The Book of the Dead (26 page)

A white line disappears.

“Remind me why we became friends?” I say quietly enough that only Amunet can hear me.

“Because we were either too rich, or too weird to be friends with anyone else at school. Except you.” She sniffs, and then smiles. “You were the one member of this group that brought us some normality.”

I am normal. Amunet Kebechet has just damned me to an eternity of faint praise. I find myself wishing fervently for reincarnation. And that’s when I spot them.

The canopic jars.

The canopic jars that have just been on
BBC News 24
. Displayed on a bookshelf behind Amunet.

“How did you come by those?” I ask casually.

“Just keeping them for a friend.” Jeremy smiles like a man who has just shat his pants and is trying to act like nothing is wrong. “He said they were props for a film he’s making.” Jeremy is many things, but a good liar isn’t one of them.

“Just pretend that I’m police for a minute,” I say, “and that I can smell bullshit a mile off.” Jeremy becomes pale. I set my wine glass down.

“They,” Jeremy points at the screen, “were going to smuggle all this charlie into Egypt in those jars. But the museum freaked out when the jars went missing. We were stuck with stolen artefacts and more coke than Pablo Escobar.”

Yvonne is looking up at the shelves with a looking of growing horror on her face.

“That is some overly complicated scheming, Jeremy,” I say.

“Apparently so.” He actually manages to look sheepish.

“Didn’t Moon say they keep lungs and intestines in those jars?” whispers Yvonne.

“Well, yeah,” says Jeremy, “but there was nothing in them when I stored the coke inside. Just a bit of grey dust.”

“Jeremy! You’re a fucking idiot.” I sound harsh, even to myself, but I can’t believe what he’s done.

“It was just
dust
,” he repeats, but the conviction has been pulled from him. Yvonne is crying, nose bleeding.

“You’ve just managed to cut your cocaine with a dead Pharaoh.” I want to laugh, but there’s only so much gallows humour I can stand.

“Moon, are you OK? You’re very quiet.”

She’s sitting on the floor, slumped against the couch, and has been throughout Jeremy’s confession. Her hands lay idle in her lap and her hair has come unwound from the usual chaos, lying about her face in its rainbow profusion.

“You will address me as Sobeknofru.” Amunet stands, but she is no longer the girl I knew from school. Her eyes are the deep brown of coffee, and the muted shadow that lingers on the wall behind her looks for all the world as if it has a canine head.

“We have come through a period of great disturbance and unrest, but I, and I alone will lead us out of these times of anarchy.”

“There haven’t been any riots in London for a couple of years now. It’s hardly ‘anarchy’,” grumbles Jeremy.

“I will succeed where my sister Ammenemes failed.”

Amunet, Moon, Sobeknofru, who ever she thinks she is right now, takes off her t-shirt, tying it around her head in an intricate knot.

“Moon, you’re really freaking me out,” says Yvonne, pressing a tissue to her bloody nose, “smoke some weed or something and have a lie down.”

“She’s right,” I say, “Just take a minute. There’s no knowing what you’ve just snorted. No wonder you’re a little spaced out.” But the words die on my lips as she turns to face me. She holds herself differently, gone is the art student slouch. The bored sneer has been replaced with an indignant and imperious look. Her hands are folded neatly together, rather than stuffed into the pockets of her jeans. My mouth goes dry as she stares at me.

“There is no Moon,” the voice that escapes Amunet’s lips bears a harsh accent, “only Sobeknofru. Let all regard me and promise loyalty. I am as fit to rule as any man.”

“That’s what Thatcher said,” says Jeremy, “and look how that ended.”

But it’s too late for humour. The three of them are indelibly marked with the fucked-upness of the canopic jars. Sobeknofru drifts to the kitchen with the gait of one who is sleepwalking.

“Not exactly challenging the patriarchy there, Soberk-nufferu, ruling from the kitchen and all.” Jeremy has rediscovered a seam of his usual bluster, but his confidence is short-lived as Sobeknofru re-enters the lounge with a stainless steel carving knife as long as her forearm.

