Sphinx

by T. S. Learner

  ‘Oliver, you heard the history of the mechanism - the astrarium is an irresistible weapon for those who wish to control the events around them. It can and has changed the course of history.’ He sighed. ‘But you have been foolish. In your desire to keep everything logical, you have challenged the mechanism’s power.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I replied curtly, still not willing to reveal the extent of my involvement.

  ‘The scientist’s Achilles heel: nothing is real until proven. Newtonian empiricism will undo the world. Oliver, the astrarium is real, whether you can prove it or not, and it will pass judgement on you. The Ancient Egyptians believed that certain raw materials contained the essence of a soul - what you might call, in your dry scientific terms, electromagnetic vibrations, force fields. They constructed sacred objects out of these materials and then brought them to life through incantations. How long has the machine given you?’

  The matter-of-fact seriousness of Hermes’s tone, his absolute belief in the authenticity of the astrarium, was beginning to alarm me. I’d felt the astrarium take over my life but part of me still wanted to believe that all of this was a terrible combination of recent events, grief and too many sleepless nights. I hesitated, then decided it might not harm anything to give Hermes a few more details.

  ‘The second hand has come up - but it means nothing, and if you want to get literal, the dates could be over two thousand years out anyway.’ I shrugged, trying to look casual.

  ‘How long?’ he persisted.

  ‘Eight days.’

  ‘I can stop it, Oliver.’ He looked at me urgently.

  ‘Isabella couldn’t stop it.’

  ‘By the time she discovered the mechanism, it was too late. You know that yourself.’

  ‘All I know is that the information I’m being presented with is so bizarre and unfamiliar that I fear I’m losing my mind.’ I heard myself sounding strangely formal and realised that my tone masked a growing terror - I was being pursued by two different parties, both willing to go to extraordinary lengths to get the astrarium, but now I also seemed to be the target of the astrarium itself.

  ‘The moment when you, the staunch rationalist, so adamant about the bricks and mortar of the known world, turned the dial to your own birth date, you revealed your hidden doubts,’ Hermes said thoughtfully. ‘You have tinkered with the magic of others and now the machine is committed to your fate. I can save you. Give it to me.’

  His voice had slipped into a hypnotic rhythm: blues, shifting in half-tones, bumping gently against soft violets. The room had warmed up and bands of sunlight now illuminated the low glass coffee table; a large fly buzzed blindly against the window. Leaning back into the cushions, I closed my eyes. The jarring exhaustion of the past few days floated like a luminescent throbbing mass to the top of my skull. How easy it would be: give up the astrarium, fly back to Abu Rudeis to search for an investor with whom to partner on the new oilfield, return to my normal life. The luminescent mass shifted from blinding white to a deep red, then began to bleed: long languid droplets that solidified into the image of Isabella’s heart, then into the crimson of Rachel’s lips. Sitting upright, I forced my eyelids open.

  ‘Amelia mentioned in her lecture that Nectanebo disappeared mysteriously. What did happen to him at the end of his reign?’ I asked.

  ‘So you are finally using your intuition, Oliver.’ Hermes gave me a grudgingly respectful nod.

  ‘Am I?’

  Hermes smiled indulgently. ‘Officially, Nectanebo’s rule ended in 343 BC when the Persian general Ochus attacked Pelusium. According to Diodorus, a series of massacres and other atrocities followed and the Pharaoh reluctantly abandoned the granite palace he’d built at Behbeit el-Hagar, his birthplace—’

  ‘So Nectanebo disappeared?’

  ‘Unofficially, he fled, supposedly to southern Egypt and possibly to Ethiopia. Interestingly, his empty tomb was never raided - almost as if it was left pristine while awaiting his return - for all those thousands of years.’

  ‘But how does this relate to the astrarium?’

  ‘As a weapon of prediction it failed him, as it is failing you now, because he wasn’t able to control it. Strictly speaking, and that’s why it is so dangerous, the astrarium has no true master.’

  ‘But what happened to him? Didn’t the astrarium predict his death?’

  ‘This is the great mystery. There is no record of his death, and there are some who claim that he still walks amongst us.’

