“Are you Vanessa?” Someone behind me asked.
I jumped in a half-circle to find a cop behind me.
“Yes. What happened?”
“The doctor had a mental breakdown.” He said, chewing loudly on gum. “We found this on his desk. It had your name on it.” He held out a page that came from the doctor’s notepad between his index and middle finger.
I reached out my hand for it and he pulled it back.
“Is there a reason he’s leaving you notes? Out of all his patients, you’re the only one. Not his wife, not his staff, just you.”
“I couldn’t tell you.” The cop raised his eyebrows and looked at me for a long time. Past him I could see the young nurse sitting on the floor, crying as other staff members attempted to help her to her feet.
“Here.” He finally said and handed me the letter, but stood around to watch me open it. It wasn’t in an envelope or a folder. It was just a single piece of paper folded in half with my name written on the front. I opened it slowly, and written largely at the top of the page was, “I believe you,” and at the bottom was a picture of a rayi’s face. It was black and white, but drawn just as I had seen it many times before. It was oval-shaped, with a nose much like that of a snake. Its mouth was wide, and its teeth were jagged; but the worse thing was the eyes—or the place where the eyes should be. These rayis’ didn’t really have eyes; their skin stretched over the area where you would usually find them, from the eyebrow to the cheeks. The skin was torn and broken but even if you looked behind all of that, you only see the blackness underneath.
“That’s one ugly mug,” the cop said, laughing to himself. The paper slipped out of my hand and fell at my feet. I broke into a run, straight for the doctor’s office as the cop grabbed for me and, failing to catch me, yelled for me to stop. I pushed his door open with my body and hanging there from his ceiling fan was the doctor. He was wearing his usual uniform, a white dress shirt tucked into his black slacks. His tie was the only thing holding him to the ceiling, and his white coat was still swaying. His greying hair hung loosely in front of his pale face.
I saw this for only a moment before the policeman caught up with me and carried me out the room.
Within two weeks, there was a new doctor in his office. The young nurse never returned, and she too was replaced. This new doctor was younger, “fresh out of school” I heard people whispering. He always kept the window closed and locked. In our first session together, the new doctor asked me about the rayis and I told him everything that I knew. He smiled in response.
“You know, don’t you,” he said, opening his notepad, “that those things aren’t real.”
The Guard
B.T. Joy
Harry was beginning to believe that this new job was getting the better of him.
He woke again under his heavily curtained windows to the sound of school kids horsing around outside the Pizza King. Sitting up in bed, he fetched his mobile from a tangle of wires on the bedside cabinet, and checked the time. It was four now, which meant he’d been sleeping for less than five hours when the dream had woken him.
He rested there on his elbow for a moment. This time the nightmare had been more distinct, more natural somehow; and yet, still, now it was over, he could hardly remember a single image with any real clarity.
It was more of an atmosphere. He’d been in a cave system with high roofs, and walls lit by aquatic lights. He had been kneeling and another shape was standing on his right-hand side; and, in front of them, a twice-life-size figure of a bearded man stood surrounded in fasces of bound grain.
Harry rooted in the bedside cables again and retrieved his cigarettes. He lit up and righted the duvet around his legs. Down on Stokes Croft, leaving the Pizza King with their munchie boxes, the kids were screaming profanities now and letting off steam in general after a long day of enforced school etiquette and manners.
Harry blew out smoke and thought about the dream. He couldn’t remember having had fruity dreams in the past. He’d never been given to high fantasies and, if he was honest, he was never the brightest spark. His own schooldays had been more about fistfights and boredom than anything remotely academic, and in the end he’d left with just enough in the way of GCSEs to secure his first job stacking shelves.
He took another draw and thought it over. He had to wait until his eyes adjusted after sleeping, anyhow. He was twenty-eight now, and since the age of sixteen he’d lived in London, worked in retail and, for most of that time, he’d dated the same girl.
Now he was living in Bristol, working at the Metropolitan Museum, and the last time he’d even seen Sophie had been when he left last November. They’d left each other on good terms. It had just run its course, really. Sophie had said he’d changed a lot since they’d met and she wasn’t sure she loved him anymore.
Harry stubbed out his cigarette in the dirty ashtray by the bed.
He hadn’t agreed that he’d changed—not then—but now he was beginning to see what she’d been driving at. New town. New job. New loneliness. And now the reading he’d taken to for the first real time since leaving school, and the weird images of Middle Eastern caverns and strange gods that filled his head every time he closed his eyes to sleep.
* * *
By the time he got his shit together and got out of bed it was the backend of five o’clock, and he only had a few hours to get over to Queens Road.
That was the bitch with nightshift. You work all night and you sleep all day.
He took his prompt from the school kids and went down to the Pizza King, which was thankfully empty given the hour, but for the odd paint-stained apprentice or overweight woman in pyjama bottoms and Tiger Tim slippers, who’d come in for a takeaway.
Harry got himself a nine inch meat feast and a tray of chicken pakora, sat in a window seat and ate silently.
