The Illusion of Murder (2 page)

The stone coffin, pillars, and faded hieroglyphics are the only remnants of what was perhaps the magnificent tomb of some long-dead pharaoh. Once filled with unimaginable treasures, it now has dust and cobwebs; thieves have taken everything but the ghosts.

Shouting for help will do no good. No one knows I’m here except the person who imprisoned me; someone with murder in their heart I’ve yet to put a name or face to, but who knows I’m trying to flush them out.

The snake’s tail whips against the side of my leg and I nearly jump out of my skin.

I have no idea of what kind of snake it is, but the country is famous for its asps—deadly horned vipers and cobras. Cleopatra tested their venom on condemned prisoners to find out which killed the fastest and most painlessly before she had one bite her.

How I came to be imprisoned in an ancient tomb with one foot on a snake and the other on my own grave has me wondering how I’ve so quickly managed to offend the gods of this ancient land. A mystifying artifact of Egyptian black magic is the source of my troubles and I had been forewarned—possession of it has already caused blood to soak into the primordial dust of the Nile valley.

It is not the first time I’ve stepped into a snake pit, so to speak, but never before so literally; it’s at times like this that I wonder if there is something about me that attracts the strange and the dangerous.

My name is Nellie Bly and I’m a reporter for Mr. Joseph Pulitzer’s New York
World.
With too much boldness for my own good, I bullied and bluffed my way into having the newspaper send me on a race around the world in which I must beat the “record” set by Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s novel,
Around the World in 80 Days
.

That it was the thirteenth day of my journey when I made landfall in Egypt should have also told me that this was not an auspicious time to visit a place where priests once made people eternal with dark magic and the land blistered under ten plagues hurtled by the almighty Jehovah.

The snake twists and thrashes violently and I press harder—at least I think I do. My body is blue cold, I can’t feel my toes and my knee is shaking wildly as if it has a life of its own.

Did something move at the sarcophagus?

I’m sure I saw something move.

Dear God, let it be a trick of the light.

The fading torchlight is casting eerie shadows. There couldn’t be anything in the stone coffin, not something alive, unless it’s true that Egyptian priests could embalm in a way that preserved life for aeons.

More snakes?

The thought of being in the dark with snakes, and scorpions, and spiders, and God knows whatever else lurks in ancient tombs causes the shaking in my knee to work its way up to my hip, and my whole body trembles. I want to cry but I can’t spare the strength and instead press down harder on the snake—or maybe I just think I am pressing harder. My foot is so numb I can’t feel anything under it.

The torch flickers and hisses as if it’s burning through the last of the pitch. I have to get to it and somehow keep it going until I can find my way out of this nightmare. There has to be a door somewhere.

My knees and my courage are turning to mush and I keep imagining I’m letting up the pressure on the struggling serpent. Or maybe I’m not imagining it.

I know I can’t keep this awkward stance any longer. I have to do something now before the darkness completely embraces me.

The creature underfoot thrashes violently, whipping its whole body. It starts slipping out from under my shoe and I scream as I push down on it again, my heart pounding so hard that I’m breathless and sway dizzily, almost losing my footing.

Shutting my eyes tightly, I ask God for help. I don’t think He will listen; unfortunately I’m one of those people who never talks to Him unless I’m up to my neck in alligators, but I try anyway though I don’t think that the Good Lord would approve of my present association with the dark side of Egyptian magic.

I can’t be left blind in the darkness with a deadly snake. I need to get both feet on the snake and jump up and down until I’m sure it can’t harm me and get to the torch before it dies.

I start to bring up my other foot up as I look down.

It’s gone.

The snake has slipped out from under my foot.

Mortified, I can’t move, can’t breathe. It could strike at any second.

Mother of God, how did I get myself into this mess?
Ancient curses, magic amulets, esoteric mysteries from the
Egyptian Book of the Dead
, murder and fanaticism—it’s all insanely bizarre for a young woman from Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania, population exactly 534.

As the darkness closes in on me and my breathing takes on the hoarse rasp of a death rattle, I ask myself what I could have done differently when I decided to flush out a killer in a land blessed by the sun and damned by ancient curses.

PART I

Day 13

I shall now speak at greater length of Egypt, as it contains more wonders than any other land, and is preeminent above all countries in the world for works that can hardly be described.

—HERODOTUS (450 BC)

1

Port Said, Egypt   
•
   November 27, 1889

Thirteen days after I left New York, the
Victoria
, the ship that will see me all the way to Ceylon in the Indian Ocean, anchors in the bay at Port Said, the gateway to the Suez Canal. The bay is too shallow for large ships to reach the docks and they must lie out and be fed coal for the boiler by coolies on barges.

My effort to beat the eighty days around the world record of Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg has progressed nicely. By carriage, train, and ships—the
Victoria
being the third ship to convey me—I have put over five thousand miles under my feet.

Particularly gratifying is that my membership in the female gender has not in the least delayed or otherwise hindered my travels. Mr. Pulitzer had planned to send a newspaper
man
on the assignment because he believed the race too dangerous and strenuous for a mere woman.
*
But more about that later.

When I hear the anchor chain clanging, I dress to go out on deck and get my first sight of the ancient land by dawn’s early light.

