Counterfeit Curse

The package waited for Valerie on her desk Monday night. It was a small box, maybe the size of a loaf of bread, wrapped in plain brown paper. No return address. Heavy, though. Valerie was the only one working in the intake office for the museum at night. Not even assistants. An occasional security guard would appear, but Valerie had become adept at avoiding them.

She appreciated the solitude. But it also meant she had no one to ask about the package. She was expecting some artifacts from Brazil, but Dr. Baker kept meticulous records. His packages always included extensive notes. Plus the tracking numbers he'd emailed over the weekend indicated those packages wouldn't arrive until next week.

She peeled back the paper edges of the package to reveal a stone tablet. Valerie didn't recognize the language or any of the symbols carved into it. They looked like they could be Mayan, but not quite. The stone smelled musty and the dark gray surface felt smooth under her hand, presumably by handling throughout the years.

She didn't have anything else to work on and she liked a good mystery, so she set to work to figure out what language was on the stone. Eight hours raced by and Valerie felt exhausted, but no closer to an answer.

The next night she ventured out of her office to drop off a sample of the stone to their labs. She had filed off the tiniest flakes of stone she could. It would take anywhere from a couple days to a couple weeks to get the results back. She probably should have logged the package into their system, but she didn't want to enter it until she knew what it was.

She couldn't match the etchings to anything on her computer, so she sought out the physical Mayan artifacts in their collection. Some things couldn't be seen in photographs. The halls exuded darkness, but Valerie didn't mind. Perusing the museum at night soothed her. No people. The security guards passed by occasionally, but they were used to Valerie and her eccentricities.

There must have been a new hire, though, because halfway through the night she noticed someone following her. She could only catch glimpses of the figure out of the corner of her eye, even though they didn't have their flashlight on. Whoever it was wandered off after Valerie passed the Egyptian exhibit, presumably to ask the head guard, Scott, about her. The Egyptian exhibit just opened yesterday. Since it was new, Valerie didn't know the layout that well and as such she couldn't find her way in the dark. Valerie pulled out her phone to use as a flashlight and noticed that her phone had almost no charge. Down to five percent. It was fully charged when she'd left her office half an hour ago and she hadn't used it since then. Strange.

The writing still didn't exactly match anything else they had in the museum. The only thing she knew was that the language wasn't Mayan, the symbols too angular, not as rounded as she'd initially thought. The smooth edges of the carvings seemed to be crude attempts to correct mistakes. What kind of mistakes Valerie wasn't sure. When she ran her fingers slowly around the round edges, her nail caught on a bit of stone, crumbling some stone into her fingertips. She swore and saved as many crumbles as she could. As she wiped off the surface, she noticed that in the place it had broken, there seemed to be a space in the stone, a minuscule cavern. Valerie tried to peer in, holding the stone at various angles, but could only see darkness. She sent a request to the head office to use their x-ray machine on an unknown artifact.

On her out of the museum, Valerie ran into Leon. She asked about the new guard and he told her they hadn't hired any new security guards. It was just him and Scott.

Wednesday night, Valerie deciphered a couple of the symbols. If she read them correctly and the language was Egyptian hieroglyph adjacent, the tablet held a request for something from the gods or higher powers. Valerie didn't believe in curses or godly favors. She decided to check out the Egyptian exhibit. She could also admit that part of her wanted to see if the shadowy figure she'd been seeing was still there. It was, only there were two figures now. Valerie had the uncomfortable sensation that she was losing her mind.

On her lunch break, without having any success finding the unknown figures, she went to check on her x-ray request. Unfortunately, it wasn't just her phone that died this time. It was every single computer in her office. She left early.

Thursday night a power outage hit at around one in the morning. All the lights flickered before going out completely. Her phone had died too. Thankfully, she'd been working in this museum for the last decade. She knew her way around, even in complete darkness. She felt her way to the door and found the rest of the museum just as dark. She made her way to the security office, but found neither Scott nor Leon. Hopefully out fixing the lights. She heard footsteps behind her. Valerie saw flashlights, but their footsteps fell differently than either Scott or Leon. Lighter, somehow. The security office sat by the front door, which had automatically locked when the power went out, so Valerie ducked into the Egyptian exhibit, hiding behind a statue of Anubis so tall that almost reached the ceiling. One flashlight beam danced past and Valerie relaxed, sighing in relief before being grabbed from the side. One of the shadows had turned off their flashlight.

Too surprised to struggle, Valerie found herself shoved into an electrical supply closet. If she knew anything about electronics, she might have been able to fix the lights, but she didn't. Something heavy scraped across the floor and in front of the closet door.

Scott rescued her two hours later, the Anubis statue pushed aside and irreparably damaged. The thieves had already taken several gold statues and an emerald box. Each small enough to fit into a jean pocket. Valerie got her x-ray request granted Friday. There was an electronics disruptor hidden in the stone.

With that information Valerie realized the language was a simple cryptograph. A rough, bastardized approximation of Egyptian hieroglyphs. It asked the gods for good luck.