Chapter 1

It was a week ago that John Doe died in my office. It wasn’t unusual for a John Doe to die in my office. When you have a small walk-in clinic in the heart of a big city, John Doe’s often stumble into the clinic. Worse yet, they are waiting on the doorstep in the morning when you arrive. Though they often recover within a few hours or a few days when the alcohol or dope wears off, they also often die. Even when I do help them survive their current problem, they usually go back to whatever vice they enjoy most, and soon enough it claims it’s due.

This particular, John Doe, though, had captured my attention. Unlike the usual folks who ended up on my doorstep, this one didn’t appear to be intoxicated. He was an older gentleman, an oddity for this part of the city. Most people who came into the clinic looked old, aged by the harshness of life on the street, by life as an addict. This John wasn’t like that, he appeared to be truly old. I wasn’t quite sure why I thought this, it was simply my physician’s instinct that told me how old a patient might be, both physically and spiritually.

I first saw this John when an old blue Plymouth, tail fins and all, dropped him off on the doorstep. I didn’t see who dropped him off. Someone started beating on the door, but by the time I opened the door, all I caught was the tail end of the car speeding around the corner. He was lying on the doorstep, draped in an awkward position, and unresponsive. He had a peaceful look on his face and appeared to be resting comfortably.

I checked his pulse, which was slow but regular, and his breathing, which was also slow but not labored. His pupils were equal and reactive to light, and his breath was surprisingly free of alcohol. I called for the orderly to help carry him into an examining room as I rolled up his sleeves to check for tracks on his arms. These were also strangely absent and I was beginning to become intrigued with this new stranger.

The orderly arrived and we carried him into an examining room where I began to undress him as the nurse took his vital signs. For an older gentleman, he was in strangely good shape. His muscle tone was excellent. There were no signs of trauma, either past or present, no surgical scars, and his skin, though aged, was thick and healthy, unlike the skin of a person his age.

The nurse told me his vital signs, which were all slow but stable. I pulled out my stethoscope and ordered the nurse to draw some blood for routine tests while the orderly finished inserting the IV.

As I listened to his heart and lungs, I listened to a man die. Slowly, but steadily, his body simply stopped. One moment his heartbeat was slow but steady, otherwise sounding completely normal, and the next moment it began to slow noticeably. I yelled for the orderly to bring the code cart and quickly probed his abdomen, which was also normal, and then began CPR.

When the code cart came, I quickly gave him an amp of epinephrine to stimulate his heart and then prepared the paddles to shock his heart back into rhythm. I cleared everyone away and gave him the first jolt.

I was surprised when his heart responded exactly as it was supposed to do. I was even more surprised when he opened his eyes. The smile was gone from his face, replaced by what I can best describe as a look of consternation. He then slowly shook his head, almost sadly, then closed his eyes again.

I stepped back to look at the monitor and this time I watched his heart slow and stopped on the monitor. Once again, I started CPR and once again, I got him back. But just as soon as his heart had restarted, it again slowed and stopped. This time no matter what I did I couldn’t get him back.

---- “Dammit!” I muttered aloud, disturbing the other people in the library.

That had now been more than a week ago and I was still bothered by the death of this odd gentleman. The coroner had come and gotten his body a few hours after I had pronounced him dead and an autopsy performed the next day had revealed that the man had died of natural causes, a term that meant that we didn’t know why he died, he just simply had. There was no obvious cause. The tox screen was also clean, not even a trace of marijuana, cocaine, meth, or any of the other favorite substances of the street people.

At least they had confirmed that there hadn’t been anything else I could have done. Somehow though, that had not relieved my conscience. There was something that bothered me about the man, I had not been able to get him out of my mind. I felt like I missed something, something important.

I stared out the window at the pouring rain. The gray, gloomy day rather matched my mood, something that never ceased to amuse me. It always seemed to rain when I was in a foul mood. My research at the library had been unrewarding and I had as many questions as when I had begun. I turned in the pile of books I had been pouring over, checked out a couple I wanted to read at home, and went out into the pouring rain. I stood there on the steps of the library, letting the water run over me, awakening me, making me feel alive again.

When people started staring at me standing there soaking wet, I decided it was time to go. I climbed into my car and pulled a towel out of the overnight night bag I kept there. I dried off as much as I could, shedding my shirt for a dry t-shirt in my bag and my pants for a pair of workout shorts I had in there as well. I cranked the car and decided to give in to the vice that I enjoyed most, driving fast. I had a little game going with some of the local cops who routinely patrolled the expressway. I had bet them that my BMW was faster than their best patrol car. To date, I was still winning, and I decided to give it a try in the rain.

