The Mummy or Ramses the Damned (23 page)

He turned around and went back into the library of Lawrence Stratford and sat down again in the man’s comfortable leather chair. He had placed lighted candles all about this room for his own pleasure, and now it had the very pitch of light he so loved. Of course the little maidservant would faint dead away in the
morning when she saw the dripping wax everywhere, but never mind. She would certainly clean it away.

He loved this room of Lawrence Stratford—Lawrence Stratford’s books and his desk. Lawrence Stratford’s gramophone playing “Beethoven,” a medley of squeaky little horns that sounded oddly like a chorus of cats.

How curious that he had taken possession of so much that had belonged to this white-haired Englishman who had broken down the door of his tomb.

All day wearing Lawrence Stratford’s stiff and heavy official garments. And now, at ease once again, in Lawrence Stratford’s silk “pyjamas” and satin robe. The most puzzling part of modern dress had been the man’s leather shoes. Surely human feet were not meant to wear this kind of covering. It was more than a soldier needed to protect him in the heat of battle. Yet even the poor wore these little torture chambers, though some were lucky enough to have worn holes through the leather, making a rough sandal of sorts so their feet could breathe.

He laughed at himself. After all he had seen today, he was thinking of shoes. His feet didn’t hurt anymore. So why not forget it?

No pain ever stayed with him very long; or any pleasure. For example, he smoked Lawrence Stratford’s delicious cigars now, drawing in the smoke slowly, so that it made him dizzy. But the dizziness went away at once. So it was with the brandy as it always had been. He experienced drunkenness only for an instant, when he first swallowed and the delicious heat of the drink was still in his chest.

His body simply threw off the effects of things. Yet he could taste and smell and feel. And the strange tinny music winding out of the gramophone gave him so much pleasure that he felt he might start weeping again.

So much to enjoy. So much to study! Since coming back from the museum, he had torn through five or six books in the library of Lawrence Stratford. He had read complex and exhilarating discussions of the “Industrial Revolution.” He had dabbled a bit in the ideas of Karl Marx, which were sheer nonsense, as far as he could see. A rich man, it seemed, writing about poor men when he did not know how their minds worked. He had reexamined the world globe many times as he memorized the names of continents and countries. Russia, now that was an interesting country. And this America was the greatest mystery of all.

Then he had read Plutarch, the liar! How dare the bastard say that Cleopatra had tried to seduce Octavian, her last conqueror. What a monstrous idea! There was something about Plutarch which made him think of old men gossiping as they gathered on benches in public squares. No
gravitas
to the history.

But enough. Why think about that! There was a sudden confusion in him. What troubled him, made him a little afraid?

Not all the wonders he’d discovered in this twentieth-century world since morning; not the coarse abrasive English language, which he had mastered before afternoon; not the length of time that had passed since he’d closed his eyes. What troubled him was this entire question of the way his body constantly restored itself—wounds healing; cramped feet relaxing; brandy having little or no effect.

It was troubling him because for the first time in all his long existence he was beginning to wonder if his heart and mind were not subject to some similar system of uncontrollable renewal. Did mental pain leave him as easily as physical pain?

Not possible. Yet if that was not so, why hadn’t his little trip to the British Museum made him cry out in agony? Numb and silent, he had walked among mummies and sarcophagi and manuscripts stolen from all the dynasties of Egypt even to the time in which he had retreated from Alexandria to his last tomb in the Egyptian hills. Yet Samir had been the one who suffered, beautiful golden-skinned Samir, whose eyes were black as Ramses’ had once been. Great Egyptian eyes, those, the same after countless centuries. Samir, his child.

It was not that the memories weren’t vivid. They were. Like yesterday, it seemed, that he had watched them carry the coffin of Cleopatra out of the mausoleum and down to the Roman cemetery by the sea. He could smell that sea again if he wanted to. He could hear the weeping all around him. He could feel the stones through the thin leather of his sandals as he’d felt it then.

