Sphinx (48 page)

‘This heart is heavy with deceit!’ Horus shrieked, his voice like a bird’s cry. Thoth, holding his feathered quill high, started writing on his papyrus scroll, while to either side of me Isis and her sister Nephthys began to ululate in that hair-raising manner of Arabic mourners.

A small wave suddenly ran across the surface of the pool behind the scales. I turned at the movement; it resonated in my drug-heavy mind, echoing some frightening image: Ammut, the devourer. In terror, I struggled in my chair as the air grew pungent with a fishy stench. The water rippled again and this time I was convinced I saw the flaring eyes of a crocodile in the torchlight.

There was a splash and the gnarled horny head of a crocodile lifted out of the water, its long yellowed teeth snapping at the heart. A lion’s mane hung from its reptilian scales, a travesty of wet and matted fur.

I retched.

A figure stepped from the shadows beyond the flaring torches and walked towards me - normal, human, dressed in a simple cotton dress. This was no double - this had to be Isabella! Fear slammed into the back of my throat, my heart a rattling cannon. I tried to stand, to walk towards her; my arms tore against their bindings and began to bleed.

‘Will you save your consort and surrender Nectanebo’s skybox?’ Isis whispered.

I was jolted out of the artifice, my mind suddenly coming out of its fog. ‘What! What’s that got to do with all this?’

The words tumbled out of me as I tried to close myself against the image of my wife, iridescent in its paradoxical ordinariness. Now I could see the spreading stain of dark blood across her chest, oozing from the wound where her heart had been removed. Whose terrible imagination had concocted this?

‘Give up the astrarium.’ Isabella’s voice sounded in my head but her lips didn’t move. ‘If you do not, I will have no afterlife. I will not even live on in your memory. You will be my condemner, my murderer.’

She had articulated my worst fear: that I had failed to save her and that - equally disturbing - I might forget her entirely. But what on Earth did this have to do with the astrarium? Even with the drugs coursing through me, I knew there was no appeal, no loophole, against the weighing of the heart. Hoping the pain would jolt me into even clearer thinking, I pushed my torn skin against my bonds, but still my mind reeled under the effects of the drug.

‘Osiris, speak your judgement. The heart is heavy, the deceased is guilty!’ Anubis barked.

Ammut’s bulky reptilian body slithered out of the water. I could see that the glistening lion’s pelt merged at her waist into the shiny black hide of a hippo. The creature shook herself dry like a large dog - somehow the familiarity of the gesture made it even more frightening. The heavy crocodile head swung from side to side as tremors ran down the goddess’s torso.

‘Save me! Tell them where it is!’ Isabella whispered urgently.

This was why people believed in visions, I suddenly understood, as the realism of the hallucination battled with my intellectual speculation that I was caught up in some horrific drug-induced sham.

‘No!’ I shouted, my anguished cry solid set against the ephemeral nature of the scene before me.

Her crocodile claws scraping against the stone floor, Ammut slithered closer to the heart sitting on the scales.

Isabella clutched at her chest as if in pain. ‘Tell them, I beg you!’

‘No! None of this is real!’ I screamed. I tore at the rope, if I could only get to my knife.

Ammut lunged forward and grabbed the heart between her jaws as if it were a piece of old meat. She turned her head towards Isis, the heart hanging from her mouth, as if waiting for a command.

‘Not real, my Lord? What is real? The waking world or the sleeping one? The world beyond the mind or the chaos that lies beneath order?’ Isis’s words were like icicles. ‘You must fulfil your role or your consort will be denied entry to the afterlife.’

The light flickered wildly as a huge shadow fell across the blazing torches. The goddess, now silent, was staring at the back wall of the cavern. Across the ceiling, extending down to where the black water lapped the bottom of the limestone, stretched a massive silhouette: a dog-like creature with four slender legs, a long tail with a forked tip, a long beaklike snout and two raised blunt-ended ears. The players all fell to their knees, foreheads to the ground. No one was looking at me, and they seemed too terrified to look at the giant shadow.

