One of the mummies - a Ptolemy and a cousin of Cleopatra, according to Mael - ran his partially unwrapped hands over the glass of a display case and then started beating on it with his palms. Mael hobbled toward him but couldn't stop him from shattering the glass. It cascaded down his bandaged legs in a torrent of tiny green cubes. Long shards of it stuck into his arms and his hands but he ignored them as he bent to retrieve a clay jar from the exhibit. Hieroglyphs covered its surface and the stopper was carved wood in the shape of a falcon's head. Mael tried to pull the mummy away from the jagged glass but the undead Egyptian refused to be lead. He was far too intent on cradling the jar against his chest.
It was the first time Gary had seen a dead man motivated by anything but hunger. "What's in that thing that's so important?" he asked.
A spectral smile twitched across Mael's leathery lips. His intestines.
Gary could only grimace in revulsion.
They don't understand this place, Gary. So much has changed and so quickly. They think they're in hell and they cling to the things they know and understand.
"I imagine the same could be said of you." It was a taunt but a half-hearted one.
Perhaps. I am a little better off than them. I have access to the eididh. It's how I learned your language and everything else I know about Manhattan. That flickering smile again.
"I've only been able to see the energy, the life force. You can get information out of the network?"
Oh, yes. Our memories go there when we drop, lad. Our personalities. What our elderly friends here would call the ba. It is the storehouse of our hopes and our fears. Indra's net. The akashic record. The collected works of the human race, all available in one handy volume. You and I can read anything there, if we open ourselves to the possibility.
"You and me. Because we can still think. You need to make a conscious effort to reach into the network and the others, the, the dead out there, they can't make that leap, not with what they've got for brains."
Aye.
"But there's a difference between you and me, as well. I can feel it. You - your energy, it's more compact. Like a living person almost but dark like mine. I can't explain it so well..."
You're doing fine. The mummies and me, now, we don't share your hunger. Our bodies are incorruptible, in the old palaver. Only natural preservatives used to maintain freshness. That twitchy smile again. Then there's the fact that you chose this. You did it to yourself.
"I can't be the only one, though. You found me from a distance, you must know if there are others like us."
Mael nodded. A few. Mostly of my sort but you were not the only one to abuse yourself like this. There's a boy in a place called Russia. Very promising. Struck down in a hit and run. He suffered for months with machines pumping his heart for him but his parents wouldn't let the doctors pull the plug. Another one here in your country. In California, she calls it. A yoga teacher hiding out in an oxygen bar. I have no idea what that means. She had the same brilliant idea you did, but it didn't work as well for her. Woke up with a bad headache and found she'd lost her multiplication tables and plenty more besides. Such as her name.
Gary nodded. "They might as well be on the moon. It's funny. A couple of days ago I thought I was the only one and that was okay. Then you contacted me. It's like I only got so lonely when I knew I wasn't alone." He reached into the broken display case and picked up a jewel in the shape of a jackal-headed god. It was beautiful - worked by loving hands. A made thing. All that was over now. "What happened to us, Mael? What caused the Epidemic?"
The Druid scratched his chin. Thinking hard, the gesture said. Mael was a master of body language, even with just one arm. I know what you think it was. A disease same as the grippe or the pox. Can't say as I agree but then I just learned about germ theory a day or two ago. In my time we would have talked in terms of retribution. Judgment.
"For what?"
Take your pick, lad. For what you've done to the earth, I might say, but then I'm just an old tree-hugger from way back. For what you did to each other, maybe. I know that sort of thing won't sit easy with you. In your world things just happen, eh? Accidental, like. Random. We thought otherwise. For us everything happened for a reason.
Walk with me, Gary. I have but a little time to converse with you. There's dark work that needs doing. Fighting. Slaughtering, before this is through.
"Huh?" Gary demanded. It was all he could think to say.
We'll get to that in proper time. Let me show you something first.
