Four minutes, twelve seconds.
Four minutes, thirteen seconds.
Four minutes, fourteen seconds.
Sixtine was not dead. At least, she was no less alive than she had been when she woke from the coma four months before. With many missing parts.
Four minutes, fifteen seconds.
Her memory was intact until the moment she had taken her wedding vows. After that, there was nothing but the vaguest of recollections, pieces of reality mingled with visions of Egyptian gods and a prophecy etched in a black sky, devoid of any apparent links to time, space, or truth.
There was a windowless cell with dead bodies, shadows whispering to her and the terrifying maelstrom in a green river. There was no party at the Louvre, no Mexico, no rescue in the pyramid; these things only existed in the stories others told her.
Amongst the many things that did not make sense, there was one that did: she was Jessica when she died. Now she was Sixtine, the nickname her mother sometimes gave her as a child. And since she no longer knew who she really was, least of all the old Jessica, that suited her just fine.
All traces of her former self were gone. The shape of her face was no longer round, but angular, just like her body. Her blond hair was now the color of the steel of a blade. But one thing remained: her natural grace. She didn’t radiate the warm, joyful glow of the summer sun. Instead, the cool, emerald light of her eyes was shining fierce, illuminating a wintry, almost spectral face of intoxicating beauty.
Four minutes, eighteen seconds.
The Asian man’s jaw was clenched, the anxious grinding of his teeth accompanying the passing of time on his stopwatch.
Four minutes, nineteen seconds.
A few nights after she had awakened in the Cairo hospital, the nurse had sounded the alarm: she had disappeared from her room. They found her soon after, shaking uncontrollably beneath the neon lights near the emergency exit, whimpering, “Don’t turn off the light!”
An extreme and paralyzing fear of the dark had gripped her, another symptom to add to the long list related to her Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder diagnosis.
In truth, it was not the dark that terrorized Sixtine. It was the things that lived in it.
At night, she made sure all was illuminated – New York, the city that never sleeps, provided the electric light she craved. Darkness was her enemy and she was always on her guard. The only time she could keep the visions at bay was when she was in the water. The lit swimming pool was her sanctuary. It was to the water she escaped every night and stayed for as long as she could.
Four minutes, twenty-three seconds.
A bead of sweat trickled down the forehead of the old Asian man, while Jay Z railed against the gods.
Four minutes, thirty-one seconds.
Sixtine had become a recluse. To avoid the paparazzi who camped in front of her building, she stayed locked inside her home. She had let go of the twelve staff members who had previously managed Seth's daily life in the five-bedroom New York penthouse overlooking Central Park. She avoided contact with friends. Gigi had gone back home to her house filled with birdcages, by the sea.
Sixtine had promised to visit, but even that simple promise was complicated.
Four minutes, forty seconds.
“Miss, you should come out of the water now,” the Asian man called out, voice shaking.
The only fixture in Sixtine’s loneliness was Han. He was the building’s night porter. He had been the only witness to the young woman's nocturnal outings. Under her hooded black coat, she was sometimes drinking in the light from streetlights and shop windows, as she prowled the deserted avenues, like one of the vandals haunting the Paris underground of her youth. He had seen her melancholy, he had seen her mourn a loved husband gone too soon, he had seen her eyes haunted by unanswered questions.
Then, at seventy-six, he got fired from his job because he was too old. Sixtine took him in. Or perhaps it was Han who took her in.
Four minutes, forty-seven seconds.
Four minutes, forty-eight seconds.
Four minutes, forty-nine seconds.
The old man rushed into the pool with his clothes on. When he reached Sixtine, he gasped in horror. He hauled her out of the water like a soaked, broken puppet. He held her for a moment, with his back against the side of the pool. Her mouth was gaping but not breathing. Her green eyes were staring out at nothing, and her head lolled upon his shoulder.
Sixtine was dead.
For the last one hundred and twenty-two nights, Sixtine had swum against the raging current of despair and void, trying to find a way out of the nightmare. People had told her she should walk in the light, enjoy her youth, forget the past. But there was no past to forget, no past to forgive; there was no past at all. Everything before the wedding felt like an illusion, a movie played for her benefit.
The FBI had questioned her, of course. A female agent with a strange name had visited her in the hospital in Cairo. Rust. She had not displayed any emotion when she had heard about Sixtine’s out-of-body experience in the pyramid – unlike the doctor, who had rushed to give her more drugs.
But there was one thing Sixtine had kept quiet to everyone, even the FBI, even the Egyptian police, even the kind nurse who had thought nothing of talks of a prophecy by Egyptian gods: the conversation with Thaddeus, the morning of the wedding.
Why? She couldn’t really tell. She had followed an instinct so strong it had cut through the fog of the drugs, through the need for easy answers or someone to blame. Or perhaps it was not instinct, but merely shame and anger and a multitude of unwanted emotions. Every time she recalled that moment in the Louvre, her mind seemed to recoil, avoiding the memory at all cost. Yet every time she allowed herself to hope for better days ahead, her thoughts came back to the mummified man, the scent of exotic flowers with a toxic note, and Thaddeus’ voice.
