However, despite all of our efforts, no significant finds were made and even the insignificant discoveries were so rare as to be little removed from unique. The Professor – who it seemed would not have cared if the sand’s displacement had revealed nothing more edifying than older sand – had of course warned us of this possibility, but I would be lying if I denied that most of we students, myself included, had not dreamt of discovering instant fame in the lost tomb of some long-forgotten king or queen.
For all of its inhospitality I still found Egypt a beautiful and romantic country and these were the qualities it somehow brought to bear on all the members of our little group, daring each of us to fall in love with it.
On a few occasions we were allowed by the magnanimous Professor Simpkin to venture into the markets and bazaars of Cairo herself. On other occasions we went regardless, small groups of us covering for those others whose turn it was to sneak carefully away, evading the sentinel of Professor Simpkin as the opportunities presented themselves. It was a journey of only a few miles as the crow flew, yet the change could not have been more profound if we had traversed half the globe. After the bleached drabness of the desert the bright, positively garish colours of the robes and rugs on sale in the souk dazzled the eyes, while the cheap, metal trinkets and weirdly fashioned containers flashed the bright sunlight as if wrought from silver and gold rather than coarser, baser metals. Everywhere we were assailed by the chattering vendors, imploring us to buy their wares in a language we could not understand. Unfortunately the only Arabic words most of us knew, which we had been advised while still in England was the only proper response to any native worker who addressed us, I had found from Charles could be freely translated to “stop malingering and get back to work”. Feeling that my limited repertoire would be more than slightly inappropriate I was thus forced to wave my open hands mutely in the faces of the more aggressive tradesmen and shake my head. It was only later that I learnt the gesture was an insult and that I had unknowingly called each of them the son of ten fathers. We live and learn.
Occasional islands of tranquillity were formed around a fakir or street performer who sang, charmed snakes, swallowed knives, played with red-hot irons or pierced his body and face with sharp skewers, while throughout the urgent anarchy you could always hear a fanatic or holy-man ranting and raving at the heaving masses in the name of Allah. The worst of it, though, was to be found at the edges of the markets. In the dark and filthy corners wasted creatures would sit, men, women and children hideously scarred by disease, accident, fate, flaw or even design, each begging and pleading most piteously for even the smallest of coins. Only once did I give anything to them, a couple of coins that would not have bought even a ha’penny sweet back home, and my reward was to be descended upon by a howling mob of beggars, a mass of open mouths and open hands which dashed itself against me like the ocean against a floundering ship, forcing me to flee from them at full clip.
Aloof from it all in their doorways, stairways, windows and balconies lounged prostitutes, their bodies obscenely rouged and displayed, offering their favours with embarrassing honesty as pairs of native men walked past hand-in-hand, giggling in the high-pitched, girlish manner which passed for laughter there.
Overall, the din was appalling. I could almost hear my father’s voice grumbling “vexatious to the ears” as he had when I or my brothers made even a trifle too much noise for his taste.
The smells were just as diverse in their nature, equally ubiquitous in their presence. Spices, smoke, food and bodily waste both human and animal vied for attention, filling the senses to the point of bursting, while under them, like a scorpion beneath a shaded rock, lurked the pervasive, dusty scent of the sand itself.
While we may have enjoyed little luck at the dig I had more than my fair share of discoveries that summer at the shops that lay off the central chaos of the bazaar, set like moons in an orbit around that hive of human activity. In those dark and dingy backstreet traders’ rooms I spent money like water on more artefacts than I could list then or recall now. Bracelets, earrings, necklaces and funerary goods of all description were purchased, packed and shipped back to England while other items of less obvious value were secreted amongst my belongings to be carried back with me when we all returned home. Scrolls, skins, copies of tomb writings and clay tablets lined my luggage, and if I could have transported back a mummy in its sarcophagus I would have done so and damned the expense.
But the most baffling find, the curio for Charles to mull over, was found in the market itself. Pushed back against a covered stall by one of the periodic surges that washed through the crowd I was forced to steady myself or risk falling to the filthy ground. As my hand flailed behind me my splayed fingers landed on the cover of a small book, barely larger than my palm, which nestled among the junk littering the rough, wooden table like a viper amidst the leaves of a forest floor. Flicking idly through the stained and tatty volume I discovered it to be a journal or notebook, each page covered with spidery writing, the mass of which was in some form of coded English. It was dated some twenty years previously practically to the day.
It seemed as if fate had led me literally by the hand to find that one thing that would obsess Charles.
A puzzle.
I bought the notebook for a couple of copper coins without all of the usual bartering that had accompanied each of my purchases in the East, acting on an impulse that had formed after I had done no more than started to skim the first few pages. As fate would have it that was the last opportunity that I had to visit the marketplaces of Cairo before the dig was wrapped-up for another year and we all embarked once more for England.
