Apep, according to common belief in ancient Kemet, was the great serpent who embodied the destructive forces of Chaos, the primeval state of the universe. He had existed even before Order brought the world out of Chaos, living in the dark watery abyss, which had existed before time. He’d survived the cataclysm of creation, which spawned the world and heavens and eventually humanity. He still attacked the great boat of the Sun God, Ra, every day just before dawn. This part of the scroll contained rituals to help Ra and his minions lest Apep eventually destroy Ra’s sun boat. If that ever happened Chaos would overwhelm Order and the world would end.
It was interesting reading, Thomas thought. Not to be taken literally, of course, in this enlightened age. At least Thomas didn’t believe in the old stories. He was less sure about the Captain. He’d never had the courage to question Benjamin Noir about his beliefs. To be sure, there was something to the magic that the Captain practiced. It worked. Thomas had seen enough empirical evidence to convince him of that. It didn’t work in every instance, of course. But what did? But Thomas had benefited enough by it over the course of his life to believe in it’s general efficacy.
But Chaos Serpents? Sun boats? Immortal gods who had the heads of animals and traversed the sky every night bringing the sun back to safety every morning so that it could arise again over the Earth? No. He didn’t believe in that at all. Even if he’d almost been killed by [103] Anubis. An Anubis that was, he was certain, a creation of the Captain’s mind.
Thomas glanced at the Captain, hard at work transcribing copious notes into his ponderous personal journal from the scroll he was perusing. Benjamin Noir looked up, frowning, as if he’d felt Thomas’s eyes on him. Perhaps he did, Thomas thought. He was almost inhumanly perceptive.
Thomas smiled as best he could and dropped his gaze down to his own papyrus. He didn’t want the old man to probe too deeply into his thoughts. He was afraid of what the Captain might possibly see.
Jon and Isaac stopped for a moment at the Glass House. For some reason the stench of the Corpse Flower was far more potent at night. The House’s interior smelled like a battlefield on a summer day after a slaughter. The smell drove Isaac out immediately. Jon withstood it to take a few measurements and jot down some more notes about the plant’s condition, batting at the night-flying moths surrounding the plant as he did so. He stared at the botanical monstrosity for a long moment, then realized he was only wasting time, holding back because that fear was still there, keeping him from beginning his search for the killer.
Jon sighed. He joined Isaac outside.
“Let’s go,” he said, and they headed for the graveyard. Not the recent, well-tended cemetery where the dead of Geiststadt lay, but higher up on HangedMan’s Hill where the forgotten of Dunkelstad had been planted into the earth.
[104] The land was quiet and dark. The moon was a miniscule sliver hanging high in the sky. The stars glittered over head without illuminating the landscape through which they moved. They were as quiet as the land itself, at one point passing so close to a fear-frozen rabbit that Jon could have reached out and speared it with his bayonet if he’d wanted to. He had no desire to kill, so they passed the creature by, heading upslope to the outskirts of the abandoned cemetery.
“What are we looking for?” Isaac asked. His voice was so quiet that it could have passed for a whisper of the night wind, but Jon heard him clearly. It seemed that all his senses were razor sharp. He could smell the grass underneath his feet and hear the patter of the breeze as it sifted through the leaves above his head. He could see almost as clearly as if it were day. The musty spice of the once-hallowed earth he stood upon was strong on his tongue, as if he could taste it on the air with every breath he drew into his mouth.
“I don’t know,” Jon replied, just as quietly. He felt strange and powerful at the same time, but he didn’t know where the strength came from or what to do with it. He only knew that something was calling him deeper into the graveyard.
He followed his intuition and Isaac followed him. The simple wooden crosses that had once marked the Dutch graves were all long gone. Even their burial mounds had sunk into the earth, smoothed by almost two centuries of wind and rain. Plants grew lushly in the boneyard, as if the ground was abnormally fertile. Flowers were abundant, though almost all their blooms were closed [105] for the night. The once-civilized roses that had marked a few of the graves had gone feral. Their blooms were smaller and stems thornier. They grew in great thickets which Jon, and Isaac behind him, skirted as they made their way into the cemetery’s heart.
