The Crystal Skull

by Manda Scott

  He pushed himself upright at last. Standing, he was more professional. His eyes flickered from Stella to the skull-stone and back again, twice. ‘It’s modelled on a Caucasian woman,’ he said. ‘Did you want to know more than that?’

  ‘If I can. I keep seeing a face – half seeing it – I think it matters to see it properly. If you can make that happen.’

  ‘And then?’ He had no trouble meeting her gaze now.

  ‘And then I might be a step closer to understanding why this is worth killing for and who is trying to destroy our lives.’

  ‘And?’

  He understood what she had not said. For no better reason than that, she trusted him. ‘And I’ll have a face to put to the things that are happening in my head.’

  ‘Fine.’ Davy Law pinched his cigarette out and dropped it carefully into the breast pocket of his lab coat. ‘Let’s build ourselves a face and see if you like what it tells you.’

  For the second time in two days, the skull-stone sat on a small plinth in a cabinet with lights shining in from different angles. Here, the background illumination was less bright than it had been in Gordon Fraser’s geology lab and the work was done not by acid projected under pressure, but by pencil-thin lines of red light that streamed in from all possible angles in all possible planes.

  In goggles and thin gloves, Davy Law puffed in streams of dry ice from a hand-held probe to make them visible and ensure their positioning.

  To Stella, over his shoulder, he said, ‘It’s all done with lasers. The scan takes half an hour, though most of that’s getting the settings right. It might be longer given the nature of the quartz. I’ve only ever worked with bone before; I’m not sure what translucency will do to the refraction indices. Kit could write us some new software in minutes to get round it. In his absence, we have to hope that the existing software will cope with the difference. We’ll know soon enough.’

  He screwed shut the door to the tank and took off the goggles. ‘The screen’s on my desk next door. I have an espresso machine. It’s not quite Starbucks, but it’s drinkable. Or you could go and sit in the car.’

  It was neither an offer nor a request, just a statement, made without weight. Stella found she was beginning to enjoy Davy Law’s quiet refusal to play the social game.

  ‘Coffee would be fine,’ she said.

  He smiled, baring his appalling teeth. ‘Thank you.’

  He was right; the coffee wasn’t Starbucks, for which she was grateful. The smell of roast beans mingled with the residues of old tobacco and came close to swamping the stench of formaldehyde.

  Davy Law’s office was small, with barely room for two chairs and a desk with two oversized computer screens and a phone. On the walls was more evidence of massacres, not all of them Turkish; Bosnia filled half of the side adjacent to the door, with the rest given to Rwanda, Darfur, and a single bulldozed site from Iraq.

  Coffee in hand, Stella stood at the last, looking at the bones. ‘Some of these skeletons have fractures that have begun to heal.’

  ‘Gordon didn’t say you were a medic?’

  ‘I’m not, I’m an astronomer. If we’re going to split hairs, I’m an astro-physicist. But I know enough of basic pathology to see when there’s a callus forming over a break.’

  From his seat behind the computer, Davy Law lit a new cigarette. The smoke was sweet and treacly and tickled the back of her throat. He picked a freckle of tobacco from his tongue and said, ‘There’s a lot of anger in Iraq. Some people take a long time to die.’

  She held his gaze, which surprised both of them. He was the first one to look away. She said, ‘Should I not have asked?’

  ‘I don’t care, as long as you can handle the answer.’

  ‘Will it be the same when I see the face of the skull-stone?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘But you know what it looks like?’

  He tilted his chair right back and looped his fingers behind his head and was silent so long, looking at her, that she thought he was not going to answer. Eventually, he said, ‘I might be wrong.’

  Before she could ask more, he tipped his chair forward and reached for his computer. ‘But I don’t think I am. Skulls are my obsession. And since we’re both going to wait a while to find out what face we can build, there might be something to be discovered in exploring some of the more interesting skull legends from around the world. What do you know about the Mayan prophecies of 2012?’

  Of all things, she had not expected that. She brought her coffee to his desk and sat down.

