Terry Dowling
One does not expect calls for my particular service most evenings, most weeks, most months for that matter. Nor does one advertise by means other than word of mouth and only then among proven clients. Misunderstandings are rife.
But if the service of quatorzième is as special as it is rare in these latter days, nearly two centuries since it was the height of fashion half a world or two and a half oceans away, I charge accordingly. As a professional dinner guest, a respectable and self-respecting woman safely beyond forty, I’m forthright, witty, dazzling enough (I’m told) to make the perfect fourteenth at the table when serendipity, careless planning, illness, or sudden calamity leaves the dreaded thirteen and the host wants no unpicked, last-minute ring-ins, no friends of friends turning up love-me-love-my-dog fashion, no partners, or unknown quantities.
There are still such dinners in the world, many in fact, not only orchestrated to the point of scrupulous personality alignments but where thirteen at table is still considered unlucky, even dire, if not for the host then for one of the guests. The perfect host knows these things.
The skilful quatorzième is always welcome, even more so when female. You will understand.
Suzanne Day was thirty percent apologetic on the phone. It was in her voice.
“Carmel, short notice, I know, but are you available tomorrow evening?” (Never “free,” of course, given the less reputable overtones.)
“For you I am, Suzanne. But I have to ask, why me? You usually go to Ella or Damien.”
“You studied Egyptology at uni, did you not?”
“Among other things. The complete dilettante’s skill set, remember? Bits of everything.”
“But you majored in it, yes? Did an honours year.”
“You’ve been reading my file again.”
“Well, this is for you,” she said with a touch of genuine glee. “An unwrapping.”
“What, a mummy unwrapping! You’re kidding me. There’d have to be countless takers wanting a ticket to that.”
“Intriguing, yes? I want to go myself but the host won’t let me. I must remain the go-between here. He wants this thirteen plus one just in case. Someone who knows a bit about what’s going on.”
“Suzanne, unwrapping parties were well and truly passé by the early 1900s.”
“Trust you to know.”
“But there’ll be experts among the thirteen?”
“To do the actual deed, of course. But they’re from the same faculty. An independent is required.”
I remained wary. “What host is superstitious enough to avoid thirteen for something like this? What have nineteenth century spiritualist concerns to do with unwrapping an Egyptian mummy in the twenty-first century? On second thought, I take that back.”
“Thought you might. It’s precisely suited to a nineteenth century–style event like this. As for why, I have no idea.” She gave the dry chuckle by which I had always known her. “Maybe a mummy suddenly became available. But the usual rates plus a late-notice bonus.”
“Then send what you have. Who’s the host and where’s it to be?”
“You’ll love this. Alan and Paula Lovejoy, and Desert House at Whale Beach. Semiformal. An early start at five p.m. Always wanted to see the place myself. Right up near where that film director Peter Weir lives. Crown of the Northern Beaches.”
On any other day I’d have played the jaded card with something like: Not that old place again. But something about this made me play it straight.
“Go ahead and confirm. Text me the details and arrange the car.”
• • •
When you follow Barrenjoey Road along the coast to Avalon Beach thirty-seven kilometres to the north of Sydney, you find yourself in what often feels like another country. It’s the inescapable feeling I always get as I round the Bilgola bends and begin heading down into Avalon itself, as if a different energy, different way of seeing, different set of values prevail.
Moving through the lazy seaside town on this early Saturday evening, finally turning up Whale Beach Road to a soirée like the one ahead only intensified the feeling.
As soon as I stepped out of the limo I could hear the ocean, the all-encompassing sound of the long swells heaving against the cliffs less than two hundred metres away. A stiff onshore breeze stirred the acacias and potted palms. The air smelled of salt spray and sea-wrack. Cicadas sounded in the summer gum trees and melaleucas back where the coastal ridge fell away to the west.
The house itself had something of an old-world cast about it. Not Victorian or Gothic, nothing so melodramatic. It was more like a sprawling, modernist, Californian beachside villa from the 1920s set back behind high stucco walls of bleached shell pink; these bordered with acacias and palms, cycads and cacti, all so scrappy in carefully controlled rustica fashion. It looked forbidding, carefree, and mysterious all at the same time.
I watched the hire car pull away, then pressed the button in the brass plate by the front door. After a ten count, it was answered by a young Eurasian man in the white shirt and dark slacks of service staff.
“Good afternoon, Ms. Reid,” he said, giving his best professional smile. “I am Ronny. Please come in.” He then stepped aside so I could proceed first, no doubt so I could enjoy the quiet spectacle of the approach to the house’s interior.
