The Deceit

by Knox, Tom

  ‘We just—’

  ‘He is the devil, he is. You think you can catch him, silly bitch! Luke will rape you, he will rape the fucking smile off your face.’

  Karen stepped up, inching towards the alarm.

  ‘He fucked me like a dog, made me pregnant, atha atharim, he is the Devil now!’

  Karen was furiously pressing the panic code. The girl came across the room; she was on Karen in a second, tearing at Karen’s jeans, trying to kiss her. Karen thrust her away, horrified and nauseated. Alicia Rothley was licking Karen’s face; laughing, and licking—

  Quickly, thought Karen. Quickly quickly quickly!

  The girl’s hand was inside Karen’s bra, thrusting like a man, groping, her fingers were clawing in Karen’s groin, forcing their way inside; her pungent saliva was wet on Karen’s face—

  The door swung open and two security guards rushed in. A doctor grabbed Alicia by the waist and dragged her away from Karen, onto the bed. Straps were flourished, and tied around her wrists. The girl began howling, like a tortured dog.

  ‘Atha atharim, atha atharim!’

  Her heart thumping with horror, Karen stepped outside the cell. For some reason she thought of her mother, burning. The crematorium. The flames burning the flesh.

  Deep breaths, deep breaths. Slowly, she did up her unbuttoned jeans, and her shirt, as best she could; one shirt-button had been ripped away entirely. Seeing a hand sanitizer on the wall, she grabbed it, pressed the button and rubbed the gunk on her hands and on her face.

  She felt violated. She felt violated by a girl. The girl’s tongue had licked her face. Like a dog.

  The noise behind the cell door had subsided. Karen paused, inhaled, exhaled, then summoned her composure and made her own way back to Nurse Hawley’s office.

  The thin-lipped nurse gave her a sad and sympathetic nod. ‘I was watching on CCTV.’

  ‘You were watching?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I sent security right away. You are all right?’

  Karen sat down. And gazed at her trembling hands. ‘Yes. I think so.’

  The nurse picked up the file on ROTHLEY, ALICIA.

  ‘As I said, it is an unusually pure and dramatic psychosis. We usually give her hefty dosages of anti-psychotics. The police at Truro, Sally Pascoe, gives me to understand she was involved in some Satanic rite? Some ritual?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Nurse Hawley opened the file. ‘Whatever it was, it probably tipped her over into psychosis. Of course she may have been schizotypal anyway; but she needed a catalyst. And she got it. Did she give you any useful information?’

  ‘No … not really. It was … sorry, I’m a bit shaken. She said her brother was the Devil. They did some magic, she said he got her pregnant. Just crazy stuff, I think. Then she went for me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Karen closed her eyes, trying to forget. Then she remembered she had a job to do, and answers she needed. ‘What are those scratches on her chin, and her neck? Have you checked them? Must be from the cats, right?’

  Nurse Hawley shook her head. ‘Well, no. Not exactly.’ A slow pause. ‘Many of the scratches are from, uh, shaving. She resists but we have to do it.’

  Karen sat forward. ‘What?’

  ‘Yes. We have to shave her. Every day. Like a man.’

  20

  The Necropolis of Cats, Bubastis, Egypt

  Ryan yawned. He was exhausted from the flights and car rides and nerve-shredding army checkpoints that had brought them here, right across Egypt, to the middle of the great reedy Nile Delta and the smoky modern city of Zagazig, with the ruins of Tell Bastet on its outskirts.

  Helen’s frown was visible in the darkness.

  ‘How can you film down here?’ Ryan asked. ‘You can barely see the rat in front of your face.’

  She laughed, briefly. ‘Sense of humour? That is good. I have a portable light here, in my bag. It will be good enough. I just need to set it up. This will take two minutes.’

  Ryan sat back, in the piles of dust. Exactly what kind of dust it was, what comprised this dust, he had no idea, and did not especially care to speculate.

  They were deep in the dark heart of the great cat necropolis, a labyrinth of tombs: surrounded by tiny three-thousand-year-old mud tunnels, each dotted with thousands of little niches in the walls. Almost every niche contained a mummified animal: a desiccated little corpse of a cat, wrapped diligently in special linens, and preserved with nitrates. Other niches probably contained jars of internal cat organs. A few most likely contained the mummies of less revered animals.

