The Ghost Reapers

by Jackie Ferris

  She shook her head. “It’s hard to imagine that sort of distance; actually, it’s hard to imagine that sort of number.”

  “The bottom line is that you need to travel much faster than light to get here. If aliens were here they did not travel through time – it takes too long. They flipped dimensions.”

  “Flipped dimensions… you mean as in a parallel universe?”

  “Not quite; we know there are four dimensions: length, height, width and time. According to M-theory there could be as many as twenty-six, possibly more.”

  “M-theory?”

  “It’s a huge generalization of classic geometry.”

  “Geometry? Cara is researching geometry. I wish I’d asked what her speciality is.”

  “My guess is M-theory. It’s pretty speculative at the moment; a modern take on string theory. Our four-dimensional world is very basic. We are probably slowly coming to the peak of our intellectual capacity. Math, and, more specifically, geometry, offer us a way forward into dimensions we are unaware of.”

  “I think I’ve reached my limit.”

  His grinned, making her heart skip a beat. “You don’t need to understand the detail. It’s highly probable that infinite universes exist, and that life forms exist within them.”

  “As in multiverses?”

  Francisco looked at her approvingly. “You have been doing your homework, but I’m talking about dimensions within this universe. Some of those life forms can flip dimensions. When they visit a base dimension like ours, they leave an echo so strong that it keeps reverberating in our universe. Our dimensions are held together by gravitational waves; the waves are cement for space and time. It is possible that when the earth shifted on its axis there was a blip in the waves. The blip accidentally allowed something from another dimension to enter.”

  “Really! Is this true, or are you making it up? I feel like I’ve walked on to a Doctor Who set.”

  “It’s a theory of mine. The echo in our dimension as we interpret it could be the notion of an all-powerful god, hence our initial interpretation of Nommo’s appearance. Of course, he was not called Nommo. He may not even have looked like a man with a fish’s body. That image is an interpretation of what the tribesmen saw.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “It makes a strange sort of sense.”

  “According to Dogon beliefs, Nommo taught the tribesmen to value every living creature. To express that ideology through a deferred memory, he must have believed it himself. He wouldn’t desert those simple people, even if he physically left earth.”

  She shook her head. “That is one cerebral thought too far. You said there was no evidence of a prolonged alien presence.”

  “No physical evidence, but if I’m right about God or many gods being part of his echo it has continued until now. Who knows, his echo may even be trapped here. It would be consistent with M-theory.”

  “Would it?” She looked at him, perplexed.

  He nodded. “A lot of circumstantial evidence supports my theory. The Egyptians believed that after they died they moved into another world. The belief in an afterlife was so strong that they had material items buried with them to use after death. Something, somewhere gave them that belief. Their notion of the afterlife was based on moving into another world. It could easily have been another dimension. The different-dimension idea probably predated the afterlife concept. The elaboration of the death ritual into an afterlife became popular at the start of the Middle Period in Ancient Egypt. According to which dates you subscribe to, that began in 1,700 or 1,500 BC.”

  Jazz snapped her fingers, suddenly connecting. “Your crazy logic makes a crazy sort of sense. I suppose Dad called the conspirators Ghost Stealers because they stole the ghosts of the past from our recorded memory? Did they stop the echoes reaching us because we weren’t attuned?” She shook her head. “I can’t believe I just said that.”

  “People’s versions of the past added to the accounts of history we have today. We can’t blame the Ghost Stealers for everything.”

  She pulled a face. “It still doesn’t explain the pyramids and why they were built. Or for that matter what Nefertiti’s treasures are doing in Tut’s tomb. If the Egyptians wanted to destroy her image, why bury her treasures in his tomb?”

  “Dad was looking for the same answers. I can’t prove my theory, but hopefully the papyri will help us get closer to the truth. If I’m even half right, it means the Egyptians were guilty of a great cover-up. They did not build either the Great Pyramid or the Sphinx.”

