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  Stroud had come on the scene rather late in July and now it was almost nine months he had labored under the close scrutiny of the Egyptians. This alone was enough to drive a man insane, but the way that Dr. Mamdoud and Patel withstood the assaults on their integrity was inspiring, and each in his and her own way kept the prime objective clearly in view at all times. It was harder for an American, Stroud knew, to work under circumstances in which one's expertise was being paid for, but one's advice and motives were constantly called into question. Of course, Egypt had been robbed and plundered by archeologists in the past, and if Egypt had anything, beyond the great monuments of the pharaohs, it was a long memory.

  The newly found ruins lay some fifteen feet below street level, and had been partially covered with sewage, which had had to be pumped out and disposed of. The dig had gone slowly, bogged down at first by the sewage and later by red tape, not to mention the fact it was in the center of a thriving Egyptian city in which two earlier digs were going forth for Roman-era artifacts. They had to work in an alley only a few feet from the doorsteps of houses. Archeologists had had to contend with children at play, passing carts and donkeys, as well as angry, suspicious villagers worried that antiquities officials might at any time invoke their legal authority to force them out and begin excavating below their homes.

  When Stroud had arrived, one such home had already been confiscated for the purpose, with plans for a second. The stress and pressures these kinds of incidents applied to the dig were nothing like Stroud had ever dealt with in the typical, rural dig he was used to. He had expected tents and desert winds and sand; what he got was an alley reminiscent of the worst in Chicago, where he had once been a policeman for some thirteen years, earning rank as detective before returning to his first love, archeology, gaining his degree from the University of Chicago.

  His field laboratory consisted of a Tensor lamp on a wobbly, wooden table that'd been provided him--his desk.

  Cheops himself had been removed for "security" reasons long before, as had most of the richest artifacts, each as soon as the archeologists had claimed, cleaned and catalogued it. There might be some truth in the security measures nowadays, because the community was getting rather noisy lately about their rights, and allowing the dead their peace and sanctity. Superstitions also abounded, and often Stroud found symbols written in blood on the door when he entered in the morning.

  In the field laboratory where he had labored the entire night, not stopping for so much as a cup of coffee, knowing that his presence in the country was no longer required or needed, Abraham Hale Stroud documented what he could of the final cataloguing of artifacts to come out of perhaps the greatest archeological find of the century. He looked closely again at the ancient relic he slowly turned in his massive hands, cradling the onyx skull of perhaps nine centimeters in diameter and less than that many pounds in weight. The jeweled eyes stared back at him like two flaming embers, the red rubies mocking him with their mystery. The find was by no means the most important to come out of the exhaustive dig at Nazlett el-Samman in Egypt, but for Stroud it held in its curves and smoothness and essential mystery all the world's wonders. It was the reason he was here, living in a strange admixture of dirt and fascination that made him both cough and catch his breath in the same instant.

  Both Patel and Mamdoud were nearby, but when Stroud lifted another of the skulls, a beautiful crystal one, he knew they did not see in it what he saw. In fact, he doubted that any two people on earth would see the same thing in the crystal skull, that somehow it radiated back some subconscious core of stored information, perhaps aspirations, perhaps wonders, perhaps a man's fears. It was impossible to say for certain. But now, in the myriad pools of dancing light, Stroud saw a stranger to him, a man standing poised on the brink of an enormous pit that seemed to surround and engulf him. Something else he saw--an iridescent green light rising from the earth to engulf the man. He didn't know who the man was, but he saw him turn around and look out of the crystal into Stroud's eyes, but the man had no eyes and nothing whatever behind the eyes. Stroud sensed that he was some sort of lost soul ... a zombie of some kind. And then beside him stood a second man with the same blank stare and careless eyes. And then they were both gone. It had occurred within the space of an instant.