Inside the front door, I found the spacious alcove of a sand-garden set with eight Pukumani burial poles from the Tiwi Islands. The main hallway was a left turn from that powerful feature with an immediate dogleg to the right. This led along a wide gallery passageway with pale sandstone fascia walls and four spotlit Ainslie Roberts originals, wonderfully in vogue again among collectors after their seventies heyday. That opened onto the main dining and entertaining area, a vast low space with picture windows creating an entire wall of glass facing east. The swells of the Pacific were already in shadow close in to the shore, but the thunderheads of a distant storm out over the ocean were brilliant with late afternoon sunlight, the great banks of cumulonimbus turned to saffron, rose gold, and coral against the looming darkness. It was like a scene from Maxfield Parrish or Michael Parkes by way of Hayao Miyazaki.
I saw that, before those windows, a long dining table was laid for ten, while in the middle of the room, closer to where I now stood, a well-lit space had been cleared by moving armchairs and sofas aside. It was there that a long shrouded form lay atop a trestle table: clearly the evening’s guest of honour.
Nine people stood in the general vicinity of that silent shape, chatting over the champagne and canapés being served by a young woman in the same style of white top and black slacks Ronny wore.
All turned their eyes to me as I entered. A dark-haired, heavyset man in his late sixties at the centre of the group immediately hailed me with a cheerful wave and came forward. He wore a tuxedo, despite the semiformal attire stipulated.
“Carmel—at last!—welcome to our soirée, our impromptu salon. Everyone, this is Carmel Reid, our independent expert on all things Egyptian.”
I quashed a stab of dismay at the final remark, immediately gave my best smile and joined the gathering.
“Hello, everyone,” I said, then, offering my hand, added: “Alan, how good to see you,” as if I had known him forever, careful to include the well-groomed woman in the salmon-pink gown who moved forward to join him moments later. “And Paula. It really is a pleasure to be invited. Thank you.”
None of us missed a beat.
“You’re welcome, dear. Thanks for coming at such short notice.”
Alan Lovejoy then made the appropriate introductions. I’d developed a knack for matching names to recurring types: the Fashion Designer, the Architect, the Broker, the Transport Company/Security Company/Shipping Company Executive, the Project Manager, etc., but the purpose behind tonight’s gathering added an extra zest to wondering why each person actually had been chosen. My words to Suzanne came back: There’d have to be countless takers. I found no difficulty concentrating.
First was Dr. Callum Jessup, a slight, very serious, greying man in his mid fifties with a long straight nose and close-cut beard who, Alan Lovejoy told me, was the official archaeologist presiding. His two aides were Fayer Das, a young, smartly dressed Indian man, and Janine Differ, wearing what was probably her very best suit and with her hair already gathered tightly back, clearly ready to assist.
Then there was James Preston (late sixties, balding) and Leah Preston (coiffed, controlled but surprisingly easy in spite of it, definitely having fun), consigned to Company Director and Wife/Close Family Friends until revealed otherwise, probably accustomed to being part of whatever adventures their hosts came up with. I was simplifying, but this was the game after all.
Next were David Latimer and John Coe, both in their midforties, the Twin Sharks, I decided, the former—the Dark Shark—narrow-faced and auburn-haired in plum-coloured jacket over black tee and slacks, a Digital Entrepreneur, I allowed, playing the game, the latter a kind of faux-blonde urban cowboy in an eighties Don Johnson–style lounge suit and string tie, anything from Louche Scion to Property Developer. Scant moments of small talk with them revealed that none other that Rosanna Carfi was preparing our meal tonight.
After the usual deflections—“How do you know the Lovejoys?”/“Ah, you have to guess.”—I excused myself to check the view, and took my glass of champagne across to the window wall facing the towers of storm cloud rising pink, golden, and ever-deepening grey over the ocean to the east. It gave me a chance to track through the guest list again.
Three kitchen and waitstaff including our chef (the as-yet-unseen Rosanna), three on the “official” archaeological team, to call it that, the Lovejoys as host and hostess, plus the mummy, left only four actual guests, with me as fifth, and who knew what special skills and insights the Prestons, David Latimer, and John Coe brought to the proceedings. They might simply be Close Family Friends too; they could equally have a vested interest known only to our hosts.
It certainly wasn’t the usual dinner crisis I was accustomed to: thirteen that needed to be fourteen for whatever reason. This was fourteen in the house, not necessarily at table, though only if you counted the mummy. I’d ask about it when I had a chance.
The meal itself began ten minutes later and was a splendid affair, well planned and beautifully prepared. After sautéed prawns in garlic with farro, green olives, and pistachios, the main course was a choice of barramundi, salad and aioli, or beef bourguignon with speck and potato puree, followed by chocolate macaron with burnt caramel and honeycomb. Champagne remained on offer, but there were excellent Hunter Valley reds and whites.
I was seated facing the incredible vista over the ocean, and had glimpses of those mighty cloud castles filled with the sudden play of lightning. It made the meal an even more dramatic affair, though the special nature of the occasion was already doing that.
