The Book of the Dead Read online

  A few passers-by actually ignore him when he asks which way America is. He’s not so bothered by that, just pleased that he can make himself understood. Eventually there’s one who points him in the right direction before hurrying away.

  He spends several fruitless nights trying to get through customs. The guards at the gates turn him away and threaten him with arrest. He explains that he is the Pharaoh, that he is trying to save his people, but this does not impress them.

  But he was not Pharaoh for nothing. He goes further away from the gates, into the streets and the buildings, and steals a coat. Then he tries the gates again, but is once more turned away. This is only to be expected. The journey through the Duat is all about getting past gates and those guarding them. During the days he sleeps in parks or in the gaps in the great stone palaces. Nobody bothers him. He wonders if this is part of his test.

  He has an idea. He tries to find one of those urns he saw in the pictures. But those he sees are in strange contexts, unsuitable for his needs. Finally, he decides he can do without. That night, he steps over the low wall by the riverbank. He has never learned to swim, but it can’t be as hard as all that, and will not be required for the hardest part of this.

  He floats, initially quite slowly, downstream. He is aware of cries from the bank as people notice him. The roaring of the great falls gets ever closer. He speeds up. He paddles a bit to make it faster. There are flashing lights by the side of the river now, but it’s too late, the spray is upon him!

  He falls, laughing. He has passed the first gate!

  He lands in the Duat in a deep pool. He waits. He does not need to breathe. He finally bobs to the surface a long way downstream, and is surprised to see the angry lights there too. He pushes at the water, and manages to head for where a group of trees stands beside the river, in some sort of park.

  He struggles out of the river, and is away into the darkness before the guards can find him.

  He is now in the Duat proper. The land of the souls that are free from their bodies. Not that they know it. He doesn’t need very much. He doesn’t get very much. He clothes himself by stealing, and drinks water from public fountains, merely to keep the power of speech. He expects the people here to be much more scared of him than they turn out to be. They can accept, it seems, almost anything. It helps that they will actually turn away from him rather than scare themselves by looking closely. It’s just as well they’re so hard to scare. But like animals that are hard to anger, Ramesses thinks, actually pushing them to that emotion might be a very bad idea.

  He remembers a few things from the map. He knows where the challenges he must overcome can be found. And now he can look at other maps, and knows he is at the top, and presumably has to make his way to the bottom, as the country gets narrower and narrower. It is like being born again. And there was one name in particular that was meaningful to him on that first map, and so he must go there.

  But there’s something that worries him. “The world of the day” was how Seth described this place. That sounds worryingly like sun worshipper talk. And everything Ramesses sees of religion here suggests that is indeed the case. The false belief has flown here and taken root! And of course it suits the Duat, all these souls on the edge of hysteria, every moment seeking escape, angry with their lot without fully understanding their situation. He passes gigantic fields of worship, open to the sky, shining huge lights upwards at night in hope of the sun, from which he can hear the cry of “Ra! Ra! Ra!” He allows himself a painful frown.

  Ramesses initially assumes it’s his task here to once more drive the sun worshippers out, and so bursts into one of their temples and starts yelling, but he’s repelled by sheer force of numbers, and threatened with the arrival of the guards, and worse still, invited to submit to the embrace of these heathen ways. They say they want to listen to him, but having heard him, finally decide they don’t.

  He falls onto a very finely cut lawn and is sprayed with water from something like a snake. He is gone before the guards arrive.

  He’s not here to learn that sun worship is true, is he? That’d be awful. But one thing he has discovered is that he’s definitely not here to push the reeds down before him. Rather, it’s like he’s leading his people across a swamp. He must tread carefully and listen to local advice.

  He makes his way down the country, night by night. He has to take many side-trips and excursions, dictated by the passage of the vehicles on rollers that he sneaks on board, or the wagons with drivers that he requests access to with a gesture. Those conversations are extraordinary. The drivers always assume he is something from their mythology, or something they can make money from. Because they have money here. When he tells them the true nature of their world, that’s it all in the service of something else, they simply don’t believe him.

