Another Pan (48 page)
Authors: Daniel Nayeri
“It’s funny,” said Wendy, “because if you read that story thinking you’re reading about a teenager, your mind automatically fills the blanks with partying and corruption and stuff, but you could just as easily read it about a two-year-old, and everything would still make sense.” She tried to remember Seti from the story. She had only just come from class, and it was easy to recall.
. . . a playboy king, unconcerned with anything beyond his own amusement, disappointed them all. He was not wise enough or cunning enough to stand up to his advisers. He was distracted, not as clever as a god-king should be. Besides all that, he rarely said more than a few words. He spent his days in amusement, forgetting his position and responsibilities. He was weak and malleable, and soon he became nothing more than a vessel for his advisers . . . Seti himself did nothing but feast, laugh, and play
.
She laughed at how her own mind had tricked her. “You know what?” said Wendy, looking at the scene in which Neferat presides over the marriage of her favorite pupil to Seti, who, like all children in Egyptian carvings, is depicted as a tiny adult, about half the height of his wife, but with the expression and posture of a king. “That’s why the story says that the wife took the place of Seti’s mother in his heart. And that’s why Egypt was shocked at the marriage. I’ll bet she was already a teenager.”
“Nice work,” said Peter. He and John began moving away the coffins in front of the nursery, using their feet to move tiles, and creating more room for Wendy. Peter tried to hide his amazement, but Wendy saw the look on his face.
When they had uncovered the nursery door, Peter didn’t waste a moment grabbing for the knob hole. He wasn’t scared of what might be behind the door. In fact, he seemed as confident as ever. He put his hand into the hole and pulled. The door didn’t budge. He reached in farther for a tighter grip and pulled again. The door remained shut.
Without a word, Peter marched toward an old, decrepit coffin, pulled a plank right out of the side, and rammed it into the nursery door. He didn’t even bother warning them to move, and John had to drop to the ground to avoid the oncoming blow.
The door burst open easily, but as soon as it did, an angry scream filled the cave.
Peter pushed the door wider and ran inside.
The nursery was as stifling as a sauna and lined with even more sarcophagi. It was smaller than the antechamber, but not as cramped, since the coffins in this room were far fewer in number.
Now that they knew to look for a small coffin, it seemed that finding Seti’s mummy would be easier. But it soon became clear that the choices had narrowed too much. Everywhere they looked, the sarcophagi were big, adult-size, and adorned with likenesses of the people inside.
Wendy noticed that all around the hiding place, the rock walls were covered with sketches of the same person, over and over again. It was Neferat in many forms. First she was short, a young girl with her parents. Then she was a nursemaid surrounded by many sons. Then she was watching over many children, an evil look on her face, just like the etching in the outer room of the cave. But then, in the latter pictures she saw that Neferat’s face grew longer. Her features hardened. Her image changed into someone, or something, unrecognizable. As Wendy scanned the drawings, she realized the answer to the final mystery. Why was Neferat such a big part of the story? The sketches showed her changing so gradually; it was like she was a spirit, sliding easily from one body to the next. In fact, she was drawn like a spirit, vague and incomplete at times, never standing on the same plane as the figures around her.
“Hurry, Peter,” said Wendy. “I can hear someone coming.”
The darkness was moving closer.
The air grew more and more crushing.
Outside the wall, a shadow was filling the cave with its deathly fumes.
Peter grabbed the plank and began working on a coffin at random. He was losing his cool — that eternal confidence slipping away momentarily — and for that instant, he could do nothing more than dig haphazardly. Peter’s makeshift crowbar sank into the side of a gold-encrusted sarcophagus and cracked just as the dark figure poured into the nursery beside them.
“Peter,” whispered the voice. It was gravelly and muted, harsh and soft, all at the same time. It sent a shiver through their bodies and made Wendy and John freeze in place.
Wendy tried not to scream.
Peter didn’t answer. His hand twitched as he reached for his satchel.
The figure was walking toward them now, a dark, hunched form, shrouded in tattered cloths and completely encircled by some sort of insects.
Wendy thought she heard the icy voice speak again.
John gulped and squeaked something about getting out of there.
Wendy looked at the Dark Lady’s strange face, then at the drawings on the wall, especially the latter ones when Neferat had begun to change, to transform into something else, something monstrous. The figure approaching them now was so much like the latter pictures of Neferat, which also depicted her covered with insects, a queen with a twisted face ruling over moths and flies. The latter sketches showed her with the pursed lips of a governess, the hunched back of a cripple, the wicked expression and careful steps of a thief. This figure now standing before them had the same look of malice and ill will all over her face. And she had something else in common with the pictures of Neferat. Despite her fear, Wendy squinted to see the face emerging from under the moth-eaten hood. Something strange caught her attention — a flash of its deep blue left eye, broken into four pieces.
