The Buried Pyramid (Imhotep Book 2)

by Jerry Dubs

  Tim smiled. “I know,” he said as he stabbed at a final potato. “I think I’m becoming a modern man again. Next I’ll be tweeting while driving and eating a Big Mac.”

  He had spent their breakfast talking about an article he had read earlier while she had been sleeping.

  “So these scientists are pretty sure that we’re a computer simulation,” he had said. “It started off as a thought experiment, you know like college sophomores do when they’ve stayed up all night drinking and smoking dope.

  “If I have it right, the theory is that since there are billions and billions of planets and since there have been eons of time, it is extremely unlikely that we are the first advanced civilization. As a civilization advances, its technology improves and one thing advanced civilizations – like us – do is create computer simulations to test theories and to understand the universe and their own past. As we get better and better at it, the simulations get more and more real. Whatever real means.

  “So given the sheer number of planets and the likelihood that millions of super-advanced civilizations would have developed awesome computer simulations of the universe, it is more likely that we are one of those computer simulations, because there would be more of those than real civilizations.

  “That is if I understood what they were saying and if they aren’t crackpots,” he had explained.

  “So we aren’t real?” Akila had asked.

  In response, Tim had poked her hand gently with his fork.

  “Feels real, right? I think the question they are really asking is what reality means.”

  Akila had sipped at her coffee, staring into the dark water as she drank. Reality meant something different to her now that she believed that Tim had traveled through time, and back again.

  “So,” she had said finally. “If that is true, if we are a computer simulation and if the programming constraints would make us live and behave as if we are real, well, what difference does that make? What can we do about it?”

  Tim had bitten off a piece of toast and chewed slowly, nodding his head as he thought.

  “I guess it isn’t that different from the idea that genetics and childhood experiences program us so much that what we believe is free will is just an irresistible unconscious response.”

  Akila had shrugged. “So? Again, what difference does this make in how I live my life?”

  “None, I suppose. Whether we are controlled by genetics or a computer program, either way I guess we live within ... ” he had paused, cocking his head at a new thought. “When I was a kid, at the dawn of computer games, the programmers would hide Easter eggs in games.”

  She had shaken her head, trying to keep up with his thoughts, “Easter eggs?”

  “That’s what they called them. Hidden surprises, maybe a pretty picture, maybe a super power, or another puzzle to solve, maybe a new room to explore,” Tim had answered as he thought of the hidden corners, the loose stones, the dark passageways within the ruins of the Third Dynasty.

  She had looked at him, suddenly understanding where his thoughts had taken him. “So you plan to look for Easter eggs?”

  A Hill of Beans

  The afternoon sun pounded against the worn, white limestone blocks to Tim’s left. Draped in shadows, the stones on the right side of the steeply pitched entrance to the Buried Pyramid looked smooth and flat.

  Tim kicked at the loose sand under his feet and sighed.

  Nearly five thousand years ago, when the tunnel had been cut and the stones had been laid, he had been Imhotep, royal physician, scribe, and architect for King Sekhemkhet. The king’s only son had not yet fallen ill. Tim had yet to watch helplessly as the child weakened and succumbed to an infestation of blood flukes, the same parasites that almost killed Maya.

  He walked along the slanting entrance until he was far enough along that he was surrounded by the ancient stones. They had been cut from the depths of the earth, brought to Saqqara, smoothed and polished, and carefully placed along the descending entrance to the subterranean chambers.

  He touched a stone, feeling the hard, grainy face, his fingers probing and finding places where the millennia of exposure had weathered the block, flaking the calcite.

  Squinting against the light, he looked down the entrance toward the tunnel that led to the burial chamber and to the two underground galleries that ran parallel to the main tunnel, like tines of a fork.

  During the past year he had searched for an Easter egg among the tunnels and throughout the galleries and among the hundred and thirty-two poorly excavated magazines that lined the huge U-shaped tunnel that ran just beyond the outside of the pyramid. He had scraped at the base of the tunnels, he had tugged at loose stones, he had swept caked sand from the ceiling, searching and searching.

  The idea of an Easter egg: a hidden message, a secret passage, a hieroglyph-adorned false doorway, had seized him and he couldn’t shake it free.

  He had been back in the modern world for almost four years now and he hadn’t found anything. He knew that there was little chance that he ever would find anything. His obsession, he knew, kept him from fully committing to life with Akila, constantly dragging him away from the present and into a past he feared was lost forever.

  Still he searched.

  Not just here in the desert where the past pressed against the present, he also searched in the museums of Cairo, through the myriad sites on the Internet devoted to ancient Egypt, and through the journals of archaeologists, especially Muhammed Zakaria Goneim, the tragic figure who had discovered the Buried Pyramid and the mysterious alabaster sarcophagus.

  He hadn’t found anything to indicate that Imhotep had died in disgrace, nor any mention of his entombment in the Buried Pyramid. There was simply nothing at all about Merneith and very little – a name mentioned in the series of dynastic leaders – for Khaba.

  Shuffling down the slope, he reached the shadowed entrance to the tomb. As he moved from the light into the cool, dark interior, he was struck with a thought.

