Ramses the Damned Page 21

  “I cannot thank you enough for this reception,” she said, with a bow of her head. “You have been most gracious. Both of you.”

  There were more thank-yous and smiles. Then she found herself stumbling down the front hallway, towards a sunlit drawing room. Just outside the open terrace doors, tuxedoed waiters stood at attention with trays full of wineglasses. Beyond, a small sea of guests mingled on the vast green lawn in between two high walls of hedge.

  “Care for a glass of wine, miss?” one of the waiters asked.

  But she had already seen him, and the sight of him rendered her silent.

  Mr. Ramsey. Handsome, Egyptian. Nodding and listening attentively to the person who was speaking to him now. Every detail of his physical being, from his olive skin to his handsome jawline to the startling blueness of his eyes, flooded her with such overpowering memory she found herself speechless and breathless. This was not the vague ink drawing in the news clipping. This was the man from her dreams, in the flesh.

  For now she could see the man a short distance from her had appeared not just in her more recent nightmares, but in another dream as well, a dream that had stayed with her throughout her life, a dream which had formed the basis of her novel The Wrath of Anubis.

  This was the man with whom she’d walked the streets of some vague ancient city. She was absolutely sure of it! The man whose face and bearing she’d never been able to recall once she was awake; whose presence had always been an awareness and little else. This was the man who had provided her with common garb and requested she view her own kingdom and her people through the eyes of one of its ordinary citizens. And his living, breathing presence before her now was like a dab of watercolor bringing richness and color to something that had been but a pencil sketch seconds before.

  It had not been just a dream. He had not been just a dream.

  Again this question shook the earth on which she stood: How could she have dreamed about a living, breathing man she had never before met?

  Unless she had met him, somehow, somewhere. Unless it was not a dream, but a memory. A memory of a man named…

  “Ramses,” Sibyl whispered.

  His eyes met hers through the crowd.

  At that very moment, an arm encircled her waist. Too close, too suddenly intimate. She almost cried out, but she was immediately startled by a blast of hot breath against her neck. With it came the stench of hard liquor.

  “Do not move,” the man whispered fiercely, giving each word terrible emphasis.

  The man stood behind her now like an old lover who had come to surprise her. But he was causing a sharp pressure against the base of her spine. “That’s a knife you feel,” he said. “Sharp as a scalpel. Move one inch and I shall drive its sharp blade into your spine. You’ll lose the use of your legs instantly. You might never walk again.”

  When she tried to speak, her breath came out in a series of weak gasps.

  “Come with me,” he whispered. “Don’t make a scene. We are old friends. Act any differently and I’ll cut you and flee this place before anyone can see you’re bleeding to death. Walk.”

  He was deranged, this man, deranged and drunk. But the grip with which he held the knife against her seemed utterly, terribly confident. And so she obeyed. He walked behind her, with only an inch of space between his chest and her back, one arm looped around her shoulders to give the illusion of intimacy.

  They couldn’t walk a good distance like this. It was too strange, too conspicuous. But he guided her quickly in the opposite direction of the guests, into the deserted first-floor rooms behind them, past the procession of servants and waiters traveling up and down the basement stairs. With each step that took them farther away from people, from the comfort of the string music outside, her terror intensified, and he relaxed his pretentious pose.

  Now he gripped the back of her neck. He steered her through an empty library, down a short hallway.

  “Who are you?” she gasped. “What do you want?”

  In what seemed like one motion, he’d thrown open the door to a small washroom and hurled her inside. By the time he’d drawn the door shut behind him, he’d brought the knife to her throat.

  “Who are you, Sibyl Parker? Who are you really? And why do you seek to destroy my queen?”

  * * *

  Impossible.

  He was seeing things, imagining things. Thoughts of Cleopatra had nagged him all day. The idea that she might make an appearance here, it was possible, of course. For what purpose, he had no idea.

  But Samir and his men had been watching the ships, the ports. So far, no reports.

  And that was all well and good.

