I released Thoth’s muzzle, and he bounded into the darkness. Red light flared from the burning oil that had splashed from Sobek’s lamp, and spread across the wall behind me. I heard barking, and then, gratifyingly, screaming. But I needed Sobek alive, to give evidence, and above all to return my son to me. I shouted an urgent order to the baboon as I ran along the dark gallery towards the figure huddled on the ground. I held my lamp up. Thoth had bitten deeply into Sobek’s throat; there was a great gash down one side of his mauled face, tearing his eye from the socket, and the ragged flesh of his cheek hung loosely from the face, exposing bone and vessels. Black blood was pulsing from the neck wound. I knelt down and dragged his ruined face close to mine.
‘Where is my son?’
Blood gurgled in his mouth as he tried to laugh.
I pressed my thumbs down on his eyes.
‘What do you see now?’ I whispered into his ear. ‘Nothing. There is nothing. You are nothing. There is no Otherworld. This darkness you see is your eternity.’
I pressed harder and harder, forcing his eyes back into their sockets, and his legs kicked in the dust like a swimmer drowning on dry land, and he squealed like a rodent, and I felt blood under my fingers, I kept pushing until his vicious heart pumped the last of his black blood from his body, and he was dead.
I kicked his useless corpse, over and over, stamping on the remains of his face until I lost all strength. Then I collapsed on the ground, sobbing in defeat. For his death had achieved nothing. I had done wrong. The oil lamp was dimming fast. I no longer cared.
And then-I heard something. Far, far off: the sound of a child, waking from a nightmare to find himself alone in the darkness, weeping and screaming…
‘I’m coming!’
Amenmose’s screams came back louder.
Thoth bounded ahead of me, into the greater depths of the darkness, but sure of himself as he moved left and right, making the choices for me. And all the time we cried out to each other, father and son, screaming for life.
Thoth found him at the end of one of the deepest galleries. His small head stood out above the rim of a pot large enough for a fully grown baboon. His face was sticky with tears and dirt, and his cries were inconsolable. I scrabbled around for a stone with which to smash open the pot without hurting him. And I kissed the howling boy, and tried to calm him a little, calling ‘Amenmose, my son’ over and over. The first blow did not crack the pot. He howled louder still. Then, with another surer blow, the pot split open. I dragged the shards apart, the dirt cascaded out, and at last I held my son’s shaking, cold, filthy body in my arms.
The lamp was guttering now. We had to try to find our way out before we lost the light. I shouted a command to Thoth. He barked as if he understood me, and bounded ahead. I held the boy under my arm, and ran after him, unable to protect the flame at the same time.
But too soon, it flickered and died.
Utter darkness. The boy whimpered, and began to cry again. I shushed him, tried to comfort him.
‘Thoth!’
The baboon bounded to my side, and by feel and habit I fastened the leash on to his collar. He moved on into the blackness, and all I could do was follow, trying to protect the boy from harm as we bumped into walls, and tripped on the uneven floor. Hope, that most delicate of emotions, flickered in me as weak as the lamplight had been. I kissed my son’s eyes in despair. He was quiet now, as if my presence in the dark comforted him, and any fate would now be acceptable.
And then, I saw a brief flash in the obscurity. Perhaps I had imagined it, a figment of my desperate brain. But Thoth barked again, and then the light duplicated itself, and I heard calls coming to me, as if from the lost world of life and sunlight. I shouted back. The lights turned and gathered, coming towards me, like sacred deliverance from the shadows. As they approached I looked down at my son’s little face. His eyes opened wide as he watched the lights in the darkness, like something from a fable bringing him to the happy ending of a scary story.
In the shaking light of the first lamp I recognized a familiar face, at once fearful and relieved. Khety.