Card no. 20
Description: A statue, whose dimensions are given as 13 by 5 by 5 [in, it is assumed], these last representing the base. A female goddess, in flowing robes, very much gravid, standing in a bronze boat formed like the body of a duck, whose head is the prow. Within its open beak it holds a cube.
Text: certain? It’s only been a month…’ I lingered at these, my own words, astonished at the assertion. ‘Of course I am,’ she snapped back, then containing herself with difficulty, lowered her tone, and continued, ‘I’ve not been with anyone, before or since,’ she said, bitterly smiling. She was very much enceinte, astoundingly so, in a way that would have been impossible had I been responsible for her state. I kept on looking at her in bewilderment. My first thought was ‘propulsive force - perhaps; generative principle - never!!’ Still holding my hand lightly, she followed up, saying, ‘It does seem impossible, doesn’t it? Not just the time - I mean, given what had happened to you, in addition. Think, though, was anything odd done to you then, or about that time? I mean …’ At that, the thought of the daily calls to the doctor snapped into mind. Once I had found out the disgusting source of the gold and green powders, I had ceased from visiting him again. Had our meeting in the ossuary been before or after the ‘treatment’s’ short course? I could not remember, for the life of
Card no. 21
Description: Another souvenir card assumed to be from the local natural history collection, exhibiting a quite large centipede of unknown type, with several interesting and anomalous features. The scale beside it a quarter-inch stick, since inches would make the creature ridiculously large.
Text: smooth and horrendously distended vulva with a disgusting plop. The three witches - I cannot think of them as being other than that -hurried to the trestle immediately, clicking the emerald daggers they had for tongues excitedly against their teeth. The multitudinous onlookers and priests held their distance. Mrs F seemed to be in a state of shock, but was still breathing with eyes closed. Horrified, I cast a look at Alicia, who stood imperturbed in her youthful nakedness, motionless, still holding the thick black candle cool as you like, as if she were in Westminster Abbey. The bloody caul and afterbirth were snipped at and cut with glassy tongues, and I saw, when the three stepped back, a foul, thick, twitching, segmented thing, snaky, glinting green and gold, thick as a moray eel, writhing between the poor woman’s bloody legs. The chief witch nodded to Alicia, who slowly moved forward, setting her candle carefully at her mother’s feet. At another signal, she picked up the glistening demonic shape, which unwound itself into a heavy, broad, segmented centipede-like beast of dimensions that left me gasping. Alicia uncoiled the slimy monster, gleaming with ichor, and draped the hellspawn ‘round her shoulders, just as if it was a feather boa. Pausing only for a moment, she turned to me with a thin leer, and asked ‘Want to hold it? It’s yours too!’ Revulsed, I turned, while she shrugged and set off on the ceremonial way, the crowd bowing to her and her half-brother, sister, or whatever, the belt of hollow birds’ eggs - her only adornment - clicking around her slim hips, brown from hours on the temple steps - as she swayed, during
Card no. 22
Description: A shining centipede probably of gold, coiled upon a dais of ebony, or some other dark wood, this last encrusted with bejewelled precious metal of arabesque form. The central object’s size may be inferred from the various items imbedded in it: Roman cameos, Egyptian scarabs, coins from crushed empires and forgotten kingdoms, some thousands of years old, the votive offerings of worshippers over the millennia we infer the sculpture to have existed. The object is fabulous: an utter masterwork of the goldsmith’s art rivalled only by the Cellini salt cellar and one or two other pieces. It almost seems alive.
