by Neil Gaiman
“What’s happened?” She knew, suddenly, that something terrible had.
“Martin’s dead.” The voice took on a cautious tone. “He’d been ill for a long time, but we both thought he was coping well. Then, this afternoon, it… exploded. All over his body, his face… “
“What’s happened?”
Another, longer hesitation. “Did he ever tell you why he stopped teaching and moved back here?”
“Not really.” Though Martin had mentioned something, just before he left, about health problems. There weren’t many health problems people wouldn’t discuss in Boulder—but she could think of one that might fit these circumstances.
“Ever heard of Kaposi’s Sarcoma?” asked the voice. “Connective tissue cancer—very ugly. Dark lesions under the skin, and Martin had them everywhere when I found him. Purplish-brown blotches like medieval plague, like his whole body was rotting.”
He took a long, shuddering breath. “They aren’t sure yet how he died, but his doctor says his lungs were involved—and that he’s never seen lesions erupt so rapidly. I mean, Martin had been living with AIDS since… “
Sara felt herself start shaking.
“Please—can you tell me what happened to the box? Did Martin even open it?”
The only response was an agonized flood of Arabic, or maybe Farsi. She got the vague impression that he was cursing someone. Her? Fate?
Ammutseba?
Murmuring condolences, Sara hung up. With one trembling finger, she erased her ex’s message—then sat motionless for several minutes at her desk, paralyzed by shock too deep for grief. She knew, as surely as the voice in San Francisco did, that her amulet had killed Martin Stanley. And that Diane’s amulet was trying very hard to kill her.
Cilia writhed behind her eyes as she reached for Martin’s padded envelope.
The contents hardly seemed worth dying for. Only a worn canvas-bound field journal and one sheaf of photocopies—though several slips of paper and yellowed newspaper clippings protruded from the journal. Blinking back tears she had no time for, Sara opened it carefully.
Journal of: Evelyn Bishop, Valley of the Kings, 1924–25 Season.
Evelyn was a copyist, the daughter of an American excavator working some tomb site in the vicinity of KV 62. That meant they’d caught the aftermath of Howard Carter’s discovery… though she couldn’t recall anybody else in that area then.
Curious, she flipped through the first few pages. It seemed to be both diary and sketch book, including some watercolors. Evelyn didn’t draw maps of the area, however—and she never mentioned the tomb by number.
Instead, she used the same nickname Martin had: Seven Sisters. It didn’t take long to see why. Their entire season had been taken up with removing over a dozen mummies from niches cut into the tunnel-like tomb’s rock walls. All the mummies so far had been female.
Sara frowned. Aside from a few stockpiles of already-desecrated royals, hidden in the vain hope of protecting them from robbers, multiple entombments weren’t common. These women hadn’t been re-entombed—or even apparently royal.
Priestesses, Evelyn noted, below a sketch showing one entire wall of niche tombs. But not Hathor’s, or anyone recognizable. She added a hieroglyphic scrawl after this last: three spiky blobs under some kind of table. In red ink.
Next to the scrawl, a slip of paper bore one word in Martin’s handwriting. Ammut-seba?
That same glyph turned up all over this sprawling tomb, always in red. Like a good copyist, Evelyn recorded each occurrence, though none of the excavators had any theories. They were also beginning to grumble that this site wasn’t even a proper KV tomb.
Too early. And the walls look wrong.
Evelyn added a sketch to illustrate. Where a normal rock-cut tomb had chips and flaws marking door-sill edges, Seven Sisters had what looked like drippings—as though something had burned through it, melting rock like wax.
Another slip of paper fluttered to the floor. Stygian: Shuddam-El, Martin had written. Devourer of the Earth (Khemite), or ??? S-E in service to A? Alliance? No wonder tomb robbers 1st Intermed. so hideously effective!
Sara stared. Martin had called Stygia a “very early” pre-Egyptian culture—which made it just about older than any she could imagine.
Maybe even pre-human?
Of course, this tomb couldn’t be pre-human. Evelyn’s fragmentary grave-goods list on the following page suggested early Dynastic, with an abrupt cut-off near the end of the First Intermediate period. After that, the tomb had been sealed up (how? from which side?) and hidden so well even catalogers never found it.
