Moon Mask

by James Richardson

“Mrs Marley,” he said. “The people who took my friends are after the mask. And if they get it. . .” he shook his head. “If you once took an oath to protect its location, then you must tell me!”

  Mrs Marley studied the young man for several very long moments. Her skin was pale, almost green, her bloodshot eyes raw with tears and her trembling body drenched in sweat. Yet, for all Raine’s dishevelled appearance, the resolve in his features made something click inside the stubborn old woman.

  His face softened. His tact altered. “You’re not going to die,” he told her and the words, strangely, hit Mrs Marley with more of a blow than her death sentence, only moments before, had. She realised, for the first time in as long as she could remember, that she actually wanted to live.

  “It was a clean shot,” he admitted. “A bit of muscle damage but you’ll be good as new in no time.”

  “There’s a lot of blood,” she stammered, out of breath. It was like an epiphany had struck her out of the blue. After so many years of hating life, her brush with death, fake though it may have been, had opened her eyes.

  Raine ripped a strip of cloth from his black shirt and began to pad the wound. Neither of them said anything for a moment, but then the old woman broke the silence, surprising even herself.

  “Forever more, the bearer of my name shall hold my piece of the map in their hand,” she intoned cryptically

  “What? What did you say?”

  Airborne,

  Location Unknown,

  “I never again saw my beloved Kha’um,” Bill read the final passage from the Kernewek Diary with a sarcastic tone in his voice. King tried to blot out the sarcasm. Despite the circumstances, this was a pivotal moment in his academic life. He was about to find out how the story of Kha’um ended. As he listened, it was not his captor’s voice that he heard, but that of Emily Hamilton, echoing out from the ages.

  “Without his piece of the map, the vast wealth we have concealed shall remain forever lost, yet I do not weep, for I know that amidst the treasure of a pharaoh’s tomb lies a darkness which is best kept from this world. My friend, Abubakar, agreed and, after many months, when we at last gave up hope of Kha’um’s homecoming, he returned to that land of frozen sand which he so loved and I know in my heart of hearts that he found the peace he always cherished. As for me, I cannot weep for the love I have lost. My life has been full and blessed. But now, as I write this final passage, now that time, that enemy Kha’um fought so hard against, has finally caught up with this old lady, I still fear what we buried in that cave.

  “Kha’um called it a gift from the gods and perhaps it was. But in the hands of man, it brought only evil. Its curse killed all those aboard the L’aile Raptor so very long ago. It turned Edward Pryce into a hideous monster, deformed and insane. And even Kha’um, the noblest man of all, succumbed to its insidious curse. No man, not even Kha’um, should have the power of god and the Moon Mask is such a power. One day, perhaps, mankind will have evolved enough to harness that power to its true potential, but until that day I must entrust these memoirs and the secrets they hold to my descendants. For the mask must only be unveiled when the time is right.

  “Kha’um’s map is lost, but not forever I fear. Abubakar took his piece with him to his new life at the world’s end. As for mine? Forever more, the bearer of my name shall hold my piece of the map in their hand.”

  With an overly dramatic flourish, the mercenary slammed the book shut. “So what the hell does that mean?”

  King’s mind was reeling as he struggled to decipher that for himself. A strange mixture of boyish excitement collided with an ominous dread. Even back then, the Moon Mask exuded some menace which Emily Hamilton had obviously been privy to. She had known then exactly what he knew now: the Moon Mask couldn’t be allowed to fall into the wrong hands.

  “Damned if I know,” he shrugged.

  “No, Ben,” Bill said casually, strolling up the length of the cabin. “She’s damned!” He slapped the barrel of his handgun against Sid’s forehead, squeezing the trigger.

  “Wait!” King jolted forward, only to have a strong pair of hands, Bill’s surviving lackey, slam him back into the uncomfortable seat. Like a shark moving in for the kill, Bill turned back to look at him.

  King’s heart pounded. His body shook. Sid’s eyes found him, filled with terror. Dirty streaks ran down her checks but her sobs were muffled by the duct tape stuck over her lips.

  “Thought of something?” Bill asked casually.

