Master of Chaos (The Harry Stubbs Adventures Book 4)

by David Hambling

  “Stubbs, I wanted you to meet my fiancée—”

  “We’ve met,” she said, cutting him off.

  I was not sure whether to stay or go, but Ross indicated an armchair.

  “And what the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.

  For a moment, I thought she was offended by my taking a seat. It was nothing so trivial.

  “This is all your fault, isn’t it?” she told me. “Why couldn’t you leave him there? Can’t you see he needs help?”

  “Darling—” said Ross.

  “Don’t ‘darling’ me,” she said. “Who knows you’re out?”

  “Nobody knows,” he said. “Except the hospital, obviously, and Maggie.”

  Her rage subsided slightly at that revelation. So far as the rest of the world was concerned, Ross was still safely incarcerated, and that was the way she wanted it.

  “Did you bring my books?”

  “Yes, I brought your bloody books,” she said, bending over the shopping bag. There were three or four of them, hefty reference works with plain dust-jackets. He reached out as if to take them, but she held the books hostage on her lap.

  “This is my final gift to you,” she said. “Don’t ask me for anything else.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I won’t.”

  “What are you going to do now, exactly?”

  “We don’t know,” he said. “But with the books, we might be able to find our way.”

  She addressed me. “Do you actually believe in this? Are you encouraging him?”

  I felt as though I was caught up in a marital argument. It was a very disagreeable sensation. I had no experience of domestic disharmony; my father’s response to trouble was always to heave a sigh and give in, attending to whatever minor task he had been neglecting with an air of martyrdom. But perhaps the fact was that my parents never disagreed about anything that mattered to them.

  “Your fiancé’s life was in danger where he was,” I said. “I was compelled to take steps to remove him from that danger.”

  “Because of ancient Egyptian rituals?” she said.

  I must have been gaping, because Ross spoke up. “Ellen is referring to my ideas about the Black Pharaohs,” he said. Which did nothing to dispel my confusion.

  “What ‘danger’ was he in?” she demanded.

  “I can’t go into details,” I said, “but there were a number of deaths, and I have reason to believe murder was involved. And I suspect Dr Nye may be behind them. How did he come to be involved?”

  “Only by pure chance,” she said dismissively. “He happened to know someone who knew us.”

  “But he was keen to have your fiancé committed, even though, as far as I can tell, he wasn’t a danger to himself or others.”

  That brought her up, but she was not stalled for long. “I accepted his professional opinion. As for not being a danger”—she turned to Ross—”you did try to kill him.”

  “Nonsense,” he riposted. “Who told you that?”

  She did not give the obvious reply but instead thought a moment, weighing possibilities and whether there might be more than one view. “I never liked him,” she said at last. “He never seemed entirely trustworthy. He kept wanting to talk to me.”

  “Did he… bother you after he had me put away?” asked Ross.

  “Of course not. You know I would never look twice at a man like that.” She was almost indignant. “But he is highly respected in his profession. And for one, I listen to professional opinions.”

  “Those Egyptologists were talking rot,” said Ross. “And I can prove it.”

  “Because you’re the only one who understands,” she said. “Because you have cosmic insight. Because you are the one chosen to save the world,” she said with theatrical sarcasm.

  “Now, that’s not fair!” said Ross, with an outburst of feeling I had not seen before. “You can’t ridicule me!”

  “I’m not the one who had to be locked up,” she said coldly. And then, to me: “You should have had him explain it all to you first. You might have had second thoughts.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Ross. “You wait a minute, now. Have you seen the pyramids?”

  She did not reply.

  “Well, I have. They are a feat of engineering beyond anything we can even imagine. A wonder of the world, still standing after forty centuries. Can we agree on that?”

  She waved a hand. “If you like.”

  “And you think all that skill, that scientific genius, that was as far as it went? You think they never grasped any metaphysics beyond the enumeration of childish, animal-headed gods?”

  “You see?” she said to me.

