A Box of Night

I never left Cairo with the division. Over the following three days, fourteen soldiers died of a mysterious ailment, two of them army photographers. The men were billeted in the desert at the edge of the city in a small village of tents. Many of them were conscripts, the “odds and sods” who had been called into service because of the great need for men. Out there, in the heat and the sand, they began to die without apparent illness or injury, in gruesome fashion. A man might climb into his bunk whole and hale and never wake again. The bodies of the dead were shriveled and papery, like husks. The eyes stared, bulging from their sockets, pupils blown to wide, dark windows. The jaws hung open in silent screams. They looked like nothing so much as mummies, except for their horrifying expressions. They were men staring into an unspeakable abyss.

I was asked to photograph them, to document their inexplicable deaths. I accompanied an army surgeon to a hospital tent where he conducted rough autopsies. One after another, he opened the desiccated bodies and vaporous darkness flowed out like ink, black and dense. Everyone around the autopsy table leapt back, and the heavy cloud slipped down to the ground and slowly dissipated. At the fourth such examination, a surgeon’s assistant proved too slow–-the fingers of his left hand were engulfed by the stuff before he could pull away. We tried flushing his hand with water, with alcohol, even with brandy, but nothing could remove the black stain. His fingers curled inward, their appearance like that of charred wood.

“There is no pain,” he reported in a trembling voice, “but I can feel something. I feel I am touching something…cold and, and…pulsing. Like a current in deep water--no, that is not right.” Tears formed in his eyes. “It is like touching the air of Hell. The sensation will drive me mad.”

The surgeon gave him morphine, and he went blissfully to sleep. I don’t know what became of him, for we were soon inundated with corpses. After the second day of shooting photos of the dead and listening to the frightened buzz in the camp, I returned to my rooms to find the woman, Keket, waiting. Twilight fell over the city like a deep blue shroud, the first stars piercing it with their brilliant iciness. Keket wore the same indigo veils as before, the same color as the darkening sky. She stood in the shadow of an arch, so still I almost passed her. The sight of her there, by my quarters, frightened me to the core of my being. I was sure I would die that night like the soldiers in the camp.

“It is my friend, the photographer,” she said. “What has your mechanical eye shown you this day?”

I could not speak. Her black eyes glittered like those of a snake. She moved out from the shadow with the sinuous grace of a snake.

“I had forgotten this place,” she said. “I slept. I dreamed of the old days. It is good to be awake. There is much to do, and I have only begun.”

“Have mercy,” I croaked. My throat felt dry as an Egyptian tomb. “Return to your sleep.”

She regarded me with solemn attention but dismissed my words.

“I go to my work,” she said, causing me to moan in terror. Behind the diaphanous veil, her mouth curved in a smile. “Be at peace, Charles Wilding. I will not forget you.”

To hear my name on those lips, voicing such a promise, turned my legs to water. I slumped against the wall of the arcade and slid along it to my door. Keket was gone in a blink, a cool evening wind and a flutter of veils. The door to my rooms stood ajar, the meager light of a single fat candle flickering against the shadows as a moth will bump against a dark windowpane. Inside, I found Nassor slumped at the table, a pen and paper before him and my darkened camera lying on its side by his elbow. He raised his head as I entered the room and focused his wide, stunned gaze on me.

“Charles,” he rasped, “be quick.”

He pushed the paper toward me and tried to sweep the camera across the table with an arm that seemed leaden and weak. Beads of sweat stood out on his brow and broke, trickling down the drawn gullies of his face. I found my legs and leaped to his side.

“Nassor! What’s happened?”

But I could see what had happened. He had met Keket, and I feared he was in the grip of whatever foul disease she had visited upon the army camp.

“The Mother of Darkness,” he said, coughing. “She was here. I was going to light the lamps.”

“I saw her. What has she done to you?”

He gave a rusty laugh. “Ask what it is I have done to her, my friend.” He gripped my arm with surprising strength. “I have found a way to stop her, and for that, she has undone me.”