  ‘I got half a million hits on Google yesterday when I searched under “Mayan” and “skull”. Most of them had 2012 in the title. There wasn’t one that made sense.’

  Law raised his rat’s-tail brow. ‘Cultural imperialism has a lot to answer for.’

  He blew her a thread of smoke and turned his attention to the screen in front of him, cutting her off as if she were not there.

  Stella studied the remaining screen. The skull-stone revolved on it clockwise, no longer blue, but digitally converted to a solid grey set against a pale background and criss-crossed by a thousand tangential lines in shades that ranged from bright, arterial red through magenta to a range of vibrant greens and yellows.

  Between these, slowly, the matt grey surface changed as flesh grew between the coloured hair lines.

  Thinking aloud, she said, ‘The red cross-hairs show a concave surface and the yellow ones are convex, right?’

  ‘And the green is neutral. Right.’ Law came to lean on the back of her chair, blowing smoke over her shoulder. He watched the screen a moment and said, ‘It takes most people half a day to work that out. If you can guess who it’s going to be, you can have a job.’

  ‘Female? Caucasian? Around at the time of Cedric Owen?’ Flattered, Stella snatched a name from history. ‘Queen Elizabeth the First?’

  He grinned wide, like a fox. ‘Nice try.’

  ‘I don’t get the job?’

  He shook his head. ‘Sorry. The skulls were made at least three thousand years before Elizabeth was born. It doesn’t mean it can’t look like her, of course; faces come down the generations with remarkable accuracy, but Henry the Eighth’s children all had high domed foreheads and almost no brows and narrow chins. It isn’t her.’

  ‘Skulls?’ Stella spun her chair round. ‘You said, “The skulls were made …” Plural. Are there others?’

  ‘Allegedly.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I did a degree in anthropology after I screwed up my medical career. It leads to strange places.’

  ‘To an obsession with skulls?’

  ‘That was always there.’

  ‘What a fascinating childhood you must have had.’ She looked back at the image on the screen. The face was barely human; a paste of blurred features against a blank blue background. She could no more have defined the shape of the chin than the colour of the eyes, which were not there.

  Law had moved back to his seat in front of the other screen. He put his hand on the top, ready to turn it for her to see. His eyes were brown and sharp and quite serious. ‘You could still walk away,’ he said. ‘It may be easier.’

  His change of mood caught her off balance. ‘David, someone tried to kill Kit in the cave where we found the stone. Someone else – or maybe the same person – trashed his room last night in a blatant act of intimidation. I can’t walk away. Whatever you said about this being the most dangerous thing on the planet, I’m not ready to get out the hammer yet.’

  ‘Davy,’ he said absently. ‘Not David; Davy. And don’t give up on the hammer too soon. When your life’s at stake, it’s always good to have an exit strategy.’

  He finished his coffee and his cigarette simultaneously and swung his chair round. ‘Tell me what you make of this.’

  The screen tilted towards her. She expected mandalas, or Mayan gods, or the other skulls. What she saw instead were Mayan glyphs, row after row of incomprehensible script, exactly as she had foun
d in the ledger.

  She leaned forward, both hands flat on his desk. ‘Where did you get these?’

  ‘From the web. There’s a site where you can download them as a jpg.’ Davy Law twisted his chair to see Stella and the screen equally.

  ‘That’s the Dresden Codex, one of the sacred texts of the Maya. Of the thousands they wrote, over hundreds of years, only four survived the spiritual vandalism of the Jesuits. This one ended up in the Sächsische Landesbibliothek in Dresden where it lay gathering dust until 1880 before someone finally understood what it said. Of course they could have asked the natives but by then almost everyone who could read the script was dead and so it’s named after the place in which it was translated rather than anything to do with the people who wrote it.’

  ‘Cultural imperialism again?’

  ‘I’d say so. There are three others the same: Madrid, Paris and Grolier, although the last one may be a fake. They are the surviving remnants of a civilization that makes ours look infantile. And according to this document, the world is going to end on the twenty-first of December 2012.’