There are things happening which are greater than you and me and Seth… If you love him with all your heart as you say you do, you will live through everything. But if you don’t…
A few hours after that warning, her life had become a black hole, swarming with shadows, blood, and a beast who devoured souls.
The key to her self, that person she no longer recognized in the mirror, had to be in what she couldn’t remember. Sixtine was sure of it. Without it, and the need for justice that came with it, there was no possible future.
Many times, she had been tempted to reach out to Thaddeus. An initial, half-hearted attempt at contacting him had proved fruitless – but she hadn’t been ready to face him anyway.
For so long, her healing soul had been divided between hope and revenge.
It was no longer divided.
Revenge had won.
Five minutes, one second.
Suddenly her chest exploded into a breath so forceful, she could have inhaled all the air in the room. Her throat swallowed some water and she coughed, her muscles tensed and as she looked up, she focused on Han's face. She was in the arms of the old man, he was very pale and his dark three-piece suit was swollen with water.
“Next time, Han, perhaps you should wear a swimsuit.”
“You stayed under more than five minutes,” he said, his voice trembling. “This is not reasonable, Miss.”
“Five minutes only?” Sixtine asked with a grimace. She had disengaged from her savior and was already swimming back towards the other side of the pool. “It seemed like an eternity, though.”
“That's what worries me, Miss.”
“I thought you said that worry was a waste of time. Turn around.”
The old man, his jacket’s pockets floating on the surface of the pool, turned his back as Sixtine walked up marble steps to emerge from the pool.
As she stood in front of the large bay window, her slender body was reflected back at her, its magnificent figure shaped by the long hours of nocturnal swimming, her gray hair dripping onto her ivory skin. In her eyes, the cold glint that no longer waited for the return of illusions lost.
She picked up her dark gray robe lying beside Han’s stopwatch, still running. She smiled and shook her head. She put it on and walked back towards the bay window over Central Park.
At her feet stood the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its shadow all-embracing.
“You can get out now, Han.”
“Thank you, Miss.” The old man came out of the pool with as much grace as possible, despite his feet squelching water on the marble and his swollen pockets draining water at every step.
“Is everything ready for tomorrow?” Sixtine asked.
“Yes, Miss. A driver will pick up the luggage at five. I spoke to the pilot. It will be a night flight, as you requested.”
“Thank you, Han. Go change, or you'll catch a cold.”
The old butler withdrew, leaving Sixtine alone once more. She grabbed the remote and turned up the volume of the sound system before glancing out at the New York skyline, taking in the shape of Central Park amongst the millions of lights, like a black belly in the city.
The deafening music, the bass like body blows, the curses of the rappers, the cries of the chorus, all resounded in her heart, bringing it to the edge of an explosion. A shiver ran through her body, and she closed the bathrobe over her chest. She raised the hood over her head and her face disappeared into its shadow.
She looked like a dark prizefighter.
It was time.
Tomorrow, she would be leaving New York. In a few days, she would be in Mexico, treading in her own lost steps.
First, she had a detour to make.
As she turned to leave, she cast one last, backward glance at the window overlooking the sleeping city. She smiled. This time it was not the outline of a hooded prizefighter that she saw reflected back at her.
But the figure of Death instead.
29
Florence kissed Max's cheek. It would have taken only the smallest of movements, the fraction of a turn of the head, and their lips would have met.
But Max did not move.
Instead, he smiled with genuine affection as he pushed back his wheelchair, its wheels struggling against the cobbles of the pavement in front of the gates of the British Museum.
“Do you want me to pick you up later?” Florence asked.
“Don’t worry, I'll take a taxi.”
“Of course,” she stuttered. “I guess I’ll see you later, then. Say hello to the Elgin Marbles for me.”
He smiled, but she had already ducked into her car to hide her blushes. She pulled off quickly.
Max bit his lip and sighed. The situation with Florence was awkward. They had just spent a long weekend at Falmouth Manor, Florence’s family estate in Cornwall. She had insisted to go there to give the shrew mummy she had bought in Cairo a worthy home, and said that Max could rest in civilized surroundings – but he had sensed she had other motives.
Florence guided a wide-eyed Max through the seemingly endless rooms with their lacquered timber wall-paneling, intricately patterned silk wallpaper, canopied beds and ancestral portraits. She led him through the foggy grounds, an old maze, musty attics, secret passageways, even a forgotten dungeon. The young architect was entertained with many of the remarkable and eccentric events which had marked Florence’s storied childhood. He took an instant liking to her father, Charles Mornay. The man was laid-back and funny without the slightest hint of the pretense which might typically have marked someone surrounded by so much privilege.
When he saw the mummified shrew, Charles explained that the hunting for ancient treasures had been a shared obsession of the male line of the family since the eighteenth century. Florence added that the line had been broken when her father failed to show any interest in anything “exotic and old-fashioned” and then, most ignominiously, to produce a male heir. Together, they placed the tiny mummy on the mantelpiece in the great hall, and spent a wonderful time in each other’s company.
For Florence and Max, the weekend in Falmouth Manor followed the natural progression of a friendship that had flourished over four months. And yet, on the way back to London, the silences that punctuated their conversations were somehow more oppressive than they had been before.
