by Paula Guran
Something else happened.
She put down the bottle.
And she reached out and took my hand.
“This isn’t easy,” Ana said.
“For me, either,” I said.
“You know, sometimes I think that maybe they’re right. The ones who say I popped out of some warlock’s bubbling cauldron. Maybe that’s the reason I took that princess’s name, or at least part of it. Like the poet said: Such stuff as dreams are made on. Sometimes I think it could be true, and I’m just a shadow of someone else’s dream. I was nowhere for such a long time. Forever, almost. And then you came along and—”
“Don’t read too much into me. I’m no knight in shining armor.”
“Maybe not. But if it is true—and let’s just say it is—then you’re the one who tried to save me the first time around and paid a price for it. You lost your brother. And you’re the one who came back all those years later and did the job the second time, and you’re paying still.”
I didn’t say anything. I looked across the water.
“And I just want you to know. I have to tell you: When you swam out there and took my hand, that’s when life started for me. I was underwater, and you saved me. But part of me feels like I’m still underwater. And I’m never going to get to the surface unless you pull me through.”
Her grip tightened, and it was strong.
“See, it doesn’t matter who I was,” she said. “It doesn’t matter at all. It only matters who I’m going to be.”
She moved closer then, and my arm slid around her shoulder. We kissed, and our kiss deepened. And it was so quiet out there by the lake. The wind was still, and so was the water, and the tall eucalyptus covered us in long shadows.
It was so quiet. I could almost hear her heart beating. I could feel it beneath my hand. And in that moment I wouldn’t have cared if the worst of it was true. It wouldn’t have mattered if Ana was a witch, or a dead thing born in Egypt five thousand years ago. Because in that moment I believed what Ana believed, that none of it mattered, that what really mattered was ahead of us.
I held her tight, and I held her close, and I told myself I’d pull her through.
I wasn’t going to let her go.
That was what she wanted.
That was what I wanted, too.
I didn’t work on the house the next day. To tell the truth, I didn’t do much of anything. I had a big breakfast and then I went for a walk, following the dirt road until it connected up with a county two-lane on the other side of the lake. I thought about what Ana had said, and I thought about the past and the future. Then I came back to the house, ate lunch, and fell asleep.
No dreams came my way, and that was a very good thing.
At dusk, a knock came on the door. I got up, running a hand through my hair, and went to answer it, expecting that Ana had cut out of work early and come back.
I opened the door, and a mummy was standing there. A small one.
He held out a paper bag and said, “Trick or treat.”
I didn’t have any Halloween candy, so I grabbed a bag of cookies out of the cupboard and gave a few of them to the kid in the mummy costume. He thanked me, and I watched him walk across the yard, alone. He made me think of Roger somehow, and that last night we’d gone trick-or-treating so long ago. For a second I wanted to call out to him and ask his name, but I didn’t. Still, it felt right somehow, remembering Roger. It felt good.
I closed the door. I didn’t know how the date had slipped by me, but the circle had come around again. But for the first time in as long as I could remember, Halloween seemed different. It wasn’t just Ana, though she was a big part of it. Things were changing. I was different. The Steiner house was different. And maybe those old ghosts could finally get some rest.
I poked around the kitchen. It turned out I had a couple candy bars in the house, but that was it. I didn’t figure to get much action since the house was down a dirt road and a good piece off the beaten path. But I also knew the Steiner place was as close to a haunted house as we had around here, so it was hard to tell. After a few more knocks, I drove down to the grocery store, grabbed a couple bags of Snickers and enough goods for a late supper with Ana, and then I headed back home.
By eight-thirty, maybe ten Snickers were gone.
After that, the only ones that disappeared were the ones I ate. And then, just past eleven, there was another knock on the door. I have to admit, that knock gave me enough of a jolt that I set my .38 on the side table next to the door . . . just in case.
Then I answered the door.
An Egyptian princess was standing there. Diaphanous gown. Little tiara. Lots of eyeliner.
