The Bone House

CHAPTER 2



In Which a Wander in the Wilderness Is Good for the Soul



Kit stood staring down the Avenue of Sphinxes feeling very much alone. It was early yet, and there was no one else around. He drew the clean, dry air into his lungs. Deeply relieved to have been rescued from looming death by Wilhelmina’s unexpected yet timely intervention, he nevertheless could not help feeling slightly bruised by her brusque manner. In fact, she had socked him on the arm as soon as they were free of the wadi and the tomb that had held them captive to Lord Burleigh’s whims.

“Ow!” Kit complained. He had not seen the smack coming. “What was that for?”

“That was for abandoning me in that alley back in London,” she told him. “That dark, stinky alley in the rainstorm—remember?”

“I remember, but it wasn’t entirely my fault.”

She smacked him again. “It wasn’t very nice.”

“Sorry!” Kit rubbed his upper arm.

“I forgive you.” She smiled, then hit him once more for good measure.

“Yikes! Now what?”

“That is so you remember never to do it again.”

“Right. Okay. I get it. I’m sorry, and I won’t desert you ever again, I promise.”

“Good. Now pay attention. We’ve got some ground to cover, and we don’t have much time.” She had then told him about Luxor and what he was to do there.

He had been instructed to go to the Winter Palace Hotel and ask for a Mr. Suleyman at the front desk. Upon presenting himself, he would be given a parcel and a letter with further instructions. Wilhelmina had been very precise: don’t stop to think or look around, hit the ground running, get to the location, secure the parcel. “It is imperative that you retrieve the package and follow the instructions to the letter.”

“Why can’t I go with you?” Kit had asked.

“We have to split up,” she told him. “The Burley Men will soon be on our trail, and they’ll follow me. If you peel off now they won’t know—they’ll think we’re all still together.”

“What about Giles?”

“He’s going with me. If they catch up with us, I’ll need someone to help me fight them off.”

“I could help,” Kit insisted. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to get separated. Where are you going anyway?”

“It’s best if you don’t know.”

“But if I—”

She had put a hand to his face. “Do you trust me, Kit?”

“Of course I trust you, Mina. It’s just that—I mean, we only just met up. I don’t see why—”

“If you trust me, then believe me when I say”—she pinched his cheek between her thumb and finger—“we don’t have time for this discussion. The ley is active now, and any minute Burleigh and his goons will learn of your escape. When they do we must be as far away from here as possible.”

“But I’m not going very far,” Kit pointed out. “You said I was just to go to Luxor—that’s only a few miles away.”

“If you do exactly what I told you, you’ll soon be in a different time zone,” she said, pinching his cheek harder. “Now, stop fussing and just do what I say.”

“Ow! Okay, okay! I’ll do it.” He rubbed his cheek. “I don’t like it, but I’ll do it.”

“Good.” She released him and gave him a pat. “We can talk about all this once I’ve given them the slip and done what I have to do.” She smiled. “Relax, it’s going to be fine.”

She started down the broken pavement towards Giles, who was standing guard at the end of the Avenue of Sphinxes. “Just pick up the package and do what you’re told,” she called, half turning back as she walked. “If all goes well, it’ll only be a few days—your time. You’ll be busy enough, don’t worry.”

“A few days,” said Kit. “Right.”

“No more than a week or two,” she hedged.

“Weeks!” objected Kit. “Wait a minute.”

“A month at most.” Wilhelmina turned and hurried to join Giles. “I’ve got to go. I’ll see you.”

Kit had watched her retreating figure, feeling like a child abandoned in a parking lot. At the end of the paved walkway leading to the ruined temple, she gathered Giles, taking him by the arm. Sir Henry’s former footman cast a quick glance behind to Kit, raised his hand in farewell, then fell into step beside Wilhelmina. The two proceeded down the centre of the avenue, passing between the double row of statues at a fair clip. There was a gust of wind, a swirl of dust; both figures turned fuzzy and indistinct—as if viewed through the combined haze of heat and dust—and then they vanished altogether.

