Sixtine- The Complete Trilogy Box Set

by Caroline Vermalle

  “One more word and I swear I will throw you into a cell myself.”

  Rodriguez made a show of pushing Franklin away from the smoldering remains of the building. He didn't resist. As Rust watched, another policeman rushed over towards her.

  “Miss, you were right. The mask of Tutankhamen has been taken from the evidence–“

  “Thank you,” Aziza Rust interrupted abruptly. “Continue your research, please.”

  So, I was right, thought Franklin. A sudden wave of determination rushed over him as he glanced back over his shoulder and saw Rust, inscrutable amidst the ruins. He wanted to shout out one last time, to provoke her into revealing something, anything – but then a woman’s voice cried out for help from the other side of the compound. Franklin dodged his distracted minders and ran toward the source of the scream. The first thing he saw was the shock of pink hair amongst the black and grey of the ashes.

  In Florence’s arms lay a grotesquely disjointed figure, crowned with blood. It was Max.

  Like a modern Pietà, she cradled his inert head in her arms, her fingers gently stroking his grime-covered face. Her gaze was focused on his unconscious form, and she did not look away from him for a moment, even as she pleaded for help. When paramedics arrived and their practiced hands set to work, Florence’s trembling lips placed a kiss on Max's forehead. It was as pure and simple a declaration of love as Franklin had ever seen, and all the more beautiful for the lateness of its arrival.

  27

  Joanne was watching the news on the TV in the nurses' lounge, her brow furrowed.

  Protesters were attacking a police station in Cairo. Tires burned, three police cars too. Retaliation for the clearing of Mohammed Hassan, they said. The protestors were claiming a whitewash. There had just been a press conference at the police station and many reporters and photographers were still on the scene. Maybe this time they might save some lives, these journalists, rather than merely spectating, Joanne thought. Then a nurse call sounded.

  It was room 12.

  She walked as fast as her large frame could manage. Had the girl's great-aunt decided to unplug her?

  She opened the door to discover Gigi, even paler than she had been earlier that morning.

  “I don't know what's happened,” she said, falteringly. “But her hand... it’s different.”

  Joanne didn’t need to look at the encephalogram, she had felt it as soon as she had entered the room. She left to summon the doctors.

  Jessica Pryce was coming back to life.

  III

  28

  Four months later

  Sixtine lay at the bottom of the indoor pool on the top floor of her Manhattan penthouse.

  The surface of the turquoise water was entirely still, except for the ripples produced by the bass of a sound system thundering Jay Z's and Kanye West’s No Church in the Wild. Sixtine's limbs moved in slow motion, like a sleepy nymph caressed by an invisible current. Her green eyes were open but did not focus on anything. Her gray hair spread out like a fragile anemone.

  She was naked, the water deforming the cross tattooed on her navel.

  Reflected in the mirror of the water surface, an elderly Asian man looked on. And he wondered if she was dead.

  Four minutes, twelve seconds.

  Four minutes, thirteen seconds.

  Four minutes, fourteen seconds.

  Sixtine was not dead. At least, she was no less alive than she had been when she woke from the coma four months before. With many missing parts.

  Four minutes, fifteen seconds.

  Her memory was intact until the moment she had taken her wedding vows. After that, there was nothing but the vaguest of recollections, pieces of reality mingled with visions of Egyptian gods and a prophecy etched in a black sky, devoid of any apparent links to time, space, or truth.

  There was a windowless cell with dead bodies, shadows whispering to her and the terrifying maelstrom in a green river. There was no party at the Louvre, no Mexico, no rescue in the pyramid; these things only existed in the stories others told her.

  Amongst the many things that did not make sense, there was one that did: she was Jessica when she died. Now she was Sixtine, the nickname her mother sometimes gave her as a child. And since she no longer knew who she really was, least of all the old Jessica, that suited her just fine.

