Sphinx (50 page)

‘Give the instrument to me,’ he went on. ‘You know it is dangerous. It will seduce you, or those seeking it will destroy you.’

‘Too late.’ I laughed bitterly. ‘Not only has it cost me the life of a friend and made me a fugitive, I’ve started seeing meanings in everything, everywhere, all linked back to that stupid device. It seems to have taken over my life.’

Hermes laughed, a dry cackle that ended with a cough. ‘You Westerners think you can control the weather, that time can be measured by mathematical units, that light travels at the same speed everywhere, and that all that you see in these four dimensions is palpable and finite. It has woken you up, this Pharaonic toy. The sooner you admit it, the better, Oliver.’

‘I prefer a world based on solid understanding. Blame my training, if you have to.’

‘Then go back to England, to grey skies and red brick, to the godless monotony of commercial enterprise, and leave the astrarium to others.’ Hermes took a sip of his coffee and winced. ‘Usta! The coffee is not strong enough!’ he yelled, then turned back to me. ‘The astrarium has given you your death date, has it not?’

I stared at him in surprise. Seeing my look, he smiled, waiting. I found myself not wanting to answer him, not only because of my suspicions but also because, somehow, the fewer people I told, the less of a hold I felt the mechanism had over me. Hermes watched my face with interest.

‘Oliver, you heard the history of the mechanism - the astrarium is an irresistible weapon for those who wish to control the events around them. It can and has changed the course of history.’ He sighed. ‘But you have been foolish. In your desire to keep everything logical, you have challenged the mechanism’s power.’

‘Perhaps,’ I replied curtly, still not willing to reveal the extent of my involvement.

‘The scientist’s Achilles heel: nothing is real until proven. Newtonian empiricism will undo the world. Oliver, the astrarium is real, whether you can prove it or not, and it will pass judgement on you. The Ancient Egyptians believed that certain raw materials contained the essence of a soul - what you might call, in your dry scientific terms, electromagnetic vibrations, force fields. They constructed sacred objects out of these materials and then brought them to life through incantations. How long has the machine given you?’

The matter-of-fact seriousness of Hermes’s tone, his absolute belief in the authenticity of the astrarium, was beginning to alarm me. I’d felt the astrarium take over my life but part of me still wanted to believe that all of this was a terrible combination of recent events, grief and too many sleepless nights. I hesitated, then decided it might not harm anything to give Hermes a few more details.

‘The second hand has come up - but it means nothing, and if you want to get literal, the dates could be over two thousand years out anyway.’ I shrugged, trying to look casual.

‘How long?’ he persisted.

‘Eight days.’

‘I can stop it, Oliver.’ He looked at me urgently.

‘Isabella couldn’t stop it.’

‘By the time she discovered the mechanism, it was too late. You know that yourself.’

‘All I know is that the information I’m being presented with is so bizarre and unfamiliar that I fear I’m losing my mind.’ I heard myself sounding strangely formal and realised that my tone masked a growing terror - I was being pursued by two different parties, both willing to go to extraordinary lengths to get the astrarium, but now I also seemed to be the target of the astrarium itself.

‘The moment when you, the staunch rationalist, so adamant about the bricks and mortar of the known world, turned the dial to your own birth date, you revealed your hidden doubts,’ Hermes said thoughtfully. ‘You have tinkered with the magic of others and now the machine is committed to your fate. I can save you. Give it to me.’

His voice had slipped into a hypnotic rhythm: blues, shifting in half-tones, bumping gently against soft violets. The room had warmed up and bands of sunlight now illuminated the low glass coffee table; a large fly buzzed blindly against the window. Leaning back into the cushions, I closed my eyes. The jarring exhaustion of the past few days floated like a luminescent throbbing mass to the top of my skull. How easy it would be: give up the astrarium, fly back to Abu Rudeis to search for an investor with whom to partner on the new oilfield, return to my normal life. The luminescent mass shifted from blinding white to a deep red, then began to bleed: long languid droplets that solidified into the image of Isabella’s heart, then into the crimson of Rachel’s lips. Sitting upright, I forced my eyelids open.

‘Amelia mentioned in her lecture that Nectanebo disappeared mysteriously. What did happen to him at the end of his reign?’ I asked.

‘So you are finally using your intuition, Oliver.’ Hermes gave me a grudgingly respectful nod.

‘Am I?’

Hermes smiled indulgently. ‘Officially, Nectanebo’s rule ended in 343 BC when the Persian general Ochus attacked Pelusium. According to Diodorus, a series of massacres and other atrocities followed and the Pharaoh reluctantly abandoned the granite palace he’d built at Behbeit el-Hagar, his birthplace—’

‘So Nectanebo disappeared?’

‘Unofficially, he fled, supposedly to southern Egypt and possibly to Ethiopia. Interestingly, his empty tomb was never raided - almost as if it was left pristine while awaiting his return - for all those thousands of years.’

‘But how does this relate to the astrarium?’

‘As a weapon of prediction it failed him, as it is failing you now, because he wasn’t able to control it. Strictly speaking, and that’s why it is so dangerous, the astrarium has no true master.’

‘But what happened to him? Didn’t the astrarium predict his death?’

‘This is the great mystery. There is no record of his death, and there are some who claim that he still walks amongst us.’

‘
Some say he still lives to this day
.’ Hugh Wollington’s comment echoed in my memory. It was an absurd hypothesis, but it was odd that both men had voiced it, almost down to the same language.

