Echoes

by Ellen Datlow

  Nine people stood in the general vicinity of that silent shape, chatting over the champagne and canapés being served by a young woman in the same style of white top and black slacks Ronny wore.

  All turned their eyes to me as I entered. A dark-haired, heavyset man in his late sixties at the centre of the group immediately hailed me with a cheerful wave and came forward. He wore a tuxedo, despite the semiformal attire stipulated.

  “Carmel—at last!—welcome to our soirée, our impromptu salon. Everyone, this is Carmel Reid, our independent expert on all things Egyptian.”

  I quashed a stab of dismay at the final remark, immediately gave my best smile and joined the gathering.

  “Hello, everyone,” I said, then, offering my hand, added: “Alan, how good to see you,” as if I had known him forever, careful to include the well-groomed woman in the salmon-pink gown who moved forward to join him moments later. “And Paula. It really is a pleasure to be invited. Thank you.”

  None of us missed a beat.

  “You’re welcome, dear. Thanks for coming at such short notice.”

  Alan Lovejoy then made the appropriate introductions. I’d developed a knack for matching names to recurring types: the Fashion Designer, the Architect, the Broker, the Transport Company/Security Company/Shipping Company Executive, the Project Manager, etc., but the purpose behind tonight’s gathering added an extra zest to wondering why each person actually had been chosen. My words to Suzanne came back: There’d have to be countless takers. I found no difficulty concentrating.

  First was Dr. Callum Jessup, a slight, very serious, greying man in his mid fifties with a long straight nose and close-cut beard who, Alan Lovejoy told me, was the official archaeologist presiding. His two aides were Fayer Das, a young, smartly dressed Indian man, and Janine Differ, wearing what was probably her very best suit and with her hair already gathered tightly back, clearly ready to assist.

  Then there was James Preston (late sixties, balding) and Leah Preston (coiffed, controlled but surprisingly easy in spite of it, definitely having fun), consigned to Company Director and Wife/Close Family Friends until revealed otherwise, probably accustomed to being part of whatever adventures their hosts came up with. I was simplifying, but this was the game after all.

  Next were David Latimer and John Coe, both in their midforties, the Twin Sharks, I decided, the former—the Dark Shark—narrow-faced and auburn-haired in plum-coloured jacket over black tee and slacks, a Digital Entrepreneur, I allowed, playing the game, the latter a kind of faux-blonde urban cowboy in an eighties Don Johnson–style lounge suit and string tie, anything from Louche Scion to Property Developer. Scant moments of small talk with them revealed that none other that Rosanna Carfi was preparing our meal tonight.

  After the usual deflections—“How do you know the Lovejoys?”/“Ah, you have to guess.”—I excused myself to check the view, and took my glass of champagne across to the window wall facing the towers of storm cloud rising pink, golden, and ever-deepening grey over the ocean to the east. It gave me a chance to track through the guest list again.

  Three kitchen and waitstaff including our chef (the as-yet-unseen Rosanna), three on the “official” archaeological team, to call it that, the Lovejoys as host and hostess, plus the mummy, left only four actual guests, with me as fifth, and who knew what special skills and insights the Prestons, David Latimer, and John Coe brought to the proceedings. They might simply be Close Family Friends too; they could equally have a vested interest known only to our hosts.

  It certainly wasn’t the usual dinner crisis I was accustomed to: thirteen that needed to be fourteen for whatever reason. This was fourteen in the house, not necessarily at table, though only if you counted the mummy. I’d ask about it when I had a chance.

  The meal itself began ten minutes later and was a splendid affair, well planned and beautifully prepared. After sautéed prawns in garlic with farro, green olives, and pistachios, the main course was a choice of barramundi, salad and aioli, or beef bourguignon with speck and potato puree, followed by chocolate macaron with burnt caramel and honeycomb. Champagne remained on offer, but there were excellent Hunter Valley reds and whites.

  I was seated facing the incredible vista over the ocean, and had glimpses of those mighty cloud castles filled with the sudden play of lightning. It made the meal an even more dramatic affair, though the special nature of the occasion was already doing that.