Ana said, “That bastard down at The Double Shot made all of us dress up in costumes tonight.”
She tossed the plastic tiara on the floor as she came in. “I think I’m going to quit that job.”
I picked up the tiara and threw it out the door.
“I think that’s a good idea,” I said.
I’d bought a bottle of wine, a loaf of sourdough, and fixings for pasta. We never got to it. A few Snickers, and we were out of there. The bedroom was too strong a draw.
Later I slept deeply, and I didn’t dream, and I didn’t wake.
Two hours passed.
And then I woke sharply.
I thought I’d heard a knock at the door.
Ana was still asleep. I slipped on my jeans and grabbed a flannel shirt. I was halfway down the hall before it hit me.
I didn’t want to answer that door.
Not at all.
Certainly not without a gun in my hand.
And suddenly I wondered if I’d imagined the whole thing. Sure. Maybe that knock was just a leftover shard of dream jackknifed in my brain. By the time I reached the end of the hallway that opened into the living room, I’d almost convinced myself of that. But I’d also remembered that I’d left the .38 on the side table next to the door, and I planned to grab it before I checked things out.
But like they say, plans change.
I came around the corner. The lights were out in the living room, but I could see.
Because the front door was open.
And dull moonlight spilled across the hardwood floor.
I waited for Charlie Steiner to follow that moonlight through the doorway. And I thought of those bikers I’d killed, too—after all, they had friends who might be looking for revenge. All that flashed through my brain in a couple ticks of the second hand, but no one was there.
I didn’t wait for someone to make an appearance. I was moving. Toward the door, and the side table. I snatched up the .38 and flicked on the living room light. I hit the porch light at the same time and scanned the front yard.
Nothing. No one there. No sign of movement. Just my pickup truck parked on the gravel drive, and Ana’s beat-up Toyota parked next to it.
I closed the front door and set down the pistol. I was just about to turn around when I caught a flash of reflection on the living room window. Something against the far wall behind me, a dark smear waiting in the corner. Whatever it was, it didn’t belong there.
It wasn’t moving . . . yet.
I spun, staring across the room.
The thing that stood in the corner wasn’t a mummy.
But it was Charlie Steiner.
All trace of the Hollywood monster was long gone. No costume, no bandages, no Lon Chaney, Jr frightface. Charlie wasn’t a rampaging mountain of cobwebs any more. No. He was just a thing that had lain in a leaking plywood box for ten long years. Shrunken and black. Desiccated and degraded. His corpse had rotted in the wet earth, then dried and baked in the heat of summer, then rotted some more when the next rains came. It had been like that month after month and year after year as the seasons ran their circles and ran them again, until all that was left of him was bone and gristle and the black jerky that held it all together . . . along with a little bit of a very old dream.
What remained couldn’t have weighed
more than fifty pounds. Charlie stood in that corner, looking more like a giant marionette than anything human, a pile of tottering bone. Empty-eyed, he stared across the room at me, death’s eternal grin on his skinless face.
I expected him to collapse if he moved so much as an inch.
But he didn’t.
He still knew what he wanted.
He still knew what he needed.
He came after it, faster than I ever could have expected. He skittered across the room like a giant insect, and his bones clicked against the hardwood floor, percussion for a nightmare dance. His arm came up just as I raised the .38, and as I turned to face him I thought that arm
had become thicker and whiter as it descended toward me.
But the thing I saw wasn’t Charlie’s arm at all.
It was Roger’s Louisville Slugger, and it came at me in a white-ash blur.
The bat slammed my wrist, and I lost the pistol. Charlie’s jaw clacked open and closed, and the sound was castanet laughter as he whirled and slammed the Slugger against my skull. Next thing I knew I was on the floor, and as I rolled away the bat came down on the meat above my collarbone.
That burst of pain hard-wired me.
The pistol was right there, by my other hand.
I snatched it up. Charlie stood above me, Roger’s bat raised over his head with both skeletal hands. He opened his mouth, and I swear I actually heard him take a breath. Blood bubbled over his black teeth, and he started to say something, the way he always did in my dreams.