Text: almost worth it. Calquon and Harrison are dead, what has become of Paul, who thought up all this, I have no idea. I have been subjected to the most hideous torture, and seen the most awful sights, that few can have experienced without losing their sanity. It is deeply ironic after all I have been through, that I by chance only yesterday discovered the object, hidden away in my belongings. What remains to be seen is whether I can bring it back to civilisation with myself intact. I cannot trust Alicia, who has clearly let her elevation to high priestess and chief insect-keeper go to her head. During my last interview with her, whilst she dangled her shapely foot provocatively over the arm of her golden throne, I, in a vain effort to play upon her familial bonds and old self, reminded her of her younger brother, who had not been seen for days. At that she casually let drop that he had been sold on to Zanzibar (where there is, I believe, an active slave market) to ultimately disappear into one of the harems of the Arabian peninsula (Philby may be able to inform more fully). ‘I never could stand the little pest,’ was her remark, so it would be foolish to hope for any sympathy from her quarter. I am being watched quite closely, with great suspicion. Can it be they know? If I ever leave here alive, it will be an absolute sensation. Biding my time, I cannot do anything now, but I can at least try to smuggle these surreptitiously scribbled notes out to the French vice-consul in the city where we bought the mules. He is a good fellow, though he drinks to excess at
An additional 52 cards remain (see photocopies), which although of great interest, bear no handwritten notes, and therefore are not described here, with the following single exception:
Card: not in sequence, i.e. unnumbered by us
Description: A photographic postal card of a large exterior wall of a stone building of enormous size. The impressive dimensions become apparent once one realises that the small specks and dots on the stereobate of the vaguely classical structure are in fact people - some alone, others in groups, these last for the most part sheltered under awnings set up on the steps. What most catches the eye, however, is the magnificent low relief work covering most of the wall, depicting, it would seem, some mythological scene whose iconographic meaning is not apparent. It is in character a harmonious mixture of several ancient traditions: one sees hints of the Hellenistic, Indo-Grecian, and traces even of South-East Asian styles. The contrasts of tone make clear that the bare stone has been brightly painted.
The relief itself: It appears a judgement is being carried out. In the background, solemn ringlet-bearded men draped in graceful robes, all in the same pose, all copies of the other. All hold a square object, somewhat in form like a hand-mirror divided into one field black and one field white, and watch with blank eyes the man before them who is strapped to a plank, while a large fabulous beast, part man, part insect, with elements of the order Scolopcndra predominating, tears at him in the fashion of the Promethean eagles, and worse. To the right, a young priestess or goddess, nude but for a chain of beads or eggs around her waist, stands contrapposto, with one arm embraced about an obscene creature, a centipedal monstrosity of roughly her own height, leaning tightly upright against her. She is pointing with her free hand towards the tortured man. The expression on her empty face has affinities with several known Khmer royal portrait sculptures. She faintly smiles, as if in ecstasy.
Don Tumasonis, after a largely picaresque and misspent youth, settled down, he thought, to a quiet life on the outskirts of a Scandinavian capital, with a charming, if Norwegian wife; lively, if rambunctious cats; and interesting, if space-consuming books. Little did he anticipate the chain of events awaiting, forcing him into the mendicant life of a writer with little more than a bronze parachute to protect him. He has since published stories in Ghosts & Scholars, All Hallows, Supernatural Tales and the Ash-Tree Press anthology Shadows and Silence. As he explains: ’ “The Prospect Cards” draws its inspiration from many sources: stuffy booksellers’ catalogues, volumes of 18th and 19th century Levantine travel, a walk along the Seine, Kipling, Rider Haggard in his usual more perverse mode, and anthropological literature. Its mood was influenced by the books of George MacDonald Fraser, Glen Baxter and the character of John Cleese. It was meant to be humorous, but seems to have got out of hand.’
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CHICO KIDD
‘I have made my way, I know you, and I know thy name, and I know the name of her who is within thee: Invoker of thy Two Lands, destroyer of those who come to thee by fire, lady of spirits, obeyer of the word of thy Lord is thy name.’
The Book of the Dead
He couldn’t resist another look at the papyrus before he put it away. Not in over forty years of scratching for treasures (but usually finding no more than detritus) in the white sands and stony cliffs of Egypt had he seen anything quite so beautiful.
With infinite and meticulous care, he unrolled a tiny section and drank in the delicate painting like a fine wine. His fear of damaging the frail thing was not quite enough to prevent one final greedy sight of the painted figures in their vibrant colours, clear and bright as if they had been drawn the day before, stylised yet wonderfully lifelike.