They stopped and waited. It was as if Jon could feel all the life around him, in the trees and among the bushes and even burrowing in the ground. And the death, as well. The sense of strangeness that had enveloped him was still there. It was almost palpable. He reached his hand out as if to touch it.
“What do you want of me?” he asked in a clear voice.
The answer came suddenly from all around him. He couldn’t be sure from exactly where. It seemed like everywhere. He looked at Isaac, but his companion’s face was blank. He couldn’t hear the words that Jon was hearing so clearly. He shivered, as if someone had brushed a feather across his naked brain.
There was a murmur of many voices. Jon Noir spoke English, German, Latin, and Greek, but he couldn’t understand what these said. Partly because so many speaking at once, partly because the words, though naggingly familiar, seemed to slip around the edges of his consciousness. They were like English and German and even something like Latin, but they weren’t those languages. Jon concentrated.
They were ...
He frowned. Almost, he had it, then it slipped away. He clenched his fists and Isaac, standing concerned at his side, suddenly gasped aloud as he saw Jon’s eyes roll up in their sockets until only the whites showed. Instead [106] of trying to understand the river of voices flowing over him, Jon narrowed his focus, trying to understand only a tiny stream, a single current. Partial understanding came. A word here or there, maybe the essence of a sentence.
The voices were speaking Dutch.
The dead resting beneath his feet were speaking to him, Jon realized. Not all of them. There weren’t enough voices to account for all the bodies buried in the old cemetery. Maybe twenty. Maybe more. Speaking all together, all at once, in the unfamiliar language. He couldn’t understand the specifics of what they were saying, but he knew that they were pleading with him. For what he could not tell.
Jon suddenly turned his head and looked up at the far corner of the cemetery, the far edge where the outlines of a single large pit marked the internment place of the twelve Hessians killed nearly sixty-five years before. Of the burial place of the last Hessian, the thirteenth, there was no sign.
It was as bright as day in that corner of the graveyard. Jon could see men in ragged uniforms, some of them bloody, with broken bones that somehow still held them up. They spoke, and Jon could understand them. They spoke German that was a little different than that he was used to, but he understood them.
“Do not blame us—”
“It is not our deed—”
“We have paid—”
“Already—”
“Too much—”
[107] “Too much—”
“Look to the living—”
They might have said more, but Isaac suddenly gripped his upper arm with a hand as powerful as a vise and even shook him a little with the urgency of his need.
“Jon! Jon, wake up. Look, Jon!”
Jon focused on reality and followed his friend’s gaze upslope from the graveyard into the notch in HangedMan’s Hill where the two ridgelines came together. Something was standing there in the notch. Something white and faintly glowing. He couldn’t be certain because of the distance and the bushes obstructing the view, but it looked like a human figure. Jon couldn’t tell if it was male or female, young or old. But it seemed to be watching them intently.
Jon couldn’t resist his sudden urge to call out.
�
��Hey!”
He waved. The figure continued to look down upon them, then turned suddenly and fled. It disappeared among the trees in moments.
“Do we go after it?” Isaac asked gamely.
Jon shook his head. “There’s no chance to catch it in the dark. Tomorrow, we’ll follow its trail.”
“All right.” Isaac looked at his friend in intent silence. Finally, he asked, “What was you listening to?”
Jon closed his eyes, suddenly very tired.
“Dead men speak, Isaac,” he said. “Dead men.”
A light was shining inside the Glass House when Jon and Isaac returned to the manor. It was late. Jon was tired, but he knew that he couldn’t sleep. He said [108] goodnight to Isaac at the bunk house door and his friend went inside to get a few hours sleep before the start of the next day. But Jon knew that his night wasn’t over yet.