“No,” I said. “This time you don’t say a word.”
Six times I pulled the trigger. And I thought of Roger, and a missing little girl, and a woman who was down the hall.
And Charlie Steiner fell. His bones clattered to the floor. The lights started to flicker, and then the room started to spin. A black hole opened up in the middle of it, and I remembered the mummy’s cobwebbed mouth opening all those years ago at Butcher’s Lake, and I remembered his buzz-saw scream.
But there was no scream this night. There was only chanting. There on the ground, with gunfire echoing in my skull, I know I heard it. Distant. Indistinct . . . as if it came from a place far below or far above. And then I started to fade and the lights went out, and the black hole went away, and the moon seemed to hang above me in the darkness. It shone on me and the dead thing at my feet like a spotlight that could open a hole into a black brimming pit. And there was no way to fight it, not when the moon shone down and that black hole returned at my feet. Charlie’s wrecking-ball fist had already crumbled, and I was slipping into unconsciousness, and everything was suddenly slipping away except for me and the whisper of my own breath.
Wherever I went next, I didn’t hear anything.
It was a quiet place, and empty, and I was alone there.
I awoke the next morning, and I was alone still.
The Louisville Slugger lay there on the floor. My pistol was next to it. But Charlie was gone. The only trace of him was a set of scratches that started in the far corner of the living room and ended at the front door. Looking down at them, I remembered the clicking percussion of his bony feet as he came after me the night before.
I searched the house for Ana, but she was gone, too. All that was left was a beat-up Corolla parked in my driveway, and a princess costume on the bedroom floor—a gown that smelled of Ana’s vanilla perfume. I went down to Butcher’s Lake, hoping I’d find her there. I drove to her apartment, and then I went to The Double Shot, but by then I knew she wouldn’t be there . . . or anywhere.
I kept it to myself for a few days, hoping the phone would ring, hoping it would be Ana. But the phone didn’t ring. Finally, I worked up the nerve to call Ben Cross. He came over to the house, and I told him the whole story. God knows what he thought of it. But after I finished, Ben asked me to get in the car and we went for a little drive.
To Potter’s Field.
To Charlie Steiner’s unmarked grave.
“We thought it was kids who did it,” Ben said staring down at the open hole and the broken box at the bottom. “You know—Halloween night, taking a dare to buck the town legend. We expected we’d find Charlie’s bones hanging in a tree somewhere. But after what you’ve told me, I’m not so sure.”
Ben kept the story out of the paper. That was fine with almost everyone. The town fathers didn’t want any more tabloid reporters sniffing around. The next day, a county work crew used a backhoe and filled in Charlie’s grave. They tamped down the earth and rolled a couple strips of fresh grass over the top of it. Next thing you knew, Charlie’s unmarked plot looked like it had never been disturbed at all.
Ben didn’t really want me in the Steiner place any more, but we worked it out. I had nowhere else to go. Now it’s my home. More than anything, it was the place I’d been with Ana. That’s what I wanted to remember about the house by Butcher’s Lake, and that’s why I stay there.
As for Butcher’s, I still go down there. Not often, but often enough. Usually at sunset. Sometimes I’ll take a bottle of wine and walk along the shore. One night the wind was up, blowing through the eucalyptus, making the cattails dance. It was almost dark. And I thought I saw someone down near the water, staring at me from a gap in the cattails.
I hurried to the spot.
Someone was there. In the cattails, watching me.
I moved closer.
My hand reached out.
It was a Halloween mask. A little princess with black hair and red lips. The mask was hung up in the cattails. I didn’t want to think about how it might have gotten there. I really didn’t need any false hope. But I took the mask home with me, and I put it on the mantelpiece right next to the plastic tiara Ana had worn that Halloween night.
Of course, I didn’t tell anyone about it.
No one, except Ben.
