by Knox, Tom
Ryan asked in his clearest, slowest Arabic where the police station could be found.
The boy paused. Then he answered, in Arabic, ‘Not far, half a kilometre past the old houses. Just up there.’
‘Thank you.’
The youth nodded, and smiled his handsome white smile, then kick-started his bike again. As he drove off he shouted, ‘But be careful. They are arresting everyone!’
This gave Ryan serious pause. Arrests? What could he do? Maybe he should go back to Sohag and wait. But that was absurd: he had come this far, and he was so near. The Sokar Hoard was within his grasp: he could sense it.
Resolved, Ryan turned. And saw a policeman.
The cop was standing three metres away. With a gun. Pointing at Ryan’s chest.
‘Come with me.’
13
Museum of Witchcraft, Boscastle, Cornwall
‘Roasted cats?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hmmm.’
The owner of the museum paused, staring thoughtfully into space. Above him was a decorative wooden sign saying: THE MOST FAMOUS MUSEUM OF WITCHCRAFT IN THE WORLD.
Karen Trevithick would normally have dismissed this as tourist-attracting whimsy, or indeed as bullshit, but everyone she had spoken to had assured her: No, go there, the guy who owns the place really knows his stuff. The museum is serious.
So she had made the long drive to the beautiful stormy cliffs of far-north Cornwall and the fishing village of Boscastle, sequestered in a cove between those cliffs, staring out at the furious waves that attacked the stone harbour. The day was blustery and bright, and very cold. The village still had its Christmas lights dangling across the wet and narrow cobbled roads; they looked melancholy now Christmas was over.
Karen was glad when Donald Ryman, the late-middle-aged owner, closed the door to the salt-scented air, silencing the seagulls.
Again he stared at nothing, then he turned. ‘Let’s go into the museum, and think about cats. Roasted cats, yes, a little strange.’
Another door led into the museum proper; a series of small, low ceilinged rooms: fishermen’s cottages knocked together. There was a big glass box in front of Karen: inside was a perpendicular stuffed goat wearing a dark scarlet robe.
‘The goat of Mendes,’ said Donald. ‘An avatar of Satan, the Horned God, worshipped for thousands of years.’ He pointed at a large rack of little glass jars, some full of vegetable matter, some containing ghastly wax dolls; naked, grimacing figurines. ‘These are herbs for witchcraft, the real thing. Gerald Gardner collected them decades ago. The wax figurines are poppets, little models of people for sticking pins in, to cause injury or death.’
She waited for an explanation but Donald’s eyes were now fixed on something over her shoulder. She turned to see what he was looking at. The exhibits were many: a dried old stoat, a hag stone for cursing, a rabbit’s heart pierced with a thorn – and a stuffed cat, chasing a stuffed rat.
He gestured at the mangy old stuffed cat. ‘Taghairm! Yes, yes. Taghairm!’
‘What?’
‘I believe what you witnessed was Taghairm! A truly ghastly ritual, often associated with the Celts, especially in Scotland.’
Karen gazed at the cat, as Donald went on, ‘Cats, why didn’t I think of this before? Yes! Cats are so important to magic. In medieval England cats would be buried alive in walls, as charms against rats or mice. These are surprisingly common – they come as a nasty surprise to homeowners, ah, renovating their lovely period cottage. A dead cat in the walls!’ He chuckled. ‘Cats are intrinsic to magical ritual. The idea of them as creatures of supernatural power dates back to Egyptian times, of course. The Egyptians worshipped the cat. The fear and veneration of cats has continued ever since.’
‘Taghairm? What is that?’
He was interesting but her time was short: they had a suicide now, a dead body, linked to the atrocious ritual on Zennor Hill. Speed the case.
‘Sorry, witchcraft is my passion, I can be a little discursive. Taghairm is a Celtic rite also known as “giving the Devil his supper”. It’s a ceremony where a series of cats is burned alive, one after the other, sometimes over a period of days. The animals would be roasted on, ah, spits, or drenched in liquors and oils and burned that way.’
‘But why?’
