Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 135, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 823 & 824, March/April 2010

On the Banks of the Khorad Dur by Brian Muir

Brian Muir is nothing if not inventive, a quality that may have developed through his work as a writer for Hollywood movies of various genres. He gives his imagination free reign in this story, which contains a tale within a tale and ranges over centuries and continents. A native Oregonian, Mr. Muir most often contributes stories in his Portland female private eye series to EQMM. The series now boasts a completed novel, one we’re sure will be a stunning first when it’s sold and released.

I write this by the dim light of a moon which hangs over the dune crest, its hue deep crimson, as if enwombed with the blood of those that have perished before me this night. I fear I have little time. But I must pause to record these events, for the story must be told.

My charges, though young, are not inexperienced. Those remaining stand nearby on the banks of this dead river, scanning the horizon, arrows notched bravely to string. Far off on darkened sands, our pursuers travel low to the ground, jaws slavering as they sniff out the scent of our dread, as comfortable on all fours as we are on two, furred knuckles the size of falcon eggs.

It is the palimpsest they want, the one I’ve stolen, but I will lay down my very life to protect it if need be, and given what has transpired this wicked eve, that may indeed be the dark outcome.

“Palimp...? Palimps...? What the hell’s a—”

“Palimpsest,” chirped Mira, reading small letters highlighted by her fingertip on the dictionary page, the weighty tome open on her lap. “ ‘Palimpsest: a parchment, tablet, etc. that has been written upon or inscribed two or three times, the previous text or texts having been imperfectly erased and remaining, therefore, still partly visible.’ Hm.”

“ ‘Hm,’ is right. This isn’t the palim-whatsit, is it?” MacLean shook the three pages in his hand, heavy yellowed parchment rattling.

“No, that’s just a letter.”

Mac set aside the letter and continued searching the old steamer trunk.

“Maybe the palimpsest isn’t in there, Mac.”

“Well, the guy stole it ’cause he thought it was valuable. If his letter survived all these years, what about the...?”

“Palimpsest.”

Mac mumbled, sifting through the contents of the trunk.

“Who knows if the letter is even real, hon.”

“Look at that thing,” implored Mac, “Look how old it is.”

“Well, it does look old, that’s for sure.” Mira carefully flipped the crinkled pages; one had writing blurred by a dark brown stain. “Looks like somebody spilled coffee on it.”

“What?!” Mac swiped the letter, turned the stationery this way and that, examining it under lamplight. “Blood’s that color when it dries.”

Exasperated, Mira rolled her eyes, yet when Mac went back to inspecting the steamer trunk’s contents, she couldn’t help but examine once more that dark blotch on the page; she didn’t want to think it was blood. She kneeled beside Mac at the open trunk as he pulled out an old flannel shirt.

Mira got a whiff, “Eeewww. I don’t think that got washed before it got put in there.”

Mac spread out the shirt arms. “It’s in good shape though. Might fit me.”

“Are you kidding? That’s going straight in the trash, mister. The stench on that shirt has its own zip code.”

Mira grabbed the shirt and tossed it toward the back hall, which led to the porch and garbage can outside.

“I doubt the palimpsest is in there, hon. Look.”

She pointed out a faded sticker on the rear bottom corner of the trunk, not a souvenir from faraway Singapore, Morocco, or even New Jersey, but rather a faded and worn sales sticker from K-Mart.

“That’s probably from the seventies,” she said.

“Some of the stuff in here is older than that, though. The guy who died was in his nineties.”

“You have to stop going to these estate auctions, hon. At least until we can afford to buy the good stuff. Not these sealed trunks with the mystery contents.”

“Hey listen, spending all kinds of money for a painting with a gilded frame will only get me so much in return. This is where the true treasures are found, the kinda stuff people go nuts for on eBay. Like that old toy truck I found last February, remember?”

“You can’t win the lottery every time. These mystery crates are like when we were in school and once a month the cafeteria would cart out its ‘Chef’s Surprise.’ How many times was that a winner?”

Mac paused to recall his junior-high years. “Chef’s Surprise...” A shiver ran through him.

“See what else is in there,” said Mira.

“Oh, suddenly we’re curious.”

“Well, it is kinda fun.”

Mac rummaged through the trunk, hauling out a dusty vase, chipped; a set of fountain pens still in their case, unused.

