The Book of the Dead (9 page)

She nodded. “Yes, actually. His aunt has a mummified cat I wanted to look at. My library – well, the library in which I work – got a grant, was looking to purchase more Egyptian antiquities. Oh well.”

Zupan sat carefully beside her on the couch. She tried not to think that just a while before – how long had it been? – they had been pressed close together, him naked. He really was very handsome; something about him was electric, magnetic, even when he wasn’t actively performing miracles.

“Let’s go to their house,” he said. “I can explain what happened, apologize for my lack of understanding. I happen to have a bottle, a
real
bottle, of Glenmorangie, that I smuggled across when I came to America… that should help smooth things over, don’t you think?”

Marjorie considered, then nodded her assent. However their plan turned out, Zupan’s company was proving to be immensely pleasant; his chivalric concern for her was endearing, if unnecessary. If only the dates her friends and family pushed her into were with this sort of enjoyable young man! She might actually contemplate matrimony if someone like Zupan made her an offer…

She had no notion of what time it was when they left the theatre through the back, but it felt very late indeed. The streets were dark and empty, and there were so few cabs still on the road that they began walking toward the wealthier French Hill district. She began to sweat, much to her embarrassment. Not only had winter finally yielded to spring, spring had apparently had yielded to summer. Much to her relief, eventually they were able to hail a cab and arrived at Mrs. Quildring’s house – which, surprisingly, was entirely dark.

“What do we do?” she asked. “Looks like they’ve gone to bed.”

“No matter,” said Zupan. He leaped from the cab, handed some money to the driver, and opened her door, bowing her out onto the dark street.

“How so?” Marjorie’s heels made a clicking sound as they connected with the pavement. The driver tipped his hat to her and then sped away. She wondered if she’d made the right choice, accepting Zupan’s help.

“You wanted to see the mummified cat, did you not?” Zupan smiled at her, and she melted a little inside. “I am a magician – many things that are impossible for regular mortals are possible for me.”

“On the stage, maybe.”

Zupan looked at her. “You saw my performance tonight,” he said softly. “Do you believe my powers are purely illusion?”

Marjorie, never one to believe in ghosts and magic, found she was unsure. Zupan was holding his hand toward her; after hesitating for a moment she took it, deciding to trust him.

“I just want to look at it,” she whispered. “To see if it’s worth all this trouble, you know?”

He nodded. “Then let us go look at it.”

Despite Marjorie’s expectations, Zupan performed no further feats of magic to get them into Mrs. Quildring’s darkened home. Instead, he helped her hop the fence, led her around to the back door… and picked the lock.

“What about burglar alarms?” asked Marjorie, as Zupan put his hand on the doorknob.

“What about them?”

“What if we set one off?”

“I do not think we will,” he said. “This door feels fine.”

He was right, though what Zupan meant by “feels fine” eluded Marjorie. The door opened without a creak, revealing the service area of Mrs. Quildring’s modest mansion. They made their way carefully through the kitchen, into the living room, and then down a carpeted stairwell. Zupan seemed to instinctively know where to go, which further baffled her, but when they came down in what was essentially a museum in miniature, and Zupan flipped on the lights, revealing all kinds of fascinating Egyptian artifacts, she forgot everything but the pure joy of discovery.

“Amarna-period glassware,” she whispered over her shoulder. “Look at the little – hello?” Zupan was not behind her.

“Marjorie.” She heard his low voice from a different corner of the room. “Come and see.”

She padded over and found him standing before a glass case. He had an irresistibly warm, loving expression as he looked at the mummified creature inside. To her surprise, he put his arm around her waist, pulling her in closer as he gazed. She did not protest.

The unfortunate animal had been mummified in the traditional way, limbs bound into a flat-bottomed cylinder, with a clay head atop. This specific cat-face was more feral-looking than most of the photographs Marjorie had seen over the years. It was beautiful in its own way, however, and certainly the best of the lot. The best she’d ever seen. A small label of yellowed cardstock was at its feet, saying only
Mummified Cat, Allegedly Belonging to The Black Pharaoh
.

“It’s a lovely specimen,” whispered Marjorie, knowing she was making the understatement of the decade; knowing, too, that she would need to make up to Edgar, and to his aunt. If she could get this artifact at a good price, let alone a bargain, her reputation at the library as an employee of quality would be assured. “Definitely worth it.”