He dragged aside the neck of his jalabiya, exposing his chest. There I saw the round black marks of four fingers and a thumb. Threads of black reached out from each mark, fine as hairs. As I watched, more of these dark roots formed and flowed along under Nassor’s skin like a tattooist’s ink.

“My god,” I said. “We have to get you to a physician.”

“That is useless, Charles. I feel the darkness opening to swallow me. Listen. She Who Brings the Night will return for you. This”—he dragged forward the useless camera—“has caught her interest. I believe it can do more than that. I have found a man to help you.” Nassor slapped the paper that lay on the table. “Go to him. He expects you.”

“Nassor …” I began.

“Go now, Charles.”

____________________

God help me, I left him there, and I never saw him alive again. I snatched up the scrap of paper and the camera, and I ran from the place. On the paper were a name and an address in the vicinity of The Egyptian Museum. I found a decrepit old cab wallowing along the streets and jumped in, shouting the address to the driver. He took me to an area behind the Museum and stopped, indicating a slender alley hung with drying clothing. I shoved a fistful of piastre notes at him, I have no idea how much, and left his cab with praises of my generosity in my ears.

The alley was black as a hat, but about halfway along its length glared a lamp. Its oily-looking flame licked sluggishly at the night, barely illuminating a faded blue door. No house numbers graced any of the several doors I had passed but, remembering that Nassor had told me the man expected me, I pounded the dusty azure boards of the lit door. The response was swift. The door opened a crack and a narrow, white-bearded face peered out at me with hawkish attentiveness.

“Charles Wilding?” the man asked, his gaze taking in the camera in my hand.

I nodded and the door was opened wider onto a dark room.

“Come in and stop making such a din.” A strong, wiry hand dragged at my sleeve, urging me across the threshold.

The man closed the door, sealing us in darkness for a moment before striking a match and holding it to the wick of a lamp. It flared against the black, an expanding bubble of radiance that lit a bare stage of white-washed walls and blue tile floor leading away into further shadow.

“I am Mostafa Shalhoub, Monsieur Wilding. I am a friend of your friend, Nassor.”

Shalhoub was tall and slim as a knife-edge. He wore a pale grey suit of impeccable cut, his white shirt open at the neck. His speech, flavored with a cultured Gallic nonchalance, made me think of my old French language professor. In my heightened state, I felt a momentary urge to giggle hysterically. I passed a hand across my eyes.

“Nassor is dead,” I growled, and I am afraid I sounded a callous, surly sort of fellow.

Shalhoub drew back, seeming to pull the lamplight from me as though excluding me from its beneficence. His face showed no change, but I had the impression that he was both shocked and grieved at my news. I felt an impulse to redeem myself.

“He was still alive when I found him. He sent me to you. He said you could help…for two nights, men have been dying horribly out in the army encampment.”

He did not move, but the glow of the light extended its warmth around me.

“My heart breaks to hear of Nassor’s death. He was a good friend.” He reached out and placed his long hand on my shoulder. “More men will die before this is over. We will do what we can to stop it, yes?”

I lifted the useless camera that still dangled from my hand. “Nassor said this thing might help. I don’t see how. I don’t understand any of this-–it’s preposterous. Yet, I’ve seen things…What can you do? Who are you, Mr. Shalhoub?”

He patted my shoulder and gave me a smile that, far from softening his expression, made him look as sinister as a cinema villain.

“Come with me, Monsieur Wilding. We have much to discuss before the morning dawns.”

____________________

Mostafa Shalhoub dealt in antiquities--not only those of his homeland, but from all over the world. He talked about his travels as he led me into the shadowy interior of the apparently empty building, and as we descended into a tomb-like maze of corridors and cavernous rooms, some stacked with crates. Bare electric bulbs were strung along our route, rather dim but adequate. The profound silence of the place oppressed me. Passing the dark archways of the storage rooms, I was aware of a shivery change of atmosphere–-a cool kiss of still, subterranean air that breathed forth from them and caused the hairs to rise on the back of my neck. I lost the thread of Shalhoub’s urbane conversation as I realized I could not recall all the turnings we had made. I was lost under the city and only the slip of paper with Nassor’s handwriting on it, naming the antiquities dealer a friend, quelled my rising anxiety.

