The skeleton with the scythe is gone. That was just for effect, like all the others. To prove a point. That Death is everything we think it is, just different things to different people. Or all things to all people. I was wrong; just as it knows me, we don’t just think we know it. We do, in all its forms.
The shadow is back, looming large. No, not a shadow— I was the shadow. At least I got that part right. I was the shadow of something much more remarkable than myself. A laughable imitation.
Time to be punished for my presumptuous behavior.
It consumes me, sliding over my body like liquid flame and burning just as harshly. I’ve lost so much blood from my wounds, but that isn’t what’s going to end me. It takes such a degree of skill to snuff out a spark so completely, molecule by painstaking molecule, and fuck does it hurt!
Now I know the secret of it all. I know who — what — Death truly is. And that knowledge finally and efficiently blows my tiny little mind.
Death comes for us all eventually. But you enter this world alone.
And you go out of it the same way.
It’s a process.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
The Hollow Men, T. S. Eliot
* * *
Paul Kane is the award-winning, bestselling author and editor of over fifty books, including: the Arrowhead trilogy; The Butterfly Man and Other Stories; Hellbound Hearts; and The Mammoth Book of Body Horror. His work has been optioned and adapted for the big and small screen.
An Inspector Calls
by Rebecca Bradley
He arrived on a cross-Nile ferry jammed with customers— with bereaved families, I mean, each bearing a shrouded corpse on a board, and wailing fit to draw the notice of Osiris himself through many cubits of solid sand. My new employee was easy to spot, being the one who was not weeping, tearing at his garb, or liberally besmirched with ashes and dust.
He was different in other ways, too, ways that did not at first dispose me well towards him. Priests take some pride in being a soft lot, pasty from spending their days in dark sanctuaries and shaded temple courtyards, spreading easily into prestigious paunches by their middle years. Apart from his spotless linen kilt, this one looked more like a field hand or professional warrior, tall, broad, flat-bellied, muscled like a statue, his skin almost Nubian-dark. Over a long, well-shaped nose, he was absorbed in watching the swarms of mourners offloading their dearly deceased onto the shore.
“I suppose that’s the new lector priest. Not bad.” Nofret was at her post on the quay, ready to direct the mourners towards the tent of purification set up between the canal and the necropolis. She is the kite-mistress, the headwoman of the professional mourners, twenty years in the business and very good at her job; she is also my beloved wife and the mother of several of my junior embalmers and my dear little daughter, Merbeset. Nobody does grief as well as my Nofret, nor has a better eye for what the market will bear when it comes to negotiating fees with the bereaved. As the last corpse came ashore, she assumed a mien of warm sympathy, and waddled off to round up our new clients, with Merbeset at her heels. I left her to it and dodged through the crowd towards the lector priest.
He was just stepping onto the bank, moving with a stately grace that I was forced to admire. Perhaps, I began to think, it was no bad thing that he looked so unpriestlike. I could see him going down very well in funeral processions, well enough to add a few grains to the profits of the house. Slap a mask of Anubis over his head, and he might play the god’s part far better than our current wine-soaked Overseer of the Secrets, and save us a bit on the subcontracting as well. His hands were empty. I looked past him for a porter staggering under baggage, but the priest was alone, and the last off the ferry. No matter, I thought, we could provide him with robes and a sash out of our stocks of linen until his gear arrived.
“You must be Hormaat,” I said as I reached him. “I am Anubis, proprietor of this benighted necropolis.”
He looked down at me over that slightly too-long nose, not into my eyes but at a spot that was roughly at the centre of my forehead. Amun bless me, he really was the tallest priest I’d ever met. After a moment of silence, he shifted his gaze downward to meet my eyes.
“You call yourself Anubis?” he said. “You dare to take the name of the great god himself, he who fetches the dead to the Hall of the Two Truths?”