In the flickering lamplight, raven-haired girls moved through a stately dance, their lithe bodies plain beneath their diaphanous skirts. A crowned woman offered a blue lotus flower to a pharaonic figure. Musicians - a flautist, a drummer, a blind harper - played to guests at a feast. Men with the heads of beasts and birds marched in stately procession. Here was Thoth, the scribe; there, crocodile-headed Ammut, eater of the damned.
His lips moved silently as he read some of the hieroglyphs: Thoth, great god, Lord of the holy words, place-taker of Re, ibis-headed, god of truth and wisdom, five times very great, and his hand crept almost of its own accord to stroke the small golden statue which stood on the table beside him.
And at first they had assumed this to be a run-of-the-mill funerary papyrus of no particular importance.
Valentim Ruivo smiled once more in sheer delight at his prize and smoothed its ancient surface more gently than, in years gone by, he had caressed the soft hair of a lover, remembering and savouring the delicious moment when he had first seen it.
Just an ordinary wooden funerary statuette, a little more time-damaged than some, its painted inscription illegible; finding it hollow, as such things often were, they had been unsurprised to discover a roll of papyrus inside. Indeed they had laid it on one side, preoccupied as they were with the golden Thoth statuette and the small but exciting hoard of other artefacts they had unearthed earlier.
Finally, though, Ruivo had come back to the papyrus, laid it on this very table after setting the remains of his lunch on the floor to be out of the way. Taking his pocket-knife, he raised the outer fold of the roll with some care, but not the delicacy he now used. And what a sight had met his eyes. He sighed with pleasure at the recollection. Such moments were not very often granted. One had to grub in the dirt for forty years to find such a reward. Although the ultimate prize, an unplundered tomb, was yet to be discovered, every Egyptologist worth his salt was convinced that it was out there: an Eldorado of the desert, a treasure trove of wonderful things.
The shaft had seemed so unprepossessing, too. It had smelled so foul that none of the locals would dig there, claiming that the vile stink was a sign that it was infested by afrits, evil spirits. So Ruivo, who did not believe in such things any more than he credited stories of cursed tombs and crumbling bandaged mummies three thousand years dead stalking the night, had wrapped a cloth over his mouth and nose and descended.
Ship of the desert, my arse, thought Luís Da Silva irritably for the hundredth time as he braced his thighs around the camel’s singularly uncomfortable saddle. I might have known it would be about as enjoyable as being keelhauled.
Torn between an urgent need for a smoke and a desire to wipe the sweat running down his face, and able to do neither - nothing on earth would have induced him to release his grip on the wooden handhold -he wondered again how he had let himself be persuaded to visit an archaeological dig in the dusty middle of Egypt. It was about as far from the sea as it was possible to be without actually being in the Sahara Desert. And therefore not the native element for a Portuguese ship’s captain, or even a remotely suitable environment. He found that he was uncomfortable this far away from water. His ship, the barque Isabella, was hundreds of miles away in Alexandria.
He squeezed his right eye shut, disorienting himself completely, and attempted to lean his head far enough sideways to wipe it on his sleeve, but succeeded only in reaching his unshaven cheek. It rasped along his sleeve. Should have shaved, too, he thought in annoyance, opening his eye hastily before he overbalanced.
The eyepatch he wore on the other side was now so unbearably damp and gritty he’d tried to give up even thinking about it. I wish I’d taken the damned thing off before I got up on this wretched beast, he thought. Normally he wore the patch to avoid subjecting people to the sight of the scar that ran from eyebrow to cheekbone, souvenir of an encounter with a demon which had cost him his left eye. But the snaggle-toothed guide who accompanied him boasted not only a horribly puckered crease down half his face but also seemed to be missing part of his nose, so Da Silva didn’t think he would have objected.
However, the speculation was academic. Thirty-odd years spent at sea meant he could keep his balance without even thinking about it on a bucking deck in the teeth of a force nine gale or a fifty-foot sea, but rocking on top of a camel had deprived him of all stability. And illogical as he knew it was, the handhold was the only thing that gave him any sense of security above the creature’s ungainly gait.
