Black Monster

The Professors name was Brain but no one ever called him that he was either Professor or Granddad, his wiry white hair refused to lay flat irratating him with the fact it made him look like an archytype or worse a sterotype, he paused with the saddening thought that most people wouldn’t know the difference. He’d gotten out the manuscript again and was looking at it under the microscope. If it was real, if… it could change the way people viewed the Mioans, it could unlock mysteries of the past, he felt a tear moisten his eye at the thought of a mystery he could not solve. His Edwin was his youngest grandchild and in many ways the most fragile, it had been a joy to find the boy could handle numbers and languages and he’d taken to the new fangled technology like something from a scifi film.

But the boy felt emotions too deeply, Brain knew what that felt like but he’d learned how to cope Edwin never had and he’d been sweet on this Christine for well over a year and now she was missing. Her having a boyfriend was one thing Edwin would have happily waited an eternity for her but her having disappeared like this, especially like this! He cursed the police woman for having filled his mind with the images of those poor cows.

He felt a chill, it was like the time he’d excavated a temple only to find a pit of sacrifices, little skeletons, so small, so somehow still recognisable, each a little helplessness offered to some god for some material gain. He’d felt the horror as he pieced together fragile skulls that looked at him accusingly, their juvinile bones did not preserve as well as adults, their ghosts seemed to cling to him. Such a waste, such a pain in his heart, little helpless things that had trusted the arms that held them. It made him sick and now someone was buttering young women. To him they were still kids, even if they’d had kids of their own they would still have been kids. The police woman was barely an adult in his eyes.

He rubbed his eyes, scrubbing away the hot tear and stood. Turning to the mass of folders and books strewn across the back wall of his office he began scanning for a specific file, he picked out a dark blue box file with ORACLES written in silver paint pen. He carried carefully over to his too cluttered desk and did a hasty rearrange so that he could actually open it. With in were maps, and photos and stone rubbings plus a stack of floppy discs. He snorted when he looked at them and frowned, looking over his tech on the desk he realised he had somehow stopped using the things without realising, there were things on those discs he thought he’d stored for ever but now he had nothing with a floppy drive.

He put it to one side and typed a quick email off to the computer guys over in the admin wing. Maybe they could sort him out a floppy drive. That done he began to flick through the photos – he’d had a thought but it was ephemerial, transient, he was frightened that if he tried to grab it, to hold it tight it would vanish for all time so he was ignoring it for now. He extracted a note book, his from decades ago now, Oracles he was an expert on them and the religous signifigance they had had in the ancient world. He flicked through the slightly crenulated pages, it always managed to rain on his field trips even if he went to the desert which had happened more than enough times. His sketches were immaculate and would have scored zero in a current exam, he had struggled with the concept of a diagram rather than a piece of fine art.

He had sketched and shaded and rendered bueatiful scenes and forgotten to put the grid references on and even if he’d remembered that he would have forgotten to say in which direction he’d been facing. He’d distorted perspective to draw the veiwer into the image. He’d learnt a lot in his first few years and still distractedly forgot it when he was out in the field.

A strange artifact sat rendered in graphite upon the yellowing page, it looked like something you would put liquid in possibly over a fire but that they knew from text and image evidence was seat or thrown for the preistess. An Oracle thrown for want of a better word. Pythia at Delphi and many names else were. All over the place they would spring up. Delphi, now Delphi he loved, Delphi was studdied in much detail since the French had gotten invovled over a hundred years ago. The sight was known, a rich rich archeological site and a place written about endlessly in the litrature both ancient and modern. It had been the centre of the Universe, it’s navel, a place of knowing and foresight. It tugged at him, like it was trying to tell him something, over decades, over centries over millenia.

He moved on to his note book on the Oracle of the Dead reputed to be the gate to the underworld he had been ripped away from the promising excavation in the 1960’s somehting that hurt him to this day. Occasionally young enthusiasts would try and convince the Italian government to let them excavate but they’d blocked off what he had excavated already. He fingered the incomplete journal, part of it had been removed and he assumed destroyed when they had turffed him from the site. Wrapped up next to it was a small impossible object. He tried to ignore it, he should not have had it, he wasn’t even sure what it was, there had been so many of them in the room, a room of the dead, his fingers strayed to it. Reverently he unwrapped it from the maroon hanky, a small glass ring with tiny flecks held within, glinting. From what he had understood of the pictograms they were the denizens of Hades. His thumb gently caressed its surface. He had puzzeled for decades on how these objects had been made, and how they had came to represent the souls of the dead. Not that any of that really helped.

He wrapped it back up and extracted the journal he was looking for. It looked like his private diary, once bitten twice shy and he had had a pretty good memory – better then than now – even for images especially if he’d already drawn them once. Something about this was nagging at him. He sat back and opened the cover.

Posted: Friday, November 16th, 2012 @ 8:08 pm
Categories: Uncategorized.
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