- 2012 -

The Secret Of The Crystal Skull

By Chris Morton & Ceri Louise Thomas

© Copyright: 2009

Preface:

The ancient Maya of Central America prophesied that one day soon, the world will come to an end.

In fact they predicted precisely when.

But their prophecies also foretell that before that time arrives, a messenger will be sent to try to save the people of this Earth.

The question is whether humanity will heed this warning, before it is too late…

CHAPTER 1

Smithton Geographic Institute

New York

December 1^st 2012

The clock struck midnight. Laura stared at the ancient, carved stone that lay on the old wooden desk in front of her. By the light of her study lamp, the strange figures etched deep into its worn limestone surface seemed almost to dance before her. She rubbed her eyes. It was late. She was tired and ought to be getting home.

One last time, she allowed her fingers to trace the carved outline of one of the inscriptions, when suddenly it clicked. She’d got it! She had finally figured it out. She had been puzzling over these hieroglyphs for days, and now she understood the meaning of the first glyph.

It said, ‘It is written’.

She felt a rising sense of excitement as she moved to the next inscription. This time, she got it almost immediately.

It read – ‘in the cycles of time’.

This was it. These were the moments Laura Shepherd lived for, when it all made sense. When she could understand what those who lived over a thousand years ago were trying to say. She had known this stone was important. It was the largest of its kind she had ever seen, and now she knew why. It was clearly an ancient Mayan prophecy stone carved with a prediction about the future, and she had just decoded the first of two concentric rings of glyphs.

The hieroglyphs said ‘It is written… in the cycles of time… that…‘

Laura sat back in her chair and gazed at the huge semi-circular chunk of stone in deep satisfaction. It had been worth leaving Cambridge and the country of her birth just for this.

But her heart sank as she turned her attention to the remaining glyphs. Most of them were so eroded they would be difficult, perhaps even impossible, to translate. What did the rest of the stone say? What were the ancient Maya trying to tell us about the future? It seemed she might never know.

She reached for her coffee. It had gone cold. That’s when she heard a strange noise that startled her out of her thoughts. It was an eerie sound, like someone whispering, or chanting, in some unknown foreign tongue – ‘oxlahun baktun, mi katun, mi tun, mi kin, oxlahun baktun, mi katun, mi tun, mi kin’.

She looked up and the sound stopped. Thinking she had imagined it, she returned her attention to the stone when it started again. The sound seemed to be coming from the corridor outside her oak-panelled office.

Laura started to feel uneasy. Who else could be in the museum at this hour of the night? Jacob, the night porter, had told her less than an hour ago that he was settling in to watch a late night movie in his booth, so it wasn’t likely to be him. Surely he couldn’t have the volume up so high she could hear it in her room? So she crept over to the door and listened from behind the frosted glass, but she couldn’t work it out.

Opening the door, she peered out into the corridor. It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the dark, but there was nobody there. All she could see was the jagged reflection of the museum security lights on the polished linoleum floor.

She called out ‘Hello?’

Her voice echoed along the dark corridor.

There was no reply.

The sound seemed to be coming from the stairwell, so she ventured out carefully along the hallway and leaned over the edge of the twisted brass banisters. Down the grand curvilinear sweep of the marble staircase a pale light was shining from the corridor immediately below.

‘Is there anybody there?’ she shouted, and the whispering suddenly stopped.

Cautiously, Laura began to descend the stairs, when she thought she heard a muffled thud coming from the lower corridor, followed by silence. Her heart began to quicken.

Reaching the bottom of the steps, she peered around the corner. There was no sign of anyone, only a shaft of light emanating from behind one of the frosted glass doorways further along the hall.

Warily, she made her way along the dark passageway and approached the door. It stood slightly ajar. Its window was embossed with the letters ‘Dr. R. Smith’.

‘Hello?’ she enquired, her voice filled with apprehension. There was no answer.

Laura’s heart was pounding in her chest as she raised her hand and knocked. The door creaked open a few more inches, and stopped.

Still no reply.

So she took a deep breath, and pushed the door wide open. She reeled back in shock at what she saw inside.

There, slumped face down on top of his desk was the body of a middle-aged man. He lay ashen-faced and motionless. It was her colleague Dr. Ron Smith and he did not appear to be breathing.

