The Ghost of Akhenaten

CHAPTER 1-1

CHAPTER 1

The Dreams BeginThe man lay on the desert sand, his body twisted and broken.

Dark shapes circled around him like jackals around a lion’s kill.

Deep voices intoned the malevolent words of a curse.

‘This man will not rise again.

This man will not go to the stars.

This man will lie forever in the desert cut off from those who loved him and those whom he loved.

His god will have no access to him.

HIS GOD IS DEAD.’

The sky deepened from the colour of fire to the colour of blood.

One broke off from the circle, crouched and wrote hieroglyphs in the sand — each one reversed.

The chanting continued.

‘May you never enter the barque that glides among the unwearying stars.

May you forget the names of those who guard the seven doors, the fourteen gates, the twenty-one mounds of the Otherworld, and may you never be vindicated in the presence of the forty-two assessors. May your heart weigh heavy against the feather of Maat in the Hall of Osiris, and Ammut, the Devourer of the Dead, feed on it. You have denied the gods of your ancestors, may they in the Everlasting deny you.’

Darkness fell and absorbed the figures of the priests who chanted these fearsome words, as though they were part of the darkness itself.

When the dawn came and the sun rose in a splendour of blue and gold, the man who lay, twisted and broken, alone at the centre of a vast and featureless desert, did not witness it.

* * * *

Eliot rang the bell in shabby Swallow Street and Emma looked around curiously. She had never visited Eliot’s friend Jack before. The place did not look promising. The door paint was peeling and scuffed, the wall grimy, and the beautiful honey-coloured stone almost unrecognisable. The whole street resembled the back of a stage set that no one had time to tidy up before the play started, while just around the corner — the front of the stage — was resplendent with reproduction Roman buildings housing a genuine ancient Roman bathing and temple complex.

At last, a disembodied voice greeted them and a buzz indicated that the door was unlocked. A steep, dark staircase confronted them, and they started to climb. The first indication Emma had that she had not entered the den of some impoverished troglodyte was the shine of leaves caught in sunlight from a skylight high above the landing. From then on the place was a delight.

A life sized Egyptian statue of worm-eaten wood that had once guarded the secret entrance to a tomb in ancient Egypt, stood beside the door to the living room. The statue held a staff that was irreverently draped with Jack’s red winter scarf, and a ski hat graced the forbidding head.

The front room, the living room, was large and light, with a view of chimneys and rooftops.

Emma knew that Jack had inherited money from his father, and many of the precious artefacts in his apartment from his great-grandfather, Ben Wilson, an archaeologist. He was in the enviable position of not having to work too hard at making a living. He fancied himself as a writer, but had never written a book, though he had a drawer full of titles and discarded first chapters. However, he had had some travel articles published and, if anyone asked, he claimed to be a freelance travel writer.

The tomb guardian had been inherited from his great-grandfather, taken out of Egypt, no doubt, before the authorities fully worked out their strategy for preventing heritage artefacts leaving the country. He also had from his great-grandfather an old leather suitcase stuffed full of ancient manuscript fragments on papyrus. He only looked at them when he was showing off to a visitor and had no idea what they were. Since they had come into his possession he had intended to have them deciphered by an expert, but never got around to it. He and his friends enjoyed speculating on their origins and meaning.

Emma stared at his mantelpiece, which was full of ancient Egyptian artefacts — a couple of ushabtis, faience slaves waiting to labour for the deceased in the afterlife, a blue pottery hippopotamus painted with flowering lotus on its sides, and several exquisite stone bowls filled with paper clips and boxes of matches. Most impressive of all were a pair of tiny ancient Egyptian silver statues of gods: Anubis, the jackal headed protector of the necropolis, and Isis, the Queen of Heaven.

On the wall above the mantelpiece was a flat piece of white chalk-like stone with the symbol of the sun painted in thin black lines, each ray ending in the stylised drawing of a hand holding an ankh, the Egyptian sign for eternal life. Something was scrawled under it in hieroglyphs, but the end sign was broken off and so the inscription, whatever it was, was incomplete. Beside it a similar shard of stone was carved in relief. It was of a hand with long, sensitive fingers reaching out to touch something that had been broken off and lost.

The hand had pride of place, mounted so that the best light in the room fell on it.

Eliot and Emma were visiting Jack because they were worried about him. Jack and Eliot had been close friends since Jack visited the United States as a teenager, and had stayed at Eliot’s home as part of an educational exchange programme. They kept up their friendship at long distance until Eliot decided to come to England, to Jack’s home town, to work.

Jack had recently been having disturbing dreams.

The first dream that he told Eliot about had occurred about a month before. In the dream the ancient Egyptian hand seemed to be beckoning, instead of reaching out. He was in a desert among the columns of ruined Egyptian temples. Whenever he looked directly at the figures painted and carved on the columns and walls they were still and lifeless, but as soon as he turned his head away, out of the corner of his eye, he could see them move.

He had lain awake for some time after this dream feeling uneasy, as though he had woken too soon and missed something very important. When he went into the living room his eye went straight to the hand. It appeared as it had always done — inanimate. And yet he sensed a subtle difference.

