“Ben,” Sid called to him but her voice seemed very far away. His own heartbeat thundered in his ears as King clung to the wall with one hand, while in the other he clutched a circular slab of metal.
It can’t be, he thought.
He had almost convinced himself that the legends of the Bouda and the Moon Mask were nothing but nonsensical oral traditions, passed down through his ancestors to his father.
A sudden flashback to that terrible afternoon in Lagos assaulted his mind. The hate-filled face of General Abuku flashed in his eyes, just as they did in his nightmares every night. A spray of blood coating his face as a bullet blasted out his mother’s skull. A pool of red swelling across the carpet of the family’s rented apartment as his sister met a similar fate. The pain as the hot muzzle of the monster’s gun pressed against the centre of forehead, forever branding his flesh.
He quickly pushed the memory aside, his thoughts drifting to a kinder time; sat around a camp fire outside of the Wassu Stone Circle near to the Gambian River, his father had finally explained to him what he had demanded to know since the day the ‘bad man’ had killed his mother and sister.
Following the tragedy in Nigeria, father and son had eventually returned to London. It had all been a blur to the little boy. He remembered a memorial service. Lots of visitors, some official, others not. He remembered the irritating counsellor that had constantly tried to make him open up his feelings about what had happened. But mostly, he remembered how his father had thrown himself into his research, more focussed than ever. While always making time for his son, little Benny had seen the distance in his eyes, his mind constantly sifting through his research even when he was not at his desk.
Two years later, when Benny was nearing his eighth birthday, they had flown to The Gambia. It wasn’t just for his research, his father had told him. Despite being a third generation British citizen, it was important that Benny learn about his ancestral roots.
His father claimed that they were descendants of the Bouda, a mythical tribe who could transform themselves into hyenas and look into the future. But they were no mere myth, he had said. They were the forefathers of Africa, the remnants of a great civilisation which had spread across the continent, teaching the people the art of agriculture and stone working. It was this search that had bisected Abuku’s own insane quest. The madman believed such a claim could endorse his brutal elimination of all non-ethnic Africans from the entire continent and enforce a return to the old religions from before the days of Christ and Islam. An original, united Africa.
Reginald had taken his son to some caves near to the stone circle where crude paintings depicted a ship attacking a city of stone. Throughout the Gambia, there were similar drawings, paintings and other depictions of the Black Holocaust, the years when Europeans raped Africa of her children. But this particular depiction, his father had told him, showed the destruction of the Bouda. It was drawn by a survivor of that terrible assault, a distant ancestor of the King family. And, prominent among the images of Africans being led to the ship in chains was a figure wearing a mask.
The Moon Mask.
Broken up by the ancient gods long before the King family converted to Islam. Broken and scattered across the globe so that no man could harness the power of god.
But one man had tried, Benjamin King believed. The ‘Black Death’, one of only two survivors of the cursed transatlantic crossing of the slave ship, L'aile Raptor. His entire tribe had perished alongside the accursed crew.
Ever since his father had told him the story of the Moon Mask, King had become equally obsessed with it. He had traced the Raptor’s voyage to Jamaica, pieced together the scanty clues about the Black Death’s life— his escape from the Hamilton Sugar Plantation, his theft of a ship, his turn to piracy. He had a paper trail proving his epic voyages in search of, King believed, all the pieces of the Moon Mask so that he could claim the power of the gods, the power of time, and save his tribe.
And yet, for all the proof he had found of the Black Death’s existence, the one thing he had never found, the one irrefutable piece of evidence that he needed to convince the world’s scholars that the Bouda were real, and, therefore, so was his father’s proposed Progenitor Race, was the Moon Mask itself.
Until now.
He gazed reverently at the metal and shook off his reverie, turning the mask over. He struggled to keep his emotions in check, wanting to jump and whoop and laugh and scream in joy whilst resisting the urge to collapse to his knees and sob. All the years of ridicule, all the whispered murmurings behind his back, the rolling eyes, the scoffing cackles, now, he would throw them right back at the ignominious disbelievers.
“It’s a piece of the Moon Mask! Sid, it’s the Moon Mask!” He whooped like a boy on Christmas morning, splashing back down into the water. “Oh my god, this is incredible!”
“Ben!” Sid called.
“I mean, this could well be the greatest discovery since—”
“Ben!” Sid snapped, alongside Nadia’s own warning.
King turned. And froze.
Plodding up the ramp from the murky pool, moving with little haste yet exuding the utmost menace, was a nine foot long crocodilian. Its armour-like scales glistened as beads of water dripped off it, whilst, in the shaking beam of his torch, the beast’s eyes shone hellish red.
He stared back at the enormous monster as it took another waddling stride, then another, the muscles of its legs flexing. “Um,” he mumbled. “It’s a crocodile. I’m stuck down here with a goddamn crocodile!”
“Are you sure it is not a caiman?” Nadia queried. While Orinoco Crocodiles were known to populate the area, their numbers were so depleted by hunting that a black caiman would be more probable.
Sid shot her friend an angry glance then peered back down the hole. “Ben, get out of there!”
King tried not to panic. Despite the crocodile’s plodding manner, he knew it was faster than he could ever hope to be and should he panic and make a dash for the dangling rope it would have its jaws around him in seconds.
Slowly, cautiously, he took a step towards the rope while tucking the mask into his satchel. Then he paused. “What about the remains?”
“We’ll come back for them later,” Sid said urgently.
“Okay,” he gulped and began a gentle, non-aggressive movement through the water towards the rope. Each footstep however brought him closer to the reptile and—
A splash of water and a lunging shadow!
Ben dived backwards, out of the wide-open jaws of a second crocodile. He went underwater, unprepared, and gulped in a mouthful of the foul tasting liquid before scrambling to his feet and back-stepping away from the beast as its shadow vanished beneath the surface.
His heart raced, his body shook with fear — no, not fear. This went beyond fear! This was a feeling he had never experienced before, this was—
“Ben!” Sid called anxiously. “There are more of them in the water!”
“You think!?” he snapped.
Indeed, beyond the shelf, where the water dropped to indeterminable depth, he could make out the disjointed silhouettes of maybe three, even four more of the monsters.
“Damn!” he cursed. “I’m dead! I’m dead! I’m dead!”
An explosion of red and purple light blasted into the chamber, half blinding him. The flare, fired from Nadia’s flare gun, part of the essential survival gear they were required to carry, shot down. It exploded just above the surface of the water, the bright light glaring from its black surface. It stunned the crocodilians, many of them lashing up out of the water and thrashing about.