Mira plopped into the armchair with the old letter:

“It was she in the tower who drew us in, silken raiments hardly concealing nubile curves, flowing hair the color of moonglow framing a mythical face such as one to lure ships to their doom on rocky shores.

“As if her beauty were not enough to slake the hunger of my battle-scarred troops, the meal she kindly set out for us warmed our hearts to her as well as our loins.”

Mira peered up over the parchment. “ ‘Warmed our hearts to her as well as our loins?’ Puh-lease.”

Mac held an old fishing reel, fifty-pound test uncurling all over the floor. “Keep readin’. I’m startin’ to like this letter.”

She frowned playfully and continued:

“It was earlier this very eve, while in the grip of some torpor brought about not by wine and revelry but of some otherworldly sort, when she seduced three of my soldiers, draining them not only of bodily fluids but of their very essence, as if a Satan-hewn succubus, no doubt killing to retain her youth or some other such devilry that is beyond my means to comprehend.

“What she had done to them I was not witness to firsthand. The heavy meal had satiated me to the point where pleasures of the flesh were not foremost on my mind, and indeed I was at the time of these events searching the tower for any riches that could be easily plundered while our hostess was thus occupied in her bedchamber.

“It was on this midnight search that I discovered the palimpsest, a curio that had me oddly bewitched. In a small antechamber, the book lay open and encased under glass atop a black marble pedestal. Candles flickered around it and a dark breeze seemed to ruffle crimson velvet curtains draping the walls. It appeared to be the only item in the room. Indeed, it appeared as if the very room had been constructed around it, so obvious was the thing’s importance to our beguiling hostess.

“I stepped closer. So light they were, the pages of the open tome, like wisps of air, as if paper pressed of rice in some Eastern temple. The words scrawled thereupon were of a language foreign to me, the letters indistinct, some inscribed with heavier ink than others, or perhaps written with a more insistent hand. In fact, there appeared to be generations of words coexisting on these pages. The lower right corner of one page contained a drawing formed of fine lines, difficult to make out in the chamber’s dim light. I held one of the lit candles closer to the glass, the better to observe it.

“What the candle flame revealed to me was of a nature too hideous to make reference to within these pages. Even a man of war like myself, a man who will perhaps one day pay his due to the devil, must have some moral compass, and the needle of my soul’s guide was sent whirling as if in magnetic confusion by the image I beheld on that withered parchment.

“It was then I heard the sound behind me, that of a heavy sandaled foot scraping stone. I twisted to see the thing lunge toward me, a scabbard in its claws and death within its blackened eye. What it was I do not know, I’ve never seen its like before, but a creature of God I am certain it was not.”

Mira put down the letter.

Mac had paused in his search of the trunk, a broken bisque doll in his hand.

“Why’re you stopping?”

“Because it’s ridiculous, that’s why. I mean, come on, succubi and monsters with scabbards...” She expelled a dismissive burst of air, shaking her head.

“Hey, we don’t know how old that thing is. Way back when, in unexplored parts of the world, all kinds of weird stuff was going on.”

“Not this kind of stuff, hon.” She joined him again on the floor next to the trunk. “You find any eBay treasures?”

“Not really.” He pointed out the contents of the trunk, now piled on the floor around him. “I might get something for this doll. Even though it’s busted.”

Mira peeked inside the big, open maw of the empty trunk. “Didn’t find any jewelry? Engagement ring?”

Mac, tremulous: “Engagement ring?”

“I’m just saying.”

Mac’s brow knitted. “Did I forget a birthday or anniversary or something?”

“No. But sometimes we ladies need a ‘just because’ gift.”

“ ‘Just because’?”

Mira nodded, grinning sweetly.

“Can we get back to the business at hand?”

“What business?” Mira reached inside the trunk. “Not even the trunk is worth anything. It’s water-stained and mildewed. Look, this corner is warped.”

Pinching an inside corner of the browned lining, she peeled it away, holding it up like roadkill.

Both heard the soft thunk. Peering over the lip of the trunk, Mac made out the brownish lump in the shadowed corner.

He reached in and pulled it out; about the size of a fish stick, wrapped in brown waxed paper, tied with a short length of knotted twine.

“It must have been hidden inside the lining.”

“Now we’re talking.” Mira beamed with curiosity.

Mac tugged on the twine, the knot petrified with age. “Hand me those scissors.”

