“Look, I don’t want to lose you, Sophs,” he remembered saying. “Whatever it is I’m doing wrong, I can change.”
“That’s the problem, Harry,” she’d told him. “You have changed. You used to be a right laugh. You’ve got so bloody serious.”
“That’s such bullshit, Sophs. People aren’t always a laugh! Not when you get to know them.”
“There’s no point arguing, Harry.” She’d been right of course. “I just don’t love you anymore. It’s like you’re a different guy.”
Harry had never accepted her flimsy reasons for the break up and for months he’d harboured a secret suspicion that she’d been sleeping with another guy on the side. But then he’d kept in close contact with a mutual friend or two after he’d relocated and, apparently, Sophie had stayed single for record time after their relationship died.
Maybe she had been right after all. In the final months before moving to Bristol, Harry had been avoiding his friends and shunning parties. He’d gone off sex around that time too, and he’d started eating badly.
Maybe his personality had begun to alter even then, and Sophie, being closest to him, had been the first to notice.
He was shattered when he finally reached the flat; it was all he could do to strip off and tuck himself under his unwashed duvet.
As he lay there with his eyes closed, sleep beginning to crawl up over his brain, he thought again of the woman and her eternal attendant, encased as they had been in that Mount Gilboa cave, packed in on all sides with natron salt.
In the liminal space between waking and sleeping, Harry even felt her naked body by his side. He imagined her as she’d been found: her throat ornamented with faience beads of Philistine design, together with several necklaces of gold and lapis lazuli wrought into the shapes of local birds, wild goats and pomegranates.
Inside his head her sapphire eyes burned with a cooling fire.
* * *
This time the dream was a nightmare.
Sophie was with him on the winners’ podium. The studio lights burned down on them like a dozen white suns and, behind the lights, in the darkness of the studio, Harry could sense hundreds of weird-shaped bodies rocking backwards and forwards tensely as they watched the show.
He blinked and took in the sight of Mr. Cairns in full black tie holding a microphone in one hand, and a stack of question cards in the other. His thickly applied gameshow host makeup made him look like some kind of stringless marionette, and Harry was sure that that perpetual Bella Lugosi smile had been painted on as well.
“I was worshipped in Arvad,” Cairns read from the questions, “where my cult may have remained until its final dissolution in the second century BCE. Who am I?”
Sophie and Harry made eye-contact. Harry didn’t know how to respond, and Sophie had taken his dazed expression as a sign that he didn’t know the answer.
“Can we buy a vowel please, Mr. Cairns?” Sophie asked excitedly.
“Of course you can, Sophie!”
The weird audience, out there in the darkness, slapped their flipperish hands together.
Cairns gestured towards the massive Wheel Of Fortune-style board that had just appeared behind them and the five blanks that concealed the word.
The fourth letter fluttered like the wings of a moth revealing the first clue:
_ _ _ O _
The audience cheered again.
Cairns smiled wider and continued:
“My true character as known to the Phoenicians has been lost with the disappearance of key cultic texts.”
“Buy a consonant!” Sophie shouted, not even bothering to confer.
Harry caught sight of one of the spectators in one of the nearest rows. Its yawping face didn’t seem human but more pinnipedal, like a whiskered seal. It was pounding the black paddles of its flipper-arms together in a frenzy of animal delight.
A blank in the board flipped round again and the word became clearer:
_ _ G O _
“I was known to the Philistines,” Cairns’ red-dotted eyes gleamed, “who may have further diluted my image by conflating me with other deities which they imported from the Aegean.”
“Buy a consonant!”
The honking seals rocked their heads back and forward and, on Sophie’s request, the first letter in the puzzle was revealed.
D _ G O _
Harry blinked. Suddenly he knew the answer.
“Dagon,” he said.
“Sorry, Harry?” Cairns cupped the question papers round his ear theatrically. “We didn’t quite catch that. Who am I, Harry?”
“Dagon!” Harry replied as clearly as he could. “You’re Dagon!”
The seals hunkered closer. Wet flippers slapped on wet flippers.
Cairns’ powdered face twitched with delight. He threw away the question cards and raised his arms.
“What do we have for them, Larry?!” He shouted.
Suddenly there was a whirring of bells and whistles as the mechanised blanks rolled away to form that ancient divine name.
The single word “D A G O N” flashed gaudily on the board.
The host’s face continued to twitch, and Harry watched as Cairns’ puppet-like jaw opened to a horrific extent, as a soft profusion of black, ringleted hair began to sprout from his chin and upper lip.
As the beard grew from his face so did Cairns himself grow, and a tall Mesopotamian headdress of plain and patterned bands began extending out from the top of his skull. To his horror Harry was sure that the lower half of that gargantuan, writhing body was no longer human but something more akin to the contorting pinnipeds that were now closing in on them from all conceivable angles.
Harry turned in the dream, looking to Sophie for comfort and support.
