Facing Worlds - Chapter 1

Chapter 3

I held the door open for the man and as he entered, he gave another quick glance around the street just to make sure nobody was there. As he entered the office his eyes would be looking in every direction, getting his first impressions through the poor state the office was in at the time.

"So this is your permanent residence?" the man said puzzled.

"No, No" I replied, "I sleep in the other room".

The man paused and then snapped out of it.

"Take a seat Mr. Smith." He sat down. "Now if you I am going to help you, you have to be able to tell me everything you know. Are you fine with that?"

He took one more glance out the window and then gave me the reply.

"Yes" Hesitantly.

"Great. Now, we'll start with the man you suspect has stolen the statue, this ex-associate of yours, does this man have something personal against you?"

"Well I don't see why he would want to harm me, but the fact of the matter is the statue is very valuable, and almost anyone would love to put a figure on it. Especially anyone who deals through the black market."

The black market. A title that rang a bell. It was like d�j� vu. I just hoped this man was not another shape shifter.

"I recall you mentioning it has some kind of power. Can you tell me about that?"

The man grew closer to me. I could tell what he was going to say was important.

"When we first found the statue, we were not entirely sure what it was. From first glance, I could almost feel something, like a force, but I was not sure whether I was just excited about the find. Anyway, I had the statue shipped here to San Francisco where we brought it to the university to examine in more detail. We discovered an inscription at the base of the statue which was written in hieroglyphics. Although we had some knowledge of the languages used in that region of Egypt, we failed to find out what exactly it said. But we managed to narrow it down to a few inaccurate words"

"And it said?......" I was hanging on.

He gave a pause, then a worried look. I could see he was growing very uncomfortable.

"It said, 'Call of the...'"

He left his sentence hanging in the air. After 12 seconds, I had enough: "Call of the...?"

"I hate to say that name."

"Maybe you'd prefer to write it instead?"

"NO!" He shouted. "Writing it would be worse than saying it." He took a deep breath. "Ok, it said Call of the... Pagunda "

Pagunda? I thought. That's it? That's the big pay off?

"Whoa, Pagunda." I replied placidly. "Everybody run to the shelters, I guess."

"This is serious, Mr. Murphy."

"Pagunda, that doesn't mean anything to me."

"Of course, I understand it might sound silly and all. So let me give you a little crash course in African folklore."

"By all means." I obliged him, reaching for my notepad, ready to take some notes.

"There is two possible meanings for the hieroglyphics we managed to decipher. Two meanings that are practically totally opposed. But, in essence, Pagunda is less a name than a state of being. It means above man but not god . In other terms, we would say superhuman ."

Superhuman, I thought. Well, looks like all those years reading comic books might finally pay off! Wait till I tell mom!

"But there is more to it. It also has a goal-oriented meaning. It's on that meaning that Jules and I were fighting over. If you take the legend in the context of the 11th century, where the Red Warrior statue originated, the P... Pagunda was believed to make the world into a perfect place, a paradise on Earth, if you will. Where harmony and abundance would flow for thousands of generations."

"That Pagunda sounds like a nice guy to me."

"Well, you see, Mr. Murphy, we found the statuette in Egypt, far from Congo, where the legend originates. And, more importantly, the site where we found it has been dated as 16th century. Next to the Red Warrior was a skeleton, Negroid type, who died around 1550. We managed to identify the remains as being a people of the Ounita tribe."

"Let me guess: The Ounita is a small tribe from Congo, where the Pagunda Legend is from."

"Exactly. Now, thanks the the works of a certain Dr. Levoisier in the 1960s, we know a good deal about this particular African tribe. Among this knowledge is the fluctuation in THAT legend. In the 16th century, The... Pagunda... was considered as a destroyer of the world."

"I see. Hence the two opposed meaning of the hieroglyphics."

"Yes."

"Let me take another guess here. You think it means Destruction and Jules Franklin thinks it means Salvation."

