Another Pan (9 page)

Professor Darling didn’t have to be asked twice. He sat on the edge of his desk, looked each rapt student in the eye, picked up a tattered spiral notebook and a smattering of crinkled notes from his desk, and began reading his own meticulous English translation of the first legend.

A legacy is a precious thing. If a man is robbed of his life’s work, of his chance to achieve the basic immortality granted to all who work and raise children, a bitterness builds inside
.

This is the story of one family with a curse on their line, a dark legacy full of the cruelest injustices. Tales of their fate have wafted through Egypt for centuries, like smoke clouds that refuse to die. They cannot die. Their stolen lives linger on, still flowing in their bones. Life has been mummified inside them, forming an ever-living bonedust — a new kind of immortality
.

Their tombs are hidden, for they bear a great secret. When ground together into dust, the remaining bones of these five mummies give eternal life — a chance to escape death and defy the goddess. Natives have long told ever-fading legends about the secret of the dust. For centuries they have searched and failed, for the family name is buried, their saga hidden. Those who decipher the ancient relics and find their way through the gates meet obstacles that have killed many
.

A legacy is a precious thing. So it was for the first father of this wretched family. In the time of the ancient pharaohs, when the people of Israel were slaves in the land of Egypt and little hope of freedom yet existed, Elan worked to save his family. Born in the tribe of Benjamin, Elan was proud of his heritage and of the heritage he would one day create. Every day, he toiled under the taskmaster’s whip. His greatest hope was to have children and to watch them grow up free
.

One day, as he hung by his waist from a rope near the top of a half-erected palace — the future home of Akhara, a high official of the pharaoh — Elan received the news that he had become a father. With difficulty he lowered himself to the ground, ready to rush to his wife’s side. But the taskmaster was loitering below. Elan tried to slip away to his wife, freed from all reason by the elation in his heart. But the taskmaster was too quick. When the broad-faced guard raised his whip, Elan did the unthinkable. He reached up and grabbed the man’s hand, bringing the whip down with a slight jerk
.

The guard’s eyes flashed
.

Another guard arrived. Then another
.

Within minutes, Elan was beaten and dragged to the court of Akhara. There, the high official offered him a bargain. “Build me a tomb worthy of a god, and upon your death, your family will be set free. There is only one condition: from today onward, you will have no tools and no help from your brethren.”

That night, Elan held his son for the first time. He turned Akhara’s bargain over in his mind
.

Soon after, Elan had a daughter, and with each passing day, he threw himself more fiercely into his work. He gathered straw from the discarded piles of the other slaves, from the stables and fields. He built his own bricks, one by one. He fashioned his own rods and rope pulleys. He erected the pieces of Akhara’s pyramid little by little, so the very walls were soaked with his sweat
.

Through all this, the gods ignored this insignificant man
.

For twenty-five years, Elan worked
.

Then, one day, when his back was bent with work and his hair had become like wisps of gray cotton, he looked up and saw that he was finished. He had built a five-headed pyramid of clay and stone, with five pointed pillars protruding from the pyramid base. It was painted a golden color since he had no gold of his own, but it was a tomb without equal
.

That night, Elan knocked on Akhara’s door with his cane. But he was greeted with silence. He called into the house, but his aging voice did not carry far. He waited until the sun went down, leaning on his cane outside Akhara’s door
.

When he returned home, Elan found Akhara’s answer waiting for him. Four guards were holding his wife and children at the point of their spears. Elan rushed toward them but was held back by a leering guard. There, before his eyes, they killed Elan’s only son. Elan fell to his knees, the screams of his wife and daughter fading behind the thundering in his head
.

Then, through the blur of tears and aging eyes, past the sandaled feet of the guards, he saw the rich robes of Akhara. “Slaves do not make bargains,” said the high official. “No slave should fancy himself so strong, or he and his sons will be cut down. But you have done good work, and I am a just man. I will marry your daughter as fair compensation.”

Elan and his wife were returned to a life of slavery. His daughter, Jobey, was swept away by the guards, and Elan never saw her again. She might have been his legacy, but she was stripped of his name, of his heritage, and of his God. She was not free, but a slave to a cruel husband
.

For years, Elan wallowed in the fact that his life’s work had been for nothing and that he would have no legacy. His children’s children would be swallowed up by Egypt, their blood diluted long after he was dust. To Elan, that was the greatest injustice of all. The bitterness devoured his soul. He died with his life trapped in his bones
.

But Elan’s daughter did not forget her father. When he died, she asked her servants to steal his body and take it to the tomb that he had built with his own hands for the thief Akhara. There, she mummified his body, preserving his bones and all the venom they contained. The body of the old man rested in Akhara’s tomb undetected until the story of Elan the builder passed to legend, and the magic that he held with him found its way to the goddess of death
.