“Moon! Put the knife down,” I say. I try to stand up. The prospect of tackling a coked-up, knife-wielding art student is not how I had hoped my Saturday night would play out. My legs refuse to obey. My arms feel as if they have been pressed to my sides.

Jeremy remains standing, but has sagged, like a man collapsing in on himself. Yvonne has covered her face with her hands, crying over and over, which means she doesn’t see the knife plunge into her chest.

“Moon, no!” I plead, but it’s done. I try to move but my legs are numb, arms leaden, chest constricted with fear and helplessness.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

The blade is bathed in crimson to the hilt. Yvonne’s arms fall to her side, her mouth falling open in an anguished silent howl. A pool of blood is staining the carpet red, matching Moon’s arms, bloodied to the elbows like evening gloves. Jeremy collapses to the floor, crawling behind the couch as expletives wither on his lips.

“I will have loyalty,” whispers Sobeknoferu.

“I can’t move,” I breathe.

“Sorry,” cries Jeremy, “I put diazepam in the wine. I thought it would be funny.”

His voice is that of a small boy, hiding behind the couch from the feature film monster. Except the monster in our midst is no monster at all. She is a woman, a woman who lived a few thousand years ago. A woman called Sobeknoferu.

Or an Egyptian art student having a massive reaction to her first line of coke.

Yvonne bleeds out with a whimper; her eyes grow dim and unfocused.

“Christ, Moon, what have you done?”

The television continues to flicker, Amunet is lit in a spectral blue that only adds to the strange atmosphere. She takes up the remote, dropped by Jeremy in his flight behind the sofa. A flick of her wrist and the television goes black; the room is plunged into darkness.

I struggle to stand, but can only stumble forwards out of the chair, landing on my knees. The room is silent except for the ragged breathing of Jeremy behind the couch. I limply drag myself forwards and promptly ram my shoulder on the coffee table. My hand presses into something wet, Yvonne’s blood.

Jeremy is whimpering loudly on each exhalation, like a beaten dog. It is the worst sound I have ever heard, made all the more so for the fact it comes from Jeremy.

Jeremy the brash, the confident.

Jeremy the lad, unbeatably assured.

There’s no way to adequately describe the sound of a knife parting flesh, but I hear it again.

I will have loyalty.
The words are like beads of poison on the velvet darkness.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Jeremy exhales one last time. And then the room is silent.

I am frozen again, the diazepam in my body has combined with the fear that makes me curl up fetal in the blood of a friend. I am supine and vulnerable, daring not to breathe, my ears straining for the footfalls that bring Moon-as-Sobeknoferu ever closer. I can feel the knife slipping between my ribs, puncturing my lungs, or carving out my heart.

I wait in the darkness.

I wait in the dark.

I wait.

And that’s how they find me the following day.

The neighbours below complained when the ceiling plaster began to drip blood. There are a lot of difficult questions that need answering, some from colleagues I know. The greatest of these questions is “where is Amunet Kebechet?”

I have no answers for them.

Nor can I tell them why I was spared.

They have two corpses, a kitchen knife with unidentified prints, a table loaded with cocaine, and my admission that Jeremy was in possession of the canopic jars. The canopic jars which are still missing, along with Amunet.

Months later, not long after I have resumed active service, I receive a letter from Egypt. The paper is of a fine tooth and the envelope smells of perfume. The letter bears one single line of handwriting, undoubtedly hers.

There is none more loyal than you.

Made clean, kept clean, wrapped dust-proof.

An Energy-Rich Candy Made in the Great City of Chicago!

Don’t confuse us with the competition!

***

“Chet,” bellows someone from the factory floor. “Chet, you got a package and Miss Klein’s signing for it, but you gotta come and pay the freight, cause your dad went and sent it COD.”

Chet looks up from the label copy on his desk, and groans. It’s 1924, and he’s twenty-six years old. Green as goat milk. Got a cavity in one of his teeth. He pushes his tongue into the problem. This is his father’s factory, the family fortune at stake, so he’s here, paper-collared into confectionary. He’s sick of gellies and chocobars, and sick of sweet. He snaps his suspenders against his flat stomach, a creation of calisthenics. His dad’s stout as Santa Claus, but Chet’ll be double-damned if abdomen will be his inheritance.

