He stopped for a moment, coughed, spit, and wiped his lips. “They watched over the other schoolhouse, too, the one for the girls.” A gust of wind struck them, rustling their clothes and hair. She shivered, he did not. “One night she didn’t come home. My father went to the teacher’s house and asked, but she knew nothing, then to the police and they had him fill out some forms. They’d post signs with her photo, they said. But that was all.
“A few days later and I’m walking to school. I see a gang of army men standing at a tree on the edge of the school’s property, pointing and laughing at the sign posted up there. Then they see me and their smiles just fade away like chalk in the rain. One looks at me and says, ‘You get on your way, no need to be tardy,’ typical talk from them, but I can see that he’s scared, looks guilty, thinks he’s been caught. So I memorized his face, every pock mark, every crooked tooth in his gaping mouth.
“Years later I moved to England. Dad was dead by then, drank into the ground, and Mom couldn’t bear the memory of Nadie. Spent her days at the kitchen window, staring out like she was waiting for Nadie to come home with a handful of schoolbooks in her arms.
“I told the immigration offices that I wanted to start a new life in London, to find honest work, and to build a little home. I did, all that was true, but what I really came for was more important than all that. I came to find that army man.”
Priscilla ran her hand down his back. “Did you?”
“No,” he said.
“What would you have done if you had?” she asked.
This finally brought his eyes off his feet. He met her stare with a pair of tired, bloodshot eyes. “I don’t know. I remember every thought I had about that, every fantasy I daydreamed. So many horrible ideas. For a while I did look for him and in the beginning I probably would have done something. Something horrible. But now, I dunno. I think maybe the world’s had its fill of bloodshed.”
Releasing him, Priscilla guided him away from her embrace and instead clasped his hands. Their knees touched in the gap between the corner of the boat and the bench seat, and this somehow felt even more intimate than wrapping their bodies around each other. She leaned in and kissed him. “I’m so sorry. I know how you feel. I know you don’t believe that, no one ever does, but I do. My mother died when I was young, a Motor Neuron disease. She was in tremendous pain for months.
“But the doctors prescribed drugs and for a while, she seemed to get better, not right, but better. Then summer came and a dig site was found in Syria. The Ottomans had kept it out of the hands of international excavation for decades, but now it was open. My father wanted so badly to head up the first expedition, but with my mother sick, he couldn’t go.”
The sun came out from behind a wild, crescent-shaped cloud, and a lazy beam of sunlight trickled down onto her face. She turned her head to the sky for a moment, absorbing the warmth. “Later on, Mom started to get worse again, convulsions and paralysis, days of dementia. I never went far from her bedside, except to school, and every day I walked home with a painful knot in my stomach. I didn’t know if she’d be alive or dead when I got home. One Saturday, men came and carted her away to a hospice out of state. My father had enlisted in the second expedition to Syria and couldn’t look after her. My sister and I went to live with an uncle. When my father returned, I asked when Mom would be coming home. He didn’t answer. Two days later, the phone rang.”
She expected herself to break down here, as she always had when she even thought about that day, but now, in that moment, the events seemed too distant to drive out tears. “She’d died.”
“Sorry,” Mason whispered.
The sun dipped back behind the clouds.
“It was months later that I found the jewelry box in the attic. I was searching through my mother’s things, searching for memories more than clothes or jewelry, I suppose. It was an old box, not used by my mother in years. Inside, it was filled with pills. My mother’s medication. It took a while, but finally I understood what he’d done. My father stopped giving her the prescriptions and replaced them with diet pills. I guess he hadn’t wanted her to keep him from any more dig sites. He made her sicker, until her body couldn’t survive. Then he sent her away so he wouldn’t have to see her at the end, and resumed the career she had halted.”
Mason’s hands repositioned and squeezed hers.
“You moved to England to find the man who murdered your sister, I traveled the world with the man I knew killed my mother. There were so many times I wanted to … but I was just a girl. And then Buddy came along and for a while things were better. But I couldn’t really trust him, either, or any man. I stayed close to my father’s side, even taking up his profession, waiting for an opportunity.