Mira did and Mac cut the twine, carefully unwrapping the heavy brown paper to reveal a simple key inside; long and slender with a fleur-de-lis head and a double notch at the other end of the dark metal stem.

“Looks like a skeleton key,” he said.

“There’s writing on the paper,” Mira pointed out.

The inside of the wrapping had faded letters broken by heavy creases in the wax paper. Mac kept turning it into the light so as to make out the faded words:

“I will soon send this across the seas and pray it falls into the hands of one stronger than I, one with the will power to destroy this parchment writ of sorcery and devilment. God be with you, Commander Hintze, on the river Khorad Dur, sixteen September, seventeen eighty-one.”

“Where the hell is the Khorad Dur?” he asked.

Mira hauled the old world atlas from the bookcase, blowing dust off the top of it. “Let’s find out.”

“He was talking about the palimpsest. Shipping it across the seas... somewhere.” Weighing the key in his palm, Mac trailed off in thought.

Mira scanned the index in the rear of the atlas. “Can’t find a Khorad Dur anywhere. Sometimes names change after so long. Or maybe it’s a regional thing, the translation is different. My guess would be the Middle East, or maybe Northern Africa. I’ll check online later.”

“But why would he want it destroyed?”

“Seems he thought it was the work of the devil. Ooooooo...” Intoning the ghostly sound, Mira reshelved the atlas and chuckled.

“I’m not sayin’ I believe any of it. But that doesn’t mean somebody else wouldn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what if I could find this thing? I put it up for sale online, list it as a genuine book of black magic, sort of like that famous one, the Necro...?”

“Necronomicon. The Book of the Dead. I think that was made up, hon.”

“Whatever. I list it along with the key and that letter to prove how old it is. People would pay good money for it.”

“Nutjobs, you mean.”

“Nutjobs with money.”

“Don’t waste too much time looking, hon. We still have bills to pay.”

The next morning, first thing Mac did was get to the hardware store when it opened and traipse into the back corner where virgin keys lined the wall, waiting to be notched. He was told that the old guy who ran the key-maker wasn’t in, probably out getting his java. Frustrated, Mac did the same, going across the street to the 7-Eleven for a coffee and donut, leaning up against his car in the hardware-store parking lot to eat it. Soon, a beat-up Toyota the color of a rotten tangerine pulled next to the rear door of the hardware store. A sixtyish gentleman unfolded himself from the front seat, holding a Starbucks cup. Wisps of sandy hair fluttered atop his sun-marked pate. Mac recognized him from when he’d been in before.

“Excuse me. Are you the guy that makes the keys?”

The man turned, one side of his crooked mouth approximating a grin. “I also play bass in a jazz quartet at the Jade Lounge on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You should come in some night.”

“Maybe I will,” smiled Mac.

He’d left the brown wax paper with the writing on it at home and now had the key wrapped in a paper towel, which he unfolded.

“Looks like a garden-variety skeleton key.” The guy squinted, pinching the key between thumb and forefinger, examining it in the sunlight. “Made of brass, not very unusual. You want a copy made?”

“No, I just wondered if you could tell me anything about it.”

The key-maker turned it over, looking closely at the fleur-de-lis head. He pulled out a Swiss Army knife, unfolding a tiny magnifying glass. “Don’t get to use this very often.”

He peered through the glass at the back of the keyhead, finding no unusual markings. “I don’t think it’s a mortise key, too short for most doors or gates. Probably opens a small box or locker, maybe a desk.”

“How old?”

The key-maker shrugged, “Early nineteen hundreds, maybe earlier.” He handed the key back. “Sorry I couldn’t be more help.”

Mac appeared slightly disappointed. “I know more than I did five minutes ago. Thanks.”

The man took his Starbucks and loped to the back door of the hardware store. “Don’t forget, the Jade Lounge...”

“Every Tuesday and Thursday. Gotcha.”

The man nodded and entered, leaving Mac in the small parking lot with the key in his palm.

Mac drove out through the alley behind the store, bordered on one side by the rear of the storefronts and on the other by thick hedges. As he rolled down the narrow, pockmarked pavement, a dark figure burst from the shrubbery, lunging toward his moving car. Startled, Mac glanced over his shoulder to see a hunched figure, wide as a refrigerator but half as tall, with arms reaching nearly to the gravel, a hooded sweatshirt pulled up over his head.

Mac stopped at the end of the alley to check oncoming street traffic, and when he glanced back in the rearview, the figure was gone.

