Demon Box Read online

  When our eyes become accustomed to the gloom of that empty stone sepulcher we both realize that the bottom is about an inch deep in piss. Boom boom BOOM ahee aheeee... To stave off delirium I take out my Hohner. Startled by German harmonics, the crowd becomes silent. Jacky plucks at my sleeve but I keep blowing. They all stand staring as I blow myself dizzy, filling the stone vault with good ol' G chords, and C's and F's. I'll show you ignorant pissants how a Yankee pilgrim can play and boom-boom both! I'm clear into the chorus before I realize what I'm singing:

  "Shall we gather by the rih-ver, the beautiful the beautiful the rih-hih-verrr..."

  Stare away! What beautiful river did you think it was, you Moslems, you Methodists, you Bible-belters - the Mississippi? The Congo? The Ohio?

  "Yes we'll gather by the rih-ver -"

  The Amazon? The Volga? The Yangtze? With that ancient picture on the back of your dilapidated dollar and that newborn profit in your bullrushes, what the hell river did you think it was?

  "- that flo-o-ohs by the throw-own... of God." Jacky hauls me out before I start preaching. By the time we're back through the Grand Gallery my head has stopped spinning but my insides are churning like a creekful of backslid Baptists.

  "You look bad," Jacky says.

  "I feel bad."

  We just make it into the open. To the applause of the whole aouda I toss my great Mena House breakfast all over the face of the Great Pyramid.

  October 18. Sick unto death. The Curse of the Pharaohs pins me sweating to the bed. I read some awful holocaust theories, have horrible dreams of humanity backsliding forever.

  October 19. I try to climb back up to the thing and am again wiped out with a high fever. More reading and dreams. Extrapolating. Okay, let's say it's coming: the Shit Storm. Let's say the scientists have definitely spotted it, like in When Worlds Collide. People everywhere are soiling their laundry, rushing around in circles, demanding somebody do something. Do what? Send an elite sperm bank into space, as Dr. Leary proposes in Terra II, thus giving the strain at least a shot in the dark?

  Accept it as the Will of Allah and let it wash over us?

  Try to outswim it?

  But wait. There isn't any real evidence for the need of a lifeboat to preserve the species. The Shit Storm has happened many times and Homo sapiens has hung in there. What is really in jeopardy is not our asses, or our souls. It's our civilization.

  Imagine, after some sudden absolute-near-annihilation (they've found mastodons frozen with fresh flowers in their mouths - that sudden) - that there are little clots of survivors clinging to remote existences. Imagine how they struggle to preserve certain basic tricks. How would we hang on to let's say for example pasteurization? It's hard to explain bacteriology to a caveful of second-generation survivors, even with the aid of some surviving libraries. Rituals would have to come first.

  "Remember, boil-um that milk! Boil-um that milk!"

  "Will do, Wise Old Grandsir. Boil milk!" They break into the milk song: "Boil-um that milk an' kill-um that bug that nobody see but make-um you sick."

  The libraries exist! Old rituals hold clues to their whereabouts. Old chants! Chambers! Charts -!

  At this point Jacky Cherry breaks into my fever in a fervor. "Muldoon's here! He's found somebody who says he knows where it is! He's going to lead us out there tonight."

  "Knows what?" I rally a bit from my stupor. "Who?"

  "A local visionary. He had a vision three Americans were looking for a secret hall so he drew a map to it!"

  "A map?"

  "To an underground hall! The guy must have something on the ball to know we were looking for one, sounds to me like."

  Sounds to me like Jacky is getting a little desperate over the flak from the home office about the resultless state of our expedition, but I dress and totter out to the street. Muldoon is negotiating with a little man in a blue gellabia.

  It is Marag.

  IV: DOWN THE TOMBS OF TAURUS

  "A drought is upon her waters; and they shall be dried up: for it is the land of graven images, and they are mad upon their images!"

  - Jer. 50:38

  Still October 19, Saturday afternoon, only a few tense seconds having elapsed.

  "Good morning, my friend," says Marag, sifting his hand from the sleeve of his blue gellabia; "It is a good morning?"

