Secrets of a Sun King

by Emma Carroll

  It was hard enough having a brother I’d never met, never mind how it must feel to have one and then lose him again. Mum and Dad in the churchyard yesterday flashed into my mind. It felt right, here with Tulip, to mention it.

  ‘Apparently my mum had a baby before me.’

  Tulip’s eyebrows shot up. ‘So now who’s got the mysterious family, hey?’

  ‘I didn’t know him,’ I said quickly. ‘He was adopted years ago, before I was born. I’ve only just found out.’

  ‘Gosh! That must’ve been a shock. Are you going to try and find him?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ It hadn’t occurred to me to. ‘Anyway, he’ll be a grown-up by now, or I suppose he might be dead.’

  We both fell glumly quiet.

  Then Tulip slapped the table. ‘Right, enough of this doom, gloom and misery. Where’s our food and Oz with that chess set?’

  Oz and the waiter arrived together. And soon our table was so crowded with food and plates and sparkling cutlery that it was a good job he hadn’t found a chess set after all, as there was no space in which to play.

  Tulip was relieved. ‘Let’s play something fun, instead. For matchsticks.’

  She whipped out a pack of cards and spent the rest of the evening thrashing us both to smithereens.

  12

  Later that night, we caught the boat from Dover. The sway of the train became the swell of the sea as I crawled into bed, exhausted. At first light we docked in France and boarded another train that was to take us all the way to Athens. This leg of the journey lasted a whole three days, though unbelievably our new train was even fancier than the last. It had doorbell-type buttons in the walls you could press for tea and cake, and a seven-person orchestra that played all through dinner. Though my mind often drifted back to Grandad and the jar, keeping my spirits up wasn’t too hard.

  Very early on the second day, we passed through German forests, then the train started climbing into the mountains. The weather got much colder; ice formed on the windows, and we had to turn the heating in our cabin to ‘high’. We went through tunnels cut into the mountainsides, and passed what to me looked like a frozen river but Oz insisted was a glacier.

  By the end of the second day, we’d come through the mountains. The snow turned to rain and we dropped down in a dizzying fashion to the valley below. The fields and forests looked less green, and we started passing crops planted in long, low rows.

  ‘Vineyards,’ Oz said.

  I caught Tulip’s eye and smiled. She was right: her brother really was a walking encyclopaedia.

  In the lull between afternoon tea and dinner that day, Tulip suggested we play a game.

  ‘It’ll be fun,’ she promised.

  We were in Oz’s compartment. He was in his bunk, reading books that apparently had once been his brother’s. Tulip and I were squished up on the floor. Sun was coming in through the window, and I could feel my eyelids getting heavier.

  ‘Count me in,’ I said, yawning.

  Tulip asked Oz for his sketchbook, which he took from his bag and gave to her warily. With a sharp yank, she pulled out the middle pages, then laid them open on the floor.

  ‘Pencil please,’ she instructed. Oz passed her the one he often kept behind his ear. Then to me, ‘Empty that glass of water, will you?’

  She meant the one sloshing about on the night table. The only place to pour it was out of the window, which I did. Oz and I then watched over Tulip’s shoulder as she wrote the letters of the alphabet in a circle on the paper. Oz guessed before I did what she was up to, which made me wonder if they’d played the game before.

  ‘Ouija,’ he muttered.

  I knew the name – you pronounced it ‘weee-geee’. Grandad said it was what the Victorians did in the days before radio sets, but Mum claimed it was just another way to tune in to different voices, and it depended on what you believed.

  A chill lifted the hairs on my arms. It was probably too late to suggest a game of cards instead, and I didn’t want to seem the scaredy-cat. If Oz was happy to play, I told myself, so was I.

  ‘Close the blinds, please,’ Tulip ordered. ‘And the lamps – switch them off.’

  She was bossy, I had to give her that.

  The dark we’d created wasn’t proper night-time black, but it was enough to change the mood. Tulip’s next instruction was to lock the compartment door and pull the bolt at the top.

  ‘We don’t want any adults coming in and ruining it,’ she explained.

  There was just enough space for us all to sit on the floor in a circle, though we had to draw our knees up to our chins and watch what we did with our elbows. Oz, I could tell, didn’t like being so jammed in.