After carving the sinister being from face to breastbone with my broadsword, I quickly removed the palimpsest from its holy pedestal and placed it within my leather knapsack. Then, from our hostess’s bedchamber I heard the bone-chilling cry of one of my men in the throes of what was a deceptively pleasurable, though unquestionably hideous, demise.

With sword held forward, I raced through torchlit corridors to the dining hall where the rest of my men were gathered. They too had heard the horrifying screams and with weapons drawn were prepared to retrieve their comrades. Though many were still in a drunken state from their evening meal, all itched for battle (and it must here be noted that many a time have we conquered entire villages in the grip of wine and grog, so their abilities were not in question).

It was then a shriek pierced the air and into the dining hall floated our hostess in her true form, hair of writhing eels and tentacles for arms, her mouth an open wound from which emitted the ear-splitting sound. Without delay I ordered my men to retreat, and it was all I could do to shield my mental faculties from the creature’s hypnotic fugue long enough to escape with my troops and not succumb to her dark powers. As we raced from the tower in search of our mounts, she set her apelike minions upon us.

“I’m telling you, the thing looked like an ape in a hoodie,” Mac relived his encounter with the figure in the alley.

“Honey, please.” Mira sucked a mango smoothie, sitting across from him during her lunch break, the two of them in the open-air food court.

“He creeped me out.” Mac plucked fries from a greasy takeout bag and shoved them in his mouth.

Mira extracted from her purse a printed sheet. “I went online this morning, did a little Googling. Looks like you can chalk another one up to yours truly. I was right: the Khorad Dur, as far as I can figure, was in Northern Africa; Libya to be exact. Some nomadic tribes referred to it by that name, but I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean. It was a dead river running through a rocky area called the Black Haruj. Great names, huh?”

“Sure.” He wasn’t too interested.

“If the guy who wrote the letter was planning on shipping the palimpsest ‘across the seas,’ he could only have been referring to the Mediterranean, which means he more than likely was shipping it somewhere in Europe. There’s no reason to think he was trying to get it to the States.”

“It could have come from Europe to New York; maybe whoever he shipped it to brought it with them when they immigrated over.”

Mira considered that. “That’s actually not a bad idea, hon.”

“Any way to find out what shipping line was operating in the Mediterranean back then?”

“Way ahead of you.” She flipped to another printed sheet. “The Ruby Seas ran cargo and passengers from Port Said and Tripoli to parts north.”

“Any way we can get copies of shipping manifests?”

“From over two hundred years ago? Hon, even if we could, the Ruby Seas had a liner that went down in a storm in eighteen ninety-two, killing all three hundred forty-eight people aboard. The man who owned the line was so overcome with guilt that he killed himself. Soon after that, Ruby Seas went bankrupt. There are no records. Not anymore.”

Mac slumped in his chair, a limp French fry drooping between his lips.

Mira stuffed the printouts into her purse. “Why don’t you just go to the family that held the auction? They might be able to tell you something. Maybe they even know what that key opens.”

“Are you kidding? They’ll want a piece of the action!”

“Need I point out that right now you have no action?”

“Once I get my hands on that palimpsest, I will.”

“If it’s even real.”

“It’s real.”

“Whatever you say, hon. Listen, I got to get back to work.” She leaned over to give him a quick kiss that tasted to him of tropical fruit.

He watched her walk away, grinning at the swish of her rear under her skirt. As she disappeared into the lobby of her building, his eyes scanned the crowd in the food court. Amid those hustling up and down the brick steps that led to the street were two figures, unmoving, both facing his direction.

One seemed hunched over, his face hidden by a dirty, hooded sweatshirt. Standing beside him was an Asian man in a navy blue three-piece suit, silver watch winking in the sun.

Mac squinted at the sun glare off the man’s watchband, shielding his eyes with his hands. By the time he shifted his head to look again, the two men were gone.

He scanned the crowd but saw no sign of the two. Quickly he stood up from the table, tossed his remaining fries in a trash can, and hustled toward the parking structure.

His tennis-shoed footsteps echoed softly off cool concrete as he marched to 2F, the letters highlighted in purple paint.

He heard laughter over his left shoulder and whirled to espy a young woman talking on her cell phone, stepping to her car.

Mac found his car and unlocked the door. He took one last look around the dark underground lot, freezing as he caught sight of those two figures again, standing in a shadowed corner across the way.

