Sphinx

by T. S. Learner

  Next to Thoth, in the place where the deceased would usually stand waiting to be judged before the throne of Osiris, were four Canopic jars carved with the heads of the sons of Horus. I felt myself gag slightly, noiselessly. I knew Canopic jars were used to contain the mummified organs of the dead. Did these jars contain Isabella’s organs? Their bright colours and the hieroglyphs painted vertically on each one looked completely authentic. The whole theatrical display seemed meticulous in its historical accuracy; garish, yet sombre with a rigid authority that had kept such a civilisation - with its chaotic underworld - so powerful for centuries. The purpose and effort behind such a fanatically correct presentation was terrifying. And judging by the participants’ concentration they appeared to be convinced by the power of their own symbolism. They weren’t just re-enacting the weighing-of-the-heart ceremony - they were living it.

  Osiris’s throne was a gilded chair on a podium, its base carved with serpents and jackals. Behind it stood two figures in profile, Isis and her sister Nephthys, as if they expected the king of the Underworld to manifest any minute. Isis wore an elaborate costume that covered her arms and hands, its long skirt reaching to the ground. Her golden breastplate was moulded in the shape of a woman’s breasts and her face was a painted mask framed by a long black wig. In contrast, her sister goddess was unmasked and near-naked - it was almost as if one goddess was meant to represent artifice, the other nature. Nephthys looked as if she was in her twenties, and I peered closer, wondering if this was the woman who had lured me into the catacombs. But her face did not resemble Isabella’s in any way.

  I crept forward along the clammy wall, careful not to make any noise. I’d come too far to go back but I was under no illusion what my reception would be if I were discovered. And aside from my fear, I was also curious. Another figure with a falcon mask, Horus, started a low chant in a language I didn’t recognise. His stance and stature were vaguely familiar to me. Horus’s role was to lead the deceased to the ritual, but as yet the deceased appeared to be absent in the tableau. Had he or she not arrived yet? The other worshippers joined in and the hypnotic monotone echoed off the limestone walls, weaving and blending into one single note that bored its way into my head. I tried to remember the exact order of the gods in the murals I had seen depicting the ritual. Osiris sat on his throne to the right, with Isis and her sister behind him. Here he was missing, the throne empty. Horus and Thoth stood next to the scales that weighed the heart. Horus would read out the sins of the deceased while Thoth would write them down. What did the jackal-headed Anubis do? I thought frantically but I couldn’t remember exactly. And there was another god missing - a figure that always appeared at the bottom of the murals, a large crocodile-type creature snapping at the heart on the scales. Ammut, that was it - Ammut the devourer of the dead, a fusion of all the creatures that terrorised the Ancient Egyptians in real life. She had the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion and the haunches of a hippopotamus. Ammut’s task was to eat the hearts of those found guilty by the gods, thus destroying any hope of an afterlife for them. Would she appear? Although the monster had a peculiarly comical look, it had always disturbed me: there was something primordially terrifying about the sly ferocity of the reptilian jaw, the jagged teeth waiting to tear apart the sinner.

  A great rustling burst up around me. My gaze snapped to the stage. The masked figures appeared indifferent to the cacophony, which grew louder and louder until what appeared at first to be a swarm of black cloth rags came streaming from the back of the catacombs. I looked on in horror at the storm of deadly ancient creatures, flapping darkly like emissaries of hell. They swerved at the last minute to avoid the stationary figures on the raised platform and I was buffeted by a huge wind as thousands of tiny beating wings missed me by inches. Bats. They poured past me and continued towards the tunnel’s entrance. I pressed myself against the stone to avoid the flying mass of tiny furry bodies, when I suddenly felt an arm wrap around my neck. I stumbled. Someone pinned my hands behind me and a needle jabbed into my shoulder. I fell back, desperately trying to free myself but my captor hauled me into the full light of the torches and pushed me to my knees. The torches began to spit small meteorites of flame and the masked figures on the podium turned slowly in my direction. They seemed to grow in height as they moved.