  “Then shouldn’t we continue reading?”

  “No, we need to check out the pyramid for ourselves. It carries the scars of the past. It will tell us if it was built by Egyptians as a place of death guaranteeing access to the Afterlife. History refers to this site as a necropolis, a city of the dead.” Francisco looked at his watch. “We have about an hour to find out what it really is.”

  “An hour?”

  He shrugged. “Perhaps less or maybe more: Akhoum will revisit the site where he lost us. All good trackers do it, and Akhoum is pretty good.”

  Jazz swallowed her fear. “What about the last canister, shouldn’t we open it first?”

  “I don’t think it’s about the pyramids. Nefertiti may never have visited them. She was afraid of the high priests and their Mafiosi. I think we need to judge for ourselves if the Great Pyramid is a palace of death before we open the final canister.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  A faint hint of jasmine mingled with camel dung in the early morning air. Already the local camel owners were gathering their beasts, in readiness for the tourist buses which would shortly arrive. It was an iconic image of Egypt, yet a false one: there were no camels in Ancient Egypt. In the distance, the breaking dawn on the horizon, painted a riot of apricot and tangerine colours in the sky.

  Jazz’s brain was cruising on information overload as she stumbled after Francisco, who was two strides in front of her, heading for the Great Pyramid. The shifting dawn light meant that the pyramids were shielded in black shadow. It was nothing like the majestic gloom of last night. As she drew closer, the image of perfect geometry was difficult to reconcile with reality. The fallen rocks of the inner shell were not what she had imagined.

  He turned to her. “You are looking at a relic of millennia; if you like, a mummy of its former glory. It has withstood earthquakes, climate change and the Arab looting of its outer casing.”

  Jazz nodded, swallowing her disappointment. “I get the picture, but up close and personal it’s a lot less surreal than it looked from the hotel balcony.”

  “Don’t let appearances fool you; besides, it’s what you can’t see right now that is interesting. There was a big construction site close to the pyramids. The workers had seventy-four cattle and over two hundred and fifty-seven sheep and goats shipped in every week; they believed in eating well. Whoever they were, they were not slaves. Guesstimates suggest that six to twelve thousand people worked on the construction site. They even had a corral for the cattle they ate.”

  “Are you saying the pyramids were built by humans?”

  “They could have built the other two pyramids. Not the Great Pyramid or at least not on their own – they had to have outside help. We barely have the technology for such precision now. There are other geometric factors you should be aware of.”

  Jazz ran her hand down her face. “I’ll regret this, my mind flat lined a few minutes ago – what are these other geometric factors?”

  “The Egyptian royal cubit, the measurement used to build the Great Pyramid, has a strong mathematical and geodetic relationship.”

  “Geodetic?

  “A branch of applied mathematics and earth sciences.”

  A glazed look replaced her perplexed expression. “You can make numbers mean anything.”

  “Bear with me for a moment. Giza is located thirty degrees north of the equator. The pyramid’s perimeter equals the circumference of the earth. When we use the regular height o
f the pyramid, 146.7 metres, it reveals the earth as a perfect sphere.”

  “Incredible: the interrelationship with the earth and the planet is way beyond the knowledge of an ancient people. We believed the earth was flat until the seventeenth century.”

  “Aristotle may have had something to do with that, but there is a more basic problem. Archaeologists believe the Egyptians used copper and bronze saws. You can see fine examples of their tools in the Cairo Museum.”

  “So?”

  “On the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, copper and bronze have a hardness of 3.5 to four. Limestone has a hardness of four to five and granite five to six. The saws were too soft to have cut the stones. We have no idea how the stones were quarried, let alone placed. Each limestone weighs over ten tonnes. They were dressed on all six sides, then placed so closely together you could not get a knife through the gaps. Even today, it is an impossible feat of engineering. A few researchers are claiming they were man-made geopolymer blocks, which is almost as crazy as the carved idea. Geopolymer was only invented in the 1950s.”