  Escape was impossible, he knew. He had been pulling against his restraints since regaining consciousness but all he had achieved was slicing his flesh on the plastic ties. His head pounded and blood crusted in his short cropped hair from the wound on the back of his skull. It wasn’t as life threatening as Bill’s men had originally believed but it still hurt like hell. But he ignored his own discomfort, focussing instead on Sid. The gun pointed at her head brought back nightmares of that terrible afternoon in Lagos. He again relived the moment he’d seen the bullet enter first his mother’s skull and then his sister’s. The circular scar on his forehead burned anew.

  “Times-a-ticking, Ben-”

  “I can work it out,” he snapped. He felt an immediate sense of guilt wash through him. His wasn’t only betraying the U.N. mission but also all that Kha’um and Emily Hamilton had gone through centuries before. He wished he had never gone to Jamaica. He wished he had just left Mrs Marley well enough alone.

  But he hadn’t. His own quest for the Moon Mask had endangered Sid’s life and he wasn’t prepared to lose her. Not even for the Moon Mask.

  “Give me the book,” he said. “The answer’s in there. I know it is. I just need to work it out.”

  Bill stared at King like a hungry predator unwilling to give up his prey, his gun still pressed against Sid’s head. Then, all of a sudden, he threw the book at him.

  “This isn’t a library, Ben,” he warned as he started to read. “Make it quick.”

  31:

  The Voyage

  Port Royal,

  Jamaica,

  “King was right,” Mrs Marley began. “About everything, really. Emily Hamilton and Amelia Kernewek are one and the same. And her diary- well, it’s more of a memoir really, written many years later- holds the key to the location of the hoard of treasure they collected. And, of course, the Moon Mask. But,” she held up a podgy finger. “I honestly do not know the location of one piece of the map, and the other piece is . . . well, I have a theory as to where it is.”

  Raine studied the old woman’s face, searching for any hint of deception but found none. It was almost like she was a different person. The moody, angry woman who had punched King in the face had vanished. A new ‘sparkle’ seemed to have appeared in her eyes and it was more than just the pain of her gunshot wound that caused it. He didn’t pretend to understand what motivated the woman. Nor did he care. He had patched her up as best he could but they still sat huddled on the roof of the Hand of Freedom building. Dawn tickled the eastern sky but hadn’t yet broken.

  “Go on,” he urged.

  “I must start at the beginning,” she told him and before he could say anything further, she flew into a commentary.

  “Just as King had suspected, Kha’um was one of only two survivors of the Atlantic crossing of the slave ship, L’aile Raptor. The ‘curse’ of the Moon Mask had killed all the slave ship’s crew and the slaves themselves starved to death. Kha’um was stronger and somehow survived for a long period without food and water. The only other survivor was Edward Pryce, the ship’s captain. But, somehow, the curse had disfigured him. His hair had fallen out and his skin was pocked with scars from agonising boils.”

  Raine kept quiet about the source of the ‘curse’ and let Mrs Marley continue.

  “While Pryce was admitted to an asylum, Kha’um was sold to Emmett Hamilton and set to work with many others in his sugar plantations until he saved the life of the owner’s daughter, Emily.”
/>   “This is what King told me,” Raine said, feeling irritable. “Mrs Marley, we don’t have a lot of time.”

  She smiled, as though amused by his words. “Time?” she repeated. “This story is all about time, young mon. About a year after saving her life when she fell down a hidden well, the Hamilton estate was attacked . . . by Pryce. A man named Hawk had released him from the asylum and supplied him with a ship and crew. His motivations were unknown, but Pryce’s were plain and simple. He wanted to reassemble all the pieces of the Moon Mask and use it, as the ancient legend suggested he could, to travel back in time and prevent the evil that had befallen him. The Bouda’s mask would show its wearer the way to the other pieces, but he knew that wearing it again would kill him.”

  “So he needed Kha’um.”

  “That’s right. But Kha’um wouldn’t help him, of course, so Pryce was cunning. He attacked the estate, killed its inhabitants and burned it to the ground. But, after confronting one another, he allowed Kha’um to not only escape but, with a small group of freed slaves, to take control of his ship. They rechristened it the Hand of Freedom.”