X
Upon my arrival back at Cambridge I was expecting to be met by Charles but was not overly surprised when, after lingering more than half an hour beyond the departure of my companions, I was still sitting upon my travelling chest in front of the same porter’s lodge that had witnessed my leave-taking so many weeks before. The duty porter, black coated and white haired, was kind enough to allow me to store my luggage in his room, a cosy chamber steeped for decades in the sweet aromas of tea and tobacco and protected from the prying eyes of students by an ancient and threadbare curtain tacked insecurely to the oak lintel above its entrance. The assumption – uncharacteristically correct as it happened – that my father had already sent someone to collect me and my luggage forced me to run to my lodgings in order to avoid keeping whichever servant had been thus dispatched from waiting any longer than was absolutely necessary. A note slipped half under my door by the letting agent informed me that my rooms had indeed been retained for my final year but, after toiling up that final flight of stairs, my breath wheezing from my lungs as if from some ancient smoker’s, my staccato knocking on Charles’ door went unanswered. I rattled the handle, more from hopeful desperation than from any real expectation of success, but upon finding it locked resolved to waste as little more time as possible before returning to the porters’ lodge. Perching on the narrow landing and using my knee as an impromptu writing surface I hastily scrawled a brief note upon the brown paper that wrapped the little notebook before propping it up against the door to stand, a lazy and disinterested sentry, awaiting Charles’ return.
Pausing only to dust off the seat of my trousers I made my way back down the flights of stairs, breaking into a run when I had emerged into the chilly afternoon sunlight. Despite the coolness of the British weather I arrived back at the lodge, sweat-soaked and exhausted, to find my luggage already loaded and both the porter and a liveried driver patiently awaiting my return. After thanking both men for their patient forbearance I was only too happy to collapse into the plush, leather upholstery and fall fast asleep.
The next two weeks I spent at home in preparation for the return to my third and final year of study, recharging my batteries and cataloguing my newly acquired Egyptian artefacts. These were, I knew, my final days as a free man, untouched by the troubles of the world. The following summer would find m
e freshly graduated from the finest university anywhere on the globe and a member of His Majesty’s Armed Forces, a newly commissioned cornet in the same regiment in which my father had served.
It would also find me, had I but known it, aged by those few months far more than was warranted by the mere passage of time.
X
I returned to Cambridge to begin my final year well aware that my skin had been darkened to a chestnut brown and my hair bleached almost blonde by the actions of the harsh, Egyptian sun (those of us who had joined the dig were all easily recognised by our dramatic change in colouration, each of us now as alike as siblings in that respect), but it was only when I looked into the water-stained mirror hung above the sink in my modest accommodations that I fully realised the sum of the changes that had taken place in the past few months. I am not, especially now in my declining years, a creature of vanity and am probably the only man I have ever known who was happy to go bald, granting me as it did a respite from the dreadful chore of caring for an entirely superfluous tangle of hair (crowning glory indeed!). However, in those halcyon days when I was still interested in the attentions of the fairer sex I had stared so fixedly into that mirror and for such lengths of time that I am surprised my image never became imprinted upon it. This being said, since the start of my more earnest pursuit of academe I had, as strange as it sounds, barely noticed my reflection. It had become an unimportant aspect, a phantom, a wraith glimpsed from the corner of my eye in shop windows and glassed frames as I made my way to or from the handful of landmarks that made up my waking world. Looking properly at it after so long the gradual changes in my figure and form, the natural metamorphoses that normally slip by unobserved over time, were flung at me all in one go and with such a force that I was staggered. Imagine looking through a darkened window and finding yourself face to face with a relative you never knew you had, a distant cousin possessing a similarity to your own features but stamped by entirely different experiences. I knew that the reflection staring back at me was my own for it moved when I moved and turned when I turned, but it was so changed, so altered, that it set me in mind of the distorting mirrors you used to be able to find at travelling fairs.
I was so thin! I still possessed the broad frame that had won me acclaim on the rugby field, the same heavy bones which had resisted the impacts that had sent my opposition reeling, but the muscle and brawn that had once filled that frame to the point of bursting had dwindled practically to nothing. My belly, once ridged like a scrubbing board, had become as hollow as a bell while the skin stretched tightly over my chest showed my ribs as painfully pronounced curves, scythe-blades of bone woven artfully together by some demented sculptor. And my face! So drawn and empty! Small wonder that my mother had been pushing all manner of foods at me during that last fortnight at home. Of course on an intellectual level I knew that I had changed, I knew the inevitable results of the cessation of my rugby training, of all those late nights and missed meals, but to see it so starkly illustrated, so shocking displayed... Horrible!
That first month of term saw me neglecting my studies once more, fitting them in where I could like books on an already crowded shelf, while I dedicated the bulk of my time towards a desperate effort to regain my old shape, to steal my body back from the thief who had taken it so surreptitiously from me. And while I obsessed over this new task I failed to notice that my friend and mentor seemed to have completely disappeared from my life.
Even looking back with the perfection of hindsight this didn’t seem so very noteworthy. The start of each new term would always find Charles indulging himself in what he thought of as an almost sacred task; the inspection of the various book-dealers, antiquarians and libraries in the area that had managed to build up their stocks-in-trade since his last visit. He once described it as “the act of an intellectual Viking”, returning to the same raided villages over and over and over again, granting each just enough time to recover from the last attack before stripping it bare once more and bearing the spoils homewards. I still heard him moving about his room late at night even though he was absent during the day, but the notes I pinned to his door either remained unremoved, or were taken but left unanswered. At least until that mid-November morning.
