Another Pan
Page 17
Harere’s body floated down the Nile to the next village, where it attracted crowds of spectators. Seth, too, came to see. He hovered above her, a vague tingle of recognition stirring inside. He reached down and took off the cloth that covered the girl’s face. In an instant, he recognized her. Harere. The real Harere.
He swept her up in his arms and took her away, deep into the desert, where his own humble tomb was kept. He sought to pay homage to his lost love. He looked for a way to honor her, to atone for his betrayal and negligence.
There he gave her the burial rites of a queen. He mummified Harere’s body, leaving it wrapped but without a sarcophagus in his own small tomb. There she lay, without peace, without rest, until her body was stolen by the Dark Lady.
Seth, brokenhearted, quietly left the village, choosing not to betray Nailah’s secret, for the sake of the two motherless sons in her care. Though she begged, he refused to stay. “I have married the worst kind of creature,” he said. “Worse than a snake whose bite is unconcealed, you are a worm that slithers underfoot, whose presence in the body goes undetected until all damage is done.”
Years later, Nailah died an old woman, bearing her sister’s name, mother to her sister’s sons.
The bitterness of this injustice devoured Harere’s soul. And so, she died with her life trapped in her bones. The goddess of death took the young mother’s mummy and the bonedust with it. She shielded it with her greatest weapons, fearing that someday death might be conquered. The Dark Lady hid the mummy in a place where no one could reach it, a legendary labyrinth of the gates, guarded by powerful deities that no human could overcome.
And so, Harere was gone, her identity lost. But she can never fully die. Her wasted life is forever trapped as grains of immortality in her bones.
The first time Connor took me on a real date, I think he was trying to impress me, so he came in his family’s limo. We were just going to the movies, but he’d decided to take me to his mom’s favorite pastry shop in Westchester. John got to the door first and interrogated him, which, when I think about it, was kind of sweet. Much better than Dad inviting him in and treating him like the board of trustees or something. Dad even pulled out a chair for him. Connor was so nervous, he said, “You have a lovely house, Professor,” and John said, “It’s not ours” (I don’t know why, ’cause he’s always hiding it, but I think to show that he was cool with it). Connor made the mistake of trying to cover for him by saying, “I know,” politely, but then John pushed, saying, “How?” I’ve never seen Connor so tense. He stammered, “Oh, it’s nothing. My family’s foundation kind of, um, oversees, um, part of the Marlowe endowment . . .” And John blabbers, “Oh, so you own it.” The room froze. Dad was maroon. He said, “It was nice meeting you, Connor. You two have a great night.” We spent the whole night not holding hands and not kissing and not anything, really. Things like that don’t happen with Peter, because Peter and I connect somehow, and he doesn’t have parents.
“Explain!” Wendy and Peter shouted at once as they marched from both ends of the hall toward John, who was trying very hard not to cower as they approached. John had run out of class the second Simon had stopped reading the third legend, and Wendy had followed him out. Peter was approaching from the opposite direction so that John had nowhere to escape. John decided to go with a two-part approach: passive-aggressive freeze-out combined with oblivious bystander.
“Ease up. I got class,” he said, shoving past Peter and swaggering in the other direction. His shoulder hit Peter hard, sending a satisfied chill through John.
Peter grabbed John’s arm, the newly healed one, and squeezed hard. John tried to pull away, but Peter’s grip was too firm, as if to suggest that the arm belonged to him. John hated being reminded. He tried to pull away, but it was useless. Peter was barely making an effort, that annoying smirk creasing his lips with every ineffective tug from John.
“What do you want?” asked John, turning toward them.
“Where did Simon get the bone?” Wendy asked.
John shrugged. “How should I know?” Oh, no. Did this count as one of those sibling betrayals? Should he have asked Wendy first? No way! Who was she to order everyone around, anyway? Real winners do their own thing. They don’t need validation.
