The Book of the Dead (31 page)

I approached the door and one of the two uniformed guards stationed at a metal detector shook her head and said, “Monsieur, dix minutes jusqu’à fermeture.” I made an excuse about forgetting something at the baggage check earlier. I wouldn’t be more than ten minutes; I was just going to pop in and collect my item and come straight out. She waved me through.

I entered a storeroom, stripped off my clothes, removed the wig and propped myself in the corner. Some time later, the security guards made a final sweep of the gallery. There was nothing more than a cursory scan of torchlight through my store room; evidently, I appeared in place alongside a clutter of other artefacts. I waited a few more minutes for the lights to go off and the quiet to settle, then clothed myself. I had considered meeting him au naturel, to show my deference, but something stopped me. I wanted to be at an advantage.

He lay in a glass case in the centre of an honourably large corner room. The lid of the sarcophagus had been sawn through and opened to reveal his chest and face, a few original items of gravewealth scattered around artfully, bright skeins padding him in the box. He was clearly a highlight of this exhibition and I felt a little burp of pride. You know, we’ve stuck around for a lot longer than most. I come from a good family.

Amenhotep III looked like he was sleeping.

I tapped on the glass in the secret rhythm our family had held for millennia.

My father’s face stirred and his body gradually warmed to life. He sat up, grimaced and stretched.

“It took you long enough, didn’t it?”

I wanted to be the adult here, to behave rationally, but something about this man provoked the basest of reactions. I regressed to a three-year-old whenever I saw him. “I’m here now,” I said.

“I’m being packed up and shipped off somewhere tomorrow. You know this? Probably stay in storage for decades.”

“Yes.”

“You come on the last day. Why bother?”

“My mother sent me. To send the respects of the family. That’s the way things are done traditionally, aren’t they?” I wish I could keep the petulance out of my voice. My inability to control my tone, to prove to him that I grown, beyond him, despite him, made me feel more naked than any number of layers could hide.

“Open this thing, boy,” he said. “I can barely hear you.”

I located the lock of the glass case and picked it. You’ve learn several skills when you get to my age. I opened the door. Amenhotep gestured me inside. I sat on the edge of the sarcophagus around his waist level.

“What’s that smell?” he asked.

“What sm– Oh. Ice cream. I had some earlier and then a long, warm walk. I didn’t manage to ablute properly before I came.”

He shook his head, rolled his eyes with a crackle.

“How is Tiye?”

“She misses you. In fact, I have not come only to send the family’s regards. I am here as a formal emissary from Mother, Uncle Amenemopet, and several of your consorts and their houses. They would like you to consider coming back.”

“Back? To what? Our kingdom is gone. Millennia ago! Does your mother want me to come back to live like you, hiding in the dark like a snivelling rat?”

“Father, I don’t –”

“
They
are the rats, these creatures we were cursed to spawn, teeming without order or respect across the face of the…” He seemed to tire of his rant. He knew I’d heard it before.

“You should give them a chance, Father. Get out into the world a little. You’ll see it’s not so bad. You should see them as our legitimate children. They still love grandeur, they love their past, the love the future. They love change. That is something we were never much good at.”

“Humpf.”

“Just today I saw some brand new buildings, right here in Paris. They reminded me so much of home. There’s still the drive to build, to make their mark, that speaks of an unwavering pride and mastery.”

“You always liked your monomania, didn’t you, boy? How’s monotheism treating you these days?”

“You can’t let that go, can you, Father?” When I reigned, I saw sense in my mother’s growing conviction that we should worship a single god, the Aten, above others. It didn’t go down so well with the conservatives, and the elders shunned me for a long time after that. “Despite what you think of it, you know full well that monotheism was the way of the future. The entire world adopted it. It led to great things.”

“Yes, great. Absolutely. I read the news the news, boy. I don’t sleep all day. Your world of the future is a bastion of order, light, labour, tolerance and advance, isn’t it?”

“It is! It’s exactly that, Father!”

“Let’s retain our differences.” Father turned and sighed, and I could sense something different in him, something frail.

“Of course. I didn’t come to annoy you, Father. I came bearing the deep respect of your family; Mother’s, and my own.”

He faced me again. “Thank you,” he said, brittly.

“Mother misses you; the young ones miss you. Think of coming home, or at least of leaving this confinement.”

“Why? At least here, on display, most of the ogling spawn come out of some debased form of regard. They pay homage. The descendants out there … they’re disrespectful.”

I thought of the children on the metro steps; but also of the young woman who helped me up the other side. I didn’t know what to argue, so I didn’t. “There are marvels out there, Father,” I said. “You’d like them.”

“You should get home, boy.”

He turned his back again and I thought he was dismissing me. I started to walk away.

“Wait,” he said. He was holding a red and azure scarab, one of the trinkets he’d been displayed with. “Your mother was looking for this some time back.”

