The Egyptian Mirror

by Michael Bedard

  32

  Cameron led them through a labyrinth of dim hallways and stopped before a door with her name stenciled on the frosted glass. She unlocked it and ushered them into a small, low-ceilinged room. There were books and papers piled everywhere. As she cleared a space for them to sit, Simon ran his eyes around the room.

  The tops of the bookcases were lined with ancient figurines. Among them was a statuette of a black dog with pricked ears and a pointed snout. It rested on its belly, its head erect, and its huge eyes staring dead ahead. He stiffened when he saw it. Abbey noticed him staring and looked up too.

  Several framed photos hung on the wall behind the desk. He’d seen one of them before: a photo of Hawkins standing with a young woman beside a deep shaft in the desert sand.

  “That was taken on the site where Hawkins and I first met,” said Cameron. “I was a raw grad student on my first dig. He was a well-respected worker in the field. As a result of something that happened on that dig I developed an interest in ancient Egyptian magic. I’ve written several books on the subject down the years. This chaos you see around you here is another in the making.

  “It was partly due to my interest in Egyptian magic that Hawkins first approached me with the mirror. It was rumored to possess magical powers, and he wanted to know if I’d ever come across anything like it in my studies. I told him that the figure of the goddess Beset worked into the handle spoke to its having served some magical purpose, but it was unlike anything I’d seen. Yet because of its pristine condition, we both agreed the mirror must be a fake.

  “But when I was going through the acquisition records of the missing objects, I came upon something very strange that I’d like you to see.”

  Abbey gave Simon a nudge and nodded toward the rucksack.

  “We brought something you might like to see,” he said and slid the mirror from the bag.

  Cameron’s eyes widened. “How on earth did you come by this?”

  “We dug it up,” said Abbey.

  “Dug it up?”

  “At the memorial, you told me the last time you talked to Mr. Hawkins, he said he’d decided to hide the mirror to keep it safe,” said Simon.

  “That’s right. He’d taken into his head that there were prowlers around the house, and they were after it.”

  “There were odd things going on around the house,” said Simon. “I saw something too.” And he told Cameron about the strange dog he’d seen in the Hawkins yard. “It looked like that,” he said, nodding toward the statue on the shelf.

  “That’s Anubis, the black jackal-like dog,” said Cameron. “Guardian of magical secrets, defender against evil forces. A life-size statue of Anubis guarded the tomb of King Tut. Go on.”

  “When I saw it a second time, sitting in exactly the same place, I thought it might be a shadow or something, so I snuck into the yard to see. There was no sign a dog had ever been there. But then I heard a growl from the bushes, and I saw eyes peering out through the leaves. Human eyes.”

  Once the stopper was off, the story streamed out like a genie from a bottle. He told Cameron about the letter Hawkins had received from Winstanley, the dealer he’d bought the mirror from, warning him about a woman with a scar on her cheek who was after the mirror, and a beast that prowled by night. He told her his suspicions that the new people who’d moved into the Hawkins house weren’t the relatives they claimed to be.

  Abbey told her about the obituary they’d found in one of the Hawkins’ old photo albums.

  “Before moving in, the new people used to come by the house at night,” said Simon. “They went through the place room by room. I think they were looking for the mirror. They threw out all kinds of things a real relative wouldn’t have. Like those photo albums and the manuscript of Mr. Hawkins’ book.”

  “We rescued it all,” said Abbey.

  “You mean you have Hawkins’ manuscript?” said Cameron, leaning forward excitedly in her chair.

  Abbey nodded. “Then one day Simon noticed a glint in the Hawkins garden.”

  “I’d read an article by Mr. Hawkins in an old journal, where he said that people once believed the best way to keep something safe was to bury it,” Simon added.

  “And so you thought he might have hidden the mirror in the garden.”

  “One night, before the new people moved in, we snuck into the yard and dug in the spot where Simon had seen the glint,” said Abbey.

  “And we found it,” he said.

  Cameron put the mirror down and examined it on both sides through a large magnifying glass mounted on the desk. Two large folders lay nearby. She opened one and sifted through some old photos. Removing one, she studied it under the glass.

  “Incredible,” she muttered as she moved between the photo and the mirror. Swinging the magnifying glass away, she leaned back in her chair. For a long while she was silent. Then she got up and walked over to the photo of Hawkins and her standing by the shaft in the sand.

  “I look at the young woman in this photo, and it all seems like a lifetime ago. But then I look down that shaft and time dissolves, and I’m back there again. Something happened on that dig—something that changed me, forever.

  “Hawkins had discovered that tomb shaft buried in the sand near a ruined temple. He found several artifacts scattered in the rubble at the bottom, but no sign of a burial chamber. I was lowered down on the end of a rope, and was busy sifting through the rubble by the light of my headlamp to see if there was more to be found, when I dislodged a large stone in the wall of the shaft. It revealed a narrow tunnel that opened for several feet and was then blocked by a wall that had been partially broken through.