Popping in a loud rock CD and hooking up the radar detector, a trick I used to spot the cops so I could be up to speed when I ran across one, I put the car in gear and headed for the highway.

Soon, I was doing a hundred and fifty down the rain-soaked roads. Luckily the traffic on the roads was light and I quickly engaged one of the local boys in a little chase down the roads. I turned on my emergency light, a fringe benefit of working in an emergency room, and floored it.

Before long, the thoughts of John Doe were gone from my mind, and in just a bit longer the police officer was gone from my rear-view mirror. Not even a challenge today. What a downer.

I pulled into my driveway and set my watch to time a speed run down the five-mile drive to the house. One of the first things I had bought when I got out of med school was land. Every cent I could save during those lean years of the recession of the nineties went toward land. Soon I had a nice-sized estate, around three thousand acres with a nice house on the far end of the property from the road and backing up to a newly expanded National Park wilderness area.

My speed run was one of my slower times down the curving driveway that had been a gift from the county after I had saved the lives of three police officers who had been shot by moonshiners on the road bordering my property. One of them had been the mayor’s son and that had a lot to do with the gift, but I enjoyed it every day, even if I had felt a little guilty accepting it at the time.

My dogs were waiting for me when I pulled into the garage. I had three purebred black German shepherds, very rare dogs that brought in a nice income for themselves in stud fees. They had almost paid for themselves, and their upkeep, and that was saying a lot since I had imported them from Germany.

Giving each an affectionate hug and ensuring that they had plenty of food and water, I sent them off to patrol the grounds while I showered and warmed up. I was glad to see the pups, they always seemed to cheer me up no matter how foul my mood. Since my wife had left me nearly five years ago, they had been my only companions.

I watched as they ran off into the woods, their tails wagging and their only thoughts were to find something to bring back to me to get another hug or another treat. I mused that the love of a dog had to be close to the love of a god. They loved you regardless of how you looked, how you smelt, how you felt, or who you were.

---- It was two days after the John Doe had been left on my doorstep that I noticed the little leather pouch lying under the bushes near where he had been left. I stooped over to pick it up from where it was lying and carried it into the office. I laid it on the desk and proceeded to forget about it as the busy day began. That evening though, as I was packing up to drive home, I saw it on the desk where I had left it.

I took a moment to examine it more closely. There was a strangely ornate symbol embossed on the pouch, and a red and white pattern seemed to have once been painted over the embossed portion of the pouch, though most of the color had been worn away.

A leather cord attached to it appeared to be broken like it had been pulled off, but the pouch was still tightly closed. I felt the pouch between my fingers and it seemed to be filled with dried leaves that crunched in my fingers, like the feel of dried herbs. I grabbed a sheet of white paper, cleared a space on my desk, and swung over a magnifying lamp. I placed the pouch on the paper and opened it.

Inside the pouch was what appeared to be dried herbs, but they were a color I had never seen before in an herb. When the bag was empty, I examined it more closely with the magnifying lens. The pattern, as near as I could tell, was that of a leaf that had been painted red. Beneath the leaf, there were three hieroglyphic-looking symbols stamped into the leather and covered by black dye.

The pouch appeared to be made of one piece of leather, ingeniously constructed to pull together tightly at the top without excess leather bunching there. Though it appeared to be very old, from the wear that was evident on the leather, it was in excellent shape as if it had been cared for on a regular basis.

The contents of the bag were a different matter. There appeared to be a couple of tablespoons of a dried and crushed dark red leaf in the bag. Between my experience working in the clinic and seeing most of the recreational drugs that went through there, and my experience in the kitchen using herbs and spices, I had never encountered anything that looked like this plant.

I couldn’t find out anything else about the leaf here so I decided to ship a bit of it to a toxicologist friend of mine from med school. He was one of the best in the country and I knew I could trust him to keep whatever he found to himself. I was fairly certain, that this pouch belonged to the John Doe and I thought it might have something to do with his very strange death.

Sealing up the package I was sending to be analyzed and then pouring the rest of the contents back into the pouch and pulling it closed, I tossed it into my briefcase and carried it home.

---- When I walked into the house, I was greeted with a delicious aroma, signaling that I had dinner waiting for me. I grabbed a hot shower and sat down to the warm meal prepared by my housekeeper. A few years ago, she had taken it upon herself to prepare my meals because she was afraid that I wasn’t eating well enough, even though I was a doctor.

As I ate her delicious Hungarian goulash, I flipped through some of the books I had checked out from the library on ancient Egypt and hieroglyphics. I had decided that until I heard back from the toxicology lab, and since my search through the library’s collection of books on plant identification had so far been fruitless, I would try and decode the three symbols that were on the leather pouch below the imprinted leaf.

