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In the flickering, uneven light of his kerosene lantern, the cyclopean stone disk seemed to loom far greater than its already impressive six foot span. It sat alone at the back of storage room B, all other antiquities and artifacts moved away to accommodate the massive girth of this extraordinary find. The result was a path that led through the detritus of ages straight to the piece, standing against the back wall, towering over all else in the vicinity and demanding the attention of all who would view it.

Carl Dietrich edged carefully through the priceless artifacts piled here beneath one of the most eminent houses of knowledge like so much refuse, shoved aside and forgotten in the face of this, this rock. An unheard of find, the Doctor had been enthusiastically informed, the foremost find of this age! Incredible only for its sheer incongruity.

The Disk had been unearthed in the South Americas, deep beneath one of the haunting temples left by the mysterious people known as the Mayans. Artifacts of this kind were not uncommon in such environment, so much so that one more stone calendar should not have been of such comment. No, this was noteworthy for the sole fact that it should not, by any stretch of the imagination, have been there. The stone from which the Disk was hewn was of a kind not found anywhere on the continent, let alone available to a largely primitive people. The sigils upon it were an even greater mystery, resembling none from any of the native cultures of the region, or truly, from any civilization from human history - but that is not a fact readily accepted by the Great Minds of science, and so they summoned Dr. Carl Dietrich, one of the foremost researchers of ancient tongues and languages in the modern world.

A single call to Carl's Rhode Island home had been enough to pull him from sleep and onto the first flight here, to look in wonder upon the greatest anthropological discovery in recent years. Or in Dr. Dietrich's case, look in cool appraisal. The good doctor was renowned for his scepticism, his hardheaded refusal to allow "flights of fancy" to distract from scientific precision. As he came into sight of the massive edifice, however, even Carl Dietrich was shaken by the object's sheer, intrusive presence.

Shaking off such infantile notions the doctor began his examination of the mysterious artifact. Excepting its sheer size, easily six feet in diameter and over one deep, the disk itself was unremarkable, hewn from dark stone and weathered to a smooth, slightly pitted finish - though this was likely the weight of ages, rather than the intent of its creators as no tool marks were to be found. The disk itself was not what held Carl Dietrich's attention, seized his gaze and hypnotized his intellect. For wreathing the monolithic edifice's entire surface were intricately carved patterns, hewn so densely and delicately that a human hand could scarce be imagined to have struck them. As he stared, the patterns resolved themselves into sigils and , not quite hieroglyphs, not runes, nor any recognizable language of human creation. In the frenetic duel of light and shadows cast by the lantern, they writhed and twisted in an otherworldly dance that captured the eye and led it in a circuitous path about the monolith's weathered face, ending in the abruptly blank centre. To look upon that blank disk was to look upon the serpent's eye, hypnotic, entrancing, patterns emerging from the blank stone only to vanish, replaced by still more alien forms on and on without end.

When Dietrich finally managed to wrest his gaze from the entrancing face of the impassive stone, he was startled for a moment by the shadows that had crept out from their demesnes at the edges of the room to surround and envelope him; the lantern which had previously held back the murky darkness, was now flickering in its final struggle to remain alight, so depleted was its fuel. Carl stared uncomprehending at the struggling mantle for a moment unable to accept the hours that must have so blindly passed. Looking back at the Disk, Carl started and feel backwards onto his back, for he only now noticed how close the cyclopean stone rested - and realized then that he had been studying the minute whorls and motifs in the heart of the monolith with his nose almost pressed to the stone itself.

The doctor rose to his feet, brushing off the dust and refuse from the floor while making a valiant attempt to ignore the great...thing commanding the room. He reached hurriedly for the lantern, knocking it over in his haste. The shadows which draped themselves about the room writhed in a wild, unsettling dance about the doctor, before rushing in to blind him as at last the failing lantern finally expired. Dietrich cried out, his hands about his head, cowering from the insubstantial embrace of the gloom. Silence reigned for several moments before Carl pulled himself together, mentally haranguing himself for letting the atmosphere affect him in such a puissant manner. Once again struggling to his feet, Dietrich now became aware, robbed as he was off sight, of a soft, almost inaudible susurration playing about his head, but disappearing each attempt he made to focus further upon it. As he turned his head in an attempt to catch once more the ghostly sound, thinking it perhaps an illusory creation of his mind, overcompensating for the loss of light, he noticed an inexplicable phenomena - despite the utter lack of light in the Stygian depths of the museum, he could clearly still make out the forms and patterns inscribed upon the Disk, perhaps even more clearly than he had in the light. Like the strange sighing noise however, the patterns vanished with the moment he focused his senses upon them. Drawing nearing the monolith, his attention upon the black before him, it was some moments before Dietrich realized that he could once more hear the phantasmic sound, more clearly than before, and this time, upon attending the occurrence, it did not dissipate. He could clearly now detect the source of the noise, none other than the stone itself. And now did the doctor at last identify the nature of the sound.

Whispers. All about him now, weaving themselves through the aether and into Carl's consciousness. They spoke a language that Carl felt sure he should understand, recognized as being known to him, but was yet completely unintelligible. He stepped closer to the stone completely engrossed now by the voices now; a puzzle to be solved. The hieroglyphs became clear now in the unlight, their forms once again familiar to the doctor, as if dreamed and since forgotten lying still in some forgotten corner of his mind. For the first time since laying eyes upon the disk, Dr. Dietrich placed his hand on the stone itself tracing the carved lines, his hand moving along them as if long known to him. And in that moment that skin met stone, a scream drove itself into Carl's mind, a sound that bespoke anguish and torment of almost seraphic purity. From beyond the stone, within the stone, came the tortured shriek:

HELP ME

Carl Dietrich knew no more until the next morning, when a security guard on his early rounds discovered the doctor kneeling at the foot of the stone monstrosity, one hand fixed, as if sealed, to the circle of blank stone at the Disk's very centre. Carl spoke of his night with the thing to no one, not wife nor colleague nor friend. He sent a missive to those responsible for his summons, conveying his regrets at his inability to coerce the find to divulge any of its secrets, and that he would be unable, due to other commitments, to continue study of the relic. Wishing them all the best of luck, Carl Dietrich washed his hands of the whole occurrence, working thoroughly to convince himself that the entire night was the product of sleep deprivation and the strain of working alone.