  He is not allowed access to the White House, where the guards tell him that instead of talking to the elected head of the peasants here, he should put his question in a net.

  He asks around about that, and spends an evening with the god Thoth in a place that he is told is called Radio Shack. Thoth goes on a bit, but gives him a spell jar that is small enough to put in his pocket. He uses the spell jar to “download” and “update” all of the spells that are upon him, which he is pleased to see are still in place. One of them is a compass, which allows him to better navigate the Duat. Thoth’s whole tone suggests that a moral conversation is beneath him, so this time Ramesses doesn’t even try.

  In Nashville, he wins a musical contest in front of an audience against a man in a wide-brimmed hat who, once backstage, identifies himself as the terrifying He Who Dances In Blood, a figure Ramesses is familiar with from many Books of the Dead. He tries to tell Dances that he’s learned a moral lesson about humility, but Dances just looks at him oddly.

  At Graceland he fights an army of warriors, all dressed alike, flinging them into each other, delighting in his martial grace, taking their songs for his own. “What did you stand for?” he asks the fallen. “What can I learn from you?” They all start to answer, but their answers are all different.

  At Disneyland, he meets with He Who Lives On Snakes, who has a giant orange and white head, and a fierce tail, and keeps insisting that the most wonderful thing about him is his uniqueness, which is hardly the case. Every question Ramesses asks him about what his next test will be is met with a reply formed in cryptic poetry. Again, Ramesses tries to suggest that he’s becoming a more moral character through these tests, but the answers he gets aren’t receptive to that idea.

  At Canaveral he is spun round and round by the goddess Nut, who every now and then allows those who live here to pierce her body, and tries to persuade them that they exist in a world which has no meaning, while everything else here says the opposite, thus torturing them with doubt, a nuance Ramesses can’t help but think of as cruel. He tries to tell Nut he’s learnt an important lesson, but all he does is vomit.

  Finally, he makes his way to the lower left coast of the Duat, where the kidneys should be, and there finds the building with the title he recognises: “the SETI Institute”. It must be named, he’s sure, in honour of his son. It is unfortunate that he gets there as the sun is coming up, and so Ramesses falls asleep on a chair in the waiting room. When he wakes, he is in a room festooned with the instruments of torture, and he shakes until he realises that there is nobody here, that they have taken him as a corpse, that he interested them. He is sure this must be where he is intended to be, that this must be an important test on his journey, and so he waits until the peasants arrive once again, and then announces himself.

  This time, they scream and run. Which is pleasing. But then they slowly come back, and remain interested. And that is even more pleasing.

  He scares and interests them in equal measure, not too much of either. This, he thinks, might finally be the lesson he’s meant to learn. He is only disappointed that his son isn’t here.

  This is how Ramesses ends up on Eater of His Own Excrement’s
chat show, carefully not quite explaining his mysterious origins, saying he’s “from time as well as space” and wearing, after an intervention by an anxious wardrobe department, a clean, over-the-shoulder set of what the Pharaoh gathers are bandages.

  Eater treats Ramesses as if he knows the answer to everything, which suits him down to the ground. “I see... the Millennium of your people will pass without an attack from this creature you call the Bug.” This gets as much laughter as applause, which puzzles Ramesses, but he nods along, he’ll take it. He’s asked what his own beliefs are, and what he makes of the old time religion in the States. He lies enormously, saying he believes much as they do, and that all people should be free to worship as they wish. He manages to stretch out a gummy grin, which is really painful.

  After the show, Eater shakes his hand and says that he’d be happy to send Ramesses on to his final destination by private helicopter. SETI will be angry, but with nothing but his own authority to go by, he’s decided Ramesses is a person, not property. Ramesses feels elated and terrified at the same time. He runs to the helicopter pad, turning down autograph requests as he goes, waving to a crowd that’s still screaming, but now not in fear.

