McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

  “Buried in the bogs,” Patwin said. He had arrived with Miss Whitfield while Mallick was speaking. He held out his hand for my photograph and looked it over silently. He handed it to Miss Whitfield. “I knew a man who’d met a man who’d found a thousand-year-old woman while digging for peat. He said you can’t look into a thousand-year-old face and not find yourself just a little bit in love. You can’t look into a thousand-year-old face and think, I bet you were an annoying old nag.”

  “You’ve just put your thumb here on the print,” Miss Whitfield suggested to me. As if I were eight years old and playing with my father’s camera.

  I imagined myself with my hands about her throat. It came on me all of sudden and shocked me even more than the photograph had. I took my imaginary hands off her and gave her an imaginary and forgiving handshake instead.

  In fact, I was angry at them all for refusing to believe the evidence of their own eyes. The woman’s face was indistinct, I granted that. But so beautiful. So filled with longing. I looked into her eyes and I could see that she had been frightened. I could see that she hadn’t wanted to die alone, had surrounded herself with other people, but it hadn’t helped. I thought I knew something about that.

  On payday there were forgeries to be exposed. A number of intriguing little carvings had begun to show up, all found by the same pair of brothers. The recent ones were simply too intriguing. Mallick made a show of dismissing the culprits as a lesson to the rest. It was all very good-natured. Even the brothers laughed at their exposure, left with a cheerful round of goodbyes. It was, no doubt, a great disappointment to Miss Whitfield, who had been looking forward to the confrontation ever since Mallick showed us the tiny forged bear.

  None of the workmen would be back until their money ran out, which meant that we would start again in two days with a whole new group. Yusef, who’d found the golden goat, had been paid its weight in gold and wouldn’t be back for weeks. This was a shame as he was one of our most skilled workers and a natural diplomat as well. Diplomats were always needed on our mixed crew of Armenians, Arabs, and Kurds.

  The site was sadly quiet with everyone gone. I missed the rhythmic chanting, the scraping of stone on stone, the frequent pleasure of dim and distant laughter.

  Davis and I used the day off to drive Miss Whitfield to the holy shrine of the Yezedis. The Yezedis worship Lucifer and represent him with the symbol of the peacock. We bounced along the road, the dust so thick I had to stop every fifteen minutes and wipe down the car windows. The last few miles can only be done on foot, but by this time you’ve risen into the pure air and walking is a pleasure. The shrine is breathtakingly beautiful, white and intricate as a wedding cake. Streams pour through descending basins in the cool courtyard and acolytes tiptoe in to bring you tea. Clearly their Lucifer is not the same as our Lucifer.

  Still we had done our best to work Miss Whitfield up with stories of Satan worshippers so that the peaceful, bucolic scene would be a nasty surprise. I fancied I was getting to know what Miss Whitfield wanted. I whispered to her that the priest, whom we did not see, was said to be kept drugged so that his aunt could rule in his name; I didn’t want the trip to be a complete disappointment.

  “Tell me,” Davis said to Miss Whitfield. He sat holding his small, black cup of tea in two hands and smiling sweetly. I was across from him, sleepy from the sun and the sound of water. Miss Whitfield had knelt by the lowest of the fountain pools. She broke the surface with her hand, so her submerged fingers seemed larger than the dry hand to which they were attached. “When you come to a place like this,” Davis asked, “even at a place like this, do you find yourself imagining a murder?”

  And I thought how easy it would be to push Miss Whitfield’s head under and hold it. It wasn’t even a complete thought, just a flicker, really, with no emotional content, no actual desire. I put it out of my mind at once, which was easy enough since it had hardly been there to begin with.

  “Would you think me a ghoul if I said yes?” Miss Whitfield’s black hair shivered in the slight breeze. She smoothed it back with her wet fingers, dipped her hand, and wet her hair again.

  “I’d think you the complete professional,” Davis said politely. “But it’s a ghoulish profession.”

  “So’s yours,” she answered. And then to me, “So’s yours,” even though I hadn’t said a thing.

