The Oeuvre

by Greg James

  I recall that night so long ago when I was a man of character and position in society rather than the washed-up, degenerate opium sot who scrawls these words in an unsteady script that has lost all its flow and style. Oh, god in heaven, what have I become? I have offended every sense in my body and every lingering trace of my soul – and still she tortures me with remembrance. I see now that total obliteration of myself from this tawdry sphere is the one remaining path to peace.

  However, to business, before I lose my way and pen an unimportant rant of self-hatred. I mean to lay before you the full facts, as I recall them, regarding the case of Amen-Ra. If you are unaware of her legend, let me enlighten you a little. A brief will suffice for a full and detailed history. Amen-Ra was an Egyptian princess of the Eighteenth Dynasty and her sarcophagus was interred at Luxor by the banks of the River Nile. In 1891, her tomb was opened by the archaeologist, Paris Marsh. It was recorded as being bare with little in the way of the usual wealth and comforts associated with a person of such high-standing. However, there were hieroglyphics on the wall that hinted at the reasons why her corpse was so impoverished. Some scandal and estrangement from her royal line - at the time, reading of it in The Times, I thought it just went to show that even thousands of years ago, gossip, spitefulness and rumour-mongering were the heart of existence for much of humanity.

  Amen-Ra’s mummy was sold to the British Museum by Marsh for a paltry sum; his hopes of gaining fame and fortune by unearthing her remains and treasures gone. Though his reasons for getting rid of the sarcophagus were miserly, more recent events have shown that Marsh's wounded avarice may well have saved him whereas the successive owners of the casket were much less fortunate despite having motives that could be argued to be far more noble and pure. It soon became apparent that there was something about the sarcophagus that set it apart from other artefacts retrieved from the tombs of Egypt's kings and queens; not just the mere fact of Amen-Ra's supposed slatternly history. Certain hieroglyphics conformed to none of the known pictographs of heavenly bodies, natural phenomena, gods, humans and so forth, instead it was noted that not only was the non-human pronounced in the decorative forms but the hieratic surrounding the peculiarly amorphous images bordered on being non-terrestrial. Familiar cuneiforms were the exception in this case, not the rule.

  Then, there was the face as painted onto the outer shell of her ornate coffin. Again it was a distinct deviation from the norm as, rather than being an expression of beatific peace and serenity, it was a mask of horror; a young woman in the throes of torture, prostrated by death agonies. Her eyes and mouth broadened and distorted to the point of sickening grotesquerie.

  Naturally, given the character of her catafalque, there were a number of stories that arose during her time at the British Museum. Tappings, scratching and frantic hammerings were supposedly overheard by watchmen and curators during the course of their nightly duties, whenever they were in the proximity of said vessel. Additionally, there was talk of a woman's voice being heard, breathy and light, close to the ear, muttering words, guttural and unintelligible, whenever a member of staff found themselves intensely immersed in a task. Startled into awareness, they apparently would then hear the sound of footsteps retreating and, in pursuing them, found themselves at the side of Amen-Ra's undisturbed sarcophagus with the askance chasms of her eyes and mouth spilling shadows at their feet. The decision to sell off Amen-Ra to the first bidder, never mind the highest, was taken after one particularly foul incident occurred, from which the British Museum was still recovering its reputation when I left London and Mother England behind me. The Times meant to do a feature on Amen-Ra; a glorified gossip column rather than an informative historical study, I shouldn't wonder. They sent a young journalist, Alistair Pearson, along to question the curators on the rumoured hauntings and to photograph the still-unopened sarcophagus. The fact that the sarcophagus was closed despite being many months in the possession of the British Museum, I will also come to later in the narrative. The interviews and photography session went smoothly. Then, the following morning, Pearson was found by his fiancée having shot himself in the head after performing upon himself what came to be described in the gutter press as 'particularly graphic self-mutilations' - this may well be hearsay conjured by mongrels looking to excite their mutton-headed readership but, since then, I have seen things that make me wonder at the veracity of their accounts.

