The Artifact III

III. A Curious Find

At approximately 9 in the morning on September 15th a small biplane touched down in a wide river next to an Indonesian delta. A thick forest was spread out over the inland parts of the landmass and a thick, dry heat pervaded the air, even in the early morning. Dr. Jacob Crane, PhD in paleontology, stepped out of a small biplane and his two colleagues Cindy Wordsworth and Dian Guntur followed quickly behind. They had left to search for ruins in an area of supposed ancient human activity. After logging many hours of research into the area Crane had informed the Museum board of officials of his hunch that a big discovery was to be found in Indonesia several times, but even he did not expect to find what he did.
Cindy was a bright young archeologist from the Museum of Natural History with a degree in anthropology whose quick wit, intelligence, and skill in many ancient languages had more than once saved Dr. Crane from delay at the hands of obfuscation. Dian was a guide who Dr. Crane had paid to help them navigate the forests and rivers of the mass of island jungles that was Indonesia. The journey was made difficult by the treacherous jungle terrain and the stifling heat, but mostly because nobody really knew what to look for. Crane tried to put a positive spin on it.
“I say we just survey a few of the areas. If there’s nothing to find, at least we’ll know we’re not missing anything.” He said to Cindy. He couldn’t talk directly to Dian but Cindy would translate for him when he needed it. After the translation, Dian nodded in agreement and he and Cindy followed Dr. Crane up the bank of the river and towards the jungle.
Cindy had worked with Dr. Crane before and never knew him to follow a hunch only to have it turn out to be a false lead. Normally she’d have her doubts about wandering into the jungle with no clear motive, but if Dr. Crane was behind it then she was too. The grass became progressively less sandy as they approached the line of thin and wispy trees, leaves sagging with the heat. Cindy looked over the shoulder of Dian, who was walking behind Dr. Crane, to see deeper into the forest and she saw that it wasn’t long before the thickness of the canopy increased, obscuring countless photons from the ground below and shading the forest in moderate darkness.
When they came to the tree line of the shadowy woods, Dr. Crane and Dian continued walking without missing a beat, but Cindy hesitated for just a moment, pushed away a sudden and frightfully unpleasant feeling, and continued following them. ‘The only thing worse than wandering in a dark forest is being lost in a dark forest,’ she thought as she picked up her pace.
As they walked they each slowly lost track of time, wandering through a lush verdant labyrinth brimming with hostile teeth and foul poisons with no temporal significance to any of them. They visited a few of the areas that Dr. Crane had studied. The first was marked by four or five odd, square-ish pillars apparently placed haphazardly in the ground. Excitedly, Dr. Crane explained to his colleagues, “See, these little structures…they are clearly not natural, and look at their age. There was definitely human activity here.” Their surfaces had been severely eroded with age but they clearly had once born intricate designs and etchings. Cindy knelt down with sketch paper and a piece of charcoal and quickly took a rubbing of the worn designs. They investigated the area very thoroughly but found nothing further of interest.
The next two sites were empty, the fourth was after a little excavation revealed to contain a crude foundation to some impressively ancient house, and the sixth contained more of the small, square-ish pillars. However, the fifth was a matter of great interest to Cindy and Dr. Crane, albeit off-putting to Dian. At first it looked similar to all the others; overgrown with verdant, tropical plants and, in the case of ruins and rocks, so eroded and worn that they truly must have been ancient indeed, but what set this spot apart was that a brief weak spot in the canopy allowed a few golden rays of sunshine in, illuminating a small, circular plain in the tropical forest. There were strange, mostly uniform stones dotting the field here and there, but most of them were obscured by underbrush and violently oppressive plant life. After a bit of searching, however, Cindy was the first to make a possible connection between the regularity of the size of the worn, decorated ancient stones and the structured order in which they had been laid. “It’s a graveyard,” she breathlessly remarked.