Max didn’t have to look far to see what the matter was.
Florence didn’t pay much attention to anybody – she was the kind of woman who marched, head held high, to the beat of her own high-energy drum, only landing a distracted ear to people who crossed her path, while assessing what they could do for her or her career.
However, she paid attention to Max.
A careful, intense, even breathless attention. She had wanted to impress him with the history of the old manor house – not to mention the luxury of it all. It worked. But that was not enough to make him fall in love with her.
The problem was, Max couldn’t find a single reason why he shouldn’t accept the romance offered by this extraordinary woman. Pretty, intelligent, courageous, educated, funny, a willing accomplice and a friend at first sight. She had probably saved his life, too.
On paper, Florence Mornay-Devereux was his dream girl. And yet something did not quite fit.
Max tried to push the thought to the back of his mind as he trundled towards the museum’s southern entrance. A heaving mass of flag-waving guides and tour groups greeted him. He detoured via the west wing, passing by Gallery 18 and the clusters of visitors who were gathered in front of sculpted friezes belonging to the Parthenon in Athens. Max couldn’t suppress a smile. They were dubbed the “Elgin Marbles”, and had managed to poison diplomatic relations between Great Britain and Greece ever since they had been sawed and removed from the Greek monument two hundred years earlier, by Lord Elgin.
Fate had not been kind to Lord Elgin, who died penniless, his nose eaten away by syphilis. His friend and accomplice, however – who had an equal if not greater hand in the thieving of the Greek treasures – had managed to keep hold of both his fortune and his nose. He now stared down imposingly from the portrait hanging inches above the newly installed Egyptian shrew in Florence’s childhood home. His name was Vivant Mornay, Lord Falmouth.
With Florence still occupying his thoughts, Max felt the warmth of the sun on his head as he wheeled himself over the stone paving stones of the British Museum’s Great Court, a vast internal courtyard with an intricate glazed roof. In the middle, under the donut-shaped dome, stood an imposing structure: the Reading Room Library. Max showed his pass to the guard and crossed its worn threshold. Tens of thousands of volumes lined the walls of a vast, round room with a domed roof decorated in gold leaves and birds egg blue. The curator greeted him warmly and helped him navigate his wheelchair to his usual place, at one of the leather-topped desks.
Max had visited the Reading Room almost every day for more than a month, trawling through ancestral volumes for clues.
Surely, someone had written about Room X and the secret passage of the pyramid of Cheops.
He knew, of course, that the archives had been meticulously combed many times before by minds more eminent than his. But he also knew that researchers could be idle and often used the same sources. So Max had left the beaten path, looking instead at not so well-thumbed volumes, journals and papers from the travelers of the Grand Tour from centuries back. Many of these texts were newly indexed, newly translated and freshly digitized. He searched the documents for any entry, suggestion, or rumor; anything that might explain what, up to then, had seemed inexplicable.
Of course, he had been told his search was futile. But Max did not give up easily.
An early find suggested his determination might not be for nothing. History books had always held that the man who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922, Howard Carter, was a good archeologist; that he had waited to enter the grave until he had the most appropriate tools and the best experts available to carry out a systematic analysis and keep the most accurate records possible. But according to little-known archives from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that all this was pure fiction.
Far from exhibiting
a scholar’s patience, Carter had succumbed to temptation as much as any greedy treasure hunter. Even worse, several testimonies buried in long-forgotten newspaper reports revealed that Carter had literally covered up his initial visits by placing wicker baskets in front of the opening he used to reach the tomb. If his methods could fell the accepted history of a giant like Carter, Max was convinced that all he had to do was continue to look and listen, and all the voices of the past that had not been heard would soon share their secrets.
After a month of research however, it became clear that if the voices of the past knew anything of the passage leading to Room X, they were reluctant to speak.
Time passed quickly beneath the domed ceiling, but as he grew tired, the pain in his leg became sharper. It was time to go home. He could almost forget the pain when he was engrossed in his search. The casts on his right leg and arm would soon be removed, and then he would be able to walk with crutches. But his left leg, which was broken in several places, would never be completely healed. He knew he would limp for the rest of his life.
But at least he was still here to tell the tale.
Unlike Moswen.
Max swallowed hard, trying to tear the gruesome images from his mind. Finally, he glanced up as the last of the researchers were putting away their books and heading for the exit. The curator helped him put his belongings in his backpack and escorted him out. In the Great Court, the bright sunshine of the early afternoon had been reduced to a dark, copper glow. But Max didn’t notice the light.
He noticed a figure standing in the long shadows, at the entrance of the Egyptian antiquities halls.
She was tall, very thin, with a strangely familiar profile. Her green eyes seemed to radiate an intense energy that belied the pallor of her skin or the gray of her hair. It took him a moment to realize that she was looking directly at him.
As he felt her gaze, he couldn’t escape the sensation of lightness and sadness combined, stretching a single moment into an eternity. As she approached, he did not move. Her steps were certain and deliberate, and a voice in his mind begged to turn and get away, confident that once she reached him, his life would be irrevocably altered.
The Pyramid Prophecy Page 13