As I step out of my cabin, a man down the corridor is closing the door of his room behind him. He gives me a studied look as if to judge whether I have come out because of him, then turns away without a “good morning” and hurries to the companionway that leads to the outside deck.

He’s dressed rather oddly for a passenger, more the work clothes of a sailor, and he’s carrying a small sea bag not unlike what I’ve seen sailors tote. Most unusual about his clothing is that the pants are a little too long, the shirt a bit too roomy, striking me as borrowed or bought on short notice.

An intense-looking gentleman perhaps close to thirty years old; I’ve offered a “good day” a couple of times in the passageway since I boarded at Brindisi, Italy, two days ago, but have gotten hardly a nod in return. He takes his meals in his cabin and appears very preoccupied with his own private affairs, so much that he forgets common courtesies. A man on a mission, the boys back in the newsroom would say. Caught up with his own importance, I’d say.

Had he asked, I would tell him that he’d have more success keeping his own affairs from public scrutiny if he acted less like a nervous squirrel hiding nuts.

Out on deck, the last lingering moments of night along with a fine mist hanging in the air make my first impression of Egypt not the golden land of the eternal sun, but the gloomy outline of a dark city with a line of buildings along the shore appearing as a great serpentine beast with humps that had lain down along the water’s edge.

No gaslights glow in windows or on street lamps, and there is not the telltale bounce of carriage lamps that one expects in a city. When I crossed the Mediterranean, I left behind the world of modern conveniences, of steam-powered engines and Mr. Edison’s newfangled electric lights, and stepped into a land that had changed little over the centuries.

A chant coming from a tall, slender tower silhouetted against the breaking dawn reminds me that I have arrived in the Islamic world. It is a call to prayer made by a muezzin from a balcony near the top of a minaret that rises next to the domed roof of a mosque. Neither spoken nor sang, the summons to face Mecca and pray is strange to my ear—a mournful wail as if a plea to Allah for mercy and bounty in a harsh, dangerous world.

I spot the peculiar passenger from my corridor and realize why he’s dressed in work clothes—he’s standing on a small wood platform being lowered to a rowboat below. He must be in hurry for him not to have waited for the accommodation ladder, a gangplank that will be placed on the side of the ship later to assist passengers in boarding shore boats. Urgent business, perhaps even a family emergency, speeding his exit from the ship? But why the sailor’s garb?

A movement at the railing on the deck above catches my eye. Someone—a man I think, but I’m not sure because the individual is wrapped in a hooded overcoat—is at the rail, watching the passenger being rowed ashore.

My neighbor at least is entertainment on an otherwise dark and gloomy morn.

When the call to prayer ends, a violent gush of wind blows from shore, buffeting the ship and creating an eerie murmuring in the rigging.

“The poisoned wind, the A-rabs call it,” a crewman says as he passes by. He pauses and catches my eye. “They say it comes out of the desert to blow us foreigners back to where we came from and there’s plenty in Port Said who believe it. Don’t go ashore without a good man’s protection, miss.”

A passenger slipping ashore under cover of darkness, a watcher in the night, a wind full of menace?

I return to my cabin to freshen up for an excursion ashore, wondering what other curious things await me in the uncanny land of the Nile.

2

The night before we anchored, Herr Von Reich, a gentleman from Vienna, invited me to join him on an excursion to the city’s native bazaar our first day in Port Said, where, he assures me, I will find the mysterious and unimaginable, along with everything under the sun to buy, from rings to rugs and “even a camel if the captain will let you bring it aboard.”

Accompanying us will be Lord and Lady Warton, a British couple who have business ties with Von Reich, an engineer and inventor who once worked in Egypt.

There are sounds of discord when I’m back on deck to meet my companions at the accommodation ladder. Arab boatmen below are shoving and shouting at each other in a mad haste to be the rowboat closest to the platform that passengers step off of at the bottom of the stairway.

Von Reich grins down at the chaos. “We need only one boat and there are six warring to serve us. Lord Warton and I will clear the way with our canes. You ladies should keep your umbrellas handy.”

Both men carry Penang lawyers, thick walking sticks with bulbous, leaded heads.

As I follow the two men down the nearly vertical, narrow stairway on the side of the ship, Lady Warton, coming behind me, says, “You’ll find that a sharp blow from a cudgel is the language these natives best understand.”

I glance back at the cost of nearly losing my footing, and make a gasp instead of a retort. Having been formally introduced to the woman only last night, and in light of their generous acceptance of my presence, it would be ill-mannered for me to point out that a stick beats more ugliness into a person than it ever beats out.

The steep stairway sways and scrapes against the side of the ship and I hold on tight, wishing I was wearing trousers instead of a long dress that makes it likely I will take a neck-breaking tumble. For sure, it was an inconsiderate man who made up the rule that only men can wear pants.

At the bottom platform I bite my lip as the canes swing right and left to drive back all but one boat. Lady Warton lashes out at a grabbing hand with her umbrella, but I have no intention of using mine in such a rude manner against fellow human beings. It’s obvious that rowing passengers ashore is the only way these boatmen have of earning their bread and it’s a small loaf at that.