Most of my signature skills weren’t required, of course. As experienced quatorzième, for instance, I knew never to be trapped into the round of introductions and backstory as other guests too often were. You only ever personalised the dinner guests to your immediate left and right, threw “cryptics” to any who quizzed from across the table.
“Tell us about yourself, Carmel” was often how it went.
And my retort, everything from a tediously glib “Best leave that for tomorrow’s tabloids, [insert name here]” to “Tonight a few recent indiscretions require that I remain Delphic in this regard, [insert name], until the unmasking at midnight.”
“But we aren’t wearing masks” was a frequent reply.
And my rejoinder: “Wine, wit, and wisdom. We’re always wearing masks.”
Delivered in a way that was sufficiently self-deprecating as not to be flip.
But this was different. While I was used to things happening on cue at these events, there was a tension here that flavoured everything.
Once the dessert plates were cleared and coffee and glasses of Armagnac and Finnish Kijafa served, David Latimer—Dark Shark and Digital Entrepreneur—turned to me.
“Carmel, this interest in Egyptology. What led to it, if I may ask?”
I smiled. “Oh, being young and romantic, David. The usual things. Loving the art, the half-theriomorphic gods.”
He smiled in turn. “Serves me right. Animal-headed, yes? But you never did time in the field.” There might have been the smallest slight in the remark, payback for using “theriomorphic” as I had.
“Never did. Like I say, too young and romantic. Did it the hard way.”
I expected him to continue with “So how did you come to be here tonight?” or “How do you know the Lovejoys?” but he stayed on theme, as if primed to direct things a certain way.
“What one thing about the ancient Egyptians fascinates you the most?”
Any number of answers would have sufficed, delivered with the right aplomb, but I chose a favourite and didn’t hesitate. “How they saw the soul as having five main parts. Particularly the part called the Sheut or Shadow.”
“I’ve never heard about this. Please.”
Again, no hesitation, not even a glance to Callum Jessup for moral support. “The better known parts are the Ba and the Ka—the personality and the vital spark. But there’s the Ib, the heart, the centre of self, the will, absolutely vital for the afterlife; hence the heart was the only organ buried with the body. Then there’s the Ren, the name protected within the magical rope of a cartouche so it would never vanish from human memory. Having your name obliterated or forgotten was a terrible thing. The last main part is the Sheut or Shadow, the part without which a person cannot exist. It’s often shown as a small black figurine. Some people—pharaohs, nobles, public figures—had theirs hidden away in a Shadow Box so it could never be taken and destroyed.”
David Latimer looked suitably impressed. “Well, I never knew. Thank you.” He raised his glass of red in a salute.
I smiled and raised my own.
John Coe—Blonde Shark and Louche Scion—did likewise. “It seems unnecessarily complicated, doesn’t it? Like overelaboration for its own sake.”
Hardly a comment I’d have expected from him.
“Like tonight’s proceedings no doubt,” Leah Preston said, clearly enjoying the novelty of it all. This had to be a far cry from the usual round of corporate dinners she had to attend.
It’s like they’re all following a bloody script, I decided.
Alan Lovejoy had been listening with obvious pleasure, sitting with his back to the spectacular light show over the ocean, a vast tower of cumulonimbus flaring with lightning even as he raised his glass.
“Friends, the centrepiece of this evening’s rather special event has made a long journey to be with us, so I’d like to propose a toast. Here’s to our silent guest of honour. Nemkheperef!”
“Nemkheperef!” we all chorused, managing the unfamiliar name as best we could.
Lovejoy set down his glass. “It’s a journey made even longer because of a most intriguing detour. He has come to us by way of one of the greatest scientific minds of the last two hundred years, the great Nikola Tesla.”
John Coe couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Nikola Tesla owned a mummy?”
“Sold it on to a dealer named Leo Morgenstern well before 1924. But yes.”
“A royal mummy?” Callum Jessup asked. He was in my line of sight, and his face seemed drained of colour at the prospect of further improprieties to be committed on an artefact that had already been disinterred, exposed for others to see, then shipped across the world not once but at least twice. I could imagine similar expressions on the faces of Fayer Das and Janine Differ, out of sight to my left.
Lovejoy reassured him. “How could it be, Callum? But beautifully preserved apparently. As I say, his name was—is—Nemkheperef.”
John Coe was still coming to grips with the whole thing. “Tesla used it in his experiments?”
“Tempting to think so, isn’t it, John? We just don’t know enough. But it has come to us—untampered with, I’ve been assured, never unwrapped—from Tesla’s facility at Wardencliffe. With it was this fascinating device.”
On cue, Ronny stepped forward carrying a short metal cylinder and set it on the table in front of Lovejoy. The drum-shaped object was the size of a stubby 1950s vacuum cleaner and sat on two wedge-style feet. A two-metre lead fixed to a flat metal plate extended from one end, while an electrical cord fitted to the other was wound several times around the device. There was a single switch on the curved surface next to a simple vernier dial, but no other features that I could see.
