The God Collector

by Catherine Butzen

  Theo gawked, momentarily baffled by a sudden rush of love for the sharp little curator. Sure, Van Allen was shaken and she’d seen cracks in his steely façade, but it seemed that underneath that mask was just more steel. So much for academics being soft. Paler than ever and clearly in pain, Van Allen was solid. Thank Christ for that.

  “Sir,” she said, “you’re the best boss ever.”

  “And don’t forget it again.” Against all odds, the hard look in the curator’s eyes took on a humorous spark. “If you see Mr. Zimmer again, tell him he’s fired.”

  “With pleasure.” Quickly, in case he noticed signs of unprofessionalism, she squeezed his free hand as she stood up. “Thanks.”

  A month ago, Theo Speer’s most grievous sin had been parallel parking. If you’d asked her to rob a museum, flee from the police or rendezvous with a man on the run, she would have been completely at sea. To be honest, she still wasn’t too strong on most of those things.

  But fleeing from police was necessary to save a life. Rendezvousing with a wanted man, ditto. And if she was going to run from someone, the museum was the place to do it. This was her turf.

  Marble halls of academe gave way to starkly lit concrete corridors thick with years of paint. She automatically shifted to a flat-footed step, changing her stride to soften the sound of her footfalls. Her breathing seemed unnaturally loud and harsh in her ears.

  In the distance, she could hear feet pounding and a rumble of voices. Trying to keep her breaths shallow, she cut a hard left and ducked through the door to Mammal Taxidermy. The doors should have been locked, but Shawn Faroe and his team tended to be slack. Nobody would want to steal dead pine martens, or so the logic went.

  From Taxidermy to Insect Preservation. Up one short flight to Tropical Fish. A quick swing from Fish into Herpetology. Kick over the trash can and leave the door to Oversized Herpetology open, just in case they thought to check which way she’d gone through. Instead, she swung right and took the fire stairs, clipping out through the safety hatch to wind up in the cleaning corridor just behind Cephalopods of the World.

  She slipped out through the security door behind the biggest squid and emerged in a maintenance alley almost calf deep in snow.

  Her path took her away from the museum campus and down to the lakefront. There, the golden ribbon of Lake Shore Drive resolved itself into eight lanes of high-speed traffic, crossed by only occasional pedestrian bridges that were doubtless slick with the fresh snow. Theo slogged along, keeping to the plowed-up patches of gravel and mud whenever possible.

  In the distance, she could hear sirens. It took an effort not to panic—there were always sirens in Chicago, even out by the museum campus. It didn’t guarantee she was being chased.

  But she probably was. The golems had wrecked the place, but who was going to believe that story when there was a convenient human, rogue employee?

  Ten minutes’ brisk walk brought her to the Roosevelt subway stop.

  The subway was cold but not nearly as cold as outside, and Theo sank down gratefully on a bench and loosened her scarf a little. For the first time in what felt like hours, she had time to breathe and think.

  THS2017, 004 and 023. They’d been three of the worst specimens in the collection, battered almost beyond recognition, their chest cavities gaping and empty and their limbs snapped off. But that hadn’t seemed to matter when they were being brought to life.

  Or had it? Theo didn’t know. She only knew that the magician—could she really put that name to Zimmer, of all people?—had worked his spell on those three, out of the whole collection. Maybe he really had been trying to take over one of their bodies, but if so, why? And if he was trying to turn them into monsters, why just those three? An army of golems would have done the job better.

  Hearts? her brain supplied a little helplessly. Hearts were at the center of the Egyptian ritual canon. Having your heart eaten was supposed to be the final destruction. Seth had said they’d put animal hearts in the shabtis, and the tyet hurt him because he was living with a heart not his own.

  But the only shabtis to rise under the magician’s influence had been the ones without hearts. Her gut twisted a little at the memory of the liquid golems, screaming as they tried to take some kind of definite shape. Maybe the magic, whatever it was, didn’t work right when there was no heart in the shabtis…

  Zimmer touching her heart…

  Seth said his brother had theorized about magic. His brother—Mark Zimmer? She didn’t know.