  “And he took Emily with him.”

  “Willingly,” she pointed out. “He protected her through the entire assault but with her family dead she had no reason to return to Jamaica. Besides, she was quite unlike most white people at the time. She respected her father’s black slaves and treated them with humanity and compassion. And, most scandalous for the age in which she lived, she had fallen for her dashing hero.”

  Raine found himself caught up in the narrative but he knew they had to get to the point. Mrs Marley caught the impatience in his eyes without him muttering a word.

  “They spent about seven months sailing the waters of the Caribbean. They attacked slave ships and plantations and freed the human cargo. A large uprising was stirring. The legend of the Black Death spread throughout the waters. He gave hope to the slaves, hope of freedom.”

  Just like the legends of Zorro and Robin Hood, Raine thought, remembering what King had told him.

  “But the rebellion stalled.”

  Raine couldn’t help himself. “Why?”

  Mrs Marley’s eyes were dark and dreamy. “Obsession,” she stated. “Just like Pryce, now free, Kha’um became obsessed with fulfilling the ancient legend and reuniting the pieces of the Moon Mask.”

  “He believed that he could travel back in time and save his family, his entire tribe.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But how? You said he needed the mask to-”

  “He had already used the mask. He believed it had already revealed its location to him. So he spent more and more time meditating in his cabin. He would rub various hallucinogenic ointments into his scalp, cutting the flesh to allow them into his blood.”

  Just like King had suspected, the visions given by the Moon Mask were in fact caused not by magic but by drugs.

  “He claimed that he kept on seeing three great mountains, covered in gleaming white snow, but they stood in the middle of a vast desert. Emily describes her frustration at trying to convince him that such a thing is impossible but then, one day, they rescue a cargo of slaves. Among them was an Egyptian named Abubakar and, upon hearing about Kha’um’s visions, he said he had seen these mountains. Only, they weren’t mountains-”

  “Pyramids,” Raine realised the moment Mrs Marley mentioned the Egyptian connection. “The three pyramids at Giza.”

  “And once, long ago, so Abubakar told them, they had been clad in bright white limestone.”

  “Which, in Kha’um’s vision, could look like snow,” he said, forgetting for a moment how preposterous the story sounded. “So they went to Egypt, which would explain the sightings of the Black Death off the coast of Malta.”

  “That’s right. And once there, so Emily Hamilton’s words say, ‘he seemed to become possessed of another mind. Suddenly, upon seeing those wonderful pyramids, he knew just where to lead us.’ And he did so, leading them slightly away from Giza to a labyrinth of tunnels hidden beneath a step pyramid. And there, they found a tomb, dozens of rooms filled with treasure; gold and precious stones, finely carved statues. Most amazingly of all was an enormous golden coffin covered with picture writing which they could not decipher.” Hieroglyphs, Raine knew. “The body within the coffin wore an elaborate death mask. But it wasn’t made entirely out of gold. Part of it,” she explained, “was constructed out of a peculiar reddish metal, just like the original piece of the Moon Mask Kha’um had seen built into his tribe’s idol. And so we arrive at what you are most interested in.”

  “The map,” Raine said.

  “They loaded the treasure aboard the Freedom and set sail again-”

  “Hang on,” Raine cut her off. “If they took the mask with them, why didn’t any of Kha’um’s crew die?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe the curse only struck Pryce because of his ill intentions.”

  Somehow, Raine didn’t think tachyon radiation would be so selective. Then again, it hadn’t done him any harm!

  “They sailed to an unknown island,” Mrs Marley continued regardless, “and placed most of the treasure, save for a share for the crew- Abubakar kept a golden dagger Emily tells us- inside a cave. But they divided the map between the three of them, Kha’um, Emily and Abubakar who had become a ‘third partner’. I don’t know how it was distributed, only that one of them knew the location of the island, one of them knew the place to put ashore, and one of them knew the route they needed to take to the cave.”

  Raine thought about the ‘tactile map’ he and King had found on Kha’um’s remains but said nothing. The contours of it most likely mapped the coastline of this mysterious Treasure Island.

