Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois (21 page)

“If someone wants to find something bad enough, they’re willing to believe anything,” said Stalls, who knew of such fools first hand.

Having handed over the cash, he was free to take hold of the jar himself and look at it more closely.

The thing wasn’t large. Around a foot tall, it was narrow at the top and widened to a diameter of about eight inches before tapering again until it became the same size at the base as it was at the neck. The top was stoppered tight by a stone plug that showed to Stalls’ practiced eye, all the evidence of not having been tampered with…as promised.

“And you won’t tell me where it came from?” asked Stalls.

The man smiled and shrugged. “You know I cannot, Mr. Stalls. The site might still hold other objects of value. Objects my associates would like to find before their activities are discovered by the police.”

It was the price, besides the money he’d just handed over, that Stalls knew came with dealing on the black market. You could never be absolutely sure of the authenticity of what you were buying, but he’d dealt with Mehmed before and never been disappointed. The items he’d purchased had always checked out. It was one of the reasons why only the cream of the collector crop were invited to Mehmed’s auctions. Gazing at the Canopic jar he held in his hands, Stalls felt pretty damn sure that he was now in possession of an object that hadn’t been tampered with for at least 4,000 years, and that dated back to the Third Dynasty. Could the object inside still be preserved? Would there be enough of the kidney, intestines, or liver to take a viable DNA sample from? If so, he might be able to prove the existence of a highly developed Egyptian proto-culture from before recorded history, could prove the existence of the fabulous Hyborian Age from which Egypt arose on the ashes of a land called Stygia.

But he was getting ahead of himself…

Handing the jar back to Mehmed, he watched as the dealer wrapped it in cheap brown paper and string so that the completed package looked no different than the packages made up by local laundries and markets.

“Are you sure you’re not interested in anything else, Mr. Stalls?” asked Mehmed as he held out the package. “We’re holding another auction in a few days…some very nice items from the Iraqi National Museum. The police have already been bribed…”

“No thanks, I have what I want.”

Stalls, made his way to the rude wooden door at the back of the basement where a man standing lookout motioned to him that it was safe to leave. A moment later, the door had closed shut on its leather hinges and Stalls had emerged onto a dusty alley in the heart of the Cairo slums. Not too familiar with the streets in that part of the city, it took him some time to finally make his way from the crowded warren onto a paved thoroughfare where he could hail a passing taxi.

It was still short of a couple hours till dawn by the time he arrived at his hotel. He waited until the taxi had driven off before turning away from the main entrance and going around to the back and entering through the receiving area. There was no one on the street at that hour and he was sure he made it into the building without being observed. Outside his second floor room he fumbled with his keys before getting the door to his room open and, finally stepping inside, sighed in relief at the hum of the air conditioner.

Locking the door behind him, he carefully set the package down on a nearby bureau, imagining what was inside. By the Third Dynasty, the ancient Egyptians had refined their art of preserving the human body after death about as far as it could go. The secret lay in moisture, or rather the elimination of moisture from the body. To do that, the Egyptian priests would remove all of the body’s internal organs and place them into separate Canopic jars, like the one Stall had just won at auction. The process of removal was a pretty sophisticated one; they even developed an operation that could remove the brain from the head through the body’s nostrils, piece by piece with a pair of specially fashioned hooks! When they were done, all that would be left in the body was the heart, due to the Egyptian belief that it contained the soul and thought processes. The priest would next anoint the body in natron, a kind of salt that would absorb all remaining traces of moisture. After a sufficient amount of time had passed, the natron would be brushed off and the body wrapped in linen. The result was the marvelously preserved bodies found by archeologists in the nineteenth century, thousands of years since they’d first been mummified.

