Mr.

Knowing my precision and marksmanship, he said I must be precise beyond any shot I had ever taken. To step back several paces and fire the projectile so that it should sever his jugular artery allowing the blood to flow out rapidly.

I trembled and objected strenuously, but he reminded me of my thrice-pledged allegiance. So I steeled myself, grasped by mesmerism from my friend that astonished me. I aimed and fired the bullet passing through my companion, already dying, and striking the limestone rock behind.

John turned, paused, then as his blood flowed out by the liter, he reached out grasped the heretofore untouchable ostracon and with his last moment of life stretched it out to me. I took it from his pale fingers as he fell to the ground.

In my hands, I possessed the last fragment of our desire and the end of our journey together. Then it dawned upon me what the pericope, which we read from the diary, meant. It was only a dead man who could pry the inscribed clay from the bewitched corpse of de Guerre. Now I possessed it.

I opened Sullivan’s case, placed the last piece with the others and read the inscription aloud, memorializing the triumph of my colleague. At the last syllable, the fog, which had laid about my feet, began to move as in a breeze, coalescing about Sullivan’s cadaver. It turned a grayish blue and then a hue which evaded description, though I saw it clearly as if it were a primary color in the bright sun above.

John revived before my eyes and stood. He spoke but I was unsure if I heard with my clouded ears or deep in my brain. His words were of warning not to touch him, for he existed in a dimension that was beyond my reach- a ghoulish existence that he had desired for decades, he stated. An existence wherein he would live eternally to conduct experiments so alien as to make the arcane endeavours we had yet undertaken as a child’s play. He bid me follow him, which I did. We ascended the stairs together into the confines of the sepulchre. He dictated to me that de Guerre had attempted the same inscription, but fool that he was, he pronounced the inscription in Aramaic when it had clearly been ancient Moabite. Mispronounced it had delayed his decay, as if trapped in a quantum dimension far removed from our own reality. He had not made it to the other side, John had.

He bid me a fond goodbye, exclaiming that in this world or the next, he would never have a friend so true as I had been. Then he swept his hand out as if a blur, ripping the case containing the ostraca fragments from my hand and evaporating into a wisp that in a blink was no longer within my observation.

Now, my dear friend, as I have been true to John Sullivan, I ask your pledge to be faithful to me. I can no longer keep my sanity in check, even to the point of whether what I have told you actually occurred or whether I have killed my friend and no longer remember. I have returned to the small cemetery and found the chains in place. I pried them loose and found the marker within the crypt marked Pierre duPont de Guerre, forced the lock on the casket and found the dried bones of de Guerre.