James Preston leaned in to examine it more closely. “What exactly does it do, Alan?”
“We can’t be certain. It was in the wooden shipping crate in the locked room at Wardencliffe, tucked in right alongside the mummy. Maybe the plate at the end of that lead was to go over the mummy’s heart, but it wasn’t attached in any way when Morgenstern saw it. Needless to say, the power was switched off, the power lead unplugged.”
Leah Preston had her hand to her throat. “Good heavens! The things people do!”
Preston’s little laugh barely hid his concern. “It’s not his earthquake machine, I hope.”
“Excuse me?” Lovejoy asked.
“That device he’s supposed to have designed—the oscillator—that ultrasonic generator for creating sympathetic vibrations to bring down buildings and bridges.”
David Latimer shook his head. “Goodness, James. It’s 2019, not 1919!”
Preston gestured towards the mummy in the middle of the room. “David, look what we’re doing tonight. Pure 1919, if you ask me. Things haven’t changed all that much.”
Lovejoy was enjoying the theatricality. “Oscillators! Earthquake machines! You’re overreacting, James.”
But Preston wasn’t to be discouraged. “Tesla was up to something, Alan. Dr. Jessup, what can you tell us?”
The archaeologist wasn’t sure what to say. “I’ve never heard anything like this about Tesla. It’s hard to know what he was trying to do.”
I couldn’t be the only one thinking: resurrection! Raising the mummy’s ghost, its ancient spirit! What else was there? Testing residual galvanic responses didn’t begin to cover it. Nemkheperef’s musculature was leather and dust. And while a living human body was an organic electrical “machine,” the CPU harnessing that electricity—the brain—had been violently disposed of at mummification millennia ago. Tesla may have been a scientific genius and relentless inventor truly ahead of his time, but he was also of his time. What could he have been thinking?
As if remembering Latimer’s earlier good-natured rebuke to Preston, Jessup then added: “Oh, and nonmuseum unwrapping parties were out of vogue by 1918. Things definitely have changed.”
“But have they, Doctor?” Preston said. “We know about dark energy and dark matter, things like superstrings, quantum states and gravitational lensing, telomeres unravelling at the genetic level, a true purpose for the pineal gland, things we know enough about to know we know almost nothing about.”
This one remark moved James Preston in an instant from Close Family Friend and mere Company Director to Research Analyst, Think Tank Adviser, and beyond, the sort of thrilling category-busting I loved most about my profession.
“Your point, James?” Lovejoy asked, no doubt knowing his friend well enough to have anticipated where all this would lead.
“There’s always more to it is what I’m saying. Fringe data to be factored in. Contradictions. A fierce rationalist like Arthur Conan Doyle was able to allow that those harmed by the opening of Tut’s tomb in 1922 were plagued by the ‘elementals’—his word—left by the ancient priests to guard the boy king’s tomb.”
David Latimer laughed in disbelief. “You mean the curse?”
Preston kept his voice calm. “He said elementals, David.”
“My God! We are back to a mystical Egypt! It truly is 1918! They were pragmatists for the most part, James. A scientific, rational people.”
I couldn’t help myself. My brief was to support the hosts at all costs, and that meant easing moments like these. “A scientific, rational people who kept getting it spectacularly wrong, Mr. Latimer. David.” I gave my best smile. “Thought the self was in the heart, not in the brain. Preserved the other organs in canopic jars and left the heart with the body. Threw the brain away—that old schoolyard favourite of pulling it out through the nose with a hook, rinsing out and packing the cranium. We see through the eyes. It’s the area where we instinctively know to think we are. But they never thought to ask what that closest mass of tissue was, positioned so close to the eyes. Oh no. They settled on the heart. They could perform brain operations to relieve war injuries on whatever that icky disposable mass was, could cut granite and build pyramids, but never took it further.”
Preston was nodding. “Never even invented the stirrup, for heaven’s sake!”
“The what?” Latimer asked.
“As bad as the Romans. Safety pins but no stirrup.”
Latimer stared wide-eyed at the older man. “James, what are you going on about?”
Preston spread both hands in an isn’t-it-obvious? gesture. “What Carmel is saying is that the ancient Egyptians—like Conan Doyle for all his Holmesian smarts—were more than pragmatists as well. Having the Rosetta Stone and populist experts like John Romer and Zahi Hawass don’t begin to give the mindset.”
“Now hold on, old boy—”
“Dr. Jessup,” I said, redirecting the exchange so it didn’t remain too personal. “Pyramids were stellar reincarnation engines conceptually and practically. Failed ones, but yes or no?”
