24 Bones

by Stewart, Michael F.

  I am the keeper of the volume of the Tablet of Destiny, of the things which have been made and of the things which shall be made.

  Identical text could be found in the Book of the Dead.

  Behold, I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. The corruptible must put on incorruption, and the mortal must put on immortality. When the corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and the mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written. Death is swallowed up in victory.

  David pursed his lips. Did they really believe a mortal could really become immortal? Did they, the Shemsu Seth, think this immortal—a prophet, Osiris—could be one of the Companions of Horus? Is that why they slaughtered the companions? Is that why, as Pope Shagar stated, the Shemsu Seth hunted him? David shook his head vigorously. They were insane, drunk on their own religion—one he’d spurned.

  Regardless, these words piqued his interest. He wasn’t just reading a prophecy, but perhaps the earliest version of the Bible on record. To translate it, David had drawn the Corinthians text straight from Google. Not a perfect match, but the crux of it was the same.

  When the dog-star rises above the companion to matter, the Hall of Ma’at sheds its skin. Reassemble, companions! Reassemble the backbone, Benu’s egg.

  Mention of Benu’s egg caught him now. The Benu bird was an early representation of the phoenix. And now the author spoke of its rebirth. Suggesting he would come again. But in what form?

  Thou shalt find the Wedjat standing by thee like the watchers. He must gather these in the thousands.

  The Wedjat, of course, was a reference to Horus, which in David’s mind was synonymous with Jesus. To David it confirmed further how inextricably linked the two religions were. This seemed to speak of the task of the Wedjat: to gather an army of watchers to defeat Seth.

  The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night in which the heavens shall pass away with great noise. From it, a beast shall rise. Power will be given unto him over all kindreds. He will open his mouth in blasphemy and cause the earth to tremble. It will be given unto him to make war with the companions and to overcome them.

  Rise up thou, O Osiris, thou hast thy backbone, O Still-heart, thou hast thy neck vertebrae and thy back, O Still-heart! Place thou thyself on thy base. I put water beneath thee.

  Parts of the first paragraph seemed to derive from Revelations. But the latter half dealt with the resurrection ritual around Osiris, a ritual that entailed raising a symbolic spine, often a djed staff. It was from the Book of the Dead, saying:

  And when this is done, there will be a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth will be passed away. And if the heaven is not raised, faith is vain and yet in sin. Then they also who have fallen asleep in faith shall perish.

  More biblical scripture, but scripture that seemed tailored to the Osiris and Horus mythology. Or vice versa.

  If the scarab shell is unbroken when the Akhet’s bullhorns haul the boat of Horus to Aten, the Benu will be lost and the Halls of Ma’at shall close.

  Go in like the hawk and come forth like the Benu, the Morning Star of Re.

  And so the translation finished. And with nothing about twenty-four bones.

  To David, this was an example of the Christian Judgment Day myth written in an ancient Egyptian script. Nothing short of stunning—and for all of the reasons that Pope Shagar and the Sisters of St. George, including his grandmother, had been long disappointed with his choices. The phrases that weren’t related to the Bible derived from the Pyramid Texts and the Book of the Dead. Both of these were funerary texts that combined spells and ritual for the journey of an Egyptian soul, or Ba, through the underworld.

  The last portion contained a most interesting kernel, however. It suggested a timeline to fulfill the prophecy. It answered the question, why it would fall into David’s hands now. Akhet, the ancient Egyptian new year, approached.

  Packing away the translation, a thrill ran up his own spine. The blow that this stele could strike would shake the foundation of Christianity. David’s derision for organized religion extended to the Church for good reason. After his failed indoctrination into the Shemsu Hor, he’d been shipped first to England and then to Canada where he attended private boarding schools. Father Trent had been the Headmaster of the Highbury Catholic School, and someone who, at David’s grandmama’s request, had taken a special interest in him.

  Late for Mass, David had been regularly tacked, or lashed, by a thin whip of wood. Often the wood would splinter across his back and leave fragments imbedded in his flesh. But worse than the tackings were the runs. Father Trent ran daily, and every Saturday, when most boarders had returned home to their families, David ran with him. Tied to the Father’s waist by a rope, David gasped scripture and ran until he vomited. Father Trent had always completed his task in the moral certitude that David could be saved.

  A man carrying a shovel and hauling a bucket of earth shouldered past David. David blinked in the settling dark.

  Tara could answer his remaining questions. Now that he’d spoken with Shagar, he knew he wasn’t only here to complete a translation. They had brought him here to help fulfill a prophecy, to take up some connection with Shemsu Hor. He chuckled a little maniacally at the thought.

  He checked the address in his pocket again. It was copied in his rushed scrawl onto a slip of paper. He took a last look for Zahara.

  Despite the shadows in the tunnel that led into the walled city, the streets at his back were more frightening. David glanced down the narrow paths into a neighborhood of poor apartment blocks. Children played among refuse. Shuttered windows were missing blinds. Steel pipes and wires climbed the raw concrete shells. A figure watched him from a shadow pierced only by a cigarette ember. When his gaze lingered, she stepped forward into the rays of the declining sun.

