The Cairo Diary

by Maxim Chattam

  More than half of the shadows around them were now running in the opposite direction.

  The rifle shots rang out again.

  Jeremy saw two silhouettes sidestep the fugitives to go around him and attempt to take him from behind.

  A third charged at him, full-out, just avoiding the angry mob of fugitives.

  Jeremy could not fire; there was movement everywhere. Any bullet would go through several bodies before reaching his attacker.

  Suddenly, the human tide became so dense and so violent that everyone was carried away by the tidal wave.

  Unable to resist without falling and being trampled underfoot, Jeremy allowed himself to be carried along, pushed, and propelled by the power of this wave of flesh.

  His attackers were swept along just like him, dispersed, moving their legs as much as they could to remain at the surface.

  The tide burst as it reached a square, plunging its offshoots into the narrow streets that opened off it in all directions.

  Jeremy threw himself into the recessed doorway of a house and waited for the main body of the herd to pass. He looked for Jezebel among the faces.

  And he found her, on the other side, terrified but safe and sound. He lost her as she swiftly left a busy thoroughfare to escape the mobs along an adjacent street.

  Jeremy threw his head back against the wall, and let out a long breath.

  The worst was yet to come.

  Tonight was going to be the longest and the most sinister of Cairo nights.

  45

  Children’s laughter awakened Marion.

  Her tongue was coated, and her head filled with a throbbing pain.

  She no longer knew where she was. The room was going around.

  In the rail car … I’m with Jeremy, in the rail—

  No, she was in Cairo. She’d been attacked during the riot.

  She remembered a shape that looked like death, pursuing her. No! She was the one chasing it.

  The diary.

  Mont-Saint-Michel.

  Marion remembered. She was in her place. In her little house.

  For a moment she no longer knew who she was. Her life had become transposed with the earlier life of Jezebel.

  She was Marion.

  She had got back the black book. Jeremy Matheson’s private diary. And she had gone back up to the Salle des Chevaliers, more angry than worried. Someone had been playing games with her. Had she misheard that click in the lock? Was it in fact that of the postern door, or had the thief caused a diversion at the main door before running round to enter behind her back, so as to sneak the book away from her?

  She had not found the answer. In the end it mattered little.

  Then Marion had gone back down.

  To see Béatrice; she’d needed to talk.

  The shop was shut. Closed on Mondays. And nobody was in the apartment upstairs.

  Marion had noticed Ludwig coming out of an adjacent street, and had flattened herself in the dusk to avoid him before going back to her place to take refuge. This was not the moment for him to come and whisper sweet nothings in her ear.

  She stood there in the living room for five minutes, and then started crying. She was lost. Incapable of making the right decision. She’d found the telephone in her hand, while she punched in the number written on a card in her purse. The man from the DST.

  She’d hung up before the first ring.

  And paced up and down instead.

  When her feet started hurting, she sat down and poured herself a gin and orange. Then another. And so on.

  Her mind had grown calmer, and she had picked up the book to flick through it; and even before she meant to, she was reading what came next.

  She fell asleep at the end of the riot, when Jezebel ran away.

  Knocked out by the alcohol.

  She had slept for two hours.

  Now the children were making a din underneath her window.

  Night had fallen. And there were no children on the Mount.

  Marion blinked, very slowly, but did not get up.

  She opened her mouth, and her lips came unstuck like chewing gum being peeled off linoleum.

  She reached out to grab the top of the sofa and pulled to haul herself up. Her nose made contact with the cold glass of the bay window.

  Down below, in the street, dozens of people were walking up towards the abbey, each at their own pace, the children in the lead.

  The orchestral concert.

  Marion had helped Sister Gabriela put up the flyers in the village square last Saturday afternoon.

  She looked at her bare wrist and realized that she hadn’t worn a watch since she arrived here. She found the time in the kitchen. Twenty past seven.

  The concert was in less than an hour.

  Marion had no desire to attend.

  She wanted to be home. In her real home, in Paris. She wanted to go to bed in the evening and set her alarm clock for the following morning, the very same one that made her grumble at quarter to seven when she had to get up and go to work. She dreamed of being able to forget all this.

  Why did somebody persecute her? Who?

  Matheson’s private diary lay upside down on the sofa, open at the point she had reached when she fell asleep.

  It was impossible that there was any relationship between this diary and what had happened to her in Paris, the case of the suspicious political death. So whoever was pursuing her here simply wanted to get the book back. What was there in it to arouse such determination?

  Marion picked it up.

  There were only a few pages left to read.

  And perhaps then, she would know.

  She sighed with all her soul and sat down in front of the gin bottle.

  The diary fell open on her thighs and the pages turned one after the other until they stopped, suspended in midair.

  Marion pushed away the bottle of alcohol.

  And returned to her place.

  That night in Egypt, when the worst was yet to come.

  46

  Jeremy returned to the eastern districts, to see the dragoman he had engaged to find all those who had participated in the nocturnal vigil along with Azim.

