A Life of Death: Episodes 9 - 12

by Weston Kincade

  I looked around the small office and the ancient artifacts. “How old did you say they were?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, glancing at Dr. Kamal. “About thirty-four hundred years… give or take a few hundred.”

  I rose from my chair and grabbed my jacket. “You know, I think I’ll pass. There’s probably nothing I can do to help you anyway. It’s just too old, and the likelihood of a murder weapon or something else connected to a murder surviving this long is slim to none.”

  “Look, Mr. Drummond,” Dr. Mayna said, rising with a hand half extended toward me, “I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. I just hoped you might be able to help us.”

  I paused while shrugging into my overcoat in an attempt to flee the two skeptics. “You don’t understand, and you’re not being honest. I opened up and told you everything, things I never tell anyone. You don’t really believe me, which I honestly expected, but now you want to try and test me, to try and catch me in a lie. I’m not lying.”

  Dr. Mayna gave a hesitant nod. “You’re right. I did want to test you. I should have mentioned that, but I wasn’t lying. I do hope you’re telling the truth. It’s a bit hard to believe, but if it’s true, you really can help us. You can give us an insight into a world we’ve all dreamed of.”

  Even Dr. Kamal nodded at this.

  “We study ancient Egypt because we’re fascinated by it. To be honest, I wish I’d lived in that time, in that culture. It’s just astounding what they accomplished,” she continued.

  I straightened the collar of my jacket and opened the door. “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but I can’t help you. It’s been too long. Nothing could remain after three thousand years.” Could it? I wondered, but chose not to voice my own curiosity. I already had enough problems and didn’t need more added. Besides, I was in no mood to die again that day.

  “How do you know?” she asked. This time her tone sounded desperate. “You said you relived some people’s murders from the Civil War.”

  Maybe she does hope I’m the real deal. “Well… I don’t know for sure,” I admitted, “but the Civil War was barely a hundred-fifty years ago. You’re talking thousands of years. Besides, what do you even have that might work?”

  “Bones. We have the skeletons of the victims.”

  “Victims… plural?” I walked out the door.

  Jessie turned his attention from the enclosed artifact he was inspecting down the hall and stood watching our argument, a pleased smile on his face that silently said, “I told you so.”

  Dr. Mayna followed me with Dr. Kamal on her heels, watching as though this were a newly released soap opera.

  I spun on the tiled hallway floor. “Don’t you think I’ve tried bones, Dr. Mayna? All that’s left of some of the victims are bone fragments and ashes. On the last few victims we were able to find earlier, I tried to see what they’d gone through. Their charred skin wasn’t even able to contain the memories. Why do you think this will be any different?”

  She took a deep breath. “Because… burning changes the chemical composition of things. Our skeletons show no evidence of being burned or ritual sacrifice. These were people who may have been unjustly murdered. You said you try to bring these victims, these ghosts, some kind of satisfaction, right? Absolution?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What if these people have been stuck here as ghosts for thousands of years, left to dwell in a world they no longer understand and can’t interact with? Do they deserve your help any less? I’d think you’d want to help them, to do what no one’s been able to do—to give them peace.”

  The thought of being stuck in limbo, as some ghosts inevitably were, sent a chill down my spine. I looked around me at the posters on the wall advertising the university’s attempts to rescue lost and stolen artifacts, at the shattered pottery lining the hallway and ancient artwork adorning the walls. These were some of the few remaining pieces left from an entire civilization, thousands of people gone from this world. How many are stuck in between, not living but not quite dead either? And this is just one culture. It dawned on me how few people I’d helped in the grand scheme of the world. There were many more people out there, searching for a way to the other side. I wasn’t sure what existed beyond our world, but if ghosts were real, which I knew to be true from previous encounters, then there had to be something. Heaven, Hell, the Duat; whatever it was had to be better than limbo. “How long will this take?”

  Dr. Mayna smiled. “How long does it take to have a vision?”

  “Seconds, minutes, I don’t even know if I’ll get one. I can’t promise anything, you understand?”

