Rings of Anubis: A Folley & Mallory Adventure

by E. Catherine Tobler

  It was then the first pain overtook him. Virgil rolled to his side, jabbing a knee into the bucket. Toads and smelly water sloshed out. The toads flopped much like Virgil, half-unaware of their surroundings, until at last they righted themselves enough to escape.

  Virgil was vaguely aware of the sodden ground beneath him; he dug his fingers into the mud in an effort to set himself upright, but he could not stand. He managed to get to his knees before doubling over again. His jaw came down against the edge of his spade, and he reeled back in pain before his body once again jerked forward. He splayed into the mud, into the last of the fleeing toads.

  “God!”

  He cried out, but there was no answer. When he cried again, he felt his jaw slip loose, expanding impossibly outward. Virgil lifted a shaking and muddy hand to his jaw, trying to put it back, put it back, oh God put it where it belongs, but his body was a thing separate from his mind. His hand was no longer his hand; his fingers curled inward to his palm and his nails cracked apart, sharp claws gleaming in their place.

  Inarticulate sounds erupted from him as clothing tore; his skin came next, splitting and peeling back as though something vile sought escape. He tried to get away, but there was no escaping himself. His legs felt twice their normal length, tangled in snapping grapevines.

  No, snapping bones, my bones.

  His leather boots burst around his growing feet, trousers ripped and fell into the mud, and his hair—Oh Lord, his hair. It was everywhere.

  The human boy was gone, and soon after, all human thought fled. All he saw and heard was transformed; his eyes were more readily able to discern motion, his ears picking up even the slight rustle of toads moving through grapevines. He could smell the toads, sharp and rich, and the lake in the distance. The water called to him, for the day was warm, his belly empty.

  He loped straight through the grapevines, mindless of the trellises, the spade, or the bucket. He trampled one toad, then scooped the next into his mouth. He chewed, content with the crunch of bones and flesh against his teeth and tongue. Then he coughed it up. The thing tasted foul, sharply bitter in his mouth. He spat it out as best he could and ran on to the lake.

  The lake was not beautiful or ugly to his eye; it was simply a pool of water into which he leapt after taking a good look around the bank to ensure a lack of predators. The cool water closed over him and he thrashed, easing the warmth that had encased him. He drank and paddled back to the bank, where he caught another toad and consumed it whole. He caught another and though they stayed bitter, another, and only then did the nausea and pain come over him again.

  When human reasoning returned, Virgil lay naked on the bank of the lake, covered in mud and debris, a toad leg caught in the corner of his mouth. Virgil rolled over and vomited everything he’d eaten, everything he’d drunk. Once empty, he crouched there shaking. The low drone of toads farther down the bank made him close his eyes.

  He was unsure how much time passed as he finally roused enough to pick himself up. His bare toes dug into the ground as he gained his balance. He staggered to the water, to wash with stiff motions before he headed back to the grapevines.

  His clothes were destroyed. Where they were not shredded, toad-fragrant mud matted them. He picked up his clothes and the flattened bucket and stared at the ravaged length of grapevines before him. His father would kill him—if his mother didn’t first over the ruined clothing. He didn’t know which was worse, but neither was punishment compared to what he had turned into.

  A glimpse at the darkening sky told him he didn’t have enough time to repair the trellises. He didn’t want to tend this vineyard for the rest of his life, but neither did he want to see it fall to pieces. He was responsible for this destruction, so tossed his shredded clothes aside and reclaimed his spade in an effort to set the trellis to rights. By the time he finished the sun burned low against the horizon, the last rays winking through the trees along the hillsides.

  Virgil felt steadier, but was no clearer as to what had happened. He retrieved his clothes once more and held them in a muddy bundle against his bare chest as he traced his way back to the house. How to explain it to his parents? He chewed his bottom lip and watched the house before he moved closer. It didn’t look as if anyone was about.

  “Saint Michael, give me strength,” he whispered, and then made a dash for the back garden.