As he suspected, his father, lantern in hand, was standing before the Corpse Flower, staring at it as if it could reveal to him the secrets of the universe. And maybe, Jon thought, it could, and would, before its bloom died back. He was only happy that his strange acuity of senses seemed to have disappeared. He didn’t think he could stand the aroma of rotting flesh that was the Corpse Flower’s perfume if his senses were still as strong as they’d been in the graveyard.
His father glanced at him as he came into the Glass House.
“You’ve been out wandering in the night again,” his father said in his deep, sepulchral voice.
Jon nodded.
“What did you find?”
“Dead voices,” Jon said. “Dead people.”
His father nodded, as if he’d said “Rabbits and squirrels” instead.
“The heka is strong there,” he said.
“Heka?”
Jon felt his father’s eyes on him, peering as if he wanted to pierce through to his son’s soul. Benjamin Noir shook his head suddenly, an expression of almost human doubt on his face. Jon was shocked. He had never seen that look on his father’s face before.
“Sometimes,” he said, in musing tones, “I wonder if I didn’t make a mistake with you.”
[109] Jon would have said something in the sudden silence, but he was too stunned.
“You look like your mother, boy, but my blood runs strongly through you, as well. Maybe as strongly as it runs through your brother. Perhaps I should have educated you both—but, no. I had to concentrate on the one, the thirteenth, and so neglect the other.” Benjamin Noir’s gaze turned inward, and he spoke again as if to himself. “But perhaps there’s still time.”
He looked at Jon, the old fire back in his eyes. “Yes, heka. That is why I moved to Geiststadt.” He gestured, encompassing, it seemed, all of Noir Manor and the surrounding land. “For whatever reason, the land here is drenched with heka.”
“But what is it?” Jon asked.
“The ancient Egyptians knew it by that name, boy. It’s power. Energy the Creator used to make the world. It holds the universe together. It brought life to this world. The modern Arabs call it barraka. Many living beings, human and otherwise, possess it. Even some places and objects do. Anything strange, abnormal, exotic, or ancient. Deities possess it in great quantities. Kings do. The dead have it. Especially the walking dead.” His father looked him in the eye and suddenly Jon feared him, feared him as never before in his life. He suddenly looked unhuman. More than human, or perhaps less. His face was the mask of a terrifying ancient god. Not cruel but merciless. Unconcerned with human trivialities. “I am the thirteenth son of my father, boy, and I have it!” His voice was like that of a lion, or a fire roaring out of control. For an instant he seemed invincible and [110] immortal, but then suddenly he was just a man again, strong and vibrant beyond his years, but just a man. When he spoke it was in a quiet, almost introspective voice.
“But not enough,” he said, and his broad shoulders slumped almost imperceptively. “No. Not enough.”
He turned without a word and, taking his lantern with him, left Jon alone in the dark in the Glass House, the stench of the Corpse Flower all around him.
7.
Saturday, June 18th, Third Intercalary Day
“Jon thought that it would be difficult to sleep, but he was wrong. His mind was in turmoil, but his body was exhausted and for once it won its battle with his brain. He sank into a deep sleep and awoke with the sun already risen. He slept, he thought, like the dead. Though that metaphor was no longer as apt as it once seemed to be, as apparently the deads’ sleep was more restless then he’d ever realized.
Jon had always been a rationalist. If he believed in a God at all, it was in some far off, largely beneficent but mostly preoccupied figure who, once he’d set the world in motion had gotten distracted by other affairs and let it pretty much roll along on its own. He had no specific theological beliefs. The Roman—or Egyptian, for that matter—cosmology seemed as likely as the Christian. Or as unlikely.
But now. Now he had positive proof of the soul, of survival of the spirit after death. He had seen the revenants with his eyes, heard them with his ears. It was solid evidence that he had to believe. He knew that his father had spent all those years in the study of esoteric knowledge of some sort or another. It had seemed that Benjamin Noir had spent his days chasing will-o-the-wisps and imaginary wisdom. Now, it seemed that perhaps his father had been right. This business of heka ...
Jon hesitated at the entrance to the kitchen. Callie was [112] in her normal spot, cooking breakfast, but he was surprised to see Thomas already at table. His servant, McCool, was standing behind him, shoveling food down his gullet when not waiting on his master.