“Years later, we were in Caracas. He’d caught a local flu virus, nothing serious, but enough to keep him in bed. I snuck out of my tent, like I did so many nights, but I wasn’t going to meet Buddy. I went to my father.”
It took a few moments for her to summon the words that told the next part. She’d only ever told the secret to one man, her husband, and even then it was only after a late night of drinking and horseplay. His face had lost its drunken grin when she told him. He left her the next day.
“I didn’t go alone. I brought along a specimen jar. There’s a spider in Central America called Wandering Spider. I’d captured one, a juvenile, no larger than a dime. My father was sleeping on his back, snoring, his mouth open. I opened the jar and placed it against his lips. When the spider was inside his mouth, I took away the jar and pinched his lips closed. I waited a minute for him to wake or scream or thrash around, but he didn’t. He never did again.”
Mason’s gaze dropped back to his shoes.
“You don’t know what you would have done if you’d ever have found those army men?” she asked. “That’s the trouble, Mason. I do know.”
Chapter 31
They watched the clouds. Rowed. Watched the ocean. Slept. Spoke. Hungered and thirsted. Made love. The sun slid down the sky and the wind grew stronger. They huddled together, his fever keeping her warm through the night. Waves lapped against the lifeboat’s sides, incessant and mathematical, nature’s perfect metronome.
Morning came and they woke to a new sound: the distant chatter of a flock of seabirds, like a troop of drunk musicians with broken woodwinds, but scanning the ocean, they saw nothing. Lifting the short wooden oars, they rowed toward the sounds, muscles cramping, until the birds appeared, at first as tiny as insects, then, coming closer, an immense flock of gulls circling and diving into the sea.
Closer still and the nature of the carrion became clear. Bodies floated on the tide, young men in long gray military overcoats with pale face, mouths yawning open, arms splayed out at their sides. As their lifeboat passed by one young soldier’s body, a huge gull fluttered down and landed on his chest, causing the corpse to bob. The bird eyed them with suspicion, then, apparently comfortable they represented no threat, began to peck at the dead man’s eyes.
Priscilla turned away.
“Land,” Mason said, pointing toward an outcropping of stone.
A dense fog was rolling over the blue-gray peninsula, obscuring its length. It might have only been a tiny volcanic atoll for all they could tell, but her heart raced all the same. They hadn’t expressed their fears to one another that they would die at sea, but she saw in every glance that he shared the same awful premonition.
Rowing past the bodies, dozens of them, some no more than torsos or severed limbs, they could see more of the land through the translucent haze. Mountains appeared.
“This isn’t a British Isle,” Mason said.
Not expecting a response, she asked, “Where are we?”
The coastline was little more than a jagged ledge of rockface descending into the surf. The tide had washed in a dozen more bodies, these in worse shape, clothes torn, rot setting in. Small crabs scurried over the remains, teasing at loose bits of skin and flesh with their claws. The gulls stood in a line and wa
tched the lifeboat run up against the shore, squawking and gibbering among their ranks, rising and spreading their wings as Mason and Priscilla climbed onto the land.
Entering the fog, Priscilla sneezed twice as the scent of sulfur overpowered the stench of the dead. Taking Mason by the hand, they walked on, through the lace curtain of fog until it thinned and then evaporated. Beyond a ridge of leaning rock walls, deep trenches had been cut into the soil. Insects buzzed overhead, hinting at more bodies inside the man-made furrows.
Shredded canvas tarps hung from broken poles, the remains of long tents. In one, a smashed shortwave radio sat alongside a portable battery, a pair of gloves, and a torn British flag.
“You’re sure this isn’t England?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” he answered, pulling back a length of gray tarp hanging from a stumped post, revealing the body of a British field marshal, his green uniform torn across the chest by close-range machine gun fire. He stank of urine.
A rustle of sound snapped her attention back to the radio table. The small blur of motion she saw brought a wave of disbelief and confusion. “Can’t be.”
