Ashen

The river runs foul with the stench of death. It won’t be long now. For ten years I have fled, found each and every rock to hide beneath, a plethora of gutters soaked in the outcast remains of civilisation. No city, nor village, nor town has provided me with shelter. No home or friend to offer me sanctuary. I am untouchable, a rotten reminder that knowledge can be the bane of all who seek and thirst for it. Ten years of night have passed quickly since, and the dust does not shake easily from my feet, nor does the memory of what I uncovered simply dislodge from my mind. This recording will be my final testament, and this piece of rock by the river Nile my last resting place. Thank God for that, for I cannot continue in this wretched shell. To those who are listening, heed my story, forget the relics of the past, for they are surely cursed by things far fouler than the modern mind can ever comprehend. I must speak quickly, for the sun is low in the sky, and soon my pursuer will be upon me. My name is Dr Samuel Russell, and if you’re listening to this, let my tale be a warning to the curious.

*

When all this started I was an ambitious type. As an archaeologist I dreamt of the day that I would make an earth-shattering discovery, one which would lead to fame, a sentence in the history books, perhaps even a paragraph or a whole volume, a name not to be forgotten at the very least. This was my desire, my passion - to find a fragment of mankind’s past which would rewrite a chapter of our story as a civilisation. By the age of 32, I was convinced that I had found just such a thing.

The public does not realise that many archaeological breakthroughs have been made decades after their initial discovery. So many digs, so many ruins uncovered, so many bones unearthed - too many in fact. More often than not these relics lie packed away in crates and boxes in the bowels of academic institutes and museums, waiting to be categorised and understood by future generations. In some instances this can take years, and in the case of my discovery - the dusty old crate which held the tainted promise of fame and fortune - had been left to fester for over a century in the dark.

I had been searching through the archives at the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, Scotland, after travelling there from New York to study the South Uist mummies. A colleague, Dr M. Grealy, was kind enough to allow me access to the Museum’s basement areas where vaults of crates, documents, and relics from digs over the past two centuries waited to be rediscovered.

It was purely by accident that I stumbled across the tablet. I was looking for an old text on ancient burial practises, to aid my study, when I noticed a strange entry in an archive book. It read: 1883, Predynastic Stone Tablet. Origin Unknown. How could I refuse such a mystery? Surely I could spare a few hours to investigate such a curious description? As I wandered between the crates and other boxed relics looking for the item, my excitement grew at the possibilities held within that description: ‘origin unknown’. How could its origin be uncertain? After all, it was a relatively easy task for an expert to identify such things, the language or hieroglyphs used, where the material was quarried from etc.

After much wandering around the labyrinth of dimly lit containers, cases, and bookshelves, I finally found it. The wooden crate had a number of old weathered travelling stamps on its side which read “Al Fayyum, Cairo, Boston, Vienna, London, Glasgow”. It certainly had done the rounds, no doubt being handed from expert to expert as they scratched their heads trying to identify it. The crate was nailed shut, and as I prepared to pry it open with a crowbar it was at that moment that I first noticed it. A sensation which would grow with time, becoming a constant unwanted companion through these past few years. I can only describe it as the feeling of someone walking over my grave. Dread, and foreboding, a coldness running up my spine, and the blood draining from my face. It was not unusual to feel uneasy in such a quiet isolated basement, but there was something uncanny about the experience - a momentary breathlessnesses, as if suffocated by the earth, with the taste of sand in my mouth.