Chet Savor’s a poet. He could be the next Keats, but no: here he is, doomed to vats and batter. The only comfort is that Hart Crane’s father is a candy maker too, the inventor of
Life-Savers: For That Stormy Breath!
It doesn’t keep Crane from writing the poems over which Chet pores at night.

It’s winter, and the factory is a sieve open to the winds of the Arctic. Workers skate on sugared shoes. There’s an ice storm coming over the Great Lakes. The ink keeps freezing in Chet’s pen, and in any case, there’s no inspiration here. He could be in a speakeasy dancing the Charleston for all the writing he’s getting done.

Below him, there’s a swarm of workers in unladylike coveralls, scarves and woollen sweaters. Business is booming. Everyone wants a bite of the bars made here:
The Three Bears
and
The Chicken Dinner
,
The Old King Tut
and
The Abba-Zabba!

Chicago, as far as Chet’s father is concerned, is a Duat of delights, and the factory is a candyland of nougat and nuts, condensed milk and pots of crystallizing honey, and even a coop of chickens, egg-laying amidst heat lamps. Chet has to be vigilant: the factory girls constantly try to warm their hands on the hens.

He deserves a secretary, he does. He’s got no one to help him. His older brother died in France, and what should have been Chet’s post-collegiate bohemia became a sticky servitude.
SAVOR’S SWEETS SINCE 1892 IN THE CANDY CAPITOL OF THE WORLD!
Chet’s got no girlfriend, and isn’t likely to get one, even though this factory is full of girls. None of them are poets. None of them are muses. They’re forbidden anyway. His father, for all his eccentricity, has rules.

Chet grimaces: forbidden girls bustling, forbidden girls on coffee-break. Women suddenly think they can work their own hours. Dippers and piece-workers, packers and wrappers: none of them see him as boss. Certainly not Miss Klein, his dad’s secretary. He could dictate such poems to her if she’d give him his due. He could.

There’s a great, battered wooden crate in the loading bay, plastered with paper that shows it’s been around the world. The delivery service toe taps, waiting for Chet to pay for the postage, and it’s not cheap. He has to ferret around in his dad’s desk drawers, finally emerging with a handful of crumpled bills. Some kind of mixer, maybe. A marble slab, or a copper bathtub with a giant whisk attachment. He kicks the crate but it doesn’t budge.

“Kicking won’t open it,” says Miss Klein, her voice an ice cube chilling the blood of idiots. “It’s nailed.”

“I’m not trying to open it,” lies Chet. His big toe feels broken.

Miss Klein’s hair is pinned with pointy black combs into two tight buns over her ears. Her glasses are leftovers from Queen Victoria. Her dress is bluish-black and jet-buttoned. She might as well be in mourning. She’s paid $19.45 every week, and this irks Chet into a fret. He makes exactly the same amount. As well, she calls him “Young Mr. Savor.” He can’t protest. In principal, the title is perfectly correct.

“Is my dad coming home this week?” he asks Miss Klein. “He didn’t mention this delivery.”

The Senior Mr. Savor (
né
Savorsky) buys things without trying them. Devices fill the factory’s back room: lolly engines, vacuum kettles, twist-makers and chocolate smashers. Chet’s dad travels by ship and train, posting confection innovations home for Chet to suffer. He appears in person every few months, unannounced, stouter and happier than before, his waistcoat and cases stuffed with saffron taffy, suets made of sesame seeds, chewy lumps of lemon zest pulverized with maple sap, tiny blue eggs filled with candied yolk presented together with a repulsive jar of Chinese bird’s nest jelly made from the filthy nest of a swiftlet. Chet shudders at the memory of the texture, the gloppy sweetness, the knowledge that he was eating something wrested from the interior of a cave.

Miss Klein clicks away from the crate, her black hips twitching. He can see the lumpy buttons of her garters through the dress. There’s something insect about her. The pinched waist, the long fingers. She’s too tall, and he’s not a small man. He’s had to invest in a new pair of shoes, with discreet lifts in their soles.