  “So where are the three maps now?” he asked.

  “Kha’um’s piece I can only assume lies with his body somewhere inside the rainforests of South America,” she said, ignorant to Raine’s knowledge of the man’s fate. “Emily Hamilton’s own piece has always eluded me. The last passage of her journal suggests she passed it to the ‘bearer of her name’.”

  “Her descendants,” Raine suggested.

  “Of which I am one,” she said, confirming King’s theory that Emily had married an African. In the subsequent generations, the Caucasian traits must have been bred out of her children’s children’s children. “The comment about keeping it in that descendant’s ‘hand’ suggests it is somewhere in this building. But I have never found it and nor did my father. He told me that my family had taken an oath to protect the mask’s location and made me vow to keep that promise.”

  Raine wasn’t sure why, but he believed she was telling the truth. She didn’t know where Emily’s map was. “What about Abubby-thing’s piece?” he asked.

  “Abubakar,” she corrected. “Well, to discover that, the story must continue,” she said and without permeable dived straight back into her narrative. “Once the treasure was secure, Kha’um placed the Egyptian Death Mask on his head and Emily describes him being assaulted by visions which she could not see. The experience brought him to the point of death, she said, but when he awoke, he knew where the next piece of the mask was.”

  Raine didn’t understand how that was possible. And, thinking about it, he couldn’t work out how the drug induced visions had brought him to the exact spot of the Egyptian tomb either. But he didn’t have a chance to voice his doubts now.

  “It was on an island, surrounded by an army of statues which had themselves been modelled on the piece of a face which had fallen from the stars years before. We now call the place Easter Island but Kha’um had no name for it as it had not yet been discovered by Europeans and wouldn’t be for another eleven years.”

  Raine had visited Easter Island with his grandfather as a boy and remembered staring up in awe at the world famous moai. Had they really come about because of a piece of a broken mask, theoretically scattered across the globe by an ancient culture? And how could Kha’um possibly have known ab
out the island, much less that a piece of the mask was there, simply by wearing another piece of it?

  “So they set sail again, heading south and rounding Cape Horn. But in a powerful storm, the Freedom was damaged and they had to beach the ship to repair it. They went ashore in Tierra del Fuego and encountered members of the Selk’nam Indians. After an uncomfortable first encounter, Abubakar developed a ‘friendship’ with the daughter of a Selk’nam chief. He, apparently, was fascinated with what he described as a ‘land of frozen sand’- snow. He fell in love and actually married the chief’s daughter but nevertheless left with the Freedom when repairs were completed, vowing to return.

  “They continued on to Easter Island and found another piece of the Moon Mask which they stole from the island’s inhabitants and returned to their ‘treasure island.’ Now, the mask was almost complete. He had two pieces, he knew that Pryce’s benefactor had another, the Bouda piece, and planned to steal it from him. But there was still a final piece to be found. Again, he wore one of the masks, though whether it was the Egyptian or Easter Island piece I do not know, and saw where the final piece of it was. But when he described it to his crew – an underground city filled to the brim with human skulls and skeletons and ruled by hellish demons – they said he had described Davy Jones Locker. The pirate hell.”

  Raine was taken aback by Mrs Marley’s description, picturing Xibalba in his head. But how could Kha’um have known that before he went there? Then again, Mrs Marley had said the book was more of a memoir than a diary, written when Emily Hamilton was an old lady. She must have escaped and written her own description instead of Kha’um’s exact words.

  But that theory went out the window with Mrs Marley’s next words.

  “Emily and Abubakar refused to accompany him, as did many of the crew.”

  Then how could she have described his vision so accurately? he wondered.

  “In a heated argument,” the Jamaican went on, “Emily accused Kha’um of being obsessed by his hunt for the mask. It had clouded his judgement and sent him to the brink of madness. And, to literally go into the jaws of hell itself, was beyond even that madness. And so they parted ways. Kha’um vowed to return, but he never did. Emily and Abubakar waited for almost two years before finally giving up hope of seeing him again. Pryce was rumoured to have followed Kha’um into ‘the Locker’ but whether that is true or not is a mystery.”