The Book of the Dead Read online

  He read out another, hesitating over the characters. “Well I’m not sure what this one is – a poem, maybe. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense.”

  “Difficult to know what to do with these things,” said el-Akkad. “We could put them on display in the museum, but who wants to see some old wood tablets? I was thinking if there’s anything exciting – a new Beowulf story, maybe – something that would tickle the popular appetite for northern exoticism.”

  “He was thinking maybe publishing a translation and making his fortune,” boomed Suyuti, with a laugh.

  “It would be of scholarly interest,” insisted el-Akkad.

  “I don’t think there’s anything here like that,” said el-Kafir el-Sheikh. He read another one aloud. “What a barbarous language it is,” noted Gurbati. “And as much gibberish to those two as to us!” He gestured at the two Jutland servants in the corner.

  “Well if you don’t want them for the university in Aarhus,” said el-Kafir el-Sheikh, stacking the clicky wooden tablets one on top of the other. “Then I would love to take them back to Cairo with me. We have Danologists who would love to get their hands on this.”

  “We can discuss it later,” said Suyuti. “Bille!” he called. “Hans, come along! We’ll need you to help us lever the body out of the… Hans!” he shouted. “Stop that! What are you doing?”

  What Hans was doing could best be described as dancing. His eyes were wide open, popping from his circular face, his arms were stiff at his side. He hopped in a rapid, jittery jig from left foot to right foot. The old man, Bille, was regarding the lad with frank horror, “Stop!” yelled Suyuti, angrily. “What do you think you’re doing, boy?”

  The child opened his mouth, and gurgled. Black blood poured from his lips. His arms jerked and flew away from his sides, and with a crash he fell backwards onto the wooden boards. The four scientists leapt up. The lad was supine, thrashing as if in the middle of a conniption fit. Blood began to ooze from the pores of his face. His shirt and trousers soaked black from within. His eyeballs had rolled up white, and the sockets filled with red. In moments he stopped moving.

  The four men, and the servant, stood motionless, horrified. “What?” el-Kafir el-Sheikh gasped. “What?”

  “It is the curse-death,” said Bille, in a gravel voice. “The curse-death of the bog king! We have all seen it, minherren! We are all cursed too.”

  “Curse, nonsense,” barked Suyuti, “It must be some terrible medical condition – the poor fellow!”

  “Do you think it’s contagious?” Gurbati wanted to know, stepping back from the boy body. Blood was still oozing from him, seeping between the planks of the floor.

  “We should call the police,” said el-Kafir el-Sheikh. “We should notify the authorities.”

  “There aren’t any phone wires out here,” Suyuti said. “We could make our way to Tollund – that’s the nearest village. But there are no phone lines there either; it’s a tiny place, a community of farmers and a couple of Ummah policemen in an outpost. Better to go back to the hotel.”

  El-Kafir el-Sheikh looked down. To think he was gazing on a fresh corpse! Yet it felt queerly unreal. The strange thing was that the dark-brown body in the trench outside had a greater heft about it, a sense of the gravity of actual deceased humanity. This diminutive shape, wet with dark fluid, looked like a doll. “Where was he from?”

  “I don’t know,” said Suyuti. “One of the villages, I suppose. Tollund, probably.”

  “We can’t leave him here.”

  “We can’t take him with us!”

  “Bury him,” said el-Akkad. “Get Bille to dig a grave.”

  “Burn him, rather, minherren,” exclaimed Bille, waving his arms. He added something in his own language, but gabbled it too fast for el-Kafir el-Sheikh to be able to understand. Then, in Masri: “burn the body, or more will die!”

  “The police will surely want to look at the corpse,” Suyuti declared. “So we can’t burn it; and we can’t just leave it here.” But then Gurbati worried aloud about wolves, which hadn’t occurred to el-Kafir el-Sheikh; so they did bury it in the end – a shallow grave, that Bille dug very complainingly. The corpse was so covered in blood that there was nowhere to hold him without dirtying one’s hands; in the end they wrapped a rope about his feet and dragged him outside and into the trench

  - 4 -

  They agreed to postpone undertaking further work on the mummy until after the police had examined the scene; given them the all-clear. In the circumstances there was nothing else for them to do but return to the hotel. Suyuti went outside to tie down the canvas over the trench, but he came back in a state of agitation. “The mummy is gone.”

