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of a castle; packing material cascading onto the floor, revealing the crate's contents. It happened so quickly, the sight of it startled me.
     A dark angel stared out from the inside of the crate, perched in such a manner that it seemed as if it was prepared to leap and fly away. Dark, not just because it was formed from a stone as black as a cloud of smoke, but because its wings were those of a bat. Its ears rose high and pointy, surrounding a head that was gaunt and malformed, looking more like a skull than a face.
     When I caught my breath, I noticed that the thing was crouching upon some sort of pedestal. Cautiously, almost as if not to frighten it, I approached the statue to marvel at its sinister detail. I found myself mesmerized, frozen and staring into the abyss where its eyes should have been. Then I realized the eyes were indeed there, glistening so darkly that I could see myself in them.
     Stepping back to view my gift in its entirety, I began to appreciate the reason Bob had sent this for my birthday. The creature sat perched on a tall, square block that held a chiseled inscription. A few of the characters were instantly recognizable, but spread among far too many that were not. An ancient puzzle to solve... I loved it.
     Part of me wanted to laugh at how great a gift it was, and how Bob knew the four guardian angels had no value to me in comparison to this magnificent, stone beast. The other part of me held back my joy, feeling as if it would be almost disrespectful to my morbid guest. I only wish some part of me could have remembered, no matter how well-intentioned Bob was in his efforts to make me enjoy life, how I always found myself getting into trouble as a result.
     When Bob said "See you soon," that usually meant about two months. It had taken the crate almost three weeks to arrive, so I had about five weeks to solve my birthday gift before he returned, near the end of October.
     I'm not sure if I slept at all during that first week, re-reading the books in my library to refresh my knowledge of lost civilizations and the occult, and consuming volumes of new research in an effort to translate the inscription. The language was similar to ancient Hebrew dialects I had come across, with elements of dead Eastern characters, often grouped together as that of the Magi. Still other characters I cross-referenced with that of the Etruscan texts recently found in northern Italy.
     The fragments of words I deciphered made little sense.
G-O-L was the beginning of the large inscription, but the stone base was quite weathered, making it nearly impossible to discern some of the markings. Below that were etched words such as blood, servant and master. After close to a month, I had hit a wall of frustration as imposing as the monolith itself.
     Long, sleepless nights of constant work didn't make the task any easier. At times, the draftiness of my studio made me feel the creature was sighing in impatience. Its eyes, those unblinking obsidian orbits, followed me around the room as if the thing were waiting for me to unlock its secret. Falling asleep from sheer exhaustion, I would awaken to the sound of grinding stone pushing its mass across the cold, damp slab of the studio. And on the rare occurrence when the room was in total darkness, I would think it was moving, so slightly, like an enormous, restless sloth in a cage.
     But in the light of day, and when clear of mind, it was just the graven image of a fallen angel.
     I awoke on this night, the night of my death, with my head resting on my drawing table, having scribbled for the thousandth time the letters and words of the inscription. I stirred suddenly, sensing a cold presence, as if something were standing behind me and looking over my shoulder. I turned and saw the creature perched where it had been since its arrival. When I turned back to the table, the sound of grinding stone gripped me.