We turned into a corridor unlit by electricity. Instead, small oil lamps set in niches cast a shimmering blush over walls painted floor to ceiling with the kind of glyphs and artwork one might see in the temples of Luxor. At the corridor’s terminus stood two bronze doors. Shalhoub glided up to them and turned to address me. Gone was his mantle of world-weary decadence. Before me stood a stern authority, almost regal in his bearing.

“Within lies the reason our friend Nassor believed I could help,” Shalhoub intoned. His white brows drew together. “When he realized that She Who Brings the Night was among us, he came to me straight away, as one of very few who would believe his tale. I show you this sacred place only because I must. You, Charles Wilding, must spring the trap we set tonight if you wish to save the lives of your countrymen.”

His hand was on the door handle.

“Wait,” I said, cursing the quiver in my voice. “If you have something in there that can stop Keket, why don’t you use it? You know more of this than I.”

He looked down for a moment in seeming contemplation.

“I can only show you and try to explain. None of this is simple. We are bound by ancient contracts to do what we may for ourselves…come, see what names me steward.”

With that cryptic statement, he flung wide the doors.

The room so revealed was immense and bathed in lamplight, glinting where it struck the gold leaf of the wall paintings, richer sisters to those in the corridor. Plush carpets of intricate design covered the floor. A handsome table that could have seated twenty stood upon them in the middle of the room, heaped with fresh fruits, roasted lambs, breads, dates and almonds, and jugs of wine. Fat beeswax candles nestling among this bounty sweated honey-scented beads and runnels. Shallow bowls of lotus water, the gorgeous blossoms floating on their surfaces, lent their perfume to the heady mix. Yet this jaw-dropping feast faded to mere titillation for the senses as my gaze roved further to the row of statues seated on the dais beyond the table.

I drew in a colossal breath, so great was the impact of their presence. Twice the size of living men, ten ancient gods meticulously carved of stone sat enthroned. Stunned, I turned toward Shalhoub and saw beyond him ranked columns of figures standing at attention. These were no statues. They were mummies, perhaps a hundred of them, bound tightly in their wrappings to their necks, their gruesome, desiccated faces infused with watchful ardor. My breath rushed out again in exclamation.

“Jesus! What is this?”

I had taken an involuntary step backward, but Shalhoub’s hand clamped on my shoulder, steadying me.

“Do not fear,” he said. “These”—he indicated the mummies—“are my ancestors. They represent many generations of my family. One day, I will take my place among them, and the eldest will have earned his rest. We are priests of the old traditions, and caretakers of these gods you see before you.” He made a slight bow in the direction of the statues.

“According to family legend, we trace our origin back to the Old Kingdom. How accurate that analysis may be…” He lifted one angular shoulder in a self-deprecating shrug. “It is certain that we have kept watch over these sacred vessels since the first Pharaohs. The gods have not always inhabited them but came and went at will. It has been some time now since they have left them. They do not sleep. It is more like a long meditation.”

His voice had taken on a contemplative tone, and he regarded the ancient stone beings with baffled affection. I looked again at them, noting the few I recognized among them: falcon-headed Horus; Anubis, the black jackal-headed guide of the dead; and Sekhmet with the head of a lion, goddess of war and so appropriate a deity for the times. There was Osiris, with his skin stained the green of renewal, and beside him Isis, holding her ankh. The others I did not know.

Shalhoub introduced them. “They are Amun the Hidden One, Thoth the Wise, Maat the Just, Mut the Mother, and Geb who brings forth the fertile earth. These last two are elders among the group-–of the primordial gods. Like them, Keket is from the time before time.”

