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What the hell is happening?
30
January 24, 6:15A.M.WIB
Jakarta, Island of Java, Indonesia
“Is there any mention of a cure?” Heng asked.
Gray tuned out the physician as he finished reading the last page in the stack. He concentrated on piecing the tale together. Once done, he slid the page to Xue, who sat beside him at Kadir’s desk. Besides the handwritten account, more drawings were spread across the mahogany, extending the story and the mystery.
Gray waited for Xue to finish.
On the far side of the room, Seichan whispered with Zhuang and Guan-yin. In the opposite corner, Captain Wen had his head bowed with one of his men. At the doorway, Yeung stood guard next to Kadir.
It had taken more than an hour to read through the pages, and tensions continued to mount in the room. Gray didn’t know how long this truce would last, but he hoped it would stretch enough to glean some answers.
Heng crossed to the open safe, staring down with crossed arms at the macabre remains of Matthew. Even Stamford had offered no answers about the transformation of the Aboriginal lad’s body—or at least, his central nervous system. Raffles had described Crawfurd’s horror at the discovery of the still-living tissue inside the mineralized shell of the boy’s skull. Mercifully, it had only survived twenty minutes before finally going slack with death. Afterward, Stamford had interred theremains in the hopes that some future scientist could make sense of the boy’s death.
Xue finally shoved the last page aside.
Gray watched him stare contemplatively off into the distance and waited for the man to return. It was a frightening story and still left many questions unanswered.
Like the condition of Matthew.
Xue sighed and turned to Gray. “What do you make of it?”
The others in the room gathered closer.
“What did you learn?” Seichan pressed them both.
“The story picks up where Stamford and Crawfurd left off. Following the autopsy of the two bodies.” Gray waved to the buried safe. “We all know how one of those post-mortems ended up.”
“What about the other?”
“Stoepker.” Gray sighed. “Crawfurd discovered strange welts over the man’s body. On those regions of the man’s flesh that had been untainted by the biomineralization process. He believed those welts were the source of whatever cured him.”
“Or at least,haltedthe advancement of the disease,” Xue corrected him. “I doubt it could reverse it. To reform bone that had been dissolved.”
“True,” Gray acknowledged. “Crawfurd found more information about those welts in the account that Stoepker wrote. While dying, Stoepker had related the events that followed after he and Matthew had left theTenebraein a steel-hulled tender.”
“What happened?” Heng asked.
“Shortly after boarding the tender and escaping the burningTenebrae, a fierce quake struck. Their boat nearly capsized. The tender got swamped with broken branches of coral that stung and burned. Stoepker also discovered a strange sight in the ash-covered seas.Hundreds of spiny balls of coral, as he described them. They seemed to spin and churn on their own.”
“What were they?” Heng asked.
“We’ll get to that,” Gray said and continued the account. “Over the course of a dozen days, the pair got sicker and sicker. Unfortunately,Matthew went downhill faster—maybe due to his body size or perhaps he took on more of the venom. They also witnessed how those spiny balls, even fractured pieces of them, could set fire to any combustible material. Wood, clothing, oil.”
Xue nodded. “Stoepker wrote of rowing past a small bay that was entirely aflame.”
Gray eyed the others, stressing the significance of this next part of the story. “But it wasn’t justcoralin the water. Stoepker described seeing lights flashing under and around his boat. Though the source would never reveal itself, Matthew insisted they were Rainbow Serpents. He told Stoepker that if they prayed to them, the serpents might intercede.”
“Did they?”
“Matthew tried his best. Over the course of two days and nights, he drew his picture and sang to the waters. He so exhausted himself that he fell into a coma afterward. Still, something heard him, or maybe it was happenstance. But one night, those glowing serpents rose around the tender and probed with long shining tentacles, revealing themselves to be some type of bioluminescent cephalopod—or so Stoepker believed at the time.”
“If they weren’t that,” Heng asked, “what were they?”