Looking at the package, Stalls could only wonder where it had come from. He was in no doubt about its authenticity, Mehmed was no fool; if word got around that he was dealing in forgeries and fakes, he’d be out of business in no time. All of the known tombs and pyramids were tapped out, there was nothing left to find in Cheops or the Valley of Kings. From time to time, isolated tombs were discovered beneath the shifting sands of the Sahara. Could his jar have come from one of those? He suspected that if any evidence for the existence of Stygia were to be found, it would most likely come from farther south, in what was known in ancient times as Upper Egypt. Could it have come f

Eagerly, he unwrapped the jar and set the paper aside. Holding the artifact closer to the lamp, he noted the faint markings that circled the jar. He recognized many, but one in particular stood out, the one that had caught his eye when he first examined the jar before the auction. The stylized figure of a serpent, the traditional emblem of Set, the snake god.

Setting down the jar, Stalls went to one of his suitcases, produced a key, and unlocked it. From inside he removed a vinyl case, unzipped it and withdrew a thick sheaf of Xeroxes bound in an unlabeled ring-binder. Sitting down on the edge of the bed and placing the binder on his lap, he flipped through its pages until he stopped at a title page labeled
The Saracen Rituals
. In order to be fully prepared for his Egyptian “shopping” trip, Stalls had brought as much of his research materials with him as possible. Most, of course, was stored on disk, and so accessible on his laptop, much of the rest was a simple matter of surfing the ‘net. Some items, though, could be had in no other way than old fashioned hard copies. For that, he’d visited a few libraries in the United States and arranged to make copies of the pertinent information directly from the printed source. For
The Saracen Rituals
, he had to make a special stopover in London to visit the British Museum which had one of the only known copies on hand. Only a single chapter from Ludwig Prinn’s larger
De Vermis Mysteriis
, most Egyptologists dismissed the work as the ridiculous ramblings of an early version of a conspiracy theorist. Which it may well have been, but Stalls suspected that as paranoid as Prinn no doubt was, he did spend time in the Middle East in the 1500s and could very well have picked up some useful information; a suspicion the American confirmed when he first laid eyes on the jar. Flipping through the scanty pages of the
Rituals
, he finally found what he was looking for: a drawing of the Seal of Nephren-Ka, the infamous Black Pharaoh of Egyptian history. It matched perfectly with the image of a trampled snake on the jar in Stalls’ possession and confirmed in his mind that Nephren-Ka not only existed, but that he had been mummified at some point. What he had in the jar on the bureau before him, were none other than the human remains of the most notorious man in Egyptian history, a man that many researches still were not completely convinced even existed. But now he had the evidence! And if DNA testing proved it, his reputation in the field would be made. Of course, there would be questions about where the jar came from, but he already had a plan to explain that.

In any case, it was useless to speculate on the issue any further until he could have the jar examined in detail…and there were university laboratories he knew in the States that would do the job without asking any questions. Resigning himself to the wait, he snapped the binder shut and replaced it in his bag. Retrieving the paper and string, he rewrapped the jar and, yawning, shed his sweaty clothing and stepped into the shower.

A few minutes later, he emerged feeling refreshed and was still scrubbing his hair when he thought he heard a sound from the bedroom.

“You want to leave some extra towels before you…” he started to say, expecting to find the housekeeper changing the bedsheets. Instead, he was confronted by a robed figure whose burnoose hid his features in shadow. Cradled in his arm was the package containing the jar. Behind him, one of the leaves of the sliding glass door was open and the warm morning breeze was wafting the curtains inward. Outside, the sun was brightening the eastern sky and from the streets below, traffic sounds could be heard.

“Hold it right there, mister!” Stalls shouted, trying to sound as threatening as he could. Standing in the center of the room stark naked however, didn’t make him feel very formidable right then.

Showing not the slightest bit of intimidation, the burglar crouched and began to back toward the open doorway — was that a
hiss
he was making? Stalls didn’t have time to wonder about it as he lunged after the retreating figure who sidled this way and that in quick, jerky movements that struck the American as definitely odd.

The burglar’s moves allowed him to easily avoid Stalls’ clumsy attempts to grab him before slipping out the door and over the railing that lined the balcony outdoors. Desperate not to lose the jar, Stalls dashed outside in time to see the man land on the sidewalk and scramble in a loping run down the street.