  “The evidence is there in black and white,” he said.

  “And, miraculously, you’re the only one who can decode it,” she said. “And all those Egyptian scholars who have been slaving away for years are numbskulls.”

  “No, it’s just I’m the only one—” he protested.

  “The only one who understands how an engine works?” she asked acidly. “None of this woolly-minded, namby-pamby, liberal-arts nonsense for you.” I tried to remember what I knew of her education; I suspected his background was in the sciences and hers in the arts and it had become a bone of contention between them. “Or is it perhaps because you were there at the time, and you’ve been conveniently reincarnated?”

  He flushed at that and was momentarily lost for words. Miss Bentham was a skilled debater. I would hesitate to argue with her as I would hesitate to step into the ring with Jack Dempsey.

  “Miss Stopes had a vision once,” said Ross to me. “Under a yew tree in her garden, God spoke to her. Miss Stopes wrote a letter to the bishops, telling them she was the prophet of God and they should ignore what St Paul said and listen to her on birth control. Is that sane behaviour?”

  “There’s no comparison,” said Miss Bentham.

  “Miss Stopes wants to save the world from reckless breeding—and so do you!” he said. “How does that make you any better than me?”

  “I admit, I am even deluded enough to think I can make the world a better place for women,” she said. “But I don’t let my delusions destroy my life or make me incapable of acting like a normal human being.”

  “You think you’re a normal human being?” he demanded.

  She ignored him, turning to me instead. “You’re his friend. Please think about his welfare,” she told me. “If he would be safer in some other institution, we’ll arrange it.”

  “I will bear that in mind,” I said.

  “I doubt it,” she said. She sighed twice. “I don’t know. I wish I could believe in your revelation—”

  “It’s not a revelation,” Ross protested.

  “Or whatever you call it.” She looked down at the books on her lap. “But I can’t entirely discount it, either. Dr Beltov had his doubts about Nye, didn’t he? I was trying to remember what he said on the phone before I saw you.” Miss Bentham took the books in her arms. She seemed to be wrestling with herself.

  Ross said nothing, perhaps to avoid provoking her.

  “I suppose I’ll leave you to it,” she said at last. It was not a happy decision, but it was a decision. She stood. Ross stood, too, and she thrust the armload of books at him. “Goodbye,” she said before suddenly kissing him on the lips and pulling away before he could respond. “Do what you can,” she said to me, and she was already walking out, her little dog trotting alongside with a backward look towards me.

  “Goodbye, Ellen,” Ross called after her. “And thank you.”

  The front door slammed shut a second later. She had gone off to save the world in her own way.

  “Sorry about the scene,” he said, looking at his feet. “I thought things might go better if there was a third party in the room. Ellen can be a bit of a handful at times.”

  “I’m sorry you two are arguing,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” he said, but he sounded relieved it was over. “I’m for a whisky and soda
. Will you join me?”

  “I was contemplating the prospect of a cold beef sandwich,” I said. “I don’t mind assembling it myself if the makings are around.”

  “To each his own,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind a bite to eat myself, now you mention it. Maggie’s out shopping, so we have the run of the place.”

  In the kitchen, I sliced bread and meat from the pantry, while Ross clattered about with cutlery and crockery.

  “Of course, most of what Ellen said was true,” said Ross. “It’s the way she says things that makes them sound ridiculous. I don’t go talking about her work like that.”

  I don’t disbelieve in reincarnation, or spirits, or anything. I was willing to believe that a mind could flit from one body to another. And, on the basis of there being more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, I was prepared to believe a great deal more was possible. As Beltov had said, there were things beyond even our power to imagine them.

  “Perhaps now would be a good time for you to tell me the whole story,” I said.

  Chapter Fifteen: Ross’s Story

  “This happened towards the end of the war. In ‘17, my squadron was stationed in Egypt. There was a hiatus after Romani, and command were trying to decide what to do with us, shove us into France or keep us in theatre.