  A spreading elm rose in the center of the garden, a stone wall enclosing the entire space. Virgil had climbed the tree countless times, though his hands and feet found better purchase now than they had before. He wedged his tattered clothing under one arm and climbed until he could reach the small balcony to his room. The doors stood ajar, likely his mother’s doing since she often told him the room needed airing. Considering the stench he brought with him this time, he couldn’t argue the point.

  He dropped his muddied clothing on the balcony and caught a glimpse of himself in the cheval mirror that stood inside. He looked a mess, his hair matted with mud and blood, leaves clinging to his legs. His pale skin blossomed with bruises, as though he’d been in a fight. A fight with a monster. He wrapped his arms around himself, afraid they come apart again, but they didn’t.

  “Saint Michael, give me strength,” he whispered.

  The skies over Northern Africa ~ October 1889

  Virgil prayed to Mary more these days than Michael, though he was unsure why, for both remained important to him. They had given him strength and solace and provided guidance when there was no other to be found. When he woke from bad dreams and ached for opium, as on this night, it was the image of Mary he reached for, her comforting hand.

  He traded whiskey in his cabin for the Nuit’s moonlight-flooded second deck. The ship made a pleasant hum, the halls dim and quiet, everyone else closed into their rooms for the night. He pictured Gin asleep at the controls and the co-pilot guiding the ship toward the African coast. For now, the windows looked down upon the Mediterranean, calm and silvered under a waning quarter moon.

  “Mallory?”

  He startled at the sound of Eleanor’s voice and pulled his robe around him. He scolded himself, for he should have smelled her, and now that he knew she was here, he did. That now- familiar scent of old books and soap, which carried with it a combination of rosemary and another herb he did not know. He was certain if he stood close enough, he could also smell the dust of Egypt on her, as though it had been rubbed into her skin enough times to become a part of her. He had let his guard down on this familiar ship, and found it hard to raise again as Eleanor made her way to him.

  “Trouble sleeping?” she asked before he could ask her forgiveness.

  He grunted and moved on bare feet toward her. “Yes,” he said and came to stand at the edge of the window, so that he could look down and find himself in apparent flight above the water. “You?”

  This near, yes, he could smell Egypt on her. It was pleasant in this close space, and he wanted nothing more than to take Eleanor to his cabin where they could burrow for the rest of the flight, talking of distant lands. Not so he could learn more of Caroline, but so he could learn more of Eleanor. Eleanor of the rings, he thought, spying the line of the gold chain she wore.

  “Yes,” she said, and he could see smudges under her eyes, proving she hadn’t slept well either. “My childhood haunts me.”

  Virgil couldn’t have been more surprised unless Eleanor had confessed to being the Virgin Mary. He saw in the moonlight the pale tracings of the scars on her hand, the scars that reminded him of those marking him. They were not even, but ragged, as though made by an angry mouth. As his had been.

  He wanted to confess that he, too, had woken from dreams of his own childhood, but didn’t. Wanted to ask her about her hand, for it was not in her file. But this remained complicated.

  “Mistral won’t hurt you,” he said instead. “You have my word.” It was easier, perhaps, to come back to this, their earlier conversations which did not involve lingering childhood horrors.

  “I
want to believe that,” she whispered.

  Virgil also wanted to believe it, though his inquiries into what had happened at the Exposition left him unsettled. Something was moving behind the scenes, but he couldn’t yet pinpoint what. Perhaps it was more accurate of him to say he wouldn’t let Mistral hurt Eleanor—that he could control somewhat more.

  “I confirmed that the men who attacked your display at the Exposition were on probation from Mistral—agents whom no one would exactly miss were they dispatched.” Surely whoever sent them knew exactly how Virgil would respond to such an advance. They would have known, too, how Eleanor would react, given her history.

  “Have you been on probation?” she asked, still whispering, as if she were afraid to ask personal questions. He also wanted to know more, wanted to share more, and yet these things never came easily. Not after Caroline. Not after the wolf.

  “After my wife and partner died, yes.” Probation was a hell he never wanted to experience again. In those days, he’d had only his work, and the reduction of it left him reeling. Mornings were spent organizing Mistral paperwork, but afternoons were left to him to fill. He had acquainted himself with far too many opium dens.

