The Book of the Dead (17 page)

“Ain’t that the stuff they brought baby Jesus?”

“Yes. Then they sewed the body back up and wrapped it with bandages of fine linen cloth smeared with gum to glue it to the body.”

“Like a cloth coffin? Sounds like they were cheap. Wrap someone in a sheet and call it a day.”

“Except that they then put them in coffins. They wrapped each of the organs and put them in canopic jars. Each one shaped into the form of a head of the four sons of Horus, who was charged to protect them.”

“That sounds cool.”

“You young lot want the scares and blood of it all. Always with the blood – never enough evisceration for your prurient minds. But for us, the old folks, we cling to the hope of contact with the other side. We want some… consolation. Consideration. Something from that place. To let us know it’s okay. That it’s all worth it. But the dead keep their secrets to themselves.”

Their first Christmas together, he spent three weeks in the woods hanging lights. Cobalt lights, purchased from all the stores in the city, strung in the trees surrounding the house. When he turned them on, the shimmer haloed the tree tops for miles around.

The lights bathed them in sapphire luminescence when they stepped in. JaQuon twirled, wide-eyed, as he took in the room. A bank of shelves lined the wall. Jars, like soldiers at parade rest, awaited inspection. Dark shapes bobbed in clear liquid, like raw meat drained of their color. The serpentine coil of intestines piled in one jar. Kidneys floated in another. Liver. Stomach. Lungs. On and on, a collection of viscera cleaned and preserved. Attending their distant mistress. On a stand next to her glass coffin was her heart.

“They couldn’t get her eyes right. They were the most delicate shade of blue, but they lost something in the process.”

The old man ran his hand along the glass surface, the reliquary of memories, wanting all the things he had left behind. A forgotten pair of glasses here, her favorite pen there. He was afraid to disturb anything. Hoping in vain that it wouldn’t hurt as much tomorrow.

“I never want to know who I am without her.” He left one hand on the glass sarcophagus, a final lingering touch before turning back to JaQuon. “I think I’ll purchase your skateboard, after all. It’s all right to let him go. Five hundred dollars suffice?”

JaQuon nodded absently, his revulsion rooting him to the spot.

“I thought I knew what I was looking for. You know how there’s a word on the tip of your tongue, just out of reach. I’ll know when my collection is complete.” He pressed the bills into JaQuon’s hand then checked the time on his pocket watch which no longer told time, knowing that the time was always theirs. His and Helen’s. “I suppose it’s time for you to go.”

The first time he told her he loved her, she said she didn’t believe him. Trust was a razor, she said, and belief had to be earned. The threat of competition, the possibility of her absence reduced his breath to hollow gasps.

He couldn’t keep her forever; she had never been his. However, he could watch her sleep, stroke her cool cheek, brush her hair from her face. She would lie, silent and cold, the only time she would let him dote on her. A memory preserved. Her eyes were blue.

He had words to describe his love.

But it was the love written in the margins of journals. His alone.

Elizabeth had never smelled an Egyptian mummy before. (Well, truth be told, she’d never smelled
any
mummy before.) They didn’t have the same stench as the other long-dead-and-recently-exhumed corpses, the ones that came through her door for all manner of medical and chemical testing. Nor did they have the nice aroma of incense, of the various perfumes and oils used in the mummification process. Even the whiff of pine – from the resin that coated these linen strips and held them all together – had faded over time. Only a musty scent remained, like a box full of very old books.

Gone were the internal organs, the biggest contributors to the usual foul odor of decay. The priests had removed them all, placed them in ornate canopic jars, then filled the empty body cavities with natron salt, with sawdust and flowers – drying them out, leaving no home for the stink of decomposition to take root. They’d done it carefully, reverently, with expert hands, and not just for the human bodies, either. They’d even done it for the cats.

So many cats.

They were the worst of it, the things that really gave Elizabeth the creeps. Those withered, vacant eye sockets... Those mouths full of teeth, frozen in rictus snarls... Some had a few stray whiskers extending like bits of straw from their emaciated snouts. And all had those perfectly preserved little noses – black nostrils that stood out against wrinkled, brown skins.

She shuddered, her tongue suddenly sour and dry, as if these dehydrated creatures had sucked all the moisture right out of her mouth to –

What? Come back to life?

Elizabeth shook her head. Dead was dead. And she had seen enough death over the last four years to know that, whether it had been a few hours, days, months, or even centuries since these bodies had last tasted life, there was no power on this Earth that could revive them.

“Miss Wilson?”

At the sound of her name, Elizabeth blinked and looked up from the withered, smiling mummies all laid out in rows, reminded that there were other living people in the room. Professor Marsters stood on the opposite side of the table, staring back at her, acting as if everything was fine between them, as if nothing had happened.

Just another day at the office.

“Yes, Professor?” she replied. She’d never addressed him as anything other than “Professor,” just as he’d never, in four years, used her first name. Not even during sex.