  Most of my signature skills weren’t required, of course. As experienced quatorzième, for instance, I knew never to be trapped into the round of introductions and backstory as other guests too often were. You only ever personalised the dinner guests to your immediate left and right, threw “cryptics” to any who quizzed from across the table.

  “Tell us about yourself, Carmel” was often how it went.

  And my retort, everything from a tediously glib “Best leave that for tomorrow’s tabloids, [insert name here]” to “Tonight a few recent indiscretions require that I remain Delphic in this regard, [insert name], until the unmasking at midnight.”

  “But we aren’t wearing masks” was a frequent reply.

  And my rejoinder: “Wine, wit, and wisdom. We’re always wearing masks.”

  Delivered in a way that was sufficiently self-deprecating as not to be flip.

  But this was different. While I was used to things happening on cue at these events, there was a tension here that flavoured everything.

  Once the dessert plates were cleared and coffee and glasses of Armagnac and Finnish Kijafa served, David Latimer—Dark Shark and Digital Entrepreneur—turned to me.

  “Carmel, this interest in Egyptology. What led to it, if I may ask?”

  I smiled. “Oh, being young and romantic, David. The usual things. Loving the art, the half-theriomorphic gods.”

  He smiled in turn. “Serves me right. Animal-headed, yes? But you never did time in the field.” There might have been the smallest slight in the remark, payback for using “theriomorphic” as I had.

  “Never did. Like I say, too young and romantic. Did it the hard way.”

  I expected him to continue with “So how did you come to be here tonight?” or “How do you know the Lovejoys?” but he stayed on theme, as if primed to direct things a certain way.

  “What one thing about the ancient Egyptians fascinates you the most?”

  Any number of answers would have sufficed, delivered with the right aplomb, but I chose a favourite and didn’t hesitate. “How they saw the soul as having five main parts. Particularly the part called the Sheut or Shadow.”

  “I’ve never heard about this. Please.”

  Again, no hesitation, not even a glance to Callum Jessup for moral support. “The better known parts are the Ba and the Ka—the personality and the vital spark. But there’s the Ib, the heart, the centre of self, the will, absolutely vital for the afterlife; hence the heart was the only organ buried with the body. Then there’s the Ren, the name protected within the magical rope of a cartouche so it would never vanish from human memory. Having your name obliterated or forgotten was a terrible thing. The last main part is the Sheut or Shadow, the part without which a person cannot exist. It’s often shown as a small black figurine. Some people—pharaohs, nobles, public figures—had theirs hidden away in a Shadow Box so it could never be taken and destroyed.”

  David Latimer looked suitably impressed. “Well, I never knew. Thank you.” He raised his glass of red in a salute.

  I smiled and raised my own.

  John Coe—Blonde Shark and Louche Scion—did likewise. “It seems unnecessarily complicated, doesn’t it? Like overelaboration for its own sake.”

  Hardly a comment I’d have expected from him.

  “Like tonight’s proceedings no doubt,” Leah Preston said, clearly enjoying the novelty of it all. This had to be a far cry from the usual round of corporate dinners she had to attend.

  It’s like they’re all following a bloody script, I decided.

  Alan Lovejoy had be
en listening with obvious pleasure, sitting with his back to the spectacular light show over the ocean, a vast tower of cumulonimbus flaring with lightning even as he raised his glass.

  “Friends, the centrepiece of this evening’s rather special event has made a long journey to be with us, so I’d like to propose a toast. Here’s to our silent guest of honour. Nemkheperef!”

  “Nemkheperef!” we all chorused, managing the unfamiliar name as best we could.

  Lovejoy set down his glass. “It’s a journey made even longer because of a most intriguing detour. He has come to us by way of one of the greatest scientific minds of the last two hundred years, the great Nikola Tesla.”

  John Coe couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Nikola Tesla owned a mummy?”

  “Sold it on to a dealer named Leo Morgenstern well before 1924. But yes.”

  “A royal mummy?” Callum Jessup asked. He was in my line of sight, and his face seemed drained of colour at the prospect of further improprieties to be committed on an artefact that had already been disinterred, exposed for others to see, then shipped across the world not once but at least twice. I could imagine similar expressions on the faces of Fayer Das and Janine Differ, out of sight to my left.

