The Book of the Dead (19 page)

Marsters frowned and rolled his eyes, but he didn’t back away from her, and he didn’t run. Why should he? He was the master, after all, and she was his meek,
obedient
little dog.

“They’ve taught me quite a bit about the whole mummification process.” She took another step toward him. “I’m sure you’d find it fascinating.”

“Really, Miss Wilson, I don’t –”

“Are you worthy of forever, Professor?”

Before he could say another word, she removed the taser from her pocket and shoved it into his crotch.

After what seemed like an eternity to Elizabeth, Marsters’ eyes finally fluttered open.

“You’re awake.” She tightened the last of the restraints that held him to the gurney, then wiped the sweat from her forehead. “For a moment there, I thought we might have gotten carried away.”

She held up her taser.

“75,000 volts. A high school graduation present from my mother. She was so
worried
I would run into some sicko here on campus. Boy, was she right!”

Elizabeth chuckled. And when she reached over to brush the hair from his face, he recoiled from her touch. She couldn’t help but smile at that.

Marsters lifted his head to look at his bonds, then glanced around the room, his eyes widening. All around him, the mummified cats gathered, crouching at the edge of the tables with their tails swishing and their fangs bared. The priests and priestesses of Bast were there as well, standing at the ends of the gurney, smiling their eternal grins. Elizabeth couldn’t help but wonder what he thought of their tightly wrapped bodies now.

“You know,” she began, turning away, “I should really thank you. Before last night, I was this sad, pitiful little thing who would never have stood up for herself in a million years. Then you abused – no, you
tortured
me, suffocated and buried me in plastic, and I was re-born.”

She walked over to the relic table, found one of the ceremonial daggers, and snatched it up.

“Now, we have a busy night ahead of us, Professor, so I think we should get started.”

“Please, Miss Wilson... Elizabeth...”

“Wow!” She spun to look back at him. “You actually know my name!”

“Think about what you’re doing.”

“Oh, believe me,
Professor
, I have.” She held up the dagger, admiring the seated cat that formed its golden hilt. “I’ve done nothing all day but think about it.”

“Please.” He squirmed on the gurney, tried to pull free of the restraints. “Please... stop.”

“But you’re not finished.” She pointed at him with the blade. “How many innocent girls have you hurt over the years? How many did you rape before me?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Truly, I am. But –”

“I’m sorry too,” she told him, but not believing a word of it. She wasn’t as naïve as she’d been the day before. Not by a long shot. And it was all due to
her
. “I’m sorry those other girls didn’t have Bast to help them.”

The goddess stepped from the shadows, her beaded headdress flowing over her shoulders and down her back.
“Content, my child?”

Elizabeth bowed her head. “Very, my goddess.”

Marsters seemed to take no notice of Bast. No. His terrified eyes were focused squarely on Elizabeth, on the blade she held in her hand.

“She’s not only the protector of cats, you know.” Elizabeth walked back to the gurney, waving the dagger as if conducting a symphony. “She’s also the goddess of women.”

“And of secrets,”
Bast purred, following her.

“She wanted me to cut out your tongue,” Elizabeth smiled, “so you wouldn’t be able to tell anyone what we’d done, your version of it anyway. So you wouldn’t be able ruin my life.”

“You’re insane,” Marsters said, and then he cried out for help, screamed at the top of his lungs.

Elizabeth pulled off his necktie and gagged him with it. “I told her that wasn’t good enough. You see, if I cut out your tongue, you’d still be able to hurt other women.”

She took the blade and moved it slowly down his body to his crotch. Tears formed watery veins down his cheeks and he moaned into the tie.

“But, that’s still not the root of the problem, is it? No, your sickness is in your head.” Elizabeth pointed at her own temple with the blade. “In your
mind
.”

She walked back over to the relics. The mummies followed her with their desiccated eyes, knowing what was coming, what they had prepared her for. Their leathery lips pulled back to reveal even more of their teeth.

Bast leaned back against the opposite table, petting her beloved cats.
“Tell him what you want, child.”

Elizabeth smiled. “I want to play your game again, Professor. Just one, little difference...”

She selected something else from the table: a long, golden rod with a hook on the end; an Egyptian embalming tool, used to remove the brain through the nose prior to wrapping. She held it up for Marsters’ inspection.