  Stroud didn't know what this represented or what it meant. He only knew he could not write about the event in his scientific journal. But while it was the only time that he had seen two men in this particular skull, it was not the only time that Stroud had seen the face of the first man, a man he somehow knew was named Weitzel. None of it held any particular meaning to him, yet something about the man, the way he stood, the way he moved and the way he looked but did not see; it all cast an overwhelming sense of panic and plague in Stroud's mind--so much so that rather than sleep or eat, he had worked, thinking work would stave off the panic he felt creeping into his being.

  The others, particularly the sensitive Dr. Patel, felt his recent change, the obvious no-longer-at-ease stance he had taken. The others believed that he was beginning to worry about the locals, rightly afraid for his life, and likely wondering why he, an American, and a wealthy one at that, should have bothered exiling himself in this way from his homeland.

  "Dr. Stroud, you must get some rest," Ranjana said to him, making him look away from the skull and into her jet-black eyes. She was a small woman, middle-aged, always a smile of reassurance on her face. "You must be tired."

  There were a few cots at the back, but he could also go to the Hilton on the other side of town where he had kept a room that he had used very little in all his days here.

  "Yes, perhaps you're right. I think I will take some time."

  "The work will be here when you return, I assure you," agreed Dr. Mamdoud, a lusty, well-built Arab who was lighter-skinned than most Arabs. The Egyptians often treated him rudely, even those in the Antiquities Organization. He had had an American education, and he was considered by the Egyptians as an American since it was Mamdoud who had organized the U.S. financing of the sewage project at the outset. Consequently, the Egyptians didn't trust him much more than they trusted Stroud or other Americans on the project. Mamdoud wore soft-soled oxfords and the coat and tie of a professional, even in the Egyptian heat at noonday. The locals considered him quite mad.

  Stroud said at the door, "I'll be back."

  Within an hour after arriving at the Hilton, showering and shaving and having a light snack tray sent up, Stroud knew he would not be going back to the dig. His door was knocked on and men with guns stood outside, the Egyptian police. They held him at gunpoint while searching his room, ostensibly for stolen artifacts. Some earlier people working on the dig had made off with a few incidentals, knives, stone pieces, jewels--or so the Egyptians claimed. His sudden departure from the dig had worried someone high up in the Ministry of Antiquities, Stroud supposed. He let them search. And they did so with abandon, angering Stroud, who stalked and shouted at the police when they began to toss things about.

  "Come on, take it easy with that!" he yelled when they hurled open a briefcase filled with papers.

  "Here, here it is, Captain," shouted one of the young officers to his commander, holding up a small, bejeweled bracelet.

  Stroud knew instantly he was being hustled, and that the bracelet had not come from the Cheops burial temple. "All right, so your boss wants me off the dig."

  "You are in serious trouble here, Dr. Stroud," said the smiling Egyptian commander, a curl lifting his cheek. "I think very bad trouble for you."

  "What is it you want?"

  "I think it will save the state some difficulty, Doctor, if you were on the next flight to your country."

  "I thought so."

  "We will, of course, escort you to the airport." He ordered his men out as Stroud tried to clean up the mess they had made. Then the officer said, "I will give you time to dress and pack your belongings, Dr. Stroud."

  "Thank you ever so much."

  "Not necessar
y for thank-you." He was gone, but knocking for Stroud to rush before a few minutes had passed. Stroud packed, attempted to contact Mamdoud or Patel at the site, and failing this, he went with the authorities to the airport. Over the police radio he heard that the field laboratory had been the scene of street violence when police and locals clashed there. There were reports of gunshots and wounded. Stroud silently prayed for Patel and Mamdoud and the beautiful skulls of Cheops.

  On the flight that would take him to New York, Stroud leaned back in the chair and fell asleep, the face of a stranger to him, a man named Weitzel, crystallizing in his mind. A face ... just a face ... sad and empty and devoid of all emotion ... just a face ... yet something deep within the mind of the emotionless face, buried but striving to climb to the surface ... a hunger or thirst or longing or all three; a hunger to be destroyed. But this death wish was also opposed by the same source. The dual nature of the longing to live and the longing to die represented a powerful life force. Bizarre, perhaps; perhaps unnatural. Either way, the abject sadness of the little man and the force that kept him alive seemed shrouded in a mystery that Stroud would never unravel, for the impressions and the vision wrought in his brain were fleeting, giving way to oblivion and sleep.

