Demon Box

“He fired Dued and moved his operations to Mykerinos, where he found a sarcophagus that he claimed held the pharaoh’s mummy, but as luck or fate would have it the boat sank on the way back to England and Howard-Vyse lost his trophy. All he had to show for five years of digging and blasting is that resultless hole there and those damned upper chambers. One of which was filled with a mysterious black dust.”

“Yeah? What was it?”

“When science progressed enough to analyze it, it was found to be the bodies of millions of dead bugs.”

“Terrific.” Jacky stood up and straightened his necktie. “I’m inspired to walk back to the hotel and kill mosquitoes. Let me know if you turn up anything resultful.”

After Jacky moped off, Muldoon painted in some of his past for me. Raised by parents both ecclesiastical and into the Edgar Cayce readings, Muldoon had grown up pretty blase concerning theories arcane. Enoch of Ohio was his first real turn-on.

“He came to town and set up his tent. During the day he did horoscopes and tattoos, then at night he’d have these meetings. He’d go into a trance and answer questions, as ‘Rey-Torl.’ Rey-Torl used to be a cobbler in Mu, made Mu shoes, then his business went under so he moved on to Atlantis and became an unlicensed genetic surgeon. He eventually got run out of town and ended up in Egypt, helping Ra-ta build the pyramid.”

“Sounds hot. Did Rey tell you any good dirt?”

“Not really. The same thing that Cayce and all the other prophecy brokers say: that the Piscean Age is flopping toward the end of its two-thousand-year run and the Grand Finale is coming up soon, and that it’s going to happen in this last quarter of this century. Rey-Torl called it Apodosis. Enoch called it the Shit Storm.”

“The last quarter?”

“Give or take a couple of decades. But soon. That’s why the Cayce people place so much importance on locating that secret hall. It’s supposed to contain records of previous shit storms plus some helpful hints on how to survive them. However—”

I had the feeling this wasn’t the sort of stuff Muldoon talked about with fellow Egyptology students at the university.

“—everything has to be exactly right before you can find it: you, the time, the position of the earth, that damned Cat’s Paw.”

Looking off toward the black lump of the Sphinx’s head he quoted by heart the most famous of the Cayce predictions:

“‘This in position lies, as the sun rises from the waters, the line of the shadow (or light) falls between the paws of the Sphinx, that was later set as the sentinel or guard, which may not be entered from the connecting chambers from the Sphinx’s paw (right paw) until the time has been fulfilled when the changes must be active in this sphere of man’s experience. Between, then, the Sphinx and the river.

It was the same prophecy that had drawn me to the pyramid by way of Virginia Beach. Everybody at the Cayce library was familiar with it. Whenever I mentioned that I was on my way to Egypt the usual response from blue-haired old ladies and long-haired ex-hippies alike was, “Gonna look for the Hall of Records, huh?”

“And the Sphinx isn’t the only guard,” Muldoon went on. “The readings mentioned whole squadrons of ‘sentries’ or ‘keepers’ or ‘watchmen’ picketed around the hidden hall. All around here, actually. This whole plateau is a geodetic phenomenon protected by a corps of special spooks.”

I shivered from the wind. Muldoon stood up. “I’ve got to head back to Cairo if I’m going to make my eight o’clock tomorrow.” He snapped his Levi’s jacket closed, still looking off at the Sphinx. “A woman from the A.R.E. did come over and try, you know? After a lot of rigamarole and red tape they actually let her drill a hole in the front of the right paw…”

“Did she find anything?”

“Nothing. How she chose that one spot out of the mile or so between the paw and the river she never disclosed, but it was solid rock as far down as she drilled. She was very disappointed.”

“What about those ghostly guards, did they smite her?”

“That was not disclosed either. She did, however, end up marrying the Czechoslovakian ambassador.”

Hands in his pockets, Muldoon headed off into the shadows, saying he’d see me “bukra fi’l mish-mish.” It was a phrase you hear a lot in Cairo. “It’s the Arabic version of mañana,” I remembered Jacky had said, “only less definite. It means Tomorrow, when it’s the season of the apricot.’ “