Moon Mask

by James Richardson

  The wormhole burst into existence!

  Although invisible to the naked eye, the hyperactive electrical synapses in King’s brain, excited by the tachyons, sent his Parietal Lobe into overdrive. The intensity was far greater than what he had experienced when he had placed the mask on his head in Germany. The Extra Sensory Perception that was stimulated, as before, now reached further than he had ever imagined, tendrils of his mind shooting into the invisible vortex before him, reaching out to the distant epochs of the past.

  All of eternity lay before him now.

  USS George Washington,

  Pacific Ocean

  “Admiral,” the operator called to Harriman again.

  He stared through a pair of binoculars across the water to see the burning wreckage of the Eldridge listing to port. Water was pouring into her hull, he knew. Her superstructure was little more than a burning tower of smashed and jagged metal sticking up from wild flames in the middle of her deck.

  The three rescue helicopters he had sent were nearing her now, their huge flood lights illuminating her scorch hull. The sky was finally clear of Chinese fighters but the surviving U.S. birds remained in the sky as a precaution.

  “Sir,” the operator said more urgently.

  “Yes, what is it?” Harriman snapped.

  “Energy levels on the Eldridge are spiking again, sir.”

  Harriman looked at the young sailor. “Like before?”

  The young man hesitated. “More than before, sir. Readings are off the scale!”

  Harriman looked back at the ruins of the ship, at the helicopters preparing to land.

  “Get those choppers back here,” he ordered. “Order all ships to fall back to the predetermined coordinates and await further instructions. And get those planes back, now!”

  The sailor moved away to issue the admiral’s orders but was halted by his voice again. “And get me a secure line to the president.”

  USS Eldridge,

  Pacific Ocean

  “Benny!” Raine yelled at his friend. More sparks spat at him as the remaining Spetsnaz fired on full auto, his weapon tearing through the central computer station. “What are you doing?”

  He glanced through the glass partition. The lead shield had failed to lower and he could see King drop to his knees, pressing his hands to his temples in pain. The emergency lights cast a hellish sheen off the metallic surfaces.

  He heard King’s voice, calling out a name. “Sid!”

  “Sid’s gone, Ben!” he shouted back. He checked his magazine. He was running low on bullets. The gun fire ceased a moment as the Spetsnaz soldier reloaded. Raine took the opportunity to lean around the workstation and fire twice. He missed and the barrage of automatic fire resumed.

  “Nate, we’ve got to get him out of there!” Nadia yelled at him from where she had taken cover.

  “Tell your man to stop shooting at me and I’ll do that!” he shot back.

  “I tried,” she shouted over the din. “He’s not obeying me!”

  “Probably doesn’t want to take orders from a little hussy,” he grumbled.

  A bullet shot close to his head and he slid down further.

  “Ben, don’t do this!”

  King existed in a place above the clouds, below the ground, beneath the ocean; all at once, then and now, past and future all coalescing into the here and now so that neither existed one without the other; each tendril, each thread wove in and out of the endless tapestry, every colour, every nuance of each fibre joining in the mosaic of the others, and yet the ultimate picture remained elusive, twisted images of what he knew to be true ripped asunder by those which could not be so.

  “Ben, don’t do this!”

  The voice invaded his thoughts, harsh, real. He recognised it above the silent din around him and struggled to pay attention to his friend.

  “Sid’s gone!”

  Images spun around him, odd and twisted images. A row of hellish faces, long and drawn, glowered at him. Three mountains, blindingly white with snow, stood in the middle of a desert. Two towers with sweeping arches crept into the night sky. A bolt of fire streaked down from the heavens and ploughed into the ground!

  “No,” his own voice sounded hollow to him. “I can get her back!”

  He saw the face of a man, big, broad shouldered, skin as black as night. He saw a ship, a jungle, a desert. More fire from heaven, more flashes of red light. People screaming, people laughing. He saw Xibalba, but not the empty shell of an abandoned city, not the mythological realm of nightmares, but a vibrant city, full of children playing, the smell of bread baking.

  He saw the Yonaguni Monument towering into the sky, the shore over a mile away. Towns and temples surrounded it, crowds of worshipers bent in prayer.

  He saw Easter Island, the giant heads erected and carved in the image of a single piece of the mask.

  He saw the pyramids of Giza, not the dusty ruins on the outskirts of Cairo, but shining beacons, encased in startling limestone. He saw the Step Pyramid of Djoser, the man who would become a demigod organising its construction.

  And he saw a city built of stone, nestled on the banks of a river. The big man was there again – Kha’um. He wrapped his arms around a woman, he played with children, he laughed and he smiled and he-

  His lifeless eyes peered up at him from the ruins of his ship, alone in the middle of the jungle, on the outskirts of the realm of Davy Jones.

  “You can’t save her, Ben!”

  Raine’s voice was there again, loud and bold in his ears.

  “I can!”

  “But you shouldn’t! She’s dead, Ben. Gone. Murdered, yes. Does it hurt? Yes. I know it does!”

  “How do you know? You know nothing!”