  “Gone!”

  Naturally they all rushed out to see for themselves. It was true. The body had been stolen. The man-shaped indentation remained in the mud, showing exactly how the figure had once lain curled on its side. They searched the length of the trench, and then moved in a series of wider circles through the foggy ground outside, but there was no sign of the body.

  “Gurbati!” Suyuti called. “Do you have your pistol?”

  “I do.”

  “Good. I’m also armed.”

  “What are you bellowing about guns for?” el-Akkad wanted to know.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Suyuti replied, in a lower voice. “Somebody has stolen the mummy. Whoever they are, they’re dangerous. There must be more than one of them, or they couldn’t have got the body away. You think it mere coincidence that the boy died just when he did? It was a diversionary tactic – they poisoned him, to keep us occupied. Murder is nothing to them.”

  The fog seemed to have crept into el-Kafir el-Sheikh’s stomach; his whole torso felt cold. “But what do they want with a mummy?”

  “These people,” Gurbati said, “are a mess of superstitions and muddled religion. Who knows what devil-magic they hope to perform? We really ought to get back to the hotel. We need to get the police out here. We need the colonial military to go through the whole area.”

  They found Bille by the grave of the lad, on his knees in the dirt with his palms pressed together over his head, after the manner of the strange religion of the land. He was not happy to be interrupted, but he did what he was ordered, howsoever surlily. They all clambered into the vehicle. It took a repeated series of backward-forward manoeuvres, each one topped with a bone-breaking sound of gears being shifted, before the automobile was facing the right way. Then drove off down the track, through the gates, and el-Kafir el-Sheikh felt a weight lift from his soul. He was the least superstitious person in the world, but it was good to get away from that place. “Is that how the others died?” el-Kafir el-Sheikh asked the Jutlander. “Did they – sweat blood until they died?”

  “Some, minherr,” Bille replied. “Some melted away, like lard in a pan. Some exploded, bmm! and flew in lumps in all directions.” He smacked his lips.

  The road began to climb, and all at once the wheels of the vehicle became stuck in the soft ground. They all had to get out and push, save only Bille crouched over the steering wheel. By the time they had freed the automobile and hefted it to the top of the rise the four archaeologists were mud-caked up to their hips, and spattered all about their bodies and faces. Suyuti in particular was in a foul mood. “Cursed countryside – this is the very landscape of uncleanness!” he yelled.

  El-Kafir el-Sheikh could not disagree. It was not the mud, only; it was the fog. There was something noisome about the vapour. It had thickened, and its pearl chill had yellowed, acquired a buttery, rancid quality. It stuck in the throat. “Come along, gentlemen,” he called, trying to chivvy himself along with everybody else. “Back in the car and to the hotel. A hot bath will restore us to humanity!”

  That was when they saw the mummy.

  There was no mistaking it: el-Kafir el-Sheikh has studied that leathern face, with its millennially-etched detail of wrinkle and stubble, carefully enough. And now it was standing in the headlights of the automobile. Its
skinny arms were little more than two bones; but its face was solid, fleshy. Its eyes were open: they glinted blackly in the electric beam of the headlight.

  For a moment nobody moved. Then the mummy opened its mouth, and began to speak – one word, two, three emerged, impossibly, from the dead man’s mouth. El-Kafir el-Sheikh was thrown. It was no language he recognised; neither Marsi, nor Old Danish, nor even New Danish. The creature stopped, as if to draw breath; but what use could it have with breath? Then it uttered a string of words. One sounded like the Old Danish for “possession”; but el-Kafir el-Sheikh could not be sure.

