Scarborough Fair and Other Stories (2 page)

“I brought one for each of us,” he said in that very matter-of-fact way he has, then added, “I decided we might need them more than I'd need my tuxedo. Cindy had one too. I was looking to see if she was using it a minute ago.” Sometimes that boy actually seems to have a sense of humor. Not to mention that he seems to have learned what a tuxedo
is
since he turned down the girl who asked him to the prom because he thought she had to be joking.

We heard the wind howling and moaning around the corner of the hotel as we trudged down the stairs. That seemed funny to me because usually when the wind is high, the fog gets blown away.

Instead it was as if kidnappers had pulled a gray woolly sack over the entire area, the only distinctions from the pervading dark fuzziness were the occasional wisps or blobs of white floating through it.

I unlocked the hotel's outer door (they always give you a key for after hours) and we had only taken a few steps out toward the road when I glanced back. The hotel's looming bulk had been swallowed by the fog.

“Cindy?” I called, trying to keep my voice pitched so that if she were near, she could find her way back to us but I wouldn't be waking the old-age pensioners,. I couldn't help feeling that if I had screamed my lungs out, the fog would muffle my racket as it muffled everything else.

Jason strode past me, cupping his hands to his mouth and bellowing, “Yo, Cynthia Dawn!”

Something scrabbled off to the right and I said, “Cindy!” sharply.

There was an answering “Rrrow?”

Though that is not, of course, Cindy's normal voice you will understand, brother, why I, cat-mother of Treat and Kittibits, instantly felt relieved. I understood Cindy's motivation for being out here. Obviously she had heard the cat crying and come out to investigate. I'd have done the same thing if I'd been aware of it. She was very possibly trying to find her way to the hotel kitchen to get it some fish or milk or something. I handed Jason the key to the outer door of the hotel and told him to go check out the kitchen and see if his sister was there. I would stay and try to entice the cat to stick around until the kids got back either with or without a tidbit.

“Here, kitty,” I said, kneeling and rubbing my fingers together. “Kitty, kitty? Mrrow?”

Now, yes, Mother, I know that not even my animal loving niece and nephew and I can save every stray cat in England, but what you don't seem to understand is how awfully lonesome I get for my kitties when I'm away from them for any length of time. I was not cajoling the cats for their benefit as much as my own and I can safely say that Cindy's motives were similar.

Jason had already turned away and I heard the key turn in the lock of the door. I didn't even look back, however, knowing that with the fog so thick it wouldn't do me any good.

“Kitty?” I asked again, since I hadn't heard it since that first time. “Cynthia? Are you out here too?”

“Yow,” said another, higher pitched feline voice from the other direction.

I took a step into the fog toward it.

It's a good thing I was looking for a cat because I was looking down, hoping to see those coin-bright eyes reflecting the beam of my flashlight. Where the road should have been, blackness gaped. I shone my light directly into it. Water and rock, broken asphalt and jagged edges of earth and cement rimmed a hole so deep the beam couldn't penetrate the bottom.

The sameness of the fog and the depth of the abyss—I'm not exaggerating. It really was an abyss, not just a hole. I have never seen sinkholes in permafrost that deep—plus being jerked out of a sound sleep combined to give me a sense of vertigo. “Omigod!” I know I said aloud, and yelled, “Cindy, are you down there? Are you okay? Say something, honey? Make a noise!”

The pavement crumbled from under one foot and I stumbled backwards. As I did, my heel encountered something soft and yielding. An angry hissing and the scream of a cat pierced my shell-like ears. I almost jumped back into the hole again but instead tripped over my own feet fell on my butt, which did not endear me to the invisible feline at my feet. Trust a cat not to come when it's wanted but to be right underfoot when it's sure to trip you up.

“Sorry, kitty,” I said, falling on my rear. I tried to stand, but found my ankles wouldn't separate enough for me to rise. As I reached toward my feet, my hand encountered a strip of fabric, something that felt like rough cotton, snaking up my legs toward my knees. Now instead of the angry teakettle noise, a loud purring twined around my legs as the cotton strips did the same. “That's enough of that, cat!” I said sternly. “Naughty kitty!”