  I tell him it isn't a bad morning for two in the afternoon and shake his hand. We look each other over for the first time in the daylight. He's older than I thought, graying, but his eyes are as youthfully bright and black as his teeth are white. He's smiling at me to see what I'll do. There's protocol at stake here on this sunny sidewalk: an acknowledgement that this is my main hash man could be a faux pas costing me a good connection; on the other hand discretion might be taken as a snub, etc.

  Muldoon ends my dilemma by introducing him to me as Marvin instead of Marag. I tell him my name is Devlin. Muldoon says Marvin has this map, and quick little hands produce a roll of paper. Something is dimly penciled secondhand over a kid's math assignment still showing through. We lean to look and it rolls back up like a windowshade.

  "Marvin says it's a map, to a Secret Hall of Holy History -"

  "Secret Tunnel," Marag corrects, "of Angel History. Not far. I have car and driver will take you there very reliable. Hut! Nephew! My friends from America. Hut hut hut!"

  He waves at a guy slouched against the fender of his cab at the curb, a surly sort about twenty years old, wearing polyester-knit slacks and a polo shirt, sleeves rolled up to emphasize the arms-folded biceps. He looks us over, the set of his jaw and the beetle of his brow letting us know here, by Allah, is a customer cool yet dangerous. He answers Marag's hail with a curt nod, the very image of rawboned threat were the effect not flawed by the driver's actual squat-legged big-butted round-shouldered shape.

  "Not so much education," Marag confides, "but a fine driver."

  "Say, Marvin, just where'd you get that map?" I can't remember mentioning anything to him the other night about the Hall of Records.

  "I hear talk the American doctors one with baldness are searching for the Secret Tunnels. I draw this last night this map."

  "You drew it?"

  "And have my son write in the words. Very reliable secret map. My family is live at Nazlet el-Samman many hundreds of years, pass down all is know."

  Muldoon says all he is know is Marvin wants ten pounds for it. Ten pounds! Jacky and I say at once.

  "Only five for me," Marag hastens to add. "Other five for car and my nephew driver." He notes our hesitation and shrugs good-naturedly. "As you wish, my friends. I don't blame you being cautious. We take only five now - for car, gasoline - and my five for map when you are return satisfied. Is good? Only five now?"

  Five seems to be the going front figure. Marag keeps grinning at me.

  "Let's go for it," I decide. I take a five-pound note out of my wallet. The hand comes out and the note vanishes into the folds of the blue gellabia; not as quick as the nephew's eye, though; he comes fuming over and he and Marag have a splendid argument in screaming Egyptian.

  As squat as the nephew is, he still is some inches taller than his bantyweight uncle, and you can tell he's pushed a little iron down at the YMMA. Still, it's an obvious no-contest. That bright-eyed little mink of a man would swarm all over Cool Yet Dangerous, leaving nothing but a pear core.

  "My nephew is a fool with money," he confides, showing us all toward the battered Fiat. "But a most reliable driver you can be insured."

  As he bustles around the car closing us in, I realize he isn't coming along.

  "Also most furthersome. His name is T'udd."

  "Thud?" we all ask in mutual dawning apprehension. "Thud?" - as a thick brown thumb punches the starter into a victorious roar. Pumping the foot feed, Thud turns and gives us a thick-lipped leer of triumph. The map is crumpled in his hand.

  "I haven't seen a grin like that," Jacky concedes, "since Sal Mineo won the Oscar for Young Mussolini."

  Th
ud adjusts the mirror so he can see his reflection, brushes back an oily lock, then "peels out" is, I believe, the term: lays rubber in a squealing fishtailing brodie away from the Mena House turnaround off down Pyramid Boulevard, the pedal to whatever metal there is in a Fiat floorboard. Too late we realize we are in the sainted presence of Brainless Purity; as Las Vegas has distilled Western Materialism down to its purest abstract, so Thud is the assimilated essence of motormad Egypt. Blinking his headlights and blaring his terrible warhonk, he charges the afternoon traffic ahead, fearless as the Bedouin! wild as the Dervish! He reaches the creeping tail end of the traffic pack at full fifty. Never touching the brake he goes rocking shockless over the shoulder to the right of a poky VW, cuts back sharply between two motorcycles, and guns into the left lane to pass a tour bus, the passengers gawking horrified as we cut back just in time, then to the other lane around one of those big six-wheeled UAR machines the two soldiers on top with a cannon-passing left or right, again and again, just making it each time by the skin of our grill, finally getting in front of the pack to what looks like a promising clear stretch a chance to really unwind -- except for one minor nuisance, a little accident jam ahead, about thirty cars, coming up fast -

  "Thud!"

