“Wonderful revelations from this young man,” says Egon. “History-making.”
I know something about Scott Dillard’s history-making-ness. In car, I was reading Egon’s newsletter,
Egypt Regained for You
, and sandwiched between appeals for contributions, he provides news items about the museum. “Record Attendances in March,” et cetera. There’s a major story about Scott Dillard, “One of our two wonderful Resident Scholars. Dr. Dillard, newly hired at Yale to be Focus Professor of Ancient Egyptian History. He will be with us for two months. We are eagerly anticipating his revelations about NEFERTITI. A big celebration for this. Tickets soon.”
The other Resident Scholar, it seems, is Rita Claus, the crazy lady who thinks my dad is a murderer.
Scott looks at Egon. If I knew Scott better, I’d say the glance was pitying.
We go on into Egon’s house, which is big and overstuffed. Like the museum, it contains a lot of slate and marble; it also has wall paintings that resemble tomb wall paintings, chairs that look like the ones in a tomb, couches copied from Tutankhamen’s collection. Everything is red, gold, or peacock blue; straight-backed; and signaling,
I am ferociously uncomfortable
. Tomb furniture was designed for the next life, not to be sat on by living people, or at least not modern ones. The Egyptians seem to have had better posture than we do.
The room is bathed in pink light from recessed overhead fixtures. I glance at Scott D. under this romantic illumination. He still looks handsome and I remember how much I hated that Habitat guy.
“How very fortunate,” Egon enthuses over dinner, “to have my two foremost scholars here together. And how much I hope to compensate, dear Dr. Day, for your awful experiences. I cannot explain. The sheriff is usually a perfect gentleman. And Rita—Dr. Claus—well. She has been feeling ill.”
Daddy is bland. He takes another piece of chicken, he wipes his hands on a linen napkin. He says that he would like to see his coffin lid.
And eventually, everyone being sated on chicken and fried doohickies dipped in powdered sugar, we form a short trail behind Egon, headed for the museum and its Edward Day Room.
My father likes having everyone’s attention. “Someone was trying to kill that man,” he announces as we start walking.
“Dr. Day, you
must
tell me,” and “What exactly did you see?” Egon tries, reaching for Daddy’s arm.
But Daddy shrugs him off. “The ways are strange,” he declaims.
Egon is plaintive. “Oh, dear. I feel so very lost.”
The museum is approached from Egon’s house by an underground passage.
Egon cheers up when he gets to demonstrate this. “It was a special idea of hers.”
She
is his grandmother, Gudrun Rothskellar, a lady whose portrait appears on bottle labels as lantern-jawed, ferret-eyed, and wearing a lace cap with ears. Gudrun, I have heard, made a bundle off a restorative tonic for women and left her fortune to Egon. “Very interested in Egypt,” he says now. “Very spiritual. In touch with meaningful forces.” He gestures. “The niches were her idea.”
This section of the underground passage is lined with open apertures that look like the ones in the catacombs in Paris. The Paris catacomb niches contain bodies, most visibly skulls. These openings hold Egyptian pottery plus some objects that look like skulls but are, I hope, ceramics. The walls are calcined an attractive shade of blue-green. There are candleholders at intervals whose candles end in crimped electric flames.
Scott gestures at the pottery. “A couple of good things here, Egon.”
“The ka will be distressed,” my father says.
Egon says, “I worry about earthquakes.”
My father says he is on his way to see his coffin lid.
Egon says, “You know, she is buried in the basement.” I gather that we are back on the subject of his grandmother. “In a special sublevel. A truly beautiful tomb. A marble structure on top, but inside many aspects of the New Kingdom. We must do a tour. I don’t usually invite people for tours.”
We pop up inside the museum’s main gallery via a flight of stairs and a mahogany coat closet. Egon produces a remote that gets the lights on.
I decide I like the museum better when there’s nobody else here. The mummy and decayed wrappings exhibits seem less staged minus the lines of schoolkids making remarks like, “Yech. Where’s his eyes?” and “I bet when they take that glass lid off, it really smells.” The museum has some decent art objects that show up now. I stop to admire a bronze mirror with a handle shaped like a lotus plant.