  She nodded. “I do. It’s worth a try though.”

  “Fine, let’s give it a shot.”

  Dr. Kamal watched with a curious expression. “You Americans are never boring.”

  “Tell me about it,” I replied, following the GW professor down the hall and past Jessie, who joined Dr. Kamal and me.

  “What’s going on?” my old friend asked.

  “Quid pro quo. We’re gonna try and see if I can die again today.”

  “They bought it?” he asked.

  Dr. Kamal’s eyebrows rose.

  “There’s nothing to buy,” I answered.

  “I know,” Jessie replied. “I know it’s real, but what you can do most people view the way the Puritans saw witchcraft.”

  “Let’s just be glad we don’t burn people at the stake anymore.” My thoughts went to the fourteen victims. “Well, most of us at least.”

  A LIFE OF DEATH: 10

  BY

  WESTON KINCADE

  - BOOKS of the DEAD -

  Nine

  Ancient Memories

  September 16, 2011

  We passed from the hallway into a gallery filled with artifacts. I slipped my hands into my coat pockets and made sure to keep a moderate distance from each display. Although they were enclosed and protected, I didn’t want to take chances. After walking through a few rooms, we finally entered a door marked Authorized Personnel Only. Inside the long room were rows of stainless-steel counters and tabletops, with short boxes containing all sorts of jagged pottery shards, bones, casts, and other assorted historic discoveries. Researchers, young interns, and a few adults I assumed to be other professors worked at the different stations with brushes or sat huddled over well-lit boxes trying to piece together the remains of hundreds of years of history as though it were a jigsaw puzzle. Windows lined the walls above the tables, but instead of looking outside, through them other, similarly designed rooms could be seen. We followed Dr. Mayna through two sets of swinging doors, past more people dressed in white lab coats, and entered a room with larger, occupied, stainless-steel tables. It was like an L-shaped morgue, but without the frosty chill. Instead, dust seemed to permeate the air from the remains, and a sterile, haunted feeling crept up the back of my neck.

  Dr. Mayna took a lab coat off a coat hook behind the door and slipped it over her other clothes. It dwarfed her slim figure, but seemed to belong there. “Meet Jack and Jill,” Dr. Mayna said after shooing the few researchers present out of the room. She motioned toward the two complete skeletons filling the short-walled, body-length boxes on two tables. On a third, parallel table was yet another skeleton. “And this is Curly. We have other names, as you can see by the tags, but our interns spend so much time with them that they always name them.” Other skeletons lay about the room in varying conditions, some only partially present. “Jack and Jill are from Deir el-Medina, just outside the Valley of the Kings.”

  “So which one’s been giving you problems?” I asked while Jessie snooped around the room.

  Dr. Mayna’s head snapped up when Jessie reached into a box. “Please, do not touch, Mr. Arturo!”

  Jessie’s hand leaped from the box as though it had been slapped. He nodded and moved on, slowly meandering through the maze of tables.

  “Well, we’re not going to get anywhere if I can’t touch it,” I whispered, somehow feeling as though it were nec
essary. The atmosphere was oppressive, almost as though by stepping into the room I’d set foot on the consecrated ground of a graveyard.

  She massaged a crick out of her neck and shrugged her shoulders as though trying to work out the stress of such an idea. “If you have to,” she said with hesitance, “but be careful. Don’t pick anything up.”

  Dr. Kamal watched, seeming curious both about the rooms, which he evidently hadn’t seen yet, and what I might do.

  Having touched the bodies of victims and the remains of bones before, I doubted anything would come of this. However, looking down at Jack’s skeletal remains, the bones appeared to have darkened with time and sent a deeper chill through me. The top of Jack’s skull was crushed in, as though with a pick or ax. The fractures and damage were typical of trauma to the head. Looking at the victim so long after the accident was less messy than what I was used to, and it seemed clear what had happened. “So what can you tell me about Jack?”

