The Daughter of Tem

Creeping, October fog lay thick around the Chamberlain Hotel’s empty veranda and clung close to the windows, like fragile, but heavy hands pounding silently on the thick, leaded glass. On better days, one could have sat in a fine wicker chair, drinking strong iced tea and watching the slow New England summers roll down the bunting-christened streets of Ogden, Massachusetts. However, when the leaves died and gathered themselves into already stuffed gutters, the town emptied and boarded up shore houses would stand solemn watch until the cold retreated to Labrador and the warm Bermuda wind came sweeping up the coast. I certainly would have welcomed such a wind.

Inside the hotel’s dining room, I sat by the crackling fire, distracted from the thick parcel of notes on my lap, unsure whether my distraction came from the comfort of dancing flames or my desire to heave the notes into them. Tel-el-Thinis, Tomb of the Reeds, 1919-1921 Dig Report by Dr. T.H. Finchley the cover droned across the front page. In my head, it had his voice. His voice. The voice I came here to escape is still corroding my ears, even this many miles from Boston. I sighed and buried my head in my hands.

It had been my wife’s idea to take a weekend away, alone, unfortunately, but at least away. She made me promise twice, once in the kitchen and again at North Union Station that I would leave this packet of foolishness at home, but sure enough they found their way into my suitcase yesterday and onto my lap today.

I sat hunched and alone, trying to ignore the hovering innkeeper, one hand wrapped around a half-eaten English muffin, the other tapping absently on page 486, the wall in my research. It had taken the miserable old man four hundred and eighty-six arid pages to finally get to where they opened the strange tomb of tel-el-Thinis, far up the ancient Nile.

The journey to page eighty-six told the tale of the lowly dig. Far up the Nile, and missing the soaring pageantry of Giza or the Valley of the Kings, tel-el-Thinis was a marshy hill between sugar cane plantations near Gurga’s Coptic monastery, rediscovered by an old farmer clearing land. The old man had found a pair of gilded cat mummies, laying nose to tail, encased in the Nile mud. The colonial officers had first reached out to the British exploration of Dr. Horace Wray at Luxor. Wray, already managing two digs, the Luxor one and a smaller expedition at Deir el-Medina, and not fancying digging in a bog, declined, but emphatically offered the services of his American colleague Thomas Howard Finchley who had been working at the smaller dig. The more I read, the more I think Wray was sick of Finchley and wanted to get rid of him. Having worked with the man, I can’t really blame him.

In command of his own fresh dig, the pompous little man had puffed out his chest, declared the mound a ritual site, and had optimistically named the boggy mound in honor of Thinis, the lost capital of the first dynasty. The dig proper began on New Year\'s Day, 1919 amongst the sugar cane, beneath the same Horian sky that had engulfed that place since the distant days.

The dig had been as tedious as Dr. Wray had feared. The soil was marshy, the weather was unseasonably poor, and every time they had begun to dig towards where they believed the remains of a structure were, they would just uncover more cat mummies, so many that in letters back to Wray, only around a fourth of which received a response, Finchley had begun calling the place Tel-el-Bis, the mound of the cat. It took them until late June to find a series of stairs, descending into the mound, and by that time, the Nile had already begun to spread its life-giving tendrils up from the Sudan and into the blossom of the full flood season.

The plantation had remained flooded until the second week in February. During this period, Finchley’s notes were brimming with sketches, grandiose predictions of what lay beneath the mound, and of course cats. Page after page of cats.

He began again in late February. By the end of March, they had uncovered the entrance to a small tomb with a novel sigil upon the door and a warning ringing the threshold among other blessings and curses. There was quite a bit of debate on what the warning actually said, even amongst our department, but I eventually settled on the translation. “Let no unrighteous man tread in the house built for ages to come.”

From this date on, Finchleys notes grow less organized. According to him, half the dig workers left, elders gathered on the edge of the sugarcane to pray duas of protection from dusk ‘til dawn, and the coptic monks began having prayer services in the middle of the night. By the time Finchley had decided to break the seal, only a small remnant remained, mostly Americans who had followed him up the Nile from Beit-el-Medina. Upon breaking the seal, the expedition found a low, triangular room, filled nearly to the cane root tangled roof with sediment, dripping with moisture and reeking of bad air.

By now Finchley and most of his team had stopped sleeping save for a few hours a night, towards morning. Shovel after shovel of mud slapped out into the sun, and with it came the degraded mummies of thirteen cats. While their condition was poor, Finchley recorded that the cats had been richly decorated and painstakingly posed. By late May, the mud had been lowered to reveal a great sarcophagus on a raised dias. By the first week in June they had completely uncovered the sarcophagus, revealing that it first, empty, secondly, built into the dias itself, and thirdly and most strangely seemed to have some kind of grip or handle on the interior, never seen in any Egyptian burial before or since. On June 16th, he had finished recording the bas reliefs on the interior of the tomb and had resolved to try and open the bottom of the sarcophagus, or the “door of the dead” as he had called it.

