SIXTEEN
The scanner hummed as it photographed precisely one hundred fragments of papyrus. The ancient documents that had been consigned to the Gold Tomb three thousand years ago had been torn into pieces that were no larger than postage stamps. Most of the fragments bore markings in ink. These would be the hieroglyphs that the Egyptian scribes had written on the papyrus, an early form of paper made from reeds harvested from the banks of the Nile.
John placed the fragments of papyrus between sheets of glass to hold them still. After that, he laid this glass sandwich on the scanner and repeated the process, photographing the shreds of ancient paper. The computer program ran as he carried out this task, automatically piecing fragments together wherever it could – an electronic jigsaw wizard tirelessly and expertly working to produce virtual copies of entire documents.
John managed to keep his mind on his work. Though, in truth, he repeatedly recalled what had happened last night when he’d woken up to find Oliver standing there in the bedroom with such a strange expression on his face. The boy had then flaked out, losing consciousness for a worrying dozen seconds or so. He and Ingrid had put him on the bed where he soon woke up – but those twelve seconds had been long ones. Both he and his wife had been incredibly worried. John had picked up the phone ready to call an ambulance. However, within a minute, Oliver seemed almost back to normal. OK, he was confused for a while, and appeared to be muddling a dream he’d had with reality. He’d kept saying, ‘I saw it walk into the house. It was in here with you. I stopped it hurting you, Mum. I stopped it. I really did. Smell the air. You can smell that the mummy was in here with you.’
Just for an instant, he thought he’d caught a musty smell of something old. But when he’d inhaled again he could smell the lavender growing outside in the garden. The odour of dust couldn’t have been there after all. Oliver was sweaty, dishevelled. Ingrid interpreted this as the boy coming down with a fever and concluded he had been tossing and turning in bed. She gave him paracetamol, washed down with a drink of water.
Later, as John had tucked his son back into bed, Oliver had murmured, ‘I didn’t dream it, Dad, I didn’t … The mummy was here in the house. He wore a metal band around his head.’
John checked the computer screen. The expensive software worked its magic. Already the computer had connected images of the papyrus fragments together. There were still thousands of pieces to go. This was a start, though, and a promising start at that. In some cases, five or six fragments had been joined together, enabling John to make out lines of hieroglyphs, that archaic writing of the Egyptians formed from pictures of snakes, dogs, temple flags, and seated men, along with lines, circles and other symbols.
He glanced at his phone, tempted to call Ingrid to find out how Oliver was. When he’d left this morning Oliver had been in a deep sleep. He hadn’t woken his son. After all, as the saying goes, sleep is the best medicine. John had rested his palm against the sleeping boy’s forehead. The skin felt warm rather than hot, so perhaps the fever had begun to ease off. Oliver had probably picked up some bug or other. Even so, he wondered if they should visit a doctor to have him checked out. Once he’d heard someone jokingly say that an anagram of ‘parent’ is ‘I’m always worried’. It was one of those nonsensical jokes that all parents could identify with, and it carried a generous portion of truth. We are always worried, he thought. We worry when our children go to school for the first time. We worry when they look unwell, or are troubled by some secret problem or other. John resisted the urge to call Ingrid just yet. He’d wait until lunchtime. Of course, she’d be keeping a close eye on Oliver. If there were any indications he was becoming ill she’d call him immediately.
Returning to the computer, he emailed images of the reassembled papyrus fragments to a hieroglyphs expert for translation. It was important at this stage to make sure that the computer software hadn’t randomly connected pieces of the document. The purpose of this task was to repair the damaged documents in order for linguistic experts to read what was written there and to translate ancient Egyptian into English. These examples would serve as a useful test.
After he’d hit ‘send’ he went to grab a coffee before starting on the next batch of papyrus confetti (because that’s what the mess of scraps resembled).