  Were the guards okay?

  Why would Zimmer want to move his soul into her body? Was that what he’d been planning when he came to the museum that night, or had he just seized an opportunity when he learned she was there with Van Allen?

  Her head ached, her shoulders burned, blood and clay and sweat soaked her. She wanted sleep. She wanted food. She wanted Seth. But Seth was gone now, back to being an ancient Egyptian warrior running from an Egyptian magician. Or worse, actually facing him.

  I can’t die like this, he’d said. His turf and his mission, so of course he’d follow his own rules.

  Except he hadn’t been the one to stop the golems. They hadn’t been something he was prepared to face; the spirit was willing, but the flesh was out of ideas. But she’d won. There was motion there, she’d grabbed it with both hands, and she’d done something that he couldn’t.

  And she was just supposed to go home?

  Hah. Home. There were probably police watching her apartment. She couldn’t go back to Aki—no, she’d risked getting him into trouble already. And she guessed her parents wouldn’t be too thrilled to harbor a fugitive daughter.

  Parents. A jolt of hope sparked through her. The house in Deerfield! Parents in Taos, a house standing empty. A house that the cops might not be watching. It would take her a couple of hours and several train transfers to get there, and that could only help to throw them off her scent.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ammit is the eater of hearts, the great devourer, the final death. Though each sin burdens your heart, it makes it all the sweeter to her. Poison yourself with goodness, that she will not love the taste of your flesh, and pass you by.

  ~Excerpt from The Commandments of Neferu, circa 1700 BCE

  Deerfield was the kind of neighborhood where the sidewalks were unimportant. Snow was piled a foot deep on the undisturbed lawns, occasionally tinted coral pink or pale green by Christmas lights and glowing inflatable Santa Clauses. Craftsman houses and pseudo-Victorians stood alongside modern cement-and-glass boxes, but the night blended them together into patches of soft color and shadow. It was a comfortable, quietly wealthy neighborhood where people slept after long days at the office and rarely walked farther than the mailbox.

  After a moment, Theo decided not to turn on the lights. No one was supposed to be here, after all. Sighing, she walked stiff-legged up the stairs.

  She wanted sleep, badly, but not as much as she wanted a shower. Chicagoans might not stare at a woman smeared with drying clay, but they would still remember her. Faced with the bathroom’s array of Italian shampoos and French-milled soaps, though, she balked slightly and settled for a quick sponge bath at the sink. The clay, at least, peeled off easily. Then she wrapped a towel around her damp hair and walked down the hall to her old room.

  The room felt sterile. Her books were still on the bookshelf, her locked cupboard of art supplies was in the same place, but everything had been cleaned within an inch of its life. Her Formula One posters and comic books were long gone, replaced by Ansel Adams prints and a throw rug that had clearly never been walked on. It took her almost ten minutes to debone the bed—removing all the pillows, shams and decorative bedspreads—before she could collapse onto it.

  The ceiling was just layers of shadow. Staring at it did nothing for her.

  She lay on a cold bed in a cold house, unable to even turn on the lights beca
use she was a fugitive. Her family had no idea where she was, and the man she wanted to be with had been forced away by something dark and evil.

  The whole thing had gone further than Theo’d ever imagined. She was exhausted, alone, and had no idea of where to go next or how to help Seth. The world had spun out of control, and she was barely clinging to it.

  So much for the greatest discovery in the history of mankind.

  Automatically, hungry for a distraction, her mind seized on the thought. What had those words been? Not the shabti inscription but the prayer, the one Seth had recited to her only hours before. Concentrating, she called up her paint mnemonic from the depths of her mind. The first colors had been slightly discordant—tangerine and gunmetal, that was it, ha and ne…

  It took almost half an hour to reconstruct the sequence. She stole paper from the printer in her mother’s office and scribbled out the syllables, cross-linking them with the colors she had assigned. It was a quick-and-dirty system that had saved her bacon in a few college examinations, but this time it was infinitely more important. If she got a single syllable wrong, who knew what would happen?

