Ghost of a Chance

As Alex stepped inside, Iggy closed the door and reset the deadbolt. From this side, Alex felt the protection construct activate. If the construct in his watch had been a chord, this sound washed over him like the crescendo of something written by John Phillip Sousa. It wasn’t a physical sound, of course, but that didn’t stop the hair on his arm from rising nonetheless.

“You had me worried there,” Alex said, finally having the presence of mind to close his pocketwatch and return it to his waistcoat.

Iggy cast him an appraising look.

“Still on with that nonsense about losing your magic,” he said. It was not a question; the old man knew Alex well enough to make that deduction. “I told you it doesn’t work that way.”

Alex wanted to believe him, more than he was willing to admit, but Iggy had trained him as a detective. He knew that all the doctor had to go on was his own intuition. He’d never actually met someone who’d traded the majority of his life energy for power. Not until Alex did it, anyway. There was no way the old man could really be sure.

Still, Alex reminded himself, he could sense the runes activating in the door and in his pocketwatch, and he wouldn’t be able to do that if he’d lost his magic.

It wasn’t an airtight theory, but Alex decided not to poke any holes in it.

“I suppose you’re right,” he said to Iggy. “So,” he went on, changing the subject, “why are you reading the Monograph?”

Iggy’s face grew troubled.

“Follow me,” he said, turning and heading for the kitchen.

Alex hung up his hat on the row of pegs along the foyer wall, then headed after his mentor. In the kitchen, Iggy had a half-dozen books laid open on the massive oak table. Each book seemed to have several pieces of torn paper sticking out of it, marking various pages. A notepad filled with Iggy’s spidery script lay on the table, held open by an ashtray. In the center of this storm of reference material, lay two books; one squarish, thickish, and bound in black cloth… and the other tall, thin, and covered in red leather.

Alex could feel the presence of the Archimedean Monograph the moment he entered the room. It was a collection of the most powerful runes known to man, handed down from the most famous and clever runewrights in history. Iggy had found it around the turn of the century and had kept it carefully hidden ever since. Even that precaution wasn’t enough though; he’d been forced to leave his home and his family, fake his own death, change his name, and flee to America because of it. Alex knew first-hand that the legend of the Monograph drove many dangerous, desperate, and unscrupulous people to seek it. People willing to do anything to obtain it.

Alex had learned of its existence a year ago when he managed to unravel the secret of its deadly finding rune. He’d been stunned that the book had been hiding on Iggy’s bookshelf the whole time. Iggy had been prodigiously proud of Alex for finding it, promising to reveal the book’s secrets to Alex in time. Then he had promptly forbidden him from opening it without his permission.

So far, Alex had kept that promise.

The smaller black book was the one Alex had taken off the dead-and-burned kidnapper. Several of the pages had been torn out and laid around the open books, their face-like symbols staring out from the papers.

“I take it you didn’t have any luck at the museum,” Alex said, picking up a rune that looked like a man with an enormous nose looking to the left.

“Not entirely,” Iggy said, picking up the rune book and turning to the last page. “No one knew what these were at first, but then I showed their senior Egyptologist this drawing.”

Iggy turned the book so Alex could see. On the last page, a runic construct had been carefully drawn. Or, at least Alex assumed it was a construct; the form seemed familiar at least. It was round and made up of concentric rings. Each ring had symbols like the strange runes on it. In the center was a large circle with a grotesque caricature of a man’s face, with his tongue sticking out. Almost all the runes in the rings looked like they were depicting creatures of some kind. Alex recognized birds, animals, and a few men, along with others that he assumed were mythological.

“So what is it?” Alex asked, not able to make heads or tails of the construct.

Iggy grinned at that, causing his mustache to rise up.

“The Egyptologist sent me to a Dr. Hargrave, he’s an expert on ancient languages,” Iggy said. “As it turns out, this is a calendar used by the ancient Mayans.”

Alex knew the Mayans used to live in South America and they made pyramids like the Egyptians, but that was the extent of his information.

“So the runes are Mayan?”

“The linguist couldn’t be sure,” Iggy said. “He’d never seen symbols like the ones in this book, but the calendar is exactly like one at the museum.”

“So what does all this mean?” Alex asked, tracing the rings of the calendar with his finger.

“Dr. Hargrave wasn’t sure,” Iggy said with a sigh. “Mayan is a dead language.”