A figure wearing a white mask swoops down a deserted hospital corridor towards a quarantined patient. Covered in black sores and writhing in agony the patient can't be saved by modern medicine. But then, the masked figure is not a modern doctor... Bodies are being discovered all over London, all marked with the same black sores - it seems a contagious disease is spreading across the city. But when witnesses all report seeing the same mysterious masked figure it seems there's something more sinister going on. This is a case for CRYPT: a team of elite teenage agents who use their extra sensory perception and arsenal of high-tech gadgets to investigate crimes that the police can't solve.

Cryptic drawings, maps, strange symbols. This is what twelve-year-old Mike Hilliard discovers as he investigates the long-dead, ruthless millionaire Titus Morley. As these strange symbols and drawings hover in his dreams, Mike rambles through the listless Cleveland Heights summer with Billy Hayworth, a photography intern at the Western Reserve Historical Society, where Mike’s uncle, Robert “Otto” Hilliard is an historian. After his death in an 1872 refinery explosion, Titus Morley’s treasure trove of rare grimoires and ancient masks disappeared. Could the drawings and maps provide clues? Mike and Billy are determined to find out. But after rambling through a nearby cemetery at midnight, Mike’s confidence is shaken, Billy is not the same, and a soul-stirring horror has been awakened. A fortune in missing books and masks. A long-dead millionaire who wanted out of his body and wanted to command the dead. Bodies missing from morgues and graves. What can these things possibly mean to a boy spending the summer with his uncle?

A circle broken and laid at your feet, accident, perhaps? A part suspects the circle broken intentionally to represent a broken trust. No sooner than the word normal escapes lips, a new threat takes its place. An evil fog covers the world, slowly taking shape and grasping for small amounts of power it can find. New bonds mend and new hostilities break with no end in sight. A broken path appears on the edge of our heroes minds but they will not travel down unfamiliar territory. Broken. The word keeps repeating, broken. A broken shield tarnished by lies and tempered in secret remains in the hands of the future crown. A power long believed lost returns to take what it claimed by right thru the warmth of gold. Words stop writing and the pages grow fewer with each turn.

'We're coming. The martyrs are awakening. Spirits are gathering. This will be our time...' In York and London, strange shapes are taking form, emerging from the shadows. And who is the man who lies in a pitch-black room, listening to a voice that seems to speak from the darkness itself? Jud Lester knows that something evil is afoot. He also knows that it can't be investigated by any normal brand of counter-intelligence... This is a case for CRYPT: a team of elite teenage agents who use their extra sensory perception and arsenal of high-tech gadgets to investigate crimes that the police can't solve.

A Rick Sage Mystery: Harley-riding PI, Rick Sage, follows his heart into darkness once again when he meets up with ten-year-old Pedro, a Mexican-American kid lost on the streets of Tijuana. Pedro hires Rick, with the two dollars and thirty-five cents he has left in his pocket, to find the gang of antiquities thieves who murdered his parents. Shadowed by a jaguar spirit Rick begins to believe is real, his promise to help the boy takes them on a trail leading from Tijuana to the Copper Canyon, then on to Mexico's Mayan ruins at Palenque, and down a jungle border river into Guatemala. Along the way, Rick and Pedro join up with a beautiful but mysterious redheaded nun, and a magical, fleet-footed Tarahumara shaman. Haunted by his own tragic childhood, Rick is determined to fulfill his promise to Pedro to find the murderers and recover the Jade Death Mask of the Jaguar Cult, as they are drawn deeper and deeper into a dark plot lit only by the beacons of a jaguar's eyes.

Drawing on secondary works in archaeology, art history, folklore, ethnohistory, ethnography, and literature, the authors maintain that the mask is the central metaphor for the Mesoamerican concept of spiritual reality. Covers the long history of the use of the ritual mask by the peoples who created and developed the mythological tradition of Mesoamerica. Chapters: (1) the metaphor of the mask in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica: the mask as the God, in ritual, and as metaphor; (II) metaphoric reflections of the cosmic order; and (III) the metaphor of the mask after the conquest: syncretism; the Pre-Columbian survivals; the syncretic compromise; and today's masks. Over 100 color and black-&-white photos.

This literary and cultural study explores the practice in nineteenth-century Britain of treasuring objects that had belonged to the dead.