T.J. Laverne

© Copyright T.J. Laverne

 

Chapter 1:

Silver and Gold

 

A blood curdling shriek, beginning as that of a fourteen year-old girl, and finishing off with forced manliness, emerged from the smoky corner of the loft. The outline of a young man was just visible through the grey fumes, shaking his right hand violently while hopping up and down in a circle, continuing to yell, “Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!”

 

A young woman sat low upon her usual moldy chair at a table in the middle of said loft, with barely a glance over the yellow stack of papers in her hands at the carryings-on of the young man. A couple minutes passed, however, and the young woman was compelled to emit a dry cough. This time her eyes left the paper in front of her, and she looked suspiciously over to the still yelping man in the foggy corner.

 

“Is that potassium hydroxide?”

 

“Yes,” the young man managed to gasp through his performance, his face cherry red. “It is!”

 

Without further ado, the young woman flew over to one of the yellow stained windows and hurriedly pushed the glass open with a threatening rattle. She threw the top half of her body to the outside, papers still in hand, and thrust herself upon the window ledge with a loud grunt, where she teetered, her legs leaving the floor and curling up behind her. As if nothing had happened, she lifted the papers again in front of her face and began to whistle the tune “Doggy in the Window,” kicking her legs back and forth to the beat.

 

Behind her, the young man began to splutter and sneeze uncontrollably. The young woman opened her eyes wide and turned around with a jerk.

 

“Ivan!?!”

 

A frantic patter of feet was sounded, and a few yards to the woman’s left, an adjacent window was flung open and the young man’s head popped out, still hacking quite loudly. A window mere feet across the alley from the young woman was at this point slid open, and an old woman’s leathery head was poked through. Her cold eyes met the young woman’s in front of her, still teetering over the window ledge, and they stared at each other. The young woman forced a smile.

 

“Afternoon, Mrs. Dicksee! How are you?”

 

The old woman did not smile back, but turned her head instead to the next window, her eyes widening. The young man called Ivan put his non-injured hand over his closed mouth as he continued to heave and splutter, eyes magnified through his protective goggles as he stared at the old woman like a bug. He waved his reddened hand weakly and apologetically, and coughed out an, “I’m sorry.” The old woman stared at him another minute or two, then retracted her head without a word and slid the window shut.

 

The young woman turned back to her yellow stack of papers dispassionately, and Ivan looked sadly down to his raw wound as he openly finished off his round of phlegm.

 

The name of the coughing young man was Ivan Brighton, and the young swinging woman next to him was his younger sister, Alexandra Brighton, or Alex, as Ivan liked to call her. They have been called young, though that is for others to determine, for they were truthfully somewhere in the vicinity of thirty, though Ivan had for a few years been calling himself twenty-five. Their real ages were known only to each other, for Alex was far too old to not yet be married, and Ivan too old to be still living off his sister’s penny, however small a penny that was.

 

Ivan was a chemist—hence the aforementioned potassium hydroxide—though in a liberal sense of the word Achemist”, for over the past five years he had dedicated his Chemistry know-how to the rather flighty and obsolete field of Alchemy—the medieval antecedent to Chemistry, which long ago centralized its efforts in finding a substance that possessed the ability to transfer any metal into silver or gold, as well as to bestow immortality to the beholder, a substance otherwise known as the Elixir of Life. Hence Ivan’s lack of money. Ivan had a couple years previous achieved a pale yellow color in a copper penny, but that was about the extent of his alchemical success thus far. Perhaps Ivan’s choice of study was his desperate attempt to make his line of work more interesting, or perhaps his choice stemmed from the fact that he was not fit to do much else in his field, or perhaps he genuinely believed he would find what he was looking for. It is safe to assume that all apply.

 

As for Alex, the yellowed papers which she held before her were excerpts from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, for Alex was an archaeologist and a linguist. The money which in fact paid for the brother and sister’s shabby loft, arose indeed from Alex’s translations of this Book of the Dead. However, like Ivan, Alex’s life’s dedication was set at finding a something which many, if not most people, believed did not exist; in Alex’s case the Book of Thoth. As is probably not common knowledge, the Book of Thoth was, and is, a book of Egyptian legend which is said to hold the knowledge of the language of the animals, as well as a spell which would allow the caster to enchant the sky and the earth. More later.