  Dr. Mayna quirked her head. “I thought that’s what you were going to tell us.”

  I turned to stare at her, but she just returned it without emotion. “Well, first off I’d say that you’re right; Jack was murdered.”

  “A vision?” she asked with audible skepticism.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “You can see from the stress fractures in the skull that the impact was while he was living, or at least before his body had deteriorated. If it had happened later, his entire skull would have been more brittle and collapsed under the pressure.”

  “Why murder, though? Couldn’t it have been a rock or something large that fell on Jack’s head?” she asked, still showing no emotion, but circling the table like a vulture.

  “No. Something large wouldn’t have pierced the skull in such a way. It would have crushed it. The murder weapon was sharp, like a small ax or pick.”

  “I see.” She continued to walk, but lowered her chin to her chest and crossed her arms as though in thought, but again her tone lacked any of the concern or conviction she’d held when we spoke over the last forty-five minutes.

  “But you already knew that,” I added.

  She stopped to glare at me. “Yes, Mr. Drummond, we did. Like you, I’m well trained to analyze crime scenes and the results of murder. I understand you know your business as a police officer—”

  “Detective,” I interjected.

  She harrumphed and glared at me as though I were an intruder moving in on her turf, which I guess I was, but it was at her request. “You know your business, Mr. Detective,” she continued, “but we both know that isn’t why I asked you to come back here.”

  I nodded. “You’re right.”

  “Are you pulling my chain? Are you even a detective, or just some actor wasting our precious time because you got the urge to look at dead bodies after watching the History channel one too many times?”

  “Now look here!” I demanded, raising my voice, but keeping it quiet enough not to disturb the researchers in the other rooms. I pulled a few photos of the serial killer’s victims out of my overcoat pocket and slapped the most recent onto the brushed-metal surface of the table. They were of the last four charred bodies we’d recovered. “Don’t you dare confuse me with some amateur out to get his thrills. The shit I endure is nothing like your neat laboratory. What I see day in and day out is blood, guts, and rage. This!” I waved a hand at the expanse of naturally cleansed bodies. “This has already been sterilized by time and nature.” Pointing at the first picture on the table, I said, “Timothy Sterling, victim fourteen, murdered September 20, 2009. Less than two years ago, he was standing here, as alive as you and me.” I gave her a few seconds to approach and look at the picture, then whispered in her ear, “He left behind a son, Travis, age six, and a daughter, Sarah, age ten. He’ll never see them grow up, go to college, get married… never see his grandkids.”

  She took a half-step back, then jumped when I threw a second image on top of the first. It was another charred corpse with hands bound in front and feet tied. “Barnie Pitts, victim thirteen,” I continued, reciting information from memory, “murdered September 20, 2008. He was a widower and is survived by Marty Pitts, his eight-year-old son. Marty now lives with his grandparents and will never truly know either of his parents.”

  Dr. Mayna stared down at the picture. When she began to look up at me, I threw a third photo on top of the others.

  “Steven Tripp, victim twelve, murdered September 20, 2007. You’ll be happy to know that this guy was single––no kids to leave behind, only his parents, and four older brothers and sisters who outlived their youngest, loving sibling.”

  Dr. Mayna’s hand shook as she fingered the image, but I wasn’t done. Throwing a fourth photo down of yet another gruesome ritual sacrifice, I whispered. “Waldo Gutierrez, victim eleven—”

  “S-stop,” she mumbled.

  “Murdered September 20, 2006. He left behind three little girls, none older than six, and a wife who’d stayed at home to raise them.”

  “Please stop,” Dr. Mayna whimpered. When she looked up, tears streaked down her pale cheeks.

  I drove my index finger down on the victims. “This is only four of fourteen. I don’t have the luxury of distancing myself from the murders. For some, I experienced everything they did and even died with them, only coming to as they left consciousness. I didn’t know them in life, but I know them in death, and I’m their only hope.” I slid the pictures into my palm and pocketed them as I walked toward the door. “You coming, Jessie?”