When Miss Klein types, she clacks and pings so quickly he feels his heart trying to align with her staccato. She’s his age, but seems a thousand. She could be a pretty girl if she’d smile, but she never does. She could be anything but this. She doesn’t even like candy. She doesn’t paint her face. She’s knife-boned, her eyebrows like licorice whips.

“Where are you going, Miss Klein?” he asks. He clears his throat. He’s been alone in the upper office too long, speaking the obscure rhythms of wrappers.

“To get a hammer,” she says, and clicks her tongue. “You’re just as useless as your dad said you’d be, Young Mr. Savor.”

“Will you please just call me Mr. Savor?” he asks for the hundredth time.

“That’s your father’s name. And you know he’s not coming in this week. He’s visiting the nougatiers.”

Nougatiers
. His father speaks a dictionary set’s worth of invented terms for candy-making.
Cherrinators
for the people who make the marinated filling of the
Red Rose
bars.
Pollinificators
for the honey-suppliers.

He fiddles at one of the boards, pinching a finger beneath it. He thinks he hears something moving inside. Surely not. His father wouldn’t arrange delivery of a cow or goat, would he? And if he had, it’d be marked with caution tapes. The crate is large enough to contain a piano. He indulges thoughts of a rhinoceros or yak.

“Now, then,” Miss Klein says, flipping the hammer to the claw side, and prying a nail free. “Let’s get you open.”

The sound again, a scratching.

“Do you hear that?” Chet is suddenly nauseous. It’ll be bugs. There’ll be an infestation. They’ll pour out into the candy factory, a million roaches and tarantulas, and Miss Klein will wriggle her fingers and make the swarm obey. He feels an exquisitely painful poem rising inside him. A villanelle on the skyscraping height of Miss Klein, a few lines regarding spiders soaked in caramel. He finds a stub in his pocket, licks a pencil tip.

Miss Klein wrests a plank from the end of the crate.

“I hear it, of course I do. I’m not deaf, am I? Something’s in there. Open the letter and make yourself useful, why don’t you?”

Chet sees the envelope pushed beneath that plank, the gaudy monogrammed stationary, his father’s distinctive hand.

CHET!!!
Always the double underlines and strings of exclamation points. He sighs and breaks the seal.

Chet – Met this in Cairo and found it
terrifically interesting
. BE WARY when you open!!!! Happy Returns, Your Dad.

Unbearable man. Chet sucks his tooth. Soon he’ll be nothing but an absence.

Miss Klein has managed to remove another five boards in the time it took him to read the letter. She pushes hair off her face, bends at the waist, and buries her top half in the crate. Chet assesses her from behind, and sighs. No manners. Any proper woman would ask for help. She’s nearly somersaulted into the crate. She flings out handfuls of excelsior. They drift down around Chet, and he sneezes.

“Well? What’s it say?”

“It says: be wary when you open it,” Chet says, and sighs. “Maybe he’s sent us a tiger. He says he got it in Egypt.”

“There aren’t any tigers in Egypt,” Miss Klein says, her voice muffled. Chet looks around, making sure there are escape routes. Last time his father sent a package, it contained some arcane artificial sweetener that burst into flames, and scalded off Chet’s eyebrows, just after he’d stupidly put a spoonful of it in his mouth and swallowed. He was doomed to days of quelling internal explosions with
Dover’s Powder.

That scratching again. And a knocking. Knocking in a rhythm. The sound reminds Chet of his mother, the way she’d knock when they were paying a call to someone’s house. A knock with an accusation of bad directions included in it. A knock to say: “where is the butler, then, and how have you failed me?” And Chet, always skulking beside her, trying in vain to convince her to join the modern world. Of course, now she has. She’s been in India for three years, and he’s heard nothing from her. Nor has his father. “Your mother,” his father says fondly, and that is all he’s ever said about it. Chet’s mother is having his Bohemia.

“Maybe we should wait for my dad to get back into town,” Chet says. “I’m not sure what this is. I don’t trust him. It might explode again.”

Miss Klein pops up, one whole cinnamon bun of hair now unpinned, her glasses askew.

“For heaven’s sake, Young Mr. Savor,” she says. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were scared.”