  No pressure, though.

  Once she had the formula, she set it aside and headed for the computer. The only books in her parents’ house were coffee-table tomes and histories of political philosophy, but their Internet was top of the line. Theo dove in.

  Words streamed past her as she swam from one site to the next, frantically clicking and reading, compiling and adding. Wax models…practices similar to vodoun…ushabtis intended to substitute for the deceased…the power of the name and the image…

  An idea began to coalesce. It was insane, but insane had been par for the course for a few days now, and Theo was more than angry enough to take a leap of faith. Wax and clay she didn’t have, but there were always other options.

  Papier-mâché, for example. Hands trembling, Theo ripped open the cupboards, assembling the ingredients she needed. Flour. Salt. Water. Newspaper. Mix and mold.

  The object that emerged was crude—she’d never been much of a sculptor. But there it was, a little mummiform figure with the bow and dog’s leash of a hunter in his hands. Servant of the dead. Tongue between her teeth, she scratched out the hieroglyphs on the damp surface, muttering the incantations as best she could remember and praying that her little mnemonic would help her get it right. The damp paper strips bunched and tore under the knife blade as she worked.

  There was only one ingredient left. She threw the shabti in the oven to harden a little, then snatched a garbage bag and, with some effort, hauled the ladder out of the garage.

  It would have been easier at her apartment, where generations of vicious city pigeons lived and died on the roof. Still, the house was a flat-topped International Style box, and Theo remembered well how much random junk could collect up there. She scrambled up over the eaves and landed in a snowdrift.

  Jackpot! A few dead birds at the edge, one still fresh. From the looks of things, Mom and Dad had been putting out traps to keep the pigeons from crapping on the roof, and the snow had preserved the evidence. Trying not to breathe, Theo scraped the freshest up and shoved it into the garbage bag. If she was going to be doing this a lot, she should really invest in a good chest freezer or something.

  Back in the kitchen, it was the work of a few gruesome moments to remove the heart. Murmuring the prayers helped—she could almost imagine she was back in Seth’s Egypt, the kitchen an embalmer’s workshop.

  Or not. She switched the oven off and ran to throw up in the sink.

  Into the shabti went the heart. One final set of incantations, close the hole in the chest with a plug of papier-mâché, and…

  …nothing.

  Nothing at all. Her disgusting little mixed-media sculpture sat there silent and inert, a testimony to the depths she’d reach, if given the opportunity. Paste and blood on her hands, an amateur autopsy on the kitchen table. Egyptian voodoo.

  What would Mom think?

  “Not very chic,” Theo said aloud, a smile tugging at her lips. What would Amy Clarendon Speer, star of the dinner-party circuit, with her Hermès scarf and English rose complexion, say if she could see her daughter now? She’d probably be outwardly proud her baby girl was expanding her horizons, but inwardly she’d cringe at the thought of dismembering animals. Maybe she’d line up a good shrink. Pretend it was all a dream.

  The laugh bubbled up inside her, hoarse and rough and completely mirthless, a cackle with an edge of hysteria that tore its way out of her dry throat. She laughed and laughed, tears somehow leaking from her reddened eyes, as her crude little project sat quietly on the kitchen table in a puddle of bodily fluids and flour paste. Arts and crafts with Leatherface.

  She laughed until she had no more breath or tears and staggered into the living room to sleep. Her abortive attempt at black magic lay abandoned on the table.

  Four thousand years was a heavy burden for anyone to carry, but if Seth was lucky, it could help him. He’d been in danger so many times before, after all, and still lasted into the current day with shabtis to spare. What had he done then? What could he do now?

  This cache was the biggest he had in the city. It was an old bank building, good turn-of-the-century construction with granite walls and marble floors that he owned through a dummy company. The aboveground floors were abandoned and falling apart—one more piece of urban decay in a city that had seen two hundred years come and go. Underground, though, the cool stone basement and vault were perfect for preserving documents. And other things.