  There is the sickening metal-to-metal cry of brakes screaming for new shoes; then the shudder of the emergency against more scored metal; finally the last-minute cramping skid. My door is inches from the rear of a flatbed full of caged turkeys.

  "Jacky for the love of God, tell him no more! I've got a wife and kids! Tell him, Muldoon!"

  It's no use; both interpreters are in tongue-tied shock. Thud can't hear anyway, has his horn full down and his head out the window, demanding to know the meaning of all this mangled machinery impeding us. He eases ahead so we can see. It's two flimsy Fiat taxies just like ours, amalgamated head on, like two foil gum wrappers wadded together. No cops; no ambulances; no crowd of rubberneckers; just the first of those skinny street jackals sniffing the drippings, and what apparently is the surviving cab driver groggily standing on the center stripe with a green print handkerchief pressed to his bloody ear with one hand, waving the oncoming traffic around with the Other. Thud keeps shouting until he provokes a response. He pulls his head back in and passes the information on to us, so matter-of-factly that Jacky is brought from his trance to translate.

  "He says that's a relative, mother's side. The dead cabby is also a relative. Was a good relative but not a very good driver - not amin, not reliable."

  "Tell him about my unreliable heart!"

  Too late - Thud has spotted what looks to him like a remote possibility, is peeling around the rival driver - the green paisley handkerchief hanging unheld to the injured ear as the man shakes both fists after us in outrage - Thud paying no heed - all under control - situating the rumpled map on the dash so he can study it as he simultaneously scans the road checks his face in the rearview honks his horn drives down the wrong side of the center line straight at a big fucking yellow Dodge panel oncoming with furniture all inside packed clear to the windshield a brass bedstead lashed to the grill in front springs on top while Thud -- [Here, the page of the journal is smeared]

  October 20. Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, just after dawn and before breakfast... out in back of my cabana in chaise lounge without the chaise.

  Jacky went to the desk last night and raised a dausha about them not putting his call through to Jann Wenner and us not getting separate rooms yet. He was so effective they moved us right out of our nice room into two poolside cabanas, tiny cement cells intended for bathing-suit changers, not residents: a hard cot, no windows, no hot water, costing as much apiece as our other room. But Jacky was going nuts with me prowling weird in the wee wired hours from all that Turkish coffee and Pakistani hash...

  I've wheeled the lounge chair from the pool to where I can sit looking at the Great Pyramid over the hotel ledge. The morning sky is spectacular, piled with thunderheads. The air is so still I can hear the pyramid ravens jiving around the summit, a dozen black specks jostling for the king perch on the long wooden pole that is planted atop the pyramid to indicate where the peak would be if the capstone was in place. They are having a great time, swooping and skawking. Must be better than Turkish coffee. Kirlian photographs of small pyramid models show force fields streaming straight up out of the peaks, like volcanoes erupting pure energy. There are all sorts of tales of mysterious machinations manifesting on top of the Great Pyramid: compasses going crazy, wine botas shooting sparks, radium paint crumbling off the wristwatch dials to rattle around inside the crystals like green sand. I should check it out before going home...

  Yesterday was the first time away from the pyramid since coming out from Cairo a week ago. I had resolved that I would concentrate my time only on the Giza area and resist the tourist's mistake of trying to "see it all."

  But yesterday we were driven to see one of those alls, for all of my resolve, and damn near to our doom as well. Thud turned out to be about as reliable and furthersome as Marag's map, and a much dirtier burn.

  As soon as we were a good skid away from the Mena House he forsook the ability to comprehend any English whatsoever, and when he finally realized that Jacky and Muldoon weren't shouting Arabic phrases for his hairbreadth triumph through that amazing pile-up he went into such a cloudy sulk that even they couldn't reach him. Every request for slower speeds was answered with a "Mish fahim abadan."

  "It means?"

  "It means I don't understand,' " Jacky screamed. "But what it really means is we have insulted the sonofabitch! He's kidnapping us is what it amounts to."