‘Ron!’ cried Laura as she ran to his aid. She shook him by the shoulders but he did not move.

‘Ron Smith!’ she shouted. She was frantic now. She slapped his face and shook him as hard as she could but he was a dead weight and still he did not respond.

That’s when she noticed he was clutching something, holding onto it so tightly his knuckles were white. As she shook him violently it fell from his fingers. It was a large crystalline object that rolled slowly across the desk before it came to rest right in front of her. She paused in her resuscitation attempts and gazed at it in horror.

There, staring up at her was the face of a skull. A skull of solid crystal.

She stared at it, as if mesmerized, for what seemed like an eternity.

Then, pulling herself together, she grabbed Ron’s phone, and called the emergency services…

CHAPTER 2

Before Laura knew it, the room was bustling with police officers and forensic experts, all dusting for fingerprints, removing objects and papers, and sealing them into transparent plastic bags. Laura stood and watched as the police photographer took a series of flash photos of Ron’s pale, lifeless body.

Detective Frank J. Dominguez was a big black man who had the assurance of someone who had spent many years in the force. He leaned over the body, inspecting it carefully from different angles.

‘So you heard some kinda whispering’ he said, eyeing Laura with suspicion, ‘You went downstairs to investigate. And this is exactly the way you found him. Is that right Dr Shepherd?’ he asked in his deep gravel voice, a voice that seemed to have grown rough from a lifetime working the streets.

‘Y… Yes’ answered Laura hesitantly, numb with shock as she gazed at Ron Smith, his body still slumped on top of his desk. She was finding it hard to reconcile that the person now lying dead in front of her was the same Ron Smith that had given her such a beaming smile in the canteen earlier that afternoon, the same Ron Smith who wore those dreadful sweaters and always went to Cape Cod on holiday every year.

A junior police officer came in to speak to the detective.

‘We’ve searched the whole building, but there’s no sign of anyone who shouldn’t be here, sir.’

Detective Dominguez nodded before turning back to Laura.

‘So you’re telling me he’s worked here ever since you started, and yet you hardly knew him?’

Laura felt the accusatory edge to his tone.

‘Yes, Ron is… I mean was…’ she corrected herself, ’someone who kept very much to himself’.

‘Mmmm. Is that so?’ Dominguez glanced at Ron’s corpse with indifference. He’d seen too much of this sort of thing to get upset about it.

‘Now let me get this straight…’ He turned back to Laura and fixed her gaze. ‘You’re both… What is it?…’ He flicked back through his notebook to find the right page,’…Ancient Mayan experts, and yet you have no idea what Dr Smith was working on before he died?’

He sounded as if he didn’t like ‘experts’ in anything very much.

‘That’s right’ replied Laura, sounding a little over-defensive, ‘We all have our own very specific areas of expertise. I’m the hieroglyph specialist and Ron worked more on the anthropology side of things’.

‘Is that a fact?’ said Dominguez. Huh! Eggheads in museums, he thought to himself. He couldn’t think of any other business where two people could be doing almost the same job and not know what each other was up to. But it seemed strange to him that these two Mayan specialists should be the only people in the museum after midnight, and now one of them was dead.

Laura was trying to explain ‘Ron took over all the field work a few years ago when my job became more office bound.’

‘Oh, really? Why was that?’

‘I had… family commitments,’ she replied.

Her hand rose to touch the little silver heart-shaped locket she wore around her neck.

‘And you’re not aware of anyone who had any kinda grudge against him, or didn’t seem to like him?’ asked Dominquez, casually nodding in the general direction of the body.

‘No, not Ron,’ she answered, ‘He was a gentle, quiet soul’.

‘How about anything or anyone that might have been bothering him, any strangers hanging around asking about him, or anything else out of the ordinary?’ The detective rattled off his list of standard questions with palpable boredom.

Laura shook her head.

It chilled her to think Ron might have been murdered. He can’t have been, she kept telling herself. But she had heard voices outside her door. There must have been someone else in the museum. Yet why would anyone want to kill Ron?

‘And, as far as you’re aware, he wasn’t having any financial difficulties, health issues, family problems or anything?’

