The Best of Connie Willis

by Connie Willis

  The water glitters, hesitating.

  “ ‘Do not come against me,’ ” Zoe says. “ ‘My spells protect me. I know the way.’ ”

  The thing in the water turns and swims away. The boat follows it, nosing slowly in toward the shore.

  “There it is,” Zoe says, pointing past the reeds at a distant row of cliffs. “The Valley of the Kings.”

  “I suppose this’ll be closed, too,” Lissa says, letting Neil help her off the boat.

  “Tombs are never closed,” I say, and look north, across the sand, at the distant Pyramids.

  Chapter 6: Accommodations

  The Valley of the Kings is not closed. The tombs stretch along a sandstone cliff, black openings in the yellow rock, and there are no chains across the stone steps that lead down to them. At the south end of the valley a Japanese tour group is going into the last one.

  “Why aren’t the tombs marked?” Lissa asks. “Which one is King Tut’s?” and Zoe leads us to the north end of the valley, where the cliff dwindles into a low wall. Beyond it, across the sand, I can see the Pyramids, sharp against the sky.

  Zoe stops at the very edge of a slanting hole dug into the base of the rocks. There are steps leading down into it. “Tutankhamun’s tomb was found when a workman accidentally uncovered the top step,” she says.

  Lissa looks down into the stairwell. All but the top two steps are in shadow, and it is too dark to see the bottom. “Are there snakes?” she asks.

  “No,” Zoe, who knows everything, says. “Tutankhamun’s tomb is the smallest of the pharaohs’ tombs in the valley.” She fumbles in her bag for her flashlight. “The tomb consists of three rooms—an antechamber, the burial chamber containing Tutankhamun’s coffin, and the Hall of Judgment.”

  There is a slither of movement in the darkness below us, like a slow uncoiling, and Lissa steps back from the edge. “Which room is the stuff in?”

  “Stuff?” Zoe says uncertainly, still fumbling for her flashlight. She opens her guidebook. “Stuff?” she says again, and flips to the back of it, as if she is going to look “stuff” up in the index.

  “Stuff,” Lissa says, and there is an edge of fear in her voice. “All the furniture and vases and stuff they take with them. You said the Egyptians buried their belongings with them.”

  “King Tut’s treasure,” Neil says helpfully.

  “Oh, the treasure,” Zoe says, relieved. “The belongings buried with Tutankhamun for his journey into the afterworld. They’re not here. They’re in Cairo in the museum.”

  “In Cairo?” Lissa says. “They’re in Cairo? Then what are we doing here?”

  “We’re dead,” I say. “Arab terrorists blew up our plane and killed us all.”

  “I came all the way out here because I wanted to see the treasure,” Lissa says.

  “The coffin is here,” Zoe says placatingly, “and there are wall paintings in the antechamber,” but Lissa has already led Neil away from the steps, talking earnestly to him.

  “The wall paintings depict the stages in the judgment of the soul, the weighing of the soul, the recital of the deceased’s confession,” Zoe says.

  The deceased’s confession. I have not taken that which belongs to another. I have not caused any pain. I have not committed adultery.

  Lissa and Neil come back, Lissa leaning heavily on Neil’s arm. “I think we’ll pass on this tomb thing,” Neil says apologetically. “We want to get to the museum before it closes. Lissa had her heart set on seeing the treasure.”

  “ ‘The Egyptian Museum is open from nine A.M. to four P.M. daily, nine to eleven-fifteen A.M. and one-thirty to four P.M. Fridays,’ ” Zoe says, reading from the guidebook. “ ‘Admission is three Egyptian pounds.’ ”

  “It’s already four o’clock,” I say, looking at my watch. “It will be closed before you get there.” I look up.

  Neil and Lissa have already started back, not toward the boat but across the sand in the direction of the Pyramids. The light behind the Pyramids is beginning to fade, the sky going from white to gray-blue.

  “Wait,” I say, and run across the sand to catch up with them. “Why don’t you wait and we’ll all go back together? It won’t take us very long to see the tomb. You heard Zoe, there’s nothing inside.”

  They both look at me.

  “I think we should stay together,” I finish lamely.