“Do you want me to take it back to her?” I didn’t come closer.

“Let me hang onto it for now.”

At dawn, when the guard changed, I snuck out of the service door and made my way along the avenue to the Place de la Concorde. The obelisk seemed perverse planted there, stuck like a thorn in an ants’ nest, the cars milling mindless and officious around its base, heedless of the power of Aten that the rock was drenched in, the lifefuls of blood that had charged it. I couldn’t get that pale boy’s face out of my head. Maybe my father and the huddled elders were right. Maybe the golden days had passed.

I was about to step into the road when I heard someone calling behind me. “Monsieur! Monsieur!”

I checked my garments, wondering if my body stocking was showing again, but it was not.

“Monsieur! Monsieur!” the voice repeated. I was tired. I didn’t want to turn. The man could be calling anyone. But the other pedestrians waiting at the crossing were angling looks in my direction and I knew the voice was hailing me.

Still the call came, and now in a different tone. At length, I turned to see a red-faced police officer striding up behind me.

Was he in trouble? And how might I help him?

I had no intention of shouting back to him to ask what he wanted, so I shrugged and turned my hands. This seemed to irritate him and he broke into a lazy trot, his face blooming with colour.

“Je m’escuse,” I started. “Je ne–”

“Vous devez retirer la capuche, monsieur.”

His words were polite, but his bearing was not. Take off my hood? But why? He was still advancing, that wary outrage colouring his face. I was afraid he would try to grab me or even strike me, and I did not want to disintegrate. I took a step away from him and as carefully and respectfully as I could, I removed the hood of my djellaba. Aware of how I must look: an emaciated old man with greasy, wrinkled skin and an unnatural wig, I raised my hands. Perhaps he would sympathise with me, think I was the victim of a disease.

“You are not to wear headdress in this country,” he said in English, that mongrel, common-denominator patois they all default to these days. “Perhaps where you come from,” he added. “Here, we are in France. You respect our customs.” At last he was close enough to me to stop approaching. He may have been myopic, because it was only when he glanced at my face from this range that his cheeks paled. He nodded once, then turned on his heel with a mutter. A French man wearing a peaked cap shook his head as he passed; whether in sympathy or antipathy, I was unsure.

I was playing backgammon with Kiya when Mother came over and showed me a news article on her tablet. “Priceless Egyptian Artefacts Missing from French Museum. Lax Security Blamed.”

We both smiled, our tendons popping. I wondered what flavour he’d like when he came home.

This is the fourth release of documents from the uncatalogued cache found in the Central Archive of the British Museum six months ago. The handwriting remains the same and continues from prior material. Dating of the paper and internal clues in this bundle led us to believe that it may have been concealed in the stacks by the eminent Keeper of the Egyptian Rooms, Sir Samuel Birch (1813-1885), probably near the very end of his life. His intent remains unclear.– Ed.

Minutes of the 77th Meeting of the Praetorian Club, 17th June 1885

Reading of the Brothers in attendance
. [Names scratched out]

The roll-call of the dearly departed was read.

Following the Treasurer’s report, it fell, as always, to the nominated Secretary to the Committee to record the discursive part of the proceedings, to preserve a true record of the transactions of the club. As recorded in the April meeting, Brother Monkhouse Lee had inquired as to the suitability of inviting Professor Ferrara, given that he was known for his extraordinary experiences. Worries were expressed, it being well known that Ferrara had been blackballed from both the Oriental Club and the Athenaeum. After discussion, and a vote, Monkhouse Lee was given permission to deliver a letter of invitation, outlining the requirements that Ferrara must be willing to record, in full confidence, a true record of any experience that might fall under the category “psychical”, however catholically defined.

At this meeting, Professor Ferrara was duly entered as Guest.

Record of Account 77, delivered by Professor Ferrara

The Professor is a gentleman of impeccable dress and manners, which belies his reputation amongst clubmen of traditional hue who will not countenance him even as a Stranger. He has a dark beard and swarthy visage, the imprint of his extensive foreign travels, and wears tinted eyeglasses, a legacy of the opthalmia that bedevils the East.

Monkhouse Lee introduced the man. With Ferrara’s roguish history, we were fascinated and repelled in equal measure. He exuded immense self-confidence where so many Guests had faltered before this company. After a record of his public accomplishments (Monkhouse Lee did not hint at rumours otherwise), the Professor was invited to speak. He contemplated the coal of his cigar, of Egyptian or Turkish tobacco from the aroma, and smiled wolfishly around the assembled company.

“Many of you will remember the Gaddis case of 1880.”

He had made a decision to shock us. Several men visibly started. They had not expected this. It was not hard to recall these events, even though five years had passed.