  ‘Very funny.’ There was a strange metallic taste in her mouth. Stella spun her chair away from him.

  He caught the armrest and spun her back. ‘Listen to me. This isn’t a joke. The Codex is the product of a civilization that could map out the planets with an accuracy that would make NASA green with envy.’

  ‘I’m an astronomer. Don’t try to blind me with science.’ She hadn’t mean to snap, but she did not take it back.

  ‘Stella, I’m trying to open your eyes. Look—’

  Stabbing at the keys, he opened other pages. Block upon block of glyphs flowed across the screen.

  With an unexpected animation, he said, ‘You’re an astronomer; listen. The whole of the Dresden Codex is a table of Venus and Mars progressions as accurate as anything that can be done today. It’s the foundations of the Mayan calendar, which makes ours look like Noddy goes to Toytown. Back in Cedric Owen’s time, while we were still pissing about in the transition from Julian to Gregorian calendars, trying to find a system that didn’t leave us with Christmas in midsummer, the Maya had already lived for a thousand years with a calendric system that could predict a lunar eclipse to the nearest 0.0007 of a second for eight millennia either way. When were we ever able to do that? Last year? Maybe eighteen months ago if we were lucky?’

  ‘We could do it by the year 2000, easily.’ Stella sat back and poured herself more coffee. ‘What has this got to do with infantile Armageddon prophecies?’

  Without her seeing, he had rolled and lit another cigarette. He glared at her through a haze of smoke.

  ‘The Dresden Codex is the key to Mayan cosmology. They divided time into ages of 5,125 years each. We are living in the fifth age. According to their legends, each of the previous four ended in a cataclysm that destroyed the nascent races of men: fire, earthquake, storm, or, in the case of the last one, a flood.’

  ‘Are you quoting scripture at me?’

  ‘Not particularly. There are one hundred and thirty-seven culturally separate flood legends besides the one where the animals go in two by two; every civilization currently on the planet remembers that they were born out of flood water. The Maya, however, are the only ones who left us with a timetable for the next disaster. The end of the fifth age won’t be like the others. It’s not just the end of an age, it’s the end of an era, as defined by the precession of the equinoxes. An era lasts about twenty-six thousand years and each one begins and ends when the sun lies over the Galactic Centre at twenty-eight degrees of Sagittarius, a place named by the Maya Xibalba be, the Road to the Underworld. When the sun walks along that path, we are finished; we’ll see catastrophe on a grand scale. Nothing so small as a flood or a fire; this is complete annihilation – Armageddon, as you called it – and it will be caused by man, not by nature as were the others. This is the date that was mined out of the translations of the Dresden Codex. In the Mayan calendar it’s 13 Baktun, 13.0.0.0.0.’

  Davy Law wet his finger in the dregs of his coffee and drew it on the table. ‘In our calendar, that’s 21 December 2012.’

  He stabbed out his cigarette and threw his hands behind his head and stared at her, unblinking.

  Stella drank her coffee. After a while she said, ‘What’s it going to be? Global warming? Eco-catastrophe? Nuclear annihilation?’

  ‘All of the above, I should think. The Maya destroyed themselves in the space of about fifty years; an entire culture wiped out by a mix of warfare and overuse of local resources. We’re doing exactly the same on a planetary scale. The end result will be no different.’

  ‘I don’t see what this has got to do with the skulls.’

  ‘Because according to the legends, the Maya – or more accurately their predecessors at the end of the fourth age, around the third millennium BC – made a group of thirteen crystal skulls which, when brought together, will help us find a path out of this catastrophe of our own making. You have one of those skulls.’

  ‘The skulls will stop Armageddon?’ She was incredulous.

  ‘They won’t stop it, they’ll find us a way through. A gateway, if you like.’

  ‘Do you actually believe this?’ She stared at him, wide-eyed and disbelieving, far beyond the bounds of normal decency.

  He did not smile, only shrugged and tapped again at his keyboard, to no obvious effect. ‘I’m telling you what’s in the old texts. The people who wrote them believed it.’

  ‘Don’t dodge the question, Davy.’