The only evidence that anyone other than the occupants ever had known its location appeared in a sketch a couple of pages later. Red clay potsherds, as found near the misshapen crack of the tomb’s only entrance.
Breaking the Red Pots, Martin’s note added helpfully. Early ritual exorcism—funerary rite?—to destroy malign spirits or?
The tomb’s occupants hadn’t been popular in life, either. Several had died by fire, or violence so obvious even mummification couldn’t hide it. Evelyn’s father expected to find more of the same when he unwrapped his chosen specimen. She would be sketching it, of course, but she confessed to feeling queasy about the assignment.
Queasy didn’t begin to describe Sara’s own feelings as she read. For a while it was mostly sketches: not mummies, yet, but wall ornamentation. Walls and ceiling. The tomb’s main chamber ceiling boasted a strange variant on the Nut-mother of later tombs, her dark form twisted and bloated by cankers which—on closer examination—seemed to be clusters of stars. Another steady stream of stars poured (or was being sucked?) into her gaping mouth.
Gate p. 12, Martin noted. As highlighted.
Sure enough, the sheaf of papers was entitled The Gate of All Lost Stars: A Fragmentary Translation. She couldn’t find a translator’s name, and the manuscript looked as though it had been photocopied at least a dozen times. The handwriting was clear enough otherwise, though: tiny neat academic script below meticulously drawn lines of hieroglyphs.
Page twelve had its own heading: Of How She May Come Forth By Night. Behold, Ammutseba has devoured the light of the stars, she has eaten their words of power, she has eaten their spirits…
Sara stared at the highlighted passage. Here it was, from And the stars are as bread for Her body to For Her restoration she shall swallow up their fires in the night. The whole week’s reading as Diane had supplied it to her—but how had Martin known? She hadn’t quoted it to him on the phone, or in her e-mails.
Turning back to Evelyn’s drawing of the Nut-like figure, she found three words written beneath it in faded pencil. Devourer of Stars.
And, again, the table-and-three-spiky-blobs glyph. This time, though, the blobs were three upside-down stars. This thing… this diseased, woman-shaped black hole… was Ammutseba. And swallowing stars (weren’t stars the souls of Kemet’s blessed dead?), nourished her.
Allowed her to her come forth by night.
Desperately, Sara dove back into the journal. Gate had something to do with the Seven Sisters tomb, and she guessed it might have been found there. But where? She’d seen no mention of papyri found with the mummies, or any tomb texts on the walls.
It took her a month’s entries to find out. In the meantime, she came across another of Martin’s notes—with the epithet Daughter of Isfet (Chaos / Azathoth?)—accompanying a tomb wall sketch with similar hieroglyphs. Copying this bit of art had given Evelyn nightmares.
It’s as though we aren’t alone here any more. All the mummies… the awful ways some of them died… really starting to wear on me. Father says they found the ideal specimen today, though. A High Priestess, from her regalia, maybe the last one entombed here. Strangled and stabbed and burned…
So the worship of Ammutseba wasn’t healthy then, either. Sara flipped forward. Sure enough, Evelyn’s father picked this last mummy to unwrap—defying the wishes of his colleagues.
But it’s all rig
ht, Evelyn noted the next day, because there’s actually writing on some of the bandages. Hieroglyphs. Whole words and phrases and prayers.
Sure enough, she’d found Gate. Skimming ahead, Sara learned that several other mummies were also being unwrapped, in search of more texts. Meanwhile, Evelyn’s father continued with his High Priestess.
I’m supposed to start sketching her tomorrow. I don’t want to. Her face is… awful, what’s left of it. What they did to her…
Besides, I’m nursing Dr. Parker now. He’s got a terrible fever and none of the fellaheen will go near him.
She was skimming ahead, noting uneasily that the native workers disappeared from the site soon after, when she came across another sketch. This one was full page and tinted with watercolor, but less detailed than Evelyn’s usual.
And something about it was faintly, hideously, familiar.
Readjusting her desk lamp, Sara studied it. She’d seen unwrapped mummies before, in half a dozen books. The look of ancient death had never bothered her. So why did this particular one send cold spiders down her spine?
