On this upper floor the windows allowed light from the gibbous moon to shine through, revealing to Mac a battered steamer trunk in the corner, resting on end, much like the one he’d purchased at auction. Invigorated, he rushed to it, shoving the key home and forcefully cranking it, trying to make it work but having no luck.
He froze as somewhere above him sounded a loud scrape. Hoping it was an errant branch brushing the outside of the house, he shivered as the sound was followed by that of small footsteps tracking across the floor overhead.
He recalled that yellow light behind the rounded window at the top of the house, the attic window. Someone was up there, in the house with him.
He heard a door open somewhere above, then footsteps slowly padding down a stairwell in the darkness.
He raced from the bedroom down the dark hall, glancing back over his shoulder to see a woman trailing after him, moving past moonlit windows into faint light then disappearing into darkness again before reappearing into light. The woman’s hair shot out from her head, undulating like the tentacles of a translucent sea creature, her loose garments floating behind her like a cape.
Too frightened even to scream, Mac found the head of the stairs and blasted down them, hand tracing the cold railing. Halfway down, his heel missed the edge of a step and he went tumbling. Reaching out to stop his fall, his arm bent awkwardly, the wrist snapping like the crack of an ice cube dropped in a glass of tap water, loud in the cavernous house.
Whining in pain, he cradled his broken arm and crab-walked backwards across the floor as the woman seemed to float down the stairs toward him.
Closer and closer to the front door he inched, but it swung open before he could reach it and two men entered, one flipping on a light switch: the well-dressed Asian and the muscled goon in the hoodie.
Mac yelped like a little girl, clumsily changing direction on the floor to crawl away, bumping his elbow against the wall, shooting pain through his broken arm. Wincing, he collapsed in the corner, the two men coming at him from one direction, the witchlike apparition from the other.
“Please... don’t hurt me... I don’t want the palimpsest... take it... please... just don’t hurt me...”
With his good arm, he held out the skeleton key.
“Oh.” The old woman’s face lit up with a beatific smile, an angel’s smile, looking nothing like a witch at all. “Just what I was looking for.” She plucked the key from Mac’s palm with fingers delicate as breadsticks.
The Asian in the clean blue suit regarded the old woman. “You shouldn’t be wandering around without your sweater, Mom. You’ll get pneumonia.”
“Mom?” squeaked Mac.
The big guy behind the Asian lowered the hoodie to reveal an Asian face of his own, a stockier version of the man in the suit.
“We been trying to find you all day,” he said to Mac.
“You’re rather a hard man to track down, Mr. Burling,” said the well-dressed one. “We had your address on the auction receipt, but not your phone number. You never seemed to be home when we stopped by.”
The old woman lowered herself into a sheet-covered chair, a small wooden box in her lap. Carefully, she inserted the skeleton key into the lock and turned it with a satisfying click.
“Is the palimpsest in there?” Mac squeaked.
The beefy one asked, “What’s this palimpsest you’re talking about?”
“The old book... the one in the letter... the one the guy fought those ape-creatures for...”
The well-dressed guy shook his head amusedly. “There is no palimpsest, Mr. Burling. Clearly, you’ve fallen victim to one of my father’s old games.”
“Huh?”
“Our parents were divorced many years ago, but when they were young and in love, my father used to send my mother cards and letters from the road — he was a traveling salesman — and often disguised them as old parchments or documents, sometimes giving her clues, sort of like a scavenger hunt.”
“A scavenger hunt?” Mac winced again as pain shot through his busted arm.
“Sometimes it would take her days, but my mother would follow the clues until, inevitably, they led her to a prize, often a declaration of my father’s love for her, or a bauble or trinket. She would sometimes include me and my brother on those hunts.” He grinned at a pleasant memory.
The big one in the hoodie nodded. “Sometimes he’d leave toys for us to find.”
“You mean the letter was a fake?”
“I’m afraid so, Mr. Burling. At least, in terms of its historical significance; certainly fake. When my father died recently, one item he left to my mother was that wooden box, though she had no key for it. Presuming — correctly — that the key was mistakenly sold off at auction, we managed to contact every one of the buyers in our search for that key... sort of our last scavenger hunt. Finally leading us to you.”
Mac sighed. “Oh.”
All three men turned when the old woman gasped, a sound so tiny, as she opened the wooden box and removed a trinket none of them could see from across the room. She cosseted the little thing in her two withered hands. She closed her eyes. A single tear tracked through the crevices of her face as she clutched the trinket to her breast, a symbol of love strong enough to conquer time and difference, outlasting even death.
As I sit here on the bank of this dead river under the blood-moon, surrounded by my vigilant troops eyeing the dark horizon, I feel so alone without you, my dear. I pray this letter reaches you even if I do not. The mission that has taken me so far away from home for so long seems unimportant now.
Granted, the adventures my men and I have had may be written about and cast down through the generations. That is not for me to say. I have always been one to seek out adventure, never content to hear handed-down tales of the exploits of others.
Though I have faced a bewitching succubus, battled simian warriors under the charge of an Asian general, and gazed upon a tome perhaps writ in the blood of Satan himself, all pales to the pain my heart now feels, yearning for you, my love.
Though this riverbed, that of the once-raging Khorad Dur, is naught but dry dust and pebbles, the blood that pumps through my heart still rages with passion for you. Know that whatever years or miles or discord come between us, it will be this way always.
The glow of the monitor lit his face as Mac scrolled down the screen, typing with one hand. His other arm rested useless on the desk, encased in a chalk-white cast.
Mira flipped on the lamp as she entered the dark room, setting a plate on the desk with a bologna sandwich on it.
She kissed his cheek.
“Hey, check this out,” he said. “I told you that bisque doll would sell. Just about paid for the whole trunk of junk.”
“But it won’t pay for your arm.” She rubbed his shoulders.
“Well, there is that.” Mac tapped a pencil on his cast.
“I hope you’ve learned not to buy any more of those mystery trunks,” she said.
Mac grinned. “I’ll always go after the mystery trunk, honey. Check out the bidding so far on that old fishing reel.”
Mira peered over him at the screen, surprised. “Damn.”
“But I have learned a few things these past couple days. That’s for sure.”
He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a tiny gift-wrapped box topped with a shiny, curling ribbon, handing it to her.
Flabbergasted, she regarded it as if an extinct species of butterfly had lit on her palm. “What’s this for?”
He smiled. “Just because.”