‘To summon the Devil! Or least a highly important demon. It was believed that the horrendous shrieking of the cats would disturb the Devil, and invoke him, and eventually he would be forced to reveal himself and do the bidding, at least temporarily, of the coven or the wizard.’
A ritual for summoning the Devil? Karen walked around the darkened rooms with their glass cabinets and their morbid contents: a naked mandrake in a jar, inscribed with a screaming face; a knitted poppet woven with real human hair and stuck with a vicious pin; a medieval wooden carving of a woman tearing open her vagina, leering. The silence was claustrophobic. She turned to look at Donald, who was sorting through some keys.
‘The museum.’
‘Yes?’
‘Why is it so empty?’
‘Because we’re closing today you see, closing for the winter.’ He brandished the keys. ‘We open from April to October, for the tourists. In the winter we reopen for Christmas and New Year, but that’s it. The village is largely holiday homes, half are empty in winter: there’s really no point after New Year.’
The village had seemed strangely deserted. A bit like Zennor. Karen filed the thought away: holiday homes? That was a thought, but she didn’t know why: it was a useful object she could not yet find a use for.
‘OK, tell me more about Taghairm. This really happened? How do we know?’
‘Because it is attested by reliable historians.’ Donald smiled. ‘The last known certain case of a Taghairm was in Skye, Scotland, at the so-called False Church – a large rock by a cave – some time in the eighteenth century. Though there are reports of it happening since.’
‘What reports?’
‘Rumours, as it were. No more than that. Satanists, Wicca practitioners, you know.’
Karen felt she was missing something. Cats. All those cats. Screaming. She walked between the glass cases, examining the noisome objects. A selection of moles’ feet; a human skull strapped in a leather harness ‘for placing on an altar’; glass spirit houses – pieces of animals and plants trapped in ancient glass bottles.
The collection was impressive, and disturbing. Karen had no time for superstition, no more than she had for religion, yet there was a real quality to this display; the weighty evidence of human credulity, and human malignancy, was itself unnerving. People actually believed all this stuff: to curse and kill, bewitch and invoke. And people roasted dozens of cats, on Zennor Hill, just last week.
Cats. Again the cats. What obvious piece of the puzzle was dangling in front of her face, hidden in plain sight from her mind?
Karen had reached the back of museum. It was very dark here, and cold. The wind moaned at a small window. These cottages were badly lit. But the walls were thick and strong, to withstand the winter gales.
A passing shaft of frail sun illuminated a SPECIAL EXHIBIT OF SEA WITCHCRAFT: a mermaid’s purse for capturing ghosts, a lobster claw inscribed with a spell, a glass ball for warding off evil from the oceans, and something very odd: a kind of ugly, fragile grey cloth. What was it?
Leaning closer, Karen read out loud the small explanatory sign: ‘One of the museum’s prized possessions, this is a human caul, a membrane that sometimes covers a baby’s head at birth. Dried and preserved, these were much sought after by seamen as they were supposed to prevent drowning.’
Karen winced. A baby’s caul? Wretched.
She turned to ask Donald a question but he was nowhere to be seen: locking up his business, perhaps.
‘Hello?’ she called.
The museum was silent. The skull with the leather harness stared at her. The sacred seahorses on their little strings swung gently in some unfelt breeze. The darkness was palpable now, the winter
twilight falling at four p.m. She thought about her mother, burned in the crematorium. The burning of the corpse. This was stupid; yet it was so dark. She could barely see the way through the maze of exhibits to the door.
The door was shut.
‘Hello?’
Silence. Karen felt a rising and absurd panic. Where was Donald Ryman?
‘Miss Trevithick.’
She jumped as if she had been scalded. He’d appeared from nowhere – or at least, from a little open side door she hadn’t even seen.
‘Jesus!’
‘My apologies, ah, did I scare you?’ He lifted the keys again. ‘I was locking some of our most valuable cases, the Golden Dawn collection. In the side room.’
‘The Golden what?’
