Mystery of the Sands

Extract

Pam bit her lip and then turned back to look at Lucien.

"And you’re absolutely sure that I don’t need to put any sun cream on?" she asked.

Lucien rolled his eyes. "Of course not," he sighed.

"All right," Pam said defensively. "It’s not my fault I don’t understand wizard things."

"I’m not a wizard, I’m a priest," Lucien said.

They were in the main exhibition hall, standing in a circle with Lucien in the centre. Everyone was present, although Zara and Lily weren’t part of the circle. They were standing a little way off, being watched carefully by Arthur the monkey. Despite the protestations of both Marcus and Lucien, Nathan had decided that the grave robbers should be informed of what was about to happen. If in their wanderings about the museum they had returned to the exhibition hall and found the others seemingly comatose, they may have tried to come to the rescue, thus ruining Lucien’s magic.

While Amber had sarcastically pointed out that Zara and Lily were unlikely to care, Pam was glad of their presence. She would be more comfortable with losing her consciousness, or whatever was going to happen to her, if she knew there were people watching.

She did not consider Zara or Lily to be a danger. It wasn’t like they knew where she lived, and anyway they seemed only interested in robbing the tombs of dead people. Plus, one encounter with a cat like hers would put them off crime for life.

Assuming, that was, that being crushed to death in the last crime they had attempted hadn’t put them off already.

"Before we begin, you should understand that we will not be able to catch the murderer out through their memories alone," Lucien said. "When sharing dream states, only the memories that are held in consensus will be projected into our minds. Otherwise we would all become confused by having the memories of several different activities all taking place at the same time. Suddenly we would all be adjudicating over a dispute, pursuing grave robbers, checking the food stores, and whatever else we were all doing with our time. So the murderer will be able to walk among us, without fear that their memories of killing Nathan will be revealed to us all. And the rest of us should be aware that the absence of those memories may not mean we are all innocent."

Nathan looked around the group.

"Well," he said. "Are we ready?"

Nobody answered in the affirmative, but there were no protests. Pam assumed that the others, like her, saw the wisdom in what they were about to do, but were not any more eager to participate as a result.

Tired of waiting for an answer, Nathan returned his gaze to Lucien. "So, what do we do?"

Lucien nodded, as though thinking things through in his head. It didn’t give Pam any confidence in his abilities whatsoever. She wondered if there was a safety position, like on a plane, that she could adopt. She wasn’t particularly sure that holding her head in her hands would help when it came to travelling 2,000 years back in time to a palace constructed entirely of memories. Still, she found it hard to resist the urge to check beneath the chair she wasn’t sitting on to make sure that the lifejacket that wasn’t there was still present.

"We should sit," Lucien said. "When our minds are in the shared memory, our bodies will be out of our control. This room has a particularly hard floor, and a selection of hard objects which we could hit ourselves on as we fall."

Why couldn’t this have all happened in a mattress factory? Pam wondered bitterly. Although in that scenario the presence of seven long-dead Egyptians would be even more bizarre.

Doing as they were told, Nathan, Amber, Matthew, Marcus, and Pam lowered themselves gently onto the cold stone floor. Lucien took his place in the circle, between Nathan and Matthew. Pam could not be sure, but she thought she spotted a flash of jealousy rippling across Matthew’s face as someone came between him and his king. He was so incredibly loyal, Pam found herself thinking. She wasn’t sure if she herself could claim to be as loyal as Matthew was about anything.

Lucien held out his palms.

"We should all link together physically," he said. "As this will allow the memories to pass more easily between us."

In unison, the group held up their hands, clasping those of the people on either side of them tightly in theirs. I’m holding hands with a mummy, Pam thought excitedly. How many other people could claim to have done that? Granted, there were probably a few scientists and archaeologists who could say the same thing, but in Pam’s case the mummy in question had a say in whether or not their hand was held.

"We all need to think very hard about the place we have come from," Lucien said.

He looked up at Pam to find a confused expression on her face.

"For you, Pam," he said, "you need to empty your mind of all thoughts in order to allow us to fill your head with our memories."

Emptying her mind turned out to be far from simple. As soon as she was instructed to do so, Pam found a huge number of irrelevant things popping into her head and refusing to leave. Song lyrics, memories of Norris fallen over, the look on her cat’s face when he hadn’t received his afternoon biscuits at the right time. Pam gritted her teeth and tried to force the memories out of her head. Gradually they left her, although it was the mental equivalent of getting the last blob of toothpaste from the tube.

With one last glance at Zara and Lily, Pam closed her eyes as the others in the group had, and waited for something to happen. She could hear the expectant breathing of Amber to her left and Marcus to her right.

Just as she was beginning to think that nothing was going to happen, and that this was all some practical joke Lucien had cooked up, Pam became aware of a bright light trying to force its way through her eyelids.

She heard gasps of surprise from way off to her right, and assumed that Zara and Lily were currently the sole audience to an amazing spectacle.