The wide one seemed a shadow unto himself, dark and evil, face obscured. The other, the Asian, took one step forward, an overhead light forming Karloff shadows on his narrow face. He stared at Mac and, grinning, pointed right at him.

Stunned, Mac dropped behind the wheel, slammed the door, and cranked the ignition. He shifted into drive and stomped the gas, tires screeching as his old car chattered toward the glowing green exit sign.

He didn’t even glance in his mirror.

As we made our escape from the tower with those howling hairy beasts at our backs, it became clear that it was not the woman directing them, but another, a man of Oriental persuasion, skin the color of saffron. Perched atop the battlement, his bald pate appeared to glow in the torchlight, grinning like a skull with a moustache of blackened broom-wisps, giving pointed commands to his ape-soldiers with onyx-clawed hands.

We took to saddle and spurred our mounts across that arid plain, blue as a sea in the moonlight, and none of us looked back as the chattering howls of those creatures tore the air in our wake, pounding the sand with their fists as they gave chase.

Reading in the armchair, Mac tilted the letter toward the window to catch the last of the dying sunlight, squinting to make out the writing. The piercing doorbell caused him to jump an inch off the seat.

He took a breath, set down the letter, and strode to the door.

He casually peered into the peephole. His hand froze on the doorknob as he saw, peering back at him, an Asian man, face distended in the fisheye view. Standing on the porch behind him, a dark wide figure, face hidden under a hooded sweatshirt.

Mac gasped, pulling his face away from the peephole.

As the doorbell rang again, Mac tiptoed through the room to swipe his car keys off the kitchen table. He pocketed the old letter and skeleton key, quickly sifting through a wad of receipts near the phone until he found the one he wanted.

Then out the back door he slipped, dialing his cell phone as he snuck to his car, parked in the driveway that hugged the side of the house.

“Mira?” he whispered when she answered. “It’s me... I can’t talk any louder! Don’t come home yet. Listen, those guys are here... the ones I told you about earlier! I’m serious! Look, just go over to Carol’s or something. I’ll call you later...”

He hung up, quietly opening the car and lowering himself behind the wheel. Leaving the door open, he shifted into neutral and used his foot to give a Fred Flintstone shove and get the car rolling backwards down the slight incline of the driveway.

He pulled the door in without shutting it, letting the car roll, tires crunching pebbles with little sound, past the front porch of his house where the two figures waited at the door, turned away from him.

He watched them anxiously, then checked the rearview for traffic and cranked the ignition as his car hit the street.

With the cough of the engine, the Asian and his hooded companion spun to see him making his escape.

Mac slammed the car’s door shut, shoved it into drive, and sped away as the Asian ran into the street, gesticulating wildly behind him.

Mac laughed victoriously, turning the corner and erasing the man from his rearview mirror.

The sun had set by the time he got to the house, sky the hue of ripe autumn squash. At the bottom of the hill, he switched the car’s dome light on, scanning the receipt again to check the address. The name on it was Hintze — why hadn’t he put that together before? — the same as on the note wrapped around the skeleton key, probably a distant relative of the family that held the auction.

He switched the dome light off, instantly enveloped by the gathering gloom. He got out of the car and peered apprehensively up at the house, a Gothic structure with sloping dormers, multiple chimneys, cornices bordering the several levels, and a shingled crest housing an attic. The only light from inside was a rounded oculus window glowing from an upper story, with sash bars like a cross to warn visitors away. Mac gulped fearfully, thinking of that creepy house in Psycho, wondering what he was doing here.

He knew the answer was in that house, the answer to what the skeleton key opened, maybe even the palimpsest itself. The Asian and his goon had some connection to this place. Maybe they knew what the key opened and were trying to get it back; maybe they hadn’t known the key was hidden in that old footlocker until it had been sold. Mac’s mind reeled with paranoid possibilities; they were after him for some reason and he hoped they wouldn’t figure out that he’d come here to the house. At least not until he’d had time to snoop around.

He crept up the sloping hillside, through scrub and rocky talus. Then across a lawn badly in need of maintenance, grass high and thick enough to conceal Viet Cong snipers.

As the last of the dying sun faded, he reached a corner of the old house, touching the splintered wood of one of the porch support beams. The house loomed large over him, taller than it appeared from the base of the hill, a malevolent shadow.