  ‘Now join hands, everyone, and shut your eyes,’ Tulip said.

  Though I did as she asked, I’d a bad feeling this game wasn’t going to be ‘fun’.

  ‘Spirits, we’re here today to ask if there are any messages for us from the other side. Please, make yourselves known in a manner of your choosing.’ Tulip’s voice – heavy, slow – reminded me of school assemblies when the vicar read for hours.

  Then my stomach made a slurping noise.

  ‘Sssh, Lil!’ Tulip tutted.

  ‘Sorry!’ I squirmed, half laughing, half horrified. ‘I can’t help it!’

  Oz dropped my hand.

  ‘Don’t want to play,’ he said. ‘It’s too much hand touching and being close.’ He climbed back on to his bunk and promptly picked up his book.

  ‘We’ll do it with just the two of us, shall we?’ I suggested.

  Tulip shook her head. ‘It won’t work.’

  But she let me take her hands, and when I shut my eyes again, she must’ve done the same, because moments later she was speaking in that same sermon-voice. I sat very still. Without Oz breathing next to me, it was easier to concentrate.

  ‘Is anyone there?’ Tulip asked. ‘Give us a sign, spirits, if you can hear us.’

  Nothing happened.

  ‘Is there anyone there?’ she asked again.

  Behind me, the bunk creaked. It was Oz.

  ‘You can’t just call up any old ghost,’ he pointed out. ‘You need to have someone specific in mind.’

  I opened one eye: Tulip didn’t. Sitting ramrod-straight she told Oz, calmly and coldly, to shut up.

  ‘So, spirit world,’ she resumed. ‘Do you have a male visitor for us, or is it female?’

  Tulip dropped my hand, suddenly. I opened my eyes to see her finger now on the bottom of the upturned glass.

  It began to move across the paper. It was obviously Tulip’s doing, though that didn’t stop it seeming eerie. The glass came to a halt next to the letter A.

  ‘What’s it saying?’ Oz asked.

  ‘A’ was for Alex, of that I was pretty certain.

  When Oz saw which letter it was, he sank back on to the bed. ‘I thought you said this would be fun, Tulip,’ he said miserably. ‘It’s not real. You’re making the glass move.’

  ‘Shall we play something else?’ I suggested, thinking this wasn’t fair on Oz, who was clearly spooked.

  But Tulip grabbed my hands. ‘You try.’

  I put my finger on the glass like she’d done. It didn’t make any difference.

  ‘Tulip, I think—’ I stopped.

  Something was happening. The room grew warmer, suddenly. I could smell dust.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Tulip sounded nervous now.

  The lamps, already switched off, flickered to life, then died again.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted.

  Before our very eyes then, the glass moved. My finger was on it, but certainly not guiding it. It inched across the paper by itself.

  Tulip got to her knees. ‘Are you pushing it, Lil? You’d better not be!’

  ‘No!’ I took my hand away to prove it.

  The glass kept moving in its funny, jerky way. It wasn’t right, seeing a glass moving like that. The air around us seemed to fizz and prickle. I felt cold, and very afraid.


  ‘You must’ve done something!’ Tulip cried. She glared at me, at the glass, the paper, as if expecting to find a trick there.

  ‘I haven’t! I promise!’

  Oz crouched next to me on the floor. ‘That,’ he gasped, staring at the glass, ‘is incredible!’

  I didn’t think so. It felt wrong and creepy, though I couldn’t look away as the glass moved clumsily towards the first letter.

  Tulip willed the glass on in an almost-frenzy. ‘Choose A for Alex!’ It looked as if it might, then, at the last, it veered right and stopped at N.

  ‘Write it down, somebody!’ insisted Tulip.

  Oz grabbed his sketchbook and pencil. The next letter came fast: O. Then a T, and a pause, followed by an H, an E, an R, another E.

  I read the words aloud: ‘NOT HERE.’

  ‘What sort of message is that?’ Tulip asked. ‘And who’s it for?’

  I didn’t know. But my heart was knocking so hard against my ribs, I wanted this stupid game to stop. The glass hadn’t finished, though. The next word was IN. We looked at each other, still baffled.

  ‘A person, maybe, or a place?’ I caught myself thinking of the jar, and all the strangeness that came with it. Could the glass be trying to tell me something?