Beside Mark Antony she had asked to be buried; and so it had been done. He’d stood in the crowds, a common man, with his coarse cloak wrapped around him, listening to the wailing of the mourners. “Our great Queen is dead.”

His grief had been an agony. So why was he not weeping now? He sat in this room staring at her marble bust, and the pain was just beyond his reach.

“Cleopatra,” he whispered. Playfully, he envisioned her not as the woman on her deathbed, but as the young girl who had
awakened him:
Rise, Ramses the Great. A Queen of Egypt calls you. Come out of your deep sleep and be my counsel in this time of woe
.

No, he did not feel either the joy or the pain.

Did this mean the capacity to suffer had been affected by the powerful elixir that never ceased its work in his veins? Or was it something else, that he had long suspected; that when he slept, he somehow
knew
the passage of time? Somehow even in that unconscious state, he travelled away from the things that had hurt him; and his dreams were only one indication of the reasoning that went on in darkness and in stillness. Without panic, he had known before the sunlight ever touched his body that hundreds of years had passed.

Perhaps he was merely so shocked by all he’d seen about him in the twentieth century that the memories had not attained their full emotional force. The pain would return all at once and he would find himself weeping uncontrollably on the edge of madness—unable to embrace all the beauty that he saw.

There had been a moment in the wax museum, yes, when he had seen that vulgar effigy of Cleopatra, and the ludicrous, expressionless Antony beside her, when he had felt something akin to panic. It had soothed him to return to the noisy, bustling London streets outside. He had heard her crying in his memory: “Ramses, Antony is dying. Give him the elixir! Ramses!” It seemed a voice from somewhere outside of him, which he could not silence at will. It disturbed him that she had been so grossly represented. And his heart had been tripping like those steam hammers that broke the cement pavings of London. Tripping. But that was not pain.

And what did it matter that the wax statue had so cheapened her beauty? His statues bore no resemblance to him finally, and he had stood about in the hot sun chatting with the workmen who made them! Nobody expected public art to have anything much to do with the flesh-and-blood model, that is, not until the Romans started filling their gardens with portraits of themselves, down to the very warts.

Cleopatra had been no Roman. Cleopatra had been a Greek and an Egyptian. And the horror was, Cleopatra meant something to these modern people of the twentieth century which was altogether wrong. She had become a symbol of licentiousness, when in fact she had possessed a multitude of amazing
talents. They had punished her for her one flaw by forgetting everything else.

Yes, that is what had shocked him in the wax museum. Remembered, but not for what she was. A painted whore lying on a silken couch.

Silence. His heart was thudding again. He listened. He heard the ticking of the clock.

A tray of savory pastries lay before him. There was the brandy; oranges and pears on a china plate. He should eat and drink, for that always calmed him, just as if he’d been starving when he was not starving at all.

And he did not want to feel the agony again, did he? Yet he was frightened. Because he did not want to lose his vast experience of human feeling. That would be like dying!

Once again he looked at her beautiful face, rendered there in marble, more truly Cleopatra than that wax horror. And something deep inside threatened the strange quiet of his mind. He saw images without meaning. He put his hands to his head and sighed.

Of course if he thought of Julie Stratford in her bed above him, his mind and heart would be instantly united. He laughed softly as he picked up one of the pastries—sticky and sweet. He devoured it. He wanted to devour Julie Stratford. Ah, this woman, this splendid woman; this delicate-boned modern Queen who needed no land to rule to make her regal. So wondrously clever and surprisingly strong. But then he had better not dwell on it, or he would go up and knock down her door.

Picture it: crashing into her bedchamber. The poor servant wakes in the attic and starts screaming. So what? And Julie Stratford rises in that lace bower of hers, which he glimpsed earlier from the hallway, and he covers her, ripping off her scant gown, caressing her hot little limbs and taking her before she can protest.

No. You cannot do that. Do that and you destroy the thing you desire. Julie Stratford was worth humility and patience, a great deal of it. He had known that when he had watched her from that strange numb half-awakened state, moving about this library, speaking to him in his coffin, never guessing that he could hear.

