Another Pan

by Daniel Nayeri

  “To store whose stomach?” asked Wendy.

  “Marcus Praxis’s?” John guessed.

  “Can’t be,” said Peter. “His organs were removed by Hurkhan, remember? Then he made the mummy as a trophy.”

  Layla took the four jars in her arms and cradled them like babies. She brought them to her face and touched them gently, as if they really did contain her husband’s remains. She bent over them, mesmerized. Then she began shedding tears into the jars.

  “I thought I could just fight them all off.” Peter shook his head angrily. “I never thought about . . .” He trailed off, then sighed loudly and rubbed his face with both palms. “The story says that Layla roams the maze, looking for a token of her beloved.”

  “How the heck did he decipher that?” shouted Wendy. “How did he know what token she was looking for?”

  “It’s another injustice we missed,” said John, impressed. “He was mummified, so his organs should have been preserved in the jars. The empty jars mean something to her!”

  As Layla dropped to her knees and began losing herself in the inspection of the jars, Simon slipped into the pyramid.

  “No way,” said Peter. He got up to run after him. John and Wendy followed. But before they could cross the threshold of the pyramid, the wind kicked up again and they heard a scream pierce the air. Layla had risen up, still holding the jars, and was taking back her ghostly form — a shadow on the pyramid’s side. She turned to face them, stabbing them with her terrible gaze. Then she stirred the sand around them, keeping them back, while Simon was left free to search the pyramid.

  For what seemed like twenty or thirty minutes they struggled. They tried to crawl on their bellies to go past her, to run into the wind with all their strength. None of it worked. They struggled until they were exhausted and parched and coughing out sand.

  “Can you pull away?” Peter shouted at the others. It was almost impossible to hear one another over the wind and Layla’s mournful cries.

  Wendy stepped back, and to her surprise, she easily broke free from Layla’s grasp. “Hey, yeah,” she said. “Just step backward.”

  But no matter how much they pulled, John and Peter couldn’t break free.

  They were still battling Layla when Simon emerged from the tomb, a bandaged leg strapped to his backpack.

  “No!” Peter called as he attempted to run after Simon. But the wind had formed a funnel around him and John, and Simon was long gone before they were finally able to break free.

  Peter stalked the halls of Marlowe in the dead of night. He didn’t seem bothered by the cameras. As he strolled, he took a path that eluded the gaze of every single one.

  Last night, he had barely made it out of the labyrinth. If Wendy hadn’t broken free from the ghost Layla, run back through the gate, and brought a canopic jar from the exhibit to throw into the wind, he and John could never have gotten away. Once again, she had saved him. But what did it matter? Simon had the fourth bone.

  Wendy had replaced the Book of Gates in Darling’s bedroom late last night, after their trip into the labyrinth. By the morning, the book was in a dehydrator in Professor Darling’s office, and the old man was none the wiser.

  Peter stopped at the door to Professor Darling’s office. He slipped in the key and opened it without a problem. During the governor’s gala, the valet had made copies of every key in the professor’s key chain. Peter strolled into the room. The orange light of the dehydrator caught his attention immediately. He didn’t turn on the lights but walked straight to the device. The book sat under the lamp, slowly drying.

  He gazed at the book wistfully. Until now, no one in the history of the world had come as far as Peter had. But now Simon had the fourth bone and was probably gunning for the fifth. Peter would have to go in again. He had already promised John and Wendy that they would wait until the book was returned to the exhibit. Then they would go back for one final journey into the labyrinth — together. They would find the fifth mummy and get the fourth batch of bonedust back from Simon. Wendy was eager to help him; Peter knew that. And she had already been so useful. He liked Wendy. She brought him good luck and happy thoughts. But Peter didn’t really want her there for the fifth mummy. He didn’t want her to see what he was willing to do to get the fourth bonedust back from Simon. Besides, what is a promise when a whole life’s work is at stake?