  ‘Some say he still lives to this day.’ Hugh Wollington’s comment echoed in my memory. It was an absurd hypothesis, but it was odd that both men had voiced it, almost down to the same language.

  ‘You know that’s not possible,’ I retorted, trying to keep a grip on the conversation. ‘The astrarium can’t make you immortal.’

  ‘Can’t it?’ Hermes replied, with a smile. I looked at him, allowing silence to fall, then stood up abruptly, realising that I was now infinitely more frightened by the potential of the astrarium than I had been before.

  ‘If you are so convinced that the device has no power then there is nothing to worry about, is there?’ Hermes concluded almost smugly. ‘Give the device to me for safe keeping, or at least let me be your guide. What do you have to lose?’

  I hesitated. Should I trust the Egyptologist? I remembered Francesca blaming Amelia, not Hermes, for her husband’s belief in the old ways. Was it possible that Hermes had truly cared for Isabella? But then he would have protected her as a child, kept her away from Giovanni’s role-playing, as any sane person surely would have. No, I couldn’t afford to trust him, not yet.

  I walked to the front door. Hung above it was a papyrus scroll with a hieroglyph painted on it. The image showed the four-legged creature I’d seen twice in the last two days. Hermes followed my gaze.

  ‘That is Seth, god of thunder, chaos and revenge - once the ruler of Ancient Egypt, after he murdered his brother Osiris and overthrew his nephew Horus.’

  ‘I know him.’

  ‘Of course you do. The Christians bastardised him into the lesser form of Satan.’

  I locked the door of my hideaway above the barber’s shop and unpacked the astrarium again. I sat for a moment, staring at it. Was I any closer to fulfilling Isabella’s grand plan? She’d told me there was a destination for the astrarium, but where? I ran through Amelia’s lecture points again in my mind - built for Ramses III, taken by Moses to part the Red Sea, then abandoned in a temple in the Sinai, driven by guilt or terror of Isis’s revenge. Then sought out and found again by Banafrit, only to be lost again by Cleopatra, who was apparently too terrified to actually use it. Had she known about its ability to reverse fortunes and change destinies not only in a good but also in a bad way, turning on the user and perhaps condemning him to an early death? And how was the god Seth related to the device? Was he just part of the death pointer, or was he connected to the darker uses of the device? The jigsaw puzzle was becoming more complex by the day, but now I felt I had at least nearly all the pieces - it was just a question of fitting them together to make sense. And I knew who Mosry was working for and why they were after the astrarium. I still needed to know more about the strange re-enactment in the catacombs and about Giovanni’s movements twenty years ago. But the most important challenge was to find out what Isabella had intended to do with the astrarium - before my own time ran out. I forced myself to peer into the mechanism. My reluctant gaze found the small death pointer - the date was unchanged. The low ticking of the magnets’ movement now sounded like an inevitable acceleration towards my own death. A sudden panic gripped me, and I steadied myself against the desk. Stay rational, stay calm, I tried convincing myself.

  I reached for the reference book that I’d asked Ibrihim to pack with my clothes and looked up Seth.

  Names: Seth, Sutech, Setekh, Seti, Sutekh, Setech . . . god of destruction, thunder, storm, hostility, chaos and evil. Manifestations: sometimes as a crocodile; sometimes as a four-legged beast with a curved beak,
two upright ears and a forked tail. Referred to as the lord of the northern sky in the Book of the Dead, Seth was considered responsible for seizing the souls of the unprepared in the underworld. Son of Nut and Geb, or Nut and Ra, brother of Isis, Osiris and Nephthys, Seth battled with Horus, his nephew, after he murdered Osiris . . . According to one myth, every month Seth attacks and consumes the moon, considered the sanctuary of Ausar and the gathering place of the souls of the recently dead . . . In the Old Testament, Seth was the third brother of Cain and Abel; he also appears in the suppressed gospels recovered in Egypt in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, in which he is Sethian, the gnostic god who rules over the thirteenth realm of the cosmos and carries out the will of the stars on mankind, regardless of how much havoc that might wreak . . .

  Why had Seth’s shadow appeared on the wall of the catacombs during the ritual, I wondered. Had it been meant to frighten me into believing that Isabella’s soul had been taken by the devil? And why had the other players seemed so genuinely terrified? Was Seth part of their plan?