Dr. Crane looked up and squinted one eye a little, as he often did when processing a great many thoughts. Suddenly he looked around and he could see the signs too, and said “This must mean they were advanced enough to have a society…look at these stones, Cindy.” He could not speculate as to the vastness of their age. Cindy cleared a little of the underbrush away revealing yet more graves and exposing a dichotomy in the stones. Roughly half were low, squat cylinders with spiral designs so worn that one could only barely discern them by touch, and the other half were taller, rectangular shapes. These only bore designs and markings on one side, yet all the designs of all the rectangular headstones were on the same sides. “Remarkable,” Dr. Crane muttered, as he made a mental note about the location.
Dian cocked his head and asked Cindy about leaving quickly with a slightly awkward tone in his voice. “Dian’s nervous.” Cindy said, and then asked Dian in Indonesian if there was any danger or something they should be concerned about. He told her no, so she asked him next about what was bothering him.
He proceeded to explain that he had grown very uncomfortable with this location and that a strong sense of foreboding filled his being. He wanted to leave but could not leave his employer, Dr. Crane. His family needed the money and he’d only get paid at the end of his service. In an increasingly worried tone, he suggested again and again that they leave. Dr. Crane asked Cindy, “What’s wrong with him?”
“I guess he’s just getting a bad vibe. He says there’s no danger or anything, but he really wants us to leave. Soon.”
“How much does he know about this site?”
“Not much, he’s never been here before.” Cindy looked over at Dian, who shot her a piteous look.
After a moment, Dr. Crane said “He doesn’t speak English, right?” taking care not to gesture at Dian.
“Not a word of it. What is it?” Cindy replied.
“I think it would be best if we don’t tell him this is a graveyard until we leave. He seems…fragile.”
Cindy paused for a moment. Then she said, “Agreed.” She calmly told Dian that there was nothing to worry about and that they’d only stay at the site for a little while longer.
The rest of the graveyard was filled with more of the headstones and nothing else. Dr. Crane was not satisfied with this find, as he knew there was something more that they were missing; something bigger. After scouring the site a few more times, he had Dian lead them further into the jungle past the final row of graves, and they continued onwards for roughly two hours. The noon sun burned high in the sky, but back under the canopy it was dark and cool again. They began to grow weary and decided to take a lunch break. Nobody wanted to eat in the darkness under the canopy, so they decided to backtrack and return to the venerable field of headstones to enjoy the soothing light of the sun. Even Dian had calmed down after sitting for a moment and seeing that there was no danger.
They all enjoyed a brief lunch together and talked about their find, gently suggesting the graveyard theory to Dian when he had calmed down more. He started to get afraid again but Cindy talked to him in kind, soothing tones while Dr. Crane walked around the graveyard to take another look. He looked at each stone more carefully, examining each one. ‘What if it isn’t a graveyard?’ he wondered. Suddenly he heard a brief crumbling and lost his footing, feeling the rush of terror flooding over him as the ground gave way and he fell into darkness.
Cindy and Dian heard Dr. Crane’s screams and turned immediately. Dian started running first having still been on edge about the place, but Cindy followed quickly after him and caught up soon enough. It didn’t take long for them to find where Crane was, as there was a sinkhole in the ground so large that it would be impossible to miss. “Jacob?” Cindy called out, desperate to quell her fears for Dr. Crane’s safety. The sinkhole was about six feet wide but deep enough to absorb even the sunlight of the forest plain. Dian peered over the edge of the hole and was instantly hit by a pungent stench. He stumbled away from the hole and vomited behind a tree as it had caught him off guard. There was a gagging noise from inside the hole as Dr. Crane, who had been holding his breath, tried to breathe again. He retched for some time, but eventually composed himself enough to respond to his colleagues.
“Hello? Can you hear me?” Dr. Crane called out from inside the hole. “Don’t worry, I’m alright!”