Kit drew another breath and held it, listening for sounds of pursuit, but heard only the thin warble of a solitary bird on a distant cliff top. Satisfied that he was alone for the moment, he let out his breath again. Still raw and reeling from the loss of Cosimo and Sir Henry, and the prospect of his own demise narrowly averted, Kit stood contemplating his next leap and thinking that everything was happening way too fast. Off to the east, the sun was just breaching the ragged hill line. If he did not go soon, he would have to wait until evening, and that would very likely be an invitation to disaster. “Might as well get on with it,” he muttered to himself.

Mina had told him to start his walk at the fifth sphinx from the end of the row, and to be at full stride by the eighth ram-headed statue—a distance of thirty or so paces. If he had not made the crossing by the time he reached the eighth sphinx, he was to stop dead in his tracks, carefully retrace his steps, and try again. Wilhelmina had been most emphatic about that. Making the leap at the precise spot on the avenue would bring him to the predetermined time period—give or take a few hours, days, or perhaps weeks. Any more than that and he would be wildly off course in time, if not in place as well.

He paced back to the appropriate sphinx at the end of the avenue farthest from the temple, turned, and paused to locate the eighth statue in the long double rank. “Ready or not, here I come,” he said, and started walking briskly.

He felt the air quiver around him and sensed a prickling on his skin. The wind gusted sharply as he approached the designated statue. Stepping up his pace, he drew abreast of the eighth ram-headed statue and braced himself for the transition.

Nothing happened.

Against all natural inclination, he forced himself to stop as instructed by Wilhelmina.

“Terrific.” He turned, stepped off the ley, and hurried back to the starting place. “Second time lucky,” he muttered, and strode off again. Once again he felt the now-familiar tingle on his skin, as when, just before a lightning strike, the air becomes electrically charged. The wind gusted, driving fine grit into his eyes, which instantly started watering so that he had difficulty seeing where he was going. He must have unconsciously slowed a step, because he reached the eighth sphinx and still had not made the leap.

“Bugger!” he muttered. Had he lost the knack?

The thought that he might be stuck in 1920s Egypt with the Burley Men on his tail did not bear thinking about, so he dashed back to the starting point and took his place, putting his toes to an imaginary line. Lowering his head like a sprinter awaiting the gun, he muttered, “Third time lucky!” and shot off.

This time, with a determination absent from the first two attempts, he willed himself to leap. Perhaps it was this heightened resolve that turned the trick, for upon approaching the eighth sphinx he felt the air quiver; the ground beneath his feet trembled, and the world around him grew dim and indistinct, but only for the briefest of instants—the merest blink of an eye. He lurched forward and, like a drunk who has misjudged his footing, tottered dizzily for a few steps before righting himself and stopping.

When his head cleared he found himself standing almost exactly where he had been standing before—in the centre of the avenue at the eighth sphinx. The temple at the end of the avenue was still a ruin and empty, the ragged hills just as arid and dusty as before, but the sun was now high overhead and blazing down on him with a ferocity that brought tears to his eyes.

The discomfort of the crossing quickly passed. He noted with satisfaction that with each jump he was a little less nauseated and disoriented. The first had left him dazed and confused and upchucking over his shoes; this last spate of dizziness was nothing compared to that.

Now to get himself to Luxor. Assuming that the leap had been successful, and that he was in the time zone anticipated by Wilhelmina, he knew in general what he had to do: get to the river and follow it downstream until he came to the town, which was ten miles or so as the crow flew—depending, of course, on the crow. Then he was to make his way to the hotel and collect the package. Simple. Mina’s letter would tell him what to do next.

He set off. Reaching the river meant working his way up and over the hills—no easy task, as he soon discovered. Following a goat track, he slowly climbed the barren slopes and was soon panting with the exertion. The heat bounced off the pale rock all around, scorching through his clothing. Sweat ran down his face and neck, the fat drops raising little dust puffs with every step. Mina had given him a skin of water for the journey, but as the heat took hold he worried that it would not be enough, so he nursed it carefully, taking only tiny sips of the now-warm, slightly brackish liquid.