Her eyes are the color of the butterscotch candies his father makes to trick Prohibition-pained consumers into thinking they’re getting a sip of something better than syrup. Her hair trickles down from its pins like dipping chocolate drizzling onto a slab. He must be delirious, but suddenly he thinks Miss Klein is more than meets the eye. A chocolate-covered ant. That’s the vision he has. The crunch of a carapace, just beneath a melting richness. The ooze of caramel beneath that crunch. Oh, what is he inventing? What horrible confection?

He gags again, and Miss Klein looks sharply up at him. Oh dear. He’s coming down with something. Likely, he needs a tonic.

He takes off his jacket, rolls up his shirtsleeves, and bends into the crate to avoid looking at her. There’s a smell there, as he digs in the shavings, a deep and earthy sweetness, something quite different from the rest of the factory’s sweet smells, and at last, his fingertips graze something hard.

Scratches from the inside, as he scratches at the outside.

A sharper scent now, and he inhales it in a delirium before he realizes it’s her. Miss Klein, her own perfume, sweat, warm woollen stockings, secrets. He breathes through his mouth, trying to forget he ever smelled it.

The ground in the delivery bay is covered in wood shavings and planks. Before him, in the rubble, is something he hadn’t at all expected, though he should have.

“Oh dear,” he says. Should he send the workers home? Stop the dipping and the wrapping? Unfondant the crèmes?

“Hello,” says the sarcophagus. It’s a quiet voice, a polite one.

“Miss Klein,” Chet says, not looking at her.

“Chet,” she replies. It’s the first time she’s called him by his Christian name.

“Hello,” repeats the something inside the sarcophagus, and then knocks more forcefully at the inside. “Have I arrived in Chicago? The train was very uncomfortable, and before that, the ship. They kept me in the hold, though I was promised First Class passage. I shouldn’t be asked to endure rough seas. I’m not used to travel.”

Of course! A prank. His dad must be here somewhere, watching, shaking with laughter.

“What is it?” he asks Miss Klein. Who knows what his father might have put inside that case. A tiny crank-powered Peter Pan record player? “A parrot? A phonograph?”

His dad can only have stolen the sarcophagus. The gilded face, the smooth contours, the perfect and brilliantly painted beetles and animals. The news has been all Tutankhamen for two years now. Chet runs a finger over the carved face, the high cheekbones, the pursed lips. The sleek eyelids over wide black eyes. He can’t tell whether the face is male or female.

“It’s very cold in Chicago,” says the sarcophagus, conversationally. “I wasn’t expecting such cold, but I can feel it even in here. It’s better for me to be warmer. I’d like something boiling hot to drink.”

The claxon of the lunch alarm, and a surge of girls emerge from their stations, each with her waxed-paper provisions. Chet’s sweating through his shirt. The wind is coming in off the lake, and he sees the ice storm beginning. He tugs down the rolling door between the delivery bay and the factory, and as he does it, he wonders at his urgency. He wishes, not for the first time today, for a drink. What kind of prank is this? His father’s normal methods are itching powders and coiled paper snakes.

He hears the clicking of Miss Klein’s heels. When he turns his head, she’s on her knees before the abomination, hammer in hand. He wonders at how he hesitates to look.

“Well,” says Miss Klein, standing up, wiping her hands, one, then the other, on her skirt. “Well.”

She giggles, and startles at the sound, but then the noise of her own laughter sets her off into peals. After a moment, Chet laughs too, though he controls his mirth. It doesn’t do to laugh with a secretary. Miss Klein is nearly levitating. He takes another stop toward the sarcophagus, toward whatever hilarity she’s uncovered, and then stops.

Something is sitting up from inside it, slowly, as though unused to moving.

Someone wrapped entirely in bandages, and filling the air with the scent of honey. It’s as though they’ve been transported out of the city’s ice and into summer. The smell is overpowering, and Chet’s mouth waters. He grew up surrounded by sugar. He’s immune to it. This is more than sugar. This is ambrosial, desert flowers, white petals and spice, and when he inhales, he feels dizzy.

The someone’s head turns toward him. Bandaged hands testing fingers on the sides of the case. One bandaged leg extends gracefully into the air and stretches its toes.