After this page, his notes faltered and then swung from the words of an overly optimistic scientist to those of an old man lost in his imagination. He never said what became of the door, or what he found beneath. All that was recorded was a rough sketch of a hole descending into darkness. Probably imagination, for surely by then the tunnel, if there was such a tunnel at all, would have been filled with water.

They said he kept digging until mid July, when the floodwaters were pouring down the stairs. In spite of himself, Dr. Wray had rushed by steamship down from Luxor and dragged Finchley, jaundiced and raving, back to Cairo. That’s not what he’d said in his lectures, but seeing the notes, I believed Wray. Yet, even if the notes were worthless, the pictures were all there at least: the tomb and its bas relieved walls, the door and its prophecy of doom on any intruders, the empty sarcophagus, the unmovable panel, and the thirteen mummified cats in the chamber itself.

This is where I came in, 1921.

Finchley, mostly recovered, had returned to Boston to write his notes and experiences, bringing with him a half dozen of the most degraded mummies for his graduate students to dissect. At first I had seen it as an opportunity, but in the end, I saw it as little more than an exercise in one man’s delusion, with little to show for it other than the gold and lapis baubles wrapped into the moldering shrouds.

The darkness of the front room was growing oppressive. The green and gold wallpaper patterns took on strange undulations and unsettling patterns in the late-morning gloom, seeming to grow closer and more complex as I continued tapping at the page and not eating the muffin. I felt a slight chill running up my back though the fire was oppressively warm. Finchley had mentioned the cats often at the end and I, even having touched them, cut them, and seen what was inside, the circle of them around the sarcophagus keeping eternal sentry never failed to give me that chill. Something about its otherworldly dedication, its unshakable belief in the unknown frightened me, but only after the fact, just as the warning on the door had only frightened Finchley on his return to the States. Even in the warm, tacky safety of the Chamberlain Hotel I needed to remind myself that dead men’s curses do not make old men die of pneumonia.

The page started to swim in my eyes, words and pictures combining to make unreadable monsters and blobs of disconnected letters. Merrilee was right. I shouldn’t have taken these notes to waste my time. A walk, a good dinner, good night’s rest, and, most importantly, time away from page 486 should restore me. A wise man retreats before he is defeated, something Dr. Finchley should have learned sooner.

Sighing again, I placed the muffin back on the blue china plate and looked for the innkeeper who, true to form, was at my side in mere seconds, clearing away the dishes with the stiff grace unique to yankee hoteliers. “Are there any good walking trails around?” I asked, closing the book carefully.

“Well now,” the innkeep stood there, shifting from foot to foot, wiping his free hand on his apron. “Some folk go down to the beach for walking. It’s a good clear stretch of beach, a few miles down to the lighthouse at Maynard’s Cape and back. You could do it in an afternoon, easy. If not, you could always head up to the bluff. The path doesn\'t go all the way down to the lighthouse, mind you, but it’s pretty far still. Most take the high road on the bluff.”

I thanked him, stood, and escaped from the claustrophobic front room. From my hotel room, on the edge of the top floor, full of thick carpet and dark wood, I stood at the window, watching the ocean churn out beyond the fog. I would walk by the sea.

I dropped the notes on the rickety desk by the window and, to my horror, they fell open to page 486. It mocked me. With a scowl, I shut the book and lay it aside. Cats and coffins. I needed a walk. I really needed a drink, not that there was much possibility of that.

Down at the front desk, coat and hat in hand I lingered by the abandoned front desk, hands on the manicured counter, toying with the idea of calling Merrilee, but she would still be at the library, even on a Saturday. Giving up on the idea, I turned and left the Chamberlain, head lowered in quiet meditation.

Down empty, Puritan streets I wandered, piercing the fog between the early twinkles of streetlamps. Even blocks away from page 486, I was still thinking about it. How many times had I read the hieroglyphics with a magnifying glass, creeping my fingertips over them. I knew them all by memory. I knew them probably better than the man who carved them. Finchley’s obsession was now mine. Embrace it, I thought, he built a career on it, so can you.

A sudden, metallic bang stopped me in my tracks. Somewhere deeper in the fog, a yowl and another crashing of metal rang out before dying away with a hiss and a darting of feet. Cats. I smoothed the collar of my jacket, regaining my composure. Cats: things best enjoyed when mummified, just like people.

With a renewed confidence, I continued down the empty streets to the sodden shore. The fog held close and wet, dulling all things edgeless and gray, even sound. The beach before me vanished into a blue-gray void between hissing waves to the left and grim bluff face to the right.

Wet sand pushed out from under my rubber soles as I stepped gingerly into the mist. Even with my jacket pulled tighter around my narrow shoulders, the all consuming dampness settled stubbornly on the back of my neck.

