Moon Mask (6 page)

King felt his face flush hot as he followed them into the examination tent. His eyes drifted to a large handgun tucked into Raine’s waistband.

Nadia moved to one side of the examination table and began to unwrap the remains when sudden commotion caught her attention.

Raphael del
Vega burst through the tent flap, his olive skin glistening with sweat. His khaki Bolivarian Militia uniform was dirty with wet patches under the armpits and across the chest but he insisted on wearing it as a reminder of who he represented. President Chavez and the Venezuelan government. His presence had been one of the conditions UNESCO had needed to agree to in order to get the permit to explore the mountain.

Behind him came seven other men; local workers employed from the scattered settlements throughout the region, their angular features betraying their mixed Spanish/Indian descent. They were all big men with large muscles and were currently covered with dirt. Five of them had been down in the tunnels all day, but the other two had been preparing the expedition’s evening meal in the mess tent.

Irate about something, del Vega began talking quickly and loudly in Spanish to McKinney, his heavily accented words supportively repeated by his followers.

“Raphael,” McKinney held up her hands, trying to calm him. “Please slow down, I can’t understand you-”

But there was no stopping him. His foreign words spewed out at a speed which King struggled to translate-

“He says he has heard that you’ve found a mask,” Raine translated smoothly. He leaned casually back against the thick central tent pole, arms crossed, eyes hidden behind the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses. “It is an Evil Spirit which will devour us all. You must return it now. Return it to where you found it.”

King was irritated by Raine’s ability to translate so easily. He considered himself fluent in Spanish but found the local accents he had encountered difficult to understand. Then again, he often found McKinney’s Glaswegian accent even more difficult.

“Raphael,” McKinney said smoothly in her usual, condescending tone. She had a habit of talking to everyone as though they were infants. “I know all about the Ye’kuana legend. I assure you, there are no evil spirits living in the tunnels.”

Indeed, most people on the expedition knew about the Ye’kuana Indian legend; in fact, it was how the tepui had earned its name. Supposedly an Evil Spirit lived on the summit, devouring human flesh and making the sound
‘sari . . . sari . . .’
To this day, the Ye’kuana feared the mountain and warned any who trespassed there about the evil it contained.

McKinney’s flip dismissal further agitated del Vega and the other men. He gestured at one of the men, the youngest of the group.

“He says this man worked on a Sanumá reservation. He was told a story,” Raine continued his translation, “a story passed down through many generations.” He frowned as he struggled to translate one of the words and King felt a twang on smug satisfaction. “Eons?” del Vega nodded.

“Eons ago, the Evil Spirit, without form, grew hungry. To satisfy its hunger it manifested itself into a face so that its mouth could devour the humans who lived on the mountain.” He paused to catch up. “Many died. Whole villages. Many hundreds-”

“
Thousands,
” King corrected the obvious mistake, trying not to gloat. “He said ‘many thousands’.” Then he turned his attention to the militiaman, suddenly very interested in this legend but McKinney cut him off.

“Enough of this superstition and speculation,” she snapped. A crowd had gathered outside the tent and she had noticed the documentary crew’s cameras pushing their way to the front.

“Doctor King, you have your find to be getting on with studying and I want an
impartial
and
unbiased
initial report as to the mask’s origins and identification by morning. Doctor Yashina,” she looked at Nadia, the beautiful woman now kitted up in medical examination garments. “I can trust you to give me nothing but solid facts relating to these remains. I want to know this person’s statistics; its height, sex, age, race and cause of death. I appreciate these things take time but again I want an initial idea by morning so that we can make a-” she fixed her gaze solidly on King- “
professional
decision as to how to proceed with this investigation.”

She turned to Raine and, infuriatingly, her expression softened, a wide smile replacing her frown. “Mister Raine, thank you once again for all your help. Raphael,” she continued, guiding the native workers away and assuming a diplomatic air. “Walk with me please.” Their gabbled conversation faded as they moved away through the camp.

There were a few moments of awkward silence in the examination tent. The four interns who had brought in the skeleton looked nervously about themselves until Nadia ordered them out. Then she turned back to the examination table and snapped on a pair of latex gloves.

“Yikes,” Raine said, pushing away from the tent pole and stepping closer to the Russian woman, his ice-blue eyes mischievous. “I love a girl in latex.”

Nadia’s equally cold blue eyes glanced at him for only a moment before looking down at the skeletal remains. “And I love probing around in dead bodies, Mister Raine,” she replied.

He raised a roguish eyebrow. “How about probing something a little livelier?”

She looked at him with exaggerated sadness. “I am afraid that my specialities are limited to human remains, not over-confident Americans with dinosaur-level attitudes towards womankind.”

One for the Rusky!
Ben thought admiringly.

“Ooh, Nadia, you wound me,” Raine moved on, unruffled. “Is there no melting the Ice Queen?”

“Of course,” she said, examining the skeleton’s thigh bone. “Unfortunately there is nothing hot enough to thaw ice in the current vicinity.”

Strike two!

Raine simply laughed light-heartedly and moved towards the exit. “I’ll see you later Sid,” he smiled and King felt his hackles rise. “Benny,” he nodded by way of a departure, and then he was gone, leaving the three scientists alone.

“See,” Sid said under her breath. “He’s trying to be your friend.”

“I hate being called ‘
Benny’
!”

Sid was about to say something further when they both felt Nadia’s eyes boring into them. They turned to face her and saw that she had looked up from her work and was staring straight at them. “I work most productively whilst free from interruptions and distractions,” she said in her usual clipped tone.