  She held up her hands. “So how did it happen?”

  “When another dimension brushed the earth, knowledge was transmitted to the people through a dimensional echo, a kind of osmosis; a bit like a laser image. People who were aware of the Visitation copied the image.”

  “It’s so off the wall it makes sense.” She rolled her eyes.

  “If the dimensional echo trickled through the millennia, Nefertiti could have been one of the people Nommo touched.”

  “You mean there are more?”

  “The negative photographic image on the Turin Shroud is inexplicable. It could be a materialisation of the echo. There could be other examples. My guess is that the Ghost Stealers have them, or have destroyed them.”

  She ran her hand down her face again. “I can’t get my head around this.”

  “Don’t try; we need to get inside before the tourists arrive.”

  Crouched low to the ground, they ran past the guides sipping thick sweet coffee as they waited for the onslaught of tourists.

  As they drew closer, Jazz appraised the closed door barring their entrance. “Shouldn’t we wait until it’s open?”

  “Baksheesh opens all doors.” He waved to one of the guides bringing their camels.

  “Yes, sir.” The guide with shiny white teeth and big brown eyes spoke Essex English.

  “Will a hundred dollars open it?”

  The man’s grin broadened. “This way, sir.”

  They moved quickly into the inner sanctum, then stopped.

  Their guide shrugged his shoulders. “I can’t turn the lights on. Use your phone torch to go up into the King’s Chamber. I’ll wait here.”

  Francisco turned on his phone, then led the way up the small staircase. Jazz followed, grabbing the handrails on either side for reassurance.

  The climb was steep, and the passage no more than three foot five inches wide, and three foot eleven in height. Jazz was breathing heavily as she climbed over a great stone slab to reach the Grand Gallery. It was double the width, and around seven metres in height. She stretched her limbs, glad to finally stand up. The huge slabs of perfectly placed, polished limestone were impossible to ignore. “They’re incredible – and certainly not man-made.” She pointed upwards. “How did they get them up there?”

  He shrugged. “No one knows.”

  She peered into another low horizontal passage leading off the chamber. “What is it?”

  “The Queen’s Chamber; a misleading name given by Arab visitors, it was the Arab custom to bury women in gabled tombs. It has nothing to do with buried queens.” Francisco continued to climb.

  A few minutes later they arrived at the King’s Chamber, thus baptised by visiting Arabs because of its flat roof. Jazz stared at the red polished granite on the ceiling. Francisco also tilted his head upwards. “Nine slabs, each weighing seventy tons. How did they get them here? How could they fit them so perfectly, with such crude tools?”

  Jazz was half listening. “The stillness is remarkable.”

  Francisco nodded. “We are lucky; not only are there no tourists, but the lights aren’t humming either.”

  “You can almost feel the energy.” She sat on the floor; her disturbed sleep and early wakeup call was beginning to take its toll.

  “You are not the first to say that. Two hundred years ago, when Napoleon entered, he ordered his soldiers to leave. Legend has it that, when he finally came out, he was ashen-faced and would not speak of his experience. The story has moved into popular folklore, in spite of his personal secretary’s denials. Apparently, Alexander the Great came here too.

  “In the last century a few small studies were made of dead animals. They didn’t decay, they dehydrated.

  “Perhaps, if the Egyptians were trying to simulate dark matter, they saw water as the largest component of matter, and were trying to eradicate it.”

  “Who knows… but the silence is amazing. I can’t believe this was ever a tomb.” Jazz looked at the open coffer. “If it was, it didn’t start off as one.”

  “Certainly not an Egyptian tomb: there are no paintings on the walls, and the lidless granite coffer looks nothing like an Egyptian sarcophagus. It’s too small for a pharaoh. Besides, how did they get it in here? The piece was carved out of a solid piece of Aswan granite.”

  Jazz moved closer to examine it, measuring it with an app on her phone. “It’s two feet three inches wide. They could have hauled it up here.”