But he felt his breath catch in his throat, and the seals yawped all the louder when he found it wasn’t Sophie next to him any more, but the woman—the mummified woman from the Metropolitan—her arms parted in praise as the cancerous, twisting shadow of the god gyred above them.
* * *
When next he woke it was to the first genuine feeling of unease that the mummies had inspired in him.
He had a sense that such dreams had been a frequent occurrence over the last five months, though this was the first one that he had vividly remembered afterwards. This weird inversion of night and day that his working hours brought about was playing unaccountable tricks with Harry’s mind, and it was becoming almost impossible to tell fantasy from reality.
The fear that now accompanied his new obsession became worse as, again, he found himself online, searching through a hundred sources, deeper than before, discovering new and unnerving facts about the strange series of events that had followed the mummies like flies follow stench.
After being excavated, he read, the Metro Mummies had been kept on the campus of Tel Aviv University, together with a wealth of Philistine archaeology that was issuing from the Tel Qasile site during the period of their discovery in 1972.
By 1979, though, the cultural authorities in Israel had auctioned off the mummies to the highest bidder, and the Metropolitan in Bristol had topped out at £15.6 million.
The first strange event occurred when the mummies had only just arrived on British soil. They’d been flown in from Ben Gurion and had arrived at Lulsgate without incident. That was, until one of the baggage handlers unloading the craft went wild and tried to prize open a crate with his bare hands. Under restraint, he later insisted that something was alive in the consignment and that he’d heard a woman’s voice from inside.
Due to protocol airport security were compelled to crowbar open the lid, and it struck everyone as somehow outlandish that, even though the handler had had no knowledge of the box’s contents, it did indeed hold the remains of a woman.
That particular employee was later discharged and placed on mental disability. It would later turn out that the voice he’d heard had been his mother’s and, he being due for retirement at that time, his mother had been dead for mor
e than a decade.
The motif of spectral voices continued for nearly a decade.
In November 1986, for instance, and carrying on into late December, a night guard at the Metropolitan by the name of Sam Bevis swore he could hear a transistor radio playing in one of the gallery rooms during his shifts. He later identified the source of the sounds as the display case where the Palestinian mummies had been housed.
Harry had stopped reading at that, and taken a cigarette to steady his nerves.
In his mind’s eye he could still see that whiplashing shape of Dagon in the dream. He could see himself kneeling on wet stone. He could hear the witch chanting in the frantic strains of a lost Philistine language, which Harry, somehow, could understand perfectly. That, and all around him, like a chorus of fat toads, he could still hear the voices of the recently dead.
Harry blew smoke into the room and thought about Sam Bevis, the guard who’d held his own post—on nightshift at the Metro—some thirty years ago. He remembered the article in detail. How Bevis had come to identify some of the voices he’d heard on that phantom night radio as being the voices of well known personalities.
It had been taken as a joke by the media of the time, especially when Bevis had insisted that the most notable voices he’d heard had been those of Cary Grant, Rudy Vallée and former prime minister Harold Macmillan.
It was later frightening for Harry to realise that every personality Bevis had been able to pick out from the din had died in the November or December of that same year.
According to the few scant sources that Harry could find, Bevis had resigned in the New Year of 1987 and taken up his old position as watchman at the docks. There he is reported to have told colleagues about the weird blue light that had accompanied those dead celebrity voices and how, one time, he swore, he’d entered the room with the mummies just in time to see that aquatic luminesce fading back into the wineskin at the female mummy’s hip.
Harry crushed out his cigarette without looking. He couldn’t blink or breathe. Things hadn’t ended well for Bevis. He’d been found later that year drowned between the wharf and the hull of a container boat. Suicide was assumed.
And now Harry—he knew it now—was seeing and hearing the same things. He thought of his image caught every night in the glass of the security monitors. He thought of himself standing and staring up at the priestess— the witch— and the hunched gollum of her degraded acolyte.
He too—he remembered now—had seen the blue lights trafficking in and out of that dark and empty museum room.
He’d watched the woman’s sapphires flash, and he knew that, as she had in the ancient world, she could see the bodies of the dead crowding around them.
She could see them; Harry could hear what they were saying.
Like voices transmitted through radio waves Harry could hear the communications of the centuries like a dull chanting in his brain, and the clearest sounds, the strongest frequencies, were the pleas of the youngest souls, so recently deprived of light, as they were, and lost in all that darkness.
He saw himself again in his own mind’s eye: standing there, listening to all the disembodied petitioners who had come seeking the fertile life energy of Dagon, and who assembled round his priestess like a flutter of moths around a blue flame.
Flame, Harry thought. Yes. Flame.
He saw her unaccountably unblemished face, fierce and feminine as a lioness, framed in all that gold and precious stone.
The woman with the wineskin. The witch from Mount Gilboa.
He saw her orbs of sapphire flashing with images of the long and not long dead. He saw the blue flame dancing in her blue eyes.
Flame. Yes, flame!
Suddenly it was entirely clear to him.
Suddenly he was sure of what he had to do.
* * *
Sophie’s friends had only convinced her to travel to Bristol a decade after the incident.
