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.