Terrence Holt - In the Valley of the Kings - Stories

I was shouting, I realized, a foot from the old man’s face, as if volume could give substance to my words; shouting into a face that seemed, more and more as I peered into it, too uniformly relaxed.

— He’s dead, I whispered, and my voice fell hoarse among the echoes fading in the quiet room. I reached out and laid a hand upon his shoulder. His head lolled, his jaw opened, and a rattling snore escaped.

He recovered, one half of his face blinking and rewrinkling as he tried to lift both hands to rub his eyes. — xcuse me. He muttered at last. — m sorry. Sleep again. No reflection, please blieve me.

He settled his glasses on his nose and his living hand upon his paunch. — Would you mind terribly much repeating?

I put the cassette in the slot, and clunked its hatch down:

Budge’s voice emerged, attenuated, as if it really were a spirit’s voice.

— Sorry to leave this to last minutes, — , but I’m all at sixes and sevenses with this and that. I’m packing books with both hands while I talk. I don’t know, Lester, ask your mother. Now. Assuming the beastly custodials haven’t changed the locks overnight, you should find the thing on the shelves to the right of the door as you face it. From inside, that is. It’s about the size of a carry-on bag. Black leatherette. Do you have it? Careful when you lift it down: it’s not terribly fragile but it is heavy, and I don’t want you to break your foot. Now.

Now. Budge’s voice went on, brightly and (I could tell) well pleased with himself — with his packing, his ingenuity, his casual belief that somewhere he was still alive. In his empty office, the familiar clutter had been reduced to stripped shelves, a few mounds of equipment catalogs and boxes of bright electronic shards. His voice was almost unbearably real to me, bouncing sharply from the bare walls as I acted out his instructions, levered down the heavy case and thumbed up its hasps, muttering to myself the instructions from the tape. My hands were trembling too much to attach the power lines to the battery, and I had to stop, shutting off the tape-player with more effort than necessary.

Sitting at the bare table beside the open case, for a long time I could not catch my breath. I was near to crying. Not for Budge: do not mistake me, it was none of that. A wordless despair had seized me, and was long minutes vanishing back into whatever pit it had crept out of.

I had started to believe in Budge’s absurd promise.

When I could take a breath without its catching, I eased down the button on the recorder, and turned again to my inheritance. At his direction I flipped three switches, waited for the screen to light and settle, a flickering void, then set two dials at his instructions.

The screen shuddered.

I was looking at a luminous floor plan of the lobby, six stories below my feet: there was the ugly aluminum sculpture, there the three broad granite steps up from the entrance, the inscribed marble benches, the men’s and ladies’ with their pipes and porcelain off on either side. At my ear, Budge was explaining how it worked, but I couldn’t hear: my eyes were full, and my heart was beating loudly. At the center of the screen, a darkness beat as well.

There were small rites to perform. I carried my files — on the King, on myself — out into the backyard. There was a barbecue pit there, relic of an earlier tenant.

I had thought so much tinder would flare in an instant, flash and vanish, but the burning was slow: one page at a time caught at the corners, the blue flame flickering as it read over, consumed, and curled each up to reveal the next: I saw a story roll up like the sky at Judgment Day, blacken to ashes before my eyes. This was on Wednesday.

On Thursday I drove to the school where I had taken my doctor’s degree. My thesis was shelved among a thousand like it in the doctoral papyrus dump. As I pulled it from the shelf and felt again its ungainly mass, like no other book in the world, in the solitude of the library I felt as if my adult life had been a dream: here I was carrying my new dissertation into the library, about to walk to Professor—’s.

The circulation clerk took my name and address, and accepted my alien faculty ID. I hoped urgently she would not notice the names on the card and the book were the same. As she opened my thesis to stamp the date due, she spoke.

— You’re the first one to check this out in…thirty years.

— Someone else checked it out?

— Sure. See? She showed me the dim, purple date, two weeks after I had received my degree.

— Who?

A laugh. — Thirty years ago? I wasn’t even born.

I stood facing the house that had been Professor——’s.

The housekeeper-nurse had inherited, I remembered. I had never learned her name. Was she still there? In the bowels of the house, a bell rang; footsteps approached; the door swung back. An ordinary woman, far too young, holding a wide-eyed infant.

AND ONE OTHER thing: as I drove out of town, over the bridge where the breath of the sea blew in through the window, over the rail I heaved the black flapping shape of my thesis. It dropped from sight, and I could only imagine the splash.

This vignette represents the deceased on his knees, embracing his soul.

I looked around me, and there was nothing more to do: no family for farewells, no friends; my equipment I carried in my own hands. My office I simply locked, and in my empty house I locked my keys. Let the newspapers gather, the mail spill out of its box. I wished for the days of milk delivery, that one more mourner might leave offerings at my tomb. No matter: I would be gone — escaped — into darkness or into light.

of the ashes is the soul reborn in the twelfth hour of the Duat. He enters the tail of the mighty serpent, which is named Divine Life, and issues from its mouth in the form of the scarab Khepera, who rolls his own egg of spittle and mud. But the last door of all is guarded by Isis, she who nurses the throne, and by Nephthys, the barren one who wails, and they also are in the form of serpents; their mouthsare open, their tails twine together, their fangs drip venom as the soul of the deceased approaches.

Now Urnes, the river of Duat, flows into the primeval

I awoke once, en route, in the never-never-time of the Atlantic: over the wing the sun was rising, spreading purple shadows miles across the clouds. The cabin was quiet but for the vibration of the engines, the rushing of wind, the intermittent snore of my two-hundred-some companions. I thought I saw a small beetle, gold and iridescent blue, emerge from the carpeting at my feet. It raised its wingcovers, and flew a yard or two down the aisle before disappearing into the center of my vision.

A voice rose and subsided, murmured, surged and submerged again, out of and into the eastward urging of the engines: unun neb-t shet-t unun maa-t; unun neb-t shet-t; unun neb-t upsh; neh-ti neheh; unun neb-t upsh, upsh, upshhhhhhh.