  “I know what it is like to lose someone you love.” There was pain in his voice. Anguish. “The mother of my child!”

  “What?”

  “You think I wouldn’t give anything to go back and save her? You think it’s easy not to step into that goddamn time machine with you, to do like Nadia said and right all the wrongs that have happened in my life? I’m a traitor, Ben, because I stopped the slaughter of innocents at the hands of my countrymen! I’m a fugitive because I escaped unjust imprisonment. I have been used and coerced and shat on by my people, my government, and my president! You think I don’t want to change all that?!”

  Flashes of King’s own life assaulted him now. His temporal destination was approaching, he knew.

  His mother was there, and his sister. There was laughter, there was love.

  And then there was Abuku. One shot rang out, then another. Bodies fell. A ring of fire seared into his forehead, forever branded by the monster.

  Then he realised the true power he had been granted! He could go back, he could save his mother and his sister, prevent his father from vanishing into the depths of Africa. No, he could do more than that! He could go back and stop Abuku from butchering not just his family, but all the other innocent lives he had taken-

  He was there again, the monster’s face glaring out of his nightmares, just as he always had. Only, he was older now and his own eyes held fear! A gun planted itself firmly against his head and the last thing General Abuku saw was the ice-blue eyes of his assassin.

  Nate?

  “Tell me, Ben, do you believe in destiny?” Alex Langley’s words seemed to echo through his skull.

  That same mission that saw Raine kill the Himmler of Africa, King somehow knew, was the same mission that saw him being convicted of treason, all because he was the only one willing to do the right thing.

  Was that destiny?

  No sooner had the images resolved in his mind - flashes of gunfire, a village of Africans cowering against Abuku’s forces, aided by American soldiers, CIA operatives, led by Raine himself - than they dissolved once more.

  He saw his father then. They were sat by the Wassu Stone Circle, then the Cenote Sagrado. They argued about his expedition into t
he heart of Africa, in search of the Bouda. He left through the door, the last time he had seen him. But it didn’t have to be like that! He reached out to him, but he was gone, whisked away by the endless torrent of time.

  Then she was there, her smile cutting through the darkness that had descended on his soul.

  Sid.

  “But I have no right,” Raine continued. “It is not down to me to decide who lives and who dies! It’s not down to me to decide what empires shall rise or civilisations shall fall. How do you know what effect it will have, saving Sid? Time is like a tapestry! All you need to do is pull out one thread and the whole thing will come crashing down!”

  Sid was with him now. He felt her skin against his, her lips. He looked into her eyes. He held her close. He would never let her go. Not this time. Not ever again.

  Kha’um’s lifeless eyes stared back at him!

  He pushed the image aside, focussed on Sid. They were on the beach, back in England, the sun warm-

  Kha’um had journeyed half the way around the world to save the woman he loved, but in the end it brought him only more sorrow-

  No!

  He saw the wormhole, the tunnel through time. It swirled about him, a maelstrom of colours, tendrils of energy, yet he knew Raine could not see it. But it was there! It was real!

  He stepped towards it, felt the embrace as it wrapped around him.

  Still, the great tapestry of time played through his mind. He was on the summit of Sarisariñama now, tumbling through a wall into an undiscovered corridor.

  Pryce was there! His body decayed, his skeletal fingers still clutching the prize that had claimed his life and his soul.

  Just like Kha’um.

  He was in New York, then Jamaica, racing over the glacier in Chile, crawling through the mine in Cornwall, diving beneath the waters of Yonaguni-

  The boat. He was on the boat.

  It was now or never!

  He saw Sid running. Saw Nadia fastening the harness hanging from a helicopter. Gun raised.

  “No!” he screamed.

  He stepped into the wormhole. The mask floated before him.

  “Benny! It’s not up to us to play god!”

  It’s not up to us to play god!

  It’s not up to us to play god!

  Benjamin King wrenched his mind back from the precipice. He was still in the mask chamber, both of them clutched between the metal fingers of robotic arms.

  There was no swirling maelstrom of colour, no lashing tendrils of energy, yet he knew it was there, yearning and churning at the subatomic level.

  It’s not up to us to play god!

  The words finally slammed home. Abuku had tried to play god. He had butchered thousands. Pryce had tried to play god, and how many had died in his quest? Kha’um had tried to harness the powers of the gods, as had his own father, and now so did he. But, in all their quests to undo the wrongs of the past, to bring back Kha’um’s people, to save Reginald King’s wife and daughter, to save Sid, only new horrors emerged, more death, more suffering.

  Raine was right. It wasn’t up to him to decide who lived and who died. Was it fate? Was it destiny? Was it god?

  “Sid,” he whimpered and her face was there again, before his eyes, beautiful and angelic. His obsession with the Moon Mask had lost her long before Nadia’s bullet had taken her from this world.

  “Ben!” Raine bellowed at him.

  The stolen Russian pistol was still in his hand.

  Time is like a tapestry! The words repeated themselves over and over.

  He aimed.

  All you need to do is pull out one thread and the whole thing will come crashing down!

  And fired.