  He dreamed of a normal life, a life without the Stroud curse upon it. Like his great-grandfather, Ezeekiel, and his grandfather, Annanias, Abe Stroud possessed an uncontrollable and often annoying precognitive power. Stroud had even seen the terrible event of his parents' deaths in an automobile accident, but not soon enough to alter it. As a child he had seen plane crashes, had even known the number of the flight and the airline before the plane went down. On the occasions when he tried desperately to warn anyone in authority, he was put off, ignored until it was too late.

  It was not until his own brush with death much later, as a young man in war, that he truly became a seer, and this was after he had had the steel plate firmly affixed to his skull. The genetic "gift" or "cursed" gene handed down to him from generation to generation had been intensified and honed by the metal in his cranium, and sometimes it seemed to act like a bloody beacon, picking up psychic waves and auras from anyplace on the globe. In Andover, Illinois, the site of his ancestral home, it had sent him a vision of a small boy who had fallen prey to a cannibalistic vampire that the locals had come to regard as the Andover Horror. His psychic antennae had received pictures of slaughter and terror in a small Michigan town where people were being devoured alive by a werewolf that eventually made its way to Chicago. In both instances, Stroud's investigations had uncovered whole colonies of supposedly supernatural creatures, first vampires in Andover and then werewolves in Michigan.

  Prior to becoming an archeologist, and prior to taking control of Stroud Manse in Andover, he was an ex-Marine turned policeman in Chicago. It was his near-death experience on a battlefield in Vietnam, the resultant steel plate given him by the V.A., and his ancestry that made his life a "curse." It was as if the metal plate had electromagnetically charged what nature had already given him. Without the plate, he doubted, for instance, whether he could "receive" the voices of his dead grandfather and great-grandfather, as he did on occasion.

  When he was a policeman in Chicago, the Tribune and the Sun-Times had begun to refer to him as the "Psychic Detective." He soon grew tired of the freak show treatment he received even from guys in his own precinct.

  A big man, broad-shouldered, in good health and shape, he towered over most men, and this, along with the "gift," scared lesser men. The result was that he knew few men whom he could call friends, and he had learned to be suspicious of those who tried too desperately to get close.

  His dreams sometimes saw the thin anchoring of pressed alloy that one expert at the V.A. hospital outside Chicago claimed to be causing the pressure inward against the neurological center of the brain. It was the same area known to be most active during REM sleep, and during ESP.

  For a time after his part in the war, there at the V.A., he had become a living laboratory to psychic researchers from all over the country, until he became sick and tired of the role they had handed him. Not waiting around for a second botched job on his head, the surgeons anxious to have another go at him, he abruptly left the V.A. center.

  Pressure on the brain or no, ill-fit or no, seizures or no, he went on to make it through the police academy a year later. He'd spent thirteen years as a policeman, most of them as a detective. But in all his years as a detective, he had never put together the details of a crime scene so clearly as the picture of a man now nagging and pulling at him, a man named Simon Albert Weitzel. So clear, like high-tech resolution, the details of the man's hangdog expression, the blank stare in his eyes, the green hue to his aura where he stood teetering on the brink of a pit that gaped below him like the mouth of Hades itself. In the pit a black world filled with lost souls, and now Weitzel mechanically turns and leans in toward the maw of darkness when Stroud's hand leaped into his dream and took sudden hold of the man's arm, but it slid through his grasp like vapor, and the ill-conceived dream itself vaporized.

  It left him in peace. The image of the man left him in peace. It was what he wanted, to be left in peace. He was tired, and the disturbing dream was unwanted. And the curse he had fallen heir to was also unwanted. And yet to cast it away he must remove his own skull.

  His sleep persona told him to focus his mind on the lovely, soothing beauty of the Egyptian artifacts he had helped to uncover and document, and he settled on the image of the crystal skull. A calm peace came over him that nothing, he prayed, could shake.