  This weird monologue was interrupted by Bille’s screaming – the big man opened his own mouth wide and howled like a dog. He gunned the engine and, notwithstanding than none of the four archaeologists were inside the car, accelerated hard. The left front bumper struck the mummy with an audible clunk. The dark leather man lurched and span away into the mist – but the automobile did not stop. “Bille!” Suyuti shouted. “Come back, man!”

  For a long minute the throaty diminuendo of the vanishing car was the only sound. Then everything was quiet again, the eerie muffled silence of fog. “I’ll have him flogged,” Suyuti fumed. “That dog!”

  “I suppose, then, that we are walking back to the hotel,” el-Akkad said.

  “Are we going to pretend we didn’t see that?” el-Kafir el-Sheikh demanded. “The mummy? It was right there!”

  “I only saw the mummy,” said Suyuti,

  “What do you mean, you only saw?”

  “I mean,” said Suyuti, stomping over to where the car had been. “There must have been people, or at least a person, propping it up – to play that… trick upon us. There must have been, but I didn’t see them. Perhaps they were dressed in white?”

  “It was a strange thing to see,” said Gurbati, in a cowed voice.

  “Bille knocked it over,” said al-Akkad. “Drove straight at it and knocked it down. It must be just there – where you’re standing, Mohammed.”

  “I know,” snapped Suyuti. “But I can’t see anything. This cursed fog! Gamal – could you bring your lamp over here?

  The only thing el-Kafir el-Sheikh wanted to do was to run – to get away from that place as fast as his legs could propel him. If a jinn had appeared and offered him instant transportation back to Cairo for the price of all his personal wealth, he would have taken the deal without a moment’s thought. But here he was, stuck in this remote place, in the whited-out cold. It took an effort of will, and he was not naturally a brave man, but he conquered his panic. Suyuti and he then spent twenty minutes searching the soggy turf, looking first for the mummy, and when it became apparent that it was not to be found, looking for the traces of whoever had carried it there. They found nothing; not so much as a footprint. “The turf, though wet, is pretty springy,” Suyuki said. “Footprints might not leave much of an impression.”

  “Are we sure we saw – what we all think we saw?” el-Akkad asked. “Might it be some kind of… collective hallucination?”

  “It spoke!” cried el-Kafir el-Sheikh.

  “Bille clearly thought it was real,” Gurbati said. “And for a hallucination it made a hell of a thwunq when he drove into it.”

  “Well it’s not here now,” said Suyuti. “And in this fog we won’t be able to track it. I think the best thing we can do is walk back to the hotel. It’ll take us a while.”

  “We’re simply going – to walk away?” el-Kafir el-Sheikh asked.

  “You propose we stay here?” returned Gurbati. “This fog is bad enough in the daytime; imagine how it will be after sunset! Come – you’re the rationalist, my friend. I agree that we have seen some strange things; but there must be a scientific explanation.”

  “I suppose there must,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh conceded.

  “To subscribe to supernatural explanations,” Suyuti went on, giving his hands alternately a rub and a squeeze and stamping his feet, “would be to sink to the level of the natives. We can do better than that.”

  “And to speak for myself, I’ll find it easier,” el-Akkad agreed, “to discuss the possibilities inside, with a hot meal in my belly. And a pipe.”

  They started walking. To begin with it was easy enough following the road; and after half an hour it even looked as though the fog was thinning. A drizzle started falling, and everybody grew colder and grumpier. “At least,” Suyuti declared, “the rain will drive away the fog!” But it didn’t happen. The drizzle faded, leaving them wet to the skin, and the fog was still all about them. Then the road led them down into a declivity and the mist thickened so much that el-Kafir el-Sheikh lost sight not only of his surroundings but even of his fellow travellers. The men called to one another to prevent them losing touch, and after an hour the road rose again. As they went up the fog thinned somewhat. The trunks of trees became dimly visible in the cataracting blankness of the mist.

  “I can’t remember the last time I felt this cold,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh announced, to no-one in particular. “I’m shivering continually! It’s like my muscles are being twitched by repeated electrical shocks.”