Mac skirted the wide front porch, looking for a back way in. He discovered most of the shutters locked over the darkened windows. Likewise the storm doors leading to the cellar, which inwardly pleased him; he didn’t relish the idea of sneaking through the cobwebbed basement of this spooky place.

When he came to the rear door and put his hand on the polished knob, it turned freely, surprising him.

With a creak, the door opened and he stuck his head into the darkness, eyes acclimating to view a pantry, its shelves nearly empty but for scattered mason jars of old fruit and stacks of rags and towels.

He stepped inside, softly closing the door behind him. He crossed through the pantry into a large kitchen, the only light a flickering fluorescent bulb over the counter, causing the black-and-white tile floor to strobe bluish before his eyes. Two shipping boxes sat open on the big wooden island, filled with cast-iron skillets and battered pots. An old refrigerator hummed in the corner. He opened it to find nothing but a few cans of Coke and a lone Hostess chocolate cupcake in open cellophane, nourishment for those clearing out the old house.

In the large dining hall, a chandelier hung high. Furnishings covered with sheets, the ghosts of sedentary creatures. The quiet seemed to suck the very air from the place and Mac’s tennis shoes made too much noise even on tiptoes.

He nearly tripped over an ottoman in the dark and it scraped across the wood floor, the echo like a dying rodent. He rubbed his shin, cursing himself for not grabbing his flashlight from the glove box, though knowing himself as he did, the batteries inside it were probably dead.

He lifted the corner of a nearby sheet, carefully, as if expecting a gargoyled hand to slash out from underneath, but discovered only a green velvet sofa. He moved about the room, lifting sheets, until he found a varnished oak desk with many drawers, one of which — on the upper right-hand side — had a dark keyhole.

He dug the skeleton key from his pocket and inserted it into the keyhole, but it wouldn’t turn. Frustrated, he lowered the sheet and kept looking.

In a dark hallway he uncovered a bureau, a bottom drawer of which was locked. Again he tried the key and once again was unsuccessful. He continued his search in the dark and quiet, berating himself for coming up with this stupid plan.

He moved up the curving staircase to the second floor, discovering what had once been the master bedroom. The four-poster bed seemed only bones without its mattress, an ornately carved relic waiting for a family member or perhaps a winning auction bidder to claim it.

On this upper floor the windows allowed light from the gibbous moon to shine through, revealing to Mac a battered steamer trunk in the corner, resting on end, much like the one he’d purchased at auction. Invigorated, he rushed to it, shoving the key home and forcefully cranking it, trying to make it work but having no luck.

He froze as somewhere above him sounded a loud scrape. Hoping it was an errant branch brushing the outside of the house, he shivered as the sound was followed by that of small footsteps tracking across the floor overhead.

He recalled that yellow light behind the rounded window at the top of the house, the attic window. Someone was up there, in the house with him.

He heard a door open somewhere above, then footsteps slowly padding down a stairwell in the darkness.

He raced from the bedroom down the dark hall, glancing back over his shoulder to see a woman trailing after him, moving past moonlit windows into faint light then disappearing into darkness again before reappearing into light. The woman’s hair shot out from her head, undulating like the tentacles of a translucent sea creature, her loose garments floating behind her like a cape.

Too frightened even to scream, Mac found the head of the stairs and blasted down them, hand tracing the cold railing. Halfway down, his heel missed the edge of a step and he went tumbling. Reaching out to stop his fall, his arm bent awkwardly, the wrist snapping like the crack of an ice cube dropped in a glass of tap water, loud in the cavernous house.

Whining in pain, he cradled his broken arm and crab-walked backwards across the floor as the woman seemed to float down the stairs toward him.

Closer and closer to the front door he inched, but it swung open before he could reach it and two men entered, one flipping on a light switch: the well-dressed Asian and the muscled goon in the hoodie.

Mac yelped like a little girl, clumsily changing direction on the floor to crawl away, bumping his elbow against the wall, shooting pain through his broken arm. Wincing, he collapsed in the corner, the two men coming at him from one direction, the witchlike apparition from the other.

“Please... don’t hurt me... I don’t want the palimpsest... take it... please... just don’t hurt me...”

With his good arm, he held out the skeleton key.

“Oh.” The old woman’s face lit up with a beatific smile, an angel’s smile, looking nothing like a witch at all. “Just what I was looking for.” She plucked the key from Mac’s palm with fingers delicate as breadsticks.