Samantha stood by the coffee machine, sipping from a mug. ‘Bloody mummies,’ she said.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I slept like I’d entered the land of the dead myself last night. But all I did was dream that one of our bandaged brethren walked to and fro past the house.’ She shuddered. ‘I’m sure one night I’ll look out and see the whole bloody lot standing there – our entire mummy family will come to visit me. I tell you, if the salary wasn’t so damn good here, I’d pack my suitcase and go back to Oxford.’
Ben received a text on his phone. He touched the screen and read what was written there.
Hey! I need that stuff I gave you to keep for me. URGENT! URGENT! Text me your address. I’ll collect it from you today.
The text was from Micky Dunt, his mother’s boyfriend. Ben hated the man. Micky Dunt was a low-life thug. He’d only been released from prison a few months ago after serving ten weeks for assaulting a train conductor. Micky had tried riding the train for free. What Ben’s mother saw in the guy he couldn’t even begin to understand.
Ben thought: No way is Micky coming to this house to spoil what I’ve got here. I like the Tolworth family. They’ve been kind to me. Bringing Micky here would be like bringing a plague rat into the house. Deleting the text, Ben switched off the phone and lay back on the bed. ‘Get stuffed, Micky,’ he said out loud. ‘You’re not going to ruin my life the way you ruin Mum’s.’
The first tantalizing fragments of translation arrived. John called Samantha from the laboratory where she’d been examining X-rays of Amber, the mummy of the teenage girl.
‘I knew you’d be keen to see this,’ John told her. ‘Grab a chair by the computer and I’ll show you what we have so far.’
Samantha grinned with excitement. ‘Names? Confirmation that we have a mummy king in our castle? The story of how a family ended up in the tomb with no names?’
John chuckled, amused by her unbridled enthusiasm. ‘Hold your horses, girl. All I did was send random samples of text that the software put together. This is going to be a Humpty-Dumpty of a job.’
They sat down at the computer. John clicked on a file, bringing up images of hieroglyphs. Beneath the ancient text were lines of print in English, the expert’s translation.
John scrolled down through the file. ‘This is rough and ready, warts and all. What we have here is basically a test-run to prove that the software isn’t randomly connecting all those little bits of papyrus and producing a jumble of text that the translator can’t make head nor tail of.’
‘You’re telling me that the text is gibberish?’
‘On the contrary, we’re getting some terrific results with the first batch of samples.’ He smiled at her, pleased that his hard work hadn’t been for nothing. ‘The software has correctly matched up a lot of torn documents. The hieroglyphs on the restored papyrus – albeit in virtual form – do make sense. Look.’ He pointed at the screen. ‘This section of hieroglyphs appears to be part of a letter; it says, I am travelling from the land of mountains to … something, something, that part’s missing. Soon my head will lie upon your breast so that I might hear the drumbeat of your heart. This will be of great pleasure to me.’
‘A love letter home. How delightful.’ Samantha’s eyes sparkled.
‘There are more fragments that talk about the length of a journey in days, and about sailing along the Nile. There is also a list of foodstuffs, such as bags of grain, onions, honey, spices, wine, dried fruit.’
‘Provisions for a journey?’
‘They might be. Either the library found in the Gold Tomb focuses on travel, or by sheer chance I’ve scanned in the fragments of a smaller body of work devoted to this particular letter
writer’s adventures abroad.’
‘Time will tell when you’ve pieced together more of the text. Any names yet?’
‘No names. But I haven’t checked a second batch of translation yet. I knew you’d want to see for yourself that the software was working.’
‘Thank you, John.’ She smiled, pleased. ‘That’s most considerate. In fact, I was like a kid the day before Christmas this morning, knowing we should get some results today.’
‘I’ll read through the rest of the translation now and give you a shout if there’s anything of interest.’
‘Oh, John, you know you shouldn’t keep an eager girl waiting.’ She gave one of her sexy winks. ‘Show me all you’ve got … now. Please? Squeezie pleazie?’
He laughed. ‘I wonder what the Egyptian hieroglyphs are for “squeezie pleazie”? OK, we can take a look.’
‘Together? Reading translated glyphs side-by-side is so intimate, don’t you think?’