  “I called up to say what I’d found, but there was no reply. Then, in my excitement and inexperience, I did something I should never have done. I crawled into the tunnel. The sides were slick with damp and the brick was soft, but I was set on reaching the wall to see if it opened onto the missing burial chamber. I inched along on my elbows as far as the wall and was clearing the rubble around the opening to see what lay the other side, when without warning a section of the tunnel collapsed behind me.

  “I lay there, pinned in the dark, afraid to stir in case the entire thing came down on my head. Suddenly, the light of my headlamp fell on a pair of eyes peering out at me through the opening in the wall. Rather than alarm me, there was in those eyes such a sense of strength and calm that it helped allay my panic.

  “I have no idea how long I lay there before I was aware of voices in the shaft and was pulled free by a rescue party. The tunnel was shored up, and at the end of it, beyond the broken wall, they found a burial chamber, rich with grave goods. Among them was a life-size statue of painted wood and plaster. It was found nowhere near the wall, but as soon as I saw it I knew those eyes.”

  * * *

  Cameron walked slowly back to the desk and sat down on the edge of it.

  “When that second artifact, the mummy’s necklace, recently went missing,” she said, “I went down to the archives and pulled the accession files on it and the other missing item. They’re very old, as you can see, among the oldest of our records. I was looking for exact details of the missing objects, so that I could provide the police with a full description, and alert the antiquities dealers to be on the lookout for them.

  “Even back then it was standard practice to make sketches or take photos of each find on site as soon as possible, so that a detailed record would exist in the event that an object should suffer damage, or go missing. Bronze objects in particular are susceptible to a rapid form of corrosion called bronze disease when suddenly introduced to the atmosphere after having been buried under the ground for so long. And it is not uncommon for an object to go missing. Ancient artifacts can fetch a high price on the illegal market, and theft is a constant problem on any dig.

  “That, in fact, is precisely what happened here. One of the artifacts foun
d with the mummy in its coffin that day, along with the necklace and the amulets, vanished from the site and was never seen again. It was likely stolen by one of the workers.

  “It was a bronze mirror. All that remained of it was the description of it in this file, and the photo they took that day—this photo.” She took the photo she’d been studying under the glass and set it down on the edge of the desk in front of them.

  “As soon as I saw it, it reminded me of Hawkins’ mirror: the unusual figure forming the handle, the incised eye on the face of it. And laying the two side by side now, I see that even the snaking pattern around the rim is the same.

  “The mirror discovered on that dig has all the signs of corrosion one would expect to see in an ancient bronze object. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. The elements are unstable and, over time, revert to their original state, forming a solid coating over the object. The process is irreversible. The corrosion doesn’t sit on the surface like a stain that can be removed. It is the surface.

  “When Hawkins showed me the mirror he’d bought in London, it had absolutely no trace of corrosion. It was that more than anything that convinced us it was a forgery. Yet as I compare it now with the photo of the artifact stolen from that dig almost a hundred years ago, it’s beyond doubt the same mirror—somehow magically renewed. Though there are signs of decay on it now that weren’t there when I first saw it.”

  “Even in the short time we’ve had it, it’s changed,” said Simon. “It’s as if it is sick.” The words spilled out without thought. And as they did, the image of Alice Loudon sitting wrapped in her shawl on the porch flashed into his mind.

  “What is it, Simon?” said Abbey.

  “Mr. Hawkins calls mirrors ‘soul catchers’ in his book. He says that ancient people believed the double they saw in the mirror was their soul, and that they used to bury mirrors with their dead to keep the soul nearby.”

  “That’s true,” said Cameron. “The ancient Egyptians commonly buried mirrors with their dead. They believed that the ka—what we would call the soul— needed a place to dwell in the tomb. That place was very often a mirror. The offerings they brought to the tomb were meant to feed the ka, so that it wouldn’t wander. There’s a chilling image in one ancient manuscript of the Book of the Dead, depicting the ka as a shadowlike figure wandering from the tomb.”

  Abbey’s mouth fell open. She looked at Simon. “Tell her,” she said. “It’s okay if it sounds crazy.”

  “Alice Loudon dropped by our house for a visit right after she moved in,” he said. “My mom told her about my illness, and Mrs. Loudon said she had a chronic illness herself. She looked older than she had when Abbey and I saw her in the park just a month before. And high up on one cheek, half-hidden by her makeup, she had a scar, like the scar Winstanley talked about in his letter.

  “She offered to make some herbal medicine for me. She brought it by the house a couple of days later. I didn’t take it, but I saved it. I have it here.” He took the packet from his pocket and handed it to Cameron.

  “It’s the most awful smelling stuff you can imagine,” said Abbey.

  Cameron opened the packet and examined the powder closely. She took a sniff and flinched a little. “Go on,” she said.

  “I’ve never seen her eat or drink,” he said. “That day she was at the house, she took the tea and cookie my mother offered but didn’t touch either of them. And Abbey’s watched her in her yard, taking the food her husband prepares for her and dumping it secretly onto the grass for their dog. It was just a little rust-colored pup when she first moved in, but the bigger it gets the more it reminds me, especially at night, of the dog I saw in Mr. Hawkins’ yard.