“Tonight, it’s your turn to be the mummy.”

I have never thought of myself as a religious man. Yet the first time I set eyes on Nikolai Fyodorov, I wanted to call him “Father”. He had that kind of air. In Tiflis, the fathers had been like everyone on the Table of Ranks; obsessed with hierarchy, eager to lord it over the heathens, convinced of their own superiority. I had never
wanted
to be a religious man.

After the events of the past months, perhaps I no longer have a choice.

The deep winter snows have dried the Oxus to a trickle, and I will not make the fort at Bokhara until the spring. As the clouds come down again from the heights, and I fancy I can hear voices ringing on the wind, I console myself that at least one survivor returned from the Roof of the World.

It started with a death. Before the winter of the year 1900, at the end of a tumultuous decade in which a great fervid spirit seemed to have been conjured in the Russian soul, I had received a letter from Nikolai Pavlovich, telling me of an expedition to the farthest reaches of our Empire.

“He is a remarkable man,” he had written from Ashkabad. “I envy you that you will travel so far with him. Extend him every courtesy, in spite of what others may think. He may seem an idiot, but he has the holy simplicity of Our Lord.”

Those words haunted me as I regarded him in the ice cave, as we stood and stared aghast at Myslev’s horribly mutilated body and the lurid red splashes against the hoarfrost white. Fyodorov was an old man, with a forked beard like a patriarch, and eyes in his wizened face which burned like sparks, as though they took in everything he beheld, fully, brightly, yet without ego. Beneath his furs he still wore the greatcoat of a fashion of a quarter century ago, threadbare and patched, and held around his belt with a rope; he had removed his mittens, revealing dirty fingers poking out of fingerless gloves. He held his shoulders hunched, his head bowed slightly, so that he had to look up at me, and for the first time his shy smile was gone.

“The mummy is no longer there?”

“Look for yourself!” cried Madame Vysotskaya, pointing to the open sarcophagus where Myslev had been working. The matronly demeanour she had worn from Petersburg had faded since we left the train at the Amu-Darya, the legendary River Oxus of Alexander the Great, replaced day by day with the waxy visage and tangled locks of the wild-eyed Kirghiz shamanesses of this frozen wilderness. “It was a corpse — thousands of years old! What has happened to it? Some animal? Do something!”

Krepkin the soldier regarded Madame Vysotskaya with dismay. “Calm yourself, Sofia Filippovna. This does no one any good. Somebody bring me some water – this lad is still alive.”

He took the head of Arkady Apollonovich, the young student of the late Doctor Myslev, in his lap, and brushed the boy’s sandy hair from his face, bluish-white like the ice cave floor.

“The Kirghiz spoke of the
almas
– the wild man of the mountains,” I suggested, recalling fireside conversations as the wolves had howled in the frigid night. “Perhaps some unknown species of ape, or a bear...”

Fyodorov’s voice was small, like a guilty child. “I do not think so. There is no spoor. And the wounds on Myslev’s body... these do not look like the claws of a bear.”

Myslev’s wounds were like nothing we had ever seen – more like the symptoms of a wasting disease than an attack. His neck was purplish and discoloured, as though he had been strangled; but the skin over all his body seemed dry, and covered with burst veins and broken blood vessels. Here and there his flesh had ruptured, splashing red over the ice of the cavern floor; but the surge seemed to have faded. His skin looked like blue cheese.

The young Arkady Apollonovich had fared better. Profoundly unconscious, his skin was the same mottle of veins, but less pronounced, as though the attack had been less intense.

“We have to leave this place,” said Vysotskaya. “Get off this glacier, return to our Cossacks and the tribesfolk below. Perhaps we can find help...”

Krepkin looked to Fyodorov. The old Moscow mystic was the reason for our expedition to the Roof of the World. High in the Pamir Mountains, at the source of the legendary Oxus, he believed there lay a secret lost to mankind since the beginning of civilisation. Up here, in the ice.

When we had first met, Fyodorov had pointed at me with jollity in his eyes. “You are the poet Geroyev,” he had said. “A singer of Holy Russia’s soul. You must tell me of your dreams. We are returning to the birthplace of all our dreams. Who knows what we shall find!”

