I could sense much evil in his presence, but he overcame my fear by hinting of strange and wondrous things. He pointed me to Giza, to the plateau of the three great Pyramids and the great Sphinx. He told me to seek out a man named Kaji, who knew further secrets and could show me something my eyes would not believe. He gave me a medallion which he said would gain me an audience with Kaji.
Al-Iblis wanted me to return to him, to tell him what I had seen, but I knew even as I left his palace I would never be back there and never wanted to be in his presence again.
He was right in his hints, for at Giza, under the guidance of Kaji, I saw something hidden under the earth, in the bowels of the plateau; something so strange as I can still hardly believe it, and was told a tale even stranger, that every effort of my life from that moment to this as I write, the darkness of death not far from me, has been dedicated to tracking down the Truth. It became my tarigat; my spiritual path leading to the truth.
I barely survived that first step as Kaji tried to leave me to die under the plateau, but that tale will be told elsewhere.
The beginning of this path, I eventually learned, revolved around intelligent creatures who were not men, who were not even of this planet. These came to our Earth from the stars before the dawn of recorded history and fought among themselves for millennia, in the process changing much of mankind’s history, most often for the worse.
I have learned much of these creatures — the Airlia — and their followers who walk among us. Once I overcame my shock at being told of their existence and seeing the proof in the Black Sphinx hidden under the Giza Plateau, I set out to learn as much as I could about them.
Over the years I have traveled far, read, seen, and heard much. What has fascinated me most are the Legends that man has woven to explain things that could not be explained any other way at the time.
Artifacts from these Airlia have become part of the lore of many lands, being given various names. Most have been called no more than literary devices by scholars with no basis in fact. I had always thought such thinking naive. Now I know it to be.
What I have discovered is that the Legends are real, and they date back before the shadows of what those same scholars call the beginning of history.
On these pages I will write of the Grail, the Spear of Destiny, Excalibur, the Ark, and other objects shrouded in myth and legend.
Much of what I write on these pages cannot be proven. Most comes from documents that I have translated with great effort from tongues that have not been spoken for a very long time and from another tongue that scholars insist does not exist despite all evidence to the contrary. Other information comes from tales told to me in shadowy rooms by men and women, and even those who are not completely human, whose veracity may indeed be questioned, but I believe it all because of the pieces of the tale I have seen with my own eyes. And because of the efforts that were made both to aid me and to hinder me in this path, too much effort was made to stop me, for there may be some truth in what I have learned, truth that others want to keep buried.
The story begins before Rome was founded, before the Greeks etched their letters on stone tablets, even before the pyramids themselves were built — before the dawn of recorded time.
Turcotte hit the scroll key, but nothing happened. “That’s it?” He turned to Quinn.
“That’s all of Burton’s prologue,” Quinn said. “Inserted behind those first pages were several written in a different hand.”
Mualama leaned forward. “Do you know of Sir Richard Burton? His life? The controversies surrounding him?”
“Not really,” Turcotte replied. He was anxious to be moving, to be planning a second assault on Giza and rescue Duncan. He didn’t understand Mualama’s fascination with an old manuscript.
“Burton translated the Kama Sutra,” Mualama said. “And the Tale of the Thousand and One Nights. He was more than a writer and translator of other’s written works. He was a famous explorer. A man who dared to travel where others feared. He searched for the source of the Nile hidden in the heart of Africa. It has been widely believed that his wife, Isabel, burned a manuscript when he died.” Mualama pointed at the screen. “It appears she burned the only copy of this manuscript.”
“The next few pages tell what happened on the night Burton died,” Quinn said, “and why she did what she did. It is most intriguing.”
“Put it on the screen,” Turcotte ordered. The writing that appeared was written with black ink, a thin spidery lettering:
My love is dead. His body not yet cold.
I write to warn you. If you read these words and have this manuscript in your possession, you are cursed, as my dearest Richard was.
As Richard had feared for so many years, the evil creature who started him on his path, his tarigat, came for us last night just as Richard finished the manuscript. I was making a copy, as I always did, of Richard’s work. The opus was complete and Richard felt he had done all he could with the life he had been given.
The creature came in the dark. Its face was pale, its twisted body cloaked in black. The eyes — I will always remember the eyes. If my sins — and they are many according to those who say they know those things — send me to Hell, I readily expect to see eyes like that again. But is there a Hell? I wonder because I no longer believe in Heaven.
I wander. My mind is not in this. Richard lies dead just down the hallway. But you must know of the creature who knows not death. Because if you are reading this, then the creature will eventually come for you too.
The creature wanted the manuscript; the information Richard has so painstakingly translated and gathered over the past four decades.
It came after dark. Richard was in bed, his body weakened by the disease ravaging him. I was wiping the sweat off Richard’s brow, when I heard the heavy wood door crash open. I ran to the top of the stairs and saw it in the foyer. It looked up at me and I first beheld those eyes.
They transfixed me. I knew Richard’s guns were in the study, but I could not move. The creature came up the stairs, occasionally staggering to the right, grabbing the railing as if it were drunk.
It wore a long black cloak, the tail almost touching the floor, and underneath, formal wear, as if it had come from a party. But the cloth was dirty and spotted. It came close to me and I could smell the stench of death on its breath. It opened its cloak. A hand came out holding a surgeon’s blade. It pressed the weapon against my throat. I thought it would rupture the skin. Never had I been so aware of the blood that flowed through my veins, feeling that cold steel against my flesh.
“Your husband, whore,” the creature hissed. “I want your husband.”
I wanted to shake my head, but I thought it would finish the work of the blade. “He is not here.”
“You lie, bitch. You are a whore like all the others.”
I was startled when Richard’s voice came from the doorway to our room. “I always knew I would see you once more.”
How Richard managed to get out of bed, I knew not. I felt, and still feel, I had let him down. I should have thrown myself into the blade and ended it there. Perhaps that would have satisfied the blood lust I could feel coming off the creature. We once met a man named Bram Stoker who spoke of creatures of the darkness who drew blood from their victims for sustenance. Richard had been intrigued and talked with Stoker deep into the night until I could no longer stay awake with them. Richard told him of Indian legends of things called vampires and other similar creatures he had heard of in our travels around the world. If such creatures existed, I knew this was one of them. But Richard seemed not afraid of this thing that stood in our house.