  I should be clear here that Pearson was not dead but rather, having made a mess of the event, severely mentally-impaired. He was sent away to the madhouse. His fiancée did not survive the circumstances as well as he did. Her suicide was much more effective - hung by the neck using her dressing cord. It was sometime after Pearson's failed suicide and derangement that the casket of Amen-Ra was purchased by an American collector, Donald Fairview; a self-made millionaire who, after the fashions of the time, purported an interest in the occult and otherworldly. Pearson's photographs of the sarcophagus and its strange designs having been part of a reflective feature on the man's prematurely terminated career in The Times, they brought the attentions of people such as Fairview to the long-dead princess.

  So it was Fairview who desired Amen-Ra should travel to New York with him aboard a passenger liner making her maiden voyage from Southampton dock: RMS Titanic. As you will no doubt surmise, it is at this point that I found myself drawn into the narrative of events, a narrative that I fear is soon to end for me under circumstances I could never have dreamed of back then, in the innocent days of mere months ago. How little time it takes for a man to fall to ruin, so suddenly is the subtle weave of his fate undone.

  In former times, I was known for my mastery of therapeutic mesmerism. So talented that I was able to eke out a living of reasonable economy visiting the Soho salons and homes of well-to-do ladies where I assisted in the healing of peculiar mental hysterias by the use of subtle suggestion and coercive forgetfulness. Some would call my behaviour unethical but I would put it to them that we have all the surgeons in the world and yet we remain as unable to successfully heal the wounds of the mind as the cave-dweller who first trepanned his brother in order to release the evil spirits bedevilling his brain.

  The invitation to Mr Donald Fairview's cabin came as something of a surprise to me at the time. I was travelling alone, looking forward to a much needed holiday in New York, my first time in America. I had just dined sumptuously in the elegant Jacobean saloon on salmon in a water cress sauce - if I had known it was to be my last good meal on this earth, I would have savoured it all the more. Chance, destiny, fate, the Will as defined by Schopenhauer - which of these was behind my undoing that day?

  I know not and think I never will.

  Fairview's cabin was well-appointed, as were all of the First Class cabins, with a double bed, polished teak table and chairs with gold leaf decoration. The cabin was well occupied upon my arrival. Whatever revels were underway, I was none the wiser as to their nature until the matter was fully explained to me. The explanation must wait a moment however as a young woman did then enter the room and, as well as myself and the dead witch, Amen-Ra, she is intrinsic to what happened that night. The last point in the triangle. The final figure in our fateful trinity.

  She was fair-skinned, dark-haired, and wore a blue nightdress that seemed to glow sapphire-bright in the dim light of the cabin. The only illumination came from a handful of oil lamps that had been turned down as low as could be. Her eyes were startlingly feline and shone emerald. She was a paragon of beauty, leaving my mouth dry and heart shuddering when her gaze passed over me. Her gaze came to rest upon the cabin's bed where something unsightly reclined; a wizened, frayed torso with walnut skin drawn tight over its fragile bones. Uneven teeth nestled within the receded pucker that would have been full fleshy lips in life and nuggets of browned gristle glistened in charnel-pit sockets beneath a torn papyrus brow, which showed patches of a darkly crystalline skull. These revealed patches caught the low light in a queer and fractal way, sending black rainbows st
reaming across my vision before cascading and dying out in the peripheries. For some reason I could not explain, the momentary illusion made my eyes swim with tears and a surge of melancholia seized at my heart.

  There was a curious odour in the room that was identified to me as a mixture of balsamic resin and incense, apparently a fusion once favoured by the priests of Ancient Egypt when performing certain rites. The person who identified the source of the odour to me was the overseer of the scene into which I had unknowingly walked and would soon become a knowing and much-accursed player.