With a supreme effort I yanked at my bonds again and managed to slip my knife out. After I’d sawed frantically at the rope, it finally gave. I leaped from the chair, jumped over the figures prostrate on the floor, snatched the heart from Ammut’s jaws and bolted down the long corridor towards the steps that led back up to the surface. Behind me I heard chaos erupting - shouts and footsteps.

I raced up the stone steps. Knowing that I was running for my life, sheer terror propelled me forward. At the top a hand shot out. I stumbled but a figure carrying a torch broke my fall and pulled me into an alcove. Faakhir.

‘This way!’ he cried, waving my abandoned cassock.

We ran towards the light of an open door. Outside, a car was waiting. As I fell into the back seat I managed to murmur the name of the barber’s shop before dropping into unconsciousness.

I woke sweating in the small iron bed. An embroidered blanket had been thrown over me. Shooting pains burst rhythmically over each eye and it was hard to swallow. The naked electric bulb seemed to swing against the smoke-stained ceiling. My mind was numbed into a sensory jumble that made it difficult to make sense of where I was, even who I was. I lay there waiting as my frenetic thoughts slowly collected themselves. I glanced down at my wrists and the red bands burning around them - the marks of restraint. Flashes of the night before began to flicker across my memory: the catacombs, the ceremony, Faakhir helping me to the door of Abdul’s shop, telling me not to look for him but that he would be watching me.

I looked over to the back window. Beyond lay the rooftops of Alexandria. The sun was high; it was about midday, I guessed. Beside the small camp stove sat a bowl of fresh fruit and a bottle of water. Abdul had obviously left some supplies. I reached out and my fingers brushed against a small box on the floor next to the low bed. I sat up and grasped it, slipping my hand into the open top. My fingers hit something sticky and organic in texture. I pulled out a purple lump of muscle tissue; the withered dark flesh bulged out between my fingers.

With a smothered shout, I threw the heart back into the box and leaned over the side of the bed, retching. A few minutes later the shivering finally stopped. I sank back heavily and considered the events of the night before. Why the weighing-of-the-heart ceremony? And why had I been designated as Osiris? Who was the woman who had lured me there? Had it really been Hugh Wollington playing Horus or had that been a figment of my imagination, a desperate attempt to link events and make sense of them? But who else would go to the trouble of creating such an elaborate and macabre charade in order to obtain the astrarium? And if it
was
Wollington, how did he know of the connection between the ritual and Isabella’s recurring nightmare? Was it a charade, or was it real? It was impossible to ascertain; the angles of the room still tilted, my thinking blurry. The Coptic robe that Father Carlotto had given me lay neatly folded at the bottom of the bed. Faakhir must have collected it from where I’d hidden it in the catacombs. Had they been watching me the whole time? What was Faakhir’s role in all this? And where was Mosry?

I heaved myself out of bed and walked over to the mannequin. Taking it apart and feeling inside I reassured myself that the astrarium was safe. Between the explosion at the Sheraton and the horrific scene in the tomb it seemed more crucial than ever not to let it fall into the wrong hands. I glanced back at the box containing the heart. I wasn’t even sure that the heart was human. Then I remembered that I knew someone who would be able to tell me.

 

Demetriou al-Masri peered through his thick half-moon glasses at the heart on the laboratory dish and prodded it.

His office was a windowless annexe off one of the city morgue’s main chambers; I suspected that it might once have been a large cupboard. Dressed in my Coptic robe I’d entered the morgue with remarkable ease, and on seeing my disguise Demetriou had immediately pulled me into his tiny cubicle.

We’d both been staring at the heart for at least five minutes and I was beginning to doubt whether I was going to get a conclusive verdict.

Finally al-Masri cleared his throat and sat back. ‘It is a human heart, from a smallish body, quite possibly female. I would say around thirty years of age.’

My own heart started rattling the bars of my ribcage. ‘My wife’s?’

‘It might be, it might not. That is not something I can confirm.’ He sighed and began packing the heart back into the container in which I had brought it. ‘May I ask how you came by the organ?’

‘It was delivered to the villa anonymously.’