‘Dawn. They were a group of bohemians and writers, poets and aristocrats, in the 1900s, in London. Yeats was a member, the Irish poet. The Order of the Golden Dawn. They revived Western occultism. We have some of their more exquisite paraphernalia here, very valuable. And actually …’ His smile was scarcely visible in the gloom, but he was definitely smiling, a man with a secret, or a revelation.
‘Go on.’
‘I have had an insight that might entice you. The library angel has visited!’
Donald began the walk back to the main door, swinging the keys, annoyingly. And talking over his shoulder. Karen followed, listening.
‘One of the most famous members of the Golden Dawn was Aleister Crowley, of course. Interestingly, he was also closely associated with the use of cats for ritualistic purposes. He was known as the wickedest man in the world, the Great Beast 666.’
Karen was mystified. She followed Donald into the museum shop, and watched as he locked the door behind them. She was glad to be in the brightness of the shop. With its plastic skulls and its fake poppets. ‘I don’t see the relevance of this Crowley guy, apart from the cats.’
‘Come over here. I have a book for sale. The Tregerthen Horror, by a fine local writer.’
He plucked the book from a wire rack and handed it to her. A storm seemed to be picking up outside, dark rain flaying the shop windows.
‘There are several links between Crowley and far-western Cornwall. As this book explains: links between him and Zennor, and Penzance, and Newlyn, that whole area. I also believe there is some connection between him and Carn Cottage – wasn’t that the cottage where you found the cats?’
Karen nodded. She had one more question. ‘But who was Crowley?’
Donald was turning off the lights, one by one. ‘Oh, a great Satanist, or a great lunatic, take your pick. A very controversial figure. In the 1920s he rented a villa in Sicily, which he devoted to sex magic and such, a very notorious place. He had his wife raped by a goat there. And he is said to have performed Taghairm, which killed someone.’ Ryman switched off the final light, so that they were drenched in sudden darkness. ‘That’s interesting, isn’t it?’
14
Nazlet, Egypt
They didn’t even get in a car.
The policeman just walked him five hundred metres up the road, to a large office tiled white and blue. What was happening? Why was he being arrested? Was this the police station? Ryan gazed around, repressing his panic.
The place was certainly governmental – one of the few buildings in this broiled and dusty town not made of mud brick and straw.
Inside the stuffy office were three more Egyptian cops, irritable and tired. The men were sweating in the afternoon heat and waving at the sandflies. A non-dusty oblong on the otherwise dusty wall showed where the latest portrait of the lately deposed president must have hung until very recently.
A cop invited him to sit. The police didn’t seem that hostile. More dutiful. But dutiful could easily turn to vengeful with the Egyptian security forces. And they weren’t averse to beating up the odd foreigner.
Ryan steeled himself.
They questioned him for two hours. What was he doing here? How did he get here? Why come to a place like Nazlet Khater? Why did he speak good Arabic? Did he have a permit to travel? Ryan knew his best hope of avoiding a much nastier complication was honesty, or something close to it. So he was honest. Almost.
‘I am an Egyptologist, an American academic. I live in Abydos; here is my passport. I am an old friend of Victor Sassoon, and I heard that his body had been found. I do not have a permit to travel, but I only travel by day …’
But it wasn’t his answers the saved him from further harassment: it was Hassan’s letter.
When he produced it, the senior policeman read the contents and broke into a wary smile.
‘Ah, Hassan Elgammal. A great friend. I know his father.’
He handed back the letter, and nodded, with a faint expression of apology. ‘We have had a lot of trouble here. Many people wanted to find this Victor Sassoon, I do not know why. Anyway, his body is already buried, in accordance with Islamic law, so you have no further need to concern yourself.’
Every part of Ryan’s soul was yearning to ask: what about the Sokar documents? What was found with the body? But he knew he couldn’t do that: this would only provoke their suspicion once again, and then their wary acceptance of his story would certainly revert to something much nastier.
Taking Egyptian antiquities unlawfully was a serious offence, in any circumstances: the Sokar documents technically belonged to the Egyptian people and the Egyptian state. The police could put him in jail for years if he confessed what he was really doing, without any kind of permission. It would be like admitting intent to steal the golden death mask of Tutankhamun.