  And so he lands at the southernmost end of the country, in New Mexico, at the Acoma Pueblo, which, he is told, is “the town in the place that always was”. A figure stands tall under the whip of the helicopter blades, and Ramesses is relieved to see that it’s Anubis, actually wearing an appropriate head dress, dogs barking around his feet, and he’s carrying a Was Staff too.

  “This is where they keep what they think of as the truth,” the god explains, leading him into a small pueblo hut. Ramesses looks around for a moment before he ducks inside, and sees the faces of the Acoma tribe, with all sorts of expressions suggesting interest and lack of it, involvement and lack of it, as real as life.

  Inside the hut stands Osiris, green-skinned, his legs wrapped, holding his crook and flail in the posture of a Pharaoh. Ramesses relaxes. It really is time, and he’s ready. “We’ve had your ba here for some time,” says the god, unrolling a scroll and raising an eyebrow. “And when we heard you’d finally gotten around to gracing us with your presence, we sent ahead for your heart.” And there it is, in his hand, a tiny shrivelled apple of a thing.

  And now Ramesses is afraid again. For himself, and his people, and that he won’t see his son. He can hear movement outside, a siren again; a shadow is cast through the door onto the wall. It’s Ammit, the devourer, the end of the world, ready to take him.

  Osiris produces the scales, and puts the heart on one of them. Ramesses gets out his spell jar, and switches it on, fingers fumbling with the tiny glyphs on the screen. Osiris makes a movement of his fingers, and produces a feather from the air, that is the goddess Maat, also represented by a glyph. It’s good to see Mattie again. The green god puts the feather onto the other pan of the scale. The heart starts to grumble. Ramesses is fearful that it’ll tell tales about the anger and cruelty of his life. So he quickly activates the spell he’s been told will silence it. He lets out a long breath as the heart subsides. Osiris smiles at him. Well done.

  The feather and the heart remain in balance. Osiris produces another scroll, and compares it to the ba. Then he asks the first of the forty-two questions. “Have you committed a sin?”

  Ramesses makes sure the right spell is activated and quickly replies. “No.”

  The list includes having slain people, terrorised people or stolen the property of a god, all of which Ramesses knows he’s done, but the spell lets his lies go unchallenged. One of the questions is whether or not he’s felt remorse, which makes him feel particularly vindicated. He may not have changed the Duat, but it has not changed him.

  Osiris reaches the end. The feather has remained in balance with the heart. He smiles again, and holds up his own spell jar to show Ramesses. On it is a communication from a Museum in Atlanta, who have bought him intending to set him free.

  The transition finally happens on one of these people’s flying machines, somewhere over the ocean. The context changes between the Duat and the mirror of heaven. Ramesses finds himself standing beside the crate containing his body, and here is Seti with him!

  He laughs and cries, hugs his son to his breast. They are both themselves again. “The things the gods have put in place!” says Seti.

  “I liked your Institute,” says Ramesses.

  “They do their best,” says Seti, stroking his father’s hair.

  Escape from the Mummy’s Tomb

  Jesse Bullington

  The Mummy lurches forward, all of its illusions undone by the meddlesome Englishmen. Gone is the dapper, sandy-skinned gentleman of indeterminate age and ethnicity. In his place is a desiccated corpse swaddled in yellowing bandages, the eyes set deep in its taut, skeletal face burning with malevolent fury.

  The Englishmen stumble backwards, revulsion and terror straining their universally handsome features. Impossible as this transformation most assuredly is, the most maddening element is how swiftly the Mummy moves. Were it a shambling mummy, its stiff limbs propelling it in staccato jerks…that would be one thing. This is something else entirely.

  The Mummy snatches a strapping blond gent by the throat before his fellows can blink, and a hand that looks ready to crumble apart squeezes shut on its victim’s cravat. There is a sound like wet gravel crunching under a tyre. Blood erupts from the man’s mouth and nose as the Mummy casts him aside, his attention shifting to the next of the doomed as soon as he feels his first victim’s soul torn loose.