“Oh, I know.” Zupan squeezed her playfully. “Mau-Mau was mine. Half wildcat, if not more. Such a little menace! Claws like you’ve never seen, and when she bit you, if you didn’t bleed, you’d bruise. When they tricked me into sleep, twenty-seven long centuries ago, she was sent with me. They did us that honor, at least. But when that man Quildring discovered my tomb, he separated us, keeping her but destroying me. He was a fool, but he knew he had not discovered the final resting place of Nehesy, but another Black Pharaoh entirely.”

Marjorie, though intrigued by Zupan’s odd speech, was extremely discomfited by it. Zupan had seemed reasonable up until this point, but was now raving like a madman. No, not raving –
chatting
like a madman, which was even more disturbing.

“He burned my corpse to ash in the belly of a steamship heading up the Nile,” continued Zupan. “He thought that would be the end of me. But I had been mummified with my mouth and eyes closed—so to speak—in order that my soul should not reunite with my body in the afterlife. When they burned me, however, my soul became free to find a new body, and live again.” He turned his head to meet Marjorie’s eyes. “But how could I live without Mau-Mau? She was the only creature in the world who was never afraid of me. Curious, awed, but never
afraid
. So I listened, biding my time in ways that seemed more or less interesting, until I heard her mentioned.”

It was, Marjorie decided, time to go.

Zupan’s speaking volume had increased over the course of his declamation, and so not only were they risking being overheard, he and the situation were becoming increasingly unstable. She inched away from him, hoping his grip around her waist would loosen, but instead he slid his hand down to her hipbone and clutched her there so hard she cried out.

“Your part in this is not yet done,” he said. Marjorie gasped, the strange knife from his final trick back at the Coliseum was in his hand, glowing and jagged with writhing tendrils of light. He flipped it up, improbably grabbed it by its blade, and used it like a hammer to strike at the glass of the display case. It shattered loudly and rained down glass upon the carpet.

Her first instinct was to run for it, but like earlier in the night, when she was atop the pyramid, Marjorie found herself rooted to the earth. Helpless, she watched as Zupan took the cat from its pedestal. She observed him in abject horror, as he used the blade of his knife to cut through the elaborate wrappings around its body, turning them to scraps and dust, revealing the desiccated corpse inside. She wished she could look away; watching a valuable piece of material history destroyed so wantonly was fundamentally repulsive to her.

Yet more repulsive was when, just as suddenly as the knife had appeared, the four canopic jars from the earlier illusion were with them in the room. One by one, the kneeling Zupan decanted them into the open mouth of the cat’s corpse. As he did so, the cat –
somehow
– grew more and more alive before Marjorie’s eyes. The creature’s skin softened, its patchy fur hair turned softer, thicker, and in some places grew back entirely, and its limbs began to loosen. After all four ghost-organs had been funneled into the animal, he applied his mouth to the cat’s snaggle-toothed rictus and breathed into it.

The long-legged, fat-tailed, slender, fox-eyed and – now – whole and live tabby-cat got unsteadily to its feet. After washing its left paw with its pink tongue, it meowed once before jumping into Zupan’s arms and nuzzling his chin with a bone-to-bone
thonk
. Zupan scratched it behind its ears, whispered something, and got to his feet.

“Thank you, Marjorie,” he said kindly. “Your assistance for my final trick tonight has been invaluable. But now, my show is at an end… as is yours.” Zupan shook his head. “I’m sure the police will be able to concoct
some
theory around why such a promising young acquisitions librarian would sneak into a home and destroy a priceless Egyptian artifact. Possibly they will blame your coming to my show. That’s a popular one these days. More likely they’ll see you as a jilted young woman out for revenge on a man who treated you shabbily.” He manipulated her still-motionless body onto the carpet, beside the ruined bindings and ancient dust of the formerly-mummified cat, and placed the hilt of his knife in her hand, where it lengthened into a common ball-peen hammer.

“Here they come,” he said, winking at her – and disappeared.

Only when Mrs. Quildring, in a flowery night-dress, and Edgar, looking like he’d been hitting the “apple juice” all night, rushed into the room, could Marjorie move again. She sat up, hammer in hand, mouth open to explain… but no words came to her.

