Crook & Flail

by Maira Isabel Pita

  * * * * *

  Back at the foot of Hatshepsut’s temple Mark fends off flocks of souvenir vendors as they make their way back to the cab. Lucia walks just behind him, using his body to shield herself from the noisy flocks of souvenir vendors. Her legs are feeling a little unsteady, although not from running. During the bumpy ride to the Valley of the Kings she remains silently introspective.

  Respecting her mood, Mark leans over into the front seat and strikes up a conversation in Arabic with the driver. Inspired by his creative grammar, the Egyptian’s constant smoky laughter makes her grateful for the open windows.

  Doug and Lori are waiting for them at the rest stop, at an outdoor table overlooking the Valley.

  Rising, Doug plants a moist kiss on Lucia’s cheek and pulls a chair out for her. “This is absolutely the last day I’m wasting,” he declares cheerfully. “We’ll camp at the entrance to the tomb of Ramses III. It contains over thirty chambers. Only the first seventeen are open to tourists, since the rest aren’t totally safe, but if we’re careful…”

  Lucia stops listening as her own thoughts possess her.

  Julian is, for some cruel reason, projecting images of his dead brother. Richard has been beautifully embalmed by technology, wrapped in video bandages and mummified by light, what every ancient Egyptian would have given anything to attain. It isn’t necessary to preserve the body anymore. It can be discarded along with the brain and yet you can still live forever in a few square containers no larger than the palm of your lover’s hand.

  Lori catches her eye and smiles knowingly.

  Lucia smiles back at her anxiously. It was foolish of her to confess what she is really thinking and feeling about her late husband’s soul to a close friend of Mark’s but the other woman’s gruff sympathy had caught her off guard.

  “It’s too bad we can’t bring a telescope,” Doug’s wife comments. “But I guess it doesn’t matter. The visibility out here at night is unbelievable. You can see things with the naked eye you’d never be able to see anywhere else.”

  A tense silence falls over the table.

  Mark scrapes his chair back. “What would you like, Lucia?”

  “Whatever you’re having.”

  He hesitates a second before rising, as if unable to escape the gravity of her stare.

  “I’d like another beer,” Doug says.

  “Can I get you anything, Lori?”

  “No, thanks, Mark, I’m fine.”

  Doug is still describing Ramses III’s tomb when Mark returns.

  Lucia endures a greasy hamburger and a watery beer without comment. She is hungry enough not to care.

  * * * * *

  Doug provides them with an empty backpack and then he and Lori head back to the Institute to pack sandwiches, wine and everything else necessary for a hedonistic night in the desert.

  Mark and Lucia catch a cab to their hotel.

  The Habu is located directly across from Medinet Habu Temple dedicated to the King of the Gods, Amun-Re.

  Mark was right. The Habu makes the Etap look like a five star luxury hotel. Their room in the old building is small and Spartan. She is glad they won’t be spending the night there.

  Inside the closet-like bathroom she uses the ancient pull-chain toilet and manages to coax a stream of tepid water from the sink, stained yellow as ancient ivory around the drain.

  Mark takes his turn next then kicks off his sneakers and spreads himself out on the bed beside her.

  Despite the hard mattress, she nestles with perfect comfort beneath his arm. “Let’s visit Italy next,” she murmurs.

  “I’ll have to sell some work first.”

  “Mark, for better or for worse,” she feels relaxed enough to broach the touchy subject, “I have all this money and it would definitely be for the better if you would agree to travel with me for a while.”

  “Well, maybe.” He consents lazily, drifting off, and it is the easiest thing in the world for her to follow him.

  Lucia is the first to surface from a shallow sleep flooded with images like schools of colorful fish darting just below the surface of a river.

  Mark turns his head away when she slips out from beneath his arm but doesn’t wake.

  She sits up and gazes down at him.

  It makes her feel distressingly sober, how young he looks.

  She gets carefully out of bed, walks over to the window and flips open the blinds.

