Death of a Pharaoh Read online

  That same week, a young white couple from Cornwall arrived at the orphanage to look for a child to adopt. They visited the nursery and fawned over several infants but quickly fell in love with the chubby Afro-American boy with the precious smile. The paperwork took ten days but baby John Doe finally had a good home and loving parents. He was one of the lucky ones. They named him Ryan James Murphy, as his adoptive father was of Irish descent.

  Thoth closed the file. Herbert’s description of the priest did not match Fannie’s killer. He was much older and had a twisted nose as if it had been broken several times. It was not the same man. He would communicate the information to Timbuktu. Thoth would miss Fannie very much. They had met several times when she appeared before the Supreme Council and he liked her endearing combination of doting grandmother and sharp businesswoman.

  Sheshat arrived with the Book of Kings. It felt as heavy as his heart. With the death of the Pharaoh, only one member of the royal family remained alive. Someone who knew nothing of the fate that awaited him. Within an hour, by earth time, he should receive another message telling him whether they had confirmed Nkosana as the true heir. He sensed there was much anxiety among his fellow deities. Most of them knew little about the boy destined to reign and there would be many questions should the report confirm the transfer of powers as everyone expected. He thought it wise to prepare and reached for the file embossed with the name ‘Nkosana’.

  Chapter Three

  As a child, people would show me bad things, really bad things! Before I went to kindergarten, I witnessed rapes, murders, multiple wife-beatings and guys having sex with kids younger than me. It was scary trying to comprehend adult evil when I hadn’t even joined the Boy Scouts yet. It always started with an innocent pat on the head or a pinch on the cheek, so it wasn’t long before I hated being touched. Hugs were the worst; they lasted longer. I think my parents knew but they didn’t do anything to stop it. Still, I forgave them. Orphans often do that because it is better than being alone. I didn’t understand at the time that they had no choice.

  I prayed for it to stop. Every single night I knelt beside my bed, clasped my tiny hands together and begged Jesus not to let bad people touch me anymore. I guess he wasn’t listening.

  Weekends were a lottery at my house with a constant stream of visitors. Mostly they were neighbors, ladies from my Mom’s bridge club on Saturday morning or guys that my Dad invited over to watch the game on Sunday. No matter how my parents tried to protect me, someone would inevitably give me a hug or tousle my hair. Right away, I saw everything evil they had ever done or even wanted to do. Like watching a movie in my head except there was no remote to change the channel.

  Most of the time it would pass quickly but once in a while, I’d recoil like a puppy that just got kicked and I’d squirm until my mother excused me. Sometimes, the reaction was more extreme! I’d burst into tears and run to my room as if I had just seen a ghost. My Mom blamed it on the flu or some other seasonal bug in front of the company then came up and calmed me down by stroking my hair. It never bothered me when she touched me. It was a nice sensation, like the smell of cotton candy at the circus. I’d fall asleep only to wake up having forgotten what frightened me so much in the first place. It didn’t screw me up because I could never remember the details for more than a day. Still it was confusing and I couldn’t understand why my parents never talked about the incidents or even punished me. I sensed they knew something that I didn’t and they couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me.

  Apart from seeing other people’s nightmares, I soon developed a few of my own. Most of the time I’d be in dark water like in a lake or a river; I was drowning but never did. I saw a face below me in the depths. She had the same skin color as me and I suspected it might be my birth mother. She looked calm and she called to me with her eyes. I tried to swim to her. No matter how much I struggled, she only seemed to get farther and farther away. Then I woke up.

  By the time I turned five, the face in the water haunted my sleep and obsessed my daydreams. That August my parents took me to a lake in upstate New York for summer vacation. It was a nice cottage with beachfront, a swing under a big old tree and a fire pit to roast marshmallows at night. I paddled in the lake for hours every day with those inflatable water wings under my mother’s watchful eye

  I hadn’t learned to open my eyes in the water yet so I couldn’t see if it looked like my nightmare down there. I spent half my vacation practicing in a bucket until I could keep them open without blinking. One day I decided to search for the woman in my dreams. I hugged my mother and left her in the kitchen preparing lunch. At the time, I barely weighed fifty pounds soaking wet so I figured that I needed some help. I loaded up my pockets with a bunch of stones about the size of my palm. The shore was dotted with them. I couldn’t really judge how many I needed, so I shoved a few more down my pants just in case. Then I waddled like a duck to the end of the dock and jumped in, as simple as that!

  The first part was easy. Almost fun, like when you slide down in the bathtub and stick your head under. The stones did a great job and before I knew it, I was sitting on the bottom looking at a bunch of rusty tin cans and a slime covered rubber tire. I spun around in a circle real proud of my new aquatic vision, but the woman wasn’t there. I wondered if she only came at night like in my dreams and perhaps I needed to try again after dinner. That seemed the best solution. It was time to get out.