Jessup was thrown by being included so suddenly, but quickly recovered. “Well, when you put it like that, yes—”
“The tombs in the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens were unsuccessful reanimation machines, powered by spells. Whenever you enter one, it has to be thought of that way. The whole mummification process—”
“Misconceived, flawed, yes,” Jessup said. “Like so many burial customs and belief systems.”
I didn’t leave it there. “Or something instinctively, mutually yet insufficiently understood. Like dark matter, dark energy for us now, as James just said. We may never know.”
Latimer saw what I was trying to do, working to smooth things, and became a temporary ally. “So a collision of ways of seeing. Understanding mindsets.”
“Exactly,” I said. “The ancient Egyptians were both fierce rationalists and committed spiritualists. Both. That’s the point.”
Jessup was nodding. “At the very least. Following what they took to be a clear scientific method.”
It was time to step away. “So we do the same, allow that we don’t have it all yet.”
But Latimer needed more than that. “So look at us tonight. Pure 1918 granted, but at least we agree that there’s no magic involved. Nothing like magic. Nothing like Doyle’s elementals.”
See what I’m trying to do, my glance told him, and I made sure I kept any impatience out of my voice. “Doyle is a case in point. A very smart man. He reminds us how such a clever person can believe in elementals, even that two things might be true at the same time. It’s like choosing a favourite between red and green. You can love both, choose both. Well, here it’s like knowing about the existence of dark matter or some ultimate role for gravity, but allowing we just don’t know enough yet.”
Jessup had faced groups like this before, enthusiasts carried away by the more sensational aspects of mummification lore, devotees of a mystical Egypt that never was. “All we know from the coffin itself is that it’s male, probably a New Kingdom minor noble from the Twentieth Dynasty. If this is what we actually have, it means he died sometime around 1170 BCE. Given the quality of the embalming we can expect to find going from the little Tesla’s notes tell us, it will be nothing too fine.”
“But this is Nemkheperef?” our hostess, Paula Lovejoy, asked. “Isn’t that who we’ll find?” She was no doubt recalling what the mummy had cost and was aghast at the prospect of having been conned.
Jessup shook his head. “Not necessarily. There were reburials, reinterments, coffins and sarcophagi plundered from earlier periods. So we’ll open this and see what we have.”
Leah Preston was still relishing the prospect of something from the spirit world. “But none of Tut’s elementals.”
Jessup actually managed a smile. “If there were, Mrs. Preston, they’re long gone. Maybe Tesla purged them with his alternating current.”
This may well have been rare humour from the archaeologist, and James Preston laughed in appreciation.
But Leah was still concerned. “But the case has been opened? There is a mummy in there?”
Lovejoy spared the archaeologist the need for further reassurances. “There is, Leah. Morgenstern checked it out. And Tesla opened it—or had it opened. Had it sealed again. Kept it in a long wooden box at Wardencliffe to protect it so well.”
Latimer was frowning. “After doing what, I wonder?”
Lovejoy shrugged. “There’d be riotous urban myths aplenty for that in the right circles if word were to get out. Many would concern whether Tesla actually owned it. Many why he did, given his ongoing experiments with electricity.”
Preston turned his attention to the device again. “But you say he did. With that device attached? Or at least there to be attached?”
All eyes turned to the cylinder on the table in front of Lovejoy. It looked so innocuous, even comical in a clichéd mad-scientist fashion, and yet definitely sinister as well. The metal glowed dully in the storm light from over the ocean.
“When Morgenstern’s grandson sold the mummy on last month, he told me that’s how it was set up when his own father bought it from Tesla, originally as a donation to our very own Nicholson Museum. As you can see, it never got there.”
John Coe looked up from the device. “So, Alan, why do it this way? Why not a proper museum opening with respected archaeologists, scans—what’s the term—?”
“CT scans,” Jessup said. “Computer tomography.”
“—all properly documented?”
Lovejoy spread his hands. “My mummy now. My rules.”
Latimer looked equally dismayed. “But the archaeological significance!”
Lovejoy chuckled. “Here’s where we recall the mantra: Private collections tend to protect artefacts better. Private collectors are the true conservators. Repeat as needed.”
Dr. Jessup gave a thin smile and tried to reassure Latimer, though was more likely reassuring himself. “Like I say, nothing too fine. A cartonnage mummy case.”
“Which is what?” Leah Preston asked.
Jessup was back in his element. “Cartonnage coffins and funerary masks were originally made from overlaid strips of linen layered for strength with plaster, then sealed and painted. Over time it came to be more your waste papyrus soaked in plaster, rather like papier mâché covered in stucco. By Ptolemaic times they were using old papyrus scrolls from the Roman period. You can still buy cartonnage fragments showing the old texts easily enough online.”
As if indeed prompted by a script, Preston seized on this. “Spells?”
“They didn’t have to hide their spells, Mr. Preston,” Jessup said. “Those were painted in plain sight inside and outside the coffin. Sometimes on the mummy as well.”