Ryan felt defeated. The entire exercise had been valueless. Now he could go back to hodding his bricks in the Oseirion, back to the life of a Pharaonic slave. But something in him rebelled at the idea: Hassan had been right, Ryan had done enough labouring now. He wanted to be a scholar again. To be the Egyptologist he was. To think. Use his brain.
The police officer stiffly gestured: ‘You can wait in here for a while, then we will take you to the buses and you can go home.’
A door was opened to a side room. Two other people were sitting on bare chairs therein. A white woman in her late twenties, and a light-skinned Egyptian. Both looked weary and bored; both gave him a brief glance, then looked away, staring at the floor, or at the barred and grimy window.
What was a Western woman doing here? Ryan had no time to find out, or even ask a question. Minutes later, a fifth policeman entered the room. He escorted them silently out into the blinding sun, with their bags. The woman had a hefty rucksack, like a backpacker. They were squeezed into a police car, which rattled down the muddy road, to a bare and windy square. Dented minibuses waited here. Egypt’s rural public transport. The policeman gestured at one empty bus.
‘These will take you to Tahta. From there you can get a train.’
The police car drove off. The light-skinned Egyptian looked nervously around, then immediately climbed on board the minibus.
Ryan was about to follow when the woman spoke, very quietly. ‘You’re Ryan Harper. The Egyptologist. You knew Sassoon.’
He paused, almost frightened. She continued.
‘I’ve seen you in photos. With him. I know a lot about Victor Sassoon.’ Her English was perfect but she had a definite accent: Dutch, or German. A blonde European woman in Nazlet who knew who he was: what the hell?
Now she lifted two stiff fingers to her mouth like a boy pretending to blow smoke from the muzzle of a gun. As if to say: Wait, be quiet, listen, say nothing.
He said nothing. She spoke again. ‘You came looking for something, didn’t you?’
The wind whirled across the sandy square. The place was deserted, apart from a stooped old woman in black shrouds, walking in the shadows towards a little shop. Ryan nodded and replied, very quietly, ‘Yes.’
The young woman’s face was expressionless. She seemed to be assessing him. ‘I have something you need to see, later. We can talk later. In the town.’
He climbed on the minibus, and
calmed himself as best he could.
The journey was staccato and uncomfortable. The road to Tahta passed endless little villages identical in their poverty: the repetition was like an hallucination, as if Egypt had hired a handful of extras on the cheap to appear in every scene. There was the wall-eyed man sitting on a stool smoking shisha outside a tea-house, there was the dog with three legs dragging itself towards a reeking heap of rubbish. And there they were again.
Through it all the European woman texted messages from her phone. Occasionally she made, or took, furtive calls, whispering and inaudible. Glancing at Ryan as if she was deciding something.
What did this woman have? What was going on?
‘Tahta!’
The minibus had drawn to a halt in a nondescript square with a perimeter of tea-houses with shishas, and a blue Co-op gas station, trailing a queue of rusty taxis. Everyone climbed off, dragging their bags. Ryan looked around. The sun was going down, turning the eastern cliffs, fifteen kilometres away, to mauve. The city of Tahta was straggled along the Nile valley.
The light-skinned Egyptian disappeared at once. The other passengers dispersed. Soon it was just him and the woman.
Abruptly, she extended a hand. ‘Helen Fassbinder.’
Perplexed, Ryan shook her hand.
For the first time, she allowed herself a small and anxious smile. ‘You must have questions.’
‘Just a few million. Nothing too demanding.’
‘Come. Let us have tea.’
The Dutch or German accent was definitely there: come – komm. Brusque and forthright.
His curiosity burned.
Ryan followed as Helen led them to the dirtiest possible tea-house at the corner of the square. Despite its impoverished exterior, it was busy with men smoking nargilehs, sipping thick sweet coffee from small dirty cups, playing sheshbesh, arguing. Some of them glanced at the Western couple, then returned to their games and caffeinated debates. Obviously Tahta still got a few tourists, thanks to its train station: tourists heading south for Abydos and Luxor, or north to Coptic sites, like the Monastery of the Bones.