Behind her, Mason asked, “What can’t—”
A large tortoiseshell cat streaked across the table, rubbed against the battery, and sat on her haunches at the edge. The colors and markings were instantly recognizable.
“Old Scratch?” Priscilla approached the cat with both hands open and outstretched. She still could not trust her eyes. It couldn’t be the same cat, she reasoned. It must be another with the same markings. The same exact markings.
“How’d you get here, puss?” Mason asked, shifting his gaze between the animal and Priscilla. The look in his eyes told her that he didn’t question it was the same cat. His certainty made the idea seem less impossible.
Leaping down off the table, Old Scratch wandered a trail away from the encampment, stopping to look back as if making sure they followed her lead. They did, without words between them, allowing the cat to take them away from the destroyed British outpost, through an opening that cut through the beach’s rock walls.
The fog returned, thicker here. They passed through it, eyes focused downward on Old Scratch as her nimble paws navigated the rough terrain, until the rock walls parted. They walked out into a beach enclave, a nook hidden by the rise of staggered rock outcroppings. In the center of the beach’s oval shoreline, smoldering and blackened, rested the remains of the Limpkin. Almost fully on its side, with wide portions of its hull reduced to twisted metal framework, the ship resembled the carcass of an enormous beach whale.
Old Scratch stopped, sat, and craned her head back toward Priscilla and Mason. She yowled once, as if to punctuate the sight before them, and then lowered herself close to the ground.
“It shouldn’t be here. It should have sunk,” he said.
Priscilla moved a slow hand across his shoulder. “After the last few days you’re still worrying about what’s possible and not? I’d have thought you’d have abandoned that kind of thinking by now. I have.”
Mason took a step closer to the wreck, but only a single step, as if his bravery was limited by an invisible barrier. “Nothing could have survived. No, nothing got out of that ship alive.”
Alive, she thought. It was a meaningless word when it came to the mummies. They had life, diabolical life, but she found it difficult to believe that the word “alive” applied to them.
Old Scratch’s ears dropped back and she stiffened, darting her head around as if in response to a noise too subtle for Priscilla’s ears. Priscilla’s fingers tightened into to a claw on Mason’s shoulder as she turned, searching the landscape for the source of the cat’s alarm.
A gunshot sounded, short and sharp and close.
Wobbling and unsure on his feet, Mason spun toward the rock wall. Old Scratch sprinted down the beach and disappeared behind a curve in the rocky dune.
A voice from above called down, “Fermata—”
“It means halt,” Priscilla told Mason. “It’s Italian.”
He raised his hands. “This doesn’t look like Italy to me.”
Soldiers appeared over the rock wall, sliding out of the crag walls and hurrying down the decline. They wore the same long gray uniforms as the dead men in the sea. They carried bulky rifles at their waists, hung from leather slings twined around their necks. Most appeared no older than twenty.
“At least it’s a language I understand,” she said, watching the young men shuffle down, kicking up pebbles and dust.
Mason asked, “And you speak it?”
“A little,” she answered.
“A little enough to keep us alive?”
“Dunno,” she said as she watched the last of the soldiers trudge down to the beach, closing the circle around them. “Never had to talk my way out of a firing squad before.”
The muzzles of a dozen rifles stared at them.
One soldier stepped beyond the others. He had a bookworm’s face hiding behind a few days’ worth of stubble. Priscilla could tell he was the type just counting down the days until his mandatory military service was over. In Italian, he asked, “Who are you?”
“Americans. Our boat was sunk.” She crooked her thumb to point over her shoulder to the Limpkin. “We escaped on a lifeboat.”
The soldier smiled. “You are American. You’re Italian is pathetic. What is your name?”
“Priscilla Stuyvesant.”
Pointing to Mason, he asked, “And your name?”
Before he could answer, Priscilla did. “He’s Buddy Martin. He’s mute.”