I swear I could hear it laugh, and maybe it was just the stars in my head from my fall, but looking around me, I seemed to see teams of golden eyes surrounding me in the fog, an occasional “mrrup” of encouragement punctuating the thrum of purrs.

And then, suddenly, something infinitely larger loomed out of the darkness throwing its huge shadow across the frail beam of my flashlight.

“Nope, Aunt Annie, she's not in there either,” Jason said.

“Shine your light on my feet so I can get untangled here, will you?” I asked. He did. There was nothing around my ankles but little wraiths of the white fog, that trailed away as I got to my feet. “These cats seem to be practical jokers.”

Jason started off.

“Watch out!” I cried, and he stopped. “There's a big hole there. I thought maybe your sister had fallen in...”

He shone his beam, considerably stronger than mine, into the hole. “Nope,” he said and started off again.

“Where are you going?”

“To look for sister,” he said.

“Well, yeah, but watch the ground. I bet that's not the only new hole in the road.”

“I
know
that, Aunt Annie,” he said disdainfully, as if I were treating him like a baby.

We walked and walked, with only our flashlight beams to guide us. At first the walking was flat, then it went uphill and down, and though we walked slowly, my feet were getting tired. Despite my coat and the exercise, I began to shiver. I heard Jason sneeze and thought something was blooming which was no doubt bothering his allergies. That's about the time I realized my hair was blowing into my face and plastering itself over my eyes, and wind was cutting through my leggings. Then a big fat raindrop—the gulls weren't up yet so I hoped it was a raindrop—plopped on my nose, followed by a lot more of them.

The wind tore ragged chunks from the fog, revealing that the white blobs were not simply different colored foggy bits, but raggedy, lumbering, forms that looked as if they were the heavily bandaged victims of terrible accidents. As the rain moaned it seemed that these bandaged forms did too, their gauzes bannering like dirty, tattered ribbons away from what was no doubt their corrupted bodies underneath. Although, hadn't Bert said they were ground up?

“Aunt Annie?” Jason asked.

“Huh?”

“How come the mummies of people and cats we saw in the museum had their legs tied together but these guys are walking and the cats are even waving their tails?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Don't ask me. I'm no special effects expert.”

Most of them
did
look fairly indistinct, and then the fog before us also got blown away and we saw a larger mummy, taller than me, and under its bandages the pale triangles of orange reflector cloth winked back at us from its jogging shoes.

“
Cindy!”
I yelled. Jason yelled, “
Cynthia,”
at the same time.

This is the point at which many of my students would write, “and then Cindy turned around and we saw that the bandages were just wisps of fog wrapped around her, as were all the other things we thought were mummies. She lowered her hands, blinked her eyes and said, ‘I must have been sleepwalking!' and I hugged her and said ‘Yes, it was all a dream.'”

But at any rate, that is not what happened, though she did seem to be sleepwalking. However, contrary to what they say in the movies, waking a sleep walker is not dangerous to his or her health and it certainly doesn't kill anyone.

Cindy simply blinked at us through very sloppily applied bandages, which she brushed from her face like cobwebs when she stretched and yawned. “Aunt Annie, Jason. Hi, what are you guys doing here?”

“You go first,” Jason said. My sentiments exactly.

Cindy said, “I little cat cry and I came out to find out where it was and if it was hungry. Then a bunch of bandaged kitties came out of the fog to play and wrapped me all up. Then they wanted me to go someplace with them.”

“Where?” I asked.

As if in answer, the wind roared itself into a gale and blew away the last of the fog. We were standing on a lonely stretch of road beyond the strand, beyond the main part of the city. The road gaped with holes and in one of these was lodged the front wheel of the bus that had driven us back up the hill that afternoon.

“That's Bert's bus!” Jason said.

It was indeed and Bert himself, albeit Bert looking like a refugee from a casualty ward, swathed in bandages as seemed to be the style, tottered forward with his hands outstretched. “I am the ka of the Pharaoh Hamen-Ra. Woe to those who disturb my rest.”

“
Us
disturb
your
rest?” Jason complained. “We haven't slept all night because of all you Band-Aid guys and cats.”

