The Jar of Nephren-Ka

Aftermath

Quitman, Georgia: 11:42 PM, Sunday, June 10th, 1984

I sat there at the foot of the stairs, staring at the body of Cornelius Randolph, for a long time. My thoughts were jumbled; slow, hazy, like I had just woken from a dream. Also like a dream, the events of the last hour seemed ephemeral, unreal somehow.

The body on the floor was real enough, though.

Eventually, I rose and walked over to Randolph's body. I reached down and placed two fingers on his carotid artery. Nothing. I stood, collected my thoughts, and decided to gather as much information as I could. I didn't know what in the fuck was going on, but I planned to find out.

I stooped and examined the chalk circle. The five-pointed star wasn't quite a pentagram; it was asymmetrical, warped looking, with some points being wider or longer than others. The circle was a simple line surrounding the star, and the writing, nonsense as far as I could tell, surrounded the circle.

There was one blemish in the circle, and I examined it carefully. It was near the left-most edge, almost where Randolph had been standing, and it looked like a shoe had smudged the words and the outer part of the circle.

The events of several minutes ago replayed themselves in my mind. I was sure the circle was whole when I had first seen it. I saw Randolph chanting, hands waving as he intoned. Then I saw him turn to look at me, and as he did so, his left foot scrubbed the side of the circle.

Is that what happened? Did the circle protect him from the Jar?

"Horseshit," I said out loud to the empty room. The whole thing was horseshit. A slug, fired in a stone room, had ricocheted until it found a target. Could have just as easily been me. The break in the circle was coincidence.

'Why did you almost shoot yourself, then?' my inner monologue asked. 'Why did you feel the obsessive need to wash your mouth out with a revolver?'

Hypnotic suggestion, I thought. Had to be it. I'd read about situations where people did strange things for no reason, like the dancing plague of 1518.

Still, this wasn't any less terrifying, or magical. If someone can make you try to execute yourself, does it really matter if it was 'real' magic or some kind of hypnosis?

I thought about the terrible compulsion I felt to bring that weapon up and blow my own head off and broke out into a sweat again. I shook my head to clear it.

There had to be a rational explanation, and some way to fight it. Had to be. Once you start believing in diyí', in magic, it's magic all the way down. Nothing makes sense, it's all just mumbo-jumbo about the powers of the winds, or the thunder, or the animal spirits, or God.

I put the question aside. I would gather all the information I could, and then, like any other case, I would assemble the facts and try to find an explanation. Let the explanation be derived from the facts.

Well, one way or another, I needed this damn jar. I reached down and picked it up.

It was heavier than I expected, maybe 10 pounds, and the size of a small flower vase. Scrutinizing it, I couldn't help but be awed by the workmanship, especially when it came to the lid.

The little pharaoh's head was exquisitely detailed, with minute details so small they were almost invisible carved into the stone. The eyes were the most amazing of all. Unlike the rest of the head, which was made of onyx, the eyes seemed to be individual black pearls set into the head, iridescent in the candlelight.

Cradling the jar in my right arm like a football, I moved around the circle and over towards the table on the right wall. I looked through the jars and vials for a while, struck by how much this reminded me of my grandfather's medicine lodge. Many strange herbs, plants, rocks, and even some dried chunks of flesh sat in neat rows, labels on the bottles in some impenetrable language.

I examined the books on the table. The first one was small, maybe four inches by six inches, and perhaps an inch thick. It was bound in soft brown leather, the paper untrimmed and poking out slightly from underneath the cover, edges worn. I opened it up and flipped through it. French.

I spoke a little French, and understood a lot more, but I sure as shit couldn't read it.

The second book was bound in ancient leather, edges cracked and crumbling. It was larger, about the size of a normal hardbound novel, and was closed with an iron clasp. On the cover were the words The Book of Eibon in calligraphic script.

I unlatched the clasp, then opened the book. The cover made creaking and popping sounds as the old leather stretched.

Inside, the linen pages had a musty smell, and the edges were blackened, as if they had been exposed to a flame. The words on the pages were in the same expansive script as the cover, and seemed to be English, though it was some kind of 'ye olde English'. Skimming the first page, it reminded me of trying to understand Beowulf in school.

Still, I flipped through the book. Many of the pages were water-stained, with many towards the end of the book unreadable. Throughout the rest of the book were pages upon pages of writing and diagrams, the meaning of which was lost on me.

I closed the book and fastened the clasp.

Next, I examined the body on the slab. The victim was a young male, Caucasian, with no obvious identifying features. He was chalk white, probably due to blood loss. His face was twisted into a grimace, whether from pain or terror, I couldn't tell. His eyes stared blankly at the ceiling.

Careful not to disturb the scene, I looked inside the body cavity to determine what happened to him. I'm not an anatomical expert, but it looked to me like all of his organs were present, save the heart, and had just been 'moved around' so that the heart could be removed.

As far as the heart was concerned, it looked in-tact with the exception of the right atrium, which was missing. I stooped a little to get a closer look, then stepped back, horrified. Someone had taken a bite out of his heart, literally. Indentations, from human teeth by the looks of it, were all along the ragged edge of the flesh.

Despite all the death I had seen in my time, this made me a little queasy, and I clamped my lips shut and closed my eyes, willing my stomach to settle. When I felt in control again, I went to the staircase and made my way up.