  I couldn’t come up with an answer. Instead, my mind filled with the unsettling sense that the astrarium had begun to control not just me but also the events around me.

  37

  Rachel hung the bag of fruit and other food over the hook on the door, then swung around. She looked exhausted; the events of the past two days were taking their toll.

  ‘It’s dire out there, Oliver. The bomb attack on the Sheraton has escalated the political tension and the Americans are talking about cancelling President Carter’s visit. At least there’s now a ceasefire between Libya and Egypt, thanks to the president of Algiers. I tell you, it feels unsafe simply walking the streets as a Westerner, never mind an American. I tried to glean some info from a friend at the Embassy but there’s a blanket silence on everything. Something big’s afoot. I can feel it.’ She sighed heavily. ‘I was real worried about you last night. Why didn’t you send a message? ’ she asked, frowning.

  I pulled a chair out for her and poured her a cup of the thick black coffee that I had percolating on the camp stove. ‘I went to the catacombs at Kom el-Shugafa,’ I told her. ‘I was enticed there by someone I thought was Isabella. Total madness, not to mention suicidal, I know. But I was captivated, I had to find out.’

  ‘Oh, Oliver . . .’

  ‘It gets worse. I stumbled across some kind of crazy re-enactment, and the lunatics conducting this little performance injected me with drugs.’ I pulled my shirt from my shoulder; the puncture mark had bloomed into a small purple bruise. ‘It was an Ancient Egyptian funerary rite called the Weighing of the Heart. I couldn’t tell you whether they were Egyptologists, a local cult or just some unemployed actors hired for the occasion, but they acted deadly serious and in full costume.’ I held back the gruesome detail of the heart itself.

  ‘And you think this is somehow connected with the death of your wife and with the astrarium?’ Rachel asked, her fingers touching the bruise lightly.

  ‘They were trying to pressure me into giving them the astrarium. I suspect that they were the same group Isabella’s grandfather was involved with - apparently he dragged Isabella into it as well when she was a child.’

  Rachel came closer and looked into my pupils. ‘I think you’re still wasted. I’d have thought strong hallucinogens would be difficult to get here in Egypt - unless you have military connections. The US Defense Department experimented with extreme hallucinogens in Korea - I wrote a piece on it once. Scary stuff.’

  ‘Any long-term effects?’

  ‘Flashbacks, paranoia, delusions.’

  ‘Great - I was having those already.’ I attempted a wry grin.

  ‘There’s something else you should know.’ Rachel sighed tiredly. ‘I spent the best part of today interviewing various members of Sadat’s family for Time magazine.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, just as I was leaving, an aunt of his told me that another journalist had visited them the day before, asking all kinds of strange questions about Sadat’s date of birth - whether the official date was correct, the hour exact to the minute, that kind of thing. At first, she said she thought he might be considering writing a biography, then she became suspicious because, although he spoke English and claimed he was writing for an American magazine, he looked Arabic - like a Saudi, she said.’ Rachel nodded meaningfully, in case I didn’t understand the implication. ‘She gave me his card and wanted to know whether I’d heard of him or the magazine.’

  ‘Had you?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t exist. Besides, I know every journalist covering this part of the world - the guy’s a fake. What I want to know is why anyone would insist on getting the absolute correct date and time of Sadat’s birth? That’s kind of weird, right?’

  ‘I can think of one reason.’ The image of the moment when I’d set the astrarium to my own birthdate came flooding back as well as Amelia’s ringing voice claiming that the astrarium could be used for both good and evil. Rachel, reading my expression, inhaled sharply as she arrived at the same conclusion.

  ‘Surely not . . .’

  ‘Rachel, the astrarium is legendary in its reputation as a powerful weapon of fate. It can also be used as a political symbol or abused—’

  ‘If it’s true that Moses used it to part the Red Sea,’ she said sceptically.

  ‘It doesn’t even matter if it’s true or not, as long as people believe it, and Prince Majeed certainly does.’

  ‘They must really believe it is capable of killing.’

  ‘You mean it can actually kill? How do you know?’

  ‘I’ve used it. Only in my case, it apparently passed judgement on me and my stupid attempt to defy it, and spontaneously gave me my own death date.’