  ‘OK,’ said Helen, in the unsavoury darkness. ‘Nearly ready. One more second …’

  ‘Where is Albert?’

  ‘He is still with the guards, bribing them, making sure we have time and that no one interrupts us. We need to be quick though. Half an hour, I think. OK, start by telling us what you have discovered about the papyrus.’

  ‘Wait, you want to spend half an hour down here?’ Ryan stared around. The idea of lingering for more than a few minutes in this stifling maze of tunnels was grotesque. The air was acrid with death. Ryan wondered how many ancient diseases were preserved here. He thought of his wife and child, dead of malaria, an infection bred here, in the Delta.

  ‘Really, Helen. Can’t we film up above ground? Just do an intro?’

  ‘But here is better!’ Her smile was brief but sincere. ‘It is so atmospheric in a necropolis! A catacomb. Even the name is good. The catacombs of Bubastis. It will really work, trust me.’ She looked at him, smiled again. ‘Please?’

  She’d said please. For the first time ever.

  Ryan nodded and obeyed. He rubbed dirt from his face and turned to the dazzling light that Helen held aloft. Shadows danced beyond the cone of light, the shadows of little cat corpses, as he spoke.

  ‘We are now closer to unravelling the mystery of the Sokar Hoard. By comparing our pages with similar documents, in the archives of the Monastery of St Apollo, outside Akhmim, we now know a lot more about our papyrus. It appears to have been written in the late sixth century by a Coptic scholar from Akhmim named Macarius. Quite possibly, judging by the vocabulary we have translated, Macarius was a follower of Gnostic Christianity, certainly a scholar of religion. The papyrus seems to be an investigation into faith, in the form of a journey across Egypt, a very early travel book, if you like. These are not unknown in the ancient world. But most of this we have yet to translate. Yet we have already deciphered some of his sentences. For instance …’ Ryan coughed some of the endless dust from his mouth. The dust of dead cats. ‘For instance, in the very first passages, he says “I went to Alexandria, but there I found nothing, for there the great knowledge had been destroyed by the invaders. But it did not concern me as I had read all the books which came from Egypt. And so I went to …”’ Ryan paused, and turned his notebook to show the camera. ‘Here, Macarius uses hieroglyphics, as he often does when citing a place name. These hieroglyphics say Pr-3BST. As it happens, this is easily decipherable. Ironically, the demotic hieroglyphics are easier to translate than the obscure, archaic Coptic dialect. So. Pr-3BST is Per-Bast, the House of Bast. In other words, he means here, Bubastis, the city where the cat goddess Bast was famously revered.’

  Ryan put down the notebook and gestured at the roof of the mud tunnel above him.

  ‘So here we are in the necropolis of cats, the city of the dead cats, underneath the ruins of great Bubastis. From the first days of the Early Kingdom to the Persian invasions of the fifth century BC, this famous capital – at one time the capital of all Egypt – was the centre of cat-worship. As a result, Egyptians and others brought cats here, by the cartload, to be mummified; some cats were specially bred just to be killed, ritually drowned, so they could then be mummified.

  ‘And it wasn’t just cats. Many species of animals were mummified throughout Egyptian history: dogs, rats, rams, fish, ibises, baboons and sacred crocodiles. And beetles. Scarab beetles.

  ‘The Egyptians were so
obsessed with the afterlife they went so far as to mummify insects. The dust of Egypt is therefore littered with millions of these animal mummies: so many, in fact, they have since been used as fuel, or fertiliser, dug up by bulldozers and shipped abroad by the ton.’ Ryan now gestured at a little niche close to his shoulder. ‘But here in the Bubastic necropolis it is very definitely cats that predominate, as we can see. Here. If I just reach in …’

  He slid his hands into the dark, dry, narrowing slot. He could feel the three-thousand-year-old cat, preserved within its gangrenous swaddling. The papery corpse was repellent to the touch. Desiccated yet still faintly organic, dry yet moist, paradoxical and revolting. He swallowed his disgust and pulled it out.

  ‘In my hands I have a classic example, probably a cat mummy dedicated by a poorer family or individual. The richer votaries would commission a coffin for the cat mummy, and Canopic jars for the organs. The poor would simply have their cat basically eviscerated and embalmed, like this one, as you can see.’