The Asian in the clean blue suit regarded the old woman. “You shouldn’t be wandering around without your sweater, Mom. You’ll get pneumonia.”

“Mom?” squeaked Mac.

The big guy behind the Asian lowered the hoodie to reveal an Asian face of his own, a stockier version of the man in the suit.

“We been trying to find you all day,” he said to Mac.

“You’re rather a hard man to track down, Mr. Burling,” said the well-dressed one. “We had your address on the auction receipt, but not your phone number. You never seemed to be home when we stopped by.”

The old woman lowered herself into a sheet-covered chair, a small wooden box in her lap. Carefully, she inserted the skeleton key into the lock and turned it with a satisfying click.

“Is the palimpsest in there?” Mac squeaked.

The beefy one asked, “What’s this palimpsest you’re talking about?”

“The old book... the one in the letter... the one the guy fought those ape-creatures for...”

The well-dressed guy shook his head amusedly. “There is no palimpsest, Mr. Burling. Clearly, you’ve fallen victim to one of my father’s old games.”

“Huh?”

“Our parents were divorced many years ago, but when they were young and in love, my father used to send my mother cards and letters from the road — he was a traveling salesman — and often disguised them as old parchments or documents, sometimes giving her clues, sort of like a scavenger hunt.”

“A scavenger hunt?” Mac winced again as pain shot through his busted arm.

“Sometimes it would take her days, but my mother would follow the clues until, inevitably, they led her to a prize, often a declaration of my father’s love for her, or a bauble or trinket. She would sometimes include me and my brother on those hunts.” He grinned at a pleasant memory.

The big one in the hoodie nodded. “Sometimes he’d leave toys for us to find.”

“You mean the letter was a fake?”

“I’m afraid so, Mr. Burling. At least, in terms of its historical significance; certainly fake. When my father died recently, one item he left to my mother was that wooden box, though she had no key for it. Presuming — correctly — that the key was mistakenly sold off at auction, we managed to contact every one of the buyers in our search for that key... sort of our last scavenger hunt. Finally leading us to you.”

Mac sighed. “Oh.”

All three men turned when the old woman gasped, a sound so tiny, as she opened the wooden box and removed a trinket none of them could see from across the room. She cosseted the little thing in her two withered hands. She closed her eyes. A single tear tracked through the crevices of her face as she clutched the trinket to her breast, a symbol of love strong enough to conquer time and difference, outlasting even death.

As I sit here on the bank of this dead river under the blood-moon, surrounded by my vigilant troops eyeing the dark horizon, I feel so alone without you, my dear. I pray this letter reaches you even if I do not. The mission that has taken me so far away from home for so long seems unimportant now.

Granted, the adventures my men and I have had may be written about and cast down through the generations. That is not for me to say. I have always been one to seek out adventure, never content to hear handed-down tales of the exploits of others.

Though I have faced a bewitching succubus, battled simian warriors under the charge of an Asian general, and gazed upon a tome perhaps writ in the blood of Satan himself, all pales to the pain my heart now feels, yearning for you, my love.

Though this riverbed, that of the once-raging Khorad Dur, is naught but dry dust and pebbles, the blood that pumps through my heart still rages with passion for you. Know that whatever years or miles or discord come between us, it will be this way always.

The glow of the monitor lit his face as Mac scrolled down the screen, typing with one hand. His other arm rested useless on the desk, encased in a chalk-white cast.

Mira flipped on the lamp as she entered the dark room, setting a plate on the desk with a bologna sandwich on it.

She kissed his cheek.

“Hey, check this out,” he said. “I told you that bisque doll would sell. Just about paid for the whole trunk of junk.”

“But it won’t pay for your arm.” She rubbed his shoulders.

“Well, there is that.” Mac tapped a pencil on his cast.

“I hope you’ve learned not to buy any more of those mystery trunks,” she said.

Mac grinned. “I’ll always go after the mystery trunk, honey. Check out the bidding so far on that old fishing reel.”

Mira peered over him at the screen, surprised. “Damn.”

“But I have learned a few things these past couple days. That’s for sure.”

He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a tiny gift-wrapped box topped with a shiny, curling ribbon, handing it to her.

Flabbergasted, she regarded it as if an extinct species of butterfly had lit on her palm. “What’s this for?”

He smiled. “Just because.”