The night was a bit lighter than usual, it being late March by now and the days getting longer, and so after he’d finished his meal he found himself sitting there just staring out at the calm, blue dullness of Stokes Croft. And as he sat he dreamed of the mummies.
It had been them. He knew it. They’d been the initial catalyst for his uncharacteristic new interest in archaeological scholarship. They were why the front room of his flat was littered, even now, in a dozen dogeared books from the local library, and they were the reason for his otherworldly nocturnal adventures.
He remembered the first time he’d seen them. Mr. Cairns had taken him on a short tour of the museum after his successful interview, showing him the exits and entrances, and explaining the dos and don’ts of the night guard’s protocol.
They’d descended methodically from top to bottom; through rooms dedicated to Gainsborough and Constable, displays of Georgian silver and Chinese glass; down through worlds of geodes, Precambrian fossils and taxidermied apes; and, finally, to the basement of the affair which housed the museum’s cache of Egyptian, Assyrian, and pre-Semitic antiquities.
It was there that Harry saw the mummies for the first time: two full sized human beings standing behind the glass of a display case that dominated an entire wall of the basement complex, surrounded on all sides by the fragments of ancient paraphernalia that had been found with them.
Harry had asked about the exhibit right off, but Mr. Cairns had just grunted something noncommittal. Harry had been sure that Cairns’ jaded lack of interest would soon rub off on him. He’d told himself that a few weeks alone with all this art and opulence and he too would view the articles stored there as nothing more exotic than the tins of beans he used to stack at Waitrose. But it had been nearly five months now, and if anything his fascination with those millennia-old corpses had grown into what bordered dangerously on obsession.
The owner of the Pizza King hovered close and stood with his hands in his pockets staring out at the steadily darkening street and the few odd glimpses of passing trade that wandered by that way.
“Going to rain,” he said in his unmistakeable Punjabi accent.<
br />
As a result of his junk food diet, Harry was quite familiar with the proprietor.
“Yeah,” he said. “I think we’ll get a bit.”
* * *
It was pissing down so hard that it bounced off the streets by the time Harry had to leave for work.
He put his uniform in a black bag, as he often did on such occasions, and wore his civvies on the short walk to the bus stop on Corn Street.
When he finally reached Queens Road he was drenched to the skin and had to change in the small locker room adjacent to the employees’ lounge.
Mr. Cairns, who worked the backshift himself so he could keep an eye on his two juniors, had found Harry in there just as he was slipping on his overly official looking cap and fixing the keys to the fob at his waist.
“Good thing you’re on late shift, Paterson,” he’d observed. “Wouldn’t want you around when the visitors are here. You really do look like shit.”
Harry was beginning to get used to Cairns’ interminable putdowns; that, and the old man’s Victorian habit of referring to his underlings only by their surnames.
“Are you still not sleeping well?” he asked.
Harry nodded.
“It’s the hours. I’ll get used to it.”
Cairns laughed.
“Well if you do, let the rest of us vampires know how, won’t you?”
Harry looked at his senior with an obvious lack of amusement. Mostly because, in the pale halogen lights of the lounge, Cairns looked just white and bloodless enough for it not to have been a joke.
“Come on,” the manager said. “I’ll walk you to the lobby.”
* * *
When they got there Harry slipped into his chair at the information desk and put down the book he’d brought from home among all the messy papers.
Cairns eyed the title and scoffed. Religions From The Sea: A History Of The Phoenician Cults.
“Funny thing, Paterson,” he commented, “you don’t half look thick as shit, but these books you read is clever enough.”
Harry nodded noncommittally. In his view, every moment Cairns remained after the old man’s shift had ended was an affront to his own privacy. He was beginning to like this job, its silence and its solitude.
“Alright, I’ll be off,” the old man said at last, tapping the desk for emphasis. “I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
It took Harry a good fifteen minutes after the other guard had left, locking the revolving doors behind him, to really settle down into the peaceful muteness of his environment.
He’d been kind of a rowdy guy back in London; always out on the piss and the pull, or playing five-a-side with mates at the park. He’d taken care of himself, too; kept his hair cropped and styled, and wore good clothes when he could afford it.
No one from back then would even recognise him nowadays, addicted, as he was, to archaic books and stillness; sitting there untrimmed and only roughly shaven, like an artefact himself among all those petrified shapes of alien marine life, the shattered scelidosaurus bones dug up from the Jurassic coasts of England, and the newer specimens of fanged animal life that stared out grinning from the display case.
Harry picked up his book and leafed through it to find his place. He began reading:
Although it is certain he was worshipped in Arvad, where his cult may have remained until the final destruction of the religion in the second century BCE, the true character of this deity as known to the Phoenicians has been lost with the disappearance of key cultic texts.
What we know concerning this god we know from Biblical sources and their description of his appearance and traits as known to the Philistines, who may have further diluted his regional image by conflating him with other deities which, having Cretan origins as a people, they imported from the Aegean.