To take his mind off his hike, he thought about where he was going and what he might find when he got there. He wondered what year it was, and why he had remained in Egypt when always before when using a ley, the traveller ended up in a startlingly different location. It probably had something to do with the length of distance travelled along the ley, he decided—for lack of any better explanation. Maybe that was why Mina had been so adamant about making the leap between the fifth and eighth sphinxes. If he had missed that mark, where would he have ended up? More to the point, without a map, how would he have found his way back?

That was the question. Finally, if somewhat belatedly, he was beginning to gain a more fundamental appreciation of Arthur Flinders-Petrie’s singular courage and the awful importance of his Skin Map. “Don’t leave home without it,” Kit mused aloud to himself.

Other questions bubbled to the surface: What era had he landed in now? There was no way to judge from his bleak surroundings—the desert had not changed in a few thousand years, so far as he could tell. What epoch was it? Here was another poser: How had Wilhelmina found her way to rescue him and Giles from pretty near certain death at the hands of Burleigh and his goons? She did not seem to have a map—even a paper one—or any other sort of guide. How had she accomplished this feat? More to the point, how had she become such an expert on ley travel? The last time Kit had seen his former girlfriend, she had been bawling in a London alley as a freak storm drenched her head to heel. They had been separated then: he went one place, and she ended up . . . who knew where? And Kit still didn’t know, because she had not had time to tell him.

These and other questions occupied him to such an extent that he was surprised when he looked up and saw, shimmering like a mirage in the near distance, the Nile: a gently undulating line of silver nestled between two verdant strips and cradled by bone-coloured hills and desert highlands on either side. The sight was so arresting that he paused to treat himself to a long drink of water before starting the climb down. In the shade of a rock overhang, he sat and closed his sun-dazzled eyes.

Instantly the image of the corpses in High Priest Anen’s tomb came winging back to him: the bodies of his poor dead great-grandfather and Sir Henry Fayth, laid top to tail in the lidless sarcophagus. Shocked by their deaths, and mindful of his own close call, he still felt a little stunned. In their haste to make a clean escape, he had not yet had time to mourn them properly. Instead, what he felt was not grief exactly, but was closer to a churning animosity towards Burleigh at the wicked waste of those good men’s lives. So far as Kit was concerned, the earl and his men were vile low-life scum, evil through and through. In his burgeoning fantasies of revenge, Kit concocted inventive and agonising punishments for them all.

This was the first sign of the new attitude rapidly crystallising in Kit’s character: call it stalwart determination. Perhaps, at last, one could detect the vestiges of a sturdier, more robust backbone. Although it took little more than the form of a swiftly hardening resolve to discover the secret of the Skin Map, still, it was a beginning. Taking up the quest in dead earnest, he decided, would be the best tribute he could offer Cosimo and Sir Henry. They deserved that much, at least.

Whatever else could be said, they did not deserve to die like that: stricken down by the contagion of the tomb, some airborne plague germ or something—wasn’t that what killed Howard Carter and those other archaeologists who opened King Tut’s tomb? Whatever infested the tomb, dear old Cosimo and Sir Henry had succumbed to it, and if Wilhelmina had not turned up when she did, no doubt he and Giles would have suffered the very same fate. He wondered if he had caught the bug already. Truth to tell, he did not feel any too strong just now. What I need, he breathed to himself, is a good meal and a restful night’s sleep to see me right. That’s all.

Was that too much to ask? Kit did not think so.

With this thought in mind, Kit roused himself and, fortifying himself with another swig of water, started down the long meandering path into the broad Nile valley. Upon rejoining the rock-strewn way, the heat hit him anew and he considered taking off his shirt and wrapping that around his head turban-style. But that would just be trading a present misery for the future one of sun-fried shoulders. He would get a good hat at the first opportunity.

Picking his way over the shattered landscape, he dropped lower into the valley; the air grew slightly more humid the closer he came to the river. His progress, though steady, was not as swift as he hoped it would be. Distances could be deceiving in the desert, he knew, and for all Kit’s donkeylike progress he seemed to come no nearer his destination.

As the sun drifted lower and ever lower in the western sky, Kit watched his shadow stretch out before him over the rocky waste. Mesmerised by his ever-lengthening silhouette, he was brought once more to his senses when a chorus of barking dogs announced his arrival in a small riverside village.