“Maybe she’ll come back,” he said. “She was a dream, that one. I guess she really was.”
I don’t know any more. I really don’t.
Like I said, I don’t like dreams. I don’t trust them
But that doesn’t mean I don’t have them.
I have them, still.
“The Emerald Scarab” is one of a series of short stories featuring Kamose, a magician, archpriest of Anubis,—the jackal-headed god of cemeteries, embalming, and funerary rites—and hated rival of the priesthood of Thoth. The character was inspired by the Setne Khaemwaset cycle of Egyptian stories/legends. Two parts of it survive on papyrus: the first (dating from the Greek Ptolemaic Period) is in the Cairo Museum; the second (probably from the Roman Period in the first century CE) resides in the British Museum. “Setne Khaemwaset” (setne is the priestly title setem garbled into a name) was a fictionalized version of Khaemwaset, a real son of Ramesses II: a prince, soldier, and priest. Centuries later, he was regarded as a great magician and his putative exploits became stories.
The Emerald Scarab
Keith Taylor
I
The Archpriest Kamose, at the best of times, had an austere, sardonic presence. This was not the best of times. Haggard from grim vigils and sorceries, eyes reddened and sunken, he glared at the stone desiccation table on which lay a pharaoh’s corpse. It neither impressed nor awed him; he had seen other dead pharaohs—greater ones.
Besides, and strictly speaking, the body could not be seen for the heaps of powdered natron covering it over. Kamose noted the hue and texture with an expert’s eye. Frowning, he rubbed a little of the granulation between his fingers.
“How long since this was changed?” he demanded. “Ten days, holy one.”
Penma’at spoke, the Second Prophet of the Temple, a thickset, conscientious man. Although he made an able subordinate, he would have done poorly as the archpriest. In Kamose’s absence, he had directed the embalming process. Now he watched apprehensively as his master lifted the corpse’s arm out of the grayish-white heap. Turning swiftly, he raked his underlings with a baleful stare.
“You sacrilegious swine! This is a pharaoh, and yo
u prepare him for the tomb as though he were a Libyan spearman! Ten days, you say? I cannot believe this natron has been changed at all!”
“Yes, holy one!” Penma’at bleated. “Each ten, or sometimes seven, days! I saw to it!”
“If that’s true, it was not fresh. Either you hoped, with the spirit of a sand-flea, to pare cost—or you are so wholly incompetent you did not even know. Remove this excuse for natron! Take it hence! Let me see how much of your witless damage I can undo.”
They obeyed, bowing out backward, one or two of the minor priests even stumbling in the face of their master’s ire. Penma’at kept his usual pompous poise, though appalled to have been berated before his inferiors in such a fashion. Old Djeseret looked vaguely distressed, and the young lector-priest (whom Kamose did not know) seemed amused if anything.
Certainly his air of self-love did not lessen. Well, it wasn’t astonishing; he had noble, if not prince, written all over him.
Alone in the wabet, the place of embalming, Kamose swept the natron to the foot of the sloping stone table. Setekh-Nekht’s eviscerated, eyeless body looked almost prepossessing when one considered that he had been thrashed to death with a heavy rod. Curved ivory splints and gold wire braced his ribcage within. His right arm, broken in two places while he strove to protect himself, had been neatly bound in straight splints.
The fractures were not fatal. It had been savage blows across his abdomen, one after the other, that truly made an end of Setekh-Nekht.
Nothing could have been done for the ruptured stomach and spleen (and almost pulped liver) except, when death came, to dry them, preserve them with spices, and cover them with layers of resin before they went into the mortuary jars. Sinking to one knee, Kamose studied the four such jars ranged on a shelf near the floor, with their varied stopper-lids, one each for the lungs, liver, stomach, and viscera.
All appeared in order. It should be. Worthy, predictable Penma’at would never allow anything less than what was wholly proper. Setekh-Nekht’s existence in the hereafter depended on the presence and condition of those internal organs. Penma’at believed it, and so did the pharaoh’s kindred.