Chapter Sixty-Three

Imogen landed on soft carpet in a familiar den filled with elegant furniture and paintings. One was a melting family portrait of Mum and Dad with Imogen when she was six. Smoke filled the air. It stung her lungs, making her cough. Heat pressed against her skin. Screams echoed from above and below. Olga’s baby wailed.

As Imogen walked through her burning house, she witnessed the memory of that dreadful night. Family members ran through the flames in slow motion…. Her father and Heinrich Müller fought the spreading fire in the study. Their clothes ignited like torches. Olga backed into a corner with the crying baby, penned in by a fence of fire. The maids, trapped upstairs, shouted for help as their hair and dresses caught flame, then fell over the railings to their deaths. Her nanny, Miss Emily, cried out Imogen’s name as a blaze and beams collapsed on top of her.

Fire leapt and spread across the ceiling of a downstairs hallway. Imogen watched helplessly as her mum and younger self crawled on hands and knees toward a bathroom, where a tiny window offered escape for only one. The bathroom door closed.

Imogen beat on the door, feeling the flames scorching her back. She crouched, unable to handle the heat. Smoke clouded around her. She coughed in fits. She squeezed her eyes tight, awaiting the fire to consume her.

Then she was suddenly outside, the cool night air embracing her. Imogen opened her eyes. She was standing in the front circular driveway of the manor – now a looming fortress of flame and billowing smoke.

Her younger self cried, struggling to open the front door so her mother could escape. The chains shackling the door’s handle to a post were so hot they burned the little girl’s hands. She cried on the lawn. Imogen approached her younger self to comfort her, but the girl faded like a ghost and vanished.

“Immy…” called Mum’s voice from inside the house.

The chains around the front door came loose and fell to the ground as the front door burned away. From a foyer consumed with hellfire, out walked a group of burning corpses. Her parents stepped onto the driveway. Next came the Müllers, her nanny, the servants…all gathered in front of the house. Heinrich’s face was a blackened skull. All of Olga’s beautiful hair had burnt away. The young mother cradled a small charred body.

Mum’s and Dad’s orange rippling forms stepped forward. Dad’s skin floated up in cinders and ash. Flames draped Mum’s body like a gown, as if she were dressed to attend a ball where devils and demons danced. She reached out her fiery arms. “Come to Mum and Daddy, Immy. It’s time to go home.”

All the grief and guilt that Imogen had suppressed gripped her heart. She couldn’t help feeling responsible for her family’s deaths. If I hadn’t shot the pistol at Geoffrey’s mob and angered them more…. A part of her regretted not dying in the fire with her family. She had never understood why God had allowed her to survive and not them.

“Come be with us, ladybug,” her father said. “We all miss you.”

“I miss you too.”

All the longing to be with her family again returned. To be home. Imogen began to reach for her parents’ hands. Before they touched, she felt the painful heat and pulled away. She stared into her mum’s eyes peering through a veil of rippling flame. It brought back the moment when Imogen was a little girl trapped with her mother in the bathroom as fire burned the door. Smoke had made them both cough. Mum had hurried to the small window and opened it. “You must go,” she had said.

“I can’t. I don’t want to leave you.” Young Imogen had wrapped her arms around her mother’s waist and clung to her.

“I want you to live, my precious girl. Live and have a glorious life.” Mum had hugged her tight, kissed her forehead. “Now, out you go.” She’d ushered Imogen out the window.

A moment later, thick smoke billowed through the window and her mother’s coughing and cries of pain went silent.

Now, standing with Mum and Dad brought tears to Imogen’s eyes. “You helped me escape, so I could live.”

Their ghosts nodded. “This was our destiny. It can be yours too. Come be with us again.”

Her parents, all of their staff, and the Müllers started toward her.

Imogen backed away. She recalled what Caleb had said about the Duat projecting her darkest fears. It was trying to trick her into suffering an eternity with her guilt. “You’re not real,” she told them. “I won’t go with you.”

Everyone stopped and quietly watched her as the flames continued to burn skin off their bones. Soon they were nothing but skeletons glowing with fire. Only her parents still had faces.

“Goodbye, Mum and Dad. I love you.”

They both nodded. The last thing her mother said to her was “What our enemies did to us wasn’t your fault. It was ours.”

Imogen wiped tears from her eyes as her parents’ fiery ghosts burst into embers and were gone. The rest of her family vanished as well. The ruins of their three-story house caved in inside the crackling fire.

Imogen turned her back on it and continued walking through a dark tunnel. The surrounding darkness remained quiet. The more she walked, the more her grief, guilt, and shame left her body like ashes blowing away. A beam of light surrounded her. She floated up and found herself once again suspended in the Hall of Ma’at with all the gods watching. Her heart, back on the scale, moved up and down until it stopped in perfect balance with the feather.

A murmur of voices echoed around the pantheon.

Thoth stepped forward with his book and conversed with Osiris in their alien language.

Imogen, held suspended above the pit, wondered what was happening.

Osiris said something incoherent. Thoth read a few passages from his book, his voice reverberating around the great hall, and then he closed the book with an echo that made Imogen shudder. Anubis pulled her heart off the scale and sent it flying back into her chest. The hole closed up and she felt her heart beating rapidly against her breastbone. She floated toward the scale and was set down on her feet.

Thoth motioned with his hand. “Imogen, come forward.”

Hearing the god speak her name humbled her. The spotlight followed her as she stepped before Thoth. The giant with the curved beak examined her with luminous eyes.

“You are one of the few who has balanced the scales,” he said. “By the laws of the Supreme One, who is Highest of the Highest, we must give you a choice.”

He held up his palm and two vortexes swirled open, one to Imogen’s right. Inside it, a cave tunnel led straight to sunlight and the most beautiful blue sky. The second spinning vortex glowed directly above her. It glimmered with stars.

“You can go home or you can ascend to the next level,” Thoth said. “Should you ascend, your time in the Earth Realm will be complete. To go to the kingdom Aaru, to learn every truth in the universe, you must shed this body for the next. Should you choose to go back to your world, you will forget all that you’ve experienced in the Dark Realm. What happened to the others on your expedition and knowledge of our existence will be erased from your mind. Now you must decide.”

Imogen stared down the tunnel that offered escape. After all she’d been through, it was tempting to run to freedom and feel the sun on her face. But what was there to pull her home? Grandfather, the last of her family, was dead. She could continue working at the museum, piecing together the puzzles of ancient Egypt, never knowing that she had once come in contact with their gods or seen that Duat was a real place.

What she’d always wanted was to know the mysteries of the universe, see it in all its wondrous dimensions. The world she’d be leaving behind offered nothing but an endless search for answers. Her fear of dying melted away and she was left with a deep feeling of reverence. For the first time since she was a child, she had faith.

She looked up at Thoth. “I choose to ascend.”

The god of knowledge nodded and raised his hands. A peaceful aura of blue light swirled around her. Both excited and curious as to what awaited her beyond this life, wondering if she might see Grandfather and Caleb again, Imogen floated upward into the swirling light.