  Lovejoy reassured him. “How could it be, Callum? But beautifully preserved apparently. As I say, his name was—is—Nemkheperef.”

  John Coe was still coming to grips with the whole thing. “Tesla used it in his experiments?”

  “Tempting to think so, isn’t it, John? We just don’t know enough. But it has come to us—untampered with, I’ve been assured, never unwrapped—from Tesla’s facility at Wardencliffe. With it was this fascinating device.”

  On cue, Ronny stepped forward carrying a short metal cylinder and set it on the table in front of Lovejoy. The drum-shaped object was the size of a stubby 1950s vacuum cleaner and sat on two wedge-style feet. A two-metre lead fixed to a flat metal plate extended from one end, while an electrical cord fitted to the other was wound several times around the device. There was a single switch on the curved surface next to a simple vernier dial, but no other features that I could see.

  James Preston leaned in to examine it more closely. “What exactly does it do, Alan?”

  “We can’t be certain. It was in the wooden shipping crate in the locked room at Wardencliffe, tucked in right alongside the mummy. Maybe the plate at the end of that lead was to go over the mummy’s heart, but it wasn’t attached in any way when Morgenstern saw it. Needless to say, the power was switched off, the power lead unplugged.”

  Leah Preston had her hand to her throat. “Good heavens! The things people do!”

  Preston’s little laugh barely hid his concern. “It’s not his earthquake machine, I hope.”

  “Excuse me?” Lovejoy asked.

  “That device he’s supposed to have designed—the oscillator—that ultrasonic generator for creating sympathetic vibrations to bring down buildings and bridges.”

  David Latimer shook his head. “Goodness, James. It’s 2019, not 1919!”

  Preston gestured towards the mummy in the middle of the room. “David, look what we’re doing tonight. Pure 1919, if you ask me. Things haven’t changed all that much.”

  Lovejoy was enjoying the theatricality. “Oscillators! Earthquake machines! You’re overreacting, James.”

  But Preston wasn’t to be discouraged. “Tesla was up to something, Alan. Dr. Jessup, what can you tell us?”

  The archaeologist wasn’t sure what to say. “I’ve never heard anything like this about Tesla. It’s hard to know what he was trying to do.”

  I couldn’t be the only one thinking: resurrection! Raising the mummy’s ghost, its ancient spirit! What else was there? Testing residual galvanic responses didn’t begin to cover it. Nemkheperef’s musculature was leather and dust. And while a living human body was an organic electrical “machine,” the CPU harnessing that electricity—the brain—had been violently disposed of at mummification millennia ago. Tesla may have been a scientific genius and relentless inventor truly ahead of his time, but he was also of his time. What could he have been thinking?

  As if remembering Latimer’s earlier good-natured rebuke to Preston, Jessup then added: “Oh, and nonmuseum unwrapping parties were out of vogue by 1918. Things definitely have changed.”

  “But have they, Doctor?” Preston said. “We know about dark energy and dark matter, things like superstrings, quantum states and gravitational lensing, telomeres unravelling at the genetic level, a true purpose for the pineal gland, things we know enough about to know we know almost nothing about.”

  This one remark moved James Preston in an instant from Close Family Friend and mere Company Director to Research Analyst, Think Tank Adviser, and beyond, the sort of thrilling category-busting I loved most about my profession.

  “Your point, James?” Lovejoy asked, no doubt knowing his friend well enough to have anticipated where all this would lead.

  “There’s always more to it is what I’m saying. Fringe data to be factored in. Contradictions. A fierce rationalist like Arthur Conan Doyle was able to allow that those harmed by the opening of Tut’s tomb in 1922 were plagued by the ‘elementals’—his word—left by the ancient priests to guard the boy king’s tomb.”

  David Latimer laughed in disbelief. “You mean the curse?”

  Preston kept his voice calm. “He said elementals, David.”

  “My God! We are back to a mystical Egypt! It truly is 1918! They were pragmatists for the most part, James. A scientific, rational people.”