  Donald Fairview was an American gentleman in the classic sense. As stout and bullish as the English gentleman is considered to be gaunt and affected. His chin was broad and hung double, making him appear as an over-excited rooster when he spoke. His complexion was as flushed as his daughter's was wan and pale. His eyes were dark sparking flints. He shook my hand with over-familiar vigour, thanking me for accepting his invitation. “I understand you know how to put a woman under, sir? Get her in touch with the spirits as it were?”

  I assured him that the sex of the individual I mesmerised had no bearing upon their susceptibility.

  “The point is can you put my Esme under or not?”

  Before I agreed to make such an attempt, I asked what the purpose of the session would be and indeed why there were so many spectators. The vast majority of my appointments in London were private sessions. Fairview puffed himself up – a rooster in the henhouse – introducing himself even though everyone present was already well-acquainted. “I am Donald Fairview, a self-made man am I and, tonight, I mean to do what no-one else has been able to before me. I mean not only to speak with the dead but to get the dead to come back, to cross the great divide and show themselves in the here and now.”

  I asked what was the purpose of the abomination laid out upon the bedspread.

  “That is the Princess Amen-Ra. I mean to speak with her, bring her here, have her kneel before me and acknowledge me as her better … “

  I was no longer sure what to make of the man. Great wealth had clearly had a deleterious effect upon his faculties.

  Fairview went on with his self-important declamation as follows, “ … she tried to do as I will do tonight centuries ago and they cast her out for it. Shut her up in a casket that could not be opened unless someone came along who knew the code. Well, I found the code in an old book, a very old book, and, as the book says, first shall the body be set free and the spirit thereafter.”

  Red in the face, his soliloquy done with, Fairview offered me a sum of money to mesmerise his daughter that no man in my position, or any other for that matter, could have turned down, my conscience became a bleating, insignificant thing.

  “Very well, sir. Let us get to work then,” Donald Fairview declared.

  Esme Fairview sat before me. Though it pained me, I asked her to close those stunning eyes and I took her hands in mine as I spoke in soothing tones, performing small circular motions upon her palms with my thumbs. I then laid down her hands and made a series of passes; touching her brow, cheeks, and chin, repeating the gestures in a variety of sequences, all the while continuing to speak and soothe until it was apparent that Miss Fairview was completely under. Her chin sank a little as did her shoulders. She breathed in the rhythm of a light sleep. A hush descended and, licking my lips, I waited, unsure as to my next move. I was no carnival hypnotist. I had never sold myself as a scryer of spirits yet the ignorant had made me out to be so. The sum promised to me by Fairview crept into my thoughts and, letting out a long, uneasy breath, I proceeded. “Esme, can you...hear me?”

  Nothing.

  “Esme, can you see...anything?”

  Nothing.

  Then, something. Her lips trembled, twitching, curling, hardening then softening. Falling open, her tongue hung loosely in her mouth, so very still, then it happened. A minute vibration, a pendulous motion, an utterance that was seismic in the cabin's interminable, expectant silence.

  “Darkness.”

  “You see only darkness?”

  “ … no ... darkness ... not darkness ... bright and ... white ... white darkness ... outside darkness ... outside time ... “

  “What the hell is she on about?” Fairview was breathing down my neck, an unpleasant sensation.

  “Your patience, please, Mr Fairview. I assure you that your daughter is under as you requested.”

  “What's all this jibber-jabber about white darkness? I want her to find Amen-Ra.”

  Sweating a little, I bluffed, “The astral form cannot be guided as one of the blind. Think of her as a leaf in the wind, blown hither and yon, we must wait for her to find Amen-Ra naturally.”

  “Naturally ... right ... how long will that take?”

  “Please, Mr Fairview. Let me do as you have asked.”

  “Okay, son. But you get me what I asked for or you don't get a dime. Clear?”

  I nodded my understanding and took up Esme's hands in mine, hoping physical contact might create a grounding influence for her, like copper earthing an electrical current. “Esme, please, tell us more of who is there with you?”