  But still, she was on his mind, as they now said, and always would be. And that’s why he’d recognized her gaze in the face of the pale-skinned, golden-haired woman who had appeared just inside the terrace doors. Her eyes. The woman had Cleopatra’s eyes. Her eyes before the resurrection. Before their color had changed. Brown and wide and expressive and full of intelligence and perception. And her poise. Perfect, upright, assured.

  And then she was gone.

  Lost behind a sudden shift in the sea of guests all around him. Nowhere to be seen on the terrace or the steps or the lawn on either side of him.

  He had begun to rudely ignore the guests to whom he’d been speaking seconds before. He managed the most polite excuse he could and departed.

  Where had she gone, this woman? Perhaps her resemblance to Cleopatra was a trick of the mind. But her sudden disappearance? This was cause for immediate suspicion.

  A hand gripped his elbow.

  Alex was standing next to him. “Don’t go too far, old chum. We’re toasting you both in just a few minutes. Fetch Julie if you can.”

  “Yes, of course, Alex. Thank you.”

  Yes, he would fetch Julie. But first, this strange vanishing woman with Cleopatra’s eyes.

  * * *

  Fear moved through her in a wave.

  What was there to fear in this small temple? A replica of the Pantheon, it seemed, with a gallery of Roman statues in alcoves lining its walls and a statue on a pedestal in the center. Was it Caesar? She could not tell. Her memories of his likeness were entirely lost to her now.

  So where did this fear come from? Not dread. Not anxiety. But a sudden, violent paralysis throughout her entire body.

  Sibyl Parker. From Sibyl Parker, this fear comes. Does she send it willfully? Or is that what she now feels? It was exhausting her to try to make sense of this.

  “You are ill,” Julie said.

  No trace of malice in this statement, just a kind of gentle fascination.

  Still gentle, this Julie. Why so gentle?

  “How is it that you are so ill?” Julie asked her. “Haven’t you healed completely from the fire?”

  “I healed from the fire. The illness…it is in my mind.”

  “Whatever it is you want, I will give it to you, or I will have Ramses give it to you, on one condition.”

  “And so we negotiate now, you and I? The queen who fed Rome and the aristocrat who wept her way into the arms of a pharaoh?”

  “Wear your cruelty however you like. It doesn’t fit you anymore. You need help. You are here for help. And that is what I offer you now. Help.”

  “But on one condition. So tell me, dear, sweet Julie Stratford, what is this condition?”

  “You must stay away from Alex Savarell. Forever. You must leave him be entirely.”

  “Leave him be entirely,” she whispered.

  How unexpected, the anger she felt at this request. The rage she felt when she saw the fear in Julie’s eyes, so similar to the fear in Teddy’s when she’d left him a few hours ago.

  “Leave him to forget me and our time together, you mean.”

  “Yes,” Julie whispered, “that is exactly what I mean.”

  “And so he thinks of me often, does he? And this pains you? Do you love him still?”

  “I never loved him. Not as a woman should love her husban
d.”

  “I see. So you think of me as poison, his thoughts of me as a corruption.”

  “He is tortured by memories of your madness.”

  “My madness?” she roared. “My madness born of your lover’s guilt and arrogance! This is how you describe what was done to me? As a madness that comes from the fiber of my being and not his? Tell me, sweet, dear Julie, how did he offer you the elixir? Did he anoint you with oils? Did he uncap the bottle in some palatial bedchamber while musicians played? Did he explain to you its power and its defects? What you would gain, what you would lose? He did me no such kindness in the Cairo Museum. He rendered me a monster and abandoned me.”

  “He offered it to you two thousand years before. You—”

  “And I refused it! I refused it and still he forced it upon me two thousand years later in death. In a death I chose!”

  Why did Julie cry now? Was she simply afraid? Or was there such pain in Cleopatra’s words, she too was overwhelmed by it. It seemed almost as if she felt guilty herself.

  “He has said these very things, hasn’t he?” Cleopatra asked. “He knows what he did. It tortures him, because he knows.”