  Hardly daring to breathe, I waited.

  The glass didn’t move. After a while, Tulip shifted to a more comfortable sitting position. Oz started twiddling his pencil. My mind, ever so slightly, began to drift. You could almost feel the mood in the room relax. All the signs were the message had ended.

  Then, just as Tulip was about to speak, the glass shot across the paper. I jumped a mile. The glass spelled out the next word, then rolled on to the carpet, stopping against the sole of Tulip’s shoe.

  ‘NOT HERE IN AFTERLIFE,’ Oz read from his notes. ‘That’s what the message says.’

  Tulip frowned. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It could be about Kyky,’ I suggested. Wasn’t it why we were trying to return the jar, so the curse would stop and Kyky could finally complete his journey to the afterlife?

  Or it could be about Alex.

  ‘It’s only a silly game,’ Tulip reminded us, getting stiffly to her feet. ‘Come on, we’ve been cooped up in here for too long.’

  *

  All that evening, Tulip kept gazing into the middle distance, or drifting off halfway through conversations. Oz, meanwhile, was tired and irritable.

  ‘Whatever’s the matter with you both?’ Mrs Mendoza asked more than once.

  In the end we went to bed early.

  ‘The Ouija message bothered you, didn’t it?’ I asked Tulip when we were alone in our cabin.

  She flopped down on to her pillow with a sigh. ‘The way I see it is this: either I get my hopes up that Alex is still alive, or I ignore the message completely. Both things are heartbreaking.’

  She had a point. But thinking about my brother – how odd to say that! – life had a way of springing things on you when you least expected them.

  ‘Never say never,’ I told her.

  To my mind ‘Not here in afterlife’ had two meanings: a dead person stuck in limbo, or someone who wasn’t dead at all.

  13

  At breakfast the next morning a strange telegram arrived. It was the latest from Mrs Mendoza’s contact in Cairo, who kept her up to date on events in the Valley of the Kings. In the few days we’d been travelling, Mr Carter had been worryingly busy. He’d cleared sixteen sunken steps, at the bottom of which appeared to be a sealed-up doorway. Yet today’s message had a rather queer ring to it.

  ‘That poor canary,’ was Mrs Mendoza’s first reaction on reading the telegram.

  We all stopped eating.

  ‘Apparently Lady Evelyn – that’s Lord Carnarvon’s daughter – brought a canary to the dig so they could check there weren’t any poisonous gases before going inside the tomb.’

  ‘Did the bird die?’ I asked.

  ‘Apparently a snake killed it.’ Mrs Mendoza tutted. ‘Hardly thrilling, though, is it? How am I going to write a lead story about that?’

  ‘What sort of snake was it?’ Oz asked, looking up from his book. He never ate in front of other people, Tulip told me, yet he happily came to every meal just to sit there and read.

  ‘Does that matter, darling?’ But she read the message again, her finger trailing under the words. ‘Bird bitten by cobra. Death almost instantaneous. Carter and Lady Evelyn trying to calm anxiety over possible curse.’

  ‘Death shall come on swift wings,’ Tulip reminded us. ‘Looks like Mr Carter knows about the curse, but he’s being block-headed and refusing to be scared off by it.’

  More fool him, I thought grimly.

  ‘Isn’t the cobra a protector in Egyptian mythology?’ I asked.

  Oz nodded eagerly. ‘Uraeus. The rearing cobra. Guardian of kings and queens.’

  ‘Sounds to me like Tutankhamun’s curse is trying to keep the archaeologists out,’ said Tulip.

  I hoped it succeeded, at least until we got there. Mrs Mendoza, though, looked positively cheered.

  ‘You’ve given me a story, darlings, so thank you!’ And she went off to type it up.

  *

  Later that day, the train made a stop at a little country station. Oz said it was in Yugoslavia, though I wasn’t sure how he could tell. The platform was empty but for an old woman selling lemonade.

  ‘Looks like someone’s joining the train,’ I said, pointing to a motorcar that pulled up just as we did.