  I tried not to let my teeth grind together or to squeeze her fingers as I waited for a response. It seemed to be in vain as I listened to time passing, punctuated by the staccato breathing of Fairview and his coterie of followers. Though uncowled and lacking witch-like deformity, I was sure that this was the reason for their unspeaking yet oppressive presence in the cabin.

  Esme was suddenly seized by a series of extreme spasms that made me wince and cringe. The urge to go to her aid was beating strong in my breast but I was well aware of the perils inherent in doing so. My childhood friend, Bertram Stephens, died before his time after a maid disturbed him during a sleep-walking episode that ended in his starting suddenly awake and then tumbling over the stair bannister to break his neck and shatter his skull on the floor below. As I hoped, she did eventually settle down but there was a marked change in her temperament when she did. There was a firmness of posture and rigidity in her bearing that was not apparent before. There was a sense of, not someone but something else being there – inside her. Dry and aching, my throat caught on her name as a needle catches on a record. “Esme–”

  Her eyes opened and her fingers wound tight around my own, squeezing with an insidious strength that made me cry out and strike hard upon a most effeminate octave. God, the power in her then, and those eyes, what was stirring in them. The bejewelled emerald irises were gone as were the pupils and the whites. There was only a pulsating luminescence that brought tears to my eyes and that same surging of melancholy as before only now it was peaking into a metaphysical quaking; an abiding and biting sense of despair that went tearing into me as long as I met those eyes. I think I would have expired there and then had it not been for Fairview; eager and foolish, he pushed me aside and I fell to the floor, breaking both the hold of her hands and the alien gaze of her possessed eyes.

  “Esme? You there? Amen-Ra, is that you, huh?”

  From her hanging tongue came a sound that haunts me still; an echo carried from the depths of some cosmic slaughterhouse, of something slowly and wetly dying, far-off, far away, in a space that should not be and a time that we should not know. Recovering, I realised Fairview was not moving and neither were his faithful followers. It was then that I was witness to the most startling revelation of the night for, as I witnessed the spread of the contagious paralysing fit on those before me and wondered what I was to do about it, there was an utterance from the bed.

  From the long-dead thing resting upon it? No, impossible!

  Like a fool, I snatched up the nearest oil lamp, lengthening the wick enough that a healthy light emanated from the glass. I had had enough of shadows and suggestive gloom. Stumbling over to the bed, I held the lamp close to the dried-up remains of Amen-Ra and beheld an occurrence so small and yet so terrible that I wish I was not so willed as to set it down in words – it breathed.

  The ragged mouth, which had wo
rn down to little more than coarse paper over the centuries of internment, moved of its own volition. The reptilian skin around the teeth crackling as if it were being set aflame. I heard the unmistakable sound of air being thinly drawn into a hollow space where there were no longer lungs left to receive it.

  The cry I let out and the violence of the fit that seized upon me were the cause of my temporary salvation. The lamp fell from my fingers, its glass bursting and scalding oil spilling out across the desiccated corpse. The light of the wick found kindling in her bones and fire began to devour the corpse hungrily. Soon the flames were spreading across the bedspread, consuming the frail horror that was twitching there in a beggarly fashion. It screamed, though it had no means to do so, no organic engine by which to produce such a terrible and pealing sound. The blackening twigs that had once been the mummy of Amen-Ra let loose a raging shriek; a terrifying banshee's fury. Soon enough, it guttered and choked down into smoke-tinged silence – as did the fire. It should have continued to spread but instead it died out as if it had never been. I stood away and watched the liquescent stain darkening the silk and cloth before gathering them over the incinerated mess, burying it from my sight.

  The tableau of paralysis was unchanged behind me so I thought, until I looked closer though taking care not to move myself physically closer, depend upon it. I saw that the eyes of Fairview and his followers were as his daughter's - pouring forth a luminescence that would make them soon become seething singularities; portals of all-devouring pain. To look upon it was fatal, of that I was sure. Fairview had saved me by knocking me down and taken my place as the first vessel to bear this incorporeal parasite. The others in the cabin had looked and become the same. They were all empty – dead inside.