  -2-

  Stroud was awakened by the sound of the pilot's voice calling for all passengers to fasten their seat belts, telling everyone of the dismal weather outlook below the blanket of clouds they now skimmed through as they approached Kennedy. A stewardess became solicitous as she passed him, telling him he had slept through dinner.

  "I hope you worked right 'round me," he told her.

  "Will you be staying over in New York?" she asked, her pert red hair bobbing about an innocent-looking face with huge brown eyes.

  "No, I'm going on to Chicago."

  "Good ... good, so am I."

  "See you on the last leg," he promised.

  When they came out of the clouds, Stroud saw a city painted in gray and blue, her streets dappled in slick moisture. Obviously, it had been raining for some time, and the giant that was New York was being irritated now by a steady drizzle, hardly visible in the lack of light filtering through from above her. Above and around them, the underbelly of the clouds reflected the city lights, creating strange shapes in the night sky, shapes that looked like Grecian sculpture.

  Stroud was soon watching people pass by and out of the plane, waiting until the place was near empty, as was his habit, before grabbing his carry-on, anxious to get to the rest room where he might shower his tired eyes with water, get a quick shave. He had a two-hour layover, and very little to occupy his time. He'd look for a New York Times, maybe look through the book racks for the latest potboiler by Steve Robertson, his favorite author, whose books always dealt with Chicago cops.

  Stroud's mind was filled with ways to keep himself occupied--as he hated a wasted moment--when, coming down the ramp, he realized that he was being met by policemen in uniform. Christ, he wondered, did it have anything to do with the Egyptian incident? He imagined an international ballyhoo over his having been escorted out of the other country.

  "Dr. Stroud? Dr. Abraham Stroud?" asked one of the officers.

  "I am Stroud, yes. What is it?"

  "Would you come with us, sir?"

  "To where?" Stroud saw the stewardess he'd spoken to watching the scene, imagining the worst, he supposed.

  "There are some people who would like to see you, sir, just outside on the tarmac," he replied, taking him to a window in the ramp. Stroud looked down at the strange entourage of official motorbikes and a limousine. He recognized police brass when he saw it, and this was it, but two men who stood outside
the limo, staring up at him from below drenched umbrellas, looked anything but official, and were certainly not like cops he had ever seen before.

  "Who are they?"

  "C.P. and his aide," said the second cop. "Wants you pronto. Now, can we go?"

  "Commissioner of police?"

  The commissioner was most certainly inside the limo where it was dry. The two men standing on the tarmac with wet pant legs were dressed in the careless manner of scientists or professors, Stroud thought. One of these men was trying to tie a tie and failing miserably, as if he had either never learned or forgotten how. The other man's pin-striped coat clashed horribly with his brown dungarees.

  The cops led Stroud toward their motorbikes and the limousine by going through a service door. One of them announced that his bags were being taken care of. As they approached the limo, the two tacky academician types rushed anxiously forward, each extending a hand to Stroud and telling him they were so glad he could come.

  "How did you know I was on the plane?"

  "We wired you in Egypt requesting that you come. Didn't you get it?" asked the tall, slender man on Stroud's right.

  "No ... no, I left rather abruptly."

  One of the two was frail, bony and white-haired, his flesh the color of a lab coat, Stroud thought. He was short but not heavy. The second fellow was tall, perhaps the same age or older, with thin, wispy gray hair and an unkempt mustache, perhaps a bid to make up for the lack of hair on his crown. What hair this one did have on top had been forced in an unnatural wave across the barren area in a hopeless bid to cover the desert. At the nape of his neck, the hair curled in a wild arch and was in need of trimming. The tall fellow tore off his glasses and said, "I am Dr. Samuel Leonard of the American Museum--"

  "And I am Wisnewski," said the shorter, wiry little man beside him with a booming voice. "Thank you for coming."

  "I honestly had no choice," Stroud was saying when he realized whom he was talking to. "Leonard? Wisnewski? I ... I've read your books--"