7 Souls (23 page)

“Put that away,” Dylan said quietly. His eyes were squeezed shut. “Get that thing away so I can’t see it.”

Mary folded the note in half, ready to return it to Dylan’s overcoat pocket, when she suddenly noticed something else. A weak, fragrant aroma, barely noticeable—nearly recognizable—coming from the parchment in her hand.

Wrinkling her nose, Mary brought the paper close to her face and closed her eyes, breathing in its smell and realizing, with slow, inevitable dismay, that she
did
recognize it; there was absolutely no mistaking it.

The shock, surprise, and dread that shot through her wasn’t a flood of adrenaline or fear—it was something else. A deeper, more unsettling sensation, a growing awareness that she was on the edge of real understanding—and that everything that had happened up to this point was just the beginning, just the outer walls of a dark labyrinth she would have to enter.

“What
is
it?” Dylan asked. “Why are you—”

“Turn the car around.”

“What?
Why?
I don’t—”

“We have to go back uptown. Come on—turn the car around.”

Dylan was craning his neck, looking for traffic as he obediently flicked the turn signal. “But where are we going?” he demanded. “What are we doing?”

“We’re going to jog your memory.”

D
YLAN HAD FOUND A
parking spot—miraculously—just around the corner on Ninety-fifth Street off Amsterdam, and had quickly locked the car. Mary looked around uneasily at the familiar shadows of her own neighborhood. Now, with the two of them crammed into the tiny elevator on their way to the fifth-floor landing, she found herself wondering just how safe they were.

“Do you have your keys?” Dylan asked. Mary nodded as the elevator door rumbled open (in its usual maddeningly slow way). She led him out, past the dim bulbs and the other apartments and over to the familiar, hateful front door with
SHAYNE M
still printed on the small card beneath the doorbell (although it had been ten years since her father died).

This isn’t a good idea
, Mary thought as she snapped the locks open, returning her keys to her—Dylan’s—jeans pocket.
This isn’t a good idea at all
.

But it couldn’t be helped. She
had
to bring Dylan here.

“Your mom’s probably home,” Dylan whispered in the silence. Mary flicked on the overhead light, leading him over the warped wooden floorboards.
He’s been here before
, Mary remembered.
Many, many times—when he was just Scruffy Dylan and I wasn’t paying any attention
.

As Dylan walked directly over the spot on the floor where he would end up lying in a spreading pool of his own blood, Mary felt a wave of fear and anxiety pass over her.
We shouldn’t be here—this is a big mistake
, she told herself again.
We need to run
.

But there was something else she needed to do too.

“Come on,” Mary whispered, pulling him by the wrist, down the apartment’s narrow corridor, past the kitchen and bathroom—to the third bedroom door.

Dad’s study
.

This was the room Morton Shayne had used as an office. His actual place of work, where he saw patients, had been across town, in a shared office that he’d split with a couple of other psychotherapists, but this was where he always did his real work, studying cases and writing articles for journals. Nobody went in except Dad—and since he’d died, nobody ever went in there at all.

But that’s not true
, Mary reminded herself as she took a deep breath and turned the old glass doorknob and pushed the door open. It creaked against the warped floor and dust cascaded down through the overhead corridor light.
Ellen comes in here. Ellen comes in here all the time
.

The moment the door was open, the stale corridor air was flooded with
that smell
—the most familiar and most melancholy aroma in the world; one that Mary had known her entire life, that permeated her oldest, deepest memories of life as a little girl, of the strange, bright world of early childhood that was gone forever.

The smell of her father’s tobacco—his beloved Borkum Riff pipe tobacco.

The tobacco aroma was all over the note she’d found in Dylan’s pocket—it was so pungent, so unmistakable that she’d picked up the scent even before she brought the paper to her nose. Now, stepping forward into the pitch black of her father’s study, that same aroma, blended with the smells of old books, mildew and stale air, was flooding her nostrils, filling her with nostalgia and sadness and dread.

“Here’s the light,” Dylan whispered, finding a switch and snapping on the overhead bulb.