‘You know that’s not possible,’ I retorted, trying to keep a grip on the conversation. ‘The astrarium can’t make you immortal.’

‘Can’t it?’ Hermes replied, with a smile. I looked at him, allowing silence to fall, then stood up abruptly, realising that I was now infinitely more frightened by the potential of the astrarium than I had been before.

‘If you are so convinced that the device has no power then there is nothing to worry about, is there?’ Hermes concluded almost smugly. ‘Give the device to me for safe keeping, or at least let me be your guide. What do you have to lose?’

I hesitated. Should I trust the Egyptologist? I remembered Francesca blaming Amelia, not Hermes, for her husband’s belief in the old ways. Was it possible that Hermes had truly cared for Isabella? But then he would have protected her as a child, kept her away from Giovanni’s role-playing, as any sane person surely would have. No, I couldn’t afford to trust him, not yet.

I walked to the front door. Hung above it was a papyrus scroll with a hieroglyph painted on it. The image showed the four-legged creature I’d seen twice in the last two days. Hermes followed my gaze.

‘That is Seth, god of thunder, chaos and revenge - once the ruler of Ancient Egypt, after he murdered his brother Osiris and overthrew his nephew Horus.’

‘I know him.’

‘Of course you do. The Christians bastardised him into the lesser form of Satan.’

 

I locked the door of my hideaway above the barber’s shop and unpacked the astrarium again. I sat for a moment, staring at it. Was I any closer to fulfilling Isabella’s grand plan? She’d told me there was a destination for the astrarium, but where? I ran through Amelia’s lecture points again in my mind - built for Ramses III, taken by Moses to part the Red Sea, then abandoned in a temple in the Sinai, driven by guilt or terror of Isis’s revenge. Then sought out and found again by Banafrit, only to be lost again by Cleopatra, who was apparently too terrified to actually use it. Had she known about its ability to reverse fortunes and change destinies not only in a good but also in a bad way, turning on the user and perhaps condemning him to an early death? And how was the god Seth related to the device? Was he just part of the death pointer, or was he connected to the darker uses of the device? The jigsaw puzzle was becoming more complex by the day, but now I felt I had at least nearly all the pieces - it was just a question of fitting them together to make sense. And I knew who Mosry was working for and why they were after the astrarium. I still needed to know more about the strange re-enactment in the catacombs and about Giovanni’s movements twenty years ago. But the most important challenge was to find out what Isabella had intended to do with the astrarium - before my own time ran out. I forced myself to peer into the mechanism. My reluctant gaze found the small death pointer - the date was unchanged. The low ticking of the magnets’ movement now sounded like an inevitable acceleration towards my own death. A sudden panic gripped me, and I steadied myself against the desk. Stay rational, stay calm, I tried convincing myself.

I reached for the reference book that I’d asked Ibrihim to pack with my clothes and looked up Seth.

Why had Seth’s shadow appeared on the wall of the catacombs during the ritual, I wondered. Had it been meant to frighten me into believing that Isabella’s soul had been taken by the devil? And why had the other players seemed so genuinely terrified? Was Seth part of their plan?

I couldn’t come up with an answer. Instead, my mind filled with the unsettling sense that the astrarium had begun to control not just me but also the events around me.

Rachel hung the bag of fruit and other food over the hook on the door, then swung around. She looked exhausted; the events of the past two days were taking their toll.

‘It’s dire out there, Oliver. The bomb attack on the Sheraton has escalated the political tension and the Americans are talking about cancelling President Carter’s visit. At least there’s now a ceasefire between Libya and Egypt, thanks to the president of Algiers. I tell you, it feels unsafe simply walking the streets as a Westerner, never mind an American. I tried to glean some info from a friend at the Embassy but there’s a blanket silence on everything. Something big’s afoot. I can feel it.’ She sighed heavily. ‘I was real worried about you last night. Why didn’t you send a message? ’ she asked, frowning.

I pulled a chair out for her and poured her a cup of the thick black coffee that I had percolating on the camp stove. ‘I went to the catacombs at Kom el-Shugafa,’ I told her. ‘I was enticed there by someone I thought was Isabella. Total madness, not to mention suicidal, I know. But I was captivated, I had to find out.’

‘Oh, Oliver . . .’

‘It gets worse. I stumbled across some kind of crazy re-enactment, and the lunatics conducting this little performance injected me with drugs.’ I pulled my shirt from my shoulder; the puncture mark had bloomed into a small purple bruise. ‘It was an Ancient Egyptian funerary rite called the Weighing of the Heart. I couldn’t tell you whether they were Egyptologists, a local cult or just some unemployed actors hired for the occasion, but they acted deadly serious and in full costume.’ I held back the gruesome detail of the heart itself.

‘And you think this is somehow connected with the death of your wife and with the astrarium?’ Rachel asked, her fingers touching the bruise lightly.

‘They were trying to pressure me into giving them the astrarium. I suspect that they were the same group Isabella’s grandfather was involved with - apparently he dragged Isabella into it as well when she was a child.’

Rachel came closer and looked into my pupils. ‘I think you’re still wasted. I’d have thought strong hallucinogens would be difficult to get here in Egypt - unless you have military connections. The US Defense Department experimented with extreme hallucinogens in Korea - I wrote a piece on it once. Scary stuff.’