  She stared at me. ‘Oliver, you’re a scientist - you know that isn’t possible.’

  It was a question rather than a statement. I didn’t answer her. The Seth-headed death pointer indicating my demise floated back into my mind. Rachel shook her head, then pulled out a newspaper from her bag.

  ‘There’s something else I wanted to show you.’ She handed me a copy of the New York Times. ‘It’s a day old. Isn’t GeoConsultancy the company you work for?’

  I scanned the front page.

  ‘You might want to turn to page five.’ She opened the paper for me.

  The article was headlined: OIL CHIEF DIES MID-FLIGHT. I read down the page:Last night Johannes Du Voor, sixty, the CEO of GeoConsultancy, the oil industry’s largest independent geophysics consultancy, died of a suspected heart attack during a helicopter flight north of Cape Town. Shares in the company fell overnight due to uncertainty about future ownership and leadership of the company. Du Voor left no heirs . . .

  Shock ripped through me. ‘This happened the night of the explosion?’ Ordinarily I would have put Johannes’s death down to eating habits and stress levels, but something about the coincidences made me uneasy. Rachel looked at me, her gaze firm.

  ‘Pure coincidence, Oliver, nothing else. Okay?’

  I sat there, fear mingling with incomprehension. Johannes was such a large personality, it was hard to believe he’d actually died.

  I began pulling on my clothes. ‘I have to find a phone.’

  ‘You can’t go out there!’ Rachel grabbed my arm. ‘It’s not safe!’

  I held up my cassock. ‘I’ve been lucky so far.’

  ‘They’re going to catch up with you sooner or later. You’ve got to get out of town.’

  Downstairs, the shop suddenly filled with the sound of men shouting. One voice was raised above the others - gruff, deep and aggressive. It was unmistakable.

  Rachel looked at me, her eyes wide with terror. I indicated that she should stay quiet and grabbed the bag with the astrarium, quickly and quietly moving over to the window. Rachel was right beside me. Outside stretched a panorama of rooftops and terraces interspersed with squares of colourful laundry.

  The voices downstairs grew louder - one man speaking English was audible above the other
s. With a jolt, I recognised the chiselled enunciation. Hugh Wollington. So he was in Egypt. Determined to stifle the fear shooting through me, I yanked the window wide open. Below us I could now hear Abdul arguing back. There was nothing I could do for him except disappear and hope he’d be able to talk his way out of trouble. We climbed out quickly, dropping the blind back as we left. Crouching, we scuttled across the tiled roof of the shop next to us as quietly as we could, then onto the next, never looking behind. I felt the blood roaring in my ears and heard Rachel’s laboured breathing behind me. Any moment I expected the hard nozzle of a gun to be pushed against my back. Suddenly I felt a tug on my shirt and wheeled around. Pushing a sweaty hand across her forehead, Rachel pointed to our left. A fire escape was precariously attached to an old brick wall, its steps leading down to the busy market street below. We half-slid, half-fell down them and onto the ground and were instantly engulfed by a wedding procession that had turned along our narrow lane. A deafening cacophony of drumming and horns filled the air, the guests dancing madly around the veiled bride and bride-groom who were being carried above them on golden painted thrones.

  I was in jeans and a T-shirt while Rachel wore a caftan, her blonde hair, wild around her head, drawing curious stares from the jostling crowd.

  ‘We have to get out of here!’ Quickly, I glanced around to get my bearings. ‘This way!’ I said, grabbing her arm.

  We pushed our way through the crowd to emerge finally at the other end of the lane, our shoulders and heads covered with flower petals and confetti. From there I knew my way to the only place of sanctuary left to me.

  Father Carlotto ushered us deep under the cathedral and to a hidden room at the back of the crypt. We could hear the boys’ choir practising upstairs, the thin voices floating down in muffled soprano. The room was situated beneath stone arches that were obviously support structures for the building, and I had to bend my head to walk down the three stone steps into the small chamber. It stank of pipe tobacco and candle wax, and the white paint had begun to flake off the stone walls. By the light of the one lamp burning, I could see it contained a plain wooden desk with church records stacked behind it from floor to ceiling.