  Peter would have to find the location in Marlowe that coincided with the fifth and final gate. All these years, and there were still parts of the labyrinth that he had never seen. But he couldn’t start now. He had to wait for the Egyptian night to begin. Tomorrow, Peter thought, he’d have to make the best use of the time he had. He’d have to be quick and do most of his work while the Marlowe kids (John and Wendy included) were in class. Everything would be so much easier that way.

  The only noise was the low hum of the dehydrator and Peter’s cavalier humming. He gathered up the book, carefully laid the copy he had stolen from the New York Public Library in its place, and walked out.

  Let him come, whispered the Dark Lady, her branded eye flashing in rage. Let him come and take it from me.

  The diminutive nurse stood in front of the pyramid. She would have looked harmless if the ghost of Layla wasn’t on her knees before her, pleading for her to return the canopic jar.

  The fourth bonedust had been lost, but not to the boy; to the foolish fortune hunter, the one the darkness had overlooked. With her nurse’s eye, she had assessed Simon Grin as nothing more than a nuisance. A pawn to manipulate John away from Peter. A distraction and an obstacle for the children. The Dark Lady hated to be wrong. She despised the frailties of humanity. It was like being blind and deaf and dumb; being ordinary was the worst of all curses. But soon Peter would have to return for the fifth and final bone. Soon he would have to descend to the farthest depths of the pyramid, to death’s own chamber.

  The branded eye flashed again. The nurse coughed. The ghost of Layla howled with pain. The desert wind stole the breath from her mouth.

  Peter screamed and sat bolt upright. After pacing Marlowe all night, waiting for the Egyptian night to begin, he had dozed off in a small room somewhere on the first floor. He couldn’t help it; he had been so tired these past few days. He opened the door of the room a crack and peered outside. The school was so different now, since the exhibit had been here. It seemed so much older, dirtier, more oppressive to the senses. Everything seemed to move in a slow, eerie way. And yet nobody seemed to notice. The change had been so gradual.

  He wiped his brow. He couldn’t stop panting. It didn’t feel like a dream this time. It felt like something was calling to him, inviting him to come closer.

  Come and take it from me, the voice told Peter.

  He could feel her breath on his face. He could feel her claws around his throat. He felt her cold fingers grabbing his chin the way she used to do when she lived in his parents’ house and governed his every move. When she would punish his bad behavior by threatening him with the hook. Those noiseless steps. That hunched back. Those moth-eaten clothes. Each time he heard the voice, he felt a pain in his chest, as if his body was desperate to be away from her and yet was begging him not to go.

  But he was so close now. And unless he finished this, he would never sleep soundly again. Unless he went back into the labyrinth, the night would never end.

  Professor Darling called a specialist to inspect the exhibit items for damage. Perhaps it was excess moisture. Perhaps it was the recent atmospheric problems at Marlowe, all the leaks and infestations. It seemed that overnight a statue labeled Neferat had become eroded beyond recognition. And the nurse’s office, too, had been blanketed in a mysterious layer of mold in just one night.

  Professor Darling didn’t hear the sixth-period bell ring. It was late afternoon, and he looked haggard with worry. He was pacing behind his desk, flipping through papers, once in a while stopping to scratch his chin or adjust his tie. He wasn’t sure what was wrong. Nothing had actually gone wrong since
the governor’s gala two days before. The Book of Gates was drying in the dehydrator. The children had been remarkably well behaved and had even stayed away from Peter. And best of all, neither of them had pushed him to dredge up painful old memories from his LB days. They had left a sensitive situation alone, exactly as they had done when their mother left.

  Despite all this, Professor Darling paced in front of his classroom, trying to figure out what this nagging feeling at the pit of his stomach could be. Simon was nowhere to be found, but that could be expected. It had been quite obvious that Simon was trying to win a spot as the governor’s personal curator. When the book was finally sent to Albany, Simon would probably go, too, chasing better opportunities with more important people.

  “Professor Darling,” said Marla, now sitting in the front seat.

