“I was en route to the Sudan in the wake of the Khartoum disaster and was bracing myself, so to speak, in the bar of Shepheard’s. I struck up a conversation with an archaeologist fellow just off a dig around Memphis, and the talk turned, naturally, to Egyptian mysteries. The thing that continually astonished him, he said, was the absolute thoroughness of the ancient Egyptian mind. Once having decided a thing was ritualistically necessary, they admitted of no deviation in carrying it out.
“He instanced cats. We know in what high esteem the Egyptians held cats. If held in high esteem, they must be mummified after death; and so they were. All of them, or nearly all. Carried to their tombs with the bereaved family weeping behind, put away with favorite toys and food for the afterlife journey. Not long ago, he said, some three hundred thousand mummified cats were uncovered at Beni Hassan. An entire cat necropolis, unviolated for centuries.
“And then he told me something which gave me pause. More than pause. He said that, once uncovered, all those cats were disinterred and shipped to England. Every last one.”
“Good Lord. Why?”
“I have no idea. They were not, after all, the Elgin Marbles. This seemed to have been the response when they arrived at Liverpool, because not a single museum or collector of antiquities displayed the slightest interest. The whole lot had to be sold off to pay a rather large shipping bill.”
“Sold off? To whom, in God’s name?”
“To a Cheshire agricultural firm. Who proceeded to chop up the lot and resell it. To the local farmers, my dear boy. To use as fertilizer.”
Sir Jeffrey stared deeply into his nearly untouched brandy, watching the legs it made on the side of the glass, as though he read secrets there. “Now the scientific mind may be able to believe,” he said at last, “that three hundred thousand cats, aeons old, wrapped lovingly in winding cloths and put to rest with spices and with spells, may be exhumed from a distant land—and from a distant past as well—and minced into the loam of Cheshire, and it will all have no result but grain. I am not certain. Not certain at all.”
The smoking room of the Travellers’ Club was deserted now, except for the weary, unlaid ghost of Barnett. Above us on the wall the mounted heads of exotic animals were shadowed and nearly unnamable; one felt that they had just then thrust their coal-smoked and glass-eyed heads through the wall, seeking something, and that just the other side of the wall stood their vast and unimaginable bodies. Seeking what? The members, long dead as well, who had slain them and brought them to this?
“You’ve been in Egypt,” Sir Jeffrey said.
“Briefly.”
“I have always thought that Egyptian women were among the world’s most beautiful.”
“Certainly their eyes are stunning. With the veil, of course, one sees little else.”
“I spoke specifically of those circumstances when they are without the veil. In all senses.”
“Yes.”
“Depilated, many of them.” He spoke in a small, dreamy voice, as though he observed long-past scenes. “A thing I have always found—intriguing. To say the least.” He sighed deeply; he tugged down his waistcoat, preparatory to rising; he replaced his eyeglass. He was himself again. “Do you suppose,” he said, “that such a thing as a cab could be found at this hour? Well, let us see.”
“By the way,” I asked when we parted, “whatever came of the wives’ petition for an exorcism?”
“I believe the bishop sent it on to Rome for consideration. The Vatican, you know, does not move hastily on these things. For all I know, it may still be pending.”
A WEATHER REPORT FROM THE TOP OF THE STAIRS
(for Gahan Wilson)
by James Sallis and David Lunde
One of my most rewarding associations from my work in the fantasy and science fiction field is that with Gahan Wilson, famed macabre cartoonist for Playboy, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, National Lampoon, and many other areas. His talents are Brobdingnagian and do not limit themselves only to artwork. You can well imagine my delight to publish a story by the noted James Sallis and David Lunde that was based on one of his best macabre cartoons, and dedicated to him. I greatly enjoyed the tale even though I was nagged by a slight misgiving about its ending. After the story’s publication, Gahan voiced to me that same misgiving, and I thought that Jim and David should make an effort to rewrite the story from that other viewpoint. They did so, reluctantly, with David writing to me a most-convincing letter in support of their original version. Since the altered portion of the story was only over the last hundred or so words of the tale, Doubleday’s Sharon Jarvis and I thought it would be interesting to present both versions of the story with the associated letters and let the reader decide what version satisfies him the most.
Darkness is streaming down the bare branches of elms, blackening their trunks against the snow.
The boy’s feet scuff going upstairs to bed as he fits them into the worn half-moons of the wooden steps, trying to avoid the creaky ones.
The darkness mingles with smoke from the chimney, intricate open-lace patterns, blue behind gray. It seeps into the pond behind the house and turns it, beneath the willow, to mush, the mush to bluewhite slate. Cars like colored appendages of the clouds move silently at the ends of long umbilicals of exhaust. The pale sun closes its petals on the horizon: blue deepening, the sky turns the color of plums.
Like one of those fragile, tableau nativities built of colored sugar, soft pastels in half an eggshell, Mr. Wilson and his wife sit on a nubby couch in the old wooden house. The couch is gently yellow, the room done in burnished golds and blue, the rug a ripe wheat. Now the colors change and flicker, shifting with the light of the fire, with the firefly lights of the Christmas tree in the corner beside it, with the triumphant trumpeting of the angel at the top. Around them in dimness, corners are softened, angles bundled in shadow. Light flushes from a phone booth across the street.
(In silence: the wet hiss of cars passing, a clatter of trelliswork on the back porch, the sigh and creak of an old house walking through itself, an old house that dreams of snow, a cool white bed for sleeping.)
The uneven tideheat of the fire before them, washing up in waves, reddening, receding. From the bare white kitchen, mixing with the resinous tang of evergreen, comes the sweet nutmeg smell of eggnog, of coffee done and warm, waiting. Fire crackles like cellophane, wood shifts on a slope of embers.
(His arm around her shoulder.)
And outside, a face passing the window. A man trudging slowly home from pushing dirt across floors, warm pipe steaming, smoke eddying white against the darker gray. Streetlights shelled in rainbow. And other lights (rouge, ochre, pale soft blue) blinking open in windows, in stiff green limbs. Angels regarding the street.
(A feeling told without words, told by an arm around a shoulder, by being together now, by a shared brandy.
“Last year . . .”
“Yes . . .”
By a smile.)
And outside, gently, quietly, it begins to snow. First a flourish, then small flakes, then larger and quicker, till the sky is boiling with whiteness, till it is like a fine dust of flour filling the air, falling. Falling.
(His arm around her shoulder.