As he spoke, I became aware of what I can only describe as a presence in the room. I felt that I was observed and weighed, that a lofty awareness scrutinized me. I admit that I was powerfully affected by Shalhoub’s manner and the strangeness of the place, particularly the presence of the dead upright and alert in their bandages. Yet, modern man of a far country as I was, I found no difficulty in believing that the god statues before me held some ancient power.

“If Keket is like them,” I said, choosing my words with care, “why would they help us to stop her? And how?”

I had a sudden bone-chilling vision of these stone giants, accompanied by their mummified guard, striding forth in anger and laying waste to the city.

Shalhoub tugged at his beard in thought. “Are you familiar with the philosophy of maat? I do not speak of She who is seated there—” he gestured at the goddess with the ostrich plume in her headdress—“but of the principles she embodies. Maat is maintenance of the balance necessary to keep chaos at bay. It is a cultivation of harmony, with the assistance of the gods, and it makes our world possible. Keket is from a place outside this construct, where chaos dwells. She would bring forth that darkness once again, and where she goes sorrow follows. This is not the desire of the gods, who seek order. Thus, they will help us. The how is deceptively simple. You will capture her with your camera.”

“You’re bloody mad!” I held up the camera that dangled from its strap around my neck. “You want me to take her picture? I suppose this happens as she’s turning me into one of those.” I waved my hand at the embalmed priests.

“Monsieur Wilding, please, remember where you are.” Shalhoub lavished a stern, paternal glare on me, then held out his hand. “May I examine your camera?”

I unslung it and thrust it at him. After turning it about in his hands, much as poor Nassor had done, he raised it to his eye. I expected the same gasp of disbelieving horror, but Shalhoub looked long through the viewfinder with only a satisfied grunt.

“It is as I suspected…and hoped. She Who Brings the Night touched your camera, yes?”

I nodded.

“In doing so, she rendered it unfit for its purpose. I am afraid you will never make another photograph with this. But something much more pertinent to our current purpose happened. The camera and, more importantly, the film within it have been infused with her darkness. Essentially, this mechanism has become a microcosm of her native chaos. She can be captured and held here, as long as the film is never developed or destroyed.”

“Bollocks,” I snorted, unheeding of my rudeness. “How do you know it will work?”

Shalhoub smiled and inclined his head toward the dais. “I have been told so. We will say the proper prayers through the night over your camera. Tomorrow, you must face Keket.”

A chill walked down my back, but I said only, “I can’t help you with prayers, I’m afraid.”

“No. You shall sleep. There is a cot in the next room. We will pray.”

He turned toward the ranks of mummies, and I fled to my spartan bedchamber as the first of them began to stir.

____________________

The morning found me among the soldiers again, documenting yet more corpses in attitudes of darkened agony. I went about my work with one eye on the sun as it traversed the heavens, ever mindful of the fleeting hours and the approach of night. I kept the Zeiss hanging around my neck, burdensome though it was, for I could not let the precious thing out of my sight. Under my shirt, another thing hung about my neck--a simple scarab amulet of faience, a thousand times blessed by the reanimated priests in Shalhoub’s underground temple, one of two he had given me.

When I was able to break away from my distasteful duties, I rushed to my rooms. In their cool dimness, Nassor awaited me. He sat in the chair in which he had died, bolt upright and staring into the next world with ferocious courage, his hands on the table before him curled into fists. Unlike the victims in the camp, Nassor’s body showed no signs of Keket’s touch aside from the black stain over his heart.

“He was a warrior of the old ways,” Shalhoub had said of him. “He would have made a fine priest.”

With a full heart, I took the second scarab amulet from my pocket and hung it about Nassor’s neck, repeating the words for safe passage through the underworld that Shalhoub had taught me. The body relaxed. Nassor’s hands opened and he slumped gently forward and rested his cheek upon the table. I felt a desire to sit across from him once again, to converse and argue as we had used to do, but there was no time for mourning. Night drew close, and I had an appointment to keep in the souk.