  “Yes,” said the professor absentmindedly.

  “Are you gonna start class or what?”

  “Ah, yes, of course. Thank you, Marla.” He rifled through his notes and papers, scattering them across his desk until he came across the item he was looking for — his favorite English translation of the Book of Gates. It was his personal copy, printed about fifty years ago and bought secondhand when he was still a university student. It was full of his notes from over the years. He began to leaf through it, reading his musings on the mysteries of the fifth legend.

  When Professor Darling didn’t begin the lecture right away, Wendy sat up, threw a worried glance at John, and asked tentatively, “Are you OK, Dad?” Her voice was overly concerned, a trait she had developed toward her father when her mother left.

  Wendy tried to find Peter’s shadow, some sign of him listening at the window, but he wasn’t there. Even though he was usually out of sight, huddled under the window frame so that they never really saw him, Wendy was sure that he wasn’t there this time. She hadn’t been able to find him since they had lost the fourth bone to Simon.

  “Hmm . . . yes,” mumbled the professor, pulling himself together. “I was just thinking about the fifth legend. It’s very different from the others, in my opinion.” He held up his book, with its yellowed pages and scratched leather cover. “It’s so vague. There’s so much that’s hidden from us. Of course, all of them were passed down by word of mouth, but this one . . . this legend is the one that was thought to carry the biggest curse, and so people rarely repeated it. Most of it has been lost, and it’s the one most shrouded in mystery . . . the one with the highest stakes.”

  “So who was the mummy?” asked Marla. “What was it that he lost?”

  “Everything,” said the professor as he cracked open the book. “An entire kingdom.”

  “Isn’t that what Marcus Praxis lost?” asked John.

  “In a way . . .” said the professor, turning the tissue-thin pages. “In fact, you could say that what Praxis lost was more important. Being erased from history is a loss far more profound than power or riches.” He stopped and looked into the mesmerized faces of his students. Their newfound enthusiasm always brought a smile to the professor’s lips. He lowered his voice dramatically, “Still, the fifth legend trumps them all. Because in this case, the injustice carried ripples.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Marla.

  “In this final legend, we are introduced to a fascinating new character — a woman, unique because of her position as a mere servant. It is very unusual for a servant to be named and described to such an extent in a legend dating back thousands of years, especially one that is already so vague. This woman, this nursemaid, has fascinated scholars for years.”

  The students were sitting up now. Handhelds were put away. Portable games retreated into pockets.

  “The nursemaid, a peasant woman called Neferat, is important to our story because she is said to have been one of the earliest political manipulators in history. Before Svengali, before Rasputin, Wolsey, or Lady Marlborough, she saw power in the hands of those she served, and she grabbed it for herself. Still, she escaped notice until later, when people began to whisper about something they had heard. Words said casually that, years later, seemed very sinister indeed.” Professor Darling stopped to read the words from his notes. He licked his lips and read slowly. “‘Ripples,’ she said. ‘That is what I like. That is what I look for.’” He looked up again and continued with a grin, knowing what he would say next would capture their attention. “So the legend was passed along, spreading the idea that the nurse was otherworldly — a servant of the underworld.”

  Wendy considered the name Neferat. It sounded familiar. And all this stuff about ripples . . . had she heard it somewhere before? Lately, a lot of details seemed to escape her memory.

  Then her father added, “We have a statue of the girl Neferat . . . it is very eroded, but . . . some people think she carried the soul of the Dark Lady from the stories.” Wendy remembered seeing the statue. It was the one with the missing alabaster eye.

  “I don’t get it,” said Marla. “What are these ripples that make it such a big deal?”

  “Ahh,” said the professor. “I was just getting to that. You see, it wasn’t just one person who was wronged in this final story. It was the entire kingdom. According to oldest lore, the king who lost his throne would have been great. But the one who overthrew him was the worst kind of evil. And so, as is always the case with despots, there was bloodshed. There was injustice enough that the whole of Egypt festered with it — and it was all carried in the bones of this one wronged king whose soul suffered for all the torment caused by his own youthful foolishness. . . . How’s that for a satisfying capstone?”