  Horus stepped forward and his falcon’s head sprouted feathers, its beady black eyes swivelling towards me. I tried to speak but my tongue felt too swollen to move. Belatedly I realised I’d been drugged, but the knowledge didn’t stop the violent rush of fear as the bird-god stepped down from the podium, his huge gnarled claws rattling against the stone floor. This can’t be real, this isn’t real, I told myself over and over, terror reverberating through me like the echo of a nightmare drum.

  Horus stretched out his arms as he reached me, revealing a small tattoo on his forearm - the Ba symbol. Struggling to stay focused, I racked my memory for the image - I’d seen it recently . . . Hugh Wollington. Was it him behind the mask? There was so little of the human about the figure now kneeling before me. The falcon cocked its head and opened its beak to speak.

  ‘We welcome you, Lord Osiris.’

  I blacked out. When I came to I was strapped into Osiris’s throne, my legs and torso bound to its sides. Only my arms from the elbow down were free. The god’s tall crown was pressed low on my forehead and his crook and flail were tied across my chest. I was wearing a robe of shimmering fabric threaded with gold. All my senses were heightened by whatever they had injected me with; every movement of the creatures before me carried a multitude of after-images - one sweep of an arm was a thousand arms breaking like a wave, one turn of a god’s head made many, the appearance of the players was undeniably real: the fusion of fur and flesh, scale and skin, seamless and horrifically organic.

  Horus and Anubis advanced, Anubis carrying the gold platter with the heart on it, two valves trailing from the rippled purple flesh. Ears twitching, the canine fur and flesh fusing into the muscular neck of a man, Anubis held up the plate. Isabella’s heart, it had to be. Struggling against my bonds, I tried to shout but again I had no voice.

  Horus’s falcon head began to speak. ‘Oh Lord, we are gathered here in the hall of truth and justice to judge the life of Isabella Brambilla, to weigh her heart against that of the feather of truth, the symbol of the goddess Maat who will tolerate neither sin nor lie. If the deceased’s heart balances against the feather, she will be granted a place in the Fields of Hetep and Iaru. But if her heart is heavy with the weight of wrongdoing, Ammut will devour it and the deceased’s soul will be condemned to an eternity of oblivion. I seek your blessing, Lord Osiris, as embalmer to the gods and kings.’

  Isis stepped in front of the throne. I could see now that the goddess was wearing a painted mask over her features, bejewelled with turquoise eyes and crimson enamel lips that shone fantastically in the flaring torchlight. As she spoke I thought I recognised the voice - Amelia Lynhurst’s, perhaps, only deeper now and resonating with authority.

  ‘My Lord, you must bless Anubis if you wish to save the soul of your consort.’

  The heavy black wig covered her torso, concealing the figure beneath the breastplate, but there was something genderless about her shape - the shoulders too wide, the waist too thick. I struggled to remember Amelia’s figure, whether it had any similarities. Paralysed as I was by the drugs, it took extraordinary concentration to make any coherent sense of the scene and I kept slipping back into hallucination. I tried to speak again, but only managed a groan. Impatient, Isis yanked the flail from where it was tied across my chest and blessed Anubis herself.

  Anubis carried the heart over to the scales and ceremoniously placed it onto the tray opposite to that holding the white feather. The scales balanced for an instant, then tipped violently to the side the heart was on.

  ‘This heart is heavy with deceit!’ Horus shrieked, his voice like a bird’s cry. Thoth, holding his feathered quill high, started writing on his papyrus scroll, w
hile to either side of me Isis and her sister Nephthys began to ululate in that hair-raising manner of Arabic mourners.

  A small wave suddenly ran across the surface of the pool behind the scales. I turned at the movement; it resonated in my drug-heavy mind, echoing some frightening image: Ammut, the devourer. In terror, I struggled in my chair as the air grew pungent with a fishy stench. The water rippled again and this time I was convinced I saw the flaring eyes of a crocodile in the torchlight.

  There was a splash and the gnarled horny head of a crocodile lifted out of the water, its long yellowed teeth snapping at the heart. A lion’s mane hung from its reptilian scales, a travesty of wet and matted fur.