  Whilst Tulip and I were speculating on who was in the car – she thought a film star, I reckoned a spy – Oz announced he wanted some lemonade, so I said I’d fetch him one. By the time I’d done so, the motorcar had dropped its passenger and driven off. The man now on the platform was young, thin, not very remarkable-looking, so probably more a spy than a film star, I decided. Slopping lemonade, I hurried back to our part of the train. But not before the man called out to me: ‘I say, where do I get on for second class?’ because all of a sudden there wasn’t a train guard in sight.

  I pointed further down the train to the big ‘2nd’ painted on the door, but he seemed a bit confused. He had two suitcases and a bag that kept slipping off his shoulder, and a not-quite-there-ness that reminded me of Dad.

  Tulip was beckoning me furiously to hurry up. Thinking it the quickest way to get back on the train, I took the man to the second-class door, then hopped in behind him. Almost straight away, the train lurched forwards, and we were off.

  ‘Thanks for your help,’ the young man said, touching his hat brim. He had a straggly beard and a nasty scar under his eye. But his smile was a nice one.

  Finally, a guard appeared, asking to see our tickets. I didn’t have mine on me.

  ‘Where’s your destination, young miss?’ the guard wanted to know.

  ‘I’m going to Luxor,’ I told him.

  ‘Are you?’ The young man perked up hearing this. ‘Then I hope you’ll be keeping an eye on Howard Carter.’ Though he smiled as he said it, I’d heard enough about Mr Carter to detect an edge to his voice.

  ‘I still need to see your ticket,’ the guard interrupted. ‘Who are you travelling with?’

  ‘With Mrs Mendoza in first class,’ I explained. ‘And her children, Oz and Tulip. I can fetch my ticket if you like.’

  The guard was actually quite jolly about it. The young man, though, who showed his ticket all fair and square, looked so very startled I felt sorry for him.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked him. ‘Have you got on the wrong train or something?’

  ‘What? No … no, I’m fine, thank you.’ He smiled his nice smile. ‘Keep an eye on Carter, though.’

  ‘I will.’

  And I gave him the lemonade because he looked in need of it.

  *

  Twenty hours later, we finally reached Athens. Just as we got off the train a new telegram arrived for Mrs Mendoza. My heart sank when I saw who’d sent it.

  ‘It’s from Mr Pemberton!’ I whi
spered to Tulip. ‘We’ve been rumbled!’

  Tulip’s mouth tightened – a sign she was annoyed.

  ‘I don’t believe this … man!’ Mrs Mendoza cried, shaking the telegram in disgust.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ Tulip asked.

  ‘He’s pretending I misunderstood him,’ Mrs Mendoza exclaimed. ‘Doesn’t he remember the telegram he sent last week?’

  ‘It’s probably just a mix-up,’ Tulip said quickly. I didn’t know how she kept so calm when my insides were squeezing like a mangle.

  Mrs Mendoza snorted: ‘Well, he’s ordering me back to London at once, the stupid fool. Says he’s already sent a replacement man to report on the Carter story.’

  I was horrified. We couldn’t go back with our tails between our legs, not when we’d come all this way.

  As we stood there, fretting, I caught sight of the second-class ticket man again. He almost looked like he was coming over to speak to us. Then Oz turned around, frowning, which seemed to put him off. He touched the brim of his hat before melting into the crowds.

  ‘It really must be a mistake, Mama,’ Tulip was still saying. ‘All your tickets are booked, so someone at your newspaper obviously knew you were coming.’

  ‘Let’s keep going. We’re only a boat ride away from Egypt,’ I pleaded.

  But it was Oz who said the exact right thing. ‘And Mr Pemberton’s sent another man, Mama.’

  Mrs Mendoza straightened her shoulders. ‘He can stuff his orders. We’re not going to be beaten to the best story by some young pup, are we?’

  I can’t tell you how eagerly we agreed.

  *

  The telegram goaded Mrs Mendoza into action. Instead of stopping in Athens overnight we were now carrying straight on to Egypt. There were no more passenger sailings that day. But Mrs Mendoza refused to wait till the morning.

  ‘I’m a reporter chasing a story!’ she reminded us.

  By the time we reached the port it was raining. A cold wind had picked up, and beyond the harbour walls the waves were white-topped and rather large for my liking. The English Channel had been relatively flat; just the look of the sea today was making me queasy. A few US dollars later and a man with an enormous moustache agreed to have us on his boat.