“But others could’ve been on the papyrus used.”
David Latimer rolled his eyes. “Here we go, 1918 again! The mystical Egypt!”
Why are you doing this, James Preston?, I kept wondering. Are you reciting lines you were told to say? Or is there more to all this, a cabal at work here, some retro cultist gathering? It wasn’t such a crazy idea. They had all been here before me.
Fortunately, Dr. Jessup was focused on the scientific aspects of what was to come. “As you say. But they will likely be something like spells twenty-seven, twenty-eight, and twenty-nine from the Book of the Dead—the ones for protecting the heart. And there will likely be amulets included in the wrappings. Spells and amulets all the way.”
“And the heart is in there?” Leah Preston asked.
“It will be if the mummy hasn’t been violated by looters at some point, though I’ve been told by Mr. Lovejoy that it will be intact.”
At this, our host checked his watch. “And Dr. Jessup and his team have the hands-on experience to do the honours for us. His colleagues will be assisting and recording everything. Please, let’s adjourn to where our silent friend awaits so we can begin.”
With this, we headed for the cleared space in the middle of the room and arranged ourselves in armchairs and on sofas. Jessup and Janine Differ began setting up makeshift dust screens in case they were needed—sheets of plastic fixed between rented lighting stanchions—while the young Indian, Fayer Das, set the camcorder going, moved a side table closer to the shrouded figure, then wheeled over a smaller steel instrument table on castors. The team then began putting on plastic aprons, gloves, and dust masks. Jessup handed Ronny dust masks to pass to the spectators.
We watched these preparations in relative silence, listening to their quiet comments to one another, hearing the waves heaving against the cliffs below the windows. The towers of cloud over the ocean were still shot through with lightning but were fast losing their golden edges. Any remaining glories were burnt orange and old rose now, with the barest hints of aqua.
I was seated near Lovejoy, a little apart from the others, and it gave me my chance.
“Alan, there were only ten at table tonight, not fourteen. None of the usual garden variety superstitions I tend to find. You didn’t really need me as quatorzième.”
“Not in the usual sense, Carmel. But there’s no knowing what Tesla was up to. Maybe I’m hedging my bets.”
“Was thirteen ever a factor?”
“That came from Tesla. Two words printed on a card fixed to the inside of the shipping crate. ‘Avoid thirteen?’ Followed by the question mark. It may have been a power setting or an overload warning rather than anything to do with people, possibly a point of query for further consideration later. So I’m counting everyone in the house tonight, our chef Rosanna, our wait staff Ronny and Sarah, everyone. We’ll all be observing.”
“So the mummy does make fourteen?”
“Exactly. Also observing in a sense. We have to count him. It’s like remembering to count Christ at the Last Supper.”
“Who made it thirteen, you realise.”
“I do. And I like the answer you gave David Latimer about the soul.”
“He blindsided me. Asked a ten-dollar question to see if I could deliver. I gave him a fifty-dollar answer. Too much, you think? There’s a nerd factor I like to avoid.”
“It worked splendidly. David and John Coe are fascinated.”
It was then that Rosanna Carfi emerged from the kitchen, accepted the hearty applause and called-out compliments with a broad smile. She took the glass of red Ronny handed her and joined rest of us around the shrouded form.
“Dr. Jessup,” Lovejoy said. “Since we’re all here, we can begin.”
There was no further ceremony, though the pulling away of the dust cloth was like the prelude to a stage magician’s act, revealing the cartonnage coffin in all its ancient splendour. It was strikingly lit from above by the recessed spots and the occasional flash of lightning from over the sea: an off-white mummiform case of heavy cartonnage sealed with plaster and painted over, covered in hieroglyphs, pieces of hieratic script in the most vibrant colours. It was a glorious thing, almost too much for the eye to easily take in. Fayer Das took shots of the artefact with his digital camera, adding his own quick flashes to those from the storm.
Jessup finally said something to the young Indian, who immediately set down his camera, crossed to the dining table and hoisted the metal cylinder. He brought it carefully back to the operations area and set it at a precise spot on the table close by the coffin. Then he took up his camera and continued taking photographs.
“Exactly how it was placed when Morgenstern first saw it,” Lovejoy told us.
Callum Jessup turned and pulled aside his dust-mask for a moment.
“Unwrappings, if and when they occur these days, usually take weeks, months, depending on the state of preservation, the amount of anointing liquids or other residues coating the mummy that have to be scraped away, things like that.’ ”
Lovejoy spared him the rest. “We’re taking more of a slash and burn approach, cutting in to find the heart scarab or Wadjet eye, whatever has been placed over the heart. We’ll remove that amulet, then fit the plate of Tesla’s device at that spot.”
“And turn it on?” Preston asked, clearly puzzled as to why any of Tesla’s arrangements were being followed at all.