 

As Alex teetered in her window, and Ivan continued to hack up his lungs, a chorus of rough men singing the tune “Drunken Sailor” from the deck of a grimy ship reached Alex’s ears, at which point she lifted her eyes to the silver shimmering mass in the somewhat near distance to her right; a mass which was none other than the good ol’ Mississippi River. Alex could just see the corner of the harbor from her window, where she spotted several skirted ladies and dirty men scurrying up the wooden docks to greet the oncoming ship. Ivan and Alex’s loft, in fact, lay just on the grungy outskirts of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the year of 1881 to be exact.

 

For a loft it was not so lofty, but was actually rather stuffy and cramped, especially in the heat of the day, though it was mid-fall. For not only was Ivan’s bulky Chemistry equipment set up there, but Alex’s many ancient, dusty artifacts, most of them Egyptian, lay sprawled about the room in every remaining open space. Cat mummies, stone heads, amulets, necklaces, jars, puzzle boxes and musical instruments, along with dozens of books filled with nothing but hieroglyphs and Egyptian reliefs—not to mention bottles upon bottles of chemicals, Bunsen burners, racks of test tubes, scales, flasks and beakers—littered every corner of the room, leaving space only for a couple of moldy chairs and a table, and a couple of ratty beds, along with meagerly kitchen appliances, and the other essentials for human survival which will remain nameless.

 

In his own window spot, Ivan had finally dispelled all his phlegm, and sat for a while upon his knees as he rested his chin upon the window ledge, enjoying the warmth of the sun as the squawks of sea gulls sounded overhead, and the ruckus down by the harbor floated in upon the light, fishy breeze which came from the river. The chorus of drunken sailors were slowly becoming weepy, and pretty soon began to sing the Christian hymn, “Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow,” a few of them trying quite unsuccessfully to harmonize, as Ivan hummed along.

 

Though Ivan was thirty, or thereabouts, he retained much of his youthful appearance, that he could have easily pulled off twenty, let alone twenty-five. His blazing golden-honey hair stood atop his head in a strange array as if he had been electrocuted, and his bright, fervent chestnut eyes were flecked with the same golden-honey, more or less, depending on the day and the hour. He was tall and somewhat gangly, with a pointed Adam’s Apple on a skinny neck, and a crisp, young voice, if there can be such a thing. Perhaps most distinctive of all, however, were the dimples upon each of his cheeks which surfaced with any slight movement of his face, smile or no, though he smiled more often than most people. Even bedecked as he was with bug-like lab goggles, Ivan remained quite handsome, though perhaps subtly so.

 

Alex, on the other hand, was cursed with being viewed by the entire race of men as prodigiously and tantalizingly beautiful—a dainty little gem of a lady, though there was nothing unique or even exceptional about her features. Her long, dark hair fell in voluptuous waves and curls down her back, even amidst the worst of days, and her eyes were a stunning shade of silver-grey in a face of lucid-white skin, both of which seemed to radiate a light of their own. At just five feet tall, and with the youthful appearance of someone half her age, she fell well below the heights of the men around her, in all meanings of the phrase. She was much too young and beautiful to have anything to say worth listening to.

 

After a while, Alex turned around to the room behind her, and, seeing it finally cleared of its lethal smoke, retouched her feet to the floor and lifted herself up from the window ledge with another grunt, rubbing her stomach with a sour expression as she yanked painfully upon her corset. She reached for a black mask sitting upon the table and fitted it over her mouth and nose before sitting back down upon her lumpy, moldy grey chair, papers again posed in front of her face.

 

Upon seeing his sister retreat, Ivan rose from his own spot as if he were made of springs, and found his own mask upon his laboratory table. Once in place below his gawky goggles, the resulting appearance made him resemble more a strange alien creature than a bug. For several minutes on end, he leaned his whole body over the edge of the rusty sink, emitting many an Aooh” and an Aah,” as his burning hand was held beneath the meager stream of water which shot sporadically from the pump.

 

Once finished to his satisfaction, Ivan stretched his limbs and flexed his muscles, and bounced up and down upon the balls of his feet several times as if preparing for a marathon race, before plunging full force back into his work, though he winced with every movement of his blistering hand.

 

“Why are you not wearing gloves?” Alex said without looking over her papers at her brother, her voice muffled behind her mask. “Did you learn nothing?”

