Number thirteen is supposed to be unlucky. Some people dispute this theory, saying it’s superstitious nonsense. Well let me put everybody straight. Avoid number thirteen. It’s the nastiest number there is.
Princes 1-12 were all alike. Daddy had made them himself with dark matter and his own juices. Sticky little identical creations. Voodoo doll eyes.
Prince Number Thirteen was different. He was like me.
Like me, he had a name. It was Tumbletee. Like me, he also had a hobby. He liked to collect teeth in little bags. Like me, Daddy had kidnapped him from the Earth to raise him in the Underworld. My brothers told me, “We are not allowed to play with him,” and so I asked Daddy why not and he said: “Because he is the game.”
He slept in the black tower, near Daddy’s chamber. Number Thirteen. One day I climbed the tower to visit him. I wanted to know the thirteenth prince. His bedroom overlooked the river of the dead, a ripple of black fleshy waters, a vinegar stink. Whereas my bedroom was covered in star maps, his room was dripping in blood, pooling like bright bursting flower heads around his feet. I noticed his skin was pitted and scarred and moony white. He was older than me and his eyes, knife-like, would slice through flesh. He had white hair, it was moonlight white. White as fairy dust.
“My name is Loveheart. I am your brother,” I said.
He watched me intently, as through examining a bug. “Tumbletee. I like teeth. Let me see yours,” and he moved closer to me and touched my incisors with his bloodied finger. “We are not like the others,” he said. “You and I are different.” His finger moved over my teeth, lover-like. I think he wanted to pull them out. I stared down at my feet. I was standing in red.
“Why is there so much blood?”
“Daddy says I am a supernova of cruelty. We are all monsters, little brother, but I am the worst of them,” and he removed his finger from my mouth and shook my hand. I gripped his palm. It was icy, alien. Something deep inside me was screaming.
* * *
kill him.
push
him from the tower.
* * *
He smelt of spermy things. He knows what I am thinking, he knows. “Little brother,” he said, “Little brother, I want so much for you to try and kill me.”
I backed away from him, blood trailing on my feet. Marking my exit.
October 1887
Excavation Site of the Egyptian Princess
Lemon hot. We boiled under the Cairo sun. Goliath brought me to the tomb of the princess, his father’s excavation. The tomb entrance had been uncovered; I stepped closer, touched the walls with my fingers.
It fizzled cool magic.
Hieroglyphics. That is what Goliath calls them. To me they are a magic language. My finger outlined a feather shape, a wriggly snail, a bird. Each one has meaning, each one a word that forms a spell.
Above the entrance to the tomb in colours of black and gold there was a dazzling painting of a man with the head of a black dog. A jackal prince. I stroked his head. Imagined him on a lead in Hyde Park.
He looked part wicked to me, part of an underworld. I wondered what that would be like; would there be a black river stuffed with souls? Would there be a sphinx asking a riddle I had no answer to? Would they cut out my tongue, write symbols on the walls with it. Make a marking of me; squeeze me into their alphabet?
Goliath lifted me up so I could see the patterns on the ceiling, “Can you see, little one, can you see the magic bugs?”
I could, I could see them crawling over the entrance to her death chamber. Red splodges. Tiny things. A hundred of them; they nibbled the sandstone, eating the structure. They formed spirals, turning in on themselves. Making circles of everything.
He carried me out of the magic space and I sat on his lap and ate honeycakes; licked my fingers and pointed to the top of the pyramids. What are they aiming at? Pinpointing a star?
So much yellow sand – under our feet and miles away. Spread like butter. The heat melts everything, turns me into goo.
The workmen had already found pieces of pottery near the entrance; shards painted green with white vampire fang shapes. The teeth of a crocodile maybe? I played with them in the sand; tried to make a jigsaw puzzle of them. Moved the pieces around. The picture remained unclear.
Men with shovels and carts moved across the sand; under shaded tents they played cards and drank coffee. Their hands were lined deep; cracks in paper. I waved at them; one of them waved back, his mouth a red hole with two wonky teeth.
“One day,” Goliath said, “You will see inside the princess’s tomb. See her sarcophagus. My father says she was a sorceress.”