“Izzat so?” demanded Bert/Hamen-Ra. “Well, maybe you'd like to have what was s'posed to be your immortal body ground up and put on the road for lorries and tourbusses to lumber over, eh? See how well you'd sleep then, my lad! Not to mention the sacred moggies ground up for somebody's rose garden. We've had a rum deal since we was taken from our tombs and brung over here! We demands to be took back t'Nile right away.”

“Bert, this is all very funny,” I told him. “Cut it out. The Nile is definitely not on our itinerary. And listen, if you're going to play at channeling ancient entities, you're not doing it right. You're not supposed to use your own accent. I live in Port Chetzemoka, where there are lots of channelers and past life relivers and all that stuff, and I can tell you for sure you have to use the ancient spooky voice the whole time you're channeling or the effect is just ruined.”

“Silence, mortal woman!” Hamen-Ra said, continuing in the same mixture of stage-mummy and Yorkshirese. “If you'd been lying in the road, listening to kids squabbling in back seats, old folk nattering about the plumbing, and complaining the food gives them gas, or talking about what was on telly last evening, you'd not have a posh accent to channel with either. You're just lucky I've deigned to learn your bloody tongue so's I can make meself understood through Bert here.”

“He's not kidding, Aunt Annie,” Cindy said urgently. Maybe it was the rain dripping down my face, or maybe it was the rain dripping down her face or the fading beam of the flashlight, the batteries of which had put up a valiant but now losing battle, but Cindy's eyes still looked a bit strange to me.

“Oh yeah?” I argued. “Surely you've had enough theatre to recognize the amount of ham in Hamen-Ra.”

Then
she
started speaking in a deep spooky voice, claiming to be a priestess of Bast's shrine at Memphis, reciting her lineage, Hamen-Ra's lineage, and the lineage of the dynasties and so forth leading up to her time of life. That was when I knew we had a real supernatural manifestation on our hands for sure. Cindy and Jason are, as you've often told me, Mom, both great students, but Cindy is not really crazy about history and the movies don't go in for that sort of boring “begat” detail.

I inquired again if the kas of the pharaohs, cats, and courtiers wouldn't like to come home with me to Port Chetzemoka in America, where we had a nice seaport and lots and lots of nutcases who would be thrilled to channel their immortal essences, but they stubbornly declined in favor of the Nile.

Well, I was sympathetic of course, and certainly didn't want to bring Cindy home with an ancient cat priestess cohabiting her body, so there seemed to be only one thing to do. The family build came in handy for us Scarboroughs then because between Jason, Cindy and her priestess, and Bert/Hamun-Ra and me, we managed to get the truck's tire out of the hole, and turned around. Hamun-Ra wisely let the inner Bert take over the driving, since he knew the back roads out of Scarborough heading south.

Which is why my writing is a little bumpy as I sit here between the sleeping kids, bumping along in Bert's tour bus with piles of bandages and scraps of bone and pitch swept into lots of paper marketing bags taken from Bert's newsagent friend. We should be making our delivery in London and then hopefully the priestess of Bast will vacate Cindy at that time. If not, I hope the Church Camp she was going to attend when she comes home is multidenominational.

March 26, Evening

Dear Mom and Bro,

You'll be pleased to know we are sitting at Heathrow waiting to board our red-eye special, having made it to the British Museum by noon today. Other than Bert having a hell of a time finding a parking place outside the museum, we had no real trouble, much to my surprise.

I was very much afraid the museum people would think I was a nutcase, even with exhibits A and B, Bert and Cindy and their respective guest entities, but when I told the security guard that I had somehow inadvertently become the head of a Motorway Mummy Liberation Front and we wished very much to speak to the acquisitions director for the Egyptian exhibits at the museum, he simply grumbled, “Oh, yeah, we get a lot of that sort of thing with this wet weather,” and led us to the rather tacky steam heated office of the director.

I had been hoping for an Indiana Jones type perhaps, or at least a Sean Connery type, someone with distinguished strips of gray at the temples and maybe a slight foreign accent. Instead, the director was a very earnest and nerdy young man with rabbity teeth, scant hair pulled into a ponytail. All of that was forgiven because his manner was most sympathetic and his eyes understanding and full of apology as Hamen-Ra, and Cindy's priestess poured out their stories, with a few interjections and explanations from me. Jason just looked disgusted but helped the security people and the grad students interning at the museum haul the bags of mummy material into the museum.