Sid nodded in understanding. “Point taken, Nadia,” she said, smiling and taking King’s hand. “We have our own work to do anyway.”

King paused by the entrance and turned back to Nadia. “Can you let me know the moment you determine his race?”

“It will take some time to pinpoint the exact area of origin.”

“Yeah, but you should be able to narrow it down fairly quickly to give me a rough idea. All I need to know is that he was a black African male.”

Nadia considered this a moment. “I have to make my report to Doctor McKinney-”

“Please, Nadia,” King pleaded. “I’d consider it a personal favour.”

Nadia hesitated a moment longer and then simply nodded once. King smiled his appreciation then stepped out of the tent.

An unusually cool breeze drifted through the camp, stirring the canvas and making the hairs on the back of King’s neck stand on end. The setting sun cast the sky a deep blood red and twisted distorted shadows through the trees. For a moment, he fancied that he heard a whispery sound drifting through them.

Sari . . . sari . . .

He forced his imagination back under control and headed off after Sid.

4:

A Little Less Conversation

UNESCO Base Camp,

Sarisariñama Tepui,

Venezuela,

King
stood alone in one of the camp’s five lab tents. Even out in the wilderness, the lab was the epitome of high-tech science. Touch-screen computers lined the sturdy canvass walls, powered by huge generators and they synced up to numerous handheld tablet computers which the camp’s scientists could carry with them, making notes and examining the enormous array of subject-relevant e-books stored in the system’s hard-drive. Ergonomic workstations were arranged around the perimeter of the large tent, equipped with state-of-the-art polarizing microscopes, a multitude of acid and lignin-free containers, a 3D-digitizer, osteometric boards, digital callipers, microscribe digitizers and x-ray scanners, as well as an array of precision conservation tools: scalpels and minute vacuums, brushes, air purifiers and dozens of bottles of cleaning fluids and chemicals.

Wrapped within the canvass folds of the expedition’s five labs, it was easy to believe you were back in some ultra-modern European research facility rather than the hot and sweaty remote table-mountain.

Yet, despite all the technology available to him, Ben King sat hunched over one of the work stations littered with
actual
books and placed the small brush and vacuum down on the table top. In his gloved hands, he reverently lifted the carefully cleaned mask to look at it in all its detail.

While similar to the descriptions of the Moon Mask of his African ancestors, on closer inspection the Sarisariñama piece was noticeably different.

There were no brightly coloured beads patterned in swirls around the face’s cheeks. Instead this mask was adorned in some sort of ochre coloured paint, now faded and flaking. Where the cave paintings of the Bouda mask indicated rectangular slits for eyes, the Sarisariñama one had wide, gaping holes. The benevolent ‘almost-smile’ of the African mask was replaced by jaws filled with corroded metal teeth, twisted into a perpetual, malevolent snarl.

Despite the differences though, the similarities were undeniable, even to Doctor McKinney and her ilk. The overall shape of the mask was identical to the depictions of the Bouda’s, derived by following the curve of a piece which was out of place.

He remembered the cave paintings his father had shown him in the Gambia and flicked now through the discoloured pages of his battered notebook to find the sketch he had made on a return visit many years later. A faded photograph had also been taped into the book and he cross-checked the two pictures.

Amidst the images of black men, women and children being herded like cattle onto a European ship was the man described by his father as the
Oni
or Great King. The mask he wore was depicted as a swirl of colour but, easily identifiable, was a triangular section of the forehead, painted entirely in startling red, completely out of keeping with the rest of the mask’s design.

While the rest of the mask had been designed in the fairly traditional style found throughout Africa, this triangular section, his father had told him, was one piece of the shattered
Moon Mask
. The rest of the mask had been fashioned around it, its shape and dimensions derived from the curve of the original forehead piece.

The Sarisariñama mask now held in his hands also had a section out-of-keeping with the overall character of it. Though it had once been coated in the same ochre paint as the rest of the mask, a roughly triangular section of it, this time its left hand jaw, tapering up to the point of the nose, was identifiable through the cracked paint. Again, it seemed obvious to King that this piece had been used as a base from which the shape and dimensions of the overall visage had been derived.

Actually holding the mask in his hands, King was now able to completely verify what he had always believed. Unable to discern further detail from the cave painting, he could see now that, in the case of the Sarisariñama mask at least, the rest of the mask had been constructed as if to accommodate the red metal of the original piece.

Feeling a swell of excitement bubbling inside, he hurried to the lab’s scanner and, ignoring the pounding thump of music and the sounds of laughter coming from the mess tent, he placed the photograph of the Gambian cave painting down on the glass. Working the controls, he enlarged the image to four times its original size and sent it to the printer.

“Hey,” Sid’s gentle voice said as she pushed through the tent flap. Beyond her, the summit of the table-mountain was bathed in silver moon light, the points of the camp’s tents silhouetted against a purple sky.

“Nate managed to squeeze a crate of beer into the helicopter’s hold. Everyone’s having a drink in the mess tent to celebrate our find. I think the man who made the find should be there.”

I doubt they’d miss me,
he thought distractedly, knowing he was probably the least popular member of the dig. But, he knew his girlfriend wouldn’t take no for an answer. “I’ll be there in a moment,” he replied half-heartedly.

A drink in her hand, Sid moved inside the tent and stepped up behind him, wrapping her arms around his waist and kissing the back of his neck. In the low light of the tent his smooth features and dark African skin glowed bronze but he kept his gentle brown eyes focussed on what he was doing.

Sid frowned as she observed him pick up a sheet of tracing paper and use it to trace the outline of the forehead from the scanned copy he had just made: