Spirit and Dust

27


FIRST, WE HAD to case the joint.

“We have to what?” asked Carson, when I’d put it in those words. “Are we in a gangster movie?”

I shrugged. “Outdated slang is sort of an occupational hazard.”

We were walking through the park that housed the museum and it was raining—a cold, miserable, umbrella-defeating drizzle that hung in the air and seeped through my clothes. Aunt Gwenda had had too much fun dressing me. I looked like a refugee from an Anthropologie catalog.

To top it off, we’d parked in the farthest possible parking lot. “Dude,” I said, shivering in my raincoat. “What if we need to make a quick getaway?”

Carson gave me the side-eye, one brow raised. “Have I yet failed to provide timely transportation?”

He had a point.

A tunnel under Lake Shore Drive gave a break from the rain, but when we came out the other side, my feet failed me. I could only gaze in awe at the huge—sweet Saint Gertrude, really huge—neoclassic home of the Field Museum of Natural History. City-block huge, so large that the far edges of the building’s wings disappeared in the misty drizzle.

“Three stories of exhibits,” said Carson, stopped beside me as I stared. “More levels of storage below. Over twenty million artifacts, only a fraction on display.”

“Stop,” I said. “You’re making me dizzy.” I hoped it was simple intimidation and panic. But that was a lot of artifacts. That was a lot of people’s history. If only a little bit of it was haunted, I might be in trouble.

“You’ll be fine.” Ducking under the edge of my umbrella, he put his arm around me and started walking again. “You had a hearty breakfast, a second breakfast, and elevenses. You should be ready for anything.”

I decided to accept the encouragement and ignore the teasing as we climbed the stairs—there were a lot of them—and went in. While Carson bought our tickets, I scoped out the steel gates and doors that would seal the museum shut after closing time, not to mention the security cameras with their eagle eyes.

Another day, another museum. I only wished I felt as confident as I had the day before.

This place wasn’t just bigger in size. It hummed with a hundred years of visitors and curators and researchers, the living, breathing stuff that was only background noise to my particular psychic channel.

But as for that—I’d never felt such an orchestra of remnant sensation. It sang to me, pulled me like gravity, but in all directions. Up, down, sideways. It was so finely tuned, so well balanced, no one part stood out. The harmonic vibration of it made me feel a little drunk.

“Hey,” said Carson. “Come back to earth and have a map.”

“Thanks.” I unfolded it, reading as I trailed behind him. He gave our tickets to a guard and our raincoats and my umbrella to the coat check attendant, all while I got my bearings from the exhibit descriptions on the diagram.

“The man-eating lions of Tsavo,” I read. “That would be one of the things ringing my bell. The Grainger Hall of Gems. Haunted jewelry would do it.” Once I identified the things tripping my radar, I felt more secure, knowing what to avoid. “Oh, super. The Inside Ancient Egypt exhibit features twenty-three human mummies. That would definitely do it.”

Carson plucked the map from my hands, forcing me to look around. We stood in a vaulted marble hall that made the twenty-foot totem poles beside me seem like a pair of toothpicks. It looked as long as a football field. Columns lined the first floor, leading to the wings on either side, and above that was a gallery that wrapped around the central space. In the middle were two full-grown elephants—taxidermic specimens, that is—and far, far on the other end was a dinosaur.

I may have squealed with excitement.

“Throttle back, Sunshine,” Carson said with a laugh.

“I can’t help it.” I bounced on the balls of my feet in spite of myself. “I love the T. rex.”

“Of course you do.”

The Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton—the most complete ever found, according to the brochure—had been posed as if frozen midrun, her body stretched out, her tail horizontal to balance her gigantic skull and rudder her massive body through the Cretaceous swamp. Her bones had a beautiful fluidity that simulated motion so well, I almost thought I was Seeing her with my psychic senses.

Of course, remnants required a human involved somewhere, and there were no people around when dinosaurs ruled the earth. On the other hand, humans had dug up these fossils and cleaned them and mounted them with dedication and care. She was viewed by millions of people, and even had a name. Sue. Maybe she did have some kind of remnant.

But dinosaur bones weren’t why we were there. Though just for a moment, I wished they were. I wished Alexis were safe and Maguire were arrested and Carson were happy. I wanted to hold his hand with no ulterior motive, and see if we had anything to talk about if we weren’t chasing jackals and running from everything else.

“We should get on with it,” I said, squaring my shoulders, at least figuratively.

The museum would have been crowded if it were smaller. It was Friday afternoon, and the place was full of schoolkids on field trips. It was hard to maintain the proper tension levels about the twenty-three mummies while fourth graders raced to the ancient Egypt exhibit, daring each other to descend into the replica tomb.

Mastaba. The proper name for the tomb entrance slid into my mind as if someone had whispered it.

Carson and I let the fourth graders get ahead of us and entered the antechamber of the tomb, hung with slabs of real hieroglyphs that made my vision go double between the then-and-there and the here-and-now.

“You okay?” Carson asked. “Give me a heads-up if you’re about to go under.”

“I won’t go under.” At least, I hoped not. Twenty-three mummies in here and, somewhere, an artifact that might transform their remnants into unlimited power. There were only about a hundred or so other ways this could go wrong.

The stairs to the exhibit-tomb were authentically dim, but they had inauthentic handrails. Below, the light was faint and I sensed the rustle and flicker of spirit traces, not decently sleeping, as the dead should be, but waiting and watching. Curious about what I was doing there.

That made twenty-four of us.

There was a mummy case at the bottom of the stairs. Wisps of human memory clung to it like cobwebs, brushing pinpricks over my psyche as I passed. I’m just visiting, I told anything that remained. You’re safe from me.

In the next chamber, kids jostled each other, pressing their faces close to see the mummies, dark as old wood, behind the glass. Some were at rest in their cases, some still cocooned in their wrapping. Some were not. One had been unwrapped from the neck up—layers and layers of linen pulled back like swaddling around the man’s head, dried skin over hawkish nose and sunken features.

Their remnants endured as a whole, time eroding personality. Their bodies remained, scraps of leather over brown bone, but the individual spirits had melded into one collective consciousness.

Just as well. I gazed at the unwrapped mummy, pretty certain that gawping ten-year-olds weren’t what he had in mind when planning for eternity.

Carson tapped my shoulder from behind and I jumped, because I might be all enlightened and respectful of mortal remains, but dude … mummies. They were always tapping people on the shoulder right before they strangled them.

“Over here,” he said. “I think I found it.”

Around the corner, the exhibit was set up to look like a preparation room. Murals showed priests readying a body for the afterlife, presided over by the canine-headed Anubis. And in the center, guarding the entrance to the tomb, was the god in his animal form.

A black stone jackal. The basalt statue had a polished gleam and an ageless stare. But was it our Black Jackal?

It was on a pedestal with no glass and very dramatic overhead lighting. I glanced around for spectators—a guard and a museum guide were both busy with fourth graders—then flexed my fingers to get my blood flowing. Careful of alarms, I held my hands toward the statue and let my psyche scan its points and curves, reaching toward its stone heart for anything that remained inside.

“Is this it?” Carson asked.

There was certainly power and potential, but it was locked down deep somehow. I answered him slowly. “I expected more of a kick, maybe something from the sailors that died on the same ship only eighty years ago. There’s just a faint trace of them.”

“But it is the artifact from the news article?” he asked.

“I’m sure.” We stood shoulder to shoulder, gazing at the statue like it was the Mona Lisa and we were trying to solve the Da Vinci Code. “What do we do now?” I asked.

Carson ran his eyes over the lean canine shape. “Now we make a plan for how to get it out of here.”

“I’m open to suggestions.” That was going to take a lot more than a Jedi mind trick. The statue was actually dog-sized. Not Chihuahua tiny, either. Even if we could get it off the pedestal without triggering an alarm, we weren’t going to be able to walk out with it in my purse.

“Can we use magic?” he asked, under cover of the kids squealing over the mummies. “The Brotherhood used it to break into that case in St. Louis.”

“Yeah, but they had to stab a guard to get the energy for it. That’s sort of a deal breaker for the good guys.”

Circling the statue, he asked, “Can we use the Jackal itself? Is there an on switch?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Let me just look that up in the instruction manual.”

Carson glanced at me over the statue’s back, calmly intent, reflecting none of my frustration. “Hey. I’m just pitching ideas here. Don’t bite my head off.”

He was right, and I gave a guilty squirm. “Sorry. I just hate not having the answers.” It was painful to be so close but still lack the one variable to let me solve for x. “Plus, all this”—I waved a hand to encompass the mummies, the museum, all of it—“isn’t helping. It’s like standing in an electrical field.”