There was no jollity now. Only an abiding consternation, torn between curiosity and fear. What had happened to the desiccated corpse in that ancient sarcophagus, with its hieroglyphs and Greek inscriptions, which had emerged under our chisels from a thick accretion of ice? What was out there, in the tunnels that honeycombed the frozen mountain, which even now may be stalking us with murderous intent? We stood in silence, and I wondered what would happen if Fyodorov would not agree.

Finally, he nodded, as though it was all his fault. “You are right, of course. We may yet save Arkady, at least. Let us leave this place.”

We heard the howling storm over the glacier before we felt it. A savage tearing whiteness, which whipped across the blinding river of ice that filled the high Pamir valley and scoured the earth to the bedrock. We could barely hear our shouts.

“There is no way!” called Krepkin, huge in his furs. “We must go back – until it is over!”

It is a terrible feeling to be hunted. How much worse, then, to be trapped in the darkness and hunted by the unknown – by the
unnatural
? For, though none of us spoke of it, the same fear ran through all our veins: that the corpse we had found in the ancient sarcophagus had somehow returned to terrifying life, and now stalked us as its prey. That, in some perverse way, that quest for ancient secrets which had brought Fyodorov here was somehow true, and now put us at peril of our very lives. How many times had I read those lurid tales of mummies and the risen dead as mere thrills to wile away winter evenings by the stove? How many times had we discussed the tales of the native Kirghiz, their legends of the evil giant Iskander, imprisoned above the ice, which had drawn us to the glacier? And how willing was I now, thousands of miles from all that was safe and familiar, to believe that esoteric truths lay hidden within!

“It is ludicrous,” said Krepkin, as we regrouped by the sarcophagus, laying Arkady’s unconscious body on furs spread over the ground. “How can such a thing kill someone? Damn it – it’s a corpse. It has been here in the ice for thousands of years!”

Since her outburst, Vysotskaya’s mind seemed clouded by a dull resignation. “Perhaps it wasn’t really dead. Perhaps it was frozen, or hibernating.”

“People aren’t bears. They don’t
hibernate
.”

My mind went back to the peculiar stone clasps which Myslev had noted when we first prised the lid off the sarcophagus – a thing which he had never before encountered on any such tomb. “It was sealed from the outside,” I said, half to myself. “Why would anyone do that?”

Fear flashed on Vysotskaya’s face, and she looked from one of us to another as though she had not understood. None of us wanted to say anything.

“I want to get out of here now!”

“Well we can’t! We have to wait. Damn it, Fyodorov – I knew it was a mistake to bring
a woman
on this expedition!” Krepkin’s words hit Vysotskaya like a slap. “Now – let’s stick together, find out more about where we are. We must be able to defend ourselves.”

Fyodorov spread his arms helplessly. “With what, Leon Leontich?”

“We have dynamite!”

“Don’t be a fool,” I said. “You’d bring the ice down and bury us all!”

“If it’s alive, we can kill it.”

“And if it’s dead?” Vysotskaya stared at Krepkin hollowly.

Silence.

Krepkin looked away, clenching his fist and gritting his teeth. “I wish our Cossacks were here.”

We had come looking for a garden. The “father place”, Fyodorov had called it.

“Look around you, Dmitry Mikhailovich!” he had said as we boarded the Transcaspian Railway at Ashkabad. “Science! One day these engines will span the world, and all this great distance will be as nothing. And greater engines, too – we will conquer the air, even the heavens, communicate faster than sound can fly, bind the world and all men together!” He took my hand in his greasy, half-gloved fingers. “It is a great task we are embarking on, my friend. I am honoured you accepted Nikolai Pavlovich’s invitation. So many have heard the call and not understood.”

“Tell me again of your project, Nikolai Fyodorovich,” I said. “What do you hope to find on the Roof of the World?”

A child beamed out of the old man’s face. “Not ‘what’, Dmitry Mikhailovich –
who
!” he laughed. “Listen: there is a theory, that every substance is composed of minute particles, smaller than the eye can see, like microscopic dust. The Greeks knew of this. The theory says those particles are
irreducible
: the elementary building blocks of all matter, they contain within themselves the instructions the cosmos needs to create gold, diamond, even the air we breathe. Dmitry Mikhailovich – it is my contention that every one of us is composed of such particles: that within each of them is contained the instructions for the cosmos to build us, in all our uniqueness, block by block. To reconstitute us, in every particle –
even if we are dead
.”

