Ron Goulart - The Curse of the Obelisk

THE CURSE OF THE OBELISK 71
on the bones of the skull. His head was like some piece of cryptic scrimshaw. Atop the head sat a
fez-like cap, crimson with a dark silky tassel. The cap had slipped down to almost the brow ridges
of the nearly fleshless skull. The man's neck was as thin as an axe handle and it rose out of the
stained collar of the silk smoking jacket he wore. Under the jacket he had on a suit of faded long
underwear and the topmost buttons showed. Both his hands were outside the tufted covers, folded
over his sunken midsection. The wrists were sticks, the hands themselves looked brittle and
mummified.
"I am Anwar Zaytoon," he gasped in his dusty voice. "I discovered the secret of life eternal."
Jennie coughed into her hand. "I'm too polite to make the obvious rejoinder."
A strange, awful sound began rattling and wheezing around in his narrow chest. "You manage,"
he said, when he was finished laughing, "to be droll even when in danger, Miss Barr. Yes, I am full
aware I look more like death than life."
"This secret you found, what does it have to do with the obelisk?"
Zaytoon didn't reply for a moment. "In Damascus in the year 986 A.D.," he began at last, "I
discovered a supply of a rare drug developed many centuries earlier in my native Egypt. It was
derived from the now extinct tana plant. This supply was sufficient to keep me alive, when
administered in conjunction with certain mystical rituals, until this day."
"You're over nine hundred years old?" Her fingers tapped at the notebook she was clutching.
"How does that feel? What are your reactions to the—"
"This is not the time for an interview, young woman," he cut in. "My supply of the tana drug
has, at long last, run out."
"Haven't you been scouting before this?"
"Always, obviously," Zaytoon answered in his dim faraway voice. "In Tyre in the thirteenth
century I found a small amount that had somehow been preserved, unbeknownst to its owners over
the centuries, in a funerary urn. Another small quantity I was able to add to my store in the
seventeenth century. It had been mistakenly stored with some Christian relics in a country church
in Livonia."
"You killed people to get it?"
"When necessary."
"And the obelisk will tell you how to get more?"
"It contains more. There is nearly a pound concealed in a hollowed compartment inside the
Osiris Obelisk."
"Did you find that out from Professor Fodorsky?"
"Only indirectly, since he chose to sell his knowledge to a rival of mine named Max
Orchardson," said Zaytoon. his thin lips curling. "That man has committed more sins in one
lifetime than I have in centuries."
Jennie asked, "A pound is good for how many more years?"