestral links to the Bouda. Yet the fact that Kha’um also suffered from brain tumours implies that even he was not fully immune to the radiological effects. You said that, traditionally, the price that the ‘keepers of the mask’ paid was short life.”

  “But a short, one off exposure-”

  “No, Ben!” Sid had snapped, jumping to her feet. “No!” She stared at him hard, her eyes fierce and yet loving. “This is going too far. This quest for the Moon Mask killed your father, your entire family! I won’t let it kill you too! If you try to wear the Moon Mask- especially in its almost complete state- it could kill you! And I can’t lose you Ben, I’m sorry I just can’t.” She struggled to hold back tears.

  Nadia quietly invaded the awkward silence that followed Sid’s outburst. “The answer is in here, Ben,” she said, placing a hand on a computer tower. Her normally hard voice had seemed somehow softer, pleading almost. “It’s not . . . out there,” she said vaguely, gesturing into thin air. “We’re scientists, not mystics.”

  Now, alone on the bed in his room, Nadia’s words echoed in King’s mind: We’re scientists, not mystics. It was a similar sentiment he had said to his father the last time they had seen each other, when he had finally decided enough was enough, that the Moon Mask was nothing but a myth. All they had left to go on was hearsay and prophecy. His father’s reputation was in ruins, his estate dry, his future bleak, yet he had kept faith in the ancient traditions of his tribe. “Come with me, Ben,” he had pleaded. “The two of us against the world. They may laugh at us now, just like they laughed at Schliemann before he discovered Troy, but we too will prove that myth can be reality.” Together they had spent years searching for the Moon Mask but with nothing more than dead-ends and broken promises, his father had decided the only way to prove its existence was to follow the legends they had unearthed about the ‘Gods,’ a race of advance people he had identified as the Progenitors, bearded men from a distant land that had seeded civilisation in distant pre-history.

  But his father’s offer of such adventure had come at the same time as his offer to join UNESCO and build, as it had been termed to him, ‘a reputable, respected reputation, deserving of such a brilliant mind which unfortunately has been led astray.’ Roughly translated, it was orthodox science’s final chance to join its ranks, to abandon his father’s unconventional beliefs and build a name for himself. As with any young man, the dreams of greatness, of acceptance within such an establishment of great minds, had been too great.

  When his father had told him that an old shaman in Mali had given him clues to the whereabouts of the Progenitors, it had been the final straw. “We’re scientists, not mystics!” he had shot back in the middle of the argument.
His father had been devastated that he would not accompany him on what would prove to be the greatest adventure of their lives. Both distraught, they had parted company. Six months later, the official verdict into the disappearance of his father’s expedition had been made. Lost, presumed dead.

  “Hey,” Sid’s calming voice cut through the turmoil of his thoughts, bringing him back into the present. She came into the bedroom from the bathroom with nothing but a white towel covering her body. She was drying her black hair with another towel while peering at him with a touch of concern in her eyes. “I thought you were going to get some sleep.”

  He took a deep breath and tried to make himself relax. His head sank into the pillows- surprisingly soft and comfortable considering they were on a military base. “Couldn’t sleep.”

  Sid padded barefooted over to the side of the bed and dropped her hair towel to the floor. She ran one smooth hand across his bare chest and stomach. Despite being an academic, there was nothing saggy or baggy about her husband-to-be. His stomach was firm and solid, his chest well-formed and his arms were heavy with muscle. She longed to have them wrap around her, to feel the intimacy they had been denied since this crazy adventure had begun.

  “I’m sorry about how I reacted earlier,” she said.

  King met her eyes and forced a smile. “It’s okay.”

  “I just . . . I just don’t want to lose you Ben.” Her index finger ran up the centre of his chest, his neck and chin and then stroked his cheek. She leaned closer to him. “I just want this all to be over. I wish the Moon Mask had never been found.”

  King wished he could have said the same to her but despite what he had said to her after Gibbs’ team had picked them up from Patagonia, he knew that this was one Pandora’s Box which he needed to open. His father had died, disgraced in the eyes of his peers and, worse, he believed, disgraced in the eyes of his son, the only survivor of his family. For his sake, for all their sakes, he had to see this through to the end!