  The woman’s skin held a grayish cast, but even at a distance, her eyes were a startling green. The hijab framed a complexion like cracked glaze, a network of veins meandering over the porcelain sides of her face. He would have sworn the veins glowed faintly. The definition of bone, sinew, and muscle made her skin as translucent as a scorpion’s carapace. David thought her attractive, but too attractive, like a model that skipped past beauty into an alien world. Her skeletal smile erased even this.

  Suddenly a vice clamped his chest, finding his heart and almost stopping it as she held his stare. Tired sweat pores reopened and dripped icily from his temples.

  He clutched his chest, but not his left side, the right. David had dextrocardia, a rare condition that shifted his heart to the opposite side. Slowly, the tension eased and the woman flicked away the cigarette and returned into the darkness. When he peered after her, it was as if she’d never been.

  David used the wall to support himself as he staggered down the steps, other hand rubbing his sternum. As the ache faded, he dismissed the thought that the woman had somehow caused the chest pain. Once under the outer defences, he hurried down a slender cobbled street. Shaken by the experience, he wanted nothing more than to meet Tara, find Zahara, and sink into the hotel hot tub.

  Another sheer wall of the fortress climbed on his right; to his left was a synagogue purported to be Egypt’s first. It neighbored St. George’s convent, his childhood home. He now realized the convent was something more. Why would the sisters let his father brand him in their courtyard unless they were a part of the wild religion?

  He hugged the wall and slipped past the convent, wanting no part of it. He knew precisely where Tara lived. As a child, he had bounced balls against her home. He suspected she might have seen him then, maybe even scolded him.

  Plaster flaked from the alley walls, falling in shards. The street of leading to Tara’s home was dug up to repair pipes that had not existed prior to David’s own flight from E
gypt. A couple of scattered picks and shovels leaned against the walls.

  The heavy wooden door to Tara’s courtyard lay open. In a hutch, pigeons cooed hungrily. A green washbasin sat at the threshold of the walkup to her flat. A clothesline, hung between the doorway and a sycamore, drooped under the weight of towels. They were dry and stiff. No light filtered around closed windowframes. He knocked at the door, fists thudding hollowly. The door opened a crack as he knocked.

  He rapped again and then hunkered down to ease the door ajar. With a thin screech, it swung a few inches.

  “Hello?” he called. “Sister?”

  As he stared through the crack into the pitch-black interior, he wondered what he should do. He was only a few minutes late. That she wouldn’t be waiting for him after he flew thousands of miles rankled.

  Still, with the open door and silence, perhaps she needed help? He reached inside the door to feel for a light switch; his hand traced the doorframe and then plunged further into the darkness. He grew conscious of his bare hands. He imagined cold fingers clawing his own.

  He shuddered and elbowed the door open. Flies burst outward with the foul stench of decay, stale urine, and shit. Gagging, his fingers brushed against a switch. Cool light filtered through a frosted wall sconce. He lurched through the door, mouth covered by his sleeve.

  David’s chest heaved as he glanced around the room and swept flies from his sweat-salted face. Should he go on? Bookcases and shelving were thrown to the carpet. The stuffing from a torn couch with green paisley print formed drifts of foam. He could guess what the looters searched for. He glanced back at the open door, every part of him screaming to run.

  But he’d come this far and the smell told him that whoever had done this was long gone. He stepped briefly into the kitchen to draw two triangular blades from a knife block. Their weight was a comfort in his greasy palms. He passed through the living room, but paused.

  On the wall, with a quiver still bristling with arrows, an unstrung bow balanced on two hooks. He squinted at them, then drew a finger over the cracked leather quiver. A small inscription at the base confirmed his thoughts. It was his bow. His quiver. Left with the sisters after his father had died and they’d sent him away. But what were they doing here?

  The inscription read, Heed the call of Re. With his curiosity further piqued, he ventured deeper toward the heaviest buzz of flies, suspecting that he was about to find Tara.

  In a bedroom, sheets hung over a mattress, and a chest of drawers had toppled on the floor, contents strewn. From the next bedroom came a sound. Something shifted on bedsprings. David’s thick eyebrows gathered together. He edged around the corner with his carving knives held in front.

  A furless dog, sleek and muscled like a Doberman, squatted in the center of the room. It growled, protecting its dinner, a half-gnawed man.

  David stumbled backward. The hound leaped. David lunged into the adjoining bedroom and fell back against the door. Its swing jammed the hound’s fanged snout. He sliced the muzzle and carved a flap of pink flesh from the bone. The muzzle disappeared and the door clicked closed. He fumbled for the lock and drew it across. He held his hands at his temples. The knife blades stuck upward like horns.

  “Fuck.”

  Paws scrabbled at the wood. David thumped the hafts of the knives against the door. When the paws stopped, he righted the chest and propped it against the door. David sat on the bed only to jump back against the wall when the door rattled on its hinge. The hound slammed into it full tilt a second time, and the door buckled. David breathed quick and shallow pants.