I had always dabbled in languages, learning a bit of German, French, and Italian. But I learned quickly that hieroglyphs were another matter altogether. I understood how an ancient language had baffled experts for years until one little piece of stone had proven to be the key to a whole civilization. This effort was severely trying my patience and my intelligence. I had transferred the symbols onto a piece of tracing paper and I was flipping through a volume that was as close to a translation dictionary as I could find, trying to find a corollary or a rude translation of these symbols.

At midnight, after four hours of peering at strange drawings that made little sense and seeing no symbols that resembled the three for which I had been looking, I decided to call it a night. I packed away the books to return them in the morning and prepared for bed, my thoughts were filled with strange symbols and herbs.

It was around four that morning when the sound of barking awakened me. I instantly knew that something was wrong, the dogs were trained to bark only when they saw me, they were fed, or when there was danger. I immediately grabbed my gun, donned a black t-shirt, and grabbed my night vision goggles.

A few years earlier, some punks had decided to rob my house, partly in retaliation for helping save the cop they had tried to kill. The dogs had saved my life that night, attacking the men and buying me a few precious seconds to get away. Since then, I had taken security a bit more seriously, and the night vision goggles, that had been a gift from a friend in the Army, were an integral part of that security.

I doused the power to all the lights, a signal to the dogs that any intruders were fair game. It also gave me an advantage over any idiot who might try to rob me. I then checked the house alarm system to ensure that the intruder was not already in the house. What I found instead was that the entrance alarm had been blatantly tripped and there was a black Porsche 928 parked in the drive. Surrounding it were the three lads, angrily barking and lunging at the windows of the car, and the seemingly helpless individual inside.

Shedding the extra equipment, but keeping the gun, I turned the lights back on a rushed down to call off the dogs. What I found was my good friend, Jonathan, the toxicologist, sitting in his car looking pissed off and scared all at the same time. When he saw the dogs relax and back off, he looked up and saw me. I motioned him to come into the house, but it was only when I had put the lads back in the garage that he reluctantly got out of the car.

“That’s quite a pack of dogs you have there, quite a way to greet an old friend,” Jonathan said.

“Well Jonathan, if you would quit conducting business in the middle of the night and make your house calls during the day when sane people might be expecting you, you wouldn’t get this kind of reception,” I replied.

We laughed and shook hands, the friendship of many years showing through. I invited him into the house and poured each of us a shot of bourbon, a tradition we began long ago in the first years of medical school. We sat down in the den and briefly caught up on old times, how his family was doing, how my ex-wife was doing, and how much the world had changed since we had been in school.

Through the whole conversation, though, I could tell that he had something on his mind. He was carrying on small talk, but his eyes kept roaming the room and then returning to me, a troubled, and questioning, look on his face.

After the small talk had reached a lull and a certain uncomfortableness arose in the room, I finally decided to simply breach the subject broadside.

“I assume you are here because you found something interesting about the small sample I sent you a few days ago,” I stated rather bluntly.

“Where the hell did you get that damn stuff. Do you have any idea what hell you have put me through trying to analyze that shit and find out what the hell it is?”

I knew he had been uncomfortable, but I had no idea that he had been angry. I was rather taken aback by his outburst and at first, I was worried that my sending him that sample had somehow gotten him into some trouble with the government. I was pretty sure that it wasn’t an illegal substance, I was quite the expert on those from my work in the inner city.

“Look, Jonathan,” I replied, “I’m sorry if somehow that sample got you in trouble, it was just that it might relate to a patient’s case and I needed to know what it was.”

“No, no, you didn’t get me in trouble, it’s just that I’ve had a hell of a time trying to identify that stuff. It is unlike anything I have ever seen before and doesn’t seem to conform to any group of substances I know.”

He paused here and took a deep breath before continuing, “But it does have some interesting qualities that I discovered. I thought I should tell you about them in person. For instance, it contains a double six-member ring that is interlinked, like two links of a chain. It also has some interesting combinations of carbon and rare metals that will need some further investigation. As to what it does, or from where it came from, I have no idea, and that is why I’m here, to see if you could give me any clues.”

I sat there and looked at him, wondering how I had gotten wrapped up in this ever more bizarre tale. I had somehow expected the material in the pouch to contain a strange substance, but in all reality, I had figured it would just be some smelly Egyptian tea that got people high.

“That was why I sent the stuff to you. I suspect that a patient who died on my doorstep had been consuming some of that substance. I thought that maybe it had been related to his death. The coroner, however, seems to think the man died of natural causes and there was no evidence of toxins or foul play.”