To start with, it didn’t look quite human. The frail woman’s face was freakishly narrow, and her leathery eye sockets took up far too much of it. They’d been both rounder and larger than any normal person’s. More like a nocturnal animal…
She whispered the name an instant before she read it, penciled below the sketch. Sesh-tet.
She’s the genuine article, though I can’t think how it happened.
The journal slipped from her shaking hands, scattering newspaper clippings like dead leaves. The Cairo Daily News, 1925: three brief mentions of a young woman rescued in the Valley of the Kings. Delirious with fever and sunstroke, she’d had nothing with her but a knapsack stuffed with what appeared to be mummy wrappings. Under these, they’d found her field journal—which was fortunate, since her tongue had been too swollen for speech.
She died alone in a charity hospital two days later.
Diane called Sara at work next morning, but only to remind her about the power raising. If she’d heard back from her tests, she wasn’t telling—and Sara wasn’t asking. She just wanted a few particulars about the ritual site, a recreational area a few miles outside town.
“Good and private, this time of year,” Diane assured her. “Unless we get too much cloud cover, it’ll be fantastic. Just be sure to set your alarm!”
Sara frowned. “On the weekend?”
“Leonids should be peaking around 3 A.M. Sunday. The 18th, remember? The paper says we’ve got a good chance at the meteor storm of a lifetime. Sesh’tet’s really excited.”
For Her restoration she shall swallow up their fires in the night…
“I’m sure she is.”
Fighting the urge to warn her, Sara halfway promised to come if she didn’t oversleep. Then she hung up, her exhausted mind spinning. After reading Martin’s photocopy until dawn, all she knew for sure was that power wouldn’t be the only thing raised this Sunday morning. Not if Sesh’tet had her way.
She tried catching up on her sleep that night—hardly her idea of a Friday—then spent Saturday running around madly. The Gate translation offered little guidance, and less encouragement. Like other tomb texts, it was a “book” for believers… but not for use in the next world.
Instead, most passages spoke of Ammutseba manifesting in this world.
Hail, O ye who open up the ways of night, O guide and guardian in the nameless hours… devourer of the beaten path of stars, She who was the thought of Isfet before the sky was split from the earth… before the Ones Who Were withdrew to their abysses beyond the sky…
That sky was utterly clear when she drove out of Boulder around one on Sunday morning. Sara cut her headlights a mile from the site, praying she wouldn’t cause an accident. Faint meteor streaks in the distance tempted her to drive faster—what if the ritual had already started?—but gravel roads weren’t quiet at speed.
She inched along impatiently until she spotted the first parked cars. Then, turning off her engine, she waited for her eyes to adjust. In the open field ahead, flashlight beams bobbed and wove in some kind of dance. She watched for a while, then eased her door open. The light sharp wind carried women’s voices, raised in a song—chant?—which didn’t sound Egyptian at all. Or like any pagan ritual she’d ever attended.
Her spine stiffened as she recognized names and phrases from The Gate of All Lost Stars. They were burning incense, too, the same bitter stuff from the circle meeting… and one page of Evelyn Bishop’s journal, where she’d smeared yellowish paste from a jar in the tomb.
Grabbing her overstuffed knapsack, she ducked away from her car.
Meteors were streaking above the Flatirons now, more every minute. The chant grew louder. Some of the women were coughing as they chanted, choking on the strange gutturals—or perhaps on the smoke twisting up against the night. They’d marked out their ritual circle with smudge pots.
Stepping carefully on the crisp grass, Sara moved forward until she could recognize people. Diane, of course, her believer’s face lifted to the shooting stars. Seven or eight other women—two on crutches, one on blankets on the ground—and, in the center, a tiny figure swathed in darkness.
Sara loosened her pack’s drawstring as she slipped it from her shoulders.
It was Sesh’tet’s voice, she realized, which rose so clearly over the others—reedy and thin, yet with unmistakable power. Every syllable fell crisp and perfect from her lipless mouth, ringing with adoration.
“Ia! Isfet-daughter! Ammutseba!”
