Mr.

The Disappearance of John Sullivan

My dear friend, I fear that upon reading this letter, you will believe me to be quite mad. Take that the very fact I have prefaced this letter, thusly, that I still hold a thin sliver of sanity. This will only intensify the horror you will find unfolded in this missive.

You well remember that my last letter spoke of an unnamed adventure that John Sullivan and I were to embark upon. Had I known the incredible and indescribable scenes, which would unfold, I should not have accompanied him, though he has been my colleague for these last 15 years.

John had always had a penchant for mystery, reading his arcane tomes late into the morning and experimenting in tangential and fearsome methods. Lately, this has intensified into a fevered frenzy for us. The catalyst was John obtaining a three millennia old ostracon. Highly sought after and dearly priced, I had been the courier, obtaining it from a disgruntled archaeological graduate student at Cambridge. It fit perfectly our other three fragments obtained from Middle Eastern dealers of such items.

The only reason we were able to expend such enormous sums was by selling the last portion of our once profitable herbalist business. Even so, my friend, we found ourselves with little left to take care of both our daily needs and funding the late adventure I am about to describe.

I was there, as the clock approached midnight, and John fit the broken shards of clay together. Eighteen words in an extinct three thousand year old language appeared before us. I must digress, for I cannot remember if I related to you the story behind these fragments. They had originally been unearthed in 1917 by the relatively unknown Pierre duPont de Guerre. The ostacon was then intact, but once he read the incredible text, he realized the enormous wealth at his disposal, but also the great danger he had been placed. His answer was to divide the inscribed clay into four pieces with the precision of a jeweler. He then offered them quietly to wealthy collectors, each not knowing what the other had. What became clear, only a week ago, is that there was a fifth piece! The eighteen words we had before us, lacked the end piece, the lynchpin of the all-important inscription.

Three years previous, John had obtained the yellowed diary of de Guerre, and now he sped to it, reading it deep into the dawning hours. He shouted in a blood chilling exclamation awakening me from a light sleep. Running to his reading table, he showed me the phrase written near the end of de Guerre’s life in 1949. It cryptically read, "Shall I reveal the secret of the fifth piece, I shall take it to my sepulchre where no man may obtain it!" My heart sank, and I did not understand the cackling chuckle John expressed. Nor did I understand when he stated that we would be off on our last adventure together,

I wondered at the danger we might face when I saw John pack his revolver into his travel case. He braced me by telling me that I should muster all the courage I had, that I should trust his fifteen years of research and friendship, and finally to pledge my allegiance and obedience to every last commandment he uttered, or that all would be lost. I pledged my fidelity thrice over, but I had no sense of the unreality in which I was about to plunge.

Three days of travel found us in the outskirts of a rural church cemetery that was unkempt.