I sit on the steps a long time, watching for the splash of Zoe’s flashlight in the doorway. Outside it will be dark, time for the Son et Lumière show at the Pyramids.
It seems darker in here, too. I have to squint to see Anubis and the yellow scales and the deceased, awaiting judgment. The papyrus he is holding is covered with long, bordered columns of hieroglyphics and I hope they are magic spells to protect him and not a list of all the sins he has committed.
I have not murdered another, I think. I have not committed adultery. But there are other sins.
It will be dark soon, and I do not have a flashlight. I stand up. “Zoe!” I call, and go down the stairs and between the pillars. They are carved with animals—cobras and baboons and crocodiles.
“It’s getting dark,” I call, and my voice echoes hollowly among the pillars. “They’ll be wondering what happened to us.”
The last pair of pillars is carved with a bird, its sandstone wings outstretched. A bird of the gods. Or a plane.
“Zoe?” I say, and stoop to go through the low door. “Are you in here?”
Chapter Eight: Special Events
Zoe isn’t in the burial chamber. It is much smaller than the anteroom, and there are no paintings on the rough walls or above the door that leads to the Hall of Judgment. The ceiling is scarcely higher than the door, and I have to hunch down to keep from scraping my head against it.
It is darker in here than in the anteroom, but even in the dimness I can see that Zoe isn’t here. Neither is Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus, carved with The Book of the Dead. There is nothing in the room at all, except for a pile of suitcases in the corner by the door to the Hall of Judgment.
It is our luggage. I recognize my battered Samsonite and the carry-on bags of the Japanese tour group. The flight attendants’ navy blue overnight cases are in front of the pile, strapped like victims to their wheeled carriers.
On top of my suitcase is a book, and I think, It’s the travel guide, even though I know Zoe would never have left it behind, and I hurry over to pick it up.
It is not Egypt Made Easy. It is my Death on the Nile, lying open and facedown the way Lissa left it on the boat, but I pick it up anyway and open it to the last pages, searching for the place where Hercule Poirot explains all the strange things that have been happening, where he solves the mystery.
I cannot find it. I thumb back through the book, looking for the map. There is always a map in Agatha Christie, showing who had what stateroom on the ship, showing the stairways and the doors and the unimpressive rooms leading one into another, but I cannot find that, either. The pages are covered with long unreadable columns of hieroglyphics.
I close the book. “There’s no point in waiting for Zoe,” I say, looking past the luggage at the door to the next room. It is lower than the one I came through, and dark beyond. “She’s obviously gone on to the Hall of Judgment.”
I walk over to the door, holding the book against my chest. There are stone steps leading down. I can see the top one in the dim light from the burial chamber. It is steep and very narrow.
I toy briefly with the idea that it will not be so bad after all, that I am dreading it like the clergyman, and it will turn out to be not judgment but someone I know, a smiling bishop in a white suit, and mercy is not a modern refinement after all.
“I have not murdered another,” I say, and my voice does not echo. “I have not committed adultery.”
I take hold of the doorjamb with one hand so I won’t fall on the stairs. With the other I hold the book against me. “Get back, you evil ones,” I say. “Stay away. I adjure you in the name of Osiris and Poirot. My spells protect me. I know the way.”
I begin my descent.
Afterword for “Death on the Nile”
When people ask me if I like horror, I usually say no, because they mean Elm Street and murderers that refuse to die and impalings and beheadings and disembowelings, accompanied by buckets and buckets of blood.
But it’s not really true that I don’t like horror—I love horror, just not that kind. I love stories where nothing frightening that you can put your finger on is happening, but the hairs on the back of your neck are still standing straight up, stories that don’t have any monsters or internal organs or sharp objects, that have instead a nice, friendly small town and a white dress and a ball of yarn, or an oddly deserted ocean liner crossing the Atlantic during wartime without any running lights, or a woman standing perfectly still, watching you from the other side of the lake.