Eliot had laughed.

‘You really ought to write that novel you’re always talking about,’ he said. ‘Your imagination is getting out of hand!’

‘I didn’t imagine it,’ he had protested. ‘I really felt...’

But already he was not certain how he had felt — and the dreams kept coming.

Some were only made up of the flotsam and jetsam of his ordinary day-to-day life, but others were more disturbing and powerful. He seemed to be recalling, in great detail, people and places in what seemed to be ancient Egypt.

Emma, an ardent New Ager, had pricked up her ears at once when Eliot told her that Jack was having disturbing dreams about ancient Egypt.

Eliot himself had no time for the New Age and had often indulged in jeering at it before he met Emma. She had not converted him or even lessened his scepticism and distaste, but he was prepared to humour her.

Emma paused a long time beside the battered old leather case containing the papyrus manuscripts. Eliot was talking, but Jack was watching Emma. Tentatively she put out her hand and touched the case. She withdrew it at once, but then put it back again and left it there for a long time, frowning in concentration.

‘What is this?’ she asked at last.

‘Oh, that’s a lot of old useless stuff from Egypt — bits and pieces of papyrus no one can read,’ Eliot answered for Jack. ‘I don’t know why he doesn’t just chuck it away or give it to some old museum.’

Emma looked at Jack. ‘It must have come into your possession for a purpose,’ she said. ‘You should have it translated.’

‘The case has been in my family for ages,’ he replied. ‘It contains mostly fragments. I can’t see that any sense could be made of them.’

‘Perhaps one of them would explain your dreams.’

Jack glanced at Eliot crossly. So he had been spreading it around about the dreams!

There was an awkward pause, and Emma moved away from the case. To break the tension she lifted up a small earthenware lamp.

‘This is Roman. Was it found in Bath?’

‘I don’t know. I bought it at the flea market in the old tram sheds in Walcot Street.’

She held it up and turned it over, examining it closely.

‘Perhaps you should rub it,’ Eliot mocked, ‘and a genii will come out and grant your every wish!’

‘What would be your wish?’ Emma asked seriously, holding the lamp up, her hand poised ready to rub it.

Even Jack laughed, and then, because she seemed so earnest and was so beautiful, he said: ‘I’d wish to understand what is going on in my dreams.’

Emma rubbed the lamp.

Nothing happened. Of course!

She put it down and returned thoughtfully to the leather case.

‘I sense very strongly that this is a key to something,’ she said. ‘You really should have the fragments translated.’

Jack crossed the room and opened the case. Inside lay the yellowing scrolls, half worm-eaten, covered in strange markings — writing, but to him indecipherable.

‘They are powerful,’ she said. ‘I’m not surprised you have strange dreams!’

He frowned, shutting the case. He had been finding his attention drawn to it more and more recently. In several of the dreams he had about Egypt it seemed as though someone was calling him, urgently, as though there was some danger. He had the feeling he was expected to do something he did not want to do.

If he had a second chance to wish on the Roman lamp he would wish for the dreams to go away, not for him to understand them.

‘Aren’t you going to offer us a drink?’ Eliot asked, impatient with what he would term a ‘spooky’ turn to the conversation.

Jack left the room at once.

‘You were supposed to be trying to help him,’ Eliot said accusingly. ‘Not freak him out even more.’

Emma moved reluctantly away from the case.

When Jack returned with three glasses and a bottle of wine, she told him she knew someone in Glastonbury who might be able to interpret his dreams for him.

‘She might even be able to give you a past life reading,’ she added.

Jack shrugged. He was uneasy that they were having this conversation about something so personal, and was not about to expose himself further to a total stranger. He knew enough about Freud to be very wary of letting anyone loose on his inner motivations. Who knew what an ‘expert’ would make of what happened to him at night in the privacy of his subconscious!

No. Emma was well meaning, but he needed no witch at Glastonbury to analyse him. He was irritated with Eliot for dragging her into it, and wished he had told his friend nothing about the strange events he was experiencing in the ‘twilight zone’.

Luckily Emma did not press the point, and the conversation turned to what Eliot had been doing since he last saw him. It seemed he might go to Chile soon to attend the wedding of his sister to a rich rancher.

Emma sat quietly, cross-legged on a cushion on the floor, and seemed removed from the conversation. Jack glanced at her frequently and saw that she was gazing at his Egyptian treasures intently. Eliot was lucky, he thought. Her hair was brown and long but shining like fire in the sunlight that had now suddenly broken through the rain clouds. Her eyes were deeply grey, her lashes long. She wore a tight jumper that did not meet her jeans, and had kicked off her sodden shoes to reveal beautifully shaped feet. The wine glass was on the floor in front of her and she was meditatively drawing her finger around the rim, listening for the high, fine sound she hoped it would make.

Eliot’s voice seemed further and further away. Jack felt he and Emma were alone in the room. The sound started on the glass and it seemed to him it was a thread drawing him away, like the voice calling in his dreams.