“OK, kid. I don’t have any patience for this.” Peter took out his handheld and started texting furiously. Before he was finished typing, two LBs appeared at the end of the corridor, carelessly strutting through the hall toward them, uniforms crumpled as always, ignoring the lovesick girls who had been chasing them all semester. They were both tall. One had olive skin, long, black hair, and a backward cap. Under his Marlowe jacket he wore a T-shirt with a picture of Crazy Horse on it. His companion was the boy they had seen the other day, the banker’s son who always got away with things at Marlowe, the country-club thug with blond cornrows.
“What’s up, chief?” said Crazy Horse, slapping Peter’s hand in greeting.
Peter nodded toward John.
Crazy Horse stepped closer. He hovered over John. The more John squirmed, the more he towered. “Are you gonna talk, or do we need to adjourn to an empty classroom?” he said, his thick voice a bit more official-sounding than John had expected.
John crossed his arms tighter.
Crazy Horse picked him up by the collar.
“Hey, let him go!” said Wendy.
“Relax,” Peter whispered. Then he shook his head, as if to say nothing’s really going to happen.
John tried to keep a cool look on his face (not easy from three feet off the ground). “It was just a souvenir,” he said. “I found it in some desert and I gave it to Simon to shut him up. And it worked. See? He hasn’t hassled us all day.”
The LB dropped John to the ground. Rather than rushing to his side, Wendy called him out.
“You gave Simon the second batch of bonedust,” she said through gritted teeth.
“What are you talking about?” said John. “Peter stashed that. This was just a stupid piece of junk I found in the sand. Besides, it was a new bone . . . not even dust yet.”
“It was Garosh’s forearm, smarto,” said Peter. “I stashed it in the sand two hundred paces from the tomb where I found it. The bones don’t crumble. They’re alive.”
“N-no,” John stammered. “You have it all wrong. It was in the sand. I didn’t take if off a mummy. There was no shroud. No shrine. No marker. No hiding spot.”
“I don’t need a marker,” said Peter. “And that bone was all that’s left of him.”
John went silent. Then his face grew red. “You said it was in the mouth of a sphinx!”
“I lied,” said Peter. “Can’t you tell playful banter when you hear it?”
“Well, then it’s your fault, isn’t it?” said John. “You didn’t trust us with the truth, and see what happened?”
“I don’t know what you were expecting, little man,” said Peter, barely hiding the annoyance in his voice. “This isn’t some video game. You saw the Elan toe. We’re looking for little tiny nothings in a big giant mother of a haystack.”
“Why did you have to give it to Simon?” Wendy wailed. “Simon, of all people.” She repeated the name as if doing so would make it all untrue.
John was seething. Peter’s video game remark stung.
After a minute of squirming under the glare of everyone’s scrutiny, John relaxed and told them the whole story. Peter turned to Wendy and said, “What’s the likelihood this jerk’s figured out what he has?”
Wendy shrugged. “If he knew, he’d have stolen the book by now. He thinks the legends are just stories. Besides, he’s not that smart.”
“That’s what you say,” said John.
Peter was typing on his handheld again. Without looking up, he said to the boy with blond cornrows, “Draw up a plan to get it back. A level three at least. We’ll need two guys or more, plus Tina. A whole lot of supplies. Possibly some rappelling and/or pyrotechnics. Can you figure something out in an hour?”
“OK,” Wendy said, and turned to John, who was brooding over how he was a lone wolf and how much he didn’t need anyone in the world. “We need your help. Please come?”
John shrugged and tried to suppress a smile. “Only ’cause the labyrinth’s awesome,” he said. “Not because I’m helping him.”
“There’s just one problem,” said Wendy. Peter just glared. He clearly wasn’t used to being bothered with every single minuscule issue. “We have to get past my dad.”