  The Englishmen see nothing but the horror before them as a second man is broken by the creature’s herculean strength, but the Mummy sees everything, all veils pulled aside for his inspection: Anubis receiving the hearts of the dead Englishmen, the Scale of Maat tipping to condemn the interlopers, the crocodilian jaws of Ammit lunging up to devour their souls … everything.

  Even before the third man expires the Mummy knows the sad truth. All of these pasty creatures shall be found wanting, none of them worth the weight of a feather. None, that is, save the one in the back: the Wolfman.

  The Mummy stares up impassively at his tormentors. The boys are in his class but even if he weren’t lying in the grass they would tower over him. The Mummy’s father insists he hasn’t hit his growth spurt yet, but considering Mr. Rasul is barely five foot three inches himself, the Mummy doesn’t hold much hope of ever being a normal height. Not that size is everything.

  “Paki bastard,” says the ringleader, a sociopathic Adonis named Smith, and he gestures toward the park’s gate. “Didn’t you see the sign – no dogs allowed, innit.”

  “Learning to read is a fine endeavour, Mr. Smith, but might I suggest you also brush up on your geography? Egypt and Pakistan are on entirely different continents.”

  The Mummy knows it is better to take the hiding in silence, but this is all getting to be a bit much and the words are out before he can stop them. Most of the football players who frequent the park are browner than the Mummy, and in all his afternoons coming here he has never before had the misfortune to run into Smith and the rest. The list of places he avoids is already long enough, thank you very much, without adding on the only decent field in walking distance.

  “That’s pretty funny,” says Smith, but he doesn’t look like he thinks it is very funny at all. The kick he delivers to the Mummy’s stomach confirms this. “Come round and this’ll be your arse, Aladdin.”

  The Mummy’s traitorous body has folded up on itself, but he forces himself to look. Smith is holding out one hand, a flick knife in the other. Behind him, the other three bullies are grinning, hungry for the kill, but the Wolfman fidgets, seemingly reluctant to pass over the Mummy’s football. Fight the beast, the Mummy thinks, but he knows there’s no hope. Each of his friends is a full moon to the boy, and Smith shines brighter than the rest put together.

  “Ball,” Smith demands, and although the Wolfman passes it over, he hasn’t joined in the chorus of taunts h
is pals are levelling at the Mummy. He’s still holding off the wolf, but only barely. The Mummy almost feels worse for the Wolfman than he does for himself.

  “Don’t take it out on the ball,” groans the Wolfman. “I need a new one anyway.”

  “You don’t want this one, Richie – it’s probably got a bomb in it,” says Smith, and dropping the ball to the grass, he plunges his blade into it. The hiss of the dying adidas is what finally undoes the last of the Mummy’s defences, and he begins to cry even before Smith penalty-kicks the deflating ball into his face. “Goal!”

  The Mummy is drawn to the museum by the stolen artefacts from his land. His true nature hidden behind the artifice of flesh, he strides through the marble halls, just another patron of the arts. A wry smile twists his fat lip as he sees the tourists clustered around the bogman, oblivious to the peat-preserved corpse’s walking, talking cousin that strolls behind them. The Mummy flirts with dropping his disguise, letting these gawping fools scream and scream as he hurls them one after another through display cases… But then he altruistically passes them by, unharmed, unaware. There will be time enough for vengeance against the cruel ignorance of mortals, but the Mummy has waited for millennia, he can wait a little longer.

  In the Ancient Egypt Collection, the treasures of his people await his worthy gaze. He nods his head as he reads the papyrus records of his deeds, and while his eyes never land on the object labels he mouths their text as he surveys the amulets and the brooches, the rings and the bracelets. All this was his, before time and death and the grubby hands of tomb robbers cheated him. All this is his by right of birth, and right of death. The Mummy puts his hand on the glass covering the sarcophagus where he slept for millennia, before the Englishmen defiled his tomb and summoned him back from the Field of Reeds. He imagines sneaking in after hours, smashing the glass and crawling back inside. If only it were that easy to put an end to all this…