  I retched.

  A figure stepped from the shadows beyond the flaring torches and walked towards me - normal, human, dressed in a simple cotton dress. This was no double - this had to be Isabella! Fear slammed into the back of my throat, my heart a rattling cannon. I tried to stand, to walk towards her; my arms tore against their bindings and began to bleed.

  ‘Will you save your consort and surrender Nectanebo’s skybox?’ Isis whispered.

  I was jolted out of the artifice, my mind suddenly coming out of its fog. ‘What! What’s that got to do with all this?’

  The words tumbled out of me as I tried to close myself against the image of my wife, iridescent in its paradoxical ordinariness. Now I could see the spreading stain of dark blood across her chest, oozing from the wound where her heart had been removed. Whose terrible imagination had concocted this?

  ‘Give up the astrarium.’ Isabella’s voice sounded in my head but her lips didn’t move. ‘If you do not, I will have no afterlife. I will not even live on in your memory. You will be my condemner, my murderer.’

  She had articulated my worst fear: that I had failed to save her and that - equally disturbing - I might forget her entirely. But what on Earth did this have to do with the astrarium? Even with the drugs coursing through me, I knew there was no appeal, no loophole, against the weighing of the heart. Hoping the pain would jolt me into even clearer thinking, I pushed my torn skin against my bonds, but still my mind reeled under the effects of the drug.

  ‘Osiris, speak your judgement. The heart is heavy, the deceased is guilty!’ Anubis barked.

  Ammut’s bulky reptilian body slithered out of the water. I could see that the glistening lion’s pelt merged at her waist into the shiny black hide of a hippo. The creature shook herself dry like a large dog - somehow the familiarity of the gesture made it even more frightening. The heavy crocodile head swung from side to side as tremors ran down the goddess’s torso.

  ‘Save me! Tell them where it is!’ Isabella whispered urgently.

  This was why people believed in visions, I suddenly understood, as the realism of the hallucination battled with my intellectual speculation that I was caught up in some horrific drug-induced sham.

  ‘No!’ I shouted, my anguished cry solid set against the ephemeral nature of the scene before me.

  Her crocodile claws scraping against the stone floor, Ammut slithered closer to the heart sitting on the scales.

  Isabella clutched at her chest as if in pain. ‘Tell them, I beg you!’

  ‘No! None of this is real!’ I screamed. I tore at the rope, if I could only get to my knife.

  Ammut lunged forward and grabbed the heart between her jaws as if it were a piece of old meat. She turned her head towards Isis, the heart hanging from her mouth, as if waiting for a command.

  ‘Not real, my Lord? What is real? The waking world or the sleeping one? The world beyond the mind or the chaos that lies beneath order?’ Isis’s words were like icicles. ‘You must fulfil your role or your consort will be denied entry to the afterlife.’

  The light flickered wildly as a huge shadow fell across the blazing torches. The goddess, now silent, was staring at the back wall of the cavern. Across the ceiling, extending down to where the black water lapped the bottom of the limestone, stretched a massive silhouette: a dog-like creature with four slender legs, a long tail with a forked tip, a long beaklike snout and two raised blunt-ended ears. The players all fell to their knees, foreheads to the ground. No one was looking at me, and they seemed too terrified to look at the giant shadow.

  With a supreme effort I yanked at my bonds again and managed to slip my knife out. After I’d sawed frantically at the rope, it finally gave. I leaped from the chair, jumped over the figures prostrate on the floor, snatched the heart from Ammut’s jaws and bolted down the long corridor towards the steps that led back up to the surface. Behind me I heard chaos erupting - shouts and footsteps.

  I raced up the stone steps. Knowing that I was running for my life, sheer terror propelled me forward. At the top a hand shot out. I stumbled but a figure carrying a torch broke my fall and pulled me into an alcove. Faakhir.

  ‘This way!’ he cried, waving my abandoned cassock.

  We ran towards the light of an open door. Outside, a car was waiting. As I fell into the back seat I managed to murmur the name of the barber’s shop before dropping into unconsciousness.