  Azim had discovered an old underground complex, in which the ghoul was hiding, somewhere under el-Gamaliya. He had brought back an old papyrus that identified the underground chambers in question as being in a part of the city between the Huisein mosque and the al-Azhar University. But Jeremy had still to find the entrance.

  The dragoman was at home, with his wife and children. Nobody was sleeping, despite the lateness of the hour. Rumors of a riot in the center of the city had reached them, and they were all waiting for news. The dragoman greeted Jeremy with an immense smile, counting the piasters the detective had just handed him by way of invitation.

  The dragoman had identified several men, and had questioned them; and he presented the information to the detective, not leaving out any detail. Jeremy drank tea with him, and he was brought a handful of dates which he nibbled in silence.

  After an account that was careful—the dragoman had an exceptional memory, retaining all the names of the protagonists—but useless to Jeremy, he concluded with what seemed to him to be the least important information: “That is not everything, effendi. I was also directed to two old men this afternoon. They cannot stop talking about this beast, this ghul, to everybody, they are becoming obsessed with it. They are annoying the people in the qawha. The first one says he knows who is behind it all. I met him just now, I don’t think he has all his marbles anymore. For him, the ghul is his neighbor in disguise. He says his neighbor is mad, that he’s a child-killer and—”

  “Where does this old man live?” asked Jeremy, who was in a hurry to get to the end.

  “In the northwest of Gamaliya, in Bab el-Nasr, very close to—”

  “Too far,” cut in the detective. “What about the other?”

  “He’s a fanatical hashish smoker. He’s been frequenting the ghoraz for too long.
He says he knows where the demon lives. In a blind alley, in the southeast of the district.”

  Jeremy spat out his date. “Not far from the Huisein mosque?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  The Englishman leaped to his feet.

  He remembered Azim, and his two witnesses, the two men who said they had seen the ghoul. One was an old hashish smoker. And it was close to the place where the underground tunnels ought to be.

  “Take me to him,” he said. “Come along, time is short.”

  * * *

  They unearthed the old man at the back of a smoking club well known in the district, with his eyes red and shining. He did not balk at taking the two men as far as the entrance to the blind alley in question when Jeremy promised him a little money in exchange.

  The narrow streets were deserted and dark.

  They walked along carrying a lantern containing a small candle, which quivered in time with its bearer’s footsteps.

  The three men moved soundlessly under the moucharabiehs that made the narrow alleyways even darker, stepping around the empty stalls, until they walked down a confused maze of passageways, some covered, some dilapidated, which served as shortcuts.

  From a distance, they resembled a little firefly, looking for the way out of a giant stone labyrinth.

  At last they ended their nocturnal walk at the entrance to a blind alley made up of ruined houses.

  “It is here,” murmured the old man in Arabic. “I’m not staying much longer, it’s dangerous.”

  The dragoman translated for the detective.

  At which the old man seized Jeremy by the sleeve and waited.

  The Englishman sighed, took a banknote from his pocket, and handed it to him. The man was about to leave when Jeremy held him back by the shoulder.

  “Which house is it in?”

  The dragoman acted as an intermediary between the two men.

  “He says he doesn’t know,” he reported.

  “In that case, ask him if he knows where the Huisein mosque and al-Azhar University are.”

  The old man hesitated, before pointing both arms to the right, in vaguely the same direction. This gesture seemed to direct their searches more to the houses on the right side of the blind alley.

  “It’s better than nothing,” grumbled the Englishman, handing the lantern back to its owner.

  The dragoman instantly translated the old man’s few words. “He says you can keep it. You’ll need it more than he does if you intend to go in there.”

  The old man was already walking away.

  “Tell me, are you really going to enter these ruins to look for the ghul?” asked the dragoman anxiously.

  Jeremy gave him the promised money. “There’s no need to follow me. Your journey ends here, my friend.”

  The detective turned his back on him without further ado, and plunged in among the crumbling façades, full of gaping holes like greedy mouths.

  Jeremy heard the guide’s footsteps hurriedly moving away.

  The first building on the right side was impossible to get into, as the ceiling had collapsed. Jeremy swiftly checked out the second one. There was nothing inside but rubble. The third required more effort, as it included a cellar that he inspected carefully.

  Inside the next one, he was astonished not to have access to a basement. He searched every corner, his dim lantern in his hand, until he halted before a sizable wooden chest filled with stagnant water.

  He placed the lamp on the ground and leaned on the wood with all his strength to make the water bucket slide across the floor.

  The hole was underneath.

  Jeremy picked up his lantern again and descended the steps before swiftly coming back up to move the water-filled container back into position as best he could, in order to keep the entrance hidden and not reveal his presence.

  Once he was down below, he could not miss the hole that had been made at ground level. A recent hole.

  Had Frederick Winslow made it himself, in order to enter the archaeological underground chambers he so coveted? It was possible. Winslow was the type to search on his own, keeping to his own corner, not telling anyone about his discoveries except those close to him and his employer if any. Or had he not had time to finish, and Keoraz had completed the job himself, to ensure he possessed a lair nobody knew about, once the archaeologist had been eliminated?