  Seth muttered to himself in Kemetic as he pawed through the scrolls in search of an answer. Toulouse? When had he been to Toulouse? As his eyes scanned the parchment, taking in the scrawled lines of hieratic, a dim memory stirred. Oh, 1216, with Fiorentino da Firenze. He hadn’t thought about it since he last recopied the scroll in—he checked the tag—1870. About the time Rachid al-Adhur had come to America, in fact.

  Fiorentino da Firenze. Nice man. Not that it was going to help him now.

  Growling, he dropped the scroll and grabbed another one. Volume three: barely fifty years out of time. With a faint sense of disgust, he perused the familiar lines.

  I know this is a sacrilege, but I cannot call it anything but an opportunity as well. When I return home, I can present myself to the king under any name I like! Once I’ve gotten his attention, I can resume my old duties and discover the fate of my children. I can do what I was made to do, and win back some favor into the bargain.

  I have all eternity at my disposal. There was never a man who could do what I can! I can conquer death—what’s to say I won’t also conquer fear? I can be an institution, a nation of men in service of Waset. In another hundred years, I’ll be the greatest general of all. I doubt the gods can overlook that.

  He’d been so stupid back then. No man, no matter how long-lived, could conquer fear.

  Seth, under many names and faces, had fought. He’d fought and died and killed under dozens of banners, and he’d never found perfection or true fearlessness or proof that the gods had forgiven him. And those the gods did not forgive… The thought ate at him.

  And he was still afraid, afraid that he would die any moment, that the tearing, wrenching feeling would return as his mummy was broken again. His hands trembled at the thought, and he mopped his forehead, trying to get rid of the cold sweat rising there. Magic or not, he was flesh, and flesh had its damn weaknesses.

  At least Theo was safe now, he thought with a sneaking sense of relief. A hand had lain on her heart—she had brushed the threat of the magic aside, but Seth knew well enough what it could have done. His enemy had tried to step into Theo’s body, replacing her soul and mind. And if it had been done? She would be a true Trojan horse, the perfect weapon against Seth. Thank the gods for the tyet—the thought of her being so used had him shuddering with fear and rage.

  He wondered i
f she’d known what she was getting in to, making love to him. Not only that, but she’d done it in full knowledge of what he was. That left a mark.

  The memories rose to the surface and Seth took a deep breath, trying to keep focused. In some ways she was afraid too—worried, determined to be liked and concerned with things he honestly hadn’t contemplated in centuries. But Neith knew, there was iron in her somewhere, bright and sharp beneath the smooth, pallid skin, showing in those moss-green eyes that looked right into his soul as she wrapped herself around him… Oh gods help him, he couldn’t think.

  It had been a long time since he’d been able to talk so freely with another human being. And a brother or scribe was nothing compared to a woman lying at his side, her voice rough with exhaustion even as she teased little bits of information out of him.

  And Theo saw things.

  He knew in his bones that there was nothing in the world that would last like he did. Everything changed, everything died, and no country or creed or dynasty would endure with any meaning. He had fought and died for causes that went unremembered, served at the right hand of men whose names were disgraced after they passed on, collected the favors of great kings whose monuments had not one stone left atop another. His tomb—and the tombs of far greater and more consequential men—was a dusty old site for bored tourists. The relics of Kemet sat in museums, studied as the flotsam and jetsam of a dead kingdom.

  But Theo saw a picture, a creation of the whole. He remembered her stroking the glass as she talked to the shabtis and told them how important they were. Jumbled scraps of tomb goods became, in her eyes, links to a great civilization that had changed the course of the world.

  Seth didn’t know if she was brilliant, naïve or even insane. But it felt good, he thought, to hope that his lives had meant something.

  Egotistic? Oh definitely. But, godsdamnit, couldn’t he pretend his life hadn’t been a failure? Theo gave him hope. Hope for some kind of future, maybe.