Jonathan looked at me, his eyes seemed to peer through me, trying to detect what it was I wasn’t telling him. I could feel that he didn’t believe me, that I was only telling a partial truth, and though Jonathan and I went way back to medical school, there was something about this whole situation that rubbed me the wrong way. Somehow, there was something odd about the whole situation that made me want to trust no one.

“Well, I was wondering,” Jonathan began again, “if perhaps you had some more of that substance. I would like to run some more intensive tests and to be quite honest I have used up all that you sent me because I hadn’t expected it to be so different.

“In fact, it was only tonight that I made my little discovery, and I just had to rush out here and tell you in person. I was fairly certain I couldn’t trust my lab people with something this different, and when you first sent me this stuff, there appeared to be some urgency in getting it back to you.”

“Well, there was some urgency at the time,” I began, tying truth and half-truth together into a new symbiotic creation, “I found the sample I sent you in the pockets of a patient who was dropped off in front of my clinic. At first, I thought he was simply high, but the urine drug screen was negative, and when I searched his pockets that was all I found.

“Anyway, the coroner sent me a nice letter saying that there was no evidence of foul play and all his tests revealed no traces of unknown substances in the man’s bloodstream.”

Jonathan sat there for a minute, his eyes continuing to search for the truth that was hidden in my little scheme. I felt bad misleading him, but until I found out more about this situation, I had decided not to trust anyone.

“Well, I can’t say I’m not disappointed. It’s not often that a toxicologist gets to play with a new drug. I assume there hasn’t been any progress on the man’s identification?”

“If there has been any progress, I haven’t been informed. To be quite honest, I don’t expect we’ll ever find out who he was. There are hundreds of John Does buried in this city every year and I doubt the police are going to put a whole lot of effort into an identity search into a man who the coroner said died of natural causes.”

Jonathan nodded, the sadness reflected in his eyes. “Well, like I said, I had to try. Please let me know if anything more comes of the case.”

We exchanged a few more pleasantries and talked for a while about the past, the good old days of med school and residency. It was close to morning when we parted, and as he was climbing into the car, he stopped for a moment, looked at me, and then shook his head. He climbed into his car and roared off down the driveway, his taillights disappearing into the woods, the roar of his engine slowly blending into the early morning sounds of the forest.

“God damned obnoxious birds! Chirping at this time of morning!” I yelled out, to no one in particular, as I walked back into the house, faithfully flanked by my three beautiful dogs.

---- Saturday, I rounded late on my patients in the hospital climbed into my car, and headed for the Capitol to see if I could find out anything more about the symbols on the pouch. I was hoping to get a few minutes in the university library to run a search through their database on hieroglyphics.

On this trip I had to be more careful, for although I did have an emergency light, the state police didn’t take kindly to abusing a privilege. That didn’t stop me from using the radar detector though! And it was a sunny spring day and I was enjoying the beauty of the North Carolina landscape freshly cleansed by yesterday’s rain.

As I drove down the highway, I tried once again to piece together what I knew about Mr. Doe and his Egyptian wonder bag. At least that was the working title I had for this whole scenario.

First, Mr. Doe was dead. He had died of what the coroner had deemed natural causes. All that meant was that there was no evidence of foul play and no other obvious cause of death. In other words, he appeared to have died of old age.

I thought back to his last moments, to the efforts my staff had made to save his life. What I seemed to remember the most was that he seemed to want to die. After the first time I had revived him when he shook his head at me, I had known that this man wasn’t going to survive. If a man didn’t want to live, then even the best in medical science couldn’t keep them alive, not even on a ventilator.

So secondly, a seemingly healthy older gentleman had for some reason wanted to die and had succeeded.

Thirdly, there was the unknown pouch of material that contained a heretofore unknown substance that may or may not have related to this man’s death. A strange biochemical content and even stranger form, function unknown, in a leather pouch with three unknown symbols on the front of the pouch.

That was, of course, number four, the three unknown symbols and my starting point in my search for some answers.

Before I realized it, having been lost in thought, I had arrived on the outskirts of the State Capitol, and within a few more minutes I was parked outside the largest library in the state.

Being Saturday, the computer terminals were rather empty. There were only a couple of professors, who seemed to have nothing better to do on a beautiful Saturday, and a few students, who seemed to be trying to cram in a project just before the deadline. I consulted the manual and entered my password. I had to re-enter it to verify who I was. It had been that long since I had been on the network. I was soon working on entering the shape of the first symbol and setting up the program to have the computer scan through the computer backs for a similar match.