“The lamp seller, that lazy son of a leprous camel,” Shalhoub had said, his fine French intonations giving way to brief Arabic vitriol, “he broke with maat, allowing greed and self-importance to become his path. It is not, perhaps, unusual, and certainly in these days there are greater evils in the world of men. But I knew him well, for his grandfather was of our order, the last of his line to serve the old ways. In his arrogance, the grandson made a claim that his lamps were of such superior quality they could disperse even the first darkness. For him, Keket was no more than a fright tale he had heard as a child.”

Shalhoub had shaken his head, but I detected no sympathy for the hapless lamp seller.

“Even now, so far from their days of ruling the land, the gods can be angered. They can still be roused to action, and this is what drew She Who Brings the Night to the souk on the evening you first encountered her. She bought a lamp from the fool, as you told Nassor, and I have no doubt he knew her and his fate. I have visited his family, who have become suddenly devout. As you saw, they dismantled the offending lamp shop that very night, but to no avail.”

I ruminated on Shalhoub’s account as I made my way to the night market. It was like a dark fairytale. What manner of land was this, where ancient myths could walk the streets, killing at will…where the corpses of centuries-old priests could bow and pray before sentient stone gods? I wanted nothing more than to return home to the cool mists of the heathered moors.

I made my way to the shop that had earlier been taken over by the rug dealer. I found him there, white beneath his sunburn and with his dark eyes rolling like those of a spooked horse. Gone were the rugs. The lamps were back, burning a hole in the shadows. The rug merchant shrank from them and refused to touch them. I felt sorry as hell for the kid, for I knew Shalhoub had forced him to lay this trap. He was nothing more than a goat tethered out as bait for a tiger.

“I won’t let harm come to you,” I told him in my halting Arabic.

It was an empty promise, as I feared for my own survival that night, but it seemed to hearten the lad. He nodded and gulped at the air, pulling his shoulders back. I showed him the camera and tried to explain how I would capture Keket within it, but my facility with the language didn’t stretch that far. I did manage, through pantomime, to impress upon him the importance of staying out of the camera shot. He moved to a corner of the shop and stood there like a fence post. For my part, I positioned myself where I could see the lamp shop and the avenue leading to it, using a heap of baskets as a sort of blind.

I raised the camera to my eye but saw only turbid black. I was forced to watch the lamp shop with one eye while gazing into the depth of nothingness with the other, a situation that triggered a nauseating sense of vertigo. I fought the sensation that I was falling into the camera’s darkness and detaching from the reality of the souk. I lowered the camera and mopped the sweat from my face with my sleeve. When I raised it to my eye again, Keket was before me. I had not seen her approach. With a start I realized that I could see her with both my naked eye and through my viewfinder, but the camera saw her only as a stormy black-on-black disturbance, vaguely woman-shaped. My finger trembled on the shutter release.

“Sayyed! Sayyed!” The fence post erupted into life, bleating for me to come to his aid.

Keket whirled to face me, a twisting wind in the viewfinder. In panic, my finger depressed the shutter release again and again as She Who Brings the Night flew toward me, knocking aside my barricade of baskets. I toppled backward cradling the camera and praying to every god I’d seen seated in Shalhoub’s temple. The little faience scarab on its leather thong about my neck slid along my collarbone, searing the skin there with the radiance of the sun. I lay on my back on the cobbles, my eyes squeezed tight, holding the camera to me like a lover. Silence descended, and then urgent hands tugged at me. An excited babble washed over me. I peeled open an eye to see the flushed face of the young rug merchant hanging above mine.

The boy patted my shoulders, my hands, and, with reverence, the camera. He sat back on his heels, smiling.

“It worked,” he said, speaking slowly so I could understand him. “She went there. I saw her go in.”

He pointed at the camera. I sat up and had a look at it. It looked and felt no different to me. A wave of fear washed over me. How could I be sure Keket was imprisoned inside? Uncertainty was like ice in my veins. I repeated my question out loud.

