Warren Murphy: Prophet Of Doom

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vat of feta curd sitting on the local city council. And so the elder Kaspurelakos found work as a cobbler.

Young Telemachus settled into his life in the United States of America, content in the knowledge that, humble beginnings aside, his future was as bright as Apollo's shield.

But the future had other ideas.

Telemachus steered a treacherous course through the Wyoming school system, graduating early from high school in the spring of what should have been his junior year. It was of no consequence to him that when he received his diploma on that sunny Sunday afternoon, he was as friendless as he had been his first day of kindergarten. After all, great things lay in store.

Down at the bakery Mama had gone on double shifts, and Papa—now proud owner of a cobbler shop—had redoubled his tireless efforts to finance Telemachus's continuing education. The young man would be the first of their family to receive a college diploma.

With no social life and few extracurricular activities to distract him, Telemachus graduated from the University of Wyoming with his B.A. in two and a half years. He then told his aging parents that he wanted to stay on in school to receive his Master's. A good education, he argued, was the surest way for him to achieve his ultimate goal of national prestige and power.

Once his next educational goal was met, Telemachus Kaspurelakos, who now went by the more American-sounding "Mark Kaspar," had informed his parents that he wanted to stay on in school to get his B.Sc. His father had just celebrated his seventieth

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birthday and looked forward to Mark's graduation so that he might at last retire from the shoe shop. Arthritis had forced his mother to leave her job long before, and the patriarch of the Kaspurelakos family had worked night and day to fund his only son's ever rising college tuition.

With a weary sigh of resignation, the senior Kaspurelakos returned to the sweltering back room of his tiny shoe-repair shop. Family was family. And Mark was the future of the Kaspurelakos family.

The father died a month into Mark's next semester. Young Mark—in truth not quite so young any longer—was devastated. At his father's funeral, he begged his grieving mother to return to the bakery, but his pleas only made the poor woman's mournful wails all the louder.

Without the financial support, Mark couldn't afford to hide out in the halls of academia. This realization terrified him. For the truth was, in spite of all the grandiose talk of his future greatness, Mark Kaspar hadn't a clue what he was going to do with his adult life.

Mark ultimately convinced his mother to surrender the proceeds of the sale of the Kaspurelakos shoe-repair shop so he could continue along his march to glory. At that point the old woman was only too willing to give in—anything to get her son out of the house.

Money in hand, Kaspar returned to the world in which he had squandered his adult life. He got a job as an English professor at a local state college.

Truthfully the only driving ambition Mark Kaspar owned was a compulsion to further the myth that Mark Kaspar possessed any ambition at all. He was,

ultimately and in spite of his own delusions, intellectually lazy and bereft of any marketable skills whatsoever. He never recognized this, however. Everything wrong in his life could always be blamed on some external factors. It was the worst kind of self-deceit, but Mark Kaspar had practiced it skillfully all his life.

And so it was for fifteen years that the young man with the glorious dream of some ill-defined future languished in a mundane job. As the days stretched into years, his early assuredness of his own destiny devolved into a visceral hatred of all that had cheated him of the life he deserved.

Until the day a quirk of fate pushed him onto the path of greatness that he had wandered from.

To impress the faculty dean, Kaspar had signed on to teach a summer course in archaeology. It was a fledgling department, and Kaspar hadn't quite studied the course requirements when he agreed to add it to his schedule. But it meant tenure. And tenure meant job security.

A month later he was in Greece.

His class had been signed up as part of an international student team set loose at the site of a new dig in the ruins of ancient Delphi.

The students—some natives of Greece, others from the U.S., Great Britain, France, Belgium, as well as a handful from as far away as South Africa and New Zealand—attacked the pile of rubble with spoons and brushes. Representatives of Greece's archaeological-affairs office dug in right beside the students, and the careful, studied excavation was soon a bustle of activity.

Mark Kaspar surveyed the work area from a dis-

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tance, slumped sullenly in a folding beach chair beneath a heavy, sweat-stained pith helmet.

The work went on for the better part of a month. Kaspar grew increasingly sullen as the permanent stains beneath the arms of his jungle jacket grew stiffer and encrusted with salt.

"My life is not supposed to be like this," he growled.

As his time in his ancestral homeland wore on, he spiraled deeper into his self-made pit of misery.

But just before the dig was to end, something happened that would change the course of Mark Kaspar's life forever.

A new chamber was discovered at the ruins of the temple to Apollo on Mount Parnassus. At first this was less interesting to Kaspar than his next decent American meal, but the team leaders acted as if they had stepped miraculously into another time.

The students beamed, while older members of the dig handed out bottles of warm wine. The discovery was talked up as of greater importance than it actually was, for although that sort of find occurred with some frequency, whenever a new chamber was discovered it was treated as if it could contain treasures as important as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Besides, the children were leaving in a week, and their Greek hosts wanted to make them feel as if they had participated in something more important than sifting teaspoons of sand through wire-mesh screens.

It was too late in the day to continue working. Once the last wine bottle was drained, everyone agreed to meet shortly at the tavern in town to continue the celebration. They would return to the site at dawn.

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They hugged and shook hands and, with the camaraderie of shared hardship, the entire group marched proudly down the hill, arms draped over one another's shoulders, and singing. Their raucous cadences boomed across the ancient rock-strewed hills, making polyglot echoes.

Once they were gone, the site of Apollo's former temple was as lifeless as it had been the day after the last worshipful Greek supplicant had come to pay his respects to the sun god over two millennia before.

Almost as lifeless.

As the jubilant crowd passed down the road and out of sight, a lone pith helmet bobbed into view behind a pile of overturned stone.

Once he was certain everyone was gone, Mark Kaspar slipped down to the excavation pit. It was marked with poles tied at the end with bits of flapping white cloth.

Mark didn't see what the big deal was. It was nothing but a hole in the side of a mound of scrub-covered dirt that might have been dug by a giant prairie dog. Beyond that there wasn't much to see.

Kaspar noticed that someone had left a flashlight near a pile of empty wine bottles beside the mouth of the cavern.

He never knew what compelled him to get down on his hands and knees and crawl through the dirt and stone chips into the midnight black opening. But a minute later he found himself crouching inside a chamber that had not encompassed a human inhabitant since before the time of Christ.

Mark still didn't see what was so fascinating. He

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played the dusty flashlight beam around the cramped room.