“One thing at a time, James. We’ll plug it in, switch on the current as intended, but leave our options open as to whether we activate the machine or not. Ladies and gentlemen, fit your dust masks if inclined. We’re going in small and focused, so there shouldn’t be much of a mess to concern us, though there will be the smell to consider. Ronny has a container of Vicks VapoRub. May I suggest you smear some around your nostrils before fitting your dust mask?”
Removing the coffin lid posed no great problem. It had been removed several times in the last two centuries, and resealed each time with a light application of an industrial glue, just enough to provide an airtight seal. The edge of a knife was enough to free it again, and Jessup and Fayer Das soon lifted it away and set it gently on the side table.
We were all on our feet at this point, craning in to see the momentous reveal: our first glimpse of the tightly swathed, ochre-coloured form within.
There were instant gasps from everyone.
“My God! What’s this?” Preston said.
For the funerary mask wasn’t mere cartonnage at all. It glowed with the unmistakable lustre of gold. Though a far more modest affair than Tutankhamen’s famous funeral mask, it featured the traditional striped nemes headdress, though without the sacred cobra and vulture adornment above the beautifully stylised face, and no royal beard below. The lappets of the headdress barely extended past the shoulder line, and there was no broad usekh collar across the upper chest.
“Who would have thought?” Paula Lovejoy marvelled, even as Fayer Das moved in to take more photographs. “A royal mummy!”
“Not necessarily,” Jessup said, as Das finally moved aside. “It’s electrum. Something the Egyptians used from Old Kingdom times.”
“Is it gold?” Alan Lovejoy asked.
“It’s what’s called pale gold, white gold, even green gold, depending on how much gold is alloyed with the silver. They’re supposed to have used it to coat the pyramidions at the top of pyramids and obelisks. This will be mostly silver, possibly even the lightest electrum coating over a base metal.”
“Original?”
“Can’t be, Mr. Lovejoy. This isn’t a royal mummy. The texts on both coffin and mummy tell us as much. It has to have been added later. Probably much later.”
Preston had moved in as close as he dared. “By Tesla?”
Callum Jessup shrugged. In forensic terms, this was already a contaminated specimen, another factor making further acts of sacrilege and professional misconduct easier. The golden mask may have given him momentary doubts, but Nemkheperef’s name on the tightly bandaged form had reassured him.
“It’s possible, James,” I said. “Man-made electrum is an alloy of silver and gold, sometimes with copper added. But it occurs naturally, too. You get wires of it on Tertiary quartz formations like you find in Colorado.”
David Latimer was watching me closely, as much because I knew something like this as for what I said. “Tesla spent time there?”
“He did. Colorado Springs, 1899. Working on wireless power transmission.”
“You know a lot about this.”
“Thank you. And, yes, in case you were wondering, silver, copper, and gold do top the list for electrical conductivity.”
Though there’s no brain, I kept thinking as I said the words. Nothing for electricity to reanimate! The heart alone can’t be enough.
Lovejoy chuckled again. “The old devil. He couldn’t leave it alone, could he? Put his damn electricity everywhere. So what’s this for, reviving the mummy? Raising—what did you call it?—its Ba or Ka? Its ghost?”
At last it had been said!
“We’ll never know,” I admitted. “There’s a lot we don’t know about the Colorado Springs period. But it is tempting to think of Tesla staging an electrical Opening of the Mouth ceremony at some point. Bringing the mummy’s Ba—its spirit—back to life.”
John Coe laughed. “I can’t believe that for a moment! Tesla trying to revive— What’s his name again?”
“Nemkheperef,” Jessup said.
“Nemkheperef.”
The Ren part of the soul, I thought, looking at the figure partly hidden by its faux-Egyptian mask. At least his name isn’t being forgotten. It’s being said often, like an incantation, part of a ritual. Like we’re calling him up.
“As Carmel says, we can never know,” Lovejoy reminded them.
Flash after silent flash lit the clouds over the ocean. The endless swells heaved against the cliffs.
Preston was staring at the coffin. “Well, better to raise the ghost of a minor noble than the elementals Conan Doyle said were guarding young Tutankhamen’s tomb. Did he say what they were like? Phantoms? Parasites? Disease vectors of some kind?”
I marvelled at these turns of phrase. Parasites? Disease vectors? These were intended provocations. There had to be a script. Lovejoy wanted the theatrics, the melodrama. Either had Preston on board to assist, using him to provoke Latimer and Coe, or wanted to keep setting him off for some reason. If you were going to have a theme-party unwrapping, why not pump it up, take every opportunity to wind up the audience?
No one said anything for a moment.
Then Jessup answered, firmly in business mode now. “Unexplained disinterment deaths used to be blamed on mould spores from confined spaces getting in the lungs or any open wounds, or noxious gases created by oxidising metals among the funerary artefacts, that sort of thing.” He had taken up a small circular saw, tested it once, twice.