“It’s okay. Let’s just focus on the Jackal.” He was right about that, too. “Is any of that electricity coming from the statue?”

I focused my other Sight to look again. “Barely. Which is weird. I wouldn’t expect ancient pharaoh, but I should be getting more from the deaths of the crew of the transport ship. Not to mention Oosterhouse.”

“No,” said Carson, hiding none of his dislike for the professor. “Let’s not mention Oosterhouse.”

Behind him, one of the field trip teachers wrapped her sweater tighter, glancing around for a draft. The room had chilled, so slowly I’d only just noticed it. I didn’t fool myself that it was the air-conditioning. Some very real spirit had slipped into the replica tomb.

It didn’t come from the crumbling mummies or the artifacts of embalming. This was something familiar.

The shade of Oosterhouse appeared, fading in like breath fogging on glass. He looked exactly like the remnant on the artifact we’d left at the apartment, but he shouldn’t have been able to travel so far from it. Yet he looked at me with recognition.

“How are you here?” I whispered. “Do you haunt this jackal, too?” No one else—including Carson—reacted to anything but the chill. The shade must be drawing a huge amount of energy to manifest, even to just me.

“You’ve done it,” he said, as jovial as Santa at Christmas, ruddy cheeks flushed above his white beard. His excitement seemed to draw an answering pulse from the jackal. “You’ve found the part of me that was missing,” said Oosterhouse. “I felt it waken, and it pulled me here.”

I felt the stirring spirit, then, a remnant of Oosterhouse in the basalt jackal, so faint that I’d only felt the potential of it. How could such a small or dormant trace have the power to bring the other shade to it?

“What’s going on?” murmured Carson, close at my shoulder. “You’ve got a funny look on your face, and I don’t like it.”

Him and me both.

The teacher rubbed the back of her neck, as if soothing a prickle of unease. She hurried her students along, leaving Carson and me alone with one specter and a collective of ancient shades.

“Oosterhouse is here,” I told him, turning to watch the professor move around the room, taking in the dioramas and displays of the mummification chamber with avid curiosity.

Carson looked startled. “I thought you said he couldn’t leave the artifact.”

“I didn’t think he could.”

The room kept getting colder and the shade kept getting stronger, as if the place was feeding him somehow. That was not good. I glanced at Carson and realized with my own shock that he was watching the spirit, too, without any help from me.

“Can you See him?” I asked.

“Yeah.” He didn’t sound happy about it. “I don’t know how.”

Oosterhouse finished his perusal on the far side of the stone jackal, standing with his back to us, hands linked behind him as his ghostly gaze roved over the murals and hieroglyphs decorating the replica tomb. “How fortuitous that we should end up here. This shall do nicely.”

“Do for what?” I asked, the bad feeling turning into more of a stab of dread.

He seemed buoyant, happy I’d asked. “A sense of ceremony, dear girl.”

“What does that mean?” asked Carson. Apparently he could hear as well as see him.

Oosterhouse turned with a condescending smile. “I’ll explain slowly, my boy. Try to keep up. You have found the piece of my spirit which lay with my bones. My ka. Now only the akh, the part waiting in the afterlife, remains.”

“You’re speaking in riddles,” snapped Carson. “Is this the Oosterhouse Jackal or not?”

“What you seek is here.” He laid his hand on the jackal’s head, fingers spread between the pointed ears. When he shifted his gaze to me, his eyes were dark with feverish intensity. “Keep your promise, Kebechet, and I will show you the secrets of the Black Jackal.”

“What did you call me?” My breath misted in the air and frost crept up the glass of the display cases, but it was nothing compared with the cold premonition uncurling in my chest.

“Daughter of Anubis,” said the professor, shadowed eyes holding mine. “Protector of the dead. Only you can help me. No one else can do what you do.”

“He’s playing you, Sunshine.” Carson’s voice was all gravel and warning. “Don’t let your ego make you do something foolish.”

Annoyance broke the specter’s hold on me, and I turned a scathing glance on Carson. “I’m not an idiot.”

Even if what the professor said about me happened to be true. I didn’t know anyone who could do what I do.

I gave Oosterhouse my attention once more, but I was back in control. “Tell us how the Jackal works,” I said. “Then I’ll open the Veil for you to move on.”

“You have the book, don’t you?” His earnestness rang false. But remnants couldn’t lie. “It will tell you all you need to know.”

“What book?” I asked, then realized I was an idiot. “The Book of the Dead?”