“I want you to begin taking samples of hair, bone, and soft tissue,” Marsters told her, as his eyes swept the rest of their small group. “We’ll be running the samples via radioimmunoassay and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry.”

The others nodded, giving the professor their full, unquestioning attention, almost in awe of him.
And why not?
Marsters was a well-respected pathologist, one of the best in his field, and it was his association with Stanley University that convinced the Museum of Natural History to entrust them with these mummies for testing. Still, Elizabeth could not help but wonder what they would think of their mentor if they knew what he liked to do behind closed doors.

She rubbed her sore wrists. The marks the handcuffs had made lay hidden beneath her white scrub jacket and blue vinyl gloves, but she could still see them in her mind’s eye. She could still feel the shackles biting her soft flesh and hard bone, as if she’d never really been freed.

“Will we be doing any DNA testing, Professor?” Adams asked. Elizabeth had done a lot of depraved things with Marsters, but it was
Adams
who had his nose up the man’s ass.

“It would be pointless,” Elizabeth told him. “The chemicals used in the mummification process preserve the mummies’ appearance, but damage their DNA. Plus, we have nothing with which to compare it.”

“Miss Wilson is quite right,” the professor agreed. “While it might be possible to extract some minute amount of usable genetic information from the areas of these mummies least affected by any contamination, these are not the mummies of royalty.”

He turned to look at one of the human mummies on the table behind him, a female, and gazed at the perfectly defined shape of its body, his gloved hand hovering over its tightly wrapped chest. A look of great yearning reflected in his eyes. Elizabeth didn’t know if anyone else could see it, but to her, it was painfully obvious.

She remained silent.

“They weren’t given any sarcophagi of gold,” Marsters went on to say, “nor were their names ever written on the walls of any tomb or monument. No, these are but a few of the hundreds of priests and priestesses of the goddess Bast.” He looked up at his students once more, his professional mask firmly back in place. “This, of course, explains why they were buried with all these cats.”

Elizabeth’s eyes drifted back down to the mummified animals. Finally, she understood. Bast had been the patron goddess of cats. Well, not
just
cats; she’d also been the goddess of women, and of secrets.

So many secrets.

Enough to fill those ornate, alabaster canopic jars in the corner.

The affair alone would have been enough of a secret for Elizabeth to keep. After all, if anyone discovered that she’d been sleeping with her professor, it would have called into question all of her high marks and expert skills. As it stood now, with everything private, the professor’s letter of recommendation would still hold weight. But it wasn’t just the affair she had to keep secret; it was the aftermath of their “tutoring sessions” – all the bruises, the marks, the shame, and after last night...

She shuddered.

It started innocently enough, of course. It always did. The professor would suggest something, and Elizabeth would give a meek little nod and go along with it. That’s how the neckties got introduced, smooth and silky, binding and yet not too uncomfortable. Then came the handcuffs, more restrictive, more
painful
. And then, last night... last night, he brought plastic wrap into the bedroom.

“When you die,” Marsters began, kneeling down beside her on the bed, his eyes traveling the length of her naked body, “you will rot. All this lovely flesh will fall away, and, eventually, turn to dust. Nothing will be left of your beauty. Nothing will be left of you but your filthy bones.”

He took the plastic wrap, the kind Elizabeth’s mother used to preserve leftovers –

Oh, honey, if mother could only see you now! She warned you about these college professors, didn’t she? Told you how they liked to take advantage of young, naïve co-eds like yourself? But did you listen?
Nooooo
. You went right out and found yourself a professor with kinks your mother had never even dreamed of!

– and he used it to lash her feet together, merge them into one bulbous mass. The wrap felt smooth against her skin, like the silken neckties he’d used in her initiation, but it was much lighter and far more constrictive.

“When the Egyptians died,” Marsters went on to say, “they found a way to preserve the flesh, to make certain that every curve and contour of a beautiful female form would remain forever intact... forever desirable.”

He slid his left arm under Elizabeth’s knees and picked her legs up off the bed. As the thin plastic spiraled around her ankles and climbed up her calves, she marveled at its strength. She tried to flex her ankles, to move her feet apart, but found them almost completely immobilized.

“Are you worthy of forever, Miss Wilson?” Marsters asked, still wrapping, still
binding
; he was at her thighs now, her legs fused into one by the plastic.

“Yes, Professor,” she replied, her voice trembling. The more these games escalated, the more painful and constrictive Elizabeth’s shackles became, the more he seemed to enjoy it, and the more frightened she became of him.

But you keep coming back, don’t you?

Yes, she did. No matter how much it hurt, no matter the shame she felt when it was over. All day long, she kept acting as if nothing had happened between them, and at night, she kept living in fear of what he might do to her if she ever told him “no.”

Marsters reached the end of his roll, then went back over the lower half of her body with his hands, pressing and smoothing her wrappings until the plastic conformed perfectly to her shape. It was cool at first, but warmed quickly as it held onto her heat.

“Put your hands at your sides,” the professor commanded, reaching for another roll.