“How can I be sure?” I spoke in English, but the boy squatting beside me understood my anguish.

“We are alive,” he said.

In the end, it was the best proof of success. The strange deaths in the army camp ceased, and the soldiers prepared to move out to their next posting. I wanted no more to do with Egypt and prepared to return to London to do what I could for the poor old bombed-out city. It was a relief to me to have no more pressing worries than Luftwaffe raids. Bombs and guns, I could understand. The Zeiss, with its final roll of film intact inside it, went on without me to Mousefoot, and there it remained until I could join it.

I have kept it, and its inmate, safe ever since.

____________________

London, 1992

Sir Peregrine, his head tilted back in his comfortable chair, eyes closed and blunt fingers steepled over his chest, finished recounting Wilding’s tale and opened his eyes to see how young Connors had taken it. It was a jolly good tale. He’d thought so when Charlie told it to them all those years ago, and it hadn’t lost any of its succulence in the ensuing decades. He was gratified to see the young man tense and white-faced on the edge of his seat.

“Well, my boy, that’s the story Charlie told us. And, good as his word, he was off to America by the end of the year. As for Mousefoot, well…I couldn’t help him any other way, so I bought it. Always loved it up there, and Evelyn, too. Capital tramping about and grouse shoots, fresh air, quiet. We take the grandchildren as often as we can.”

Connors gulped down the last of his bourbon.

“What a story, sir. It sounds as if Mr. Wilding believed every bit of it. I mean, it doesn’t seem he was having you all on.”

“Oh, he believed it, poor sod.” Sir Peregrine whirled a finger about his ear. “Went a bit soft in the head. Charlie was a sensitive sort, not made for looking at the things he photographed down there. And the climate didn’t agree with him, no matter what he said about loving it. He was an artist, you see. It’s a damn shame what happened to him. His life just went slowly to pieces. His health was always spotty after his auto accident, and it got worse. He married Jane but that didn’t last long. She wasn’t a woman to put up with his frets and vapors. He gave up his art at last, and I think that was really the end. One could almost believe some malevolent spirit was at work on him.”

Connors sat back, an idea forming behind his eyes. His head was full of war-era Egypt, a romantic amalgam of vintage films he’d seen and Wilding’s own evocative black-and-white images of Cairo.

“Sir, do you think Mr. Wilding’s camera could be found? Perhaps among his family?”

“What, that old Zeiss? I shouldn’t think so. Charlie was rabid about keeping it always near him. Never would allow anyone else to touch it…but, wait, he did have a younger brother. Malcolm. They weren’t very close, too much of an age gap between them. I suppose it’s possible he might have left the care of the camera in his hands, if he felt he wouldn’t be around much longer. I’m not sure what became of Malcolm. The family has a place in Surrey, somewhere in Spelthorne.”

Wild, vivid daydreams unfurled in Connors’ mind. The camera, the camera, the camera. Imagine if it could be found! And why not? Wilding had treasured it beyond all else. He would not have sold or destroyed it. Connors calculated the years the camera might have knocked about without its indefatigable guardian. It seemed more than possible that it was out there somewhere, perhaps sitting dusty and forgotten on some family member’s shelves or abandoned in an attic. Connors wanted that camera, but more than that, he wanted the film rumored to be inside it. The thought of finding lost, undeveloped C. E. Wilding photographs caused him to rub his hands together with glee.

He licked his dry lips. “Do you think, sir, that Mr. Wilding’s family would speak with me? I have a few days yet before I leave for my next assignment.” Sir Peregrine chuckled. The boy was really besotted with old Charlie and his work. Well, it was good for a young man to have a treasure to seek. This Bradley Connors was very like his grandfather, Billy. Always looking to Charlie to point the way.

“I’ll give you my card. It will get you in the door. And now, how about a little late supper?”

He rang the bell for Markham.

END