“I know you have it. I can sense it.” All sincerity vanished, leaving only the glitter of avarice in the specter’s gaze as he pointed to Carson. “He is carrying it now.”

I shot a look at Carson, who was coming to the same realization that I had. Alexis hadn’t hidden a clue to the book or the Jackal. We’d been carrying Oosterhouse’s translation of the Book of the Dead all this time.

Carson reached into his pocket, pulling out the mummy-shaped flash drive. “You mean this?” Oosterhouse’s gaze seized on it hungrily. “First, the secret of the Jackal.”

Something moved behind me in the dark. I whirled, and kept turning as three, then four, then five young men stepped into the replica tomb, blocking all the exits. I recognized two of them, even without the jackal tattoos on their arms.

“Hey, Maguire,” said McSlackerson. “Thanks for bringing that flash drive along. I’ll just take it off your hands.”

“Hey, Johnson,” said Carson. “Not arrested yet, huh?”

I ignored the banter, busy trying to figure out what I was Seeing. Cupped in Johnson’s fingers was a basketball-sized incandescent glow of raw power. With dawning horror, I realized why there was nothing but a trace of the drowned sailors on the statue. Johnson held them all. He had stolen the fire of dozens of deaths—dozens of remnant souls—and he held them between his palms like a balled-up snarl of yarn.

“Carson—” I warned, too late to do him any good.

Johnson pulled free a strand from the tangle and snapped it like a whip. Power made a wave of the air and washed over Carson before he could dodge. His next breath was nothing but a drowning gurgle. He struggled against it, doubled over, and heaved up a spew of dark water that stank of brine and diesel fuel.

“Stop it!” I called up my defenses and lunged toward Carson, trying to get close enough that he could use my shields to push the magic away, out of his lungs. But two of the brethren snatched me by the arms, pulling us apart.

“Give me the flash drive,” said Johnson, letting Carson grab half a breath before throwing another thread of drowned spirit at him. Carson dropped to all fours, sputtering salt water from his mouth and nose. But he managed to lift one hand—and one finger—to McSlackerson.

“Carson, you idiot!” I cried, wondering why no guards were coming, wondering why some sort of alarm wasn’t going off. “Give it to him!”

The file was encrypted. That would give us time to think of something, some world-saving plan. But we couldn’t do anything if he was dead.

On his hands and knees, Carson wheezed and spewed. “Alexis first. Where is she?”

Johnson unraveled another thread and spun a darker threat. “You’re not in a position to bargain, Maguire. There are a lot of cute little kids in the museum today. They’re all eating lunch right now, just on the other side of that wall. Maybe we should see how far this magic will reach.”

The next shred of spirit left Carson heaving helplessly on the ground. I wrestled against the guys who held me until I thought my shoulders would pop out of joint.

Oosterhouse whirled to me, so quick, so intense that his form blurred. “Hurry, my girl, and we can save him. If you open the Veil, I can help you.”

I didn’t question how he could do what he said. I couldn’t afford to doubt him and be wrong. With herculean effort I pushed back my panic and my tears and found the song inside me that called the curtain between us and eternity. I let my whole soul ring with it.

The Veil was sluggish to answer, and I pushed it, poured my desperation into the ethereal serenade until slowly the air began to shimmer behind the shade of Oosterhouse.

“You must cut my ka free from the statue,” he said, shouting over the bell-tower racket of my psychic call.

He’d used the word before, and I knew what he meant. I pictured my shadow self unknotting the threads of his silent, weak remnant in the heart of the statue. As they loosed, they blew toward the Veil but met Oosterhouse standing between. There was only one phantom strand remaining tied to the statue as they tangled around his grandfatherly form, sinking in, reuniting.…

Reclaiming.

The Veil changed, brightened along the edges with warm yellow light. In the next moment it opened, like a daylit doorway to a tomb. A figure stood silhouetted by the blinding glow, the same shape depicted on the walls around us.

It towered over Oosterhouse’s shade. The two figures superimposed and merged as the glare became blinding. The guys holding me let go, and I shielded my eyes as every display case in the room shattered.

Glass rained down and the awful brilliance became red-tinged darkness and ringing silence. When I could see again, the Veil had disappeared, and so had the fusty-looking professor with his neat white beard and khaki kangaroo pockets.

In his place was a jackal-headed god.

“This is the thing you seek,” he said, in a voice that flooded the room like the Nile. “I am the Black Jackal, and now is the end of all things.”