James Steimle - The Kukulkan Manuscript

“Intimidation, probably,” said Alred. “Scared her to death. When they asked about mail, she probably mentioned the box. They would have seen the mail box hanging by her front door as they entered and assumed the rest. A logical guess. A housewife with a mailbox at home wouldn’t check a separate post office box regularly. And as a professor, Ulman would get mail at the university.”

“Why would he have an extra post box?” said Porter.

Alred looked at him across the top of her car. “Side projects, most likely. People get post office boxes for different reasons. Maybe it was a money-making scheme only the Ulman’s knew about.”

“A scheme?” Porter said, tilting his head at her as he climbed into the passenger seat.

“Doesn’t have to be illegal. Just some project where you’d get mail, but didn’t want people to know your home address. Something like that.” Alred looked up and down the street, then to the fuchsia sky.

In a shallow voice, Alred said as she fell behind the steering wheel, “I want to know what Arnott thinks he’s doing. Creep!”

“D’you just call me a creep?”

“No. The professor here before us.” Alred shook her head. “He’s trying to figure it all out before we can.” She lightly bit the inside of her cheek. “I’m going home.”

Scratching his five o’clock shadow, Porter looked back at the Ulman home.

The curtain in the window fell closed.

“She’s hiding something,” he said, not turning away. “She wouldn’t look us in the eye.”

“Yep,” Alred said, shifting her gaze back to the house. “But why?”

10:59 p.m. PST

Dear Stan,

Don’t die on me!

I know, you’re shocked I’m writing. The worst reputation I bear has to be my irregular letter-writing pattern. Truth is, I’ve written you a number of letters! Most of those even went into envelopes. But by the time I got close to putting a stamp on them, they were at least a month or two outdated.

Yes, when we served as missionaries together in Japan you taught me to purchase a number of spare stamps to have on hand. Well, we all have our weaknesses.

But this letter, you have to get!

I’ll jump to the point. You’ve been a field agent with the FBI for at least eight years now, haven’t you? Ten, maybe? Anyway, I’ve got a question that needs a quick answer: I’m working on something right now that would fascinate you. But I’ve just learned the FBI may get in my way.

I really need this!

I figure there must be a file or something. Most likely it’s all out of your reach. But if you can tell me anything about a Dr. Christopher Ulman and his work, I’d appreciate it. Word has it Ulman has recently disappeared.

Ulman found something in Guatemala that’s going to cause an uproar in the intellectual community. See the irony? He’s a professor with a gold mine-and he’s vanished! Yes, my imagination might play games with me from time to time, but if I know archaeologists-which I do! — they wouldn’t throw away a discovery of this magnitude-the type of thing they hope for all their lives.

I know I haven’t really said anything about what he found, but I have to make sure this letter gets in the mail. I’ll tell you more later.

Kiss your wife and kids for me.

The Church is still true.

Your friend,

John D. Porter

(P.S.-The D stands for Dr. in Training of course)

(P.P. S-Write back quick! You guys at the FBI might want him for something illegal, which may soon tie to what I’m doing. Actually, I doubt you really want him at all-not your department, if I’m right. But what do I know. If the FBI confiscates my project, I’ll fail out of Stratford University in a big embarrassing way. I really have to hurry. Too much to do. Sayonara!)

April 16

5:23 p.m. PST

Porter’s heart beat like a race horse just in sight of the finish line, like a medieval bellows loaded with metal and coal growing hotter and a brighter red, like a baby taking its first breath of the new world.

He drew his fingers from right to left across the rough paper.

With his right hand, he scribbled English words into a spiral notebook of sheets that had been turned too quickly and smashed together.

“No,” he said like an exploding light bulb. His eraser hit the white page with faint blue lines, and he scribbled the correct word.

A constant whisper came from his lips as he translated. He repeated words and parts of words in both his native language and the foreign tongue before writing again. Eight facial tissues soaked with sweat and wadded into twisted balls lay around the ancient codex, his notes, and the other piles of lexicons, histories, and atlases on his desk. He wished he had a handkerchief, a towel, or something. He couldn’t afford to get the document wet with the salty water running nonstop from his face.

With a clamor, Alred entered the sweltering office. She dropped her bag and gasped. “You have the heater on in here?!?”

“The date’s all wrong,” Porter said, his eyes wide and ferocious, concentrating on the words scrawled on the codex. His unprimed voice left his mouth with a growl as if he’d been sleeping for the last twelve hours and not working. He needed rest.

She could hear the vent, pumping hot air into Porter’s tiny office. But she couldn’t find a thermostat on the wall.

“Heating’s controlled from a central system. In all my years at Stratford, I have yet to find the controls,” Porter said without lifting his eyes. “What perfume are you wearing? Polo Sport?”

“There’s gotta be a way to turn this down,” she said, using a chair to boost herself up to the vent. Almost sacrificing her nail and the tip of her thumb, she successfully pulled the little lever on the metal grating, shutting the duct. Looking at it from the ground, however, she realized the aperture would only close halfway.

“We could go to Bruno’s,” said Porter, dropping his pencil. He stabbed both his tired eyeballs with his fingers and smashed them as if they were trapped cockroaches.

“What did you say?”

“Where the temperature sustains human life. Sorry, I-”

“No,” said Alred, “about the dating?”

Porter looked to the right of his chair. From amid the high stacks of indiscernible files, multicolored volumes, and stapled papers, he pulled up the last issue of LOGOS, The Journal of Archaeology. “In Albright’s article.” He flipped it open to a well marked page.

“Did you memorize it?” she said, looking at his yellow and green highlighting, blue, red, and black underlining, and the masses of notes he’d scrawled in the margins.

“Right here in the introduction Dr. Albright says he’s dated the KM-1 codex to 700 BC.”

“BCE,” said Alred. In the modern world of scholarship, there was a big difference between the terms Before Christ and Before the Common Era, though the years were essentially the same.

“Whatever.”

“He said he dated KM-1 based on the writing. He talks about that later in his paper,” Alred said, leaning over Porter and pushing red hair behind her ear. Porter realized he smelled a little too well-aged today and knew Alred recognized this also as she pulled back to a standing position.

“He’s guessing. And these footnotes?” Porter looked up at her. “They look like they’ve been added by someone else, an aid or something. I think Albright hadn’t returned to the states before writing the article.”

“You’re saying Albright raced to get his paper published?” Alred said, taking the seat opposite the desk. She couldn’t even stand by Porter, he stunk so bad. It came with not showering. His exuberance and panic at completing the task would make him a social outcast, she deduced.