“Did you know that I resolved crucial elements of that case for the authorities?” the Professor said, smiling nonchalantly again. “And the two other murders? It wasn’t possible to have a public record, of course, since it hardly resolved itself into a legal case in the end. It was scarcely – “ his hand stirred the heavy aromatic smoke as he searched for a word.

He did not finish amidst the consternation. Two other murders? In London? It was impossible to conceive. The man’s morals were suspect already. His woeful record had not thus far stretched to mendacity. Was the man a charlatan?

Everyone in that room remembered that the body of Gaddis had been found in the Reading Room of the British Museum under the great dome, amidst much local disorder. The ligature was visible and the blackened face told the grim story of asphyxiation. Museum authorities called the police at once, and the intelligence emerged the following morning that the great Egyptian diplomat and scholar, Gaddis the Copt, had been murdered. No one knew how: the doors had been locked at six, and there was no sign of broken locks anywhere in the building. Some presumed Gaddis must have hidden in the building at the close of day, but this was out of keeping with his known habits and would have risked an enormous diplomatic scandal. No other illicit visitors had been discovered after an extensive search.

Gaddis was a guest to the court of Victoria, the greatest Orientalist of his day, one of the most trusted advisors to the Colonial Office on Egyptian matters. French plotters in Cairo muttered calumnies against the English and their disgusting newspaper men fanned the flames. As the weeks stretched into months and no solution to the crime emerged, British agents lost influence in the court of the Khedive. It had been a political disaster. Enemies of the Liberals were willing to put the catastrophe of the Egyptian uprising down to the dark arts conjured by the Gaddis murder. We smarted still from the greater disasters that followed. Several men from the Club had known General Gordon, and thirsted for revenge on the dervishes that slaughtered him in Khartoum.

So difficult was this history, it was something of a
tabou
these days to mention Gaddis in relaxed company. Many felt personally insulted by Ferrara’s faux pas.

“Sir,” Lord Coningsby spluttered, “I remind you that the rules are strict: what you tell must not be embellished, but a strict record of truth. I hardly – “

Tinted spectacles flashed in the firelight. “What I say is perfectly true: Gaddis, and two other murders. You knew Birch?”

“Sir Samuel Birch was the greatest Keeper in the history of the Museum. If you impugn him, then – “

“Did he speak of the mutilated book? The Levi?”

At once Coningsby’s objections seemed to have been met. “He did, sir. That was kept strictly secret.”

The Westminster men nodded sagely at each other. Few knew that an edition of Eliphas Levi’s
Dogme et Ritual de la Haute Magie
had been discovered torn and destroyed by the body. Some had murmured that the pages were laid out in an occult pattern. The Museum authorities and the Metropolitan police kept these details secret, to calm nerves but additionally not to bring more waves of occultists to the Reading Room, muddying matters with their mumbo-jumbo.

With the sense of a test passed, the Professor recounted his tale.

That day, the Professor began, I was in my Albany rooms when at 8.30 a.m. I received a cryptic telegram from Birch requesting my urgent presence at the Museum. By the time I arrived, there were already lost souls hovering under the portico, those men and women who had been denied their daily entry to the library. A temporary closure was announced to the public on notices at the gates.

I presented my credentials and was taken at once into the Reading Room. At the entrance, Birch, in dusty clothes and looking more burdened with responsibility than usual, shook my hand and without a word led me to the body. Thank the heavens the police and guards had as yet moved nothing. Death by strangulation was the obvious conclusion. I could not recognise Gaddis, although I had heard him speak at the Royal African Society on the problems of cotton production in the Nile delta. His features were distended; the tongue blackened; the eyes protruded, staring in horror, and were already milky with death. The suffering of Gaddis the Copt had been quite horrible.

Papers discovered upon the body alerted one of the policemen to the diplomatic implications of the death. Birch had taken personal command of the matter.

There were signs of great disorder; the body was surrounded by torn books and newspapers. They looked very much as if they had been ripped to shreds by an enraged animal, or else were evidence of a madman’s frenzy. A book, a volume of the
Proceedings of the Royal Oriental Society
, had been rent to pieces; the binding ripped asunder with gargantuan force. I glanced at the newspapers to see their dates and headlines, and noted amongst the London evening papers, the
Pall Mall
and the
Westminster
; also a copy of the
Boston Globe
, which was several weeks older.

It was the books, however, that commanded attention, and led to my hasty invitation. Amidst works on the ancient architecture of Egyptian temples and the Knossos Labyrinth, there, pages torn out with terrible violence, was that notorious work by that Frenchman Levi. Pages with magical diagrams had been laid out on the floor.

“You can see there are five points?” Birch muttered to me, pointing to them obliquely. “A bad business.”

“I wonder that you have not asked Burton to attend”, I tried. One of the investigators overheard me and stepped forwards.

“He is not, I’m told, in town,” he said meaningfully, but in a way that warned me not to proceed too publicly. There were many junior members of the Museum still milling around.