As he stepped from the boat, Gamal el-Kafir el-Sheikh’s impressions were of warm air and a bright sky. That vivid, alien green so characteristic of the northlands. It was, altogether, a pleasant surprise. There weren’t many passengers; for few people had any reason to come to this far-flung land, and el-Kafir el-Sheikh’s servant – assigned him for the duration of the excavation – found him easily enough. “I am Bille, minherr,” he said in passable Masri. “I may take you the hotel?” He was a tall man, but he stared at his own shoes as he spoke, which in turn prompted el-Kafir el-Sheikh to look down. The fellow had huge feet, big as boats, wrapped in two ill-cobbled shoes of scuffed leather. “Bille what?” el-Kafir el-Sheikh asked him. “Or is it, what-Bille?

This seemed to confuse the big Jutlander. “I’m sorry minherr?”

“I’m asking your full name.”

“Bille Jensen, minherr.”

“Come along, man, don’t quail! I’m an historian, an archaeologist, not a Grendl! I won’t eat you”. The fellow didn’t respond to this, but el-Kafir el-Sheikh clapped him on the back. “My first time here, you know. Though I’ve spent years in libraries learning about it. What a charming looking country!”

“Yes, minherr.”

They rode a horse and cart, the nag a proper north-Europe beast, rust-coloured, barrel-flanked, its legs tasselled with dirty trailing strands of hair. The road was rutted and progress was slow. El-Kafir el-Sheikh didn’t care. The air was full of xylophonic birdsong and the breeze had the authentic tang of occidental exoticism. It was all so
green
! The trees positively foamed with leaves. “Are my colleagues all at the hotel?”

“Minherr?”

“Professor Suyuti? Professor el-Akkad? Or are they at the dig?”

“At the hotel, minherr.”

“You have seen the dig?”

The fellow angled his long-boned face in his master’s direction. Was that fear in the old man’s eyes? “Yes, minherr.”

“Oh it’s a marvellous thing. You know, I have nothing but respect for your people and your culture,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh told him, a touch over-earnestly (but he was prone to over-earnestness). “You should know that these archaeological digs are a way of uncovering the rich history of your folk.”

“Yes, minherr,” the fellow said, sulkily, turning his big head back in the direction of travel.

“I sense your disaffection. You don’t like us rootling around amongst your old kings and dukes.” When this failed to produce a reply, el-Kafir el-Sheikh added: “are you a
superstitious
fellow, Bille? Is it the business with the mummies?”

The servant put a brief sine wave into the reins he was holding and barked a barbaric Jutlandese command at the horse. But he did not answer el-Kafir el-Sheikh question.

“It’s all nonsense, you know, my dear fellow,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh told him, pulling out his pipe and lighting it. “We are men of science. Of course I heard those stories about murders and strange deaths. Which is to say, I read about them in the papers. Back in Cairo there’s a deal of excitement about your mummies, you know. Oh we have mummies back home, you know, but they’re
clean
. The fact is, there’s a certain type of Egyptian who likes nothing better than grisly stories of the bog-mummies, coming alive and turning human victims to sludge. But that it’s a good story doesn’t mean it’s true, now does it!”

The cart trundled round the corner, under an archway formed by two lusciously foliaged trees, and the hotel appeared before them. And sauntering out through the main entrance was Professor Tawfiq el-Akkad. “Gamal, you old rogue!” he cried. “Finally you have come!”

The whole team took tea in the conservatory: el-Kafir el-Sheikh, Suyuti, el-Akkad and Hussein. Everyone called Hussein Gurbati because he was Dom rather than misriyūn; but he didn’t seem to mind. “It’s too late to go out to the site today,” el-Akkad announced. “And tomorrow is Sabbath. But first thing al-Ahad we’ll go straight there. We have a car, you know. I do believe it is the only internal combustion engine in the whole of Jutland!”

“I really can’t wait,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh gushed. “I brought all my books.”

“Oh, it’s your noggin we really need,” said Suyuti.

“Don’t tell me there aren’t any runes,” said el-Kafir el-Sheikh. “I was
promised
runes.”

“Runes,” said Gurbarti, in a bored-sounding voice. “We’ve dozens of tablets, linden-wood mostly, absolutely covered in runes. But it’s not that.”

“People are chatting,” Suyuti said. “In Danish.”

“You mean – Old Danish?”

“I certainly don’t mean new Danish!”

“Which people?”