  35

  I woke sweating in the small iron bed. An embroidered blanket had been thrown over me. Shooting pains burst rhythmically over each eye and it was hard to swallow. The naked electric bulb seemed to swing against the smoke-stained ceiling. My mind was numbed into a sensory jumble that made it difficult to make sense of where I was, even who I was. I lay there waiting as my frenetic thoughts slowly collected themselves. I glanced down at my wrists and the red bands burning around them - the marks of restraint. Flashes of the night before began to flicker across my memory: the catacombs, the ceremony, Faakhir helping me to the door of Abdul’s shop, telling me not to look for him but that he would be watching me.

  I looked over to the back window. Beyond lay the rooftops of Alexandria. The sun was high; it was about midday, I guessed. Beside the small camp stove sat a bowl of fresh fruit and a bottle of water. Abdul had obviously left some supplies. I reached out and my fingers brushed against a small box on the floor next to the low bed. I sat up and grasped it, slipping my hand into the open top. My fingers hit something sticky and organic in texture. I pulled out a purple lump of muscle tissue; the withered dark flesh bulged out between my fingers.

  With a smothered shout, I threw the heart back into the box and leaned over the side of the bed, retching. A few minutes later the shivering finally stopped. I sank back heavily and considered the events of the night before. Why the weighing-of-the-heart ceremony? And why had I been designated as Osiris? Who was the woman who had lured me there? Had it really been Hugh Wollington playing Horus or had that been a figment of my imagination, a desperate attempt to link events and make sense of them? But who else would go to the trouble of creating such an elaborate and macabre charade in order to obtain the astrarium? And if it was Wollington, how did he know of the connection between the ritual and Isabella’s recurring nightmare? Was it a charade, or was it real? It was impossible to ascertain; the angles of the room still tilted, my thinking blurry. The Coptic robe that Father Carlotto had given me lay neatly folded at the bottom of the bed. Faakhir must have collected it from where I’d hidden it in the catacombs. Had they been watching me the whole time? What was Faakhir’s role in all this? And where was Mosry?

  I heaved myself out of bed and walked over to the mannequin. Taking it apart and feeling inside I reassured myself that the astrarium was safe. Between the explosion at the Sheraton and the horrific scene in the tomb it seemed more crucial than ever not to let it fall into the wrong hands. I glanced back at the box containing the heart. I wasn’t even sure that the heart was human. Then I remembered that I knew someone who would be able to tell me.

  Demetriou al-Masri peered through his thick half-moon glasses at the heart on the laboratory dish and prodded it.

  His office was a windowless annexe off one of the city morgue’s main chambers; I suspected that it might once have been a large cupboard. Dressed in my Coptic robe I’d entered the morg
ue with remarkable ease, and on seeing my disguise Demetriou had immediately pulled me into his tiny cubicle.

  We’d both been staring at the heart for at least five minutes and I was beginning to doubt whether I was going to get a conclusive verdict.

  Finally al-Masri cleared his throat and sat back. ‘It is a human heart, from a smallish body, quite possibly female. I would say around thirty years of age.’

  My own heart started rattling the bars of my ribcage. ‘My wife’s?’

  ‘It might be, it might not. That is not something I can confirm.’ He sighed and began packing the heart back into the container in which I had brought it. ‘May I ask how you came by the organ?’

  ‘It was delivered to the villa anonymously.’

  The coroner studied me for a moment, then handed me the container. ‘Run, my friend, run as fast and as hard as you can. I do not want to find myself staring down at your body tomorrow.’

  He opened the door and the room was immediately flooded by the greenish fluorescent lights of the morgue beyond. I glanced back at the windowless room. Demetriou al-Masri followed my gaze.

  ‘I had a view once, but they demoted me. Curiosity can be very bad for one’s career. You should be careful. These are dangerous times. Even for a cleric,’ he added, with an ironic smile.

  I went straight to Chatby Cemetery, clutching Isabella’s heart. My air of purpose must have been apparent for the crowds parted to make way as I strode along the thronging streets. I was indifferent to my fate, intent on only one thing.