  All traces of her former self were gone. The shape of her face was no longer round, but angular, just like her body. Her blond hair was now the color of the steel of a blade. But one thing remained: her natural grace. She didn’t radiate the warm, joyful glow of the summer sun. Instead, the cool, emerald light of her eyes was shining fierce, illuminating a wintry, almost spectral face of intoxicating beauty.

  Four minutes, eighteen seconds.

  The Asian man’s jaw was clenched, the anxious grinding of his teeth accompanying the passing of time on his stopwatch.

  Four minutes, nineteen seconds.

  A few nights after she had awakened in the Cairo hospital, the nurse had sounded the alarm: she had disappeared from her room. They found her soon after, shaking uncontrollably beneath the neon lights near the emergency exit, whimpering, “Don’t turn off the light!”

  An extreme and paralyzing fear of the dark had gripped her, another symptom to add to the long list related to her Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder diagnosis.

  In truth, it was not the dark that terrorized Sixtine. It was the things that lived in it.

  At night, she made sure all was illuminated – New York, the city that never sleeps, provided the electric light she craved. Darkness was her enemy and she was always on her guard. The only time she could keep the visions at bay was when she was in the water. The lit swimming pool was her sanctuary. It was to the water she escaped every night and stayed for as long as she could.

  Four minutes, twenty-three seconds.

  A bead of sweat trickled down the forehead of the old Asian man, while Jay Z railed against the gods.

  Four minutes, thirty-one seconds.

  Sixtine had become a recluse. To avoid the paparazzi who camped in front of her building, she stayed locked inside her home. She had let go of the twelve staff members who had previously managed Seth's daily life in the five-bedroom New York penthouse overlooking Central Park. She avoided contact with friends. Gigi had gone back home to her house filled with birdcages, by the sea.

  Sixtine had promised to visit, but even that simple promise was complicated.

  Four minutes, forty seconds.

  “Miss, you should come out of the water now,” the Asian man called out, voice shaking.

  The only fixture in Sixtine’s loneliness was Han. He was the building’s night porter. He had been the only witness to the young woman's nocturnal outings. Under her hooded black coat, she was sometimes drinking in the light from streetlights and shop windows, as she prowled the deserted avenues, like one of the vandals haunting the Paris underground of her youth. He had seen her melancholy, he had seen her mourn a loved husband gone too soon, he had seen her eyes haunted by unanswered questions.

  Then, at seventy-six, he got fired from his job because he was too old. Sixtine took him in. Or perhaps it was Han who took her in.

  Four minutes, forty-seven seconds.

  Four minutes, forty-eight seconds.

  Four minutes, forty-nine seconds.

  The old man rushed into the pool with his clothes on. When he reached Sixtine, he gasped in horror. He hauled her out of the water like a soaked, broken puppet. He held her for a moment, with his back against the side of the pool. Her mouth was gaping but not breathing. Her green eyes were staring out at nothing, and her head lolled upon his shoulder.

  Sixtine was dead.

  For the last one hundred and twenty-two nights, Sixtine had swum against the raging current of despair and void, trying to find a way out of the nightmare. People had told her she should walk in the light, enjoy her youth, forget the past. But there was no past to forget, no past to forgive; there was no past at all. Ev
erything before the wedding felt like an illusion, a movie played for her benefit.

  The FBI had questioned her, of course. A female agent with a strange name had visited her in the hospital in Cairo. Rust. She had not displayed any emotion when she had heard about Sixtine’s out-of-body experience in the pyramid – unlike the doctor, who had rushed to give her more drugs.

  But there was one thing Sixtine had kept quiet to everyone, even the FBI, even the Egyptian police, even the kind nurse who had thought nothing of talks of a prophecy by Egyptian gods: the conversation with Thaddeus, the morning of the wedding.