Harry stopped. He shut the book and his eyes, both. In the dark he saw the cave system and the aquatic lights. He saw the woman at his right-hand side. She was standing with arms outspread in receptivity to the great Philistine god whose image stood among sheaves of grain in a high alcove that had been dug out from the cavern walls.
Harry himself—though not at all himself—was kneeling like an acolyte by the side of the priestess, and he felt that the air was full of the dead spirits whose voices he could hear and whose incorporeal bodies only the woman could see with her bright blue, shining eyes.
Harry opened his own eyes and the images, as they always did, disappeared like insubstantial smoke. The clear lines of the museum reasserted themselves and, though Harry couldn’t describe why, his sudden re-entry into modernity had left him feeling unaccountably empty and alone.
He looked across the wide lobby to the door that led to the stairwell, that led in turn downwards to the basement.
He’d told himself he wouldn’t go down tonight, but it was like asking himself not to scratch an itch or not to tongue a wound in the roof of his mouth.
He had become obsessed by the image of those figures, and every night, after Cairns had left, the only movements in the museum that the CCTV caught at all were Harry’s interminable visits to that same display case, where he’d stand and look in at them for hours at a time.
* * *
After the first few nights in the Metropolitan, Harry had decided to try to pinpoint where this fascination had come from.
He’d spent a few hours during one shift seeking out and reading all the literature on the figures which was available in the museum in the form of pamphlets, gift shop books and, of course, the descriptive plaques on the display itself.
Weeks later, when the interest hadn’t abated, he’d found himself browsing in his local library and online for more hours than was healthy.
His reading revealed that the ‘Metro Mummies,’ as they’d been dubbed by the public, were discovered in 1972 when the aftermath of a 4.1 magnitude earthquake along the DST fault line hit Lower Galilee, causing the walls to collapse in a minor cave on the slopes of Mount Gilboa.
The burials discovered there were a source of speculation and controversy throughout the academic community in the 1970s. Carbon-14 testing on tissue samples revealed that both individuals dated to around 1000 BCE, making them the oldest specimens to be found in the region with this level of preservation.
The primary set of remains were that of a female in middle to old age. They had been the most perfectly preserved, while the latter set, a juvenile male, had been found in a more advanced state of decomposition. This, together with the male’s relative lack of funerary adornment, was judged by archaeologists to imply that this latter was a servant of the former who in all likelihood had undergone a premature burial.
Harry, down in the basement again, took time to study those more decomposed male remains. In some ways, despite the woman’s outstanding condition and ostentatiously beautiful adornments, it was this second figure that Harry was more drawn to.
There was something about its hunched back and almost foetal position. Harry found himself wishing, as he had every night for months, that the young man’s face was not so abysmally rotten as to make the identification of his features impossible.
Still though, with the other figure Harry had no such problem. If anything, it was frightening how like a living woman’s face that dead face was. Her cheekbones were high and somehow noble, there were still lashes at the ends of her eyelids, and you could see every crease of age in her high-browed forehead.
The style of embalming used on her body, Harry knew from his reading, had been highly unorthodox for the region in which she was found.
She had been divested of all internal organs, and her cranial cavity had been similarly emptied. Also, in a style consistent with Egyptian mummifications of the time, her voided insides had been rinsed with Canaanite wine and packed with a variety of herbs, spices and resins: in this case myrtle, juniper, cassia and extracts of terebinth.
Harry looked down at the wineskin, the one she was buried with and was still holding in her yet-fingernailed hands. It gave
him some sort of grim pleasure to recollect that her extracted organs and cerebral matter had been found and still existed inside that empty sack.
He looked up and into her eyes. They were as blue and shining as they had been in his dream, though of course, in reality, they weren’t eyes at all. That was the most bizarre aspect of the entire burial as far as Harry was concerned: how they’d removed her natural eyes and replaced them with similar sized orbs of cut sapphire which may have been mined and worked as far away as Iran.
As Harry stood there by the display case, time itself became abstract.
Those nameless corpses might have been the living ones, and he—Harry Paterson, blood running in his veins—might have been the dead.
There was a subtle though discernible current of energy running between them: a pull of magnetism that drew him into the woman’s cut-sapphire eyes and a similar pushing force that issued out from her squat servant, seeming to press itself against the lobes of Harry’s brain.
If asked, Harry would never have been able to explain any of this; he’d have changed the subject, most likely, or else just stayed silent.
But here, in this place, it all felt more natural than breathing.
He closed his eyes and saw the cave. The woman’s outstretched arms. The bearded limestone god.
He felt that the dream was his reality. He felt that he’d been there, in that place of stone and archaic prayer, and for three thousand years time had frozen on that moment.
* * *
He left the museum just as it was opening.
His head was buzzing and hurt a little, and so he walked back to Stokes Croft through the fresh air to clear his mind.
It didn’t work.
All the way home circumstances from his own life replayed in an unbroken montage with the scenes from biblical Canaan described in his books. At one point he’d managed to concentrate long enough on contemporary reality to reconstruct a whole conversation from his own past in his head: the one he and Sophie had had when breaking up.
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