  THE FIFTH LEGEND

  There is so much that is precious between a king and his kingdom. If a country is deprived of a good and just ruler, if a cursed family is robbed of its one shot at redemption and true greatness, if a rightful monarch is overthrown and replaced by one much less deserving, changing the course of history forever, then a bitterness builds inside many hearts and across many lives.

  So ends the story of one family with a curse on its line, of Elan’s dark legacy, full of the cruelest injustices. The house that cannot die will come to its mortal end. This is the story of the last member of the cursed family — a family whose children no longer walk among the living yet continue to clench life from among the dead. Their stolen lives linger on, still flowing in their bones. Life has been mummified inside them, forming an ever-living bonedust — a new kind of immortality.

  Layla and Marcus Praxis left behind a daughter, a girl who was talented as well as beautiful and who lived in the house of the pharaohs. Growing up in splendor, she learned the ways of a noble life, passing on her skills and beauty to her own daughter and to her granddaughter after that. For seven generations, Layla’s female descendants grew more talented, more accomplished, and even more breathtaking. Soon, in the streets of Egypt, the family name began to take on a new meaning. Hurkhan’s tribe of beasts gave way to Layla’s line of beauties, each of whom displayed a grace and charm unmatched in her generation.

  Each of the women thrived in her own unique way, impressing court and country with new talents, and each made a more advantageous marriage than her mother. If one girl married an army general, her daughter would better her by marrying a member of the high council. And so it was until one day, seven generations later, one of Layla and Marcus Praxis’s descendants married a pharaoh.

  In the meantime, another branch of the cursed family lingered beneath the surface of public life, unseen, unheard. Brooding. For while Marcus Praxis’s line bore good and beautiful children, Hurkhan’s other descendants were deprived of accomplishments, accolades, and attention — a deficit that, though it cannot create evil, can certainly bring to the surface any evil that is already within.

  In this branch of Hurkhan’s line lived a girl called Neferat.

  She was of a middling stature, with forgettable looks and a feeble frame. Her face was too pale. Her hair too dull. And she had a strange defect in her left eye, a pupil broken like old papyrus. The eye was
blue like the Nile. Despite this lack of beauty, Neferat was confident, walking proudly as though she had chosen her every flaw. She ignored the cruel rants and petty taunts, the other women who called her a witch and a conjurer.

  She did not join in her family’s jealous rants when the pharaoh chose her beautiful cousin as his queen.

  Instead, Neferat became a servant in that woman’s household.

  This story begins deep in the chambers of the pharaoh’s women, where Neferat went to claim her destiny, and where the seeds of hate sprouted and choked the house of the god-king, changing Egypt’s history forever.

  “‘This story begins deep in the chambers of the pharoah’s women,’” Peter recited from memory. After stealing the book, he had spent the night lurking around Marlowe, counting down the hours until the Egyptian sunset, when the gates would be open once again. Now that everyone was tucked away in sixth period, he’d have plenty of time to explore. “Chambers of the women . . .” he said again, a sly grin on his lips. He looked this way and that, made sure no one was following, before slipping into the girls’ bathroom in the main corridor of Marlowe, the Book of Gates tucked under his arm.

  Neferat proved herself a capable nursemaid for the many children of the pharaoh’s court. She rose in ranks among the servants until she was the chief nurse, the one most trusted by the pharaoh. She watched the children closely, taking note of their flaws and talents. Soon, she chose a favorite, the young daughter of a minor noble and his foreign wife, a girl who had lived in the palace since birth. The girl wasn’t beautiful or charming, but she was clever, and even at the girl’s young age, Neferat could see her ambition and cunning.

  Within a few years, the pharaoh’s wife became pregnant. She gave birth to a long-awaited son and heir, the one who would become pharaoh and ruler to all his brethren. The older children of the court burned with jealousy.