  I can’t be here next year.

  ***

  “Tim?” Akila called as she entered her apartment and heard music playing.

  She placed her car keys in a round, wicker basket on a stand by the doorway. “I picked up some asparagus to make the way you like, with scallions. Tim?”

  She went to the small kitchen to put away her groceries. The music was coming from the larger room they used as a dining and a living room. She recognized it as ‘Scheherazade,’ Rimsky-Korsakov’s romantic masterpiece. She often heard Tim humming the melodic beginning of the third movement as he worked.

  He was sitting at the table writing. Beside him were two large manila envelopes, some loose paper and a bottle of Luxor Weizen beer.

  “I’m home,” she said, poking her head through the doorway.

  Tim jumped slightly in his chair. Looking up he said, “Sorry, Akila, I didn’t hear you come in.”

  She walked the few steps to the table and looked at his work. In front of him was a sheet of paper that was half filled with rows of hieroglyphs, each drawn in Tim’s neat, precise hand.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Tim sat back against the chair. Looking at her he said, “I realized today that I won’t be here next year.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I don’t know for sure,” he said.

  “I know that I’ll arrive here with Maya on August first of twenty-twenty seven. I mean the younger me will arrive here. And I know that the younger me didn’t see me – the older me – anywhere and you, you acted relieved to see me. I didn’t understand why because I didn’t know you. I mean that me won’t understand.

  “So I think that you must have been worried because I will disappear between now and next August. I don’t know what that means. I’ve been searching and searching for a way to communicate with the past, looking for a message someone might have left for me, a key to ... ” he paused and looked down.

  “A key to return
ing to the past,” Akila said with a dead voice.

  Tim pushed the chair back and walked to Akila. He took her hands and said, “I love you, Akila, you know that. These past three years have been wonderful.”

  “Don’t,” she said firmly.

  Tim bit back his words and stood silently, holding her hands, relieved that she didn’t pull away from his touch.

  “I saw Fahim’s body,” she said finally. “I know that I am not betraying him, I am not being unfaithful. And I understand that you didn’t ... ”

  Tim interrupted her. “I know that I’m talking about someone who lived five thousand years ago,” he said urgently. “I understand how that must sound. But Meryt is still real and alive to me, Akila. She was going to be held as a slave to a monster. I did what I thought I had to do, I didn’t see anyway to fight against Merneith, but ... ”

  “Tim,” Akila said gently, “Don’t you see that whatever was going to happen to Meryt has already happened? I’m sorry, but Meryt and Maya, they have been gone for thousands of years. You can’t change what has happened.

  “I know that you haunt the ruins of Saqqara,” she continued. “I know that you wander down tunnels and corridors that are restricted. My friends told me. But when you come home, when you are away from those ancient stones, you seem happy.”

  “I am happy. I am, Akila.”

  “Yet you long for your other life.”

  “I loved, no, I love Meryt. She was alive when I last saw her. I haven’t seen her since Tjau was killed. I wasn’t able to comfort my wife when our son was murdered.” Tim felt himself shaking and heard his voice growing louder and he felt tears brimming his eyes.

  “I don’t know what happened to her,” he said, his voice breaking. “I’ve searched through the museums and I’ve read everything I can find. There is no mention of Imhotep’s wife and daughter and son. Nothing.”

  He felt Akila release his hands and then move closer to hold him. She wrapped her arms around him and pulled his head to her shoulder.

  “I know that here and now I can’t save her and I haven’t found anyway to go back there,” he said. “But,” he whispered, “I thought that the younger me could change things.”

  ***

  Akila pulled a chair around the table to sit beside Tim and his papers.

  “This,” he said holding the page of hieroglyphs “is a list of instructions to Ahmes. I’m telling them to not fight the command to bury me alive. I’m asking them to drug me before they wrap me and then to put my body in the king’s alabaster sarcophagus. After the burial they are supposed to sneak into the tomb, pull me out of the sarcophagus, create a time portal and put me through it. This was easy to write because I read it the night Ahmes rescued me and I know what happened because I lived through it.

  “But I have to write it now so you can give it to young me next year. He will go back to the past and give it to Ahmes, then Ahmes can rescue me and I’ll be here.

  “I'll need to get as much money as I can find and put it in the envelope, along with one of those elastic lamps.”

  Akila nodded, accepting, but not understanding or believing his reasoning. “And this?” she asked, pointing to three sheets of hand-written English.

  In answer, Tim handed her the papers.

  She began to read: “Tim, you wrote this four years ahead in your personal future. You recognize the hand writing. It is yours, mine, ours.

  “If you are reading this you have just returned from modern Helwan with Maya who has been cured of blood flukes. The doctor there is Akila. Her assistant is Brianna.

  “You/we are married to Meryt. We have a daughter, Maya, and a son, Tjau. We followed Diane and Brian into Kemet. Brian died and Diane was sent back to her time. I’m telling you this so you know that I am not someone forging your handwriting. I am you.

  “Proof: Addy and I were planning a trip to Egypt. She was killed in a car accident and I came here alone. My first pet was a beagle named Duke. I went to Penn Street Elementary School and got spanked once in kindergarten for walking in a snow drift. When I was little I kissed Nancy on a dare. No one knows that but us, right?

