“Other what?” Sadie demanded.
“Nothing.” Amos walked past us to the steersman. He plucked off the man’s hat and coat-and there was no one underneath. The steersman simply wasn’t there. Amos put on his fedora, folded his coat over his arm, then waved toward a metal staircase that wound all the way up the side of the warehouse to the mansion on the roof.
“All ashore,” he said. “And welcome to the Twenty-first Nome.”
“Gnome?” I asked, as we followed him up the stairs. “Like those little runty guys?”
“Heavens, no,” Amos said. “I hate gnomes. They smell horrible.”
“But you said-”
“Nome, n-o-m-e. As in a district, a region. The term is from ancient times, when Egypt was divided into forty-two provinces. Today, the system is a little different. We’ve gone global. The world is divided into three hundred and sixty nomes. Egypt, of course, is the First. Greater New York is the Twenty-first.”
Sadie glanced at me and twirled her finger around her temple.
“No, Sadie,” Amos said without looking back. “I’m not crazy. There’s much you need to learn.”
We reached the top of the stairs. Looking up at the mansion, it was hard to understand what I was seeing. The house was at least fifty feet tall, built of enormous limestone blocks and steel-framed windows. There were hieroglyphs engraved around the windows, and the walls were lit up so the place looked like a cross between a modern museum and an ancient temple. But the weirdest thing was that if I glanced away, the whole building seemed to disappear. I tried it several times just to be sure. If I looked for the mansion from the corner of my eye, it wasn’t there. I had to force my eyes to refocus on it, and even that took a lot of willpower.
Amos stopped before the entrance, which was the size of a garage door-a dark heavy square of timber with no visible handle or lock. “Carter, after you.”
“Um, how do I-”
“How do you think?”
Great, another mystery. I was about to suggest we ram Amos’s head against it and see if that worked. Then I looked at the door again, and I had the strangest feeling. I stretched out my arm. Slowly, without touching the door, I raised my hand and the door followed my movement-sliding upward until it disappeared into the ceiling.
Sadie looked stunned. “How…”
“I don’t know,” I admitted, a little embarrassed. “Motion sensor, maybe?”
“Interesting.” Amos sounded a little troubled. “Not the way I would’ve done it, but very good. Remarkably good.”
“Thanks, I think.”
Sadie tried to go inside first, but as soon as she stepped on the threshold, Muffin wailed and almost clawed her way out of Sadie’s arms.
Sadie stumbled backward. “What was that about, cat?”
“Oh, of course,” Amos said. “My apologies.” He put his hand on the cat’s head and said, very formally, “You may enter.”
“The cat needs permission?” I asked.
“Special circumstances,” Amos said, which wasn’t much of an explanation, but he walked inside without saying another word. We followed, and this time Muffin stayed quiet.
“Oh my god…” Sadie’s jaw dropped. She craned her neck to look at the ceiling, and I thought the gum might fall out of her mouth.
“Yes,” Amos said. “This is the Great Room.”
I could see why he called it that. The cedar-beamed ceiling was four stories high, held up by carved stone pillars engraved with hieroglyphs. A weird assortment of musical instruments and Ancient Egyptian weapons decorated the walls. Three levels of balconies ringed the room, with rows of doors all looking out on the main area. The fireplace was big enough to park a car in, with a plasma-screen TV above the mantel and massive leather sofas on either side. On the floor was a snakeskin rug, except it was forty feet long and fifteen feet wide-bigger than any snake. Outside, through glass walls, I could see the terrace that wrapped around the house. It had a swimming pool, a dining area, and a blazing fire pit. And at the far end of the Great Room was a set of double doors marked with the Eye of Horus, and chained with half a dozen padlocks. I wondered what could possibly be behind them.
But the real showstopper was the statue in the center of the Great Room. It was thirty feet tall, made of black marble. I could tell it was of an Egyptian god because the figure had a human body and an animal’s head-like a stork or a crane, with a long neck and a really long beak.
The god was dressed ancient-style in a kilt, sash, and neck collar. He held a scribe’s stylus in one hand, and an open scroll in the other, as if he had just written the hieroglyphs inscribed there: an ankh-the Egyptian looped cross-with a rectangle traced around its top.
“That’s it!” Sadie exclaimed. “Per Ankh.”
I stared at her in disbelief. “All right, how you can read that?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s obvious, isn’t it? The top one is shaped like the floor plan of a house.”
“How did you get that? It’s just a box.” The thing was, she was right. I recognized the symbol, and it was supposed to be a simplified picture of a house with a doorway, but that wouldn’t be obvious to most people, especially people named Sadie. Yet she looked absolutely positive.
“It’s a house,” she insisted. “And the bottom picture is the ankh, the symbol for life. Per Ankh-the House of Life.”
“Very good, Sadie.” Amos looked impressed. “And this is a statue of the only god still allowed in the House of Life-at least, normally. Do you recognize him, Carter?”
Just then it clicked: the bird was an ibis, an Egyptian river bird. “Thoth,” I said. “The god of knowledge. He invented writing.”
“Indeed,” Amos said.
“Why the animal heads?” Sadie asked. “All those Egyptian gods have animal heads. They look so silly.”
“They don’t normally appear that way,” Amos said. “Not in real life.”
“Real life?” I asked. “Come on. You sound like you’ve met them in person.”
Amos’s expression didn’t reassure me. He looked as if he were remembering something unpleasant. “The gods could appear in many forms-usually fully human or fully animal, but occasionally as a hybrid form like this. They are primal forces, you understand, a sort of bridge between humanity and nature. They are depicted with animal heads to show that they exist in two different worlds at once. Do you understand?”
“Not even a little,” Sadie said.
“Mmm.” Amos didn’t sound surprised. “Yes, we have much training to do. At any rate, the god before you, Thoth, founded the House of Life, for which this mansion is the regional headquarters. Or at least…it used to be. I’m the only member left in the Twenty-first Nome. Or I was, until you two came along.”
“Hang on.” I had so many questions I could hardly think where to start. “What is the House of Life? Why is Thoth the only god allowed here, and why are you-”
“Carter, I understand how you feel.” Amos smiled sympathetically. “But these things are better discussed in daylight. You need to get some sleep, and I don’t want you to have nightmares.”
“You think I can sleep?”
“Mrow.” Muffin stretched in Sadie’s arms and let loose a huge yawn.
Amos clapped his hands. “Khufu!”
I thought he’d sneezed, because Khufu is a weird name, but then a little dude about three feet tall with gold fur and a purple shirt came clambering down the stairs. It took me a second to realize it was a baboon wearing an L.A. Lakers jersey.
The baboon did a flip and landed in front of us. He showed off his fangs and made a sound that was half roar, half belch. His breath smelled like nacho-flavored Doritos.
All I could think to say was, “The Lakers are my home team!”
The baboon slapped his head with both hands and belched again.