Mason exhaled. His thick Irish accent would have given away his nationality and might have cost him his life. Even his name might tip them off. The Italian eyed him like a suspicious customer inspecting two-day–old bread for spots of mold. While his features never relaxed enough to indicate any sort of satisfaction, he turned his attention back to Priscilla. “What happened to the ship?”
Her mind reeled, searching for some hint whether the truth would suffice or a lie would better serve them. The entire truth—mummies and all—was an impossibility. “We were boarded by Germans who meant to steal our cargo. The crew resisted. There was a fire. And then” —she pointed again at the remains of the ship— “that happened.”
A second soldier came up from behind the first, placed a hand on his shoulder, and pushed past. He stood a foot from Priscilla and stared into her with an impassive gaze, less like human eyes than a pair of microscope lenses. The man’s face told a different story, one of career service, sacrifice, and loyalty. His rigid posture was that of a warrior long past the prime of his life, perhaps beginning a long physical decline from middle age, but all the more dangerous for it, a man out to prove he hadn’t lost his edge.
“I am Colonel Gianfranco Montorsoli,” he said in a booming voice that echoed down the shore, a deep Roman tenor equal parts growl, roar, and thunder. “You will accompany us back to our camp.”
Priscilla flinched at his voice; it was much more of a weapon than the dozen rifles that surrounded them. She wanted badly to take a step back, go toward the sea, away from the colonel. But she didn’t. “We’re Americans. We are not involved in this war—”
“But you are here.” He turned and signaled his men.
Hands encircled her wrists and she was prodded along, following the colonel’s lead, down the path between the rock walls and natural outcropping. Glancing back, she saw the soldiers were rougher with Mason, tugging at his arms like a cattle rancher pulling the reins on a stubborn beef cow on its journey into the slaughterhouse.
Passing back through the fog, the soldiers’ faces blurred in the haze, dark complexions turning to pale ghosts swimming in an ocean of clouds. Coming out of the cloud bank, their expressions remained haunted—drawn, sunken faces telling stories of war and horror and death.
They’re just kids, Priscilla thought. They don’t want to do this, they know it’s wrong, but they’re scared.
She caught the eyes of the y
ounger soldier who had spoken first. She now saw he was a few years older than the others, somewhere in his mid-twenties. He had more horrors swirling in his eyes than his comrades. Unlike the colonel, he was yet to come to grips with the realities of war.
“Where are we?” she asked.
His brow furrowed. Glancing up at the colonel to make sure the commander was out of earshot, he said, “You don’t know?”
She shook her head.
The mist cleared at the destroyed English base camp. As they continued past the ruined tent where Old Scratch had intercepted them, the soldier answered her in English. “Welcome to Egypt.”
Chapter 32
The field beyond was littered with bodies, hundreds, strewn out over the miles of battlefield. Priscilla’s face scrunched up in revulsion even before the wafting reek of decay reached her nostrils. Dozens of the colonel’s men rummaged through the torn and tattered remains of the English squadron, removing the odd fallen Italian soldier and scavenging weapons, ammunition, and canned rations off the bodies. Seagulls performed a similar function alongside them, pecking at loose flesh, except they made no attempt to distinguish the nationalities. To the birds, it was all carrion.
“My name is Norberto Sangallo,” the young soldier said, leaning in close.
Priscilla’s eyes flashed back to Mason and saw a blush of jealousy rise in his cheeks. She noticed that he was stumbling a little with each step he took, the ravages of his fever upsetting his equilibrium, and noticed how pale his skin had become.
Norberto noticed, too. “You’re boyfriend, he’s sick.”
Boyfriend? Is that what Mason was to her? She’d spent her entire life running away from words like that, “boyfriend” or “beau” or “lover.” She hadn’t even liked to use the word “husband” for the few months when she had one, and the thought of it made her uncomfortable even now. She cared for Mason, deeply even, but she’d known him for only a few days; after spending a lifetime avoiding commitment—except for that once—how could she even consider the idea of a serious relationship now?
Eternal Unrest: A Novel of Mummy Terror Page 21