  Lissa looks up alertly, and I realize she thinks I am talking about divorce, that I have finally said what she has been waiting for.

  “I think we should all keep together,” I say hastily. “This is Egypt. There are all sorts of dangers, crocodiles and snakes and … It won’t take us very long to see the tomb. You heard Zoe, there’s nothing inside.”

  “We’d better not,” Neil says, looking at me. “Lissa’s ankle is starting to swell. I’d better get some ice on it.”

  I look down at her ankle. Where the bruise was there are two little puncture marks, close together, like a snakebite, and around them the ankle is starting to swell.

  “I don’t think Lissa’s up to the Hall of Judgment,” he says, still looking at me.

  “You could wait at the top of the steps,” I say. “You wouldn’t have to go in.”

  Lissa takes hold of his arm, as if anxious to go, but he hesitates. “Those people on the ship,” he says to me. “What happened to them?”

  “I was just trying to frighten you,” I say. “I’m sure there’s a logical explanation. It’s too bad Hercule Poirot isn’t here—he’d be able to explain everything. The Pyramids were probably closed for some Muslim holiday Zoe didn’t know about, and that’s why we didn’t have to go through customs, either, because it was a holiday.”

  “What happened to the people on the ship?” Neil says again.

  “They got judged,” I say, “but it wasn’t nearly as bad as they’d thought. They were all afraid of what was going to happen, even the clergyman, who hadn’t committed any sins, but the judge turned out to be somebody he knew. A bishop. He wore a white suit, and he was very kind, and most of them came out fine.”

  “Most of them,” Neil says.

  “Let’s go,” Lissa says, pulling on his arm.

  “The people on the ship,” Neil says, ignoring her. “Had any of them committed some horrible sin?”

  “My ankle hurts,” Lissa says. “Come on.”

  “I have to go,” Neil says, almost reluctantly. “Why don’t you come with us?”

  I glance at Lissa, expecting her to be looking daggers at Neil, but she is watching me with bright, lidless eyes.

  “Yes. Come with us,” she says, and waits for my answer.

  I lied to Lissa about the ending of Death on the Nile. It was the wife they killed. I toy with the idea that they have committed some horrible sin, that I am lying in my hotel room in Athens, my temple black with blood and powder burns. I would be the only one here, then, and Lissa and Neil would be demigods disguised to look like them. Or monsters.

  “I’d better not,” I say, and back away from them.

  “Let’s go, then,” Lissa says to Neil, and they start off across the sand. Lissa is limping badly, and before they have gone very far, Neil stops and takes off his shoes.

  The sky behind the Pyramids is purple-blue, and the Pyramids stand out flat and black against it.

  “Come on,” Zoe calls from the top of the steps. She is holding the flashlight and looking at the guidebook. “I want to see the weighing of the soul.”

  Chapter 7: Off the Beaten Track

  Zoe is already halfway down the steps when I get back, shining her flashlight on the door below her. “When the tomb was discovered, the door was plastered over and stamped with the seals bearing the cartouche of Tutankhamun,” she says.

  “It’ll be dark soon,” I call down to her. “Maybe we should go back to the hotel with Lissa and Neil.” I look back across the desert, but they are already out of sight.

  Zoe is gone, too. When I look back down the steps, there is nothing but darkness. “Zoe!�
�� I shout and run down the sand-drifted steps after her. “Wait!”

  The door to the tomb is open, and I can see the light from her flashlight bobbing on rock walls and ceiling far down a narrow corridor.

  “Zoe!” I shout, and start after her. The floor is uneven, and I trip and put my hand on the wall to steady myself. “Come back! You have the book!”

  The light flashes on a section of carved-out wall, far ahead, and then vanishes, as if she has turned a corner.

  “Wait for me!” I shout and stop because I cannot see my hand in front of my face.

  There is no answering light, no answering voice, no sound at all. I stand very still, one hand still on the wall, listening for footsteps, for quiet padding, for the sound of slithering, but I can’t hear anything, not even my own heart beating.

  “Zoe,” I call out, “I’m going to wait for you outside,” and turn around, holding on to the wall so I don’t get disoriented in the dark, and go back the way I came.