  On our way back we stopped in town to buy bread and chocolate to add to our supper of mutton and goat cheese and tankards of wine. Davis had taken the sun during our outing; he was as pink as if he’d been boiled. When he came to the table he sat on a chair that wasn’t solidly beneath him and fell to the floor with a great cry of alarm. I had never seen Patwin enjoy anything so much. He could hardly chew he was laughing so hard.

  Miss Whitfield was too tired to eat. Ferhid took her untouched plate back to the kitchen, where he dropped knives and slammed pots onto tables to communicate his disapproval until Mallick went out to mollify him.

  Before the light went, and when there was no one else about, I slipped away and took six more pictures of Tu-api. I developed them that night, quietly so that no one would hear me up and about. None of the new ones showed her face. I took another print off my original exposure and her face didn’t show up there either. Perhaps this should have persuaded me that the image was not to be trusted, was a fault of the paper and therefore unreal. Instead it had the opposite effect. I was more than ever persuaded in the event, which had proved so singular and so intimate. Tu-api had shown her face only once and only to me.

  “I have a bone to pick with you.” Patwin caught me as I came out of the bathroom. “You’re always riding me about my politics.” Patwin didn’t often use the sort of English idioms these two sentences contained so I imagined he was merely repeating what some more native speaker had said to him and I imagined I knew who that would be. I was outraged by the collusion, but also by the sentiment.

  “You must be joking,” I said. “The way you lecture me . . .”

  “Live and let live is all I’m saying.” And he brushed by without another word.

  I passed Davis on the way to my bedroom. “That really hurt when I fell,” he said. “I may have cracked a bone.”

  “I didn’t laugh as hard as Patwin did,” I told him.

  Miss Whitfield asked us all what it was about a dig that we liked. We were sitting in the courtyard in the middle of the expedition house and only Mallick was missing, trapped in town by a heavy rain that had turned the roads to mud. The air outside was washed and wonderful and the sky an ocean of cool, gray clouds. Davis and Miss Jackson were playing a game on a stone board more than four thousand years old. Four thousand years ago they would have played with colored stones, but they were making do with buttons. Seven such boards had been found in Tu-api’s tomb and the rules were inscribed in cuneiform though not in our dig, but back in Egypt at Carter’s. This same game had been played as far away as India. Ferhid was a demon at it.

  “Not the fleas,” Patwin said. He was scratching at his ankles.

  “Not the dust.” That was Miss Jackson.

  “Not the way the workmen smell,” I said.

  “Not the way you smell,” Patwin added. And then placatingly, “Not the way I smell.”

  “I like a routine,” Davis told her. “I actually enjoy picky, painstaking work. And, of course, I like a puzzle. I like to put things together, guess what they mean.”

  “I like that it’s backwards.” Miss Jackson won a free turn and then a second. All six of her buttons were on the board now. “You dig down from the surface and you move backwards in time as you go. Have you ever wanted, desperately wanted, to go backwards in time?”

  “Yes, of course,” Miss Whitfield said. “Erase your mistakes, the stupid things you say without thinking.”

  “I like the monotony of it.” Patwin had his eyes closed and his face turned up to the cool sky. “Day after day after day with nothing at all but your own thoughts. You begin to think things that surprise you.�
�

  Davis bumped one of Miss Jackson’s buttons back to the beginning. “There you go backwards in time,” he said, but Miss Jackson was speaking too, only quieter so it took a moment longer to hear. “You have to be in love with the dead to like a dig,” she said. She took two of her buttons off the board in a single turn and bumped one of Davis’s. A third button occupied a safe square, leaving Davis no move.

  He shook his fist at her, smiling. “You are a lucky woman,” he said.

  “Do you know how many bodies we’ve found on this site?” Miss Jackson asked Miss Whitfield. “Almost two thousand. And every single one of those left someone behind, begging their gods to undo it. Bargaining. Screaming. Weeping. You can only manage a dig if you already feel so much you can’t take in another bit.”

  A long silence followed. “Excuse me,” Miss Jackson said and left the courtyard.