  Why? She couldn’t really tell. She had followed an instinct so strong it had cut through the fog of the drugs, through the need for easy answers or someone to blame. Or perhaps it was not instinct, but merely shame and anger and a multitude of unwanted emotions. Every time she recalled that moment in the Louvre, her mind seemed to recoil, avoiding the memory at all cost. Yet every time she allowed herself to hope for better days ahead, her thoughts came back to the mummified man, the scent of exotic flowers with a toxic note, and Thaddeus’ voice.

  There are things happening which are greater than you and me and Seth… If you love him with all your heart as you say you do, you will live through everything. But if you don’t…

  A few hours after that warning, her life had become a black hole, swarming with shadows, blood, and a beast who devoured souls.

  The key to her self, that person she no longer recognized in the mirror, had to be in what she couldn’t remember. Sixtine was sure of it. Without it, and the need for justice that came with it, there was no possible future.

  Many times, she had been tempted to reach out to Thaddeus. An initial, half-hearted attempt at contacting him had proved fruitless – but she hadn’t been ready to face him anyway.

  For so long, her healing soul had been divided between hope and revenge.

  It was no longer divided.

  Revenge had won.

  Five minutes, one second.

  Suddenly her chest exploded into a breath so forceful, she could have inhaled all the air in the room. Her throat swallowed some water and she coughed, her muscles tensed and as she looked up, she focused on Han's face. She was in the arms of the old man, he was very pale and his dark three-piece suit was swollen with water.

  “Next time, Han, perhaps you should wear a swimsuit.”

  “You stayed under more than five minutes,” he said, his voice trembling. “This is not reasonable, Miss.”

  “Five minutes only?” Sixtine asked with a grimace. She had disengaged from her savior and was already swimming back towards the other side of the pool. “It seemed like an eternity, though.”

  “That's what worries me, Miss.”

  “I thought you said that worry was a waste of time. Turn around.”

  The old man, his jacket’s pockets floating on the surface of the pool, turned his back as Sixtine walked up marble steps to emerge from the pool.

  As she stood in front of the large bay window, her slender body was reflected back at her, its magnificent figure shaped by the long hours of nocturnal swimming, her gray hair dripping onto her ivory skin. In her eyes, the cold glint that no longer waited for the return of illusions lost.

  She picked up her dark gray robe lying beside Han’s stopwatch, still running. She smiled and shook her head. She put it on and walked back towards the bay window over Central Park.

  At her feet stood the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its shadow all-embracing.

  “You can get out now, Han.”

  “Thank you, Miss.” The old man came out of the pool with as much grace as possible, despite his feet squelching water on the marble and his swollen pockets draining water at every step.

  “Is everything ready for tomorrow?” Sixtine asked.

  “Yes, Miss. A driver will pick up the luggage at five. I spoke to the pilot. It will be a night flight, as you requested.”

  “Thank you, Han. Go change, or you'll catch a cold.”

  The old butler withdrew, leaving Sixtine alone once more. She grabbed the remote and turned up the volume of the sound system before glancing out at the New York skyline, taking in the shape of Central Park amongst the millions of lights, like a black belly in the city.

  The deafening music, the bass like body blows, the curses of the rappers, the cries of the chorus, all resounded in her heart, bringing it to the edge of an explosion. A shiver ran through her body, and she closed the bathrobe over her chest. She raised the hood over her head and her face disappeared into its shadow.

  She looked like a dark prizefighter.

  It was time.

  Tomorrow, she would be leaving New York. In a few days, she would be in Mexico, treading in her own lost steps.

  First, she had a detour to make.

  As she turned to leave, she cast one last, backward glance at the window overlooking the sleeping city. She smiled. This time it was not the outline of a hooded prizefighter that she saw reflected back at her.

  But the figure of Death instead.

  29

  Florence kissed Max's cheek. It would have taken only the smallest of movements, the fraction of a turn of the head, and their lips would have met.

  But Max did not move.

  Instead, he smiled with genuine affection as he pushed back his wheelchair, its wheels struggling against the cobbles of the pavement in front of the gates of the British Museum.

  “Do you want me to pick you up later?” Florence asked.