“Natives; whitters. People who cannot read or write. As to how they could acquire the complex grammar and vocabulary of a dead language… well, some say their god of language, Jut, has put a spell upon them. Cast a spell across time, from a thousand years ago.”

“Good gracious!” El-Kafir el-Sheikh sucked lustily on his pipe stem. “It took me seven years careful study to acquire it. Are you
sure
they’re speaking Old Danish?”

Suyuti’s laugh was like a thunderclap. “That’s what you’re here to determine, my old friend!” he boomed. He took a drink, and when he lowered the cup the hairs of his moustache were dewed with droplets of tea. “That – and the runes.”

“Of course you’ve heard the stories of strange goings on,” Gurbati observed, gloomily.

“Well,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh laughed. “I’ve read some silly stories. People exploding and so on. People turning to… well, manure. I can’t say I believed it.”

“
He
believes it,” Suyuti chortled, clapping Gurbati on the shoulder.

“Really? I didn’t realise you were a superstitious type, Gurbati! And you think it’s connected to your digging up these old mummies? It hardly seems credible.”

“It looks unlikely in the sunlight, I grant you,” said Gurbati. “But you wait. The weather will revert to type tomorrow, and everything will look different. As to the mummies; well, I don’t know. But I do know that there have been strange deaths. The police have opened official investigations on three of them. Talk to Bille. He saw one of the victims die. Actually watched the woman… deliquesce!”

But nothing could dampen el-Kafir el-Sheikh’s spirits. He was actually here, in Jutland, with his university friends, about to take part in the most exciting discovery in the history of archaeology! “Come come,” he said. “It’s 1333! It’s not the dark ages. We are men of science. I’ll keep an open mind,” he added, “of course. But I’m itching to see these mummies, and I don’t believe they’re
cursed
.”

Later that evening, after a splendid supper, they all sat in the conservatory of the hotel. The weather had changed, and el-Kafir el-Sheikh, listened to the rain percussing the roof with a continual, rather soothing rush of noise over their heads. They all smoked. Mohammed Suyuti gave them the benefit of his theory as to why the northerners had failed to rise to the level of the Ummah. “It’s not racial, whatever some people say. I do not hold with those despicable racist views. There’s nothing
intrinsically
inferior about the northerners. It’s an accident of geography.”

“You mean,” said el-Akkad. “The climate.”

“The climate dulls their spirits, it is true,” said Suyuti. “In Africa it is so hot that a man must either wilt or rouse himself to great things. There’s nothing like that here; they all stumble about in a daze. It’s too cold to sleep properly, and also so cold that they can’t properly wake up. But, no, I meant something else. Here.” He pulled a notebook from his pocket, opened it and began to read:

Egypt is not just a piece of land. Egypt is the inventor of civilisation... The strange thing is that this country of great history and unsurpassed civilisation is nothing but a thin strip along the banks of the Nile... This thin strip of land created moral values, launched the concept of monotheism, developed arts, invented science and gave the world a stunning administration. These factors enabled the Egyptians to survive while other cultures and nations withered and died.

“I copied that from a book I was reading. Doesn’t it strike you as true? In Egypt civilisation was focussed about the Nile, and that focus, the pressure that applied to human culture,
generated
civilisation – as carbon is compressed into diamond! But throughout northern Europe there’s no such focus. Population spreads itself more or less equally about the inlands, more or less diffuse, and no great civilisation can coalesce.”

“It’s an interesting theory,” said el-Kafir el-Sheikh, gesturing towards Suyuti with the stem of his pipe. “But I would need to see hard evidence. Science! That’s the key, gentlemen!”

“My father used to tell me,” Gurbati said, in a gloomy voice, “
men contend with the living, not with the dead
. It was his way of telling me to get on with life, and not waste my energies worrying about the past. But here – in Jutland – well, I tell you, the opposite is true. The opposite is literally true.”

“Nonsense,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh retorted. “Don’t tell me you’ve become a slave to superstition?”

“Back home the past is cleaned and tidied away. Here it’s simply left to rot where it falls. It mulches down. These bogs all around us—compacted layers of decaying generations.” He shuddered, visibly. “Magic may not be so difficult to believe as all that, you know. Not here. Not in this land.”