  He turned his chair away from the desk and lifted one shoulder in half an apology. ‘Yes, I believe it. These people knew things that we lost a long time ago when we took a wrong turning. I’m not the only one. There are a lot of other folk out there who think the same.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ She was out of the chair, pacing the length of the small room, stabbing the air for emphasis. ‘There are plenty of others who believe in the second coming of Christ, the nightly perambulations of the Tooth Fairy, and that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction hidden in the Iraqi desert. They’re all equally mad. What happened to realism? To evidence-based science? You’re a medic, for God’s sake. You deal in flesh and blood and bone, not this kind of … inane transcendental crap.’

  She ran to a halt in front of a picture of Bosnia. Skulls lay in a neat row behind the grimly smiling figure of Davy Law. She closed her eyes and they did not go away.

  From behind her, he said quietly, ‘A failed medic. I didn’t complete my clinical training.’

  The anger left, as fast as it had come. She sat again in the chair opposite him. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. It doesn’t matter. Stella, what brought you to me?’ He was not joking now. His hard eyes held her.

  ‘I wanted to see the face of the skull.’

  ‘You were already seeing it, that’s why you came, remember? I keep seeing a face. Your words. And it sings to you. You hear a stone in your head. Tell me that’s inane transcendental crap?’

  She said nothing; she could think of nothing to say. He leaned forward and gripped the arms of her chair. His face was two inches away.

  ‘What else? If the skull-stone brought you to me, is that the only thing it’s done? Is there nothing else that makes it more than just a pretty lump of rock that men will fight over?’

  She stared past him to the computer screen. The glyphs blurred and ran together and still made no sense.

  Dully, she said, ‘The skull warned me of danger in the cave; it’s why Kit and I separated, why he was pushed off the ledge when I was not. Last night, it warned me of what was happening in Kit’s room, I just didn’t understand in time. And … there’s a cipher in the ledgers. I think I’m the only one who can see it, but it looks exactly like this.’ She jabbed her thumb towards the screen. ‘It’s page after page of Mayan glyphs. Another codex.’

  ‘There’s a codex hidden in Cedric Owen’s ledgers?’ The yearning on his face would have been comical
in any other circumstance. ‘Stella, please, you have to let me …’

  He was close enough for her to feel the heat of his face. His hand was on her arm. The words locked in his throat, too many, or too urgent, or too desperate, to find their order and come out.

  Before she could hear them, something metal cracked against the door post. A tight, acerbic voice said, ‘Am I interrupting something important? Do say. I can always go away again.’

  ‘Kit?’

  He was in the doorway, leaning on his two sticks. Stella had never before seen the twisting ugliness that marred his face. He looked through her, and on to Davy Law beyond. ‘Having fun?’

  ‘Kit! He’s trying to help.’

  ‘I can see that. What kind of help this time, David?’

  ‘Not what you think.’

  Law stepped back to his own side of the lab. Stella saw him take a breath and hold it and let it out through his nose, slowly.

  Looking up again, he nodded at her, stiffly. ‘You were leaving, I believe? Though it might be worth looking to see if we’ve put a face to your skull-stone first.’

  The other screen was turned away, where none of them could see it. Law walked behind both seats to turn it back, rather than reach across her. And so she was alone when she saw the face looking out at her from the screen.

  ‘That can’t be right.’ She shook her head, and kept on shaking it, unable to stop, and then was just shaking, and trying not to vomit.

  ‘What?’

  Kit could not move fast enough to join her. Out of charity to them both, Davy Law turned the screen round so they could both see it equally.

  Kit handled it no better. He looked from Stella to the screen and back again, twice. ‘Is this some kind of joke?’

  ‘Software,’ said Davy Law, ‘has no sense of humour. When you put flesh on the skull, this is what you get.’

  There was no ambiguity; Stella’s own face stared out at them from the screen, plastic and still, as if in sleep. She remembered the first flick of Davy Law’s eyes from the stone to her face and back.

  She turned on him. ‘You knew it was me when I first showed you the skull.’