Self-righteous pious turd, I said to myself; but what a resonant voice! I could imagine the effect of such sonorous tones on our living clientele, that wonderful voice booming funerary spells across an echoing necropolis. But I had to laugh at his gravity. “Anubis is not the name I was born with, my friend, but it’s a damned good name for the owner of a mummy factory, wouldn’t you say? Come along, Hormaat, I’ll—”
He stopped me with a heavy hand on my shoulder. “I am not Hormaat.”
“What do you mean?” I cried. “The guild promised he’d arrive this morning. We’ve got a stack of stiffs to deal with in the Cutting House, plus three or four new ones to wash from this boatload, plus two funerals tomorrow, and I’m seriously short-handed. Why isn’t he coming?”
“The one that was called Hormaat in this life cannot come,” said the newcomer in his rich voice. “He cannot come because he has begun his own long journey to the Hall of the Two Truths.”
Now I was irritated. “You mean he’s dead?”
“I was with him when his journey began. His flesh now lies in a tent of purification on the west bank at Thebes, while his ka waits for guidance at the gates of—”
“Save it for the paying customers,” I broke in. “Well, may Set take him and Amemit devour his ka, but I suppose it can’t be helped. You’ll do just as well. What was your name again?”
“My name is— Saweser.” He had paused for a beat before speaking his name, almost as if trying to think up a good one, and I felt a brief touch of suspicion. Was he truly a priest? Had the guild really sent him? But contemplating his grave, impassive face, I decided he just had a naturally measured way of phrasing himself, which would not come amiss when he was reading the spells.
“Saweser?” I repeated. “Son of Osiris? Well, that’s another grand name for a necro priest. Have you worked with embalmers before?”
“With embalmers, no,” he said, “but I have worked with the dead.” He looked into my eyes so strangely that I felt my suspicions stir again. I was, however, extremely short on lector priests.
“Good, so you know some of the basics, and I guess you’re not squeamish. Come along, I’ll give you the tour and then get you started.”
* * *
Our first stop was the washhouse, as we embalmers call it amongst ourselves. To the rest of the world, it is more formally and respectfully known as the tent of purification. Mine is a professional yet decorative structure of carven poles hung with rather fine patterned matting, all inwoven with repeating friezes of life, prosperity and health. I noticed Saweser nodding with approval at the bright matting, the tall jars of lotus flowers that flanked the opening, the large barrels of Nile water and palm wine for the ritual bathing of the deceased.
“In my experience,” I whispered to him, “spending a little extra on this part of the setup is never a waste. Remember, this is just about all the customers ever see.” He gave me that strange look again, but made no comment.
Just inside the entrance, my dear Nofret was dickering with a pair of principal mourners, an ash-covered farmer in a ritually torn loincloth and his equally disheveled wife. Our sweet Merbeset crouched not far away, the darling, observing but keeping her mouth shut, like a good little apprentice mourner. Nofret was using the wooden models, three little corpse-dolls depicting the likely results of different levels of expenditure. They graded from lifelike, through somewhat disturbing, to a bony horr
or with bared teeth: a reminder to the customer that you get what you pay for when it comes to embalming. Nofret had them talked up to the second model already. The deceased, a handsome boy of about ten, lay naked on one of the pallets, ready to be washed once the price was settled. Saweser surprised me by kneeling beside the dead child and gently patting its hand.
“Sentimental, are you?” I whispered to him. “I thought you’d worked with stiffs before.” He rose to follow me out, but he did not look at me this time.
* * *
We followed the same path the corpses take after their bath, to the large courtyard enclosing the Houses of Purification and Beauty— or the Cutting House and the Stuffing House, as we like to say. Unlike some necro bosses, I prefer to keep a little distance between the mourners and the processing department. Therefore, my main operation is in a separate compound on the desert edge of the necropolis proper, a good long walk from the washhouse, surrounded by a shoulder-high mud wall topped with acacia thorns. The thorns are not to keep people out; the smell, I’ve always thought, makes a more effective barrier in that regard, rot and incense, sewage and resin, like a combination latrine, abattoir, and perfumery. No, the thorns are placed in hopes of keeping out desert scavengers, who seem to like the smell.