First sun, then rain, and finally mist. The following morning el-Kafir el-Sheikh pulled the curtains back to be faced with an honest-to-goodness Jutland fog. The homely sun and blue sky had been completely erased, as if dissolved in white solution. Boughs from a couple of the nearer trees loomed blackly towards him, looking disconnected from the world as if levitating in mid-air. Everything else was albumen and opacity. He opened his window. The smell of clouds, wet and faintly vegetative; and a weird muffled silence.

Breakfast was a muted affair, as if the fog had gotten into everyone’s spirits. Suyuti spoke at an ordinary volume, which for him was akin to whispering. “You’ll need gloves, and a scarf,” he advised el-Kafir el-Sheikh. “And I recommend a hat. It’s a long drive to the dig, and we’ll have to take it slowly in this weather. Visibility, you know.”

“Chilly, chilly,” el-Akkad confirmed.

The drive was a surreal experience. The road was unsmooth, and the four of them (plus Bille, who was driving) were bounced around, continuously jiggled and agitated; but otherwise el-Kafir el-Sheikh had almost no sensation of motion. Objects might suddenly appear, as if magically transported from nothing into being – the end of a hedgerow, a cow – and lurch towards them, and then vanish into nothingness behind them. And it
was
cold. Worse, el-Kafir el-Sheikh found that his clothes soaked up moisture and quickly became sopping. The sun was a vagueness of light, high up and to the south. Nothing cast a shadow. “I pride myself on my scientific rationalism,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh confided to Gurbati; “but even I can see that – this is a spooky sort of place.”

“It’s so
ancient
,” Gurbati replied, raising his voice over the rattle and hum of the car’s passage. “I mean: Egypt is ancient, obviously. But Egypt has moved on.
This
land is trapped by the past – as if the past is throttling it, preventing the whole country from going forward.” He shuddered. With the cold, perhaps.

“It’s like some vast entity has breathed onto the mirror of the sky, and clouded it over,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh said.

Finally they arrived: two lights like pearl-coloured eyes bright in the fog revealed themselves to be oil-lamps, struggling to light either side of gateway in a fence of knitted wire. A Jutlander boy, presumably alerted by the sound of the approaching vehicle, was standing guard. Bille drove past him, and turned the car to a halt, tossing up a little surf of mud. They had parked in front of a long wooden shed, lit from within. El-Kafir el-Sheikh was not sorry to get inside, for there was a stove in the middle around which they all huddled. “So cold!” el-Kafir el-Sheikh gasped. “And yesterday was sunny and warm!”

“We’re on higher ground,” Gurbati said. “That, and the mist, cools it. That, and that fact that this land is always cold – cold as death! Come! Do you want to see this mummy, or not?”

The four of them went out of the back of the building, leaving Bille scowling by the stove. The trench was two dozen yards away, roofed with canvas; they went down the turf-cut steps one after the other into the dark. It took Suyuti an unconscionably long time to light the lamp, and el-Kafir el-Sheikh stood in the grey mirk trying to see where the mud at his feet ended and the ancient bodies began. But even when light filled the space it was hard to see. “They’re the same colour as the soil,” Gurbati explained, pointing to the first of them. Dark brown bumps and ridges, inset in the ground. Suyuti lit a second lamp and handed it to el-Kafir el-Sheikh; and by squatting down he made out the contours of the body. “The face is,” Suyuti prompted, pointing, “particularly well preserved.”

“Remarkable!” el-Kafir el-Sheikh agreed, holding the lamp closer. And so it was: two thousand years old, yet every detail perfectly preserved – the grain of his chin stubble; the left-curling line of his nose (broken in life, perhaps; or distorted by the pressures of the bog); the creases under his closed eyes; the vertical worry-ridges running up his forehead. As if he were asleep and having a bad dream. The fellow was wearing a thin leather cap, tied under his chin. Moving the lamp, el-Kafir el-Sheikh could see the cord – he’d read about it, of course – tight around the corpse’s neck and trailing down his back like a tentacle; the leather rope that had killed him. “Why the hood?” he wondered aloud. “From Strabo and Tacitus we discover that the northerners stripped their victims naked before sacrificing them to the goddess. And,” he moved the lamp to shine more clearly on the corpse’s emaciated body, a man-shaped, teak-brown leather sack pulled tight around its skeleton. “He is naked. But his
head
is covered!”

“The other bodies we’ve found
have
been bare-headed, as you probably know,” said Suyuti, in a condescending voice. “This chap must have been special.”