Since his friends and family back in London had heard about what happened to Harry that night in the museum, his ex girlfriend had become increasingly hung up on the details of his suicide. There was guilt involved, given that she’d apparently been his last serious relationship, and everyone she spoke to would repeatedly prompt her to finally find out what happened and so put the issue to bed.
She’d found Mr. Cairns, upwards of seventy by now, in a little semi-detached in Henieaze, north of the city. It was summer and he was out in his front garden tending to the weeds round a stand of delphiniums when she came to the gate and asked for him.
She’d told him that she’d read in the few articles she could find on the Bristol Metropolitan fire that he was Harry’s supervisor at the time, and that she’d found his address through directory inquiries.
“You’ll have to forgive the clutter,” Cairns had said as he showed Sophie into his front room.
He placed his gardening shears on the coffee table and cleared the blankets from the sofa so that there was room to sit.
“I sleep down here these nights,” he explained. “Had a stroke three years ago and the stairs’ve become a bugger.”
Cairns gestured at the sofa and Sophie took a seat. Cairns sat too, and looked at her with an expression she could hardly place. It was either annoyance or something deeper, like trepidation.
“I was never right after that night,” the old man said, “after Paterson—eh—after Harry put himself off.”
“Did he say anything to you,” Sophie asked, “about why he did it?”
Cairns shook his head.
“Not in so many words, but really I should’ve known. There was something in his face that night that said he was set on something drastic. He hadn’t brought a book—which he usually did—and he was helluva cagey about the rucksack he’d left in the employees’ lounge. Police said later that that must’ve been where he was keeping the petrol.”
Sophie’s teeth went on edge. It was almost too much to handle. The thought of a man she’d been intimate with—whom she’d loved in her own way—pouring flammable liquid over his head and body and setting himself alight in that dark and lonely basement room!
“The museum’s still recovering, so I’m told,” Cairns said. “There were forty million in damages that night, and some of the most famous artefacts in the southwest were destroyed. I left my position after that. Some things happened that were just too strange.”
“What things?” Sophie seized on her opportunity to ask.
Cairns looked at her.
“Listen, Miss,” he said, “I don’t want to tell you too much. The story isn’t pretty and you might think I’m just some old geezer exaggerating for attention.”
“Please,” Sophie pressed him. “I need to know.”
“Alright then,” Cairns sat up on the sofa, lessening the space between them. “What year was Harry born in?”
Sophie frowned at the question but answered it anyway.
“1987,” she said.
“Yeah,” Cairns nodded. “Now, there was another guard at the Metropolitan who drowned himself down at Bristol Harbour in the same year, 1987. His name was Sam Bevis and he left the night guard position only about six months before I started there. He killed himself on the third of May.”
Sophie looked startled.
“That was Harry’s birthday,” she gasped.
Cairns nodded in such a way that Sophie was sure the old man had known all along.
“And that ain’t all,” he said. “I know enough to bet that old Bevis and our Harry had more in common than just the dates.”
Sophie shook her head, incredulous.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Cairns. I don’t understand.”
Cairns held up one raddled finger and rose unsteadily from his seat. He crossed the room and left it, leaving Sophie, a perfect stranger from out of town, sat in his front room alone for ten minutes or so.
She listened to the old man from where she sat, as he hunted through drawers in the hallway and lavatory both, before reemerging with a battered
brown jiffy bag in one hand.
He took his seat again and immediately started to explain:
“The security tape from that night shows that Harry had applied the petrol to only two places: His own body and the space around the display which held two sets of Middle Eastern remains...”
Cairns went into the jiffy and retrieved a photograph. He placed it on the coffee table between them.
Sophie looked down at the image: a coloured press shot of two mummified corpses, one bent and hunched as though praying and utterly deformed by time, and the other, obviously female, looking in some respects as though she’d been interred yesterday.
“He tried to destroy them,” Cairns explained, “them and himself. But look at them—just look—”
He slapped his hand down on the photograph.
“These pictures were taken after the fire— Harry’s body was almost entirely consumed—but look at them—they both survived without a scratch, and her as fresh as a daisy, as handsome now as she was when they dug her up!”
Sophie couldn’t think what to say.
“It was only after Harry did what he did that I started to remember the old stories Bevis told before jumping off the docks. He’d been obsessed with them bloody mummies too. For months I couldn’t put the picture together in my head until the strangest thing happened. Then I just couldn’t take it anymore. I left the museum, came here to Henieaze and I’ve been here ever since...”
The old man fished in the jiffy bag and produced a second photograph which he held, almost secretively, to his thin chest.
“In September that year,” he said, “six months after the fire, a team of forensic archaeologists began a project with the Metro. They studied the second mummy—the male one—and they took measurements of what’s left of the face, and fed them into a computer program designed to reconstruct what he looked like.”
Cairns took the photograph away from his chest, and offered it into Sophie’s hands.
Onyx Neon Shorts Presents: Horror Collection - 2015 Page 10