  “Virgil.”

  His name was made new and strange in her mouth, and he felt then as though they crossed a line on a map. Here be dragons and wolves and squirming beetles buried in sand. In the moonlight, her eyes were bottomless, iris and pupil smudged into one vast pool.

  “Both were agents, killed in the line of duty. Mistral thought I needed time. I spent a few months off active duty and was then saddled with Auberon.”

  While he needed the time, he also needed to stay busy. He could admit now that staying busy hadn’t solved the problem. Joel and Caroline still intruded upon his thoughts whenever they pleased.

  Virgil came back to their earlier conversation, meaning to keep Eleanor at ease with him and the idea of their working together. “Your file, the one Mistral has assembled. It isn’t you, Eleanor. It is pieces of your life, yes, but dwindled to impersonal facts. It’s like someone transcribing, say, a circus performance—”

  Eleanor stared at him, something in her expression causing him to falter.

  “I am not comparing your life to a circus—”

  “Well, it’s partially accurate, no?”

  They shared a low laugh, and Mallory found himself thinking of the attack at the Gallery, the men on ropes and the pinwheeling pterodactyls. Such a circus.

  “Imagine a performer in a circus looking at a transcription of the event. It was nothing like that, the performer would say, because for them it was an act of muscle and balance, where everyone else saw only the lights and the fall. What you will find in your file mostly relates to the Lady and your mother’s disappearance.”

  He slipped his hand into his robe and withdrew the thin black book. It was tied shut with a scarlet ribbon. He offered it to Eleanor, and if fingers could be cautious, hers were, as if plucking a bone from sand. She wouldn’t like the record, he thought as she untied the ribbon. No one he knew would like to look at their life spread impersonally on a page.

  She moved to a dimly lit lamp mounted on the nearby window frame. “These are the impersonal facts, then?” she asked as she began to skim the pages. When she came to the passage he hated, she read it aloud, low and private between them. “ ‘She journeys because her mother cannot, because she has lost the connection to the womb, because she fears the dissolution of her very self. To search the world is to avoid the one truth she cannot face, that her mother will never return. The death of the womb is the death of the daughter.’ ”

  “I don’t believe that, Eleanor,” he said.

  “My father would agree with it.” She offered him the book back, not bothering to tie the ribbon. “What if it’s true? It’s easy to doubt oneself.”

  “I do it every day,” he said, and tucked the book into his robe pocket.

  While his disquiet over his earlier dream had passed, he wasn’t clear if Eleanor’s had, and he wasn’t ready to return to his cabin. Sleep felt far away. He took a chance.

  “You say your childhood haunts you.”

  Eleanor shifted the hold of her robe, from her right hand to her left, then extended her right hand for him to see. The robe’s sleeve slid up her arm, revealing the ragged scars in their entirety.

  “This happened the day we found the Lady,” Eleanor said. “I dream of it often, the men on their horses. I was trampled by hooves, but this . . . one of the men bit me.” There was the briefest pause before she added in a strained voice, “His mouth was not human.”

  This admission was a surprise, and very like events in his childhood. Strange creatures with monstrous appetites. Virgil reached for her hand and when she didn’t object, he turned her hand over to look at the network of scars running up the inside of her arm.

  “Not human?”

  “I think time has made what it will of that memory. My dreams certainly do. I saw them as monsters, so monsters they became.” And while this explanation was neat and tidy, Virgil didn’t care for it; there was more beneath the surface, more she was afraid to explore. Eleanor looked up from her arm. “Earlier, you smelled me.”

  Virgil wanted to take a step backward, but there was nowhere to go. “It was too forward of me,” he said, not remotely an apology. He released his hold on her hand, thinking of earlier that day, when she had felt threatened and the beast inside him responded. He had wanted to protect her, still wanted that. He knew he would harm any who meant to harm her.

  “In my dream, I dreamed of finding the Lady again. I dreamed of those men who attacked, but in the dream it was you who bit me, Virgil.” Her look dropped to his mouth. “You.”