“Excellent proportions. New Kingdom,” Scott remarks of the mirror.
He has begun acting interested in me, that business of looking to see if I’m listening, aiming his remarks my way. But he doesn’t get too close, which is a plus. I dislike men who stand too close.
We proceed at a leisurely pace through the big gallery, where I stop to admire a cartonnage of a cheerful fat lady, a great favorite of Daddy’s. A cartonnage is a mummy encased in plaster and painted to look like the person inside; this one has black bangs and a jaunty smile and sports too much mascara. She’s cheap and appealing. She looks like a cocktail waitress.
“Late. Not very fine,” Scott pronounces, smiling my way and missing the whole idea.
I start to explain that the lack of finesse is a big part of the charm, and am deciding not to do this when we’re interrupted by a commotion in the next room, Egon’s voice and my father’s voice. Daddy sounding like his old professor-self, “An intrusion. Appalling,” and Egon making birdlike squawks.
When we get there, Egon has become articulate. “No one had access. No one.”
We’re in the Edward Day Room; I can’t see anything amiss except for Egon jittering and waving his arms and my father standing erect and angry, like the captain of the ship.
Egon gesticulates, “Truly, Dr. Day, I do not understand.”
“Undo it,” commands my dad.
I look at my father’s coffin lid case and then inside it; I’m at first baffled. Everything seems okay; the coffin lid itself inclines in its usual place, appearing old, scratched, and unimpressive; the transparent shell above it shines. “There,” Daddy says, pointing.
And yes, there, on the lower corner of the lid, certainly is something that ought not to be present. A little intruder. A creepie-crawlie. “Oh,” I offer cheerfully, “a bug.”
This is met by silence from Egon and cries of “No, no,” from my dad.
“It crawled in there to die,” I continue. And then I look more closely. This little thing is not a bug but a snake, small and tightly curled, more a worm than a snake, except for a very definite snake’s head. And it hasn’t crawled anywhere for a while; it’s encased in plastic. It’s one of those stupid charm souvenirs they sell at tourist stands in places like Fisherman’s Wharf. A tiny red snake in a blob of plastic. A strip of paper is Scotch-taped onto it. By squinting, I can see that the paper contains hieroglyphs. I identify a couple of them; I remember that the bird with its tail down is a negative image.
“Red is bad,” a voice says from behind my shoulder. “Bad fortune. Red is the death color.”
The voice is not Scott’s, being an octave higher; I turn and identify. The voice belongs to Rita, the crazy lady who thinks my father is a killer. Also, one of the museum’s Resident Scholars.
She wears a purple sweater and silver leather pants. Her black hair stands up almost straight.
“Oh, hell,” Scott says in her direction.
Egon gives her a thoughtful glance and turns back to the display case. “But how on earth . . .” He points at a shiny, professional-looking lock. “The case is secured. The guard and I have the keys. She is a reliable guard.”
“A house is open to him who has goods in his hand,” my father offers in a tight voice.
“Dear Dr. Day.” Egon sounds alarmed. “What
can
you mean?”
“Do you know, a person was trying to kill him?”
“You were,” Rita says.
Scott puts his hand on Daddy’s shoulder. “What person?” he asks. “Is the person here?”
My father says, “We must get my coffin lid case open.”
“What was the person wearing, Ed?”
Daddy doesn’t answer, but he pats Scott’s hand where it rests on his shoulder.
Scott turns to Egon. “You’ve got the key on you?”
Rita says, “Y’know what? Somebody should do that case for fingerprints.”
I’ve been thinking this, too, but now, looking hard, I can see that the surface is squeaky clean.
It comes up easily. Apparently, it’s very light.
And inside sits the nasty little plastic souvenir.
“Hey, hold it,” I call out, fishing in my pocket for a Kleenex to protect any fingerprints on the snake thing.
But already it’s too late. Egon, who is grasping the case with one hand, has reached under it with the other hand.
Rita mutters about a setup.
I’m not going to slip into suspecting Egon, who probably hasn’t even heard of fingerprints. He shakes the plastic blob to get the paper extended and starts trying to read it, moving his lips and frowning.