Just flirting, he wondered, or is she really sending out signals? Not sure what to think, he clicked on the second file. ‘Ah,’ he murmured. ‘This is a translation of the biggest chunk of papyrus that the computer’s been able to reassemble so far.’ He scrolled down the symbols that had been pieced together by the software until he reached a note from the translator. ‘This is a preliminary translation of the letter.’
Samantha frowned. ‘Another letter written in hieroglyphs?’
‘Shouldn’t it be?’
‘No. Excuse me if this sounds patronizing, John, because I don’t know how much you know about ancient Egyptian written records.’
‘I know hardly anything. I’m the techie side of things.’ He patted the scanner.
‘Hieroglyphs were a type of writing used for formal declarations, laws, sacred books; they were painted on to tomb walls, etched into temples and statues. Someone writing a letter three thousand years ago wouldn’t use cumbersome hieroglyphs, they’d write the message in a simpler form called Demotic. This was more like writing as we’d understand it.’
John shrugged, not sure what she was driving at. ‘This letter on-screen was written in hieroglyphs.’
‘Which suggests it isn’t the actual letter that was sent from person A to recipient B. Instead, someone was making a copy of letters using formal text. This correspondence was intended to be preserved for all eternity in a tomb. These letters were so important that someone – perhaps the very people in the tomb – decided that the letters should accompany them into the afterlife.’
‘If they’re so important,’ he began, ‘then let’s see what information they wanted to preserve forever.’
Samantha leaned forward. He could hear her respiration and feel the light tickling sensation of her breath against his face as she read what was on-screen – and what she saw made her glance sideways at John in astonishment.
John read the translation of the ancient letter himself. He soon realized that someone had sent a heartfelt warning to an individual who faced extreme danger, only they hadn’t realized it yet. John read the warning for a second time, which was presented in a form that was almost poetic as it was ominous.
My friend, my brother,
You who travelled to the Western horizon in search of me when I was lost in the great sea of dust. You who saved my life when all considered me beyond reach. Pay heed. Beware, my friend, enemies are moving ever closer to you. Beware. Make ready your weapons. Sharpen your arrows, restring your bow. The cruellest of enemies approach. They are like lions in the night that will tear a child from the arms of its sleeping mother. They are like a scorpion in your bed. They are as savage as the demon in its cave. Beware, my trusted and loyal friend. Be ready to fight for the lives of your wife, your sons, your daughter. Your enemy longs to feast on vengeance as the glutton feasts on meat. You will—
John said, ‘According to the translator, the rest of the letter is still missing.’
‘Even so … that’s one heck of a warning. Whoever the letter was meant for certainly would have realized that the bad guys were coming and he should get ready to protect his family.’
‘And for some reason the warning letter was copied on to papyrus then put in the tomb for safe keeping.’
‘That was the intention, but it didn’t work out that way. The letters weren’t safe, were they? Otherwise you wouldn’t be putting them together again.’
John gazed at the screen and shivered. Had the breeze coming through the window turned colder, or was it because he’d read the letter containing that ominous warning? In his mind’s eye, he saw the Egyptian reading the recently-arrived letter then rushing to a doorway all those centuries ago to stare out at the desert, expecting to see ‘the enemy’ approaching his home. The family in the tomb: were they victims of ‘the enemy’? Hadn’t the man’s bow and arrows been enough to save them?
A cold tingling ran across his body. Icy fingers reaching out from the grave to caress his skin? A touch of death? A morbid notion to be sure, yet it remained with him as, once again, he read the line: ‘Beware, my friend, enemies are moving ever closer to you.’