Mael lead him through the Egyptian wing of the Met. The mummies had taken it over and Gary saw for the first time how morbid the place was. An inside-out graveyard where the dead were put on display for schoolchildren. Gary saw a mummy trying on jewelry in one room, the turquoise and gold necklaces glinting against the stained linen at her throat. In another room a truly ancient mummy who was little more than rags and bones was trying to pry open a massive sarcophagus with his splayed fingers. It looked like he was trying to return to the tomb.
Mael stopped at a room partitioned off by a folding screen. The exhibit beyond was only half finished: clearly the curators had been working on it when they abandoned the museum during the Epidemic. The walls had been painted a sky blue and in white italic script above a row of empty display cases was written MUMMIES AROUND THE WORLD. The bodies in this room were truly dead. SIBERIAN ICE MUMMIES were little more than incomplete skeletons with clumps of hair attached to their broken skulls; MOUNTAIN MUMMIES OF PERU showed hollow darkness through their sunken orbits, their brains having long since rotted away. At the back of the room sat a long low case that had been shattered from the inside. Gary crunched glass underfoot as he approached it. A CELTIC BOG MUMMY FROM SCOTLAND, he read. This must have been Mael's sepulcher.
THE MUMMY IN THIS CASE LIVED IN THE TIME OF THE ROMANS. HE WAS MOST LIKELY A PRIEST OR A KING, Gary read.
A little of both, actually. Also a musician and an astronomer and a healer, when the need arose. Yes, Gary, I too was a physician in my day. You would probably consider my methods crude but I did more good than ill on the whole.
Gary squatted down to study the display. There was a recreation of how Mael would have looked in life - pretty much exactly like the apparitions that had appeared to him downtown. Next to this was a picture of Stonehenge, which the museum assured Gary was not built by the Celts but which they had used to predict solar eclipses. "How did you die?" he asked.
Now there's a tale to tell. Mael sat down on a display case full of partially preserved skulls and ruminated for a while before continuing. We took turns, is how. The burnt bannock cake came to me in my twenty-third year. That's how we chose the anointed ones, drawing bits of cake out of a bag. The summer had been too cool for the corn and my people were in danger of starvation. So they took me to the oaks above M��in Boglach and hanged me until I gurgled for breath. When they cut me down and I plunged into the black water below the peat I had a prayer to Teutates on my lips. Oh, lord, please make the grains to grow. Something of the sort.
Gary noticed for the first time that the rope around Mael's neck wasn't for decoration. It was a noose. "Jesus," Gary breathed. "That's horrible."
Mael came alive with anger as he responded, his head shaking so violently Gary worried it might fall off. It was glorious! I was the soul of my island in that moment, Gary, I was the hopes of my tribe made agonized flesh. I was born for that dying. It was magical.
Gary reached out and put a hand on Mael's arm. "I'm truly sorry - but you wasted your death. Teutates, whoever that was. He couldn't make the crops grow."
Mael stood up hurriedly and hobbled out of the room. Maybe so, maybe so. Luckily for me then that's not how the tale ended.
My world was a few score houses and a scrap of planted field. Beyond that lay only the forest - the place where the nasties roamed in the night. We had none of your technological advances but we knew things you've forgotten. Aye, true things - valuable things. We knew our place in the landscape. We knew what it meant to be part of something larger than ourselves.
When I woke here I was blind. Parts of me were missing. I didn't understand the language of my captors nor why they would shut me up in a tiny glass coffin. I only knew my sacrifice had failed - they don't work, you know, if you survive. It took me months before I opened myself to the eididh and finally understood. I had served one purpose in life. I would serve another in death.
I had become the nasty in the night.
Which brings us up to date, my boy, and to the time when I turn things around and ask you a question. I've work to do and you'd be a great help.
"Work? What kind?"
Ah, well. I'm going to butcher all the survivors. The Druid's voice had taken on a melancholy weariness Gary could barely stand to have echoing in his head. This was not a task that he wanted, definitely not anything he'd asked for. It was a duty. Gary got all that from the Druid's tone of voice. I spoke to you about judgment, well. I am the instrument of that judgment. I'm here to make it happen.
"Jesus. You're talking about genocide."
He shrugged. I'm talking about what we are. I'm talking about why we were brought back with brains in our head - to finish what's begun. Now, lad.
Are you in or out?