  The corridor seems longer than it did coming in, and I toy with the idea that it will go on forever in the dark, or that the door will be locked, the opening plastered over and the ancient seals affixed, but there is a line of light under the door, and it opens easily when I push on it.

  I am at the top of a stone staircase leading down into a long wide hall. On either side the hall is lined with stone pillars, and between the pillars I can see that the walls are painted with scenes in sienna and yellow and bright blue.

  It must be the anteroom because Zoe said its walls were painted with scenes from the soul’s journey into death, and there is Anubis weighing the soul, and, beyond it, a baboon devouring something, and, opposite where I am standing on the stairs, a painting of a boat crossing the blue Nile. It is made of gold, and in it four souls squat in a line, their kohl-outlined eyes looking ahead at the shore. Beside them, in the transparent water, Sebek, the crocodile demigod, swims.

  I start down the steps. There is a doorway at the far end of the hall, and if this is the anteroom, then the door must lead to the burial chamber.

  Zoe said the tomb consists of only three rooms, and I saw the map myself on the plane, the steps and straight corridor and then the unimpressive rooms leading one into another, anteroom and burial chamber and Hall of Judgment, one after another.

  So this is the anteroom, even if it is larger than it was on the map, and Zoe has obviously gone ahead to the burial chamber and is standing by Tutankhamun’s coffin, reading aloud from the travel guide. When I come in, she will look up and say, “The quartzite sarcophagus is carved with passages from The Book of the Dead.”

  I have come halfway down the stairs, and from here I can see the painting of the weighing of the soul. Anubis, with his jackal’s head, standing on one side of the yellow scales, and the deceased on the other, reading his confession from a papyrus.

  I go down two more steps, till I am even with the scales, and sit down.

  Surely Zoe won’t be long—there’s nothing in the burial chamber except the coffin—and even if she has gone on ahead to the Hall of Judgment, she’ll have to come back this way. There’s only one entrance to the tomb. And she can’t get turned around because she has a flashlight. And the book. I clasp my hands around my knees and wait.

  I think about the people on the ship, waiting for judgment. “It wasn’t as bad as they thought,” I told Neil, but now, sitting here on the steps, I remember that the bishop, smiling kindly in his white suit, gave them sentences appropriate to their sins. One of the women was sentenced to being alone forever.

  The deceased in the painting looks frightened, standing by the scale, and I wonder what sentence Anubis will give him, what sins he has committed.

  Maybe he has not committed any sins at all, like the clergyman, and is worried over nothing, or maybe he is merely frightened at finding himself in this strange place, alone. Was death what he expected?

  “Death is the same everywhere,” Zoe’s husband said. “Unexpected.” And nothing is the way you thought it would be. Look at the Mona Lisa. And Neil. The people on the ship had planned on something else altogether, pearly gates and angels and clouds, all the modern refinements. Prepare to be disappointed.

  And what about the Egyptians, packing their clothes and wine and sandals for their trip? Was death, even on the Nile, what they expected? Or was it not the way it had been described in the travel guide at all? Did they keep thinking they were alive, in spite of all the clues?

  The deceased clutches his papyrus and I wonder if he has committed some horrible sin. Adultery. Or murder. I wonder how he died.

  The people on the ship were killed by a bomb, like we were. I try to remember the moment it went off—Zoe reading out loud and then the sudden shock of light and decompression, the travel guide blown out of Zoe’s hands and Lissa falling through the blue air, but I can’t. Maybe it didn’t happen on the plane. Maybe the terrorists blew us up in the airport in Athens, while we were checking our luggage.

  I toy with the idea that it wasn’t a bomb at all, that I murdered Lissa and then killed myself, like in Death on the Nile. Maybe I reached into my bag, not for my paperback but for the gun I bought in Athens, and shot Lissa while she was looking out the window. And Neil bent over her, solicitous, concerned, and I raised the gun again, and Zoe’s husband tried to wrestle it out of my hand, and the shot went wide and hit the gas tank on the wing.

  I am still frightening myself. If I’d murdered Lissa, I would remember it, and even Athens, notorious for its lack of security, wouldn’t have let me on board a plane with a gun. And you could hardly commit some horrible crime without remembering it, could you?