  She is confronted with the dramatically beautiful sight of the sun setting into the ruined temple.

  After a moment, Mark groans behind her.

  She returns to the bed and sits down beside him. “Get up, lazy.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Smiling, she reaches for a pillow to smother him with.

  He grabs it from her and throws it across the room. “I don’t have the energy to punish you right now, Lucia, so behave.” He glances at his watch. “Damn!” He sits up. “Let’s get moving.”

  She slips a violet sweater on over her black shirt and jeans while Mark folds the blanket over the bed into an amazingly small square and thrusts it into the backpack. “I hate to disappoint you, princess, but there’s no room in here for whips or chains.”

  “What about black gloves? It’s cold out in the desert at night.”

  He rummages through his overnight bag and tosses a pair of black leather gloves into their backpack.

  She laughs. “I was only teasing.”

  “No, you weren’t.”

  She gravitates toward the window.

  The broken columns have become whole again in the slender black shadows they cast across the sand.

  “Okay, so we’ve established that I have kinky tastes,” she hears herself say. “Is there anything wrong with that?”

  He comes and stands beside her. “Just tell me what you want.”

  “I want you.”

  “Then you’re all set.”

  She glances down at the small wooden chair next to the window then up at his face, flushed by the setting sun. His features are so perfect he looks like a saint with a devil’s eyes. “Do we have time for a quickie?” she asks softly.

  He frowns down at her. “You’re insatiable, you know that?”

  She quickly unzips his jeans, “Yes, but it’s your fault for having such a big, beautiful cock!” She grabs the shirt over his chest and moves him over to the chair. “I want to ride you, Mark.”

  He doesn’t resist as she tugs his jeans and underpants down to his ankles and then pushes him down onto the narrow seat. He sighs patiently and kindly begins stroking his soft penis while lovingly cradling his balls. It doesn’t stay soft for long as he watches her kick off her sneakers and peel off her own jeans and panties. She leaves on her white socks and her violet sweater as she bends at the waist, keeping her legs and back straight, and takes over.

  She grasps the base of his stiffening cock firmly with one hand and caresses him lightly and swiftly with the other as she twirls her tongue around his head. When he is more than hard enough she points him straight up like one of the columns outside and braces the top of his penis inside her moist labia as she prepares to sit on him. Her pussy feels as deep and dark as a shadow cast by the fact of his erection. She focuses on the setting sun, and its warm rays flowing across the flesh-colored sand feel magically embodied in his shaft as she sinks slowly down around it, moaning at the way it opens her up. She holds on to his shoulders as she impales herself on him and then doesn’t move as she relishes the exquisite fullness of having him all the way up inside her.

  “Come on,” he urges, reaching up into her sweater to grab a hold of her hips.

  “Let go!” She pushes his hands away. “And don’t move!”

  Surprise flickering in his eyes that she is dominating him for a change, he lets his arms hang at his sides and sits perfectly still. This is exactly what she wants, for him to turn into a statute her body can fuck as the sinister fingers of the shadows caress her soul. She rides him hard, driving his erecti
on as deep inside her as she can bear, passionately stabbing herself with his increasingly rigid shaft.

  Her suicidal pace is too much for him. He thrusts his hands back into her shirt, grips her hips and holds her down over him. “Oh yes!” he hisses and throws his head back as he explodes deep inside her.

  She writhes desperately around his pulsing orgasm, working her clit against him as she keeps her eyes on the long fingers of darkness outside. And then for a blinding, transcendent moment her warm flesh becomes one with the glowing sky as she seems to rise out of her body, the intensity of her climax making thought itself feel like a mere shadow of what really is.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “We’ll wait out here.” Lori takes another swig of cheap red wine from a plastic cup. She is sitting on one side of the entrance to Ramses III’s eternal home, leaning comfortably back against the rock face.