I, too, worked to lighten the tone. “Let the tomb breathe a while has been a Tomb Robbing 101 maxim ever since. That’s how I play it. Wait forty-eight hours at least.”
There were welcome chuckles from Paula Lovejoy, Leah Preston, and the Sharks.
But James Preston kept at it. “Unless they’re like Lazarus. Once created, never dying. Always at their task in some way. Working through others.”
I stared at the balding businessman in fascination. He’d been deliberately provoking all evening, and was now firm contender for Prime Cabalist—if Lovejoy hadn’t already taken that role.
“Do we try to remove the mask?” Jessup asked our host.
“Leave it for now,” Lovejoy said.
Jessup nodded once, positioned the saw on the chest below where the mask ended, then suddenly stopped, set the saw down and bent in close over the mummy.
“What is it?” Lovejoy demanded.
“There’s something here. Tucked in beside the mummy. I just noticed it.”
Fayer Das moved in to take a half dozen quick photographs of this latest discovery in situ, then moved away again.
“Is it attached?” Lovejoy continued. “Can you bring it out?”
Dr. Jessup reached in and lifted out a small wooden box, but didn’t need to bring it over for Lovejoy to examine. We had all crowded in, just as in old-time depictions of private unwrapping parties. When Jessup pried it open, he angled it to show that the interior had been painted black and that it contained a small wooden human painted completely black too.
“The Sheut,” I said, as Das’s camera flashed. “The Shadow.”
“Should it be included here?” John Coe asked, close by my right shoulder. “What usually happened to them?”
Jessup shrugged. “We don’t have enough surviving examples to know. They were usually kept hidden well away from the person represented. We know about them mainly from wall paintings and funerary texts. This alone makes the mummy very special.”
“Tesla left it with the mummy?” John Coe noted.
“He did, Mr. Coe,” Jessup said. “The thing is that he had it in the first place. Well, Mr. Lovejoy?”
Lovejoy didn’t hesitate. “Set it by Tesla’s machine and proceed.”
Jessup didn’t ask us to move back. He simply turned to the mummy in its coffin, took up the saw again and began. The saw’s high-pitched whine filled the room, and the dry, slightly gamey smell from the wrappings made us grateful for the Vicks smeared under our masks.
The dust that sprayed up was mummy powder, alarming to think about, and the combined smells of decay, old ointments and funerary libations grew stronger, but still we stayed, wanting to see it all.
The ragged chest opening became larger. It truly was a “slash and burn” entry, as Lovejoy had promised, but Lovejoy’s instructions to the archaeologist would have been clear: Do this one thing for me and you get to process the rest of the mummy your way afterwards.
Jessup knew when to go more slowly. The steady whine fell away, became short quick stabs as he neared the actual chest wall beneath the bandages.
Fayer Das photographed every step of the process, while Janine stayed by the camcorder till Jessup needed her assistance.
Finally Jessup set down the saw. “Here it is,” he said so we could all hear. “A heart scarab. Glazed steatite most likely.”
“Bring it out,” Lovejoy told him, and Jessup did so, placing the dark-green object in the small specimen dish Janine held ready.
“What now?” the archaeologist asked.
Lovejoy didn’t hesitate. “Just for now, fit the plate of Tesla’s machine over the heart.”
“You’re serious?”
“Do it, Callum. It won’t be for long. I want to see it as Tesla had it.”
Jessup lifted the lead with the metal plate, set the plate into the cavity where the heart scarab had been. Fayer Das took more photographs, then stepped back.
There was silence in the room, just the rush of the ocean, the first rolls of thunder from out where the storm was moving in.
“What happens now?” Leah Preston asked.
I wasn’t sure what I was doing, but suddenly found myself leaning in past Jessup’s shoulder, reaching down to the machine alongside the coffin. I surprised myself by throwing the switch.
Everyone watched my boldness in astonishment, staring dumbfounded and listening to the low hum that followed that solid click. No one had tried to stop me. They kept watching as I turned the vernier dial to exactly thirteen and the humming grew louder.
Lightning flashed, filling the clouds with sudden colour.
“Why did you do that?” Preston asked, though in an oddly distracted way, not disapproving.
“I have no idea,” I said, honestly enough, then of course did.
Not the mummy yet. Not yet. Raising the elementals first! Phantoms working through others, just as Preston had said. The Twin Sharks. The Close Family Friends. The Service Staff. The Quatorzième. Bringing sufficient others together as carriers in this world so they could do the rest.
Never scripted. None of it scripted. Just another kind of unwrapping.
The machine continued to hum. There was lightning and the heave of the ocean as the moment came.
The mummy of Nemkheperef had been holding its breath for three thousand years. Now it breathed out.