When Akhara died a few years later, his family finally discovered that the great tomb had been used. They found pieces of Elan’s burial clothes and a few of his remaining belongings, but they could not find his body. Elan’s daughter, too, was shocked to see that her father was gone. For desecrating Akhara’s tomb before his death, Elan’s daughter was put to death, and her children were given to Akhara’s other wives. The women were ordered never to speak of the children’s true heritage. As for Elan, the goddess of death had already taken the old man’s mummy, and the first bonedust with it. She shielded it with her greatest weapons, fearing that someday death might be conquered. The Dark Lady hid the mummy in a place where no one could reach it, a legendary labyrinth of the Gates, guarded by powerful deities that no human could overcome
.

And so, Elan was gone, his legacy lost. But he can never fully die. His wasted life is forever trapped as grains of immortality in his bones
.

Peter sat alone on the front lawn of Marlowe watching kids in sports gear rushing this way and that, teachers heading home, and that Darling girl playing around with her boyfriend, the lacrosse player. He wondered if she’d ever had any other boyfriends, a pretty girl like that. He wondered what she really wanted — how much effort it would take him to pluck her away.

Soon it was dusk and all the kids cleared out of the school, all the sports ended, and the Darling girl went home, too. Peter sat on the lawn — even after the dark overtook the school and that fearful part of him began to shiver.

The Dark Lady was present. Peter could feel it. She had drawn him here. And now the school would begin to change. It would become like the world below, because now it was linked to that world. The fog would seep into every crevice and slowly infect Marlowe, just as it had done to every other place the book had been. The air would become harder to breathe. The walls would grow moldy and unwelcoming. Everything that was once fresh would become rancid and spoiled. Peter could see it happening now. It would start with just a feeling, and soon not a single happy thought would remain.

Across the lawn, Peter spied a matronly nurse in a blue sweater set walking toward the girls’ dorm. She swept across the lawn lithely, quietly, moving the way his own nanny had all those years ago. The nanny who had first shown him the book, thinking he would just forget about it like any other child. The ageless nanny with the moth-eaten clothes who had tried to corrupt him with her stories but had created a hunger instead. The hateful nanny with the antique metal hook, a gray mist in his mind that chased him for all these years.

“All right, everybody gather around.” Peter waved a hand to the eleven boys who made up his advisee group — the kids who lived in the hall he now ruled. To these longtime residents of the boys’ dormitory, the guy standing in the doorway of the RA room and signaling them to follow him inside didn’t seem much older than a student. Usually, resident advisers were twenty-something burnouts desperate to sidle up close to one of Marlowe’s famous professors. Once there was a girl who became an RA just so she could advise the daughter of a music mogul. Apparently, she had a demo CD. But Peter looked young, like he could be a senior at Marlowe — not an authority figure, but one of their own. They had already met the girl next to him, Tina, who had a bridge ’n’ tunnel sleazy-sexy bad-grammar thing going on that made the boarding kids imagine she’d treat their parents like garbage. Basically, they fell in love with her image. No one bothered to ask why she was at the boys’ dorm meeting. She was just always there. And they loved it — even though she had been the one to rip out their tooth with pliers (except for the two senior boys, Poet and Cornrow, who had been members of Peter’s crew for all the years they had attended Marlowe).

“Listen up,” said Peter, standing in the middle of his sparsely furnished room. The eleven boys of his hall were now packed inside. The room was old, and badly lit, with a nonworking fireplace and mismatched bricks in the walls. Apparently, Marlowe couldn’t be bothered to revamp historical buildings like the dorms. In one corner, two twin beds had been pushed together to form a king, which was covered with a gray-and-navy, standard-issue Marlowe comforter. In another corner stood a desk and one chair. Peter hadn’t bought a couch or a coffee table, as most RAs did. He wasn’t exactly planning to throw weekly study breaks. “I know you guys are new, but you have to use your heads,” he said, tapping his forehead. “You can’t just go up to a bunch of players and demand money.” He spoke slowly, as if they were very dumb children. “If you need to shake ’em down, you pick the weakest one. And always,
always,
leave a physical reminder — nothing huge — just a bruise, a cut. These guys aren’t from the streets. No need to break bones. Oh, and do it off campus.”

The boys were nodding excitedly.

“That Connor kid’s a bad target,” said Peter. “He’s the kind that goes running to Mommy. Watch him, though. His girlfriend’s a teacher’s kid, right?” Peter looked thoughtful. But he didn’t say any more about the Darlings or the exhibit he had chased all the way from London. Tina was now picking up his lecture where he had left off.

“And if someone doesn’t pay, you call
me,
got it?” said Tina.