Or a number you keep seeing—on an apartment door, on a taxi, on an airline flight.
You might recognize that last one. It’s from possibly the scariest Twilight Zone episode I ever saw. The woman on the far side of the lake is of course from Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. The ball of yarn and the white dress are from Kit Reed’s “The Wait,” and the deserted deck is from Between Two Worlds, the movie the heroine of “Death on the Nile” kept talking about when she was trying to frighten Lissa.
I saw that movie on TV when I was a teenager, and loved it (and not just because it was set in the London Blitz), but I had no idea what it was called or who was in it, so I had no chance of finding it again till I had the bright idea of asking at a science-fiction convention. (Science-fiction fans know everything.)
But even though I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid, it had stuck with me all those years, just as “The Wait” and the Twilight Zone episode have stayed with me, just as the movie The Others and Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House and Daphne DuMaurier’s short story “Don’t Look Now!” have, in spite of the fact that there’s not a machete or a drop of blood in any of them.
Or maybe because of that. I’ve always thought that slasher-type horror had the same problem as Victorian interior decoration, with all its cushions, knickknacks, whatnot cabinets, and ottomans, and its penchant for putting tassels and fringes and ruffles and lace on everything. They’re both wildly cluttered—one with tea cozies and doilies, the other with severed heads and psychopaths—so crowded that the terror can’t figure out a way to maneuver its way through.
But I also think it’s because the stuff we have in our heads is way scarier than anything H. P. Lovecraft or a WetaWorks special effects team can invent. The movie Alien was absolutely terrifying right up to the moment you saw the monster, and I’ve always thought the best thing that ever happened to Jaws was that they couldn’t get the mechanical sharks to work. They kept sinking and/or exploding when they hit the water, and that’s why they had to resort to the buoys, which were far more frightening, and the shadowy, undefined “something” under the water.
It’s that undefined something we’re really afraid of—the flicker of movement we don’t quite catch out of the corner of our eye, the bad dream we can’t quite remember when we wake up, the sound of a door opening downstairs we thought we heard. And worst of all, the things we’re not sure even happened, the things that we might just have imagined, that might mean we’re going mad, all those nameless, nebulous things we can’t quite put our finger on and can only guess at.
That’s why death is the scariest thing of all. Nobody living has ever caught sight of it, and in spite of centuries’ worth of claims of hauntings and messages from beyond the grave, nobody has ever come back to tell us what it was like. And we not only can’t imagine what it’s like, we can’t even imagine how to imagine it.
But we keep trying. So we tell ghost stories about somebody coming to get your liver, and go to slasher movies, and read zombie novels, though none of them are really scary. What’s really scary is looking up at the clock on the wall of the railway station and seeing that it has no hands.
Or realizing that you’ve seen the people in the ship’s lounge before—right before they were killed by a bomb.
THE SOUL SELECTS HER OWN SOCIETY:
INVASION AND REPULSION:
A CHRONOLOGICAL REINTERPRETATION OF TWO OF EMILY DICKINSON’S POEMS:
A WELLSIAN PERSPE
CTIVE
Until recently it was thought that Emily Dickinson’s poetic output ended in 1886, the year she died. Poems 186B and 272?, however, suggest that not only did she write poems at a later date, but she was involved in the “great and terrible events”1 of 1897.
The poems in question originally came to light in 19912, while Nathan Fleece was working on his doctorate. Fleece, who found the poems3 under a hedge in the Dickinsons’ backyard, classified the poems as belonging to Dickinson’s Early or Only Slightly Eccentric Period, but a recent examination of the works4 has yielded up an entirely different interpretation of the circumstances under which the poems were written.