Cursing, Stalls ran back inside and dressed as fast as he could. He couldn’t allow the man to get out of sight if he was going to recover the jar, because there was no question about going to the police for help. Egypt had strict laws against dealing in antiquaries, and dealt even more harshly with those who bought them on the black market. No, if he was going to get the jar back, he’d have to do it himself.

Balking at the two story drop from his balcony, Stalls took the emergency stairs and burst out the service door to the sidewalk. Around him the street was still relatively deserted that early in the morning, making it easy to spot his quarry with his funny, stooped posture and jerky movements even from a distance. Thus, a fast run up the street, glancing down alleys and side roads as he went, enabled him to finally spot the thief, package still tucked under his arm, as he skittered up the far end of a narrow side street.

By the time he reached the spot where he’d last seen the thief the man was out of sight, but with only one direction he could have gone, Stalls was pretty sure he was still on the right track. A few minutes later, now deep into the increasingly crowded warrens of Cairo’s back streets, with the smells of cooking food and human waste pungent on the air, he caught sight of the thief again. So far as he could tell, the man wasn’t aware that he was being followed and Stalls decided that he could afford to slow down and wait for a chance to nab him that would be to his advantage.

He was in a wholly unfamiliar part of the city and beginning to feel somewhat nervous about the seedy looking nature of the neighborhoods he was passing through when it occurred to him that the thief might be going to meet friends, friends who could help him take care of the lone American pursuing him. Suddenly anxious to conclude the chase, Stalls put on an extra burst of speed and caught up to the unsuspecting thief just as he paused above a set of stairs leading down into a dark basement.

“Now I’ve got you…” Stalls managed to say as he collared the man by his loose robes and used the momentum of his run to swing him against the mud wall of a nearby building. Momentarily stunned, the man’s grip on the package loosened and Stalls moved swiftly to grab it from him. “I’ll take that, and you can take this…” He gave the man a good left uppercut that was meant to strike him beneath the ribs and wind him but instead, his fist caught on the fabric of the man’s jibba and seemed to glide across the surface of his body. A hiss of hot, stinking breath washed across his face as the unexpected lack of resistance threw Stalls off balance and he fell clumsily against the body of his opponent. Before he could regain his balance, something hit him on the back of the head, forcing him to his knees. Still clinging to the package, he determined to remain upright but the effort only set him up for another blow, once again to the head and this time, he fell forward, never feeling the cobblestones that rose up to hit him in the face.

The low murmur of voices was the first thing that impressed themselves on his senses when Stalls finally emerged from the darkness of unconsciousness. For a long time, or what seemed to be a long time, that was all he was aware of. The voices, or what he took to be voices, seemed to be slurred with an unusual amount of sibilants in their speech…was it English they were speaking? Or Arabic? He couldn’t tell, it was hard to concentrate.

The next thing he felt was the hard, unyielding nature of whatever it was he lay against. That’s when he realized that he was lying down. Opening his eyes didn’t do any good. He couldn’t see a thing in the darkness. He moved his arms to prop himself to a sitting position and realized that they were bound behind his back. Why…? Suddenly, it came back to him: the theft, the chase, the fight…then he was hit on the head. He must have been unconscious and whoever it was that had struck him, had tied him up and brought him here to…where was he? And it was only at that moment that he fully realized the possible danger he was in. If he’d been captured and taken by the thieves who’d robbed him, they might not feel safe in letting him go. His only hope lay in the belief by the natives that all Americans were rich and that he could be more valuable to them alive than dead.

Struggling to raise himself, he found there was a wall at his back and used it to force himself upright. He was still groggy from the blows to the head. He had a monster headache and his eyes refused to adjust themselves to the dim light of what must have been one of the subterranean basements that was a regular feature of the local architecture…offering residents the only real respite they had from the country’s relentless heat.