  “Possibly… but in any case it wasn’t a pharaoh’s tomb. There are no carvings or wall paintings to say who it is.”

  “Then why is it here?”

  “I don’t know. It has nothing in common with what we know about Egyptian burial rites. They revered the seen and unseen worlds equally.

  Remember, I told you that the Egyptian afterlife, as we understand it, began with The Book of the Dead in the Middle Period. It’s possible that their ideas were very different before that.”

  “Meaning the coffer is here for another reason.”

  “If it wasn’t for a burial, we have to consider whether the pyramid was constructed around it. The question is why?

  She looked at him blankly.

  “We can say the Egyptians viewed it as an existing sacred site.”

  “You said the outer shell was limestone?” Jazz asked.

  “That has long gone, meaning we can’t check if they entered from the outside. There are a lot of underground passages; they could have entered through one of them.

  “We also know the acoustics are amazing, and so is the darkness; neither were important to the Egyptians in the Afterlife. The granite coffer is unadorned. The pharaohs wanted to be carried into eternity in a style they were accustomed too. They would never have consented to be concealed in an unadorned coffer.”

  “The geometry and masonry is spectacular, though.”

  “Even Egyptologists agree that geometry was not the Egyptians’ best subject.”

  “Then they couldn’t have built something so geometrically perfect.”

  “It’s why we needed to see it. No amount of figures or facts can replace seeing it. We also need to get out of here. Akhoum will be onto us soon enough – but I want you to see the Sphinx first. Thankfully, Akhoum will have several sites to cover in looking for us; my guess is he is alone. If he wasn’t, they would have found us. And if I am right, it gives us a little time.”

  Jazz tried not to think how it would be if Francisco was wrong.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Suffused in early dawn sunlight, the Sphinx dominated the landscape. There were no Arab traders here yet. Even without people around, the Sphinx was all powerful, as if it was sucking energy from the desert sands.

  Jazz looked up at its enigmatic face. “It looks African.”

  “Probably because it is: the idea of mixing animal and human forms started there.”

  Jazz nodded. “Hassid mentioned it.”

  �
��Check out the erosion; it isn’t from sandstorms. If it was the wearing down would be horizontal, not vertical. Look over there: you can see it on the surrounding walls, a very big pit was dug out before the Sphinx was carved. The erosion was caused by rainfall, heavy and constant.”

  “In the desert?”

  “It wasn’t always desert. The water erosion from the walls, where the pit was dug out, could only have occurred during the climate change, after the earth shifted on its axis after an impact from space. The Great Pyramid also shows evidence of being partially immersed in water. It’s not only the water stains on the outer casing: when they first opened the pyramid, there were salt deposits and sea shell fossils.”

  “Amazing; it’s proof that we can geologically date them to when the change in gravitational wave patterns caused the dimensional flip.”

  Francisco smiled. “The rains probably dried up around five thousand, five hundred years ago.

  “There was once a big complex here, with a lake that is now called Lake Moeris. In those days it was freshwater, not salt.” He pointed into the distance. “Herodotus, the Greek historian, claimed that there was a labyrinth by the edge of the lake, with twelve palaces, interspersed with twelve halls. He actually visited it. It’s difficult to know whether he was referring to the site of Memphis or this site here. Millennia ago, the Egyptians called this Memphis. Wherever it was, there was a lot of water. He also describes a lot of carved animals and pyramids rising out of the water. The labyrinth was supposed to contain fifteen hundred rooms, with the same number of rooms underground. Probably his observations weren’t totally accurate, but some of them were. Whatever he was describing was ancient. It could easily have been a description of the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid when there was water around them.”

  Jazz studied the Sphinx, needing to grasp something tangible. The anomalies surfacing from the accepted version of Egyptian history were unnerving but exhilarating. “The Sphinx has the Mona Lisa look: it stares at everything and nothing. It’s a bit unnerving.”