  Ryan lifted the sad little corpse to the camera; the head was barely connected by the flaking spinal cord to the body, the fur was like dead ashes, the eyes were all rotted out, the greasy dark sockets gazing at him regretfully. Or accusingly. Disturbed from the sleep of death.

  He was relieved when he was able to slide the tiny corpse back in its immemorial hole. And clap the noxious dust from his hands.

  ‘So why did Macarius come here? The text breaks off at this point, tantalizingly. The following passage is illegible. But as he was researching religion, he was surely researching the religiosity of Bubastis, which was intense and famous. At one point Bubastis was home to the greatest religious festival in Egypt, described by Herodotus. Apparently seven hundred thousand people would gather for the annual festival of Bast, travelling along the Nile to the Bubastis temples and oracles in great barges. And they came to party. Herodotus describes the excited women in the barges hurling off their clothes and mocking the peasants on the riverbank with their exposed genitals. And then the drinking and fornication would begin, a Dionysiac ritual, a vast bacchanal, days of dancing and coupling above the necropolis. It was the greatest orgy of the ancient world, perhaps the greatest orgy in human history.’

  Ryan paused. He didn’t know why. Something was wrong, he was sure of it. The shadows of the cats danced around him. The dust was so thick. He cleared his throat and continued.

  ‘We can only imagine what Macarius thought about this vivid history. He may, like a good Christian, have been scandalized. On the other hand, some strains of Coptic Gnosticism already had a very unusual attitude to sexuality. A Greek scholar called Epiphanius journeyed to Egypt in 335 AD, and met a group of Gnostics whom he thought were ordinary Christians but he later called them Stratiotics, or Phibionites. He describes a group engaged in orgies, a cult that consumed semen and menstrual blood at the peak of their rites. Epiphanius even claims some Gnostics cooked human babies for Passover dinner.’

  No. Something was wrong. There was a shadow – there – it was there, looming behind Helen: she couldn’t see it. He could hear it.

  ‘Helen!’

  The black shape emerged into the cone of camera-light: it was an Arab man in a black cloak and a black beard. His face was wrought with anxiety.

  ‘Run!’ he said.

  Ryan lifted a hand. And yelled in Arabic, ‘Why? What is happening? Who are you?’

  The man pushed Helen in the back. ‘Run. There are men coming after us.’

  Ryan snapped back, ‘Who? Who are they?’

  But the man gabbled on, ‘We couldn’t stop them. I work in the gate. I ran for it. I was coming down here to warn you.’

  His explanation was cut short by a blaze of noise and light at the far end of the tunnel. Their pursuers.

  ‘They have guns. They are going to kill us.’

  21

  Bubastis, the city of cats, Egypt

  Ryan grabbed Helen by the hand and they ran, and crawled, desperately, urgently, down the musty mud tunnel, knocking cat mummies to the ground, crunching them underfoot, backbones cracking at last, skulls kicked out of the way, black rotted eyesockets staring unseeingly into the momentary glare of the flashlight.

  ‘They’re still coming, I can hear them—’

  Helen was panting, dragging her bags with the camera. Ryan twisted in the horrible, narrow tunnel and took her bag, hoisted it, and scrambled on. But even as he fled, the Arab man squeezed past so that he could show them a new route: a tiny, half-concealed, even narrower tunnel.

  ‘This way.’

  They had to duck under a low overhang of mud, rotten with age. The roof was unstable, Ryan realized. It could give way at any moment: they were taking a terrible risk. They would be smothered with dirt and ancient mummies: mummified beetles and mummified crocodiles and mummified ibises, and tons of Bubastic mud bricks. Filling their mouths, stifling them, drying them out, until they too would become just another trio of human mummies – raising the total to half a billion and three, as if anyone would notice.

  ‘Here, along here!’

  The tunnel forked. Ryan could hear voices in the muffled distance, still coming after them. Who was this? The police? How could they have followed them? Was it the army? Come to arrest them? Had Albert betrayed them?

  They took the left fork. The tunnel widened: the niches here were much bigger. Ryan glimpsed the shouting faces of dried-out baboons in large holes, grimacing, rigid and stricken.

  The Arab man seemed suddenly confused. ‘Here. No. No. Here? No?’

