The Shaman's Secret by Natasha Narayan Read Free Book Online

plans. I need to tell you about the tablet.”
    My father’s face was unusually stern. He was desperate to be out of this luxurious little prison, desperate to have me back in safety. But Mr. Baker was equally desperate. Maniacally, he babbled on about conspiracy and treasure, while my father and friends tried to leave.
    I sat back and listened, though my mind was clouded by terror and I could not take my eyes from the snake on my arm. Why had I not seen it before? Had it just appeared? Was this ugly brand a symbol of my damnation?
    That was the most terrifying thing. I could not get the thought out of my mind that Mr. Baker and I bore the brand of the snake for the same reason. We both carried a cursed bug inside us. Was this now slithering out of our insides? Had it appeared on our skin to show our leprous condition to the world?
    It had to be. The snakes on our arms had to be linked to the canker in our souls, the disease eating at our guts. Why else would Cyril and I share the same brand? If that was the case, I was truly damned. The snake was the poison I had been infected with in the mountains of India, now made a horrible fleshy reality. I had strayed where I shouldn’t—been trapped by my curiosity time and again. True, I had become entangled in the Bakers’ foul web, but my own hot-headed pride had played its part in my doom.
    The snake was the sign of all this, branded on my own soft flesh.

    Back at the boarding house I slept for several hours and awoke feeling wearier than before. A glance at my arm told me that the snake had slept too—it hadn’t vanished as I’d hoped. I had a large window with a comfortable ledge on which to perch. Down below, a curious mixture of people paraded the streets of San Francisco. There were the fine ladies, wearing the latest fashions from New York and Paris, some with ridiculously large bustles, as if they had grown two bottoms. Then there were the toughs in red checked shirts, blue trousers tucked into their boots. Miners and cowboys mingled with the best of San Francisco high society. This was a true frontier town, the sort where anything goes.
    As I watched I tried to ignore the tension in my mind, which was building up to a screaming headache.
    Drearily I went over the conversation with Cyril. He had talked more after he’d shown us the brand of the snake on his arm. Everyone, my aunt and Waldo included, had grown quiet at the sight. Cyril had told us he believed that all the objects the Bakers had sought were linked in “lines of power.”
    There were five such objects the Bakers knew about,though they believed more were scattered around the world. The first one they had acquired and kept in their castle, an ancient Celtic amulet. But then I’d turned up on their trail and things had begun to go wrong. They’d been thwarted in their desire to seize the oldest book in the world, the Egyptian writing of Ptah Hotep. They had not managed to bring back a bottle of the elixir of life from the Himalayas. Finally, the bones of Bodhidharma from the caves above the Shaolin temple in China had eluded them.
    The Bakers believed that they had identified one last object. The most holy, ancient and powerful of them all. It was a marble tablet, inscribed with ancient hieroglyphs, eerie stick figures and writing, the meaning of which was lost in the mists of time. Some believed that this tablet was Anasazi, belonging to the “ancient ones,” a lost tribe who had lived in the desert of Arizona many thousands of years ago. The Hopi Indians, who were rumored to have the tablet, believed it had been given to them by their god when the tribe emerged from the womb of the world in the Grand Canyon.
    The Bakers had learned about the existence of this tablet from their network of informers. Cecil Baker had become obsessed. He wanted to know everything about it, so for years he had studied shamanism, the magical priestly rites of the Indians. For