I admit I was taken aback. “You are speaking of resurrection?”

“Yes!” he laughed, delightedly. “What greater task can there be for science? The Bible promises us bodily resurrection – but it does not say how.
We
must do this thing, Dmitry Mikhailovich!
We
are God’s instrument. We must use the intellect He has given us to transform the world, to achieve perfection – to bring about the bodily resurrection of the dead!”

“And the Pamir Mountains?” I said, as I struggled to digest his words. “Why there?”

“Our destiny, my friend. All legends point to the Pamir Mountains as the cradle of mankind, the source of migrations back into clouded prehistory. It is a barren place now – but science has discovered it was not always thus. It was once a verdant paradise – but it, too, like sinful mankind, has fallen from grace...”

I stared at him in disbelief. “You believe it was
Eden
?”

He closed his eyes, beatifically, as though the Spirit were upon him. “There is an energy there, Dmitry Mikhailovich, I am sure of it. The echoes of our very genesis as a species. Somewhere, there, in the ground or even the air, are traces of the ancestral dust of mankind. Adam and Eve, my friend – can you imagine? Can you see now the divine mission of Holy Russia, the hand of providence that has guided the Czar, our beloved father, to sign with the British an agreement acknowledging our authority over that distant place?

“It is the tree of knowledge – the secret of life itself!”

It was no garden.

Even in the summer, the water outside our tents froze in the mornings. The landscape had a bleak and barren majesty, as though a begrudging god had scoured away the thin film of life which encrusts our globe to lay bare the lifeless rock beneath. Perpetual cloud hid the mountains that towered all around us; silent, invisible giants, mute witnesses to our violation.

“Do you really think we shall find the Garden here, Professor?” asked Madame Vysotskaya one morning, as we splashed through one of the myriad ice-cold rills which descended from the hidden glaciers above the gravel-strewn waste. Her transformation from occultist dilettante to ragged shamaness was almost complete – little did she notice her cracked nails, knotted hair, or the feral way she panted in the thin air. “There’s little life here – barely enough for grass.”

I remember at that moment how a shaft of sunlight broke through the lowering clouds. High above, a vast peak suddenly raged through the gap in the overcast, sharp and glistening white against a shard of brilliant blue, dwarfing us in its majesty. Madame Vysotskaya’s lips parted, and her expression reminded me of the Magdalene in the Descent from the Cross.

Where the sunlight touched the ground, it illuminated a rubble field, doubtless washed by the rill when in flood. “By the Holy Mother,” muttered Krepkin, and the Cossacks made the sign of the cross.

We called it the Devil’s Graveyard. A field of stone, strewn with bleached skulls with monstrous spiral horns, as far as the eye could see. I admit I shuddered; the spectacle had been unexpected, and for the first time I beheld the imminent heights with a sense of foreboding.

Perhaps Madame Vysotskaya felt the same. “You’ve brought us to a new Golgotha, Professor! A land of skulls!”

Fyodorov would have none of it. His face twitched with uncharacteristic irritation, yet he restrained himself, and became expansive. “On the contrary, dear lady. So much life, swept down from the High Pamirs. These are
ovis poli
, the giant mountain goats of Marco Polo. Some of these horns are six feet across – their lightness buoys them in the summer torrents. A greater indication of life above you could not hope to find!”

The silence in the ice cave was oppressive. Everyone listened for Krepkin’s return, fearing the footfall would bring... something else. Something which had killed Myslev.

When the soldier’s earnest face reappeared from the gloom we heaved a sigh of relief.

He held something in his ungloved hand – something small, green, fragile.

“I found it in the tunnel not a hundred feet from here. It’s some kind of flower. Where the deuce can it be from?” He looked at us in wonder.

Fyodorov peered into Krepkin’s palm. “It is a starflower – or something like. From the lowlands. It has travelled a long way. How curious...”

Krepkin nodded. “There is a smell, too. Can anyone smell it? Green... Like birch trees in Voronezh in May.”

A light came into Fyodorov’s eyes. “Show us!”

We all knew what was in Fyodorov’s mind. Kindled by excitement, we seemed to forget for a moment the danger that surrounded us, and hurried after Krepkin at the promise of a second exit from those forbidding tunnels. A vision in a dream hovered tantalisingly before us.