  Jessie seemed to jolt back to life, as though he’d been in a trance through the entire scene. “Y-yeah, Alex. Coming.”

  Dr. Kamal watched, as though absorbing every bit of information but refusing to interact.

  “Detective Drummond,” Dr. Mayna called. “Mr. Drummond, wait… please.”

  The please was what did it. I stopped. Paige is right. I am a sucker for that pitiful voice. I turned to face the local professor. She looked haggard.

  Taking a few ragged breaths, she wiped her cheeks clean with her sleeve, smearing dust across one side of her face, but she didn’t notice. “I’m sorry, Detective Drummond. I didn’t mean to question your integrity. The fact that you came here looking for our help should have been more than enough to tell me otherwise. I’ve just been caught up in everything here. Everyone wants a piece of me—” She stopped speaking and waved away the phantom excuses exuding from her mouth. “Enough. I’m sorry. Please give it a try.”

  “Will you stop jerking me around?”

  She nodded.

  I said, “I need to know what you do. You may be right, or you may be wrong, but I need something to go on, not for the vision. If it’s there, in the bones, artifacts, or whatever, I’ll get in touch with it, but this is a first for me. I’ve never tried to go so far back. I just need some idea of what I’m getting myself into.”

  She nodded once more, wet her lips, and said, “From what we know, everything you said about Jack was right. Honestly, we don’t know much more than that. We think he lived around thirty-four hundred years ago, but even that’s just a guess based on the plant particles we found on his bones. There wasn’t much left—never really is, but it was a good clue.”

  “Where did you say he was found?”

  This time, Dr. Kamal answered. “The outskirts of the Valley of the Kings. There’s a small village where the workers lived. He was found there.”

  “Okay… that gives me something to go on. You don’t by chance have the murder weapon?”

  He shook his head.

  “Nah, that would be too easy,” I mumbled.

  I paced the tile floor around the body, glancing at the surrounding tables for anything that might somehow have made its way into the wrong box. I knew it was futile, but staring down at Jack’s skeleton was creepier than I’d anticipated. I’d dealt with bodies more mutilated than his before, but the unusualness of the experience had me jumpy.

  “Aren’t you going to touch him?” Dr. Kamal asked,
a look of curiosity on his face.

  I nodded. “Soon.” I made another lap, this time reaching out to touch a random bone that could have been a leg or arm sitting in Jack’s box next to the remains of his feet and tiny toes. It was smooth and hard like a rock, almost as if he had become one with the foundation of our world, but no vision came. I let out the breath I’d been holding.

  “That was found near his body. The type of bone hasn’t been identified yet,” Dr. Mayna said.

  Time to get it over with. Stepping up to Jack’s broken skull, I took another deep breath and placed my fingers next to the wound. The odor of tanned hide, older than anything I’d smelled before, drifted in the stagnant room until the lights around me faded to nothing.

  * * *

  The smooth, wooden handle of a pick shuddered over and over as I cleared stone from the large, partially made cavern. Dust shifted the handle ever so slightly in my grip and permeated the air. The sound of others chipping away at rock and stone from the side of this mountain echoed to me through the dry desert. Glancing around, the completed entrances of hewn, polished Egyptian tombs glinted in the sunlight a hundred yards across the dry ravine bed below. A voice nearby said something in a strange language I somehow understood.

  “Can’t keep up. I’m tired,” I mumbled, wiping the sweat-infused, chalky dust off my bare chest. I took a few steps and squatted next to a wall, just inside the shade of the chiseled entrance we were working on. Setting down my pick with its copper head, I took a swig of water from a clay jar.

  “You know, Panhsj, you are lazy,” said the tall man who had spoken before. He took his copper chisel and hammer and continued to chip away at a large stone that sat on the rubble-strewn floor a few feet outside. Flakes flew off in rapid succession as he skillfully flattened one face of the block.

  “I’m not lazy. I’m tired. We’ve been working on this tomb for eternity. Ra will bed himself, never to rise again, before we get it finished.”