Scroll of Saqqara(190)

With a groan he came to his feet and lurched along the path. It was very dark under the palms. Like black pillars they clustered stiffly around him, marching away to right and left, shrouded in their own mystery. Hori tried not to let them cut him off from reality, but as he manoeuvred the final corner and saw the house crouched to one end of its clearing, he had to contend with a rushing sense of confusion. It seemed to him that he was back in Koptos, hovering on the edge of the ruins whose silence and desolation had been so familiar. With a tightening of his will he forced his imagination away from that place and into the present, but the silence and desolation remained. Its quality here was an evil, brooding thing, and as Hori staggered across the sparse, dry grass he was sure that invisible eyes were closely observing his progress. I have nothing left to lose, he told himself. No pain, no evil, can be greater than that which I am suffering now. I will walk straight through the main entrance into that cold hall. I will ignore any servant standing in the shadows, for I am positive they will ignore me. The shawabtis, retreating into their twilight world of not-being during the dark hours when their services are not required, blind, deaf, woodenly unmoving … He shuddered, an involuntary action that poured agony into his wasting muscles, and stepped from the airy darkness of night into the close, Stygian blackness of the house.

There was a servant standing in a far corner, feet together, dusky arms rigidly at its sides, eyes closed. Hori drew near and passed it with one timid glance, but it did not stir. The rear passage yawned, a hole into nothing. Pausing to temporarily put down the knife and wipe his slippery palm on his kilt, he stole into it.

The darkness was total. Hori knew that Tbubui’s old room lay to the right near the exit to the garden, and he inched towards it, shoulder against the wall. At the other end of the house Sisenet and Harmin would be sleeping, or whatever it is that the dead do at night, he thought with another burst of amusement that he recognized as hysteria. I must not disturb them. His shoulder bumped against a ridge and he felt about. The door was there. It gave at the pressure of his hand, swinging open soundlessly but with the slightest movement of air, and Hori walked in.

The same complete blackness reigned here, and in despair Hori realized that he would have to search by touch alone. He had not brought a lamp; indeed, he would have been unable to carry one. His symptoms had intensified the moment he had placed his fingers on the door, and now the sharp horns of pain gored and twisted his vitals, his brain. He tried to rise above it, to set it apart somehow from the place where reason and decision took precedence in his mind, but it was hard.

Slowly and awkwardly he began to search, his fingers probing the corners, the floor, the knife held temporarily in his teeth. Shuffling across the floor he encountered the couch, now stripped of its bedding. He felt the mattress, the gritty space under the couch, and then left it to continue on the other side of the room, but he soon realized it was bare. Her tiring boxes had all gone. The night table was missing as was the shrine to Thoth. She had taken it all to his father’s home.

Sobbing with fatigue and frustration, Hori fumbled his way back to the door. You are going to die, the pain mocked him. You will never find the doll. She is far too clever for you. Who would have thought six months ago when you sat with your father on the plain of Saqqara and watched the ancient air stream from the tomb in a thin grey cloud that you would end up crouched in this stuffy, empty room with your life draining away? Be quiet, he told himself sternly, though he felt his own tears hot on his neck. Accept and go on as long as you can. His knee struck the edge of the door and he eased himself back into the passage.

A thin stream of dull yellow light was illuminating the other end of the corridor. Hori paused, thunderstruck. He was absolutely positive that the narrow space had been completely dark before, but now someone had lit a lamp and its sullen glow was showing under a door. Whose door? Hori thought, gripping the knife and shambling towards it. He re-passed the entrance to the hall on his left and caught one glimpse of the motionless servant propped against the wall before he moved on. Whose door? It was Sisenet’s, and it was suddenly ajar. A strange calmness fell upon Hori. He pushed it all the way open and walked in.

The first thing that struck him was the smell. He had been in enough places of burial to recognize it at once—a musty, earthy odour of sun-starved rock and undisturbed soil with a hint of human decay—but here the stink of corruption was dominant. He felt it immediately in his throat and swallowed, his nostrils constricting. He had not been in this room before. It was small and unadorned, the walls grey mud, the floor untiled. A couch stood against the far wall, holding nothing but a stone headrest, and in the middle of the floor there was a table supporting a plain lamp and a box. Whatever else the table held was obscured by the man rising and turning with a cold smile. This place reminds me of something, Hori thought, standing in the doorway and looking about. It reminds me of … of a tomb.