That afternoon Ben Darrington sat on a chair on the patio. He made sure he stayed in the shade, otherwise the heat irritated the skin under the cast that ran the full length of his leg. His younger brother (Funny thinking the words ‘younger brother’, he thought) had stayed in bed all day. He’d have liked to chat with Oliver, but stairs were as formidable as Mount Everest with this cast on. Ingrid had assured Ben that Oliver had only picked up a bug, as likely as not one of these twenty-four-hour things, and that he’d feel a lot better soon. His teenage sister (Hey! I have a sister!) was smooching with the seventeen-year-old boy next door. Ben had glimpsed them laughing and exchanging kisses as she sat on the rope swing beneath the big oak tree. Ben still marvelled that he had a brother and sister; OK, half-brother, half-sister. He’d always believed he was an only child until a couple of days ago. His mother had told him nothing about his father. His mother tended not to talk about families, or cherish stability. He’d grown up admiring her as some kind of rebel, who lived by her own rules. A free spirit. One of life’s natural-born adventurers. That’s before he’d discovered that she had an insatiable appetite for drugs. Yeah, he’d smoked cannabis. He’d eaten magic mushrooms (and hallucinated that his shoes had turned into crocodiles). His mother, however, loved cocaine. He thought about the plastic container in his bag that held what must be fifty grand’s worth of coke, and wondered if it had been destined for her own consumption – that amount of cocaine would burn her two nostrils into one big, ugly mono nostril.
He squeezed that unpleasant image of disfigurement from his mind and allowed his gaze to settle on a rabbit that had hopped from under a bush on to the lawn to nibble a dandelion leaf. This is a good place, he told himself. I’m unlucky enough to break my leg, and then I’m lucky enough to end up here with such a nice family.
He listened to birds singing in the trees. A pair of yellow butterflies performed a delicate dance around each other as they flew across the flower beds. Yup, the Garden of Eden, he told himself. The e-book that he was reading on his phone drew him back into the story. Survivors in a jungle adventure were being pursued by a Zeppelin airship that fired machine guns at the hero … His phone made a chug-chug sound. He exited the e-book to see an ID pic of Nat Silvers, who was on the same course as him at uni.
He answered brightly: ‘Nat! How’s it swinging?’
‘Swings good, amigo. How goes it with the leg?’
‘Not too bad … Having said that, it feels like ants are feeding on the bone where it’s broken, but they say it prickles like that when the bits of bone are fusing back together.’
‘Uh, sounds unpleasant.’
‘Doing anything good today? In fact, doing anyone today?’
‘I live in hope. Hey, Ben, I don’t want to worry you … but …’
‘Now you are worrying me.’
‘Something weird happened today. That guy your mother knows came to the hou
se. He wanted to go into your room.’
‘Did you let him?’
‘Heck, no. I know you hate the guy. I told him that you weren’t living there any more and had given the key back to the landlord, which is the truth, isn’t it?’
‘Sure is, Nat.’ Ben felt a stab of anger. Why was his mother’s boyfriend wanting to get into his old room at the student house? Ben didn’t trust Micky Dunt one little bit.
‘Ben, I don’t like to bother you with something like this, what with your leg, but this guy wanted to know where you’re staying in Devon.’
Ben pictured the plastic box full of cocaine in his bag. He should never have agreed to keep it for Micky, but Ben’s mother had got all tearful when he said he wouldn’t. Damn it, I should have said no. I could be in trouble if the police find out. Of course, he’d kept the existence of the drugs a secret. He hadn’t even confided in Nat, who was one of his best friends.
Ben said, ‘Did Katy give you the address of my dad’s place down here?’
‘No. It’s probably a good thing, too.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘This guy turned nasty – I mean, totally nasty – when I told him I didn’t know where you were staying. He started pushing me back down the hallway, like he was thinking about beating the address out of me.’
‘Jesus Christ, Nat, he didn’t hit you, did he?’
‘No, but, man, he was blazing angry.’
‘Micky’s a thug. He spent time in jail this year for attacking someone.’
‘He looks the sort. A real knuckle-dragging cave man.’
‘You can say that again.’
Nat’s voice became more thoughtful. ‘There was something odd, though.’
‘Odd? How?’
‘After I told him that I didn’t have your address, he yelled at me, like I’d stolen his life savings or something. The more he yelled the more I got the impression he was scared … in fact, terrified. Before long he was begging me for your address, like he’s desperate to find you.’