The room was tiny, with a narrow window that looked out on the same air shaft Mary’s window did. The room was nearly filled by a gigantic oak desk, which was covered in stacks of papers and books and an old, brass gooseneck lamp. The computer was gone. (Mom
sold it
, Mary remembered.
The only time she dealt with this room at all.)
The walls held rows of pictures: of Dad’s college days at Swarthmore, of himself and Mom when they were a young couple, of the baby girls in strollers being pushed down Riverside Drive. Morton Shayne’s Columbia PhD and his therapist’s license were proudly framed on the other wall. Mary remembered everything about the room, even though she hadn’t set foot in here for ten years.

But Ellen had. The floor was littered with what were obviously Ellen’s belongings; there was a David Bowie CD that could not possibly have belonged to Morton Shayne, who had only liked classical music. There were several of Ellen’s schoolbooks on the desk, Mary saw now, along with a worn paperback of
The Fellowship of the Ring
and two or three empty Diet Coke cans in the rusted wire wastebasket.

“Mary?” Dylan said quietly, making her jump. “Why are we here?”

“Have you ever been in here?”

“No. I mean—” Dylan still sounded dazed. “I don’t think so. No. Probably not.”

Make up your mind
, Mary thought, still so intoxicated with the overwhelming pipe-tobacco aroma that she almost imagined she could smell her father. The sorrow and grief that she had avoided so carefully was threatening to drown her.
Make up your mind, because we’ve got to go
. Again Mary remembered the blood on the floor.
This isn’t a safe place to be
.

“Look at this,” Dylan said, picking up a book from a shelf on the desk.

The book was old, threadbare: a jacketless hardcover that must have been published decades ago. It was bound in what must at one time have been a luxurious purple cloth binding but had deteriorated over the years to a fuzzy-edged, pale remnant of itself. The spine and cover were bare, except for a partially worn away inlaid gold symbol. The symbol was a stylized, asymmetrical almond-shaped eye.

Dylan carefully swung the book’s cover open.

The frontispiece was blank. No publisher’s mark, no copyright date—nothing.

“What is it?” Mary couldn’t decipher Dylan’s expression. He kept turning the yellowed pages, which were ornamented with vertical columns of small drawn figures, ghostly shapes printed in fading ink. The book was so old that the frail, smooth pages were coming loose from the binding. Mary leaned closer as Dylan traced his finger along the drawings.

“Khetti Satha Shemsu,”
Dylan murmured, pointing at the symbols. “I actually recognize that.”

“What do you mean, you
recognize
it? How can you possibly—”

“It’s what I do,” Dylan explained. “Languages, and linguistic history—it’s going to be my major.”

“So what kind of symbols are those?”

“Hieroglyphics,” Dylan told her, flicking on the desk lamp and moving the book under its weak glow. Mary stared at the strange sideways figures—men or women (it was impossible to tell which) with odd clothes and headgear, surrounded by inexplicable, precisely drawn icons. “Egyptian hieroglyphics—from ancient Egypt. From, like, three thousand years ago.”

“Is the whole book—”

“There’s stuff in English, too.” Dylan showed her, flipping ahead in the book. Most of its pages were murky gray illustrations of sheets of hieroglyphics, interspersed with dense passages of English text. “It’s some kind of facsimile edition of … Look.” He showed her the thin, reedy typography on the book’s title page:

M
AGICKS
& I
NCANTATIONS OF
H
ORUS THE
S
ON OF
T
NAHSIT
.

Being a Full and Complete REPRODUCTION of Papyrus Rolls of 2600 B.C., the Tomb of Senneferi Notes & Translations by the Hon. Sir Frederick Hollead, LONDON, 1858.

“What the hell?” Mary flinched as a yellowed corner of the book’s title page flaked off in her hand. “What is this?”

“A book of spells,” Dylan marveled, his scruffy hair hanging in his eyes. “An ancient book of spells. It must have been, like, a roll of papyrus that got mummified, preserved, from, um, from some kind of archaeological dig somewhere … and, like, restored and copied in the nineteenth century, when all those tombs got opened.”

“I don’t understand—”

“There’s a marked page,” Dylan murmured, frowning in concentration. “Look.”

A yellow and white plastic New York City Transit Authority MetroCard was jammed between the book’s pages. Dylan flipped the fragile pages forward and opened the book wide.

