Carefully he lifted the dish. He poured the steaming elixir into one vial after another until all four glass containers were full. Then he waited until the dish was cooled and he licked it clean, for that was the only safe thing to do. Then he capped the vials. And he took the candle and made the wax drip around these caps to seal them, all save one.
Three of the vials, he placed in the pocket of his robe. The fourth vial, the one which he had failed to seal, he carried with him into the conservatory. He stood there in the darkness, holding it, peering at the ferns and vines that crowded the room.
The glass walls were losing their dark opacity. He could still see his own reflection clearly, a tall figure in a wine-dark garment, with a warm room behind him-but the pale objects of the outside world were coming visible too.
He approached the potted fern nearest him; a thing of great airy dark-green fronds. He poured a bit of the elixir into the moist soil. Then he turned to the bougainvillea, whose fragile red blossoms were few and far between amid the dark foliage. He poured many droplets of the elixir into this pot as well.
There was a faint stirring; a crackling sound. To use any more would be madness. Yet he moved from pot to pot, pouring but a few drops in each. Finally half the vial remained. And he had done enough harm, had he not? If the magic no longer worked, he would know within a few moments. He looked to the glass ceiling. The first blush of the sun was there. The god Ra sending the first warm rays.
The leaves of the ferns rustled, lengthened; tender shoots unfurled. The bougainvillea swelled and trembled on its trellis, tiny tendrils shooting up along the wrought-iron grillwork, little blossoms opening suddenly, blood red as wounds. The entire glass room was alive with accelerated growth. He closed his eyes, listening to that sound. A dark deep shudder passed through him.
How could he have ever believed that the elixir had lost its effectiveness? It was as strong as ever it had been. One powerful draught had rendered him immortal forever. Why did he think the substance itself, once created, would be any less immortal than he?
He put the vial in his pocket. He unlatched the rear door of the house and went out into the murky wet dawn.
* * *
The pain in Henry's head was so bad he could not even see the two detectives clearly. He had been dreaming of that thing, that mummy, when they awakened him. In cold terror, he had taken his gun, cocked it, slipped it into his pocket and gone to the door. Now if they meant to search him . . .
"Everyone knew Tommy Sharpies!" he said, fury masking his fear. "Everyone owed him money. For this you wake me at the crack of dawn?"
He squinted stupidly at the one called Gallon, who now held up that damned Cleopatra coin! How the hell could he have been so stupid? To go off and leave that coin in Sharples's pocket. But for the love of hell, he had not planned to cut down Sharpies! How could he be expected to think of things like this!
"Ever see this before, sir?"
Be calm. There is not a scintilla of evidence to connect you to anything. Let indignation serve you as well as it always has.
"Why, that's from my uncle's collection. The Ramses collection. How did you get it? It ought to be under lock and key."
"The question is," said the one called Trent, "how did Mr. Sharpies get it? And what was he doing with it on his person when he was killed?"
Henry ran his hands back through his hair. If only the pain would stop. If only he could excuse himself for a minute, get a good stiff drink and have some time to think.
"Reginald Ramsey!" he said, looking Trent in the eye. "That's the fellow's name, wasn't it? That Egyptologist! The one staying with my cousin. Good God, what's going on in that house!''
"Mr. Ramsey?"
"You have questioned him, haven't you? Where did he come from, that man?" His face colored as the two men stared at him in silence. "Do I have to do your job for you? Where the devil did the bastard come from? And what's he doing with all that treasure in my cousin's house?"
* * *
For an hour Ramses walked. The morning was cold and dreary. The great imposing houses of Mayfair gave way to the dingy tenements of the poor. He roamed narrow unpaved streets, like the alleyways of an ancient city-Jericho, or Rome. Tracks of the horse carts here, and the reek of damp manure.
Now and then some poor passerby would stare at him. Surely he should not be dressed in this long satin robe. But that did not matter. He was Ramses the Wanderer again. Ramses the Damned only passing through this time. The elixir still had its potency. And the science of this time was no more ready for it than the science of any other.
Look at this suffering, these beggars sleeping in the alleyway.
Smell the filth of that house, as if the door is a mouth that spews its foul breath while gasping for clean air.
A beggar man approached him. "Spare a sixpence, sir, I haven't eaten in two days. Please, sir."
Ramses walked on by, his slippers damp and dirty from the puddles in which he had stepped.
And now comes a young woman, look at her; listen to the cough rattling deep from her chest.
"Want to have a good time, sir? I have a nice warm room, sir."
Oh, yes, he did want her services, so very much that he could feel himself hardening immediately. And the fever made her all the more fetching; she thrust out her small bosom gracefully as she forced a smile despite her pain.
"Not now, my fair one," he whispered.
It seemed the street, if it was in fact a street, had carried him into a great wilderness of ruins. Burnt-out buildings reeking of the smoke, with windows empty of drapery or glass.
Even here the poor camped in alcoves and shallow doorways. A baby cried desperately. The song of the hungry.
He walked on. He could hear the city coming alive around him; not the human voices; those he'd heard all along. It was the machines which awoke now as the dirty gray sky grew brighter and became almost silver overhead. From somewhere very far away, he heard a deep-throated train whistle. He stopped. He could feel the dull vibration of the great iron monster even here through the damp earth. What a beguiling rhythm it had, those wheels rolling on and on over the iron tracks.
Suddenly a spasm of shrill noise threw him into a panic. He turned in time to see an open motor car hurtling towards him, a young man bouncing on the high seat. He fell back against the stone wall behind him as the thing rattled and bumped over the ruts in the mud.
He was shaken, angry. A rare moment in which he felt helpless, exposed.
Dazed, he realized he was looking at a gray dove lying dead in the street. One of those fat dull gray birds which he saw everywhere in London, nesting on the windowsills and on the rooftops; this one had been struck by the motor car, and part of its wing had been crushed under the wheels.
The wind stirred it now, giving it a false semblance of life.
Suddenly a memory, one of the oldest and most vivid, caught him off guard, ripping him from the present, cruelly, and planting him squarely in another time and place.
He stood in the cave of the Hittite priestess. In his battle garb, his hand on the hilt of his bronze sword, he stood looking up at the white doves circling in the sunlight under the high grate.
"They're immortal?" he asked her. He spoke in the crude, guttural Hittite tongue.
She had laughed madly. "They eat, but they do not need to eat. They drink, but they do not need to drink. It is the sun that keeps them strong. Take it away and they sleep, but they do not die, my King."
He had stared at her face, so old, shrunken with its deep wrinkles. The laughter had angered him.
"Where is the elixir!" he had demanded.