  Problem was with the weight of the rocks; I couldn’t even stand let alone swim to the surface. I panicked. My lungs were already bursting and screaming would only make things worse. I guess I wouldn’t even be here to tell the tale if that nice Mr. Sampson hadn’t been taking a stroll and seen me jump in. All of a sudden, the water above me exploded and a black man stared me in the face just before he wrapped his arms around me. He was a good person and there weren’t any nightmares to see, only decency, loyalty and strength. He pulled me to the surface. He had to work at it somewhat and it wasn’t until I lay on the shore coughing and sputtering that he noticed all the stones.

  “I better get rid of these before your parents come,” he said as he pitched most of them into the water just as my Mom raced down the hill yelling my name hysterically.

  “You won’t be doing anything crazy like that again, will you?” he admonished me. “It isn’t right to test the Gods,” he sternly warned as he stepped back to let my Mom scoop me up in a soggy bear hug.

  Never saw him again after that but I’ll always remember his face and what he said about testing the Gods. I’m certain he said Gods, as in more than one. So much so that I went searching in the Bible, but the only times it mentioned Gods were in a bad way. The people with the funny names who wrote the thing seemed very serious about there only being one God and all. Other than that “s” and the tanning I got from my Dad for playing on the dock, I escaped any serious consequences for my dumb stunt. Not surprising, it took me years to build up the courage to get back into the water.

  When I was seven, I had a fight with one of the kids at school. I had been taking karate already for two years so I was confident in a scrap. He’d been bullying a younger kid and I decided to step in. One of the teacher’s saw us brawling and made a report. The principal called my mother. The next day I knew why I had gotten into Billy’s face during recess because a week earlier I started to keep a diary. Every afternoon when I did my homework, I took a few minutes to write down anything I saw, heard or imagined that day. When I woke up the next morning, I still wouldn’t remember anything but all I had to do was flip through my diary to know why I had punched someone in the nose. That notebook changed everything.

  My Dad served in the marines and he always encouraged my interest in karate. He met my Sensei, David, in the first Gulf War. David was my hero. He could smash bricks with his bare hands and all those things but he wouldn’t hurt a fly. He never let on that my newly discovered sense of schoolyard justice worried him but he did remind me that I should only use karate in self-defense. He n
ever asked me about the fights or made a judgment. I appreciated that he didn’t.

  Without a doubt, I was his favorite and he devoted a lot of time to me. Everyone else was white but I didn’t believe he thought I needed to defend myself more because of the color of my skin. Something else motivated him. He made himself available whenever I wanted to talk and we frequently travelled to tournaments together. I thought of him as my best friend. When he grabbed me to demonstrate a hold or to practice a move, I couldn’t pick up on many of his thoughts. Maybe he had never done anything bad. I only sensed concern that I should turn into a good person. I was determined to make him proud of me. On my eighth birthday, he told me that within a year I’d be able to try for my black belt. If I passed the test, I’d be the youngest in the history of the dojo.

  “What about defending others?” I asked him one day.

  “It takes experience to know when getting involved is a good or a bad thing,” he told me. “You may believe you know what is right but you shouldn’t use your gifts to judge others.”

  When he said gifts, I felt that he referred to more than my karate skills. I never did get my black belt and most of it had to do with the day I broke Vince Natale’s jaw in two places and sent him to the ER. I wasn’t sorry and would do it again if I had to.

  Vince was three years older and much bigger but the solid sidekick I landed knocked him right out. It was sweet! I heard the sound of my heel making contact with the bone. Sure, I knew it was wrong to use karate as an aggressor but Vince was a serial bully and he deserved having his face rearranged. For two years, he’d terrorized the younger kids, grabbing their Nintendo’s, sneakers, lunch money or anything else of value. Lately, he’d graduated to forcing them to steal cash from their parents at home. If they refused, they’d get a nasty beating.

  Just last week, he broke Drew Summerland’s arm and got away with it. He had her so terrified; she told her parents that she fell off her bike on the way home from school. The day of our fight in the schoolyard, Vince bumped into me during recess and I knew right away that he was planning to light one of the younger student’s uniform on fire just to teach him a lesson. He’d bought a can of lighter fluid at the corner store and would have torched the kid if I hadn’t put him out of action. That night after a spanking from my father, I made certain to note everything in my diary before I went to bed so I’d remember why I’d kicked Vince in the first place. This time there’d be plenty of questions.

  Vince’s parents threatened to press charges because of the whole karate thing but the Principal talked them out of it by showing them a video of Vince bullying a second grader that one of his buddies posted on the internet like an idiot. My parents agreed to send me to five sessions with a school psychologist in order to avoid a suspension. The appointments were after school and it meant I’d miss karate. I wondered if my Dad and David made certain the times coincided as punishment.

  I never knew but from that day onward, my relationship with David changed. He seemed real disappointed and because of the police report, he never put my name forward for the black belt. Without his written recommendation as my Sensei, it was impossible. I never blamed him but there was a distance between us after that and although I would continue with the classes, the friendship never recovered.

  Life as a human YouTube for the wicked, the weird and the downright wretched could screw up any kid, even without the thing with the streetlights. I first noticed it when I was nine. My Mom sent me to the corner store for milk one evening in November after dark. It wasn’t irresponsible of her or anything like that since we lived in a nice safe neighborhood.