  “I longed to go home to defend London. We had read about the Zeppelin and Gotha raids. I was convinced it was my fate to crash my machine into a German airship and save London. I did not understand why it did not happen. We were left in limbo, near Cairo. I took myself off and found quarters out on the edge of the wilderness, miles from the aerodrome.

  “There was a craze for cards then, mainly vingt-et-un. As men do in wartime, we played for high stakes. Money is a joke when you don’t know if you’ll be around next week, and they were gambling away a year’s wages in an evening. If you were anywhere near the mess, someone would badger you to join in a game, and I had decided to quit. It wasn’t that I lost money. I couldn’t stop winning it. They said I had the luck of the devil. When anyone wins too often, a suspicion hovers over them. I’ve never cheated at cards in my life, and I didn’t care to be thought of as a cheat. So, I found my own lodgings.

  “I had a motorbike, a Brough Superior. When my duties were done, I could leave the camp behind me. It was a world away, in the quiet of the desert, but I could get back to camp in seven minutes. My unspoken status gave me privilege. Survival in the air is all luck. If you survive the first encounter, you will keep surviving. Eight out of ten never see the machine that shoots them down. After your first blooding, you are the old hand, and your enemies are the frightened pups. Becoming an ace is no harder than cutting cards and calling high or low, though the stakes are higher. Nobody grudged my eccentric lodgings.

  “My billet was a tumbledown old mosque, or the ruin of one. The roof had gone, and I pitched my tent inside the prayer hall. On the outside, the walls looked like much of the rest of Cairo, but inside the lower courses were flat Roman bricks. I’m no archaeologist, but I could tell that those bricks were laid on older foundations.

  “Before it was a mosque, the building was a temple. They worshipped some heathen deity there a thousand years before the Prophet’s name had ever been heard of in these parts. I could lie on my back, smoking and watching the stars wheel overhead, listening to the insects in the night.

  “It was an empty, godforsaken place, beside a wadi that was used as the town dump. That was no coincidence. The local worthies called the place cursed, and thought it was a fit place to empty their ash-cans.

  “The days were brutal. Heat-shimmer danced all around the horizon. If it had not been for the aeroplanes, I should have thought myself the last man on earth.

  “Rocks the size of skulls were scattered everywhere. Human skulls, cow skulls, dog skulls, white warnings of mortality. The only vegetation was a type of sparse yellow grass and scrubby acacia bushes with more thorns than leaves. In England, you don’t realise that water is precious as diamonds. In the desert, you learn its true value and rejoice in the sheer blessing of every scrap of greenery. Every growing thing is a hymn to creation, and every flower is purest music. In England, you have a million plants and flowers, and you never notice them until it’s winter, and they’ve gone.

  “I liked it for the peace—rubbish dumps in the desert don’t smell. The wadi was dry as a bone, and the rubbish desiccated rather than decaying. Household refuse mummified in the desert air, with only a few hardy rats to pick through it.

  “After a time, I also found that there was a pair of sand-coloured cats with pale underbellies in residence. They prowled the rocks by the wadi, or lay in the shade, their tails flicking gently. I watched them, and they watched me.

  “There were sparrows, no different to the ones in London, and sometimes hoopoes, small striped birds with comical crests. Mainly, there were vultures. They stretched out crucified wings and hung in the sky for hours, circling endlessly. The only time they were not on patrol was when a great squabbling crowd of them gathered around fresh pickings on the rubbish heap.

  “One day, I found an emaciated old man sweeping out my quarters with a whisk broom. He said he was the attendant or caretaker or watchman for the mosque. I never learned his name. I called him Uncle, which is semi-polite address. He called me Emir, a high honorific. I first assumed it was because I was a British officer, but I later found he had no idea who the British were.

  “I was learning Arabic, and I used him to practice. He was not talkative. He had lost the habit of human conversation. But he was patient. Much of his talk was about the desert, the winds, and the spirits that he saw. He lived more in the world of dreams than the world of men. There was a word, too, which he repeated several times which was not in any of my dictionaries: Judwali, and he struck his chest when he said it. But it was not his name.