The first two searches revealed no matches, but the third symbol revealed an exact match. The symbol, only one reference of which was listed, was believed to have been associated with a small town located on the far reaches of the Egyptian empire almost three thousand years before the Common Era. The symbol was found on a plaque located on a column in the middle of town and was believed to represent eternity.

I printed out this information and then went back and reset my search parameters to search for related symbols to the first two. I set wide parameters and figuring that the search would be long and generate a lot of useless information, I set the computer to store the information in my account.

I then took a stroll around the campus, remembering my days on a similar campus, enjoying the beauty of the coeds sunning themselves on the lawn, and sadly enough, I even began remembering the days spent on another similar campus with my ex-wife and all the wonderful times we used to have.

Luckily, I also remembered all the sad times and that quickly cheered me up. The single life had been very good to me and I wasn’t one to complain. Instead, I headed for the nearest bar to have a quick drink, to scope out a possible companion for the night, and then I figured I would head back to the library for a little more work at my little deciphering game.

---- The bar was rather empty that time of day, though it was beginning to pick up with some people beginning to sit out on the patio, having a beer and enjoying the warm weather.

I ordered a beer, grabbed a seat at the end of the bar, and watched a few minutes of a preseason baseball game that was on the television. I was also checking out the crowd that was beginning to slowly accumulate indoors when I noticed the two older gentlemen that entered the bar and took a seat in a corner booth.

I didn’t think much about it at the time, I had simply noticed them as being out of place in the bar, but then I thought that I must seem out of place there as well. Realizing that it was probably foolish of me to try and pick up a woman here, and realizing that I had finally gotten too old for the college scene, I paid my tab and headed for the library.

The walk back was quite serene and I watched the sun set over the large field on the edge of campus where a small crowd had gathered to watch a fraternity softball game, keg ball as we used to call it, where the runner had to drink a beer at every base.

I stopped and watched for a moment and as I turned for the library, I ran right into the most beautiful woman I had seen in ages. She wasn’t tall or even voluptuous, but she appeared perfectly proportioned and she had the most beautiful brown eyes that were framed by a lovely halo of soft brown hair.

She had apparently been watching the game as well, and when I suddenly turned and bumped into her, I had knocked her backwards, scattering her armful of books across the grass, and knocking her glasses onto a rock where, as if on cue, one of the lenses cracked.

Luckily, she was unhurt, slightly dazed, and maybe even embarrassed, but regaining her composure quickly she arranged herself and sat up gracefully, searching the ground for her glasses, which I picked up and handed to her.

“I’m so sorry,” I began, “I didn’t realize that you were behind me. Let me help you up.” I said, offering a hand which she accepted, and though it sounds silly there was some sort of electricity in her touch, and, for a brief moment, our eyes locked. Then as quickly as it happened, it was over and I realized that I was still holding her hand.

Letting go and dropping to one knee, I helped her gather up her books and papers, the whole time thinking that this was something out of a Laurel and Hardy movie. Boy knocks girl over, boy meets girl, and boy and girl fall madly in love and elope to Reno. Instead, I gathered her papers, helped her gather herself up, and apologized again, heading off to the library without even introducing myself or finding out her name.

In the library, I was the only person in the computer lab and I quickly logged onto the computer and downloaded the information the computer had generated onto a couple of disks that I had brought along, figuring that I would peruse the information in depth at home.

After completing that task, I figured I would glance through what information there was and then grab a bite to eat at my favorite restaurant here in town. I hadn’t eaten here in more than a year and I hoped that I would be able to get a table this time of night.

I opened the file on the computer and began scanning the information about the first symbol. It appeared that it was closely related to two other symbols the computer had found and appeared to be derived from a particular base symbol that meant plant.

The other two closely related symbols were of medicinal plants, one of which was a plant native to Egypt and now thought to be extinct and the other, more distantly related symbol, represented the poppy plant, from which that dreaded vice opium was derived. I wondered what the symbol actually stood for and how it related to my John Doe.

It was the second symbol that really confused me and threw me off my rocker. The second symbol was apparently related to either cooking or metal making. There were apparently several symbols that were related, but none very closely, and there was no clear symbol from which it was derived.

My mind immediately flew back to the previous night when Jonathan had said that the substance contained an “unusual mixture of metals in a double ringed carbon structure.” I wondered if perhaps this second symbol was a way to prepare whatever mixture there was to be made from what I assumed was a plant in the first symbol.

How the third symbol fit in I had no idea. Perhaps it represented some cult or sect that produced this mixture. Possibly this mixture was prepared to help people into the next world or something that they believed was needed to survive in the next world.