  The notion of biting her wasn’t a terrible one, if ill-timed. Virgil went still, speaking around the tension in his throat. “Tell me more of what happened after you were bitten. How old were you? How was the bite treated?”

  “I was twelve. Mistral came; they took me and my father to a hospital in Cairo. I never thought to ask where. It was a British doctor, though. He cleaned my wound and stitched me back together.”

  Mistral and a British doctor in Cairo: it wasn’t difficult for Virgil to piece that puzzle together. “It’s likely you saw a Mistral doctor. Do you remember if agents spoke with your father or you afterward?”

  Eleanor’s intent expression told Virgil she was back in that past moment even now, remembering. “I’m not certain. As injured as my hand was, they doused me with chloroform before beginning work, and my father . . . ” There was a pause, another slight shake of her head. “I don’t know if he was there the entire time or not.”

  Virgil, if pressed to guess, would say yes, given all that had happened. Renshaw Folley wasn’t the kind to abandon his only child after the sudden and violent loss of his wife. The appearance of Mistral soon after might have encouraged Eleanor’s own distrust in the agency, even if on a level she didn’t understand.

  “And the nightmares began after?”

  “Every child has bad dreams, Mallory,” she demurred.

  Virgil allowed that was so and carefully changed the course of conversation; it felt like a new book, thick with stories he hadn’t yet read. With endings they had yet to write. “What was it like, to find the Lady?”

  “It had always been a bedtime story,” she said. “Never real until all of a sudden, it was.” Eleanor stared out the windows and moonlight traced a pale, rippled line along her jaw. “I had been on countless digs with my parents; they were always digging somewhere, but this was different. My mother knew the Lady would be there.”

  “And you said four rings?” Virgil told himself to slow down, to address the rings, which they knew were fact. He told himself to not indulge in a fantasy that may or may not be true. But did Eleanor harbor a monster inside her the way he did? If she did, he was fairly certain she did not know.

  “Four rings,” she echoed. “One flat gold disk with a scarab engraving.” She lifted her scarred
hand to touch the chain she wore. “The carnelian is also set in gold. The third is gold with lapis. I can’t picture it or the fourth very well. The Lady’s hand was curled against her chest, the last two fingers curving inward.” She demonstrated with her own hand now. “I think the fourth was plain silver or electrum, but you’re relying on the memory of a twelve-year-old girl.”

  A twelve-year-old girl whose mother was torn away from her after the discovery of the Lady. That might linger when other specifics faded. “Seeing the Lady may bring some things back.”

  Eleanor looked as if she might be sick. Virgil could not stop himself from touching her arm, fingers digging into her shoulder.

  “All shall be well,” he murmured. He wanted her to believe that as much as he did.

  “I think—”

  But what Eleanor thought would remain a mystery, because the Nuit gave a sudden jolt beneath their feet, as if she had been struck by something. Eleanor lurched into Virgil’s arms and they both fell against the window. For a moment, Virgil feared the glass would shatter, sending them spiraling to the distant earth below. But there came only the groan of the ship around them; the windows, made for such potential bumps, held. Virgil waited for an announcement from Gin, from Auberon, from someone. He could feel the Nuit trying to right herself, but the ship continued her downward trajectory. He didn’t have to look out the window to know they were closing in on the water that lapped the African coastline, but still saw the moonlight against that shore, licking and hungry.

  “Eleanor, hold on.”

  And then the rear cabin exploded in flame and glass as a host of fiery cannonballs careened inside.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Port Elizabeth ~ Cape Colony, 1884

  Eleanor didn’t want to be here. Rain poured from the sky in drenching sheets, and her wet fingers slipped against the doorknob of St. Augustine’s as she pushed her way inside. She closed the door, then stepped into the nearest shadows in case eyes turned toward her; the hush of the cathedral was startling in comparison to the downpour. She became aware of the steady drip, drip, drip from her jacket onto the stone floor and she slipped it off, folding it twice and tucking it into the nearest pew. She pushed her revolver farther down into the waistband of her trousers.