I was awoken from an exhausted and dreamless sleep by an incessant hammering, a constant storm of battering on my door that made it rattle in its frame and shake on its hinges. My sleep-befuddled pleas for the unknown interloper to at least pause while I tied my dressing gown closed about my waist went unheeded, the pounding continuing until I jerked the door open and away from whichever wretch had chosen to so cruelly disturb my rest. Indeed that action of mine seemed to so surprise my unwelcome caller that his hand rapped at thin air once more before it stopped. But if my visitor was surprised then I was flabbergasted for the sight that met me was Charles, wide eyed, thin and stinkingly filthy. If I had become gaunt over the last months then poor Charles had sunk to an almost skeletal emaciation, the deeply shadowed hollows of his face further accentuated by ingrained dirt and unshaven whiskers. For those first few seconds I stared at him with such shock, such dumbfounded horror, that my numbed senses failed even to register that he was talking to me.
“You must come,” he was saying, ranting so quickly as he tugged me towards those damned stairs that I could barely make him out. “That diary...God’s blood, what have I done? What have I discovered? You won’t believe it, I tell you. Not even when you see it with your own eyes. Ia! And all from that little diary you left for me, my friend. That little book. All thanks to you.”
By now we had reached his room and the stink that poured from the open doorway compelled from my body the first resistance to Charles’ urgings I had shown. The rank odour of Charles’ unwashed body was as nothing to the foetid reek that now struck me, a miasma composed of rotten food, sweat, bodily waste, cloyingly sweet incense and other less definable but somehow organic smells that assailed my nose with a tangible violence. The combined effect of the separate stenches lifted my stomach into my mouth so rapidly that I was forced to clasp my robe to my face with my free hand or risk voiding my belly then and there. I was only grateful that I could no longer clearly distinguish my surroundings with any degree of clarity as Charles seemed to have hung a heavy, black cloth over the window, blocking out the glow from the stars, the facing houses and even the street-lights themselves so that not even a single ray of light entered the room. Indeed the gloom within which Charles lived would have been impenetrable were it not for a solitary candle burning fitfully in the far corner, a lonely island in the Stygian darkness, which revealed in chiaroscuro hints of light and shadow as great a change in the room itself as that which had befallen Charles.
The most noticeable difference was that it was now almost devoid of books. While scraps of paper and pages littered the floor in drifts as chaotic as those of leaves in a woodland clearing, there was not a single intact volume to be seen amongst them. It was as though the monolithic structures that had been built from those innumerable tomes had been destroyed, razed by some vengeful God or force of nature until all that remained was a field of paper rubble to mark their passing. Even the chair into which Charles pushed me, heedless of my discomfort and state of undress, was half-buried under a drift of handwritten pages. As my eyes accustomed themselves more fully to the gloom that filled the room and the fog of sleep lifted from my mind a closer inspection of the chamber revealed only two points to be free from the disorder: a circle of bare boards in the centre of the floor and Charles’ old writing desk. It was Charles himself who drew attention to the latter by snatching up the two items which had been laid upon it. In his left hand he held the battered and malformed shape of Von Juntz’s insane masterpiece while the fingers of his right grasped the slim, red-covered diary which I had brought for him from distant Egypt. It was this latter volume that he waved in my face as he started to rant afresh.
“This book,” he cackled, for his voice was hoarse and broken, “this book was meant for me.
So fortuitous! The right time, the right place. So many factors aligned to bring it to me, to place it here, before me. The key, Ia! The key I had searched for so long and hard. The keys to the book, and the code, and the gate. All with me, all here! Ia! Don’t you see it? Don’t you see that this proves it? That this was always my destiny, my fate?” I nodded dumbstruck, baffled into silence by the storm of nonsense, dumb-struck by the insanity I saw within my friend.
And then he laughed, that same musical laugh that had struck me as so odd all those months ago. “It was an American,” he coughed as the laughter died. “Of all things, an American.” As he spoke, spittle flecking his lips and chin, he stared me straight in the eyes and for a moment he seemed restored to sanity, his voice dropping to normality for just one sentence to ask one last, bizarre question of me before rising once more, as inevitable as a treacherous tide covering viciously toothed rocks. “Now who would have guessed an American would have held a secret so long lost to the world? Ia! Incredible!”
I stirred in my seat, my gaze shifting from my friend as my body sought to relieve the unnatural discomfort I now felt in his presence, and he crouched beside me, the hand that held the diary clamping down over my own, pinning me to the seat with a horrifying strength. I can still recall the intense heat his body radiated, pouring out from him as scorchingly hot as the air which streams from an open stove. It was as though the fever that held his mind in a vice-like grip had become palpable to my own, dread-filled perception. My skin crawled and my fingers writhed in his grasp, though I doubt he realised it, the moist heat of his touch bringing unbidden thoughts of sickness and decay to mind. Even now, so many years later, my stomach will sometimes turn when I enter a hot and stuffy room or find my hand falling upon a surface that is just slightly and unidentifiably too warm.
New Tales of the Old Ones Page 19