  On the other side of the entrance, Mark’s long legs are bent into a pyramid against his chest and he catches hold of Lucia’s hand as she prepares to follow Doug into the tomb’s luminous bowels. “Enjoy,” he says, brushing the sensitive underside of her wrist with his warm lips.

  She lingers over him, reluctant to leave both his stimulating company and their small fire’s cozy blaze.

  “Come on, Lucia,” Doug calls impatiently from inside the tomb.

  Mark lets go of her hand and she enters the rock face. She and Doug are both carrying flashlights with them to view the damaged and unlit chambers near the end.

  “What you see here, Lucia,” Doug immediately begins lecturing, “is the Litany of Re, where the king addresses the manifold forms of Re. The litany is a description of the modes and aspects of the One, or the creative principle, which manifests as the god whose actions and interactions create the universe.”

  Trying to muster interest in what she knows is going to be a lengthy tour, Lucia studies the section of wall he is describing. It is covered primarily with text, except for the forms of Re, which aren’t much bigger than the hieroglyphs themselves, stark mummiform outlines wearing different crowns.

  “‘Homage to thee, Re, supreme power, Lord of the Caverns’,” Doug translates as they move on, “‘with hidden forms, he who goes to rest in the mysteries when he transforms himself into The One Who Joined Together. Homage to thee, Re, supreme power, this Becoming One who folds his wings, he who goes to rest in the Netherworld and transforms himself into He Who Comes Out Of His Own Members’.”

  “Wow.”

  “The flavor of ecstasy emerges from the translation but its simultaneous sense of science is completely lost on us. Yet if we look beneath the poetic and metaphorical mode of expression, Lucia, it’s obvious the litany describes the modes and aspects of the One.”

  “Bohm’s sea of energy or whatever he called it. This tomb thrusts straight into the earth?”

  He holds her eyes. “Yes.”

  Quickly moving on, she comes upon four narrow niches in the walls, two on either side of her. She turns on her flashlight and carefully illuminates each one.

  “The second corridor here continues the Litany of Re.”

  Spaces that are more secretive open up around them.

  “These must be all the small chambers you mentioned.” Reluctantly, she switches off her flashlight to conserve the battery.

  Doug doesn’t answer.

  She glances back at him.

  “I find you terribly exciting, Lucia,” he confesses quietly.

  “Are you going to show me the tomb, Doug?” She ignores the look in his eyes.

  He literally shakes himself. “Yes, of course, lead the way.”

  The corridor veers abruptly to the right.

  “This is the point where the ancient builders ran into another tomb.”

  “My God.” She is surprised and distressed by this evidence of sloppiness on the part of Egyptian architects, who were always so precise with their measurements.

  “The priests didn’t keep very accurate maps,” Doug admits.

  “I guess not.”

  “The corridor straightens out again here.”

  She is glad it is an easy run back out into the night and into Mark’s warm arms, because she already misses his eyes as much as she imagines a disembodied soul would miss the daylight sky.

  “The fourth and the fifth hours from the Book of What is in the Duat!”

  Doug’s abrupt, stentorian tone startles her so much that she stumbles on the uneven floor.

  “Careful!” He grabs hold of one of her arms. “Oh, Lucia!” He pulls her toward him.

  “No, Doug!” She writhes out of his embrace as easily as a cat and runs deeper into the tomb, past two more dark, man-sized niches before she stops to look back.

  Doug’s slow gait as he follows her is reminiscent of a lion cornering its prey. “I love my wife,” he explains hoarsely. “This has nothing to do with love. She’s had her eye on Mark for years so I’ll let her have her fun if she’ll let me have mine.”

  “Mark is her friend, Doug, a really good friend—she told me so herself. He’s like a brother to her.”

  “You know perfectly well that’s what the ancient Egyptians called each other when they were lovers, Lucia. It’s her little idea of a joke.”

  The lights in the tomb start flickering suddenly and die.

  She hears herself scream just like a heroine in a movie.

