“Oh, not again,” McKinney sighed, turning her back to him. “More King fantasies about little green men seeding civilisation or survivors from Atlantis? You’re supposed to be a scientist, Ben! As was your father. Look at where his outlandish ideas got him. Dead, in some godforsaken cess-pit in the middle of Africa!”
His anger erupted. King’s face twisted into a violent snarl and he stepped towards McKinney.
“Ben,” Nadia warned.
He forced his anger under control and thrust his tracings at her. “Part of the mask I found today matches perfectly with part of the Bouda’s mask as depicted on the cave paintings near to the Wassu Stone Circle in Gambia.”
McKinney snatched the tracings from his hand and casually glanced at them. “Cave paintings,” she scoffed. “If archaeology was to believe that everything drawn on the walls of caves and tombs were real events then we would live in a world full of dragons and sea monsters and giants. These prove nothing!” She threw the two sheets of paper back at him.
King let them flutter to the ground. “They may not be concrete proof,” he admitted. “But they at least suggest that my father’s theories were correct.” He bent and picked up the drawings, turning them to face the Scot. “Two pieces of the same mask, both incorporated into newer facades, scattered across two continents that didn’t interact until the days of Columbus.” He waved the papers at her. “What these prove is that, in some distant period, a race of people, perhaps known to history, perhaps not, had the technology and the navigational know-how to cross the Atlantic Ocean.”
“And scatter the separate pieces of a smashed mask that let an ancient king travel through time?” McKinney laughed. “You truly expect me, or any respectable scientist, to believe that?”
“You mean, do I expect you to believe that an ancient legend could be based in fact? Like Troy? Shangri La? How many historical sites around the world, once scoffed at as nothing but legend, are now being seriously studied?”
“But you’re not talking about an ancient fortress long forgotten. You’re talking about time travel!”
“I’m talking about drug-induced trances,” King snapped. “I’m talking about hallucinogenic rituals in which shamans and wise men and prophets claim to see future events.”
McKinney offered no further argument so King continued. “I’m talking about almost every culture in the world that has ever existed. Witch doctors and voodoo masters, astrologers and fortune tellers. I’m talking about crystal balls and fortune telling dice. I’m talking about Christianity, Islam, Judaism and just about every other religion that has ever existed and preached of prophets who could commune with god, who could see the future. Do I believe that any of these people could do so?” He shrugged. “I’ve read the myths and I’ve read the science. Some say yes, some say no. Others just keep an open mind.”
He felt himself becoming impassioned by his speech and he let that passion take hold. For all his life he remembered his father being constantly put down by the academic world, constantly laughed at. The only man who actually believed in him was a genocidal maniac who had butchered his family. Even he, himself, had lost faith in his father’s unrelenting belief. In so doing, he had betrayed him.
Rather than accompany him on what Reginald declared would be the greatest archaeological discovery in history as he trekked through the heart of Africa to find the ancient city of the Bouda, King signed on to the Sarisariñama Expedition. It was his chance to study orthodox history, to make a name for himself as a serious, respectable scientist. Months later, his father’s expedition had officially been declared ‘Missing; presumed dead.’
Now, here, on another continent, he had the chance to honour his father’s memory. By proving that he was not some raving lunatic who had led his expedition to doom. But that he had been right all along.
“What is undeniable,” he continued, “is that the men and women who have claimed to see the future, often aided by substances, believe it. As do their followers. Why do you scoff at the notion of a ritual in which an African tribe, wearing a mask and breathing in hallucinogenic fumes to enter a trance, could have given rise to the legend of a man actually travelling into that future?”
For a moment McKinney seemed to be mulling King’s words over in her head, but then her face hardened. “Your view of archaeology would have me believing in Indiana Jones-type booby traps and the mumbo jumbo of magical masks that can predict the future. That is not archaeology, Doctor King; that is a Hollywood manuscript. Your ‘Black Death’ did not exist. There has never been one piece of evidence to confirm his existence, nothing more than unrelated, detached rumours. And as for your ‘Moon Mask’, what you have found today is nothing more than a relic, yet to be understood, just like all the ruins below our feet are yet to be understood.”
King’s fists squeezed into balls once more, his jaw clenched, and his anger swelled. “And your view of archaeology would have us believe that our knowledge of history is set in stone, that we know all there is to know. But the truth is that in a single day, in a single moment, any discovery could change everything we ever thought we knew about our ancestors, about our history. That is the point of continuing our work, to disprove tomorrow what we learned today. But you, you and your ponced-up, brown-nosing, arse-licking, little pricks who consider yourselves to be the experts, you’re too afraid that tomorrow might bring a discovery that makes you irrelevant, that makes your knowledge useless! And then what happens to your big fat pay cheques, your second homes and your fleet of four-wheel drives?!”
“Are you quite finished, Doctor King?” McKinney’s face burned red with anger, rage boiling up.
“I’ve not even started!” he growled back.
“I’m afraid you have,” she snapped. “And you’ve finished. You’re fired.”
“What?” King demanded, rising up to his full height.
“Doctor McKinney,” Nadia cut in but the Scottish woman shot her a look.
“Stay out of this, Doctor Yashina. After your disregard of procedure today you’re already on thin ice my girl.” She glowered at King. “Pack your bags. You’ll be leaving with Raine tomorrow.”