“That’s not the same . . .” Wendy began, and trailed off, remembering the lithe, diminutive, and almost elegant hooded figure that had attacked John. That figure, too, had the broken eye, but wasn’t nearly as decrepit as this hunchbacked old woman.
“It’s her, though,” said Peter, staring an old nemesis, his own surrogate mother, in the face. “This is the way she
really
looks. I’d know her anywhere.”
Standing here before the death god, Wendy could feel the connection between this ancient woman, Neferat, and the Dark Lady, who was said to be the immortal goddess of death — the goddess who had appeared even in the first legend, hundreds or thousands of years before Neferat, the nursemaid. Because, after all, wasn’t Neferat just a body and the Dark Lady just a spirit? In her father’s books, Wendy had come across this word before —
Neferat:
hatred. She now knew why the walls of this inner sanctum, the home of the most powerful bonedust, the tip of the pyramid, should be filled with pictures of this woman. Wendy knew that Neferat wasn’t simply a woman who had lived thousands of years before. She was much more than that. She had something inside her that was different from all the rest.
Neferat. Hate
. That is one of many names for the darkness in the world. Beelzebub, Legion, and the god of death. Whatever form it takes, whatever cultural icon it inhabits — a horned man, a beautiful woman, a jackal-headed god — it is all the same. The same evil. The same age-old darkness by many names. And here they were, having just opened the door to its home. The sinister spirit that had a grip on Marlowe and refused to let go. The Dark Lady. She wasn’t just one person, but a dark trinity that included so many forms. Young and beautiful, old and ugly, plain and sickly.
Neferat, the girl at the end of a cursed line in whom the spirit lived and worked its evil. Neferat, the beautiful governess Vileroy — and Peter’s much uglier nanny . . . the wicked, hunchbacked, moth-covered nanny, the ancient child thief, the liar.
Neferat, the dark spirit that had inhabited Marlowe for so long and kept a watch over them all with her broken demon eye.
Still,
Wendy thought as she glanced at the sketches of Neferat as a younger woman,
I swear I’ve seen that face before
.
It is 1926. I stand outside Peter’s bedroom. He’s asked for a story, and his father thinks the new nanny could tell it best. He’s hired for his son the most beautiful governess he’s ever seen, a vision of his lost wife — tall and blond. Poor, poor Peter. No mother to tell him stories. A father busy with the responsibilities of adulthood. Even his withered grandfather has nothing to say to him — the old sailor has no interest in children. Peter lives in fear of his grandfather’s wrinkles, his aching rheumatism, his severed hand — replaced with a hook. They are all reminders that Peter, too, will decay. Age will wrinkle and mar him
.
I think I have just the perfect story for little Peter. But first, I hunch my body and grow scars. I age my form by a hundred years . . . show him what I really look like beneath the false beauty. My silk gown becomes a black robe, and I can see that he is frightened. My fingers feel arthritic and knobby. Only my eye remains the same . . . I can never change that. I am an old, hideous crone. Peter is shaking because he knows that this will be the nanny that will put him to sleep, every night, from now on
.
“Come, and I’ll read to you from my favorite book,” I say
.
“No,” he yells, and inches away. “What’s wrong with your back? And you smell funny.”
“Peter, you have a choice,” I say. “Either you listen to my story or I’ll have to show you my hook. You don’t want that, do you? It’s the book or the hook. Your choice.”
“What’s that on your jacket?” he says. “Is that a bug?”
“This is just a little friend. She’ll watch you even when I’m asleep. So you see, Peter? There’s no getting away.”
From under my robe I pull out an antique hook just like his grandfather’s. This will be the beginning of Peter’s immortal fears, a mummy complex, a freezing of his soul. This will be a story about addictions and anchors and things as unstoppable as growing up
.
The nursery was hot, and Wendy could feel the piles of rubble over their heads. Peter was focused on only one thing: the fact that this was the very room where the bones of the baby king were surely waiting, holding the dust that could reverse time itself. Looking upward from the sketches of Neferat, Wendy could see that the room was square but that the walls seemed to slope inward as they came down — so she was certain now that this nursery was the last room before the tip of the upside-down pyramid.