I just hope Senhor Ruivo appreciates this, he thought, otherwise I’m going to go straight back to London and personally strangle Jorge Coelho. This was the shipping agent who had persuaded him into this folly: an old friend who had presumed rather too much on friendship this time.
The dry wind, which did nothing at all to alleviate the heat, tugged at the cloth over his head, and he was glad at least that he had taken his guide’s advice and relinquished his hat. Otherwise it would have been long gone into the sands of Egypt. He rather envied the native’s loose robes, as well, although he was dressed as sensibly as a European could, even to the extent of omitting collar and tie; even so, everything had become moist and most of it was itching. The majority of people wore far too many clothes, in his opinion. Especially, he thought with an inward smile, women.
Ahead, he saw his first ghost since they had left the outskirts of Luxor, and brought his attention back to the present, wondering if that meant they were nearly at their destination.
It was a very ancient ghost, this one, faded almost to nothingness, little more than a heat-haze shimmering over the desert. For a moment, he doubted his perception, and then more phantoms came into view, drifting aimlessly over the pallid scorching sands.
This ability to see the dead was the other legacy of his encounter with the demon, and it had taken some getting used to, until he realised that all he had to do was ignore them, and he had just about trained himself to do that. It had taken nearly five years, though. Getting used to missing an eye had been a lot easier, and, of necessity, a lot quicker, too.
‘How far?’ he asked his guide, who, as before, refused to reply to Arabic in the same tongue and answered in English, which annoyed Da Silva considerably, even though his English was almost as good as his Portuguese.
‘Ten minute,’ the guide replied, spreading his hand three times, and thus confusing Da Silva completely. I wish I hadn’t asked, he thought crossly, and returned to observing the ghosts.
In fact, since the camels’ lurching stride was deceptive, Ruivo’s camp came into view not much more than five minutes later. Da Silva, whose temper had begun to fray, gave silent thanks, and scanned the scene in front of him.
He picked out the archaeologist with ease, for the simple reason that everyone else in sight was obviously Egyptian. Ruivo, bustling towards them, put him in mind of a stork wearing a straw hat, lanky and stooped, with a birdlike gait.
The guide induced the camels to kneel, and Da Silva leant hastily backwards, just in time to avoid a forward dive over his mount’s head which would have been a dramatic, if a little over-flamboy
ant, introduction to his client. Terra firma had never felt so welcoming, although he was surprised and annoyed to find his knees were shaking. He handed the guide a handful of piastres - less than he would normally have done, but he was irritated by the man’s insistence on speaking English - and turned his attention to alleviating his various discomforts.
By the time Ruivo drew near, he had put the headcloth to good secondary use in mopping his face, especially under his eyepatch, and was standing bareheaded, squinting in the brightness, and smoking a small black cheroot. All I need now is something to drink, he decided, looking at the sky and estimating the time to be around eleven, before I melt away completely. His mouth, like everything else, felt full of sand.
‘Capitão Da Silva,’ the archaeologist said effusively, a smile splitting his beard, which, being pure white from jaw-level, gave the rather startling impression that he had just dipped his chin in a bowl of milk. ‘So good of you to come all this way.’
Yes, I think so too, thought Da Silva, shaking the proffered large, bony hand and finding it curiously strengthless as well as unpleasantly clammy. ‘Senhor Ruivo,’ he replied. ‘I’m sure it will be a pleasure once I find out what I’m doing here.’
Ruivo looked taken aback, Da Silva was mordantly amused to see, and he smiled to himself, his ill humour forgotten. You don’t get away with it that easily, he told the older man silently.
‘Well, er, we don’t quite have all the comforts of home,’ said Ruivo, ‘but I expect you wouldn’t refuse a drink.’
Da Silva, who knew prevarication when he saw it, but was in need of replacing some of the liquid he had sweated off, raised his eyebrows, feeling the familiar pull of the scar at the left one. ‘That would be very welcome.’
Dark Terrors 6 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 50