  She might not have felt so confident if she knew what I did about Mr. Pasquale in number 17; or about the young blonde Mrs. Badowski across the street who was well on the way to bankrupting her husband buying expensive lingerie online. She insisted on trying the skimpy items on right there in front of the deliveryman who always accepted her offer to stay for coffee, and more! I knew all of this because she couldn’t resist giving me a kiss on the cheek whenever she saw me.

  Anyway, I go strolling down the street minding my own business when the second light from the corner of Main Street, the one in front of Tommy Skokan’s house, blew out as if someone had pulled the plug right when I walked underneath! I might have considered it a coincidence if the same thing hadn’t happened at a different spot two days later coming home after karate. I tried taking detours but it only got worse. It was so bad by Christmas that Conn Edison had a repair truck parked permanently in front of the donut shop two blocks from my street. Eventually, I learned to swerve around the lights. Especially after I got a skateboard. It seemed that my capacity to fry the bulbs had a limited range.

  I didn’t have the same effect on fluorescent lights at school, thank goodness, or the smaller ones at home; especially those energy savers that look like a corkscrew. That is unless my emotions ran high or something like that, if you get my drift. Once I discovered masturbation, I had to keep spare bulbs in my bedside table drawer or do it in the dark. My personal paranormal activity really came to a head when I started to date at fifteen. Most of the girls at school found me attractive even if a bit weird. Years of karate lessons had sculpted my body lean and solid with an impressive six-pack.

  A month before my sixteenth birthday, Maria Fanelli snuck me into her bedroom while her parents slept downstairs. It kind of added to the excitement along with all that Catholic stuff. Everything went great until I got to home base and all she could think about was how much bigger Tyrone was; this dude who played football and looked like a black version of the Hulk. Hardly a turn on but she didn’t know that I could read her thoughts so I gamely plowed on so at least I could say I had lost my virginity.

  At what should have been the defining moment in my young male life, in the middle of my first ever, non-solo orgasm, the bedside light exploded, Maria screamed, my erection went south and her parents woke up. Seconds later, I snuck out the back door tugging on my jeans as I hopped toward the gate like someone in a three-legged sack race with an invisible partner. I almost fell into their swimming pool. It took me as long to take the plunge again with girls as it did to get back into the water after my near drowning.

  Around that time, I decided that my superhero fixation was a mistake. Sure, I’d divvied out justice like the time I painted the word ‘WIFEBEATER’ on Mr. Hanover’s homeroom blackboard and hid it with the pull-down map of the United States. He raised it in the middle of social studies class and within thirty seconds, a dozen copies appeared on Facebook. Even after the janitor came in and scrubbed it off, you could still see a faint outline for the rest of the semester.

  A month later, he resigned and never came back. Only problem, the security cameras mounted in the hallway recorded me entering the classroom first thing in the morning and they found the can of spray paint in my locker. I got six weeks detention for that stunt and my parents had to pay for the cleanup.

  My regular trips to the Principal’s office became a major problem so when I suddenly won a full scholarship to a private boarding school, my parents decided that a change in environment might help. I never applied or anything, which seemed strange to me. They told me it was probably an equality thing, me being black and all. It meant the end of karate, which sucked and I’d have to be a lot smarter about ragging on rich kids if I ever wanted to graduate from high school. Worst of all that was the last time I ever saw my Sensei, David. He closed the dojo shortly after I left. I couldn’t help but feel that I’d let him down. It bothered me more than I knew it should.

  Chapter Four

  Despite all my good intentions, it only took three months for me to be in trouble again. A video went viral among the student body showing a sixth grader in his school uniform jerking off to a porn movie. He was less than endowed, and I’m being generous here. What he lacked in size he made up for in passion; lots of moaning and groaning. Only thing, he sounded like a girl! The dude didn’t stand a chance. He became the butt of so
me pretty awful jokes about his micro-penis and everywhere he went the other students started to imitate his moans. After a week of torture, he hung himself at home with his school tie. He had just turned fourteen.

  We all frequented an internet café and video rental place a block from my new school. Many of the younger kids went there to surf the internet, especially in the absence of content filters on the machines. For most of the 5th and 6th graders, it meant their first chance to see pictures of naked chicks.

  The manager was cool and if he knew what was going on, he didn’t seem to mind. There were rumors that if you paid him a dollar, he would let you go into a private video booth at the back and watch real porn. Some days there was even a line up. Seems he had a hidden camera in the booth and filmed all the young guys doing what came natural to any twelve or thirteen year old staring at hard-core sex for the first time. He wasn’t a pedophile or anything just a clever businessman, and he´d figured out he could sell the videos to adult web sites. They proved so popular he was pulling in at least five hundred bucks every week.

  The filmmaker was clever and nothing in the videos gave away the location. He always made a point of being out front and visible when someone occupied the booth so nobody suspected him of being a peeper. Some students put it all together but nobody said anything. The tragic event didn’t seem to cut into his business and a few guys even went in there hoping that getting their junk on the internet might make them popular with the girls. I was sick thinking that another kid might be outed in public as a wanker and I was determined to do something about it.

  If my sudden interest in porn surprised the video guy, he didn’t show it and only warned, “Don’t make a mess on the floor.”