“You’re up early,” he said to his brother.
“Good morning to you, too,” Thomas said after chewing a mouthful of eggs and sausage. “It happens that I have a lot to do this day.”
Jon didn’t even try to suppress his smile.
“Really? You’re actually going to do some work around the farm?”
Thomas carefully spread some marmalade on a lightly toasted chunk of bread.
“Heavens, no. Why should I get my hands dirty when we have you for that?”
Jon grunted. He went to the fireplace where Callie had made him a plate of eggs, potatoes, and sausage. He took the food and a steaming mug of tea from her with thanks, and went to the rough-hewn table where he sat across from his brother. He pitched into the food. After a couple of forkfuls he looked up to see Thomas watching him closely.
“I understand you had quite the adventure last night,” Thomas said.
“Who told you that?”
“The Captain, late last night as we worked in the study.” Thomas paused. “He seemed ... not quite himself. Pensive. One might almost say doubtful.”
“Did he?”
“Yes.” Thomas’s gaze narrowed and his expression [113] hardened as he continued to stare at Jon. “Don’t forget your place around here, brother.”
“My place?” Jon put his fork down and returned his brother’s level stare. “What would that be?”
“I am the thirteenth son,” Thomas said with some emphasis. “You came after.”
“I know that,” Jon said in a low voice, his hand going unconsciously to the birthmark that arced across the base of his throat. He touched it lightly, not-quite memories of almost twenty-one years ago flitting across his mind too quickly for him to catch and examine.
“I am the rightful heir to the Captain’s knowledge,” Thomas said.
Jon shrugged casually and returned to his food.
“Maybe. Our father mentioned that to me last night, though.” He chewed thoughtfully on a slice of fried potato. “He told me he was re-thinking that idea.”
He knew that he’d hit home when he saw the anger on Thomas’s face.
“You lie!” Thomas exclaimed.
No, Jon thought, I exaggerate. But he wouldn’t say that to his brother. He took a slurp of tea from his mug as Thomas rearranged his features into a bland mask.
“We sh
all see, brother,” Thomas said in a casual tone that Jon knew concealed seething anger. “Perhaps you’ll take to the studies. Perhaps you won’t.”
“Perhaps.” Jon knew that Thomas was angry, even worried. Thomas didn’t like to share anything—material items, attention from others, or even something as hard to quantify as the prestige of being Benjamin Noir’s thirteenth son, but still his reaction to Jon’s subtle [114] taunting seemed too intense. Unless, Jon thought, there was more significance to all this than he’d realized. His intuition told him that everything was building towards a climax that would decide much of his future. Perhaps even much of the future of Geiststadt and of the entire Noir family.
“Anyway,” Thomas said with his elaborate casualness, “I’m sure it’ll all work out in the end. Other things concern me today.”
“Oh?” Jon asked, amused at his brother’s attempts to conceal his real feelings, “like what?”
Thomas toyed with his silverware.
“Oh, like that delightful girl I met yesterday. What was her name? Trudi? Too bad her father is such a drunken sot. I thought I’d go over to their place and get to know her better. Perhaps console her by letting her get to know me.”
Jon suddenly sat upright and immediately cursed himself for his lack of control. Not only had he let Thomas know he’d scored in their interminable little game, but more importantly he knew that he’d just set Thomas on Trudi’s trail. Thomas would pursue her now just because he knew it would bother him. Jon didn’t want Trudi to be some kind of trophy in a game between him and Thomas. For one thing, he doubted he could defeat Thomas in this competition. His brother had an uncanny way with women. For another, there was something about Trudi that attracted him more than any woman ever had. He barely knew her, but he knew that he badly wanted to know her better. He wanted her to [115] know and care for him. Suddenly it seemed the most important thing in the world to him.
Thomas, watching him, rose with a smile that was more of a smirk, and pushed away from the table.
THE TWILIGHT ZONE, Book 1: Shades of Night, Falling Page 9