“Apep, the evil god,” my father says, watching the plastic snake. “Very strong. Dangerous. There should be a talisman against it.”
Scott takes the snake blob out of Egon’s hand. He squints at the paper. “
Arhoo
,” he reads. “Pain.” He starts waving one hand, something I guess he does when he concentrates. “Yes. A familiar inscription. A vulture, a reed shelter, a quail chick, a sparrow with tail feathers down; this denoting pain because . . .” He stops and looks at me. “Sorry. There I go again.”
I think at him,
Someone, back in your past, has objected to your lecturing
.
I want to say, No, keep it up, so I can hear the story. What happens? The vulture hides in the reed shelter and catches the quail chick?
Those hieroglyphs are a lot more interesting than our predictable, straight-line, easily-carved-on-monuments Roman alphabet.
Rita says, “Pain? Brilliant, mister, what do
you
know about pain?” Her eyes are half-closed. I think maybe Rita takes medication, and has been getting the dosage wrong.
The protective shell is now lying on the floor, upside down. I start to circle the coffin-stand, scanning for other nasty things left inside. The room is silent except for the hiss of the climate-control machine and a low intermittent recital from Egon: “Truly, Dr. Day, I cannot imagine. Believe me, we will do everything . . .”
“Very bad,” says my father. “Red, especially. Someone sending pain.” Question crimps his face. “But Carla, I already have pain.”
I look at him, my gentle, distressed father. What do I say?
No, you don’t. It’ll be okay. Maybe you’ll forget about it
? I walk over to hold his hand, which dangles at his side.
And then after about a minute it happens. I get a bolt of inspiration, straight from the goddess. “But you
can
do something. You can say a spell. You know a lot of spells, good ones, spells against sorrow. You could recite a spell against the snake.” I’m squeezing his hand as I talk.
Daddy’s face starts to clear. “Why, of course I could.”
“You can say one now,” I emote. “It will cleanse everything.”
Egon latches on to this. “Oh, this is going to be so interesting. I feel so privileged.”
“One of the
Book of the Dead
spells?” Scott asks. “Of course, they were for the other world, but that should be okay.”
“And it will protect the whole collection. The entire museum.” Egon affects a singsong intonation. He gets excited. He tosses his white mane.
Rita sits down on the floor.
I seem to be the only one who notices that my father has deflated, shoulders slumped. I understand why. He’s having an Alzheimer’s fugue, reaching back into his foggy gray memory bank and finding nothing. No spell. No words. Just shifting space.
Well, I used to know some spells. I learned them just from listening to him and a few stuck. I try a few beginnings:
Oh you who wait at night
. . .
oh you out of the darkness
. . . Not right.
Most of my knowledge of Egyptian poetry dates back to our night sessions in the camp in Thebes. Daddy, me, and Rob (I was fifteen years old) sitting around a little fire, launching Ancient Egyptian poetry quotes at each other, trying to make a story of them. Ancient Egyptian poetry is good for this sort of thing, being very free-form and surreal; our stories were versions of comic book serials or science fiction movies.
The quote I want now would have been at the end of the story we were inventing, at the time when the good forces are getting rid of the evil ones, cursing them out, the way Daddy did Sheriff Munro earlier today, and got arrested for it. And now he can’t remember that power he evoked against the sheriff just this morning.
“Bullshit,” Rita fires up from her seat on the floor. Maybe that’s a pretty good spell.
I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to get the right setting to bring back a quote. It’s evening, along the street is a Theban ruin, night drops down suddenly; there’s a smell of cold decayed buildings but the sand’s still warm under my butt; the fire spreads its tang of singed wood scraps . . . And yep, I have it.
“
Get back! Crawl away! Get away from me, you creature!
”
That’s a spell to overcome a rerek-snake, a special divine being with a special history, but it will do for this occasion.
Scott backs me up. “Hey, great!”
“Why, yes,” my father says, “why certainly.” He stands up straight; his face comes alive; he picks up the recitation. “
Go, be drowned in the lake of the abyss, in that place where your father has set aside for you
. . .” He pauses here; obviously there’s another problem. “But I should be doing this outside. It is for a cleansing of the whole building. All of the surroundings. I should be outside in the sunlight.”