Julie Stratford had become a great mystery of body and soul and will.

He took another deep drink of the brandy. Delicious. Another
long draw on the cigar. He sliced through the orange with the knife and picked it up and ate the sweet, wet meat of it.

The cigar filled the room with a perfume finer than any incense. Turkish tobacco, Julie had told him. He had not known what that meant then, but he knew now. Ripping through a little book called
History of the World
, he had read all about the Turks and their conquests. That was how he should start, really, with the little books full of generalities and summations: “Within a century and a half all of Europe had fallen to the barbarian hordes.” The fine distinctions would come later, as he sought out the great wealth of printed material in all languages. Just thinking of it made him smile.

The gramophone stopped. He rose, went to the machine and found another black disk for it to play. This one had the curious title “Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage.” For some reason that made him think of Julie again and wanting to crush her with kisses. He set the disk on the turntable and cranked the handle. A small fragile woman’s voice began to warble. He laughed. He refilled his brandy and moved a little with the music, a slow dance without lifting his feet.

But it was time to do some work. The darkness was dissolving outside the windows. The first faint grey light of the dawn was coming. He could hear, even over the dull roar of the city around him, the faraway song of birds.

He went into the dark cold kitchen of the house, found “a glass,” as they called them, these beautiful objects, and filled it with water from the miraculous little copper tap.

Then he went back into the library and studied the long row of alabaster jars under the mirror. All appeared unharmed. No cracks anywhere. Nothing missing. And there was his little burner, all ready for him, and the empty glass vials. All he needed was a little oil. Or one of these candles, burnt down now to a convenient stub.

Moving aside his scrolls rather carelessly, he set up the little burner properly. He slipped the candle into place, and blew out the flame.

Then he studied the jars again. His hand chose before his mind chose. And when he studied the crushed white powder he knew that his hand had been right.

Oh, if only Henry Stratford had dipped his spoon into this instead of the other! What a great shock he would have had. His uncle, a roaring lion, might have torn off his head.

It occurred to him suddenly that though the poisons might have frightened the people of his time, they would be no deterrent to the scientists of this age. A person with a spark of belief could easily have taken all these jars out of here, fed their contents slowly to animal victims, until he discovered the elixir. It would be simple enough.

As it stood now, of course, only Samir Ibrahaim and Julie Stratford knew of the elixir. And they would never divulge the secret to anyone. But Lawrence Stratford had partially translated the story. And his notebook was lying about somewhere—Ramses had been unable to find it—for anyone to read. Then of course there were the scrolls.

Whatever the case, this situation could not continue forever. He must carry the elixir on his person. And of course there was always the chance that the batch had lost its potency. Two thousand years almost, the powder had lain in the jar.

In that time, wine would have turned to vinegar, or some utterly undrinkable fluid. Flour would have turned into something no more edible than sand.

His hand trembled now as he poured all of the coarse granules into the metal dish of the burner. He tapped the jar to make sure that not so much as a speck remained. Then he mixed it in the dish gently with his finger, and added a liberal amount of water from the glass.

Now he relighted the candle. As it bubbled, he gathered the glass vials and laid them out—the ones that had been on display here on the table, and two others that had remained concealed or overlooked in an ebony box.

Four large vials with silver caps.

Within seconds the change had taken place. The raw ingredients, already quite potent in their own right, had been changed into a bubbling liquid, full of vague phosphorescent light. How ominous it looked, like something that might burn the skin off the mouth of anyone who tried to drink it! But it did not do that. It had not done it when eons ago, he had drunk down the full cup without hesitation, ready to suffer to be immortal! There had been no pain at all. He smiled. No pain at all.

Carefully he lifted the dish. He poured the steaming elixir into one vial after another until all four glass containers were full. Then he waited until the dish was cooled and he licked it clean, for that was the only safe thing to do. Then he capped the
vials. And he took the candle and made the wax drip around these caps to seal them, all save one.