  “I swear she never sleeps. She’s up at all hours, playing the piano or sitting on her porch, smoking. One night last week, she was sitting there with the dog, looking really sick. I turned away a moment, and when I looked back she’d vanished. Just vanished. The shawl she’d been wearing was lying in a heap on the floor.

  “After you called this week, I took the mirror out. I had kept it tucked away, thinking she might be able to sense when I was using it. But I looked in it now, and I saw something in it—a sort of vision. It’s happened to me before. Mr. Hawkins said his wife used to see things in the mirror, too.

  “I saw Alice Loudon standing in the doorway of the bedroom in the Hawkins house. She was faint, featureless—like a shadow. She drifted into the room and sat down at the vanity. It was like I was on the other side of the mirror, watching her. She put on her makeup. She used pots and brushes and little pointed sticks, like the ones in the display case in the gallery upstairs. As she put on the makeup, she became more real. Suddenly, she looked up, and it was like she saw me watching her.”

  A faint, high laughter echoed in the hall outside the room. Cameron put a finger to her lips and stole over to the door. She listened a moment, and then, with a swift motion, threw it open.

  33

  They heard a scurrying sound somewhere off in the labyrinth of passageways.

  “Wait here,” said Cameron and set off down the hall to investigate.

  Abbey drew Simon back into the room and locked the door behind them. She glanced up at the cold eyes of Anubis glaring down on them from the bookcase. Simon felt the weight of the old building pressing down upon them. The minutes crept by.

  Finally, there was a sound of hurried footsteps in the hall, and a ghostly figure rapped on the frosted glass.

  “It’s me,” said Cameron, and Abbey opened the door.

  “Whoever it was got away,” said Cameron as she slipped back into the room. “The elevator doors closed just before I got there; a couple of kids running in the halls, no doubt. It often happens on holidays.”

  She pretended to be calm, but the incident had clearly unnerved them all. When they spoke now, it was in hushed tones—as though the ground they stood on had shifted, and they were in a different, more dangerous place than they’d been before.

  Cameron took up the mirror and turned it in her hand.

  “When I asked you to come today,” she said, “it was to show you a photo of a mirror I’d stumbled on in an old file, to see if it looked to you as much like Hawkins’ mirror as it did to me. I had no idea you had your own story to tell. Yet I wonder, now, if it might not all be part of one story—a story steeped in ancient magic.

  “Here we have a mirror that went missing from an excavation site late in the nineteenth century, only to turn up a century later in the hands of a dealer who purchased it at auction, and then sold it on to our friend Hawkins in order to be rid of it. A mirror so untouched by time that both Hawkins and I wrote it off as a fake. Yet the woman who pursued it when Winstanley had it, and then Hawkins after him, is pursuing it still.

  “Who is this mysterious Alice Loudon, and why is she so desperate to obtain this mirror? Clearly, she is deeply versed in Egyptian lore. This herbal potion is the type of remedy an Egyptian magician might have prepared. What you smell is dung, a common ingredient in ancient remedies, mixed here with a variety of medicinal herbs. The cosmetics and their application are something only someone versed in the ways of ancient Egypt would know. And then there’s that dog of hers, an ancient breed dating back to the Egyptian pharaohs and associated with Anubis, the Egyptian god of magic.

  “She has some mysterious illness, she says, and seems to be rapidly failing. And at the same time, the mirror is decaying—as if the two were somehow connected. But how?” Circling the desk, she stopped in front of the photo of herself and Hawkins standing by the tomb shaft. She stared at it fixedly, as if the answer might lie there.

  “That was my first dig—and my last,” she said. “Hawkins’ way and mine diverged after that. His to further explorations, mine to the study of ancient magic, and the task of tending the things that we, and others like us, had wrested from the dark.

  “But it changed me, changed the way I thoug
ht of the past. The illusion of distance dissolved. It seemed to me that the artifacts we unearthed were like windows in time, and there were moments when past and present stood on either side of that window and caught a glimpse of one another—as I had that day.

  “Was it an experience of magic I had down in that tunnel? I don’t know. But to this day I see those eyes peering out through the hole in the wall at me, like the eye engraved on the face of this mirror.”

  Simon and Abbey sat spellbound in their seats.

  “I said this was a story steeped in ancient magic,” she went on. “Consider these recent thefts at the museum. The first was from a case that housed a collection of objects belonging to an ancient magician. The second, from a case that contained the grave goods discovered with a remarkably well-preserved mummy on the same dig. Why were those two cases targeted? Why were those two objects taken, when many more valuable artifacts were left untouched? Could there be a connection between them?

  “The necklace had been buried with the mummy in her coffin. So too, as it turns out, had this mirror—a mirror with a most unusual handle in the shape of the goddess Beset. Now, Beset was a goddess beloved by the common people of ancient Egypt. She was invoked in many magical rituals around the protection of women and children. One of the objects in the case from which the snake wand was stolen is a Beset mask, worn by the magician while acting in the role of the goddess during such rituals.

  “At that time most magicians in Egypt were men. The only comparable collection of magical objects that has been found belonged to a temple priest. But the discovery of these objects under the floor of a common dwelling in a pyramid workers’ town is compelling evidence that there also existed at that time a class of communal magicians who tended to the needs of ordinary people in their daily lives.