 

Ivan lifted his oddly magnified eyes resentfully over to his sister as he took out a glove and fitted it over his hand with a snap, at which he let out a painful whimper. As he turned back to his chemicals, now heating a glass rod over the flame of a Bunsen burner, Alex spread out her pantsed legs wide in front of her and leaned her head over the back of her chair with a long, impatient groan.

 

“Lord, I’m hot! Why does it have to be so hot in here? Are you hot?” She wiped her forehead, which was indeed covered with a layer of sweat, and lifted her left arm to fan beneath it.

 

“No, I’m great!” Ivan replied sing-songish, his chin mere millimeters from the flames of his fire.

 

Alex twisted her body sideways with another long groan to look at Ivan, and pointed a finger at his garb. “Then what is that all over your shirt?

 

”Ivan lifted his arms one at a time to look beneath the crooks, then did a twisted little turn, pulling on the back of his baggy white linen shirt and craning his head to look behind him. Dark splotches covered much of his shirt in a splendidly symmetrical pattern: a straight line down the center of his back, a large oval beneath each arm, and a large collar of sweat round his neck. Ivan mumbled incoherently behind his mask for several long moments, among which were the words, “that’s strange,” before he pushed his goggles back up his nose with a gloved finger, and rolled the sleeves of his shirt further up his arms as if preparing to deliver a calf.

 

Alex turned back to her Book of the Dead with a satisfied smile, then sat up suddenly quickly.

 

“Listen—listen to this!” She cleared her throat with an uncontrollable shudder of excitement, then spoke out with more volume than was necessary, in a regal tone: “Be quiet. Ra is in the wind. He speaks when . . . “

 

At that precise moment, as if on cue, a cool harbor breeze blew in through the open window, snuffing out the flame of Ivan’s Bunsen burner and scattering several of his papers across the lab table, knocking over a jar full of rust-colored chemicals in the process. Alex continued on speaking without pause as if nothing had happened, while Ivan scrambled to gather his pages on his hands and knees, out of sight behind the lab table and no longer listening.

 

When at last Ivan rose to his feet holding a holey rag dripping with a blood-like liquid, which he promptly dropped in the trash along with several rust-soaked documents, he at last perked up his ears, only to hear, “ . . . Mandrake, Raisin. Grape, Pomegranate, Melon. Cypress, Palm, Osiris.”

 

Ivan made a face of confusion as he relit the flame in his Bunsen burner. “Who’s Ra?”

 

“The god of the sun,” Alex rapidly ran off in the same regal tone, “and the main god of ancient Egypt; also known as Amon-Ra. The Egyptians were mainly sun worshipers, their center being the city Heliopolis, meaning ‘City of the Sun’, named as such by the Greeks after their own sun god, Helios. In the beginning, Ra emerged from the egg of Thoth on the surface of the ocean, and in turn made and ruled over everything. He had the head of a hawk, and he sailed across the sky in a boat.”

 

“Hmm,” said Ivan in thoughtful silence as he crouched down to measure out a thick brown liquid into a flask. “Found nothing about the Book of Thoth then?”

 

“Not one damned mention of it!” Alex threw herself back down upon the chair, her neck crooked in the crevice of the back. “Though I am still convinced the Hermetic Books hint to its being buried beneath the paws of the Great Sphinx. If I could only find the clues to where Prince Neferkaptah hid the six keys for each box it’s held in,” she sulked.

 

“Yes,” Ivan jumped in at once. “The gold box, inside the silver box, inside the . . . ivory and ebony box, inside the . . . sycamore box, inside the bronze box, inside the . . . iron box! Right?” He looked eagerly over at Alex. He went through them again in his head, counting to six on his fingers.

 

“Right,” she muffled behind her mask.

 

“I still do not understand why you can’t just smash the boxes open with a hammer or a sword or something.”

 

“That would not work, Ivan. You know that,” Alex answered impatiently. She sat up quickly again. “I wish I could sail to Giza tomorrow and see it for myself! I know it is there, Ivan, I know it!” she pointed her finger at him as she stood up in her excitement. “But everyone seems determined against it! If they would only listen . . . !” She began to pace. “I don’t know what they are afraid of! If it is not there, it is not there! But if it is . . .” Alex trailed off, too excited to go on further.

