I ran back through the halls and out into the desert, gasping to restore my breath and slow my heart. But then I stopped. If the cat had found a way forward, then perhaps I was meant to follow. If I fled this dark place now, I would never know. I hit the wall of the chapel with my fists, forcing myself back to reality, these actions helping me to achieve a state that felt enough like clarity to enable me to make a decision. It was as if I heard Tanefert in my head urging me, 'Don't let your fear conquer you. Use your fear. Think.'
I gathered up all my courage – some Medjay officer, some detective, who was suddenly afraid of the dark! – and re-entered the chapel sanctuary. I felt around the back of the stele. Nothing but builders' dust. So much for the materials of eternity. I felt along the edges of the wall. I licked my finger and held it just slightly off the wall. Was I imagining it? A cooling, the remotest possibility of a current of air where there should be none? I slipped with difficulty into the narrow space behind the stele and found a gap, barely wide enough for me to pass through to a dark and dusty space, lit, strangely, by a single oil lamp. What little light this gave revealed the cat sitting in the dark, waiting. It turned, its tail curled as elegantly as a temple dancer's finger, and slipped down some stone steps and disappeared. I picked up the lamp. It had an exquisite beauty that reminded me of other sophisticated and elegant things I had seen in the city. I put the thought to one side and raised the lamp, revealing more of the way. By its wavering light I took my first steps down into the deep shadows.
At the bottom, perhaps twenty steps down, I found the cat waiting for me. I greeted her, but she darted away down a tunnel that vanished into a yet deeper darkness. The little tinkle of the charm around her neck was quickly lost. I held up the lamp. Its flame struggled against little gusts of hot air charged with the scents of sand and humid black-ness that rose up to me from the region of spirits. I was afraid. But what choice did I have now? 'Do you go down into the Otherworld, as it is said in the Chapters of Coming Forth by Day.' So I began to walk.
It was not a straight path, but a winding serpent, sometimes sinuous, sometimes zig-zagged, and soon my orientation was baffled. The Otherworld is said to be populated by monstrous-headed beings who haunt its terrible caverns and treacherous passing points. The Book of the Dead has efficacious prayers and spells to be spoken to those monstrous guardians who will yield only to their secret names. But could I recall any of those prayers now? Not one. I shivered, hop-ing no monster would rise up invisibly in this darkness to block my path and demand the fatal passwords.
I had walked now for a long time in my circle of light. The lamp was growing fainter and weaker. I could not estimate, even from a rough count of my paces, where I was. Then the wick guttered, flared for a moment in its last struggle for life, and died. I was plunged into a far deeper blindness than I had ever encountered; always, no matter how obscure the last corner of the alleyway or the deepest room in a deserted house, some light from the world had suggested itself somewhere, but not here. My eyes swam with half-ghosts, the strange, jumbled imaginings of my mind. I dropped the useless thing, and as it hit the stone it jarred horribly. Echoes noisy enough to wake the dead ran like banshees up and down the passageway.
I put out my hands either side of me, but they were invisible, as if numb in the dark. Then I touched the wall of the tunnel, and like a blind man who feels the world only through the point of his stick, and not through the hand that holds it, I began to edge my way onwards into the chaos of the dark. I tried to keep count of my paces as I had no other way of gauging my progress in time or space. But soon the numbers blurred, and I felt disorientated by the slow count.
I walked on like a dead man without his spirit, grazing and bruising myself on unseen corners, banging into the twists and turns of the walls. What few crumbs of comfort I had had – the lit lamp, the presence of the now-vanished cat, the enigmatic message – now lost all meaning and all hope.
Then, as I peered ahead into the endless blackness, it seemed to me I could see a star low in the dark. I walked on, concentrating on it, my lost hands still struggling to guide me between the walls. The more I wanted to believe it was brightening, the more it did. But could my imagination be tricking me with shadows? Or was this the approach of the moment of death, the bright light shining described by those who claim to have approached the threshold of the Otherworld and returned? The star then became a shape, a threshold of light framing a figure – waiting, it seemed in my madness, for me. I began to panic, afraid the opening would slam shut before I could reach it. I struggled on, my knuckles grazing sharply against the walls. I licked the blood and its saltiness shocked me back to a sense of life.
And then I was running, running, my breath rasping, my heart thudding, through the darkness towards the changing, expanding star, reaching out to the figure of a waiting woman. Tanefert? I heard myself shouting her name: 'Tanefert! Tanefert!' And then I collapsed through a doorway into light.