Cindy slowly crept alongside Dian, testing the ground before every step and covering her mouth and nose. “Dian, get the rope. Tie it to a tree and come down here, I think I’m in a room. Get the flashlights too. I broke mine in the fall. We found something.” Cindy’s eyes grew wide as she thought of their names being recorded with the discoverers of great archeological finds in history. She watched the darkness of the sinkhole and waited as Dian sprinted back to their bags.
“Are you okay down there, Jacob? How deep is it?” She asked.
“Not that deep, ten or fifteen feet at the most.”
“What’s with that smell?” Cindy asked after coughing briefly.
“It must have been fermenting down here for thousands of years. And if this really is a graveyard…Well, don’t think about it.” He said while stifling another gag.
Cindy thought about it, but it wasn’t long before she then thought about how Carter’s discovery of King Tut’s tomb was nothing more than glorified grave-robbing anyway.
Dian returned with several flashlights and a long nylon rope. He tied one end of the rope to a thick, low-hanging tree and secured with it a carabiner and a knot, then slowly lowered himself in. Before he was fully submerged, however, he quickly told Cindy that he brought the small filtered gasmask from the pack for her so it would be easier to deal with the smell. She smiled thoughtfully as she yelled out a quick “Thanks!” and went to his pile of supplies to find the gasmask.
Dian handed Dr. Crane a flashlight as soon as he touched down in the strange, dark room. Cindy’s legs had just poked through the sinkhole as she was beginning the descent on the nylon rope. Dr. Crane turned on his light as walking a short distance scanning the walls of the room, admiring the intricate and perfectly preserved designs all over the walls all done by stone etchings and engravings. Dian however, perhaps more concerned with his safety at the moment, turned on his flashlight and looked at the floor to see where they were standing. Dr. Crane’s accidental entrance to the room had crushed the bones of two of the eleven skeletons in the room, and Dian himself was standing on a third. For a moment he found that terror had stolen his voice, but within a few seconds he cried out in fear and ran to one of the walls, observing that the bodies were all near the middle of the room. Cindy jumped at this exclamation and lost her grip on the nylon rope, but was close enough to the ground that her fall was non-threatening. Luckily, she did not fall on a corpse.
“What the hell is this?” Dr. Crane said as he shone his flashlight over the bodies. Ten of them had been arranged in a circle, all lain out perfectly. However, there was one body out of place; an eleventh body, haphazardly lain to rest on his stomach in the middle of the circle.
Cindy stumbled around to pick herself up in the darkness, but when she had composed herself she came to Dr. Crane’s side and took a flashlight from Dian, who was now trembling next to them both. “This man had a knife when he died here.” Dr. Crane said, gesturing to the short obsidian knife under the skeleton. “Maybe he was a bandit or a grave robber. Look at these bodies. I guess this is a graveyard after all.”
“So you think this was…” she paused, then correct herself, “is a mausoleum, then?” Cindy asked.
Dr. Crane shone the light once around the room very quickly, observing some household items and practical things like tools and food containers. Some thin mattresses were laid out on one side of the large circular room. “I wouldn’t be surprised. Look at all this stuff. It could’ve been a family plot, the Egyptians used to provide a lot of goods for the dead like this.”
Cindy, Dian, and Dr. Crane began to look at more of the fine details of the room. Several of the bodies were adorned with subtle necklaces or jewelry of beads and gems, and many of the artifacts in the room were excellently preserved. Dian was still panicky but through shock or resilience he had caught a brief toehold on his mind. Dr. Crane now felt satisfied with his find, and they, especially Cindy thanks to the mask, had all gotten used to the stench of millennia-old decay.
As they were each looking through the ancient simplicities of whoever had been laid to rest in the mass tomb, Cindy walked over to the circle of bodies and slowly looked at each one. There was something about how carefully they were laid out, and the person in the middle who was breaking the pattern. ‘What could he be trying to steal?’ She wondered as he crouched down and look at his body more closely.
Then, she saw it.