I liked him at once. He introduced himself as Jack Richards of the Metropolitan police, and proved an uncommonly bright fellow. We formed a rapport instantly. Some of you will know that he subsequently went on to work on business overseas for the War Office and served the Queen in many escapades.

Gaddis had been quite agitated in his researches, we soon discovered. An elderly librarian sat at one of the radiating desks was able to provide ample intelligence of Gaddis’ last days. His demeanour was strange and his requests were much remarked upon. He asked for books that the catalogue contained no records of ever having existed. Those that did had names blackened by a reputation for blasphemy and outrage. Gaddis spoke earnestly with the occultist Samuel Mathers, displaying an agitation that brought a reprimand from the librarian. He sought an introduction to Sir Richard Burton, who refused to see him. In the course of that morning, we learnt that Gaddis haunted the antiquities shops in the vicinity, where disreputable business is still conducted.

Inquiries amongst the traders soon told us that Gaddis had been trying to acquire an Egyptian stela with an inscription propitiating Thoth, the god of scribes. He was in every shop, wild-eyed and pleading. He offered vast sums for the object, but in vain. His distressed manner meant those traders could no longer trust him, and refused his pleas.

By luncheon, officers of the Metropolitan police had reached the dubious dealers of Little Russell Street, that questionable environ with its dusky courts and open staircases. On the backstairs of a lowly hovel just beyond the choked graveyard of St. George’s, they found an odd little Egyptian with something not quite right about his papers. He was called Ismail Mazhar. A tiny man in a djellaba, baked nut brown by the desert sun. The room was stuffed was scarabs and ushabti, fragments of stone chiselled with unholy writings. Tottering stacks of items were stuffed every which way in that tiny room, many resting in packing paper hastily torn open, as if they were chrysalids that had given birth to mute monsters.

Upstairs, behind a heavy Ottoman curtain, the men found some kind of shrine with votary incense burning. That was enough for the agents: they arrested the man and held him on suspicion.

By the evening, that little Egyptian johnny was also dead.

As the agents combed over the dusty piles of papers on his desk, he had been left alone for a minute or two. At first, they thought he had made flight and the constables guarding the door were alerted to secure the posts at the street entrances, but a search soon enough revealed his body behind the curtain.

The hansom delivered me to the address within minutes. I arrived as Richards was also paying his cabman. Richards told the man on the door to keep his lips sealed and bring warning if any newspapermen appeared. No one was to know, for a second death would begin to cause disquiet and unhelpful attention for the inquiry. It was his fast thinking that prevented this story entering distressing public circulation.

Together, we went up those filthy back-stairs.

We stopped on the threshold. With a sharp order, Richards cleared the room of the milling men, so that we could see the body in situ. It was as before: asphyxiation with a ligature, a great disorder of torn paper around the body, newspapers, books, letters and bills of sale, the wrappings of artefacts sent from the fly-blown bazaars of Zagazig. Some were papyri, the hieroglyphic text torn in half, ancient secrets lost eternally now in this ghastly rookery. What a fate for the wisdom of the ages. In the foul miasma was abundant evidence that some of the papers had either fallen in to the flames or been pushed there deliberately.

“Perhaps the victim or his assailant was trying to burn something,” Richards said, and fell to a study of the sooty relics. There was a riot of Arabic, English and hieroglyphic text. To the unlearned eye, it was hopeless.

“No books this time,” Richards said, standing back. “No Levi texts. No pentangles.”

I was pleased with his observation. “That is good; let them think Gaddis was killed by black magic nonsense. We must keep this quiet: this is something altogether darker, I fear.”

“Darker?”

“You have gathered that this is a temple to leave offerings to that statue there? It is Thoth, I believe.”

“The god of scribes”, Richards said. “I acquired that knowledge this morning. But that is the extent of my learning, I’m afraid.”

“Something else. Something I had not much considered before. You think there is something strange about the ligature, Richards?”

Richards tried to avoid meeting the terror in the bulging eyes of the strangled Arab, as he stooped down close to the body. He lifted the djellaba to scrutinise the neck.

“Why, it’s twisted paper!”

“I thought as much this morning, in the Reading Room.”

Richards started. “Gaddis too?” He had clearly not noticed that odd detail. “Is that not what the Thuggees used? I confess that was my first thought.”

“You are on the wrong continent, Richards. These were both men of Oriental scholarship, but they were both Levantines. The East here is the Near not the Far.”

“But the paper?”

“It is telling us that we are required to adopt a textual attitude.”

“How so?”

“We must collect these papers around the body, have them subject to the minutest scrutiny. They must be compared with those found in the Reading Room this morning. Also, we need to find this man’s order books, to see with whom he traded in the past few days and weeks. There will be two such books: one that tells a respectable story for the customs men; one that records a rather more nefarious trade. The latter is the one we seek.”