  Miss Jackson seldom made speeches. She never, ever referred to her losses and I only knew about them because Patwin, who’d worked with her three seasons now, had heard from gossipy Mallick. Patwin had hinted that she was sleeping with Mallick, but I’d seen no signs and hoped it wasn’t true. Miss Jackson was not a young woman, nor a pretty one, but she was too young and too pretty for Mallick. Few women would not be.

  I thought back on how she’d also told us she’d seen the face of God in the sky and how that speech too had been uncharacteristic. Perhaps we’d come up on the anniversary of something or other. Or perhaps Miss Whitfield was responsible. Miss Whitfield might make me edgy and snappish, but perhaps Miss Jackson had melted in the sympathetic presence of another female.

  “Well,” said Miss Whitfield. “I hope it wasn’t something I said.” She wrote a few words in her notebook and then addressed me. “You’re very quiet. Are you in love with the dead?”

  Since I’d been thinking about Miss Jackson and not about myself, I had nothing prepared to say. “I’m not sure I do like a dig,” I answered. “I’m still deciding.” My heart was thudding oddly; the question had unnerved me more than I could account for. So I kept talking, just to demonstrate a steadier voice. “I wanted to see some things I wouldn’t see in Indiana. Mallick gave a lecture at the university and I asked some questions that he liked and he said if I could make my own way here, he could use me.”

  Miss Whitfield was staring at me through little eyes. I could see that she didn’t believe me and, from that vantage point, I could also see how defensive I’d sounded, how unresponsive to the actual question, and how unlikely my sequence of events was. Mallick in Indiana! Me, asking such good questions from the audience that I was hired on the spot. In fact, it was all true, but pointing that out would be the most suspicious move of all. I felt unjustly accused, but also terribly, visibly guilty. There was a letter opener on a table by the doorway. I pictured myself picking it up and opening Miss Whitfield’s throat in one clean swipe.

  All of a sudden Patwin laughed.

  “What?” Davis asked him. “What’s so funny?”

  “I was just remembering when you fell off your chair,” Patwin said. He was still laughing. “How your arms flew up!”

  I had begun visiting Tu-api’s tomb at night when no one would know. I would like to say that there was nothing at all odd in this, but how defensive would that sound? Let’s just skip that part.

  In fact I was disturbed by the murderous images coming over me and the tomb seemed a quiet place to figure things out. I wasn’t the sort to hurt anyone. People rarely upset or angered me. I’d never been a bully at school, didn’t fight, didn’t really engage much with people at all. Didn’t care about anyone but myself, my mother had said once after my father died. She’d never said it again, but she hinted it. Buried it in the subtext of every letter. Her own grief had been an awful thing for an eight-year-old boy to see.

  But I thought of myself simply as a typical photographer. A watcher, a recorder. Transparent. And I thought how these violent images had begun shortly after Miss Whitfield’s arrival, so they might be put to her account. But they’d also begun shortly after Tu-api had shown me her face. In fact, if I remembered correctly, at the moment I had taken my picture the word murder had been hanging in the air. There was the smell of smoke. “If you were to murder someone,” Miss Whitfield had been asking, “who would it be?” Was it possible that the word itself had brought Tu-api back? Perhaps what I saw in her face wasn’t longing after all, but remorse. Patwin was always pointing out how she was a murderess.

  Yet I found it easier to think Miss Whitfield was to blame than that Tu-api wished me ill. I’d begun to carry the print of her face in my pocket so I could pull it out and look at it whenever I was alone. At night I would sit on the bricks by her coffin and stare until I had conjured her face out of the darkness.

  One night as I was walking as silently as possible back to my bedroom I collided with Mallick. He was wearing a nightshirt that left his saggy old knees bare. “Going to the lavatory,” he explained, unnecessarily, so that I knew it was true what Patwin had told me, that he’d been visiting Miss Jackson. I tried to see the good in that, but really, what comfort could sleeping with Mallick have been?

  “Me, too,” I said with an equal lack of conviction.

  We stood a moment, carefully not meeting each other’s eyes. “So, Miss Whitfield leaves tomorrow,” Mallick offered finally. “She’s been a lively addition.” I realized then that he thought I’d been visiting Miss Whitfield. As if that wouldn’t be worth your life!

