Free The Amulet by William Meikle Page A

"http://www.moonlichtnicht.co.uk/harris.html."
    "What's this-the Harry Lauder appreciation society?"
    That one went over his head.
    "No, it's a 'magazine of the weird'. One of the sites where conspiracy theorists and UFOlogists gather."
    "UFO...what? I said.
    "Just read it, will you," Doug said. "I've got to be at work in half an hour."
    * * *

It all began on September 20th, 1987. John Harris was a musical prodigy and a Doctor of Physics, a youth with perfect pitch and an interest in the acoustic properties of archaeological sites. He had already, at the age of twenty-four, published several papers that had stood archaeology on its head.
    He had made it clear that ancient man had been much more 'acoustically sophisticated' than had been supposed, building their tombs, halls and homes as perfect places in which to sing and play music. His book The Acoustics of the Ancients was already much sought after by those in the know, and he was working on a blockbuster tentatively entitled Did Cheops play Jazz? with which he intended to prove that the Great Pyramid at Giza was actually a giant acoustic amplifier.
    On that day in September, John was studying tablets in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow University. These tablets had been brought from Ur by the infamous Johnson expedition, and he'd had to get special permission from the University authorities just to look at them. He was working on a new theory-that some of the untranslated tablets actually held an undiscovered form of musical notation.
    John hoped that, by gaining knowledge of how the Sumerian's music was structured, he would be able to finally translate, and play, music that had not been heard for more than three millennia.
    He had spent the bulk of the summer in a small triangular room in the attic, annoying the numismatist next door with his constant attempts at articulating the 'music' he was reading.
    Today he thought he might finally have it cracked. Abut eleven o'clock in the morning he had finished transcribing the tablets into what he could recognize as music. He started singing.
    And hell came to Glasgow University. Witnesses in the corridor said that the walls seemed to shimmer and shake. Some reported an intense, numbing cold, others a stifling heat. But all remembered the deep, atonal chanting that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.
    The numismatist reports that the wall between the rooms became transparent at one point, and that John Harris himself seemed to be fading in and out of reality.
    Out in the museum itself, a party of schoolchildren fled in fright as a stuffed woolly mammoth began to wave its trunk and show suspicious sign of life. Farther back, in the storerooms beyond, a paleontologist was studying a fossil fish when he found he was looking into a deep pool of sea water, with his fossil fish, now suddenly re-animated, swimming happily in it.
    Finally, there was a piercing scream. The numismatist had to break open the door, and found Harris on the floor. He was breathing and his eyes were open, but his face was contorted in terror, and his arms were raised as if to ward off an unseen attacker.
    The woolly mammoth was found half in and half out of the roped area in which it was displayed. In the storeroom, the paleontologist found that his fossil fish was now embedded in the stone floor beneath his feet.
    * * *

I raised my head.
    "You were here in '87, weren't you?" I asked Doug.
    He nodded.
    "Do you remember hearing anything about any unbelievable nonsense in the Hunterian Museum?"
    He shook his head.
    "I'll tell you later. Just keep reading," he said. "It gets better."
    * * *

It was while Harris was recuperating in hospital that things took a strange turn. Firstly he was visited by two men dressed all in black. They spoke at him rather than with him, and told him that he was messing with forces he couldn't understand. They told him that if he didn't desist, they would be forced to take action. Strangely, after they were gone, nobody in