  “He loved you,” Julie whispered.

  “Twice he abandoned me. Once as my empire fell, then again at the very moment when he brought me back to a life I did not want. May you, his new bride, be forever spared the kind of love he showed me.”

  “I am offering you what you want, but I cannot erase the centuries between you two. And neither can he.”

  “What I want…?” she muttered, circling past Julie. The answer to this question seemed to stare down at her on all sides, from the strange, stoic face of every statue in this shadowed tribute to the empire that had conquered her. “I want to know who these men are, these men of Rome. These men whom I should know. Even if these statues, these faces, are but caricatures, there should be some facet of them I recognize. Something of the cut of their chin or their hair or their armor. And yet my memories of them fade to nothing. More vanish with each journey of the sun across the sky. Caesar…” She turned towards the statue in the center of the floor. “Is this meant to be Caesar? I would not know. The man I lay with, the man with whom I bore a son, his face is lost to me. His smell. The sound of his voice. Lost to me. And my son. I am told I bore a son by him, a son who briefly became pharaoh after my death, and yet when I reach for any memory of him I swim in a great yawning blackness in my mind. His name, it is meaningless to me. And what next? What next will be consumed?”

  “Caesarion,” Julie whispered. “His name was Caesarion.”

  “Do you delight in this, Julie Stratford? Do you delight in my undoing?”

  “Do you still wish to snap my neck solely because you know it will hurt Ramses?”

  “That is not why I have traveled this far.”

  “Then I take no delight in your anguish, Cleopatra. And neither will he. But you have still not told me what you want.”

  “I want the elixir,” she said bitterly. How she hated the sound of her own desperation. “He did not use enough when he brought me back. There were holes all over my body. I could see my own bones and it drove me mad. Now there are holes in my mind, my memory. They grow bigger each day. There is only one possible thing that can heal them. And it lies with him. And it is the only reason I would ever wish to lay eyes on him, or you, again.”

  Relief in Julie’s eyes.

  But just then Cleopatra felt a sharp pain in her throat.

  Her hand flew to the spot where she’d felt it. Her fingers came away bloodless.

  Julie advanced on her quickly.

  Cleopatra recoiled, bracing herself against the statue’s pedestal.

  “Stand back,” said Cleopatra. Impossible not to interpret this woman’s advance as an attack. As Julie seizing upon a moment of weakness. But the woman’s expression was one of absolute concern. Absolute pity. Somehow this only made the pain worse.

  “Stand back,” Cleopatra said again, but it was a tortured whisper. “Come no nearer to me.”

  “Pain,” Julie said quietly. “You’ve told me of lost memories, but not pain. And it’s pain you feel now. You have trouble walking. You have trouble standing upright. This is all a result of what’s happening to your mind? It can’t be.”

  Cleopatra couldn’t answer, couldn’t speak. To speculate on Julie’s question was to return to those terrifying thoughts that had plagued her on the journey there: that her mind was no longer her own. That she had been invaded by one who was exploiting her current weakness. But that was too great a vulnerability to admit to in this moment. Not until she had the elixir in her hands.

  She held to the pedestal, laboring for each breath.

  Worse than the pain was this terror. This paralyzing fear that came once again in unstoppable waves. Where did it come from, this terror?

  “Cleopatra,” Julie whispered, her hand extended.

  “Don’t,” she cried. “Please, don’t…touch me. Stay back.”

  * * *

  “Why do you torture her?” the man growled. “Why?”

  Sibyl’s urge was to shake her head, but if she moved an inch she might die in this tiny washroom, only steps from the pleasant chatter of aristocrats and servants. Nothing she had said so far calmed this man.

  He gripped the back of her neck with one hand. With the other, he held the knife to her jugular vein.

  Could she cry out for help before he managed to cut her throat? He was a doctor, he’d said, after he’d shoved her into this tiny space and there’d been no hope of an escape. A doctor who knew just where to cut and slash and cause instant death.

