Moon Mask (7 page)

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!”

“I’m talking about drug-induced trances,” King snapped. “I’m talking about hallucinogenic rituals in which shamans and wise men and prophets claim to see future events.”

McKinney offered no further argument so King continued. “I’m talking about almost every culture in the world that has ever existed. Witch doctors and voodoo masters, astrologers and fortune tellers. I’m talking about crystal balls and fortune telling dice. I’m talking about Christianity, Islam, Judaism and just about every other religion that has ever existed and preached of prophets who could commune with god, who could see the future. Do I believe that any of these people could do so?” He shrugged. “I’ve read the myths and I’ve read the science. Some say yes, some say no. Others just keep an open mind.”

He felt himself becoming impassioned by his speech and he let that passion take hold. For all his life he remembered his father being constantly put down by the academic world, constantly laughed at. The only man who actually believed in him was a genocidal maniac who had butchered his family. Even he, himself, had lost faith in his father’s unrelenting belief. In so doing, he had betrayed him.

Rather than accompany him on what Reginald declared would be the greatest archaeological discovery in history as he trekked through the heart of Africa to find the ancient city of the Bouda, King signed on to the Sarisariñama Expedition. It was his chance to study orthodox history, to make a name for himself as a serious, respectable scientist. Months later, his father’s expedition had officially been declared ‘Missing; presumed dead.’

Now, here, on another continent, he had the chance to honour his father’s memory. By proving that he was not some raving lunatic who had led his expedition to doom. But that he had been right all along.

“What is undeniable,” he continued, “is that the men and women who have claimed to see the future, often aided by substances,
believe
it. As do their followers. Why do you scoff at the notion of a ritual in
which an African tribe, wearing a mask and breathing in hallucinogenic fumes to enter a trance, could have given rise to the legend of a man actually travelling into that future?”

For a moment McKinney seemed to be mulling King’s words over in her head, but then her face hardened. “Your view of archaeology would have me believing in Indiana Jones-type booby traps and the mumbo jumbo of magical masks that can predict the future. That is not archaeology, Doctor King; that is a Hollywood manuscript. Your ‘Black Death’ did not exist. There has never been one piece of evidence to confirm his existence, nothing more than unrelated, detached rumours. And as for your ‘Moon Mask’, what you have found today is nothing more than a relic, yet to be understood, just like all the ruins below our feet are yet to be understood.”

King’s fists squeezed into balls once more, his jaw clenched, and his anger swelled. “And your view of archaeology would have us believe that our knowledge of history is set in stone, that we know all there is to know. But the truth is that in a single day, in a single moment, any discovery could change everything we ever thought we knew about our ancestors, about our history. That is the point of continuing our work, to disprove tomorrow what we learned today. But you, you and your ponced-up, brown-nosing, arse-licking, little pricks who consider yourselves to be the experts, you’re too afraid that tomorrow might bring a discovery that makes you irrelevant, that makes your knowledge useless! And then what happens to your big fat pay cheques, your second homes and your fleet of four-wheel drives?!”