 

Ivan stirred the now greyish goop in his flask on a wire mesh ring over the burner, as he watched Alex through his goggles. He nodded but did not need to say anything in response. His eyes wandered to a relic laying upon the table, and he pointed. “You still have not told me what the gift is from Terrence Kelley.”

 

Alex sat back down and reached for an oddly shaped widget on a wooden stick, laying beside a tray of several golden trinkets, a copper mirror, and a large bowl with a cracked painting of a chariot and horses upon it, and she gazed at the object in her hand with a smitten sigh. “It’s a sistrum—a rattle,” she spoke as if it were a puppy on the brink of death. “It was used only by Egyptian women, for the goddess Hathor.” She turned the odd thing over in her hand with another sigh. “I wish it were not so beautiful.”

 

“What is wrong with Terrence again?” Ivan’s greyish goop began to bubble and splatter everything in the surrounding area, including on Ivan.

 

Alex grumbled and growled as she leaned her cheek upon her hand, pushing up the whole side of her face an inch or so as she looked up to the ceiling. “He’s tall, handsome, rich. Thinks he’s the center of the universe, and yet is remarkably vacant. And he’s my superior! With this,” she lifted the rattle severely, “he will think he’s entitled to anything he wants from me! Which is why I’m returning it immediately.” She made a little face as she looked down at it yearningly.

 

“You didn’t return the gifts from Alfred, or Manny, or what’s-his-face—Myron.”

 

“Yes, well, Alfred was one of your colleagues, and Myron gave me a jar full of mummified organs! I did not think it was necessary to return a jar full of organs.”

 

“And what was wrong with Alfred and Myron?” asked Ivan thoughtfully as he lowered the flame on the Bunsen burner and continued to stir.

 

Alex took in a deep breath. “Myron was quite handsome as well, and he also owned a nice little collection of pistols and knives, and was most likely a serial murderer; and Alfred was the most intelligent man I have ever met, and he thought he was God himself. He gave me a hairpin for my birthday, remember?”

 

Ivan nodded with a smile, “Ah, that’s right.” It was uncertain whether or not Ivan entirely believed Alex’s depictions. “And yet you managed to find wives for both of them,” he added coyly. Alex gave her brother a hated stare, marked with a hint of amusement, though she had no response. After another moment in which Ivan reveled in his own humor, he turned seriously back to Alex. “Well, are you going to play that thing for me, or not?”

 

“This?” she looked moodily at the rattle, though her eyes began to brighten and she wriggled a little in her seat. “What would you like me to play?”

 

“An Egyptian hymn, please.”

 

“An Egyptian hymn . . .” she repeated thoughtfully. She took in a deep breath, and without prelude she began to shake the rattle erratically. She started in at once with a high pitched, screeching, tuneless song which sounded oddly Egyptian—to anyone who was not Egyptian—every now and again throwing in an Egyptian syllable with little meaning. Ivan let out a cackle of appreciation, then began to join in himself behind his muddy flask, singing words of gibberish in his own screechy tone, his voice cracking several times under the strain. Alex proceeded to stand up and spin around in a circle on one leg as she continued to shake the rattle and screech, and just as Ivan began to join in this as well, there was a short knock and the front door swung open.

 

“I found the sodium diuranate!” an excited voice announced.

 

Alex stood in mid-rattle, her last screech still hanging in the air as she stood on one foot with her back to the door. She was prepared to turn around to the visitor with a smile, but her smile shrank away instantly at the sound of the voice. The visitor—a small, meek man—stopped just as quickly, and stood in front of the door, staring with wide eyes at Alex, a bottle hanging limply from his hand. The front door was still wide open to the street beyond, letting in a current of cool, fishy harbor air and the accompanying harbor noises. A man walking a short ways down the street was wailing out a slow, heartbreaking love song, hiccuping between every line.

 

“Oh! Hello,” the visitor in the door spoke quietly.

 

Alex nodded and gave a small smile, which the man could not see because she was still wearing the mask. “I apologize for my appearance,” she spit out, bowing her head and clutching her rattle to her stomach. It was most likely she referred to the pair of white bloomers she wore upon her legs, for Alex hardly ever resorted herself to wearing a dress in the privacy of her own house like most proper women, though it was unheard of in the public eye. However, the black alien mask still in place over her face, along with her unbrushed hair, flying away from her head quite madly, were an equally shocking sight, though Alex had not given either a second thought.