  Jeremy bent down and had to put his arm with the lantern through the hole to ascertain the endless depth of the passageway. The earth was damp, sweating in places, and many twisted roots hung down, like desiccated hands. Now Jeremy understood what Azim had said, “I thought I was going to die! I thought it had caught hold of me but it was a root, just a root!”

  The little Egyptian’s voice echoed deep in the tunnel, distant and ghostlike. “Just a root…”

  Jeremy kneeled down and entered the passage headfirst.

  He crawled as fast as he could, on the alert for the smallest sound. He soon began to breathe rapidly, paddling around in a swirl of mud and decomposing vegetation.

  It became difficult to move forward with the lantern, forcing him to move it in stages. The candle flame almost drowned in its own wax when the jolts were too severe. He found a lighter, sticking out of the soil. Azim’s. He recognized it immediately; his former colleague very rarely smoked, but was never parted from his lighter, always very proud to be able to light other people’s cigarettes.

  He must not feel claustrophobic, thought Jeremy. He wriggled about like a worm in the belly of the earth, twisting the different parts of his body to move forward in this humus-filled intestine.

  Finally Jeremy emerged in the underground tunnel.

  The dust filled his nose.

  Once he was standing upright, the detective took his weapon in his right hand, and raised his lantern. The darkness swallowed up the edges, gnawed away at corners that were too sharp and totally engulfed all perspective beyond six feet.

  He entered a large chamber. The feeling of insecurity suddenly took a firmer hold of him.

  Don’t make a sound, he repeated to himself. Be careful where you walk.… Be on the lookout. Don’t hurry … there you are … don’t leave anything to chance, make sure there is nothing behind you.

  He turned around to carry out this command.

  In his wake, the darkness had closed in again, depriving him of any points of reference. Was he going to be able to find his way back? Azim had managed it. All he had to do was follow the line of the wall …

  Jeremy took a step forward and, in panic, hurriedly opened his lantern and blew on the flame.

  The smell from the dying wick rose to his nostrils.

  He had just caught sight of a glimmer of light.

  Weak and moving, but a light all the same.

  It was coming from a corridor on his left.

  Jeremy approached, holding his breath so as not to betray his presence.

  The corridor, which was very short, led to a modestly sized room whose details he could not make out from where he was standing. He put down his lantern and took his Colt in both hands. He moved toward the doorway.

  The place was as sinister as it was pestilential.

  Two candles danced on a worn-out table.

  Beyond the table rose a pile of dead animals. Some of them were seething with plump maggots.

  Someone was making a snuffling noise.

  A long, sticky breathing sound.

  Jeremy aimed his pistol in the direction in question.

  And his entire being froze with the shock.

  47

  The ghoul was indeed there.

  It was tall and misshapen. Its bald pate gleamed in the candlelight, one eye abnormally open, almost dangling, the nose eaten away by disease, the cheeks and lips missing, opening the whole jaw to the air. The creature was enveloped in a long robe of coarse cloth, as dark as its skin, with a voluminous hood pushed back onto its shoulders.

  And it was playing.

  The creature was hold
ing George Keoraz, aged nine, in his arms. The child was motionless, inert and partially undressed. The ghoul was holding one of his arms, and using it to push along a little wooden train.

  It snuffled again, tilting its head back. Sucking in through its teeth the spittle that the absence of skin could not hold in. When it did that, it resembled a wild beast sniffing the air.

  Jeremy could no longer move.

  It was then that it noticed him.

  Its good eye locked onto him, then onto the weapon pointed at it. The eye turned toward something, lying on a stool.

  Jeremy followed the look.

  It was an assortment of elongated rings, each made to cover the whole of the last joint and extend beyond the end of the finger. The rings were made of metal, and ended in a claw, carved from bone and set into the end.

  So that was the secret of those hands with their endless fingers and inhuman nails. A craftsman who worked metal in a souk had made them. It was just a case of paying the price—there was no shortage of bones or metal in Cairo.

  Jeremy realized that the black giant was about to make a dash for his weapons.

  Fear unlocked his body and he took a step forward, keeping a firm grip on the gun.

  “Shhhhhh,” he hissed, hoping to dissuade the ghoul from attacking.

  Did it realize the danger represented by a firearm?

  It let go of George Keoraz, who collapsed completely.

  “Don’t do that!” yelled Jeremy, trying to get a little closer.

  And it leaped for the stool.

  Jeremy was forced to hold fire, as the child was in the possible trajectory of the bullet. He threw himself backward, trying to flatten his back against the wall so as to gain distance between himself and the ghoul, and to make sure that he was in a good position to take aim.

  His shoulders made contact with the wall.

  He refocused his eyes, just in time to see the monster’s terrible face bear down upon the candles.

  And blow them out.

  48

  A childish fear.

  A feeling of powerlessness and insecurity that went back to a child’s first, faltering attempts at speech. Written in the genes, a warning system from the reptilian brain, dating from the epoch when the whole of humanity knew what terrors could be lurking in the darkness.