"Not quite, this time. Jules and I weren't fighting over which one of the goals were the right one. We were fighting over how this goal could be significant or not. You see, Jules is persuaded that Good or Evil can't be found in an object. That it's the person who's wielding the power who brings his own Good or his own Evil in it."

"But you don't believe that."

"No, Mr. Murphy, I don't. I'm sure that some powers in this world can corrupt anyone, whoever it is. In fact, I just recently begin to suspect that Jules's interest in the statuette is motivated by more than just a professional curiosity. Something has got to him."

This was going in a weird direction. Still I knew better than antagonizing my client: "And what would it be?"

"Remember the stone I mentioned? Before we found the Red Warrior, we found a curious stone in the Egyptian site we were working in for a few months. It was an almost perfect sphere, about the size of a chicken egg. And it was all black. I'm not talking about a jewel here, I'm talking about an ordinary stone. Except for its appearance."

He continued: "Jules got all over it when it was brought to him. Me, I didn't really care for it. After a while, when digging is your job, funny stones lose all interest. But Jules seemed to fall in love with it and turned it into his official Good Luck Charm."

"Three days later, Jules came to me with a papyrus he just exhumed. The hieroglyphics on it were a description of a military-style outpost close to the southeast frontier of the country. We checked on a map to see if such a place has been discovered: we found nothing. For us, it meant the potential of a great career boosting discovery. I then asked Jules where he found that papyrus. He showed me. Here's the crucial detail, Mr. Murphy: this part of the site wasn't scheduled to be dug before at least 2 months later. Jules always used to respect the schedules."

"I think I understand what you're implying, Mr. Smith: something told and convinced - maybe even forced - your associate to search that part of the site."

"That's what I'm tending to believe."

"The stone?"

Chester Smith looked at me with a fatigued smile: "In my most tired days, when my imagination is at its most active phase, I believe so."

Somehow, at this point, I had enough of this mumbo-jumbo: "Come on, now! Are you telling me that you, a scientific man, you came to believe that such voodoo crap can exist? You're talking about a stone possessing a man, here."

"Let me tell you one thing, Mr. Private Eye. After we found the statuette, we had to come back to the country. Why is irrelevant. When it came to split the loot, as we call it, we almost ended in a fight. We both wanted the Red Warrior. I tell you, he really wanted it. At one point, he asked me what he could let me take in exchange for it. I said: 'I'll take your black stone.' He then looked at me, like as if I asked him to give me his own children. 'That stone?!' he said, 'you don't want it, it's worth nothing!' 'Well, if it's worth nothing, just give it to me and I'll let you take the statue.'"

"That was some bluff you pulled there."

"Of course, but at that point I cared more for my friend than my future museum. I wanted to see how strong the hold the stone had - if it had any - on him. 'You can't ask for it!' He answered. 'It's my good luck charm.' Then he exited the tent. He came back to me the next morning and told me I could have the Red Warrior for my museum. He tried to make it sound like a huge magnanimous gesture of his part. I just think he didn't want to underscore the fact that he preferred the stupid stone over the statuette."

He stopped talking for awhile, looking at me. I really didn't know what to say about that, so I waited.

"Are you really noting all of this?" He asked, pointing at my notepad.

I looked at what I had written on it. I showed it to him: "Is this how you write it?"

There was only one word on the pad, written in big block letters: PAGUNDA.

Smith jumped from his chair and tear the sheet right out of my hands. "What have I told you about writing this word? Aren't you listening?" He was slightly mad.

"Really, what harm can it do? It's just ink on paper."

"Yes, like that diploma on the wall behind you."

He couldn't be more right about that: it's slightly worth more the cost of the paper itself. Still, I got his point.

"I can understand that there is a legend about a powerful being able to destroy, or to save, the world. I can understand it. What I CAN'T understand is how a man like you could believe in such a legend."

"Because I haven't told you yet about the strange occurrences that happened the very same night we dug up the statuette. And the subsequent nights after."