A collective gasp rose from the circle of women. They were all staring into the sky—even Sesh’tet, though she still kept up the chant, soloing now.
Sara noticed nothing at first. Nothing but a thin dark haze, like incense smoke stretched across the night… but too high and far too plentiful for mere smudge pots. The wind wasn’t moving it around, either. When one meteor’s path crossed into that haze, it flared abruptly and vanished, like a candle flame blown out.
Sesh’tet raised both arms in a wide, triumphant gesture. “Ia! Ammutseba!”
As the others echoed her, the woman on the blankets began moaning. Diane and another circle member hurried toward her, only to be intercepted by their High Priestess.
“She is first to ascend!” Sesh’tet cried. “She is first among us all to live forever!”
From where Sara stood, the stricken woman was doing no such thing. As her moaning changed to whimpering, she lifted herself on her elbows, staring around in shock and agony. Then one thin tendril of whitish… smoke? …seeped from between her parted lips, snaking on the wind toward Sesh’tet.
Sesh’tet inhaled. Another meteor winked out in the thickening mist overhead.
“Ia! First among us all to live forever!”
As her circle sisters took up the cry, the woman on the ground collapsed. Sesh’tet lifted her arms higher, their enfolding dark sleeves slipping back for the first time. The skin underneath, though brown and smooth and perfect, was crisscrossed with some very odd striations. Like bandages.
Wishing she’d brought binoculars, Sara felt her gut clench. What she thought she’d just seen—what the Gate translation had predicted in gleeful detail—simply could not be happening. Meanwhile, the Leonids kept raining down just as predicted, a real banner year.
Except that now a lot of them weren’t raining down. Just vanishing into that body of dark vapor overhead—which was looking more and more like a real body.
The body of Nut-mother, but twisted… corrupted… stretching out across the stars to devour them…
Diane wasn’t chanting now. She was screaming. Wrenching her attention from the horror overhead, Sara saw her friend fall to her knees at one edge of the circle. The others spiraled out in their dance without breaking step, leaving her alone at the center with the body sprawled on its blankets.
And with Sesh’tet.
Fishing a lighter from one pocket, Sara reached into her knapsack. The fir
st bottle gurgled in her hand as she lit its rag wick. Barely pausing to aim, she hurled it flaming toward the circle’s heart, praying Diane wasn’t wearing anything flammable.
Her first throw went wild, catching one of her target’s flowing sleeves. Sesh’tet shrieked and tore the burning cloth away, exposing her right arm to the shoulder. Just above the elbow, that same arm dwindled to a dark twig of leather and bone. Worse, her enveloping hood had slipped back. Above that narrow face with its strange, too-wide eyes, nothing but mummified skin stretched tight over her skull.
“Look at her!” Sara yelled at the others, voice raw with desperation. “She’s not human! She was never human!”
Their chanting faltered as dancer after dancer—all but Diane, sprawled on the ground now—broke step and stared. Sara lit another bottle. This time, it landed right at Sesh’tet’s feet, spattering her with broken glass and flaming fuel.
Without stopping to watch, Sara ignited a third. Sesh’tet shrieked again, gesturing in her attacker’s direction with her still-draped arm.
“She must… not… live!”
The others hesitated, trembling like aspens in a high wind. Then, in one tight silent pack, they rushed her.
Sara hurled her last missile over their heads and ran as hard as she could. Circling wide, she doubled back toward Diane—and the writhing woman-torch still lifting her hands to the sky. Still calling on the Darkness now stretching Her solidifying mass above their heads, quenching meteors like so many fireworks.
“Isfet-daughter! Ammutseba!”
Diane was on her hands and knees now. Crawling toward the High Priestess, she grabbed a handful of burning hem and yanked with all her strength. Sesh’tet staggered. Still racing to help, Sara stumbled over one of the smudge-pots, shattering it.
Sesh’tet’s shriek changed to a high, terrible wailing.
Breaking the Red Pots. These pots weren’t red—aside from their distinctive hieroglyphs, anyhow—but they were certainly breakable enough. Sara turned and kicked another pot, then another. Charcoal and incense scattered across a patch of snow and died.