Professor Darling had been supervising the exhibit move from the basement to the auditorium all day. Even now, as the trio approached the auditorium, they could hear his thick cello voice telling the workmen how to handle each item (“Oh, no, no. Not there . . . That’s precious, you know. . . . Be careful with the neck; it’s extremely fragile!”). Wendy motioned for Peter to hide within earshot while she and John searched for the book.
Barrie Auditorium was a huge, two-hundred-seat domed space usually reserved for matriculation ceremonies, lectures by foreign dignitaries and minor celebrities, and maybe one play a year (if the writer managed to finagle a New York Times mention or donated obscene amounts of cash). The seats were a deep cherry, each with its own writing surface. They shone red in the sunlight streaming from the top of the dome and contrasted with the mahogany paneling to create an old-world academic effect, though, even here, the workers and the professor seemed to fidget, as if they knew something was wrong with the atmosphere. Something foreign was affecting this space, too. For the next few weeks, the stage area had been reserved for Professor Darling’s exhibit items.
When he saw his children, the elderly professor straightened up and waved proudly. “Come in, come in,” he said. “Look what your hard work has accomplished.” John and Wendy climbed the wooden steps to the stage. Professor Darling checked his watch. “How was class? Did Simon do OK?” He seemed worried.
John nodded, still eager to defend Simon. After all, how could he have known what the bone was? It wasn’t his fault John had made a mistake. He wasn’t trying to steal the bonedust — not that he would give it up now, whether he knew what it was or not. “He told us the Harere story. It was pretty good.”
“Ahh, Harere,” said Professor Darling, turning the name over in his mouth. “In many ways the most fascinating of the five. Perhaps the most difficult to truly grasp.”
“What’s not to grasp?” said Wendy brightly. “She loses her identity to her bitchy sister.”
“Wendy!” Professor Darling reprimanded.
“Sorry,” said Wendy.
Professor Darling was humming something to himself. “Yes,” he mumbled as he turned back toward the artifacts. “Identity is a complex thing.”
“Daddy, so . . . um . . . where’s the book?” asked Wendy as she scanned the tables and the stage floor for the Book of Gates.
“My office,” said the professor, already distracted. “I wanted to examine it a bit further before I put it on display. Don’t worry. It’ll be out here for all your friends to see.”
Wendy and John made a series of quick and barely convincing excuses that would never have worked had their father not been preoccupied, then hurried toward the spot in the back of the auditorium where Peter was hiding. He was already gone. They ran down the hall and he was there, briskly marching toward their father’s office. When they reached the door, he was already prying the lock open with a jet-black AmEx Centurion card.
The book was lying on Professor Darling’s desk, in plain view. Peter grabbed it without a word. He checked his watch. It was afternoon, so the Egyptian night had already begun. As he approached the office door, Peter hesitated. He had a look on his face as if he was about to confess something. “I haven’t really given Harere a decent search,” he said. “I spent so much time chasing my lost Garosh bone, I’ve been neglecting the others.”
John snorted.
Peter ignored him, but he switched back to his usual confident tone. “I think she would be in the Nile. That’s where she died.”
“Isn’t that a little obvious?” asked John, arms tightly crossed over his chest.
“I already tried the desert where the story says Seth had his tomb,” said Peter. “It’s final. We’re going after the Nile.”
“That’s an easy one,” said Wendy, trying to speak over her brother’s sarcastic murmurs. “The Nile has to be the hallways. Think about it . . . the Nile connected everything in Egypt and everyone gathered around it, right? Exactly like the halls at Marlowe.”
John was already shaking his head, even before she had finished her sentence. “No way, Wen. You have to think simpler than that.” He puffed out his chest, knowing that here was his opportunity to talk about his solo trek into the underworld. “Garosh’s desert was the auditorium because that’s where we have sand. Peter said that Elan’s castle was attached to a construction site just because that’s where building happens. So wouldn’t it make sense that the Nile would be someplace with water?”
Peter nodded thoughtfully. “Plus the halls match up to the maze itself. If we went in through a hallway, we’d probably end up lost in the twists and turns of it.”