  “OK, so it is me/us.

  “I’m going to tell you what you need to do to avoid a lot of pain for our family. This is extremely important. If you don’t follow these instructions, this is what will happen ... ”

  Akila put down the papers and stared at Tim.

  “You’re trying to change the past.”

  “I’m trying to save my son and my wife and daughter.”

  “You could change history, Tim. We talked about this. You said before when you were in ancient Egypt that you were careful to do what Imhotep had done. What was it you kept saying, ‘It was done, so it will be’? Isn’t that true anymore? You know what happened to your family and yes, it was horrible, but should you interfere?”

  “I know,” he said firmly. “I’ve thought about it. If these papers make a difference, then it was meant to be. The past that I lived through might be some kind of wrinkle that I am meant to change.”

  “You’re just saying that because you want to change things for yourself. You don’t believe in fate or any of this ‘meant-to-happen’ stuff,” she said.

  “Look,” he said growing tired of the argument. “I didn’t try to go back in time. It happened. I’ve gone along with this mystic ‘flow of time’ but I’m not just a twig floating on some stream. If I can save my family I will. If it changes the future, it will. Whether it was meant to be or not.”

  He took the papers and shuffled the last page to the top.

  “I only have a little more to write. Then I’ll give these envelopes to you. Please, Akila, please give them to me when I get here with Maya.”

  As she nodded agreement, Akila thought of Bogart in Casablanca. He had given up his personal happiness for the greater good, as Fahim had given up his.

  In her mind she heard Bogart bravely say, “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

  An invitation

  Sitting on the sand covered floor of the Buried Pyramid, Tim leaned against the tilted, hollow alabaster box where he had been entombed. Raising a hand, he reached over his head and let his fingers trail along the dead stone of the sarcophagus.

  Discovered in nineteen fifty-two by Muhammed Zakaria Goneim, the alabaster sarophagus had been an empty, tragic find for the Egyptian archaeologist.

  Tim remembered feeling guilty as he read the story.

  Intrigued by a rectangular shape in the sand near his excavation of another pyramid, Goneim had discovered the limestone enclosure wall decorated with false doors, one of which Tim had passed through to escape the past.

  Excavating within the walls, Goneim found the unfinished burial chamber and the alabaster sarcophagus of King Sekhemkhet. Its sliding opening was still sealed. Tim had grimaced as he read that. He was the one who had instructed Nimaasted to reseal the sarcophagus after rescuing him to hide his escape.

  Believing that he had unearthed an undisturbed coffin, Goneim held a public unsealing of the alabaster sarcophagus. When, during a gala event, the sealed sarcophagus turned out to be empty, Goneim had been humiliated by the press, the president of Egypt and by other archaeologists.

  Later, despondent after being accused of stealing misplaced artifacts, he had killed himself.

  Sitting in the gloomy tomb, Tim wondered if he was successful in returning to the past and successful in preventing King Sekhemkhet’s assassination, would the alabaster sarcophagus have a body in it when Goneim found it? Would the archaeologist be praised instead of ridiculed?

  What other changes would happen? Too many to count, too many to even imagine, he thought.

  But Tjau would not be slaughtered like a dog. Meryt and Maya would not become slaves to Merneith and I wouldn’t be buried alive.

  Closing his eyes, Tim considered his actions.

  He knew he was being selfish, but, if he
was honest, he had been selfish when he had pursued Brian and Diane. He had been satisfying his own curiosity, providing a distraction from his pain. But, if he hadn’t followed them he wouldn’t have become Imhotep.

  Time is a mobius strip, Tim thought, a twisted looped paper always turning back on itself. When I think about time, my thoughts move forward, follow a logical path and yet always return to their starting point.

  The solution, he decided, was to act. Whether he was following genetic and trained reflexes instead of rational thought, whether he was executing a computer program, whether he was being guided by fate or by a god, it didn’t matter.

  He would move forward the only way he could. The rest of the universe could take care of itself.

  ***

  His flashlight sputtered and died as he crawled along the coffin-sized tunnel that edged the pyramid. For an instant Tim was back in the Tomb of Kanakht scrambling along the black tomb in panic when another flashlight had died.

  Now he just sighed. He was well accustomed to the midnight darkness of tombs now.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out the small box of wooden matches he always carried. Striking a match, he twisted to his right preparing to return to the main tunnel that led back to the burial chamber beneath the Buried Pyramid.

  Holding the match off to his side to avoid the night-vision-killing glare of the small flame, his eyes were directed toward the rough wall of the tunnel. Stopping suddenly, he leaned closer to the stones. Slowly he brought the match closer, careful to avoid looking at it.

  A single, thin red shape was drawn on the stone.

  It was impossible; Tim had searched this same tunnel countless times. He had touched each stone, cleaning each one softly with a brush.

  He brought the match closer to the drawing, feeling a wave of excitement flashing through him.

  He shook his hand as the match burned down to his fingers and sputtered out. Shaking and fumbling he found his box of matches and lit another. He closed his eyes, calming himself and then looked at the stone again.