 

The man’s timid eyes looked meekly down to the ground before Alex as he closed the front door and began to make his way to Ivan’s corner, unable to utter a word. Alex watched him a second as she held her breath, and, seeing that he would not respond, she began to walk away in the opposite direction. “I’ll just get out your way,” she added quietly, as Ivan took the bottle from the man’s hand ecstatically and yelped, “ah, sodium diuranate!”

 

As Alex retreated to the corner in which her bed lay, concealed behind a tatty, navy blue curtain—or bed sheet, rather—she threw a fleeting look back to the timid man and Ivan, just as Ivan feverishly added to the friend, “Where did you get it, Simon?”

 

The man called Simon opened his mouth in an attempt to respond, but as he looked over to Alex, still looking his way, the words were lost in his throat. Alex gave a half-growl, half-sigh, threw the curtain open, and swung it closed behind her.

 

A moment after she disappeared from sight, Simon replied quietly, “The shipment just came into the harbor about an hour ago.”

 

“Excellent, excellent! Come! Help me with this. The gloves are over there, and I have an extra mask and goggles laying somewhere over there in that pile. No, you’ll have to dig quite deep for it.”

 

Many scurryings and scrapings and bangs were heard into the next hour or so, as Alex sat gloomily upon her bed, Indian style, the pages of the Book of the Dead laying in her lap before her. Shortly into the visit, Alex pushed aside her curtain a quarter of an inch from the wall in a curious glimpse of the sight beyond.

 

Simon—Simon Bacon, in fact—as heretofore established, was a timid man of dainty proportions, who similarly fell far below the heights of other men, though beside Alex he may have been a giant. His chocolate brown, longish, wavy hair sat rather messily upon his head, and his orbish eyes, though appearing dark from a distance, upon closer inspection were an ocean blue, in a simple, almost peaky face. He was not handsome or attractive by any popular standards, yet Alex thought he was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. He was meek, shy, scrawny, even gawky, and yet his eyes and face were the kindest, gentlest she could ever conceive, arousing a curiosity in Alex she could hardly contain.

 

And yet Alex knew very little about the man, nor did he know her. He was a lab assistant at the local University, and had been an assistant to Ivan for several years, though he was paid very little, for Ivan and Simon were longtime friends. Alex had only ever even seen Simon a dozen or so times in the years he had been Ivan’s assistant, and less than a dozen before. And on those occasions when the two were in the same room together, Simon spoke hardly a word, nor even looked Alex straight in the face. Moreover, she suspected he avoided her as often as he could in those times they were apart.

 

Alex observed Simon from behind her curtain, enraptured, as he handed Ivan an ingredient here, and a test tube there, occasionally weighing out a powder or setting up a beaker of boiling water. Ivan was little less than spastic in his scramblings from one thing to the next, yet Simon seemed to anticipate his every step, being in front of him exactly when he needed him, while still managing to keep a timid eye upon Alex’s curtain.

 

At one point Ivan made a sprightly comment of which Alex paid little attention, and Simon responded with such a sweet, heavenly smile, that it lit up the entire room with its brightness. She was so entranced as she watched the smile, that she no longer heeded her placement upon her bed, and had soon leaned over so far that she fell smack to the floor with a loud boom and a crash as several artifacts fell upon her.

 

“Alex!” yelled Ivan on the other side of the curtain. “Are you all right, there? What happened?”

 

“Yes,” came Alex’s small, strained voice as she picked herself up. “I’m fine!”

 

Ivan inquired her no further, and Alex remained crouched upon the floor for several moments, suffocating herself in her bed. Once she had recovered a little, she began to crawl along the floor to the curtain again, where she peeked to the room beyond, her cheek almost upon the floor.

 

She was surprised to see that Simon’s eyes were now planted firmly upon her curtain, though his mask and goggles covered up his expression. She was sure that he had not spotted her peeking through, and so she continued to stare, almost willing him to catch her eyes there upon him. Within seconds, Ivan reached out for his next ingredient to find Simon did not have it for him, which in turn snapped Simon quickly back to reality with a nervous little jump.

 

With a smile now upon her face, Alex let the tiny corner of the curtain fall back to its place as she crawled back to her bed and engrossed herself once again in the Book of the Dead.