She tried to alert Dr. Crane or Dian, but she couldn’t, because she didn’t want them to take it. She wanted it. She tried to look away, but she found no strength with which to break the hold of its gaze. The more she stared at it, the more she wanted to. Trembling, she desperately reached out and grabbed the small, circular artifact in hand of the skeleton in the middle, the stone artifact roughly the size of a golf ball with the curious design of teeth and tentacles around an eye within an eye.
Dr. Jacob Crane called out, “Dian, Cindy, come here quick!” There was excitement in his voice as he stared up at a wall panel of etchings and engravings not unlike a circuit diagram. Dian came over, but Cindy did not. At the center of this diagram was a large sphere from which several ball-tipped lines were emanating. These lines worked their way to other etching designs and spread out into more lines, full of corners and sharp angles, there. Between the lines there were designs of swirls and curves, and many humanoid shapes were frequently present, all of which being either short or tall. There was no variation in the humanoid shapes aside from height. The walls were all adorned with this elaborate etched plan, preserved in time due to the structural integrity of the circular underground chamber. Apparently the room was very structurally sound, despite the large sinkhole in the roof. Dian considered this hole and thought about leaving soon.
Cindy heard Dr. Crane call for her, but she did not care. She had grabbed the artifact from the dead man’s hand, and quickly thereafter dropped her flashlight. Breathing rapidly into the small gasmask, she picked up the small obsidian knife in her free hand and began stumbling towards the two men.
Dr. Crane was looking at the circuit diagrams on the walls and did not notice the other, subtler features of note in the room. He did not know what to make of the two collapsed stone walls in the chamber and as such did not question them. He did not see the collection of circular shapes not unlike the circular stone room they were in. He did not see the thin lines connecting several of them together in a network of sorts. He did not see Cindy approaching them with the man’s knife until she had stabbed it through the back of Dian’s neck.
Dr. Crane cried out and thought to reach for his gun, but he hesitated when he recognized the assailant as Cindy. Dian sputtered for a moment as he clutched at his throat and then fell to his knees, soon falling over. Cindy was still holding the knife but paused for a moment, watching Dian bleed out on the ground with a deranged look in her eyes. In the gasmask, spattered with Dian’s blood, she looked to Dr. Crane like more nightmare than human. With heavy breath she turned slowly turned to face Dr. Crane and then without a moment’s pause launched herself at him, ready to bring the knife across his neck in a fierce slash. His hand had already been on the handle of his revolver, so he quickly drew it and fired.
Cindy collapsed on top of him as she fell, the knife and artifact flying into the corner. Dr. Crane made an anguished face and lashed out with his limbs until her body had rolled off of him. He saw that she had dropped her knife, so he shone a flashlight in the corner where he heard it fall. He made an attempt to wipe some of Cindy’s blood off him. He failed. Dian’s body lay cooling on the floor of the room in large pool of his blood.
Dr. Crane found the bloody ceremonial knife but also saw something else, that repulsive artifact. He was not lured to it, but severely disturbed by its presence. He put on gloves and took out two sterile baggies; one for the knife and one for the other artifact. He kept the artifact in his pocket for safety, but stashed the knife in his bag for evidence of his innocence in the two deaths. He did not know what happened, nor did he even see the artifact in Cindy’s hand when he shot her.
After writing down the coordinates of the site, he walked through the jungle and back to the shore. He radioed for help from the plane, reporting his two colleagues dead and also his discovery. Dr. Jacob Crane then sat in the cockpit of his bi-plane and waited for help, feeling utterly overwhelmed.
About a week and a half later he dropped a good many artifacts off at the Museum of Natural History so they could analyze, catalog, and potentially display his find of ‘the burial chamber of ancient proto-humans!’ Everyone was excited. Right before he left town, he remembered the off-putting little thing in his pocket. For a second he debated just keeping it, but after looking at it for a few seconds he promptly dropped it off at the Museum and left New York immediately.