  The single bullet spewed forth from the mouth of the gun and shot through the air in the blink of an eye. Yet King saw it impact the very centre of the fake mask and punch through. Five cracks zigzagged up natural weak points in the metal, in the exact same place as the divisions on the original mask, and then the entire thing sheered apart.

  The five individual shards seemed to hang on the pulsating edge of the maelstrom for a moment and then, one by one, as if being sucked into a sinkhole, they vanished.

  No one ever quite knew where the Moon Mask came from.

  No one ever quite knew the purpose of it.

  No one ever quite knew whether it had come to the earth as a gift for good.

  Or a weapon of evil.

  But Benjamin King watched as each piece of the mask shattered through the fourth dimension of existence and reappeared, scattered through time, scattered across the globe.

  On the plains of Africa, a young boy stumbled up it; in the jungles of South America, the islands of the Pacific and the deserts of Egypt, each of the five shards reappeared.

  They had not been scattered by some ancient civilisation, as he and his father had always believed. In fact, they had been scattered, not across the earth, but across the tapestry of time, by a future one.

  Kha’um hadn’t found the wrong mask after all. In fact, there had only ever been the one mask, King realised. One mask, caught in a paradox beyond his understanding, yet ironically of his making.

  A lump of molten metal would fall from the heavens, part of a much larger meteorite. The Xibalbans would fashion it into a mask but its cult would later be usurped when a single piece of its radioactive self was hurtled back from the future. Scattered across different epochs of time like flotsam and jetsam upon the tide, each of the five pieces of the newly tachyon-charged mask would one day be fashioned into new constructions, crafted by the peoples of Xibalba and Egypt, the Bouda, the Easter Islanders and the doomed civilisation of Yonaguni. And there, in their altars or in their tombs, each piece would wait until it was stolen by Pryce, Kha’um, or King himself, and reunited now, in this very moment to pass their tachyon-charge on to that original lump of metal from the sky.

  The circle would begin again, the paradox never ending.

  It all finally made sense.

  The thread was complete.

  The tapestry was woven.

  Exhausted, Benjamin King’s body folded like a pack of cards and he crumpled to the deck.

  64:

  Threads

  USS Eldridge,

  Pacific Ocean

  Nathan Raine was a soldier. He thought laterally, logically, focussing on his surroundings. He knew he didn’t have a chance of understanding what was happening in the ‘fourth dimension’. He knew he didn’t stand a chance of comprehending whatever the hell it was that Benjamin King had just witnessed. But, as he saw his friend raise his gun and fire point blank at the fake Moon Mask, he too felt a certain sense of completion.

  However it had happened, the fake mask was gone, shattered exactly like the original and scattered into the tides of time. Soon, the original Moon Mask, clutched within the fingers of the robotic arm, would be at the bottom of the Pacific.

  It was over.

  Almost.

  The deck heaved all of a sudden, pitching Raine, Nadia and the Russian soldier forward. Down below, a huge gash ripped up the side of the Eldridge’s hull and gallons of seawater rushed in. The dying vessel moaned as it pitched to port.

  “Son-of-bitch,” he cursed, nevertheless using the distraction to launch himself at the soldier. With his final bullet, he landed a head shot and the man went down. He rushed to him, picked up his fallen rifle then lunged himself at the airlock door. He fired at the locking mechanism then ripped the door open, slammed the inner door control and rushed to King’s side.

  “Benny,” he gasped, kneeling beside his fallen friend.

  King’s eyes fluttered open, a pained expression within.

  “Come on,” Raine said, helping him to his feet, wincing at the pain in his shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”

  They hobbled to the door, then King halted. “Where’s Nadia,” he growled.

  “Forget her,” Raine said, urging him forward. “Thi
s ship’s going down. We’ve got to go.”

  King saw movement, a lithe figure darting around the access chamber and down the starboard-side catwalk. He broke free of Raine’s grip and ran after her.

  “Ben!” Raine called after him, rolling his eyes. Then he too set off in pursuit.

  King rounded the corner and ran down the length of the aft catwalk to where it branched off, running the length of the ship. Down below, more and more water churned into the enormous chamber. Without any bulkhead or internal doors, the ship would go down quickly he knew.

  Nadia was heading for the access ladder leading to the hatch Raine had blown open earlier. Even though the over-head catwalk had been obliterated, the ladders connecting the other three were still fixed to the bulkheads.

  King ran after his fiancée’s murderer. The angle of the catwalk was awkward as the ship pitched to the port side.

  “Nadia!” he bellowed at her. His voice, though thunderous, was almost lost in the tumultuous cascade of water surging below.

  Nadia froze, and turned to face him. She held no weapon and so slowly raised her hands in an act of submission.

  King approached, handgun levelled at her chest. His heart beat like a pneumonic drill.

  “Go on, Ben,” she told him, shouting to be heard. The angle of the catwalk grew ever more acute. “Shoot me. Kill me. I deserve it.”

  King’s hand trembled. His face twitched with anger. He jerked the pistol towards her and she flinched. He could see her body trembling too.

  “I know you want to,” she said defiantly, regardless of her fear.