Cynthia Gallant-Simpson

The Bactrian Malediction Cynthia Gallant-Simpson

Step back in time to the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, to the year 258 B. C. when a benevolent ruler known widely as the Wise Man or Magus attempts to save his people from an enemy army by penning a curse on a goatskin parchment. Centuries pass before a Druid priestess in Ireland in the 9th-century A. D. begins to record the history of her people in the written only secret language of Ogham upon the cleaned parchment. She too suffers and dies, as did others before her as the parchment moved from hand to hand across the ancient world. In the mid-17th-century, in what would become Germany, a noblewoman risks charges of heresy when she takes pen in hand to record her doubts regarding the authenticity of Christianity on the same parchment scrubbed clean with a mixture of oat bran and milk. Her life ends most horrifically, as well. This is the unique nature of a Palimpsest: onion-like layer upon layer of writing made invisible to the naked eye by scrubbing off the former writing to render parchments reusable. However, there is no solvent powerful enough to eradicate the powerful curse this well-traveled parchment carried through the centuries into the present time. When twenty-first-century scientists in a lab in Hastings, England, set to work with innovative technology enabling them to read down through the layers of writing, the ancient curse again reaches out its terrifying tentacles. When one of the team is found to be exempt from the horrific, mysterious suffering and there is no logical reason, things get even stickier. Is a curse more powerful than contemporary technology?