The sheets of paper on which the poems were written are charred around the edges, and that of Number 272? has a large round hole burnt in it. Martha Hodge-Banks claims that said charring and hole were caused by “a pathetic attempt to age the paper and forgetting to watch the oven,”5 but the large number of dashes makes it clear they were written by Dickinson, as well as the fact that the poems are almost totally indecipherable. Dickinson’s unreadable handwriting has been authenticated by any number of scholars, including Elmo Spencer in Emily Dickinson: Handwriting or Hieroglyphics? and M. P. Cursive, who wrote, “Her a’s look like c’s, her e’s look like 2’s, and the whole thing looks like chicken scratches.”6
The charring seemed to indicate that the poems had been written either while smoking7 or in the midst of some catastrophe, and I began examining the text for clues. Fleece had deciphered Number 272? as beginning, “I never saw a friend— / I never saw a moom—,” which made no sense at all,8 and on closer examination I saw that the stanza actually read:
I never saw a fiend—
I never saw a bomb—
And yet of both of them I dreamed—
While in the—dreamless tomb—
a much more authentic translation, particularly in regard to the rhyme scheme. “Moom” and “tomb” actually rhyme, which is something Dickinson hardly ever did, preferring near-rhymes such as “mat/gate,” “tune/sun,” and “balm/hermaphrodite.”
The second stanza was more difficult, as it occupied the area of the round hole, and the only readable portion was a group of four letters farther down that read “ulla.”9 This was assumed by Fleece to be part of a longer word such as “bullary” (a convocation of popes),10 or possibly “dullard” or “hullabaloo.”11
I, however, immediately recognized “ulla” as the word H. G. Wells had reported hearing the dying Martians utter, a sound he described as “a sobbing alternation of two notes12 . . . a desolating cry.”
“Ulla” was a clear reference to the 1897 invasion by the Martians, previously thought to have been confined to England, Missouri, and the University of Paris.13 The poem fragment, along with 186B, clearly indicated that the Martians had landed in Amherst and that they had met Emily Dickinson.
At first glance, this seems an improbable scenario due to both the Martians’ and Emily Dickinson’s dispositions. Dickinson was a recluse who didn’t meet anybody, preferring to hide upstairs when neighbors came to call and to float notes down on them.14 Various theories have been advanced for her self-imposed hermitude, including Bright’s Disease, an unhappy love affair, eye trouble, and bad skin. T. L. Mensa suggests the simpler theory that all the rest of the Amherstonians were morons.15
None of these explanations would have made it likely that she would like Martians any better than Amherstates, and there is the added difficulty that, having died in 1886, she would also have been badly decomposed.
The Martians present additional difficulties. The opposite of recluses, they were in the habit of arriving noisily, attracting reporters, and blasting at everybody in the vicinity. There is no record of their having landed in Amherst, though several inhabitants mention unusually loud thunderstorms in their diaries,16 and Louisa May Alcott, in nearby Concord, wrote in her journal, “Wakened suddenly last night by a loud noise to the west. Couldn’t get back to sleep for worrying. Should have had Jo marry Laurie. To Do: Write sequel in which Amy dies. Serve her right for burning manuscript.”
There is also indirect evidence for the landing. Amherst, frequently confused with Lakehurst, was obviously the inspiration for Orson Welles’s setting the radio version of “War of the Worlds” in New Jersey.17 In addition, a number of the tombstones in West Cemetery are tilted at an angle, and, in some cases, have been knocked down, making it clear that the Martians landed not only in Amherst, but in West Cemetery, very near Dickinson’s grave.
Wells describes the impact of the shell18 as producing “a blinding glare of vivid green light” followed by “such a concussion as I have never heard before or since.” He reports that the surrounding dirt “splashed,” creating a deep pit and exposing drainpipes and house foundations. Such an impact in West Cemetery would have uprooted the surrounding coffins and broken them open, and the resultant light and noise clearly would have been enough to “wake the dead,” including the slumbering Dickinson.
That she was thus awakened, and that she considered the event an invasion of her privacy, is made clear in the longer poem, Number 186B, of which the first stanza reads:
I scarce was settled in the grave—
When came—unwelcome guests—
Who pounded on my coffin lid—
Intruders—in the dust—19
Why the “unwelcome guests” did not hurt her,20 in light of their usual behavior, and how she was able to vanquish them are less apparent, and we must turn to H. G. Wells’s account of the Martians for answers.