  He tried the tiny window and pulled at its brick frame in an effort to widen it. He sucked the fresh air into his lungs, but the window was too small to climb through. What was going on? He’d have to call Shagar or maybe the police for help. What a disaster. A dead man lay outside the room and who knew how the Egyptian police would see David as implicated. His romantic trip with Zahara. His triumph in bringing to light a new artifact. These dreams crumbled as he slumped back on the bed.

  The dog continued its assault. Each bang jangled his nerves, but the impromptu barricade held. Finally the ramming stopped. David waited, picturing the hound feeding on the rotting corpse. He checked his watch. Quaking, he pulled a cover over his legs for warmth and tried to decide his next step.

  Outside the door, the dog growled and then gave a startled yelp. David jerked forward on the bed and listened.

  Knuckles rapped against the door.

  “David Nidaal?” a voice asked. “Tara say to come help.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Faris.”

  “What about the dog?”

  “Dead.”

  David pulled the chest away from the door and unlocked it. He held the knives low at his side. In the doorframe stood a small man dressed in tan robes. Blood dripped from a metal discus-like weapon at his side.

  “I come help.” The man reached and snatched David’s hand, pulling him over the threshold. The man winced as he yanked. “She said to say that what you seek lies with the priest’s last duty.”

  David glanced at the hound whose body lay next to its severed head.

  In the distance, dogs barked, and the man paled. “They are coming,” he said.

  David didn’t need him to explain that the people who came owned the creepy dog. The dog they’d left to eat a corpse. The same people who thought, according to Pope Shagar, he was leading them to the engraving.

  “The church, the tunnels in the Hanging Church,” David said.

  And maybe he was.

  The man might be small, but he could sure run. As soon as David mentioned the church, Faris turned his blood-soaked back and set off. David stepped over the dead dog but paused in the living room to snatch his old bow from the wall, a weapon with which he was far more comfortable. The knives dropped to the sea of foam.

  Sinew still dangled from one end of the bow and he threaded the shaft between his knees to string it. A long time had passed since he’d used a stick-and-string bow rather than a compound pulley-based system, but the bow still had a good draw and the arrows were tipped with wickedly barbed heads.

  Faris waited for him at the courtyard door, waved once, and then dashed into the street. The barking swelled, urging David on, past the sisters and toward the Hanging Church. He caught a flare of light ahead, and then another dog yelped. In his haste David didn’t get a good look but it appeared that the hairless hound had run full on into a scythe.

  The small man stood at the gate to leave the fort, bloody weapon dripping. Recalling the woman in the street outside of the fort, David shook his head and pointed the little man toward the Hanging Church.

  David, suddenly glad Zahara had disappeared, dashed back up the steps of the church and into the dark nave.

  As David entered, Shagar hurried out from beyond the screens and waved away explanation.

  “Under those pews.” The Pope pointed to the trap doors. “Hurry, I will close the doors after you are through.”

  The small man was pulling the church door shut by way of a brass ring, but David saw another dog racing up the steps ahead of what appeared to be a dwarf—wielding an axe.

  For a split second, David gaped but then regained his head. David nocked an arrow, drew back, and let fly. The arrow sped true, lodging in the chest of the animal, sending it somersaulting into the narthex of the church. The dwarf mounted the top step and raised his broad axe, which took on a bluish glow as it lifted.

  David drew another arrow back to his ear. With a sudden crack the bow shaft splintered into pieces. The doors slammed shut and a timber dropped to lock them, just as the axe struck. The half-moon of the blade pierced the thick door. David stood aghast at the power used to accompany the stroke.

  “Good,” Shagar said to David and started remov
ing the pews to free the trapdoors.

  “What the hell is going on?” David demanded.

  Faris must not have understood as he simply rushed to help the pope move the pews. David thought back to what Tara had told Faris. The priest’s last duty.

  “Forgive me, Your Holiness, but there is something else I must do …” David trailed off when Shagar placed his hands over his eyes as if he didn’t want to see.

  Lighting the taper of the oil lamp, David hopped over the chain. His steps rang out as he descended the spiral stairs.

  At the bottom, he pushed open the iron-studded door. The walls sweated and glistened in the light and echoed with his wheezing breath. At the end of the short passage was the rough hewn altar. Here was where the priests completed their final duty. Here must be where the engraving was hidden.

  Despite the attack, excitement churned in his guts as he approached.

  In the dim light he couldn’t see a drawer or cupboard where the engraving might be held. At the bottom, however, a thin rectangular line traced the stone, darker as if newly mortared. He dug his fingers into it. His nails bent as he worked. He had no tool. Finally, the soft mortar gave way and he pulled out bricks to reveal a small compartment.

  Under the altar, his fingers fell on something smooth, too smooth to be stone, and too cold. He hauled, finding it heavy and difficult to grip with sweaty hands. With a final tug, it slid down to land against his knees, slipping free of a rough cloth.

  He swallowed hard at the reflected gold. Gold. A sheet of engraved metal. The engraving matched the rubbing. But his fingers traced text on the opposite side as well. It was true. Tara had only sent him part of the story.