The coroner studied me for a moment, then handed me the container. ‘Run, my friend, run as fast and as hard as you can. I do not want to find myself staring down at your body tomorrow.’

He opened the door and the room was immediately flooded by the greenish fluorescent lights of the morgue beyond. I glanced back at the windowless room. Demetriou al-Masri followed my gaze.

‘I had a view once, but they demoted me. Curiosity can be very bad for one’s career. You should be careful. These are dangerous times. Even for a cleric,’ he added, with an ironic smile.

 

I went straight to Chatby Cemetery, clutching Isabella’s heart. My air of purpose must have been apparent for the crowds parted to make way as I strode along the thronging streets. I was indifferent to my fate, intent on only one thing.

It was extraordinary to watch how people reacted to me. Some moved respectfully out of my path, others brushed past roughly as if being deliberately rude. Reassuringly, all of them appeared to accept me as a cleric.

The cemetery was empty of living humans, apart from a few gardeners patiently clipping the trees that ran in avenues between the graves. I walked through the dappled light, unrecognisable as the man who had walked the same path a couple of weeks before.

Someone had laid fresh flowers - white lilies - across the marble slab of Isabella’s grave. The scent reminded me of the flowers she used to bring back from the street markets in London, filling the apartment with their fragrance. Whispering apologies to my dead wife, I dug a small hole in the earth at the foot of the grave and buried her heart. As I stood up I noticed that the small portal, the miniature door for her Ba, was still there on the side of the gravestone.

 

In the room above Abdul’s shop I pulled the astrarium from its hiding place and unpacked it again, my hands trembling. My experience in the catacombs had unnerved me, had shaken up my old belief system until I didn’t know what to believe any more. Anything seemed possible. Staring at the small glinting clocklike mechanism, I could now almost conceive how it might have destroyed kings and saved a people, how it could have ruined nations and made a beggar into a Pharaoh. In a moment of obstinate egoism, I had challenged it. I peered closer. There was something different about it. The pointer was still turned to my birth date and . . . No. It was impossible. There it was, startlingly harsh in its undeniable presence: Seth’s death head glinting sinisterly in the lamplight. The small silver-black death pointer had finally sprung up, marking the date of my own supposed death. I didn’t dare look. Suddenly nauseous, I steadied myself against the table.

How could the pointer have appeared by itself? I had only put in my birth date; I hadn’t even touched anything else. Thinking it must be some mechanical fault, I inserted the Was and tried turning the dials again, but the cogs were unyielding. I forced the key to the point where I was afraid it might snap in half. The pointers stayed immobile: fastened on the date of my birth and, now, of my death. A slow dread filled me. I’d survived the blowout at Abu Rudeis, the explosion at the hotel and then the ritual in the catacombs, but I couldn’t deny the very real sense that death had begun to shadow me.

I peered at the death pointer and began to draw the outline of the tiny silver figure at its tip - a doglike beast with an elongated face and a forked tail - onto a blotter. I held it up. Shuddering, I recognised the creature, familiar from Amelia’s lecture, whose shadow had appeared on the wall of the catacomb just before I’d fled: Seth, the god of war, chaos and destruction. I couldn’t stop myself. Frantically, I counted the tiny dashes running between the hieroglyphs of the full moon on the dial. The next full moon was in eight days. Did that mean my death date was just over a week away?

Suddenly, I had a visceral comprehension of Isabella’s blind panic those few days before she drowned. Despite myself, despite my inbuilt scepticism, I felt the same desperation sweep through me. It was all just ridiculous superstition, I told myself. The device had originally been constructed as a piece of political propaganda, a way of intimidating and impressing Nectanebo’s followers, of confirming his status as a great magus. Amelia Lynhurst had said herself that the Pharaoh’s enemies had turned the device against him and used it to orchestrate his death date. It was merely a toy that could be manipulated any way the user chose - just dials and a clockwork mechanism. It had no control over anything. But I couldn’t prevent my mind returning to the same question over and over: could it have stopped Isabella dying on the death date predicted for her?