  “So many trees!” said el-Akkad. “I sometimes imagine they’re whispering to one another. The forest stretches a thousand miles east from here, you know. Nothing but trees, primordial. It’s not natural for humankind to live amongst the trees. Crowding all around – it turns a human being into an interloper in a population of aliens. It’s not clean,” he added, with sudden vehemence. “This whole landscape is cluttered and dirty and – ugh!”

  They marched on in silence after that. After a while Mohammed Suyuti began what el-Kafir el-Sheikh assumed was a morale-boosting speech. “Do not despair, my friends. The journey is an hour and half by automobile; and so I calculate four or five hours by foot. Six at the most. And we have been on the road two hours already, and have made good progress. Soon we will arrive at our destination.”

  “Not yet half way,” grumbled Gurbati.

  “I shall flog Bille personally, when we get back,” declared el-Akkad. “What he has done is unforgiveable.”

  Nobody had anything to say to this; so they trudged on. Twenty minutes further the road turned right. Round the corner two eyes gleamed at them: the rear lamps of the car.

  El-Akkad launched into a run, calling out Bille’s name and adding choice imprecations. But he broke off abruptly, and by the time the others reached him he was standing, his mouth open. Bille was there, in the driving seat, but he was not moving, and his head leant back at a bizarre angle. From the front it was clear his throat had been cut – more than cut, ripped from chin to breastbone. Blood had pooled and congealed in his lap in an oval sheet, and stalactites of red dangled into the footwell.

  It was horrible.

  Suyuti broke the silence: “at least we won’t have to walk the rest of the way.”

  “Did a wild beast do this?” el-Kafir el-Sheikh asked. “Did a wolf do this?”

  “It if was a wolf why didn’t he finish him off? Or drag him away.”

  “Maybe,” said el-Akkad, “the wolf was interrupted. By something worse than a wolf.”

  “Whatever happened, it does not make me wish to stand around here,” said Gurbati. “Here, Tawfiq – help me move him. I’ll drive.”

  “And put him – where?”

  “In the back seat, I suppose.”

  “Don’t be absurd!” said Suyuti. “I’m not sitting squashed up against a corpse all the way home.”

  “Why did he stop?” el-Kafir el-Sheikh wanted to know. “Why not just drive straight through – if it was a wolf, surely you’d try and run it down, not stop and let the beast jump you!”

  “Why not read one of your rune tablets,” Gurbati sneered, “and bring him back to life – then you can ask him yourself.”

  “That was uncalled-for,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh returned, stiffly.

  “We cannot bury him,” said Suyuti. “The tools are back at the dig. And if we just leave him by the road, then wild animals will surely devour his
body.”

  “Ugh!” el-Akkad cried, recoiling from the car. “His clothes are full of blood.”

  “It’s true,” said Gurbati, in a hollow voice, poking a gloved finger at the body. “To touch him is to – it feels, it feels. It is repulsive. It’s like a hot-water-bottle, full of… ugh!”

  - 5 -

  The four agreed to pitch Bille’s body straight out of the automobile, to lay a coat down where he had been sitting and drive straight off. “It’s unfortunate for Bille,” Suyuti said. “But our hands are tied.” It was not a pleasant business: when el-Kafir el-Sheikh put his hand to the corpse’s shoulder and felt the fluid under the man’s jacket shift and squelch, it took a prodigious effort of will not simply to snatch his hand away again. But with a concerted effort the corpse was pulled over the low windshield and onto the hood, and from there it was an easy-enough business to slide him off onto the turf at the side of the road. Then Gurbati fussed for a while about arranging his coat over the bloodstained seat. But finally they all got into the automobile and started off.

  Almost at once it started raining again. “Shall I stop?” Gurbati asked. “We could put up the roof.”

  “This shower will pass in a minute,” was Suyuti’s opinion.

  “It’s easy for you to say,” Gurbati complained, his teeth clacking. “You’re all still wearing your coats.”