  “For Christ’s sake, Lucia, just turn on your—”

  She hears a dull thudding sound and then an unimaginable force grabs her by the shoulders and spins her around. The flashlight flies out of her hand and she loses her balance. She falls to her hands and knees and curls up into a protective egg shape on the floor, her arms wrapped tightly around herself as she whimpers in terror.

  It seems like a very, very long time before any coherent thoughts surface from her bottomless fear.

  Finally she dares to raise her head and stare into the total darkness. “Richard?” she whispers.

  An absolute silence answers her.

  She has to reach deep inside herself for the courage to force her muscles out of an embryonic crouch. Her hands clenched in her lap and her head bowed like a geisha in the presence of a demon entertained by her fear, she calls, “Doug?” very softly, without much hope. “Doug, are you there? Are you all right?”

  No answer whatsoever.

  She has to find her flashlight.

  Cringing, expecting something to grab her again any second, she gets to her feet, then very slowly straightens up, as though enacting time-lapse photography of human evolution. The effort of exposing herself to whatever is there in the darkness with her makes her break out in a cold sweat. Then she suddenly remembers the pit in the tomb of Thutmosis III and doesn’t dare move from the spot on which she is standing.

  Mark and Lori, drinking wine and wishing on the stars, won’t miss them for quite some time thanks to Doug’s in-depth tours.

  Lucia refuses to even imagine what happened to the Egyptologist as she calls his name again softly, “Doug?”

  Still no answer.

  If Julian is behind all this, she forces herself to reason calmly, he is smart enough to have left the lights near the entrance burning so Mark and Lori won’t suspect anything is wrong. Her husband’s brother could conceivably have entered the tomb through the one the ancient builders ran into when they were tunneling and she fervently wishes Doug had remembered this architectural detail sooner. If he had, she is sure Mark would not have let her in here.

  The thought of Mark gives her a glimmer of hope. She knows he will come after her eventually so maybe the best thing to do is stay right where she is.

  “My love!” In the darkness directly before her, Richard’s eyes possess all the shimmering beauty of distant stars. “Come to me, Lucia…” One of his hands rises and hovers before the pitch-black space of his chest, shining as if wet.

  Her pulse feels like a butterfly trapped in amber as a profoundly sweet shock paralyses her ability to think.

 
; “Remember this, Lucia?” Something hisses across the floor between them.

  She thinks wildly that what she hears is the hiss of the evil serpent Apep but then she realizes it is the sound of a whip. Fear and desire penetrate her like a two-edged blade, forcing her to bend over and press her hands against the exquisite ache in her womb. She is not afraid of what he intends to do to her—she is terrified that he is not really there. “Oh God!” she gasps. “You’re not real! You can’t be!”

  “You disappoint me, my love. I thought you had more faith than that.”

  “Oh my God!”

  “Oh my lord.”

  “I can’t breathe!” she tells the impenetrable darkness before her, because Richard is no longer there. She stares at the faint white spots floating in the space where he was standing only half a second ago—the pale ghosts of stars generated by her own visual cortex. She waits for him to reappear, like a firefly blinking on and off, but a minute passes then another, another and still there is only darkness. “I can’t take this anymore,” she thinks out loud. “I just can’t!”

  “You don’t have to.”

  The sun bursts out of the bowels of the night, Re triumphing over Apep’s shadowy minions and blinding her with his pure power.

  Julian lowers the lamp. “Sorry about that.” He sets it down on the floor beside him yet he still remains nearly invisible in a black ski mask, turtleneck, pants and boots.

  “You bastard!” she cries. “Where did you get those films of Richard?”

  “From the man himself, he left them to me in his will, with instructions. You see, Lucia, haunting you was all his idea.” He adjusts a bulky black object attached to his belt. “He was so sure of your eternal devotion. He told me they didn’t make women like you anymore and he wanted to reward you. He wanted to make you feel better by proving to you that his soul had survived and that one day you two would be together again. Only your boyfriend spoiled everything by getting all suspicious and thinking I was trying to hurt you or something.”