  Thud wrenched the car full right, off the crowded Pyramid Boulevard onto a narrow blacktop running between a high shady row of Australian gum on the right side and a wide irrigation canal full of half-sunken cows and car carcasses on our left. Free at last of the sticky traffic, Thud could cruise full out with nothing in the way but insignificant items - chickens, children, donkeys, and the like.

  "Thud" - I tried to make contact over a more universal frequency - "you trite pile of outdated camel shit, you're driving too fast!"

  "Also too far," Muldoon added, scratching his head. "I think he's taking us out to Sakkara, to the Step Pyramid."

  "That damned Marag set me up."

  "You mean Marvin?" In the front seat Jacky has captured the wad of paper from the dash. "Maybe not. See, this map isn't actually to Zoser but to some area a ways past it, to a place called the Tunnels of Serapeum. See? He might have thought it meant seraphim, as in angels."

  We gave up trying to get through to Thud. Jacky said all our shouting was just making it worse, and Muldoon added that it was probably a good idea for us to see Sakkara anyway. For perspective. "The Step Pyramid is the old-age champion grandaddy in all camps, except Cayce's. It's worth seeing, got a lot of soul."

  "Have you seen this Tunnel of Angel thing?"

  "Serapeum? I went through it with a class. It's got a lot of - of I guess you might say balls."

  After about twenty miles along that canal road we took another right, west up out of the narrow Nile Valley onto another limestone plateau. When you crest the rise you can see the Giza group shining across miles of sand, like channel markers in the sun. Then, the other direction and much nearer, the step structure of King Zoser.

  "Very badly gnawed by the tooth of time," said Muldoon. "One of the guys at the university has an act called Tennessee Egypt. He sings a song about this tomb called 'The Old Rugged Pyramid.' "

  Thud was so placated by his magnificent drive that his comprehension returned and Muldoon talked him into detouring for a look. We followed Muldoon through the reconstructed temple gates toward the dilapidated old structure. "Built for King Zoser, they say, by an architectural genius named Imhotep. About fifty years before the Great Pyramid, the Egyptologists say."

  It was hard to think of this primitive pile as being only fifty years older than the masterwork of Giza, but it was even harder to think of it as being 5,0
00 years younger than Cayce's construction date.

  Muldoon took us to a tipped stone box at the rear of the pyramid where you climb up and look through a two-inch peephole. A stone effigy is sitting at the rear of the module, tipped back in the same incline as the box, like an astronaut ready to fire himself into space.

  Muldoon told us how they think the pyramid was built by a continual adding of new wings to the basic block tomb, finally stacking them up in diminishing steps. "Some of Khufu's contractors saw it later, the theory goes, and said, 'Hey! if you just filled in those steps you'd have a great pyramid; let's build one for the Chief.' "

  He escorted us down into beautiful chambers of alabaster, tattooed ceiling-to-floor with comic strips of daily Egyptian life 5,000 years ago. There were farmers plowing, planting, harvesting; a thief was traced from crime to capture to trial; fishermen cast nets from boats over underwater reliefs depicting finny denizens in meticulous zoological detail, some familiar, some long since disappeared.

  Thud followed behind, getting more and more impatient with all this interest in things immobile. Finally he would follow no farther; he stood with his arms folded, calling out threats.

  "His dander is up again," Jacky translated. "He says if we don't get back to his taxi he's going to go on without us."

  Even fixed again behind the wheel Thud's dander didn't go back down. All the rest of the desert drive to the Serapeum location he bitched at us for taking so long, and just to look at a lot of dirty graves! We tried to humor him, offering gum, asking him to join us down the Serapeum tombs. Phhht! Crawl down in a big hole like a lizard? Not on all our lives!

  We left him revving his motor and walked out into the sand. We had no problem following the trail of torn tickets to the underground temple's entrance, a wide, sloping slot cut through the limestone down to a high square door. It looked like a steep driveway down to a sub-level garage for desert trucks.

  At the bottom the armed Arab took our piastres and handed us three half tickets from the pile of already torn halves. We entered the high door and turned left down a spacious passage, roughly hewn through the earth. Another guard asked us for another payment and took the scraps from us and halved them again. He solemnly returned our halved halves to us and placed his on his dusty pile (which was only half the size of the other guy's halves, being only quarters) and waved us on. It grew dimmer. There was another turn, left or right (I'm lost now), and another high door and we were in the main tunnel.