Wendy’s face melted into a smile. John was beginning to feel better, too, more useful. Maybe this was his second chance for a big adventure.
“I say we try the pool,” said Peter, in a voice that suggested that he’d come up with the idea all by himself. He ran out of the office with John and Wendy following behind, Wendy eager to keep up, John trying not to burn up from hatred for Peter the Poser.
Standing beside the empty swimming pool, Peter whipped out the book and began reciting the name of the hour, just as fluently and elegantly as he had done last time (Wendy could see John seething with jealousy). Peter scanned every door from the locker rooms to the buoy closets. The eye wasn’t above any of these. Then Wendy saw it.
“Ah, geez!” she said, shaking her head disbelievingly.
John and Peter followed her gaze to the bottom of the pool. The black Eye of Ra, blurry and muddled under seven feet of chlorine water, was slowly appearing in the upper right-hand corner of a drainage hole at the bottom of the pool, a slot about the size of a clothes dryer with a sliding grate-like door that allowed the water to pass through. The eye was etched in the metal part of the door the same way it had been in the door of the basement broom closet. It was charred, burned black, as if on wood.
“I say we stand close to that door and try again,” said Wendy, pointing to a locker room.
“Too late,” said Peter. “If we want the eye to appear somewhere else, we would still have to open and close that grate. We made the mistake; now we have to get wet.”
With that, he dove in, fully clothed, and within seconds was pulling at the metal bars.
Peter stayed underwater for a full two minutes before coming back up for air. Without a word, he pulled himself out, ran into a nearby cleaning closet, and took out a broomstick. He dove back in the water, dragging the broom behind him. He jammed the long broom handle into the bars. From where they stood, Wendy and John could see him throwing his weight into the broom, trying to make the door budge. Finally, a muffled gurgle escaped from the pool, and the door slid back far enough to let Peter through. On hearing the screeching metal, John and Wendy waited for Peter to resurface and tell them it was OK to go in. When it became obvious that he wouldn’t, they jumped in simultaneously, Wendy stopping just long enough to pull off her new faux-leather shoes.
Peter didn’t look back to see if the Darlings were following. He simply slid inside the hole, his body as graceful in the water as an eel. He didn’t seem to mind the size of the door, which scraped across his body and snagged his clothes as he pulled through. He simply thrust himself in, headfirst, and disappeared dow
n the hatch, past the piles of pool gunk into the oblivion beyond.
They stood, lost and confused, in the middle of an endless maze. Wendy tried not to look up at the stone sky. Being in the labyrinth made her chest constrict. It made her panic and despair at the same time.
After plunging into the pool, about an hour before, they had appeared in a river full of sludge and black muck. It was a winding, snakelike river with dark, bottomless water and a menacing feeling that reminded Wendy of the stories she’d read about the River Styx. Strangely enough, the river also reminded her of Marlowe.
When they climbed out, Wendy could see a reddish plank exactly where the red kickboard had rested in the second lane of the pool. Blue sludge grew in straight lines, dividing the river the same way the bouncing rope of blue buoys divided the pool. Equidistant between each stony horizon, a tree, ash-white and leafless, stood in place of the white lifeguard chair. Wendy almost expected to see an evil version of Connor swimming laps, which he did every morning before school.
They had walked around the river for an hour, and all they had accomplished was to get hopelessly lost. Meanwhile, Peter had told them about the guardians and what they should expect. “The first two mummies had guardians from their stories,” he said. “Creatures that used to be people — all tied to the mummies somehow. I had to fight a Bedouin monster for Garosh.”
“My guess is that it’ll be a snake,” said John. “I remember something in the story about Nailah being called a snake.”
But the river had led them nowhere, and after an hour of walking around, losing the water entirely, and ending up inside the maze, Peter had decided that this was not it. There was no shrine, no sign of a guardian. There was something about the story that they had missed. There was some clue that they’d overlooked. They would have to go back and start again.