On landing, Wells tells us, the Martians were completely helpless due to Earth’s greater gravity, and remained so until they were able to build their fighting machines. During this period they would have posed no threat to Dickinson except that of company.21
Secondly, they were basically big heads. Wells describes them as having eyes, a beak, some tentacles, and “a single large tympanic drum” at the back of the head which functioned as an ear. Wells theorized that the Martians were “descended from beings not unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and hands . . . at the expense of the body.” He concluded that, without the body’s vulnerability and senses, the brain would become “selfish and cruel” and take up mathematics,22 but Dickinson’s effect on them suggests that the overenhanced development of their neocortexes had turned them instead into poets.
The fact that they picked off people with their heat rays, sucked human blood, and spewed poisonous black smoke over entire counties would seem to contraindicate poetic sensibility, but look how poets act. Take Shelley, for instance, who went off and left his first wife to drown herself in the Serpentine so he could marry a woman who wrote monster movies. Or Byron. The only people who had a kind word to say about him were his dogs.23 Take Robert Frost.24
The Martians’ identity as poets is corroborated by the fact that they landed seven shells in Great Britain, three in the Lake District,25 and none at all in Liverpool. It may have determined their decision to land in Amherst.
But they had reckoned without Dickinson’s determination and literary technique, as Number 186B makes clear.26 Stanza Two reads:
I wrote a letter—to the fiends—
And bade them all be—gone—
In simple words—writ plain and clear—
“I vant to be alone.”
“Writ plain and clear” is obviously an exaggeration, but it is manifest that Dickinson wrote a note and delivered it to the Martians, as the next line makes even more evident:
They (indecipherable)27 it with an awed dismay—
Dickinson may have read it aloud or floated the note down to them in their landing pit in her usual fashion, or she may have unscrewed the shell and tossed it in, like a hand grenade.
Whatever the method of delivery, however, the result was “awed dismay” and then retreat, as the next line indicates:
They—promptly took—their leave—
It has been argued that Dickinson would have had no access
to writing implements in the graveyard, but this fails to take into consideration the Victorian lifestyle. Dickinson’s burial attire was a white dress, and all Victorian dresses had pockets.28
During the funeral, Emily’s sister, Lavinia, placed two heliotropes in her sister’s hand, whispering that they were for her to take to the Lord. She may also have slipped a pencil and some Post-its into the coffin, or Dickinson, in the habit of writing and distributing notes, may simply have planned ahead.29
In addition, grave poems30 are a well-known part of literary tradition. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in the throes of grief after the death of his beloved Elizabeth Siddell, entwined poems in her auburn hair as she lay in her coffin.31
However the writing implements came to be there, Dickinson obviously made prompt and effective use of them. She scribbled down several stanzas and sent them to the Martians, who were so distressed at them that they decided to abort their mission and return to Mars.
The exact cause of this deadly effect has been much debated, with several theories being advanced. Wells was convinced that microbes killed the Martians landed in England, who had no defense against Earth’s bacteria, but such bacteria would have taken several weeks to infect the Martians, and it was obviously Dickinson’s poems which caused them to leave, not dysentery.
Spencer suggests that her illegible handwriting led the Martians to misread her message and take it as some sort of ultimatum. A. Huyfen argues that the advanced Martians, being good at punctuation, were appalled by her profligate use of dashes and random capitalizing of letters. S. W. Lubbock proposes the theory that they were unnerved by the fact that all of her poems can be sung to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”32
It seems obvious, however, that the most logical theory is that the Martians were wounded to the heart by Dickinson’s use of near-rhymes, which all advanced civilizations rightly abhor. Number 186B contains two particularly egregious examples: “gone/alone” and “guests/dust,” and the burnt hole in 272? may indicate something even worse.
Time is the Fire Page 9