  “I gave him small coins. He must have had a shack somewhere nearby, and I suppose he spent the money on bread or whatever he lived on.

  “One night, I was woken by a commotion outside. Expecting robbers, I went out with my revolver and a lantern. Better to face them in the open than let them get to throat-cutting distance.

  “I found the old man leading a group of others in a dance, ululating and clapping their hands as they went, under the rising moon. My two cats watched from the gateposts. I observed this display from the shadows for some time. The old man saw me and gestured for me to join in, but I held back. There was something in his look I did not like. After a while, I returned to my bed.

  “That night, I dreamed a strange dream. I was in Cairo, but it was the Cairo of the Pharaohs. Everything was the same, the pyramids and the brooding sphinx under the same yellow moon, but it was a different age. A great procession was making its way from boats on the Nile, with banners and musicians, and the main body was of hooded dancers performing curious ritual gestures. And at their head was the old man who lived by me in the rubbish dump, his head shaved, in the costume of a high priest. I danced with them and followed along, and the stars wheeled above us.

  “It was a vivid dream, and I remember it all. I remember the crossed leather straps on my sandals. I remember the feel of the ground at every step.

  “Dawn was a crimson stain on the sky. There was no sign of the old man, but I soon found the tracks in the sand from where they had been dancing all night. I followed them around and around. It seemed to me that there was something of the utmost importance. Something I had known in my dream, but which I had lost hold of between sleeping and waking. Not for my life, but for humanity. In that dream, I had a mission which I must fulfil.

  “The tracks followed a spiral path that led across the wadi. On the other side, a gang of the vultures was tearing at something with their beaks and claws. The old man had dreamed his last dream.

  “I was greatly troubled by this. Nobody had a ready explanation for it. I asked around the mosques, and in the marketplace. Nobody knew anything, except for one Imam who spat when I mentioned the wor
d ‘Judwali.’

  “I kept asking stall holders, beggars, water sellers, porters, and that ever-present, ever-helpful class of ‘guide’ who appears whenever a white man is alone in a bazaar.

  “Money finds a way. For a fee, one such guide took me to a storyteller, and I sat in front of him,

  cross-legged on the ground next to our cups of tea. There was some dickering. The story I wanted was haram, forbidden, and he could not tell it. I put down more coins for him, and increased my guide’s fee. The storyteller agreed to tell me, just once.

  “And, when he had carefully placed the coins in a leather purse, the storyteller cleared his throat. There once was a wise sage brought before the great sultan Haroun Al-Raschid. The sultan demanded to know the essence of human nature. The sage could not explain in words, but danced in front of the Sultan. This was the dance of the Four Kings.

  “The Sultan’s followers thought their ruler was being ridiculed, and the sage was put to death. But the Sultan saw that the sage’s footprints had left a pattern in the sand. He perceived that the secret was contained in these markings. He ordered scholars to make sense of them. The scholars spent many years on this. They went mad, one by one, but afterwards, they became wandering teachers. They founded a school known as Judwali, which means diagrammatists.

  “The story said that the explanation was this: the pattern of the dance was a gyre—not a circle, but a spiral. It starts at a point and increases steadily in size until it reaches its maximum extent. Then, it diminishes again until it reaches a single point. Then, it becomes the start of another gyre. This pattern came not from men but was learned from the djinn of the desert.

  “The gyre is a map of human existence, of all existence. Once you have discovered the movement of a human soul on its gyre and discovered its geometry, you can trace the gyre back or forward to any point in time. The storyteller said that the gyre was the pyramid, and the pyramid was the gyre, rising from a wide base to its point. It originated not with humans, but with the gods long before man walked the earth. This was long before the Prophet. The story was blasphemous, and I should be ashamed of myself for forcing him to recite it. He became abusive. I calmed him down with more coins. He went off to cleanse himself at the mosque, muttering pieties.