I pointed out the sights to Saweser. Just inside the gate were the huge dumps of natron, glistening like powdered silver. Ahead of us was the House of Beauty, a large flat-roofed mudbrick structure with few windows; to the right of that was the smaller, and much smellier, House of Purification. And all over the extensive courtyard lay the dead, ranged in tidy rows, each one visible only as a natron-covered mound with a wooden toe tag at one end. This is where our deceased clients spend up to forty days, slowly pickling and drying in the natron salt and the sun, until they’re ready for wrapping and planting. I took Saweser’s arm and strolled over to the far corner of the courtyard, in front of the House of Purification, where some very junior embalmers were at work.
“We had a little trouble with the jackals last night,” I said.
His head jerked up. “Jackals? What kind of trouble?”
“The usual kind. A pack broke in and made a meal of some of our customers. We’re dealing with it.”
In truth, it was a very minor attack. The jackals had come over the wall at the corner, thorns or no thorns; they had disinterred no more than a dozen corpses, and not eaten much of any of them. My juniors were collecting the strewn body parts into large baskets, pawing through the scattered natron with salt-inflamed hands to retrieve the toe tags.
“Whatever will you do? How will you make sure that each departed one is correctly assembled?”
This time, it was I who gave him a strange look. What an idiot. “Why bother? We’ve got the toe tags. Everything gets wrapped up nicely anyway.”
“I understand,” Saweser said, so coldly that I began to be irritated. Who in the names of all the Ennead did he think he was? All the customers needed to see was the correct name on a bandaged mummy of roughly the right shape and size. Trying not to show my annoyance, I took his arm and led him towards the House of Purification— then changed tracks toward the House of Beauty. Foolish, perhaps, but I did not want this long-nosed disapproving bastard son of Set to see how we were cutting corners in the Cutting House this week, being so short-handed and all. Normally I like my cutting crews to do a reasonably professional job — the careful slit in the abdomen, a hand slipped inside to draw out guts and other innards for separate processing — but not when we’ve got a backlog. Faster to stick a funnel up the arse, flood the gut with cedar oil, and move on to the next stiff; after a week you pull the plug out and just pour the innards away, with the families none the wiser.
Since the Stuffing House also holds our storerooms of linen and spices, of incense, cassia and myrrh, it is the best-smelling corner of my little empire. I led Saweser through the front doors, which are flung wide during the day to keep a good draft blowing through, and down the central hallway, flanked on both sides by the fragrant storerooms. From a workshop at the end floated the competing voices of several lector priests attending on different corpses, and the effect was, I thought, pleasantly busy and professional. I looked up at Saweser — gracious Isis, was he even taller than before? — and saw that this place, at least, had managed to impress him more favorably. We stopped on the threshold of the workroom.
The embalming crews, which included three of my sons, were doing not a bad job. With Saweser at my heels, I walked around inspecting the several mummies currently in process: two adults and a child recently pulled from the natron piles, four or five adults at various stages of bandaging, two adult-sized packages of linen ready to be boxed up for burial. Several lector priests were hurrying from table to table as needed, mumbling from their scripts or supervising the placement of amulets within the linen. The half-drunk Overseer of the Mysteries was not present; this, I thought, was probably just as well.
We stopped at the worktable where Penanap, my second son, was stuffing the dead child’s belly cavity with balled-up linen scraps and handfuls of sand, along with some token sprinkles of myrrh. I saw the disapproving look begin to creep back onto Saweser’s face. What, did he think other mummy factories did not make similar economies? My son greeted me cheerfully, with a curious glance at my companion.
“Another funeral for Merbeset to shine in,” he said to me, indicating the blackened mummy of the child— a little girl, I saw, of about Merbeset’s age. Yes, our precious Merbeset was much in demand as a mourner at kiddy funerals. Natural talent, I was proud to say, though there was also Nofret’s excellent training in weeping, writhing, and tearing at the hair without doing actual damage. Someday, I hoped, Merbeset might be kite-mistress here in her mother’s place. I clapped my son on his shoulder and turned to introduce him to the new priest.
