to spring from the mud. Both unique from all creation, both uniquely created in person by God and after his own image. I actually forgot, as El gave them the green things to live on and told them to fill the earth, that they had been born of the dirt.”
She stopped to check her watch. I was accustomed, by now, to this ritual—and to the fact that it might signal her imminent departure. She tapped it as I had seen the demon do in the taxi with the dashboard clock. When it seemed to work to her satisfaction, she looked up at me.
“And?” I hated the way she made me wait on her. But I did it. I did it because I wanted as much to take back to my desk, to my expanding stack of pages, as possible. I did it in the hope of having more from which to glean her purpose, her unspoken reason in sharing her story in the first place.
She shrugged. “He sat back, called it good, and rested.”
I waited.
She waited.
I raised my brows. “And?”
Her mouth curved into a smile. “You think I’m pretty, don’t you.”
THE “MUMMY” ROOM WAS dimly lit, miniature track lights shedding halogen pools onto giant sarcophagi and burial masks that were never meant to emerge from darkness. It was cooler, too, the change in light and temperature making for an appropriately tomblike atmosphere. Along the far wall, a small pantheon of gods stood sentry over the dead: Isis, Anubis, Maat, Thoth. Sections of an actual burial chamber adorned the adjacent wall, etched with symbols to protect the dead.
Thinking of the Arabic calligraphy and the amulets to ward against evil in the Nubian room, I wondered what the deceased had used to protect themselves while they lived.
Lucian sauntered through the display of sarcophagi, caressing the Plexiglas cases in a way I found thoroughly unsettling.
“I know this seems like a myth to you. Ancient history at best. But can you imagine, Clay, that all of this”—she gestured around the chamber—“stemmed from them, the original two?”
I assumed what she meant by “this” were the vestiges of an elaborate culture. Otherwise, for all practical purposes, this room was a cult tribute to death.
“After that,” she said, “we waited. Even as the man began his life with the woman, feeding her and lying down with her, we waited to see what they would do, sure there would be more. But El was finished. And there was nothing for us.”
She leaned over the sarcophagus of a princess, turning her ear to it as though to listen for tapping on the inside. “I wonder, sometimes, what it must be like to die.”
I turned away.
“Oh, don’t.” She was at my side again, her arm twining through mine.
“I want to know what this has to do with me.”
“If you don’t understand the beginning, the rest will mean nothing to you, and we’ll have wasted our time. And neither of us can afford that.” She picked a piece of lint off my sweater.
A few other patrons drifted through the mummy room as I remarked again to myself at the lack of traffic. I wouldn’t have minded more; a shallow part of me felt gratified to be seen like this with such an obviously beautiful woman on my arm. And another part of me remembered that this was no woman, no human, at all.
Wheels, skidding on pavement . . . blonde hair and blood . . .
“You picked the perfect place for me to tell you all of this. Here, among your artifacts that have managed to outlast millennia of humans like you. Can you grasp what I’ve told you? That I watched the first rising of the sun, strolled the best beaches on earth before human feet soiled the sand?”
Her head tilted toward my shoulder. “I know,” she said with a sigh. “I’m giving away my age.”
HER VOICE DROPPED TO a conspiratorial whisper. “Lucifer claimed it was spite.” She might have been any woman gossiping to a friend. Across the room, a man in his twenties tried not to openly stare at her. He mostly failed.
“It was spite, he said, that El communed with these new creatures as though they were more than walking mud, as though they could ever be worthy of anything. He knew then what we hardly dared believe: that El had created a new favorite. I have a present for you, Clay.”
I was startled by the sudden sound of my own name. “You do?” I frowned. “What is it?”
“You’ll see.” Her lips curled up, catlike.
I didn’t like that smile.
She tightened her arms around mine, hugging it to her. “Now Lucifer addressed the Legion:
We paused before a statue of the falcon-headed Horus. I hesitated and then marveled at her implication. Did I imagine it, or had she winked at it? I shuddered. She nuzzled my shoulder, her eyes on the statue. My head was spinning.
“Lucifer became obsessed with the humans. I didn’t know what to make of his fixation. I had never seen him like this. Even in the throes of his failed ascent, he had never been so intent, driven by such singularity of purpose. He studied them. He lost interest in the new world. He forgot us and even ceased to taunt El. The whole world had shrunk to this one thing: the humans.” She leaned away, her arm never leaving mine, to inspect a burial mask with vacant eyes and dark, curling hair, to trace its shape on the Plexiglas.
“He prowled the garden, inspecting for himself the handiwork of El like the jealous critic who judges the craftsmanship of the master, turning the work slowly between his hands, searching for the slightest weakness.” Her finger squeaked down the front of the display case. “And who, after long days and years of searching, finds it at last.”