  A woman’s face appeared in a doorway, white and sudden. When my heart began beating again, I recognized Miss Whitfield. She didn’t speak to me; merely noted my suspicious, nighttime ramblings, my covert meeting with Mallick, and disappeared as quickly as she’d come, no doubt to write it all down before she forgot. “Taking my own sort of pictures,” she called it once, as if what she did and what I did were the same, as if her imposed judgments could be compared to my dispassionate records. If I’d wished to murder her this would have been my last opportunity.

  I went to my room and into a night of troubled dreams. Miss Whitfield left the next morning. I took pictures of everyone before she left, at Patwin’s insistence. Patwin was always reminding me to document the work as much as the artifacts. “Take some pictures of live people today,” he would say. “Take some pictures of me.”

  Everyone lined up in the expedition house courtyard, staring into the morning sun. Davis had his hand on Patwin’s shoulder, but no one else was touching. Miss Whitfield could not stand still and ruined three exposures before I got one that showed her clearly.

  “Was there a curse on Tu-api’s tomb?” she’d asked us shortly after her arrival. According to the newspapers Carter had a curse; it was one more way in which we disappointed. (According to Mallick, who had his own sources, no one could find the actual site or text of this alleged curse. Other tombs had them so, of course, Carter couldn’t do without.)

  The very day Carter found the entrance to Tut-ankh-Amen’s tomb a cobra ate his pet canary. “Some curse,” Patwin scoffed when we read this, but Davis had reminded us of the function canaries served in mines, their deaths a warning that death had entered a room. And then, just last week, we had a telegram from Lord Wallis that Lord Carnarvon, who sponsored Carter’s dig, had suddenly died in Cairo. The cause was indeterminate, but might have been a fever carried by an insect bite on his cheek. Back in England his dog also died—this curse was most unkind to pets.

  It was the dog that did it for Miss Whitfield. She cared little for mountains of copper, gold, and ebony. She was, as Patwin had once noted, being nothing but fair, no materialist. But she loved a suspicious death. She left us for Egypt just as quick as an invitation could be wrangled and transport arranged.

  I believe we were all a bit disappointed to realize that none of us was to be either the murderer nor the victim in her next book. All those murderous thoughts I’d obligingly had, all the probing we’d withstood, all the petty disputes we’d engaged in, and all for nothing. Carter would
reap the benefit.

  We stood at the entry to the expedition house and waved. She was turned around to us, her face in the window, smaller and smaller until it and then the car that carried her vanished entirely. “A dangerous woman,” Patwin said.

  “A pot-stirrer,” said Davis.

  “A terrible eater,” said Ferhid. His tone was venomous. “A picky eater.”

  “I can’t put my finger on exactly what it was about her,” said Miss Jackson. “But there were times when she was watching us, taking notes on everything we said and did, as if she knew what we really meant and we didn’t—there were times when I could have happily strangled her.”

  So we were all glad to see the last of her. It didn’t mean she wasn’t missed. It was hard to go back to how we’d been before; there was a space left where she’d been and nothing else would fit inside it. Ferhid continued to set her plate at the table for four days after she’d gone.

  The night of her departure I went again to Tu-api’s tomb. The silhouette of the ruined ziggurat shone in the moonlight. There was the hum of bugs; a dog barked sleepily in the distance; my footsteps thudded in the dust. The wind was cool and carried the smell of cooked chicken. My relief was enormous. The only reason I’d thought of murdering Miss Whitfield was that she was an annoying woman who often talked about murder. There was nothing supernatural at work here; it was all perfectly normal and everyone had felt the same.

  The moon had risen, round as an opened rose. I walked away from it into the perfect stillness of the tomb. I owed Tu-api an apology. How could I ever have thought, even for a minute, that she would curse me? I asked her for forgiveness. It was the first time I’d spoken to her aloud.

  She was not the only one listening. Mallick had apparently told Patwin his suspicions regarding me and Miss Whitfield, and Patwin, being more discerning and trained to read puzzles far older and more mysterious than I, came upon the truth of it. He’d followed me and when I spoke, he responded. “What’s this about?” he asked, and what could I possibly say?