  “Don’t worry, I'll take a taxi.”

  “Of course,” she stuttered. “I guess I’ll see you later, then. Say hello to the Elgin Marbles for me.”

  He smiled, but she had already ducked into her car to hide her blushes. She pulled off quickly.

  Max bit his lip and sighed. The situation with Florence was awkward. They had just spent a long weekend at Falmouth Manor, Florence’s family estate in Cornwall. She had insisted to go there to give the shrew mummy she had bought in Cairo a worthy home, and said that Max could rest in civilized surroundings – but he had sensed she had other motives.

  Florence guided a wide-eyed Max through the seemingly endless rooms with their lacquered timber wall-paneling, intricately patterned silk wallpaper, canopied beds and ancestral portraits. She led him through the foggy grounds, an old maze, musty attics, secret passageways, even a forgotten dungeon. The young architect was entertained with many of the remarkable and eccentric events which had marked Florence’s storied childhood. He took an instant liking to her father, Charles Mornay. The man was laid-back and funny without the slightest hint of the pretense which might typically have marked someone surrounded by so much privilege.

  When he saw the mummified shrew, Charles explained that the hunting for ancient treasures had been a shared obsession of the male line of the family since the eighteenth century. Florence added that the line had been broken when her father failed to show any interest in anything “exotic and old-fashioned” and then, most ignominiously, to produce a male heir. Together, they placed the tiny mummy on the mantelpiece in the great hall, and spent a wonderful time in each other’s company.

  For Florence and Max, the weekend in Falmouth Manor followed the natural progression of a friendship that had flourished over four months. And yet, on the way back to London, the silences that punctuated their conversations were somehow more oppressive than they had been before.

  Max didn’t have to look far to see what the matter was.

  Florence didn’t pay much attention to anybody – she was the kind of woman who marched, head held high, to the beat of her own high-energy drum, only landing a distracted ear to people who crossed her path, while assessing what they could do for her or her career.

  However, she paid attention to Max.

  A careful, intense, even breathless attention. She had wanted to impress him with the history of the old manor house – not to mention the luxury of it all. It worked. But that was not enough to make him fall in love with her. />
  The problem was, Max couldn’t find a single reason why he shouldn’t accept the romance offered by this extraordinary woman. Pretty, intelligent, courageous, educated, funny, a willing accomplice and a friend at first sight. She had probably saved his life, too.

  On paper, Florence Mornay-Devereux was his dream girl. And yet something did not quite fit.

  Max tried to push the thought to the back of his mind as he trundled towards the museum’s southern entrance. A heaving mass of flag-waving guides and tour groups greeted him. He detoured via the west wing, passing by Gallery 18 and the clusters of visitors who were gathered in front of sculpted friezes belonging to the Parthenon in Athens. Max couldn’t suppress a smile. They were dubbed the “Elgin Marbles”, and had managed to poison diplomatic relations between Great Britain and Greece ever since they had been sawed and removed from the Greek monument two hundred years earlier, by Lord Elgin.

  Fate had not been kind to Lord Elgin, who died penniless, his nose eaten away by syphilis. His friend and accomplice, however – who had an equal if not greater hand in the thieving of the Greek treasures – had managed to keep hold of both his fortune and his nose. He now stared down imposingly from the portrait hanging inches above the newly installed Egyptian shrew in Florence’s childhood home. His name was Vivant Mornay, Lord Falmouth.

  With Florence still occupying his thoughts, Max felt the warmth of the sun on his head as he wheeled himself over the stone paving stones of the British Museum’s Great Court, a vast internal courtyard with an intricate glazed roof. In the middle, under the donut-shaped dome, stood an imposing structure: the Reading Room Library. Max showed his pass to the guard and crossed its worn threshold. Tens of thousands of volumes lined the walls of a vast, round room with a domed roof decorated in gold leaves and birds egg blue. The curator greeted him warmly and helped him navigate his wheelchair to his usual place, at one of the leather-topped desks.