  “Why do you do this to her? Why?”

  “I don’t know what you—”

  “You torment her! You have entered her mind. How have you done it? Sorcery? Are you a witch?”

  “I…Cleopatra. You speak of the woman who calls herself Cleopatra? You say I have entered her mind? But this is what I have been—”

  “You sent her a message. You demanded to know where you could find her. Now you are here. You are stalking her. To what end?”

  “For help. I thought we might help each other. But I had no idea she would be here. I came because…Oh, this is confused. This is so terribly confused. If you would just please calm yourself. If you would—”

  “If I would just end you, then her visions would stop,” he growled. “She would be healed of her pain. She would be healed of you.”

  A sharp knock on the door.

  It surprised them both so badly she was terrified the mad doctor’s hand might slip, allowing the knife to slice into her vein, where the blood pumped wildly thanks to a racing heart.

  “Come back later, please,” the doctor said, in a voice of maddening, terrifying calm.

  Silence from outside.

  Oh, how she wanted to cry out. She was desperate to cry out. Torture now to listen to whoever it was depart. To have been so close to rescue. But now the mad doctor’s nose was inches from her own again, his grip on the knife steady.

  “Now,” he said, “give me one reason why I shouldn’t—”

  The door was ripped backwards. The knob fell off and landed on the floor at their feet with a loud thud. Sunlight flooded the tiny bathroom.

  There stood Mr. Ramsey. Having torn the door off its hinges, he propped it against the wall behind him as if it were a small work of art. Then he grabbed the mad doctor by the back of his neck and dragged him into the hall with one hand.

  Just as she felt relief, her legs went from under her. The mad doctor had been the only thing holding her upright.

  The back of her head slammed to the dressing table. Pain thundered through her, followed by a great wave of darkness that seemed to swallow her whole.

  * * *

  “Cleopatra, please. Take my hand.”

  She stood there with her own hand out in warning. Stay back.

  Julie was not surprised.

  The queen’s knees were bent, her eyes slits. She seeme
d to be fighting a terrible sense of disorientation.

  But Julie could sense something else. A presence she could not identify. Many of them, in fact, and her heightened senses told her they were underfoot. Somehow underneath this very stone floor. This presence seemed to be coming to life at the sounds of commotion from above.

  Suddenly, Cleopatra stood upright. But at just that moment, her body pitched forward as if she’d been struck from behind by a great and terrible force. She bucked forward, her arms flying out blindly in front of her. She seized the upraised arm of the statue.

  At first, Julie thought it was Cleopatra’s pure strength that had bent the statue’s outstretched arm like a lever. But there was a great grinding sound from all around them suddenly. The floor beneath Julie began to move. Instinctively, she backed up and away. The stone that had been underfoot a split second before shifted dramatically to one side.

  Impossible to make sense of it. It was all happening so fast. And Cleopatra was wholly unaware. Perhaps she couldn’t distinguish between her spinning mind and the very real changes in her physical environment.

  She rose upright suddenly.

  “Stop!” Julie cried. “Cleopatra, stop!”

  Did she even hear?

  There was no telling, for just then, Cleopatra stepped forward and disappeared through the hole that had opened in the center of the floor.

  * * *

  She fell, expecting the plummet to end at each terrifying second. Clawing for the mud walls on either side of her. They were too far outside her reach.

  Falling and falling, until she crashed into some sort of hard metal surface. No pain, but a kind of dazed bewilderment. Then just above her, scraping sounds and a metallic whine. The darkness became impenetrable as a lid was drawn shut over her.

  She writhed and flailed, summoning all the strength she had. This was a coffin! She was trapped within a coffin! The lid was held down by a strength as formidable as her own.

  Was she the only one who heard her screams? Was she the only one deafened by them? Trapped, confined, unable to move.

  And then, motion.

  This sarcophagus—what else could it be?—was being carried away, jostling from human movement. Her screams went with it, far beneath the earth, unheard, she feared, by all those except the ones who had just taken her captive.