Terrence Holt - In the Valley of the Kings - Stories

The coffins were carrying experimental subjects. And one of them was me.

HOW COULD I have imagined that mere words could recall the dead? If all these efforts were spent in vain, what hope had words to offer?

Was there ever hope? Even now, I cannot imagine what they hoped, those who built that engine on the ice, what they dreamed of on their journey to the limits of Creation. I can only imagine what silence settled over that voyage, with us as their unquiet cargo. What did they think: that they could wrench the dead out of the ether, compel us, like electricity, to arc from their dreams into the world? Did anyone stop to wonder what might happen then?

What happened then. After everything went wrong, and it was I alone who stirred, only I who woke into a world more terrible than ever I had imagined. By then their hopes, whatever they had been, had died with them.

Or almost. The last of their earthly hopes survives, just as long as this story continues.

Words have only this power: they keep me here. I make an offering of myself to them. It is all that they deserve.

Somewhere above, a ship approaches. A few more days must pass before gravity and inertia bring them overhead. I can imagine them entering the station, encumbered in their spacesuits and their innocence. It will be dark, and cold. Will they recognize the darkness? Will they understand the cold? I know they fear what they will find. They should. But their fear is as nothing to what awaits them here. I would pity them, but what is the pity of a shade?

I would laugh, if I could. For all their fears, they will find at first only me, frozen here at this keyboard. They will wonder at it, and the very oddness of it will spare them, for a little while, from understanding what I still conceal. Even when they realize what they have found, it will make no difference, not in the end. No matter what they find here, Death will find them whether they understand it or not. I take some consolation in that, and hope the wish is not unfeeling. It is all I have left to wish.

Even at this last, I am haunted by a wish. If I could only it begins. If I could only have done — something. Could have imagined her more, imagined her better, transcended this poor flesh: done justice to her. To her, in her individuality distinct from my desire. But I could not, cannot now, and never will. I know this now: there is no justice of this kind. Imagination fails. The mystery refuses. In the very attempt I betrayed her again.

Still I wish. I wish they had not brought me back. That I could have resurrected her. I wish I could be done with wishing. I wish for the impossible. I wish for sleep.

I wish for this to end.

I GROW IMPATIENT. Why has the power not failed? I find myself listening, knowing that days must pass before the ship arrives and I hear anyone attempting entry. Yet I am vigilant, my nerves on edge. And though I ought to laugh at thinking I have nerves at all, I rise, and on legs gone stiff with cold I go to watch outside my door.

The corridor is empty, and silent as the grave. I can no longer bring myself to sit here with so much silence at my back. I have closed the door and locked it, but even so, as the minutes pass I can hardly keep myself from turning. In the distance I imagine small sounds: a ticking of cold metal, a creak, a scratching at the limit of my hearing. I imagine them. I imagine them again.

I can no longer convince myself. It is too distinct now, even in the distance. I hear hammering. Steel strikes repeatedly on steel. How can they be here so soon? They cannot be, I tell myself: no vehicle can have brought them; the laws of physics, gravity and inertia all forbid it. But though these things are certain I can find no comfort there. The hammering continues, and now a shriek of metal excoriates the air. Its echoes fade. Silence falls again.

I hear my fingers tapping on the keys, and nothing more.

I have imagined it. They cannot be here.

Above the tapping of the keys, a muffled sound grows nearer, dull, persistent, nearer and still nearer, until unmistakably it is here. I cannot bring myself to turn, and with my attention riveted upon these words, with the frantic motion of my hands, I struggle to forestall what already has arrived. But these words and hands already have betrayed me. I hear it stop outside my door and in the silence I know , finally, that I am not alone. The worst is not yet come.

Beyond any doubt, beyond all imagining, at my back I hear a solid blow. And then another. And I do not need to imagine, because I know the sound. In a moment that teeters on the edge of eternity I know : this is the sound of someone knocking, knocking, knocking at my door, the sound of one hand I know better than any in this world.

It is the sound of my Eurydike returning. I need only look behind me. I need only turn to find you standing there.

That there were tombs, great tombs, left undiscovered in the Valley of the Kings, I could not doubt. Long study in the chronicles of Egypt, where history lapses, time and again, into silence, had convinced me: some gaps in the record were not accident. The singular lack of artifacts from a particular period — I will not tell you which — the hush of the chroniclers — the break in the lineage of the Kings: even from a time five thousand years ago when one might think the silences of history outweighed the words, this silence: it spoke to me, insistently, of something withheld. It haunted me, as if out of that silence came a voice I could not hear, and it spoke only to me. But each attempt I made to trace the lineage, each name, each face, each line of evidence I pursued, all, when I traced them back to a certain decade in the Upper Nile, all vanished — cut off, as if the earth itself had swallowed them down.

There was a King: my conviction on this point is unshakable. But nothing I have culled from the collections in London and Berlin, the great libraries of papyri in Cairo and Paris — nothing I have found has given me a clue to the identity — the history, the image, even the name — of him I seek. An obscuration comes between us. I feel it: it is a lure and a taunt, beckoning me to throw over this wretched edifice of my career, to risk everything I have and am upon my faith that somewhere in the Valley of the Kings there lies a treasure beyond price.

Do not mistake me. I have no lust for gold, for lapis-inlaid chests, trumpets of silver, daggers of bronze, for amethyst, jasper, chalcedony; alabaster urns, where liver and heart, bowels and lungs have congealed to gum — these tempt me less. And still less the voyeur’s satisfaction in undressing the pathetic corpse. Child’ s play, peering through the probe-hole plunged into the sealed door, blinking into the breeze that always escapes. The slow rustling of linen hangings, echoes lingering in the darkened room. The endless tedium of tweezering beads from the gritty floor, the nights of cataloging, card on card of cedar splinters, ovoid jugs, crumbled detritus of nothing new. I have done this, done it fabulously well. Well enough to know: the prize at the center of the tomb is only a blind.

For I was present at the excavation of the richest tomb uncovered in this century: the most important find to come out of the Nile Valley in our time — or so, at least, I believe. And on this excavation, as the tomb gave up its secrets, even down to a mummy so well preserved that its face retained the three-days’ stubble of a sick man, the wrinkles around the eyes still holding an expression I could read (the eyes themselves glass now, a slice of white beneath the shrinking lids), and locked between his thumb and forefinger the lighter-than-feather remnant of an ink-stained quill, the pigment plain along the inner curve of his middle finger: as all this and more, much more in ordinary wealth — the costly bric-a-brac, gold and ghoulish dressings, silver and silent shrines, lapis and luxuries — all this with which they buried him, all came to light, at the end of the expedition, in the swept and perfect emptiness of what had been a tomb, I was unsatisfied. I knew there must be more.