King’s entire body quaked with barely suppressed rage, his muscles bunched and he finally exploded, lashing out to smack a computer monitor and send it flying from its desk, smashing against the floor in a shower of sparks. McKinney and Nadia both gasped and stepped back away from the raging man and for a moment the Scottish woman feared for her safety.
But then King whirled and charged through the tent flap, stalking away through the camp. He didn’t jump over the taut guy-ropes but walked straight through them, ripping them from the ground. He felt the urge to lash out and hit something else but fought it.
He was close. He was so close to finally proving his father’s theory, to finally showing the bastards that he was right; about the Black Death, about the Moon Mask, the Bouda, and the Progenitors. But they were against him! They were all against him! He had been laughed at, scoffed at, mocked and belittled all his life and yet he had struggled on, he had ignored people like McKinney and sought out people like Sid—
“Don’t get ahead of yourself.” His girlfriend’s words repeated themselves in his mind. She was against him too. She had betrayed him, and where was she now? Swanning about with Captain America, swooning and drawling and—
All sense, all reason left him. He ploughed into the mess tent, pushing through the crowd. His eyes scanned their faces, looking for Sid. Looking for Raine.
“Where’s Sid?” he demanded. Blood pumped through his eyes. Adrenaline and testosterone surged through his body.
“Out back,” someone replied. “With Raine.”
King was already moving, stalking through the crowd which nervously backed away, allowing him to burst through the back entrance, just in time to see Sid, hidden inside a copse of trees, throw her arms around the American’s neck.
“You bastard!” he snarled, stalking up behind the American and grasping his shoulder. He spun the stunned pilot around and before he knew what was happening, his large and powerful fist smashed into his smug face!
Blood erupted in a fountain as Raine staggered back. The crowd burst into shocked gasps, some of the drunker ones hooting like monkeys, egging the violence on, while others screamed obscenities at the madman.
“Ben!” Sid bellowed. “What the hell are you doing?!”
King ignored her. He threw himself at Raine but the American was faster, recovering from the initial blow quickly and spinning away from the second. He swung up a defensive block, pushed King back then bolted to his feet. He moved faster than the archaeologist, jumping back, just beyond each of his swings.
“Benny!” Raine shouted, anger mixing with confusion. “What the-?” He ducked below another swing and, realising the enraged archaeologist wasn’t going to back down, he lashed out with his leg, catching King behind the knees and wrenching him to the ground.
Instead of falling backwards, King lunged forward, his powerful shoulders smashing into the pilot’s chest in a wrestling-style take-down. The impact threw them both to the ground.
“Ben, get off him!” Sid bellowed but King didn’t hear. Straddling Raine, he brought his fist back for another blow but his elbow was caught mid-air. The gawping on-lookers had finally been spurred into action and several of the men closed around him, grasping him and wrenching him off the helicopter pilot.
Raine scrambled to his feet, holding his bloodied nose. “What the hell is your problem, Benny?!”
“My problem?!” King struggled against the overwhelming number of hands holding him back. “My problem is that it’s not enough for you to sweep in here every fortnight and disrupt this dig just so you can get your end away with the interns, but now you feel the need to put your ego-centric American whammy on my girlfriend!”
“What?” Raine asked, confused.
“He wasn’t putting the ‘whammy’ on me, Ben,” Sid shot at him, angry.
“I saw you…” he wasn’t sure what word to use and annoyingly settled on “embracing! Out here in the bush where no one can see.”
“Yeah,” Sid admitted matter-of-factly. Her blunt admission brought him up short. Wasn’t she even going to try and deny it? “Yeah, I hugged him… to say thank you.”
Now it was King’s turn to be confused. He shrugged off the hands holding him. “Thank you? For what?”
“For this!” She threw a cardboard sleeve at him. It frisbeed through the air and one corner dug into the soft earth at his feet. “Nathan’s spent the last two months trying to get hold of it and get it out here in time for your birthday next month! The Royal bloody Mail doesn’t exactly deliver to the middle of the Amazon, you know!” Tears streamed down her face.
King suddenly felt very small, very stupid. The eyes of the entire camp were watching him.
“She didn’t know where you were or when you were going to arrive in the mess so we came out here so I could give her it without you seeing,” Raine explained. The embrace King had witnessed was nothing more than a friendly thank you.
“It was supposed to be a surprise,” Sid whispered through angry sobs.
“Sid, I…” he began, reaching out for her but she pulled away and pushed through the crowd, running through the mess tent and vanishing into the gloom. King watched her go, his legs heavy and unable to run after her.
“Come on folks,” someone said from behind him, addressing the crowd. “There’s nothing more to see here.” In a babble of muted conversations, the crowd dispersed back into the mess tent. King kept his gaze averted as someone led Raine past, having applied a damp towel to his bleeding nose.
Moments later, he stood alone, his heart hammering in his chest, his face flushed with embarrassment and shame. The music was abruptly cut off and the floodlights shut down, leaving him in muted darkness, staring down at his gift, still embedded in the ground.
For a few moments earlier that day he had had everything — the proof of his theory, his ticket to academic success… and he had Sid to share it with.
He finally bent over and picked up his gift, examining it. It was a record — an actual LP, not some digitally re-recorded CD. His joy at discovering the title — a rare 1976 Elvis Presley Live at Lakeland vinyl — was locked within a black pit of despair.
Not an hour earlier he had had it all.
Now, he feared, he had lost everything.