  The tunnel divided into three: it was a labyrinth. The man was paralysed by indecision, his flashlight switching this way and that, picking out a dried ibis, squawking for eternity, a piece of rock, scribed with faint hieroglyphs, and the endless passages of poisonous old mud bricks, dark and stained, soaked through with natron, wood-resins, animal fats. The salts of mummification had permeated the fabric of the tombs at this ancient end of the maze. This whole place was drenched and tainted with the liquors of preservation, the rancid juices of immortality; and now the voices behind them were audible.

  ‘Stop! Or we’ll shoot!’

  English voices? British accents?

  Helen pushed her way down the first tunnel, past the confused Arab man. But even as she did, a gun was fired. The bullet missed them, thudding into one of the niches down the way, shattering some ancient baboon skull.

  Ryan put a hand on Helen’s trembling shoulder and pulled her back. They were caught, they could not escape – running was pointless.

  The lights got brighter as their pursuers – or killers – approached. Ryan lifted an arm to shade his eyes from the dazzle as he tried to make out their faces.

  ‘We’re trying to save your stupid lives, motherfuckers.’

  This time a Canadian accent? The men were young, aggressive, wearing jeans and tight T-shirts, canvas jackets; their manner was soldierly.

  The Brit barked in Ryan’s direction, ‘You, Harper? Tell the towel-head to get us out of here. Now.’

  Ryan asked the terrified Arab man to show the way out. Once he had been calmed, the man obeyed. For several minutes they squeezed between narrow walls of mud, lined with mummies and coffins and broken and rotten bandaging; everywhere, little skulls peered from little niches, their eyesockets seeming to move with the flashlights passing. The silent journey was horribly tense, as well as grisly. Where were they going? Who were these guys?

  At last the Arab stood and lifted some planking, throwing it aside, and they emerged, blinking, into the overcast light. A dampness tanged the air: a faint drizzle had evidently fallen. This was the autumnal Nile Delta winter, so different to the endless seasonless sunshine a hundred miles south.

  The men with the guns shunted them around a heaped old ruin of mud bricks, and there was Albert Hanna, squatting morosely in the dust; beside the gateman of the ruin-complex. Two more white men with guns were standing over them. The man with the British accent, apparently the leader, snapped an order: �
�Sit. We need to talk. Sit the fuck down!’

  They sat in the dust like prisoners of war. Ryan gazed at his captors. The other man was looking to his left and right, like a trained soldier, like secret service. Ryan realized that these men were anxious, even scared. But scared of whom?

  ‘You can call me Callum,’ said the Brit, his gun casually levelled in their direction. A soldier perhaps? He had blond hair, shaved close to the skull, but wore a seriously expensive watch.

  So not a regular soldier then. Ryan tried to work it out. The other men were similarly confusing: a mixture of military bearing and surf-dude demeanour.

  ‘These are my friends,’ Callum continued. ‘We’re here to save your bloody arses.’

  Albert Hanna spoke up. ‘Then why are you pointing guns at us? Are you going to burn a village to save a village?’

  Callum chuckled mirthlessly, and slid his weapon into a holster. Then he crouched so that he was eye-level with Albert. ‘Mate, listen. You do not know the trouble you are in – a whole lot of trouble.’

  ‘But who are you?’ Helen asked.

  Callum waved away the question. ‘It doesn’t concern you. We are, for the moment, your only fucking hope.’ He turned to Ryan. ‘You have the Sokar documents – or part of them, right? And you are trying to decipher them?’

  Ryan answered, his voice tinged with anger and suspicion. ‘Yes. But who are they? How are they following us, how did they trace us?’

  ‘The cops in Nazlet coughed. Gave your names to journos, names of mysterious Westerners sniffing around Nazlet when Sassoon was discovered. Bloggers picked up the story, spread it. Everyone knows who needs to know: there are plenty of rumours on the net. The people hunting you down have spies everywhere, lots of spies and money. How many checkpoints have you been through? How many Egyptian soldiers on two bucks a day have they paid off? This is how we traced you, so this is how they are tracing you. Except they probably have satellites too. Satellites and drones, the full McFlurry. They could be here in a minute, so we need to get out. And when we go, Ryan Harper, you will decode that document for us. In return we will stop you getting killed.’