THE CURSE OF 7 SOULS

The Highest Servants of the Ancient Magick believed that Man contains seven souls. In mockery of their foolish beliefs, Horus the Son of Tnahsit perfected a vengeful curse to smite enemies with the terrible power of this mystical Number. The Ritual must be obeyed exactly: The Spell-Caster utters the Incantation before an Unclothed Victim Slumbering beneath an open Southern sky, who upon awakening is given an Amulet of Tnahsit as a Keepsake. The Spell-Caster chooses seven Minions, the seven Men and Women who most despise the Victim, and summons them with a written Invocation Marked with a Token of Tnahsit’s eye.
[Translated Incantation and Invocation Reproduced below.—F.H.]
The Spell-Caster commands the Minions to bring forth their own Hatred and Wrathful Anger in the torture and punishment of the Victim. If, by the time of one Passing of the Sun, the Curse of 7 Souls reaches its full fruition and the Victim lies Dead, then the Victim’s suffering will continue in the afterlife as he revisits the Ba of all 7 Minions, experiencing both the Pain he has caused them, and all of their vengeful Ire. The Soul of the Victim then scatters to Oblivion, unless the Victim has achieved Enlightenment and is reborn as an Akh, or new Soul, so finding a new vessel, or Ka, on Earth. Whatever the fate of the Victim’s Soul, when the day is done, the Minions will forget all that they have done in Service of the Curse: their Vengeance shall be complete, and so their memories shall be clean, and no trace of Horus’s Magick will remain upon the Earth. Horus ends the Curse with a warning: The Spell-Caster has only one day to fulfill his murderous desires, for if the Victim still lives after a day has passed, then the Spell Expires, and all shall be forgotten.

Mary realized she’d collapsed into her father’s leather-covered desk chair while she was reading. She was staring at the page of the book like it was the only thing she could see, the only thing anyone could see, in the entire world.

The Curse of 7 Souls
, she thought weakly.
I’ve been cursed
.

Of course she believed it all, without the slightest hesitation. All her doubt was gone—left behind somewhere around the time she’d come back from the dead and
watched
her friends plot against her
—participated
in the master plan that Horus’s ancient spell had somehow actually conjured out of the air. She didn’t have any doubt left.

I’m not hallucinating; I’m not dreaming; I’m not crazy
, she reminded herself again.
And this all makes sense
.

“Ellen cast the spell,” Mary whispered. She was crying, but she couldn’t feel it—she only knew because the tears were blurring and stinging her eyes. She didn’t feel anything at all. “Ellen cast the spell on me. She”—Mary looked up at Dylan, but she couldn’t see anything through the tears—“she hates me. Hated me, like you all hate me—and she did something about it. She did this.”

“Are you sure? What about the amulet?” Dylan objected. “Did you ever get anything like an amulet from Ellen? It says she had to give you some—”

“It was Ellen!”
Mary sobbed, wiping her eyes. Dylan’s hand was on her shoulder and she wanted to grab it and clutch at him, wailing in self-pity and sadness and remorse, but she was too numb to move. “Didn’t you read what it says? The note with the eye on it! Your amnesia! My own sister wanted me dead because she hates me so much!”

“Wait,” Dylan murmured. He leaned his shaggy head closer to the book, peering intently at the murky hieroglyphics. He tapped his finger against a group of symbols so faded and small that Mary could barely make them out. “Wait—this is wrong. Jesus, this is wrong. Ellen needs to see this—”

Boom! Boom!
There was a loud banging on the apartment’s front door.

Dylan jumped—his whole body tensed. His finger stabbed against the fragile book, and the illustrated page he’d been examining tore free of the binding. He grabbed Mary’s hand. She grabbed back, pressing against him.

“Stay here,” Dylan told her. “I’ll deal with it.”

No, no, no—

There was no way she was going to let him do that. It was beginning to occur to Mary that she’d made another mistake, that she’d messed up again and that the consequences were going to be very bad.
Too much time in this room
, she scolded herself as the banging on the front door repeated.
Too much curiosity when Dylan was right all along, we should be RUNNING—

“Don’t go out there,” she told Dylan, clinging to him. “Please don’t go out there.”