‘Not as far as I know,’ replied Laura, ‘although his wife died a few years ago, of cancer’

All around her Ron’s things were being collected up, bagged and labelled.

‘And do you have any idea what this is?’ The detective was pointing at the mysterious object lying on Ron’s desk.

‘No. I’ve never seen anything like it’.

Laura stared at the strange object that had rolled out of the dead man’s hands towards her just a short while before. It sent a shiver down her spine as she remembered. It was the same size and shape as a real human skull, but it was made from a transparent material that looked like solid crystal.

‘But he was holding it when I found him.’ she added.

‘You’re sure?’ enquired the detective.

‘Absolutely, it rolled out of his fingers when I shook him.’

‘OK’ said Dominguez, turning to his men, ‘Exhibit A guys!’

Laura watched as the police photographer took several close-up flash photos of the skull before two surgeon-gloved forensics came forward, picked it up carefully, sealed it into a box, labelled it, and carted it off.

As a couple of paramedics arrived with a hospital stretcher, Detective Dominguez suggested gently to Laura,

‘You may wish to go now. This may not be very pretty’.

‘No. That’s OK.’ She heard herself say. She felt strangely detached, as if the whole experience were happening to someone else.

As the paramedics began to manoeuvre Ron’s body back up off the desk, the detective spotted something that had been lying hidden underneath Ron’s slumped torso.

‘What the hell?’ he exclaimed.

Laura leaned nearer to see what it was.

A hastily scrawled handwritten note was lying on the desktop. Laura recognised his handwriting. It was Ron’s final note. It read simply:

‘I have seen the future…’

CHAPTER 3

Outside, an ambulance and a row of police vehicles were parked, lights flashing, at the bottom of the museum steps. A dark haired and driven forty-year old man dashed up the steps, between the giant pillars, and into the main entrance of the grand neo-classical building.

There was only one thing on his mind as he raced across the ornate marble foyer to where a handful of police officers and a museum attendant were guarding the public turnstiles.

‘I’m sorry sir, you can’t go in there!’ a policewoman raised her voice as she halted him. He ran his fingers through his hair in frustration. It was Laura’s husband Michael. He’d got to the museum as soon as he could. All he wanted was to get to his wife, to know that she was OK.

Beyond the gates the elevator doors opened and he could see the paramedics wheeling Ron’s dead body on a stretcher towards him. Behind them he glimpsed Laura, surrounded by a group of police officers, as she made her way towards the exit. Beneath her long blonde curls, her chiselled face was pale, drained with shock. She looked so frail, so vulnerable.

As she came through the turnstile he rushed over and embraced her. ‘Laura, are you alright?’

She didn’t answer. Her pale green eyes were transfixed on the stretcher as it was wheeled towards the doors.

‘Five minutes earlier and I could have saved him.’ She sounded forlorn.

‘You don’t know that.’ He said more firmly than he intended. ‘And what if he was, you know, attacked? If you had got there any earlier, where would you be now?’

Exiting the museum, they stood outside the enormous wooden entrance doors watching the paramedics negotiating Ron’s body down the steep steps, illuminated by the flashing red and blue lights of the emergency vehicles gathered below.

‘I just wish there was more I could have done,’ said Laura as much to herself as to Michael.

‘I’m sure you did everything you could,’ he tried to reassure her, wrapping his thick coat around her shoulders.

‘It doesn’t feel that way.’ She began the descent.

‘Maybe it was suicide?’ said Michael after a moment’s pause. He was trying hard to think of anything that might make her feel better, something to stop her feeling so horribly responsible.

‘I suppose that’s possible.’ Laura became preoccupied, thinking about the note Ron had left: ‘I have seen the future…’ It certainly looked like a suicide note. But what had Ron seen? What vision of the future could possibly have been so terrifying as to make him take his own life? She shuddered to think.

A chill wind blew as the paramedics loaded Ron’s stretcher into the back of the ambulance.

Michael looked at his wife, his handsome features creased with concern. He had an awful, ominous feeling. They had spent so many years trying carefully to rebuild their shattered lives, and now he feared that finding Ron’s dead body was about to tear Laura’s fragile world apart.