Darren Craske - The Eleventh Plague

'You?'

'But only because I had to!' insisted Aloysius, and his expression quickly adjusted to one of grave concern. 'Your thoughts had to be clear of noise. You had to believe in the task laid at your feet. If you were to think it a stray thought from your past, you would never have paid it any heed! I could not take that chance, and so even though intervention is not permitted, it is within my power…and it was necessary if light was to be shed on the crimes that occurred in Umkaza. But as powerful as I am in this form, I could not hold the memories back for ever…not once you got closer to your goal. Shards of your past have been slipping through my fingers these past few days…giving you glimpses of your time in Egypt. The chains that bound your memory were weakening, and I was forced to exert all my energies to ensure that your past was fed to you carefully…lest you go insane.'

'You mean…my apres-monitions?' Destine gasped.

'Yes,' Aloysius confirmed, his eyes twinkling like onyx.

Destine's legs buckled and she slumped onto the cold sand. The mist rose up to her shoulders only to turn tail and evaporate around her. She almost wished that she would become lost within it, transported back to reality.

'All of this…it is so much to take in,' she mumbled. 'You are a ghost. After all I have seen and done…this is so unbelievable.'

'If it helps, try not to think of me as a ghost,' said Aloysius. 'Think of me as a sort of intermediary between you and your subconscious. A translator, if you will…surely you can identify with that!' He beamed a translucent smile. 'You asked me a few minutes ago how you were able to speak to me. This is why. Now your mind is clear for the first time in your life. No little side distractions from the future to get in the way. You have learned much of what occurred in Umkaza on the night that my fate was sealed…but you do not know it all, you do not know enough.'

'Enough to do what?' asked Destine.

'Absolutely the right question, my girl,' Aloysius grinned. 'I speak for all the men that perished in Umkaza, Destine. All their tormented souls, locked within that moment. There is more to be told before the scales can be balanced…and they will be free.'

Destine rubbed her arms furiously as another trail of warm breath floated from her mouth. 'So tell me…what is so important that you would tear down the barriers between life and death to communicate with me? Godfrey Joyce is our enemy, yet he works for the British government! I can do nothing to expose him!'

'This is more important than him,' said Aloysius. 'Just as I was, Godfrey Joyce is just a plaything of a much grander puppeteer.'

'Enough riddles, monsieur!' snapped Destine.

'I have spent twenty years as a ghost, and you're the impatient one?' laughed Aloysius. 'All right. I will tell you…' In actuality, the ghost did not need to breathe, yet there was still so much of it that was still a man, and Aloysius Bedford took a long, thoughtful breath before he continued. 'Back in 1833, I was hired by a Chinaman named Cho-zen Li to find one of Egypt's greatest treasures – the Pharaoh's Cradle. A treasure lost for centuries beneath the sand, with rumour and guesswork the only guide to its location. Cho-zen promised that he knew the whereabouts of the Cradle, and I leapt at the chance to uncover it.'

'Cho-zen Li…I read of his name in your journal,' said Destine.

'Yes…devil that he is,' snarled Aloysius. 'You see, Cho-zen was after a bigger prize than the Pharaoh's Cradle alone. He'd heard tell of a curse upon it: any man to disturb the treasure would die. Now, I'm no fool, Destine. I've heard a thousand curses over the years, and not a one of them has ever been grounded in any truth…except for this one.'

'The Pharaoh's Cradle was cursed?' gasped Destine. 'It was responsible for the massacre in Umkaza?'

'In a way…' replied Aloysius. 'Yet the curse was not born of sorcery or witchcraft – the Cradle was infected with a deadly bacterium that had festered within its tomb. The expedition was all a sham so that Cho-zen Li could get his hands on that bacterium…and use it.'

'Use it? Use it how?' asked Destine.

'Let me rephrase that…use me.'

'To do what?' enquired Destine, hooked on every word. 'Why would your benefactor hire you to find the Pharaoh's Cradle if he suspected it might be infected with this bacterium?'

'He wasn't after the treasure – he was after the bacterium! He'd been searching for it for years…and my dig site provided him with all the proof that he required. We didn't piece it together at first…but when several of my men fell sick after examining some of the wrappings inside the mouth of the tomb, I knew something was up. It took us close to a month to clear the tomb's entrance to excavate the Cradle, but in that time, the sick men grew worse. Their eyes became drawn, their noses bled profusely, they became little more than walking dead.' Aloysius's shimmering light seemed to fade, only to return twice as brightly. 'The bacterium fed off them like a parasite, and I watched them wither away before my eyes. All three of them died exactly a month after infection, on the same day, the same hour, practically the same minute. Like clockwork. I'd never seen anything so ghastly, and our best medical man had no idea what we were dealing with.'

'How ever did you discover the cause?' asked Destine.

Aloysius smiled, just a hint. 'You warned me. You came barging into my tent one night, telling tales of a vision that you had experienced. You told me that Godfrey Joyce was betraying me and was allied with Nastasi. They sought to take the Cradle from me by force – now that Cho-zen Li's little field test had been successful. You told me things that horrified me, Destine…things that would occur if the Pharaoh's Cradle ever saw daylight again. Your visions were remarkably accurate, telling that the bacterium was transferred by skin contact…passed on by the merest handshake.' Bedford's spectral eyes looked down at the sand, losing their focus, yet his mind was as sharp as a pin. 'Had your clairvoyant gifts not warned me, I would have done Cho-zen Li's bidding…becoming infected with the plague myself.

'Imagine, Destine: I would have been welcomed back to England and hailed a hero. The scientific community would have flocked to my side, desperate to be seen with the archaeologist that found the lost Pharaoh's Cradle. I would have infected them all…every one of them. The Empire's greatest minds – dead because of me! That is why I had to act…and I died for it.' All light disappeared from Aloysius's face, making him look ghostlier.

'What happened?' asked Destine, remembering that she was talking to a dead man.

'After your warning, I did the only thing that I could. I uncovered the Pharaoh's Cradle, exposing myself to the plague in the bargain, and then hid it as best I could so that Joyce and Nastasi would never find it,' explained Aloysius. 'Then I wrote down what I could as a warning to others…sealing my thoughts, inscribing them for the future…and I gave it to you for safekeeping.'

'Your journal!' gasped Destine.

'That diary is the key, Destine,' confirmed Aloysius. 'But I misjudged how traumatised you'd be following the massacre in Umkaza. Your grip on reality was slipping away by the second, weakened by all that you had suffered. I prayed that you would be strong enough to leave word of what happened…just as I had left word to you.'

'My letters!' Destine cried. 'I remember! I was weak…in pain…and I feared that Nastasi's men were pursuing me. And so I took the journal to a place far from Umkaza, to a wondrous place that you had once shown me…Sekhet Simbel. I had hoped to return and collect it once my mind was healed.' She snapped her fingers, grasping the splinters of memory. 'Not knowing where to turn, I relied on my clairvoyance to be my compass. It led me to Agra, to the only friend that I could trust…Ahman. I sensed a strong link to that place – to him – and before my mind was cleansed of the memory, I sat down to write those letters…knowing they were safe in Ahman's care.'