  I couldn’t help myself. My brief was to support the hosts at all costs, and that meant easing moments like these. “A scientific, rational people who kept getting it spectacularly wrong, Mr. Latimer. David.” I gave my best smile. “Thought the self was in the heart, not in the brain. Preserved the other organs in canopic jars and left the heart with the body. Threw the brain away—that old schoolyard favourite of pulling it out through the nose with a hook, rinsing out and packing the cranium. We see through the eyes. It’s the area where we instinctively know to think we are. But they never thought to ask what that closest mass of tissue was, positioned so close to the eyes. Oh no. They settled on the heart. They could perform brain operations to relieve war injuries on whatever that icky disposable mass was, could cut granite and build pyramids, but never took it further.”

  Preston was nodding. “Never even invented the stirrup, for heaven’s sake!”

  “The what?” Latimer asked.

  “As bad as the Romans. Safety pins but no stirrup.”

  Latimer stared wide-eyed at the older man. “James, what are you going on about?”

  Preston spread both hands in an isn’t-it-obvious? gesture. “What Carmel is saying is that the ancient Egyptians—like Conan Doyle for all his Holmesian smarts—were more than pragmatists as well. Having the Rosetta Stone and populist experts like John Romer and Zahi Hawass don’t begin to give the mindset.”

  “Now hold on, old boy—”

  “Dr. Jessup,” I said, redirecting the exchange so it didn’t remain too personal. “Pyramids were stellar reincarnation engines conceptually and practically. Failed ones, but yes or no?”

  Jessup was thrown by being included so suddenly, but quickly recovered. “Well, when you put it like that, yes—”

  “The tombs in the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens were unsuccessful reanimation machines, powered by spells. Whenever you enter one, it has to be thought of that way. The whole mummification process—”

  “Misconceived, flawed, yes,” Jessup said. “Like so many burial customs and belief systems.”

  I didn’t leave it there. “Or something instinctively, mutually yet insufficiently understood. Like dark matter, dark energy for us now, as James just said. We may never know.”

  Latimer saw what I was trying to do, working to smooth things, and became a temporary ally. “So a collision of ways of seeing. Understanding mindsets.”

  “Exactly,” I s
aid. “The ancient Egyptians were both fierce rationalists and committed spiritualists. Both. That’s the point.”

  Jessup was nodding. “At the very least. Following what they took to be a clear scientific method.”

  It was time to step away. “So we do the same, allow that we don’t have it all yet.”

  But Latimer needed more than that. “So look at us tonight. Pure 1918 granted, but at least we agree that there’s no magic involved. Nothing like magic. Nothing like Doyle’s elementals.”

  See what I’m trying to do, my glance told him, and I made sure I kept any impatience out of my voice. “Doyle is a case in point. A very smart man. He reminds us how such a clever person can believe in elementals, even that two things might be true at the same time. It’s like choosing a favourite between red and green. You can love both, choose both. Well, here it’s like knowing about the existence of dark matter or some ultimate role for gravity, but allowing we just don’t know enough yet.”

  Jessup had faced groups like this before, enthusiasts carried away by the more sensational aspects of mummification lore, devotees of a mystical Egypt that never was. “All we know from the coffin itself is that it’s male, probably a New Kingdom minor noble from the Twentieth Dynasty. If this is what we actually have, it means he died sometime around 1170 BCE. Given the quality of the embalming we can expect to find going from the little Tesla’s notes tell us, it will be nothing too fine.”

  “But this is Nemkheperef?” our hostess, Paula Lovejoy, asked. “Isn’t that who we’ll find?” She was no doubt recalling what the mummy had cost and was aghast at the prospect of having been conned.

  Jessup shook his head. “Not necessarily. There were reburials, reinterments, coffins and sarcophagi plundered from earlier periods. So we’ll open this and see what we have.”

  Leah Preston was still relishing the prospect of something from the spirit world. “But none of Tut’s elementals.”

  Jessup actually managed a smile. “If there were, Mrs. Preston, they’re long gone. Maybe Tesla purged them with his alternating current.”