But Saweser was paying us no attention. He was examining the dead girl-child with a little smile on his face, like a fond uncle, and he reached out to brush her tough, blackened cheek with his fingertips. Penanap rolled his eyes.
“Are you quite sure,” I asked Saweser, “you’ve worked with stiffs before?”
He looked down at me with his brows drawn together, but then his gaze slid right over my head. I whirled to see what he was looking at, because I fervently hoped the instant fury flooding his face had a target that was not me. And it did.
Khaemwese had just staggered through the door to join an invocation in progress: our resident Overseer of the Mysteries, the living incarnation of the great god Anubis while he wore the jackal mask. Seeing him for a moment through a newcomer’s eyes, I could halfway understand Saweser’s rage. The mask was overdue for replacement, worn and scabbed where gold leaf and lapis-blue paint had flaked away; the tips of both ears were broken. When set on Khaemwese’s fat shoulders, balanced over his wobbling belly and breasts, the mask was actually pretty comical. And the Overseer was drunk as usual, swaying between two young sweepers, slurring the invocation shamefully when his turn came to speak. I gave him a filthy glare myself.
“Is that,” Saweser hissed, “what you consider to be a fitting incarnation of the great Son of Osiris?”
“Well, not really,” I said, “but he works on a very small commission. You know how things are in the business.”
Saweser growled — yes, actually growled like a dog — deep in his throat, and swung his furious eyes and great snout of a nose around to me. The crews were watching us, the lector priests had fallen silent and were standing there with their silly mouths hanging open, even that damned Khaemwese was paying a vague and dribbling attention. Very bad for discipline, I thought, as well as for our tight schedule. Time to put the snotty bugger in his place.
“Priest,” I said coldly, drawing myself up, “remember who is boss around here. I am, and you are my employee. So either you take your big nose and your oily hide back to the east bank on the very next boat— or you grab a script and start gab
bling over the stiffs, along with the others. But I warn you, I am sick to death of your attitude.”
An odd change came over his face. He looked almost amused. “Sick to death? Not yet.”
“What do you mean? I gave you an order!”
But he was already heading for the workroom door, reaching it in three paces of his very long legs, pausing to look back at me. “I serve a different master,” he said, “and came to this place on other business. But I will remember you,” he added, “when your heart is weighed in the court of my father Osiris, in the Hall of the Two Truths.” And he was gone.
Damn it, I thought, a spy! Most likely (and my heart misgave me, as we say) an inspector for some dratted nosy commission from the Great House, checking into business practices in the mummy factories. As if any of the other necroyard bosses did things any differently! As if Osiris himself would care! But I could not risk letting that lying conniver report back to his masters.
“Catch him!” I cried. “He can’t have gone far!”
But he was not in the corridor when we flooded out of the workroom to give chase, and even those long legs could not have reached the outer doors in that short a time. “Check the storerooms!” And so we did, all of us, embalmers, lector priests, sweepers, right down to fat Khaemwese puffing along under the Anubis mask. Saweser was nowhere.
I left the others doing a frantic second search, sweeping bales of linen off the shelves, checking inside the coffins, thrusting lamps into the darkest corners. Meantime, sweating and quaking with disquiet — no, of course I was not feeling guilty — I took myself to the gate of the compound and surveyed the track that led along the edge of the necropolis, back towards the tent of purification and the riverside.
There was no sign of Saweser, unless he was hiding himself among the heaps of natron, or skulking among the tombs in the necropolis. But then my dear Nofret appeared far off along the track in a cloud of her own dust, cradling a bundle in her arms. Even at that great distance, I could hear her wailing in that wonderfully-trained voice of hers. As I’ve said, nobody does grief like my Nofret.
Expiration Date Page 24