Elizabeth did as she was told. She always did as she was told.

Pathetic
.

Marsters pulled her up off the bed, held her close to him as if to hug her. He was covered in sweat now, his work becoming more laborious with each round of wrapping. He bound her breasts, pushing them together, manipulating them to please his eye. And the entire time, Elizabeth saw that smile of his; the more corpse-like she became, the wider it grew.

She tried to move her arms, but they were now merged to her sides. Claustrophobia took hold of her, gripped her like a vice, squeezing every last drop of submission out of her and leaving nothing but white-hot fear in its place.

“Stop.”

“Oh, but we can’t quit now, Miss Wilson.” His face remained bright with that wide, Cheshire Cat grin. “You’re not finished.”

Undaunted, the professor went on with his work. He wrapped the top of Elizabeth’s shoulders, then moved to her neck. The plastic rounded her throat in tight circles like a noose.

“Stop,” she cried again, terrified tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. “I mean it! Stop or I’ll scream!”

But Marsters didn’t stop. Instead, he quickened his pace, drawing the plastic up around her head and down under her chin, tightening it around her jaw like a muzzle to muffle her protests. The wrap refused to stick to her hair, but it clung tightly onto itself, and the professor kept circling her head with it, layer upon layer, until finally, he’d covered her over entirely.

Buried alive!

Paralyzed. Unable to squirm anymore, unable to twist, unable to arch her back, unable to even breathe. All she could do was lie there, the smell of plastic thick in her nostrils. The tightly stretched wrap pressed down on her face until the bridge of her nose ached, and whenever she tried to draw breath, she deflated the small pocket of air over her eye sockets, snapping it taught against her wide, panicked eyes.

Marsters ran his hands over her entire body, smoothing the plastic down to accentuate her shape, her curves. She felt the pressure of his fingers through the wrap, the humid warmth radiating from her own body, the blood pulsing through her neck and temples, but all other sensations were muted.

Suffocating!

Her throat and chest were suddenly on fire.

Dying!

Through the translucent, plastic filter, the professor’s face twisted and distorted into a devilish mask, but that crazed smile remained clear. Then, Elizabeth noticed something in his hand. Not a roll of plastic this time. No. This was something new, something
metal
; it gleamed in the lamplight like a –

A straight razor!

As she slipped into unconsciousness, Elizabeth tried hard to scream, but the resulting whimper was barely even audible outside the darkening plastic of her cocoon.

How long had she been out? A few minutes? An hour? Elizabeth had no idea. When she came to, she found herself free of the wrap, lying naked and shivering on sweat-soaked sheets.

“You’re awake.” Marsters brought her a glass of water, his tight, lunatic grin replaced with a slack expression of concern. “For a moment there, I thought we might have gone too far.”

Elizabeth pushed herself back toward the headboard and pulled her legs up until her chin rested on her knees. He held the water out for her. She hesitated, then snatched the glass from his hand and drank deeply.

Marsters sat down on the edge of the bed. He reached over and ran his fingers through the wet tangles of her hair. Elizabeth cringed at his touch, but he seemed not to notice, or not to care. She thought it was more likely the latter.

“Sorry if I got a bit carried away, Miss Wilson,” the professor told her, “but that was truly amazing. Thank you.” He’d said it with the same matter-of-fact tone he might’ve used if she’d handed him a well-researched paper. “We have a busy day tomorrow, so I think I’ll be off now. I’ll see you bright and early in the lab.”

Then, he gave her a pat on the head, as if to say she’d been a good dog.
Yes, an obedient dog. That’s all I’ve ever been to him
. And with that, Marsters got up, gathered his things, and left her alone.

Elizabeth tried to set the empty water glass down on her bedside table, but her hands shook. The glass slipped from her grasp; it landed on her bedroom carpet with a thud, but it didn’t break.

She pushed herself off the bed, her legs wobbling as she shuffled across the floor to the bathroom. The wastebasket was filled to the brim with wadded plastic wrap; Elizabeth kicked it over, and the first wave of sobs quaked through her.

Somehow, Elizabeth found enough strength to make it through the rest of the morning meeting. She stood there, with her arms crossed over her breasts, the memory of her own ordeal threatening to devour her from the inside with each passing moment, and she managed not to say a word about any of it. Her scholarships, her career, everything she’d worked so hard for all these years could all be thrown away like those wads of fucking plastic wrap.

And the bastard knows it. That’s why he did it, why he picked
me
to do it to, because he knows I won’t do a damn thing about it.

Elizabeth took a deep breath. The mummies’ musk was preferable to the stench of sweaty plastic from the night before. She took her samples quickly, handed them off to Adams and others for their spectrum of tests, and when they left the room, she allowed herself to exhale.

“Time to check out the knickknacks,” she said aloud, shifting her focus to a treasure trove of Egyptian artifacts in the corner. In addition to the canopic jars, there were other, far more priceless relics: golden statues, embalming tools, a few fierce-looking daggers, and all variety of jewelry; everything a goddess could want.