  The people on the ship didn’t remember dying, even when someone told them, but that was because the ship was so much like a real one, the railings and the water and the deck. And because of the bomb. People never remember being blown up. It’s the concussion or something, it knocks the memory out of you. But I would surely have remembered murdering someone. Or being murdered.

  I sit on the steps a long time, watching for the splash of Zoe’s flashlight in the doorway. Outside it will be dark, time for the Son et Lumière show at the Pyramids.

  It seems darker in here, too. I have to squint to see Anubis and the yellow scales and the deceased, awaiting judgment. The papyrus he is holding is covered with long, bordered columns of hieroglyphics and I hope they are magic spells to protect him and not a list of all the sins he has committed.

  I have not murdered another, I think. I have not committed adultery. But there are other sins.

  It will be dark soon, and I do not have a flashlight. I stand up. “Zoe!” I call, and go down the stairs and between the pillars. They are carved with animals—cobras and baboons and crocodiles.

  “It’s getting dark,” I call, and my voice echoes hollowly among the pillars. “They’ll be wondering what happened to us.”

  The last pair of pillars is carved with a bird, its sandstone wings outstretched. A bird of the gods. Or a plane.

  “Zoe?” I say, and stoop to go through the low door. “Are you in here?”

  Chapter Eight: Special Events

  Zoe isn’t in the burial chamber. It is much smaller than the anteroom, and there are no paintings on the rough walls or above the door that leads to the Hall of Judgment. The ceiling is scarcely higher than the door, and I have to hunch down to keep from scraping my head against it.

  It is darker in here than in the anteroom, but even in the dimness I can see that Zoe isn’t here. Neither is Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus, carved with The Book of the Dead. There is nothing in the room at all, except for a pile of suitcases in the corner by the door to the Hall of Judgment.

  It is our luggage. I recognize my battered Samsonite and the carry-on bags of the Japanese tour group. The flight attendants’ navy blue overnight cases are in front of the pile, strapped like victims to their wheeled carriers.

  On top of my suitcase is a book, and I think, It’s the travel guide, even though I know Zoe wou
ld never have left it behind, and I hurry over to pick it up.

  It is not Egypt Made Easy. It is my Death on the Nile, lying open and facedown the way Lissa left it on the boat, but I pick it up anyway and open it to the last pages, searching for the place where Hercule Poirot explains all the strange things that have been happening, where he solves the mystery.

  I cannot find it. I thumb back through the book, looking for the map. There is always a map in Agatha Christie, showing who had what stateroom on the ship, showing the stairways and the doors and the unimpressive rooms leading one into another, but I cannot find that, either. The pages are covered with long unreadable columns of hieroglyphics.

  I close the book. “There’s no point in waiting for Zoe,” I say, looking past the luggage at the door to the next room. It is lower than the one I came through, and dark beyond. “She’s obviously gone on to the Hall of Judgment.”

  I walk over to the door, holding the book against my chest. There are stone steps leading down. I can see the top one in the dim light from the burial chamber. It is steep and very narrow.

  I toy briefly with the idea that it will not be so bad after all, that I am dreading it like the clergyman, and it will turn out to be not judgment but someone I know, a smiling bishop in a white suit, and mercy is not a modern refinement after all.

  “I have not murdered another,” I say, and my voice does not echo. “I have not committed adultery.”

  I take hold of the doorjamb with one hand so I won’t fall on the stairs. With the other I hold the book against me. “Get back, you evil ones,” I say. “Stay away. I adjure you in the name of Osiris and Poirot. My spells protect me. I know the way.”

  I begin my descent.

  Afterword for “Death on the Nile”

  When people ask me if I like horror, I usually say no, because they mean Elm Street and murderers that refuse to die and impalings and beheadings and disembowelings, accompanied by buckets and buckets of blood.

  But it’s not really true that I don’t like horror—I love horror, just not that kind. I love stories where nothing frightening that you can put your finger on is happening, but the hairs on the back of your neck are still standing straight up, stories that don’t have any monsters or internal organs or sharp objects, that have instead a nice, friendly small town and a white dress and a ball of yarn, or an oddly deserted ocean liner crossing the Atlantic during wartime without any running lights, or a woman standing perfectly still, watching you from the other side of the lake.