Deeply alone, I walked further, hands jammed far down into my pockets, pennies and nickels pressing into my slightly bent knuckles, their jingling and my footsteps making a dreary rhythm for my thoughts. Thoughts ran while I walked up, down, and upside down inside my head, pushing at its soft underbelly, peering cautiously from behind my eyes, but always returning to the accursed page eighty-six.

I cursed under my breath. What had the old doctor seen in me that he would choose me, of all his students, to carry on with his notes? What spark burned in me that he had carried to that hospital bed in Boston? If that same spark burned in me, would I ever write a mad diary like his? I hated the thought of it, I hated the thought of being like him. I know one ought not speak ill of the dead, but–

My foot pushed down on something wet. Pausing, I stooped and picked up a piece of seaweed, dull green and brown, with thick cylinders of stalk and branches with exquisite bubbles of air built into them as tiny floats. This must have traveled some distance. How many miles had this little traveler been drifting? And of all the perfectly good beaches in the world, it washed up on this one. I stroked my chin for a moment before smiling. We had something in common in that regard, I supposed.

Cold seaweed in hand, I carried on, rubbing my fingers over its hard, little bubbles as I went in silence. I threw a long glance back up the beach, the narrow path of my footsteps showing me the long way back up to the Chamberlain and the notes lying on the desk.

Wave after wave rolled on, low and heavy, dredging up black water from the bottom of the ocean and throwing it up in gurgling terraces of foam, spreading it like a fortune-teller’s cards across a table. There seemed to be voices in the waves. Deep voices, dark voices, voices without words. Suddenly, above these words, I heard a scream. An inhuman, keening wail pierced and shredded the gray, cutting the path for a small, crawling creature coming through the fog.

I froze, staring at the approaching thing, every muscle bunching up against itself, ready to dash back up the pathway of footprints to my car. The crying stopped and was immediately replaced by a quiet, familiar meow. The little creature glared out from the edge of the fog, a pretty little black cat, eyes burning green in the netherlight. Our eyes met and stayed fixed on one another. As soon as she had come, she was gone, melted back into the fog, eyes seeming to linger a moment longer than her body.

What’s someone’s cat doing out here on a night like this? I asked myself, quite sure that the cat was asking itself what a soggy, pathetic man was doing out on a night like this. I rubbed slowly at my temples. Cats, wherever I went, cats. No wonder why Finchley talked about them so much.

I continued on and soon stumbled across the cat’s footprints, small and precise in the wet-packed sand. I found myself beginning to follow them in the otherwise featureless gray. I followed them as they raced arrow-straight across the sand, surprised they never changed course, or stopped, or that I hadn’t seen the cat yet. I thought cats hated water– to my surprise the simply stopped, mid-step.

I stood there staring down at the final footprint. It looked as if the cat had been picked up by unseen hands, half-way through a step, sheathed claws barely touching the sand, but there were no other footprints, human or cat as far as I could see into the fog.

I shook my head and put my hands in the paw prints, they were as real as I was. Experimentally, I extended my hand and pressed down where I figured the next step would have landed. Sure enough, the sand compacted, leaving a rough impression of my fingers. Nerves tingling, I turned and started walking back to Ogden. Whether it be a cat that could walk on air, or someone who had appeared out of nowhere to pick up that cat, I had no desire to meet either on this lonely beach. Unashamed, I retreated. The front room of the Chamberlain and a cup of hot coffee seemed much more appealing than it had been this morning.

A chill emanating from the back of my neck and the center of my back began dripping into my feet, forcing them to rush and stumble. The voices on the waves seemed to grow louder in the same dismal, voiceless tones as before, constantly echoing and re-echoing between the rock face and the sea, with me trapped in the middle. Not daring to look over my shoulder, for what strange searching thing might be lurking in the fog and waiting to catch up with me, I pushed back the way I came.

I had been walking for some time, longer than I thought I should be, when I found another set of footprints, the same as before, tiny and well-formed racing across the sand. I threw looks this way and that, no one, no creature, no person stood nearby. There was no sound but my panting and the waves, closing in around. Coat clutched at the throat, I ran, feet pounding the sand. I couldn’t have been more than a few minutes from the edge of town. I swore I would see twinkling streetlamps in a moment. They must have been right up ahead, just beyond the fog. They must have been, but they never were. I must have walked miles more than I realized, I comforted myself with diminishing results.

Perhaps the cat had meant to lead me somewhere, to show me something not meant for others. This thought burrowed deep inside my skull and forced me faster across the shore. Coat, flapping free, sand filling my shoes, I pelted onward, praying for a break in the fog, waiting to see the glimmer of sunlight or the Chamberlain on the horizon. How long had I been on this beach? How long had I been between places? If anywhere was nowhere, this was it.

As I ran, a breeze rose from the water, pushing against my red cheeks. The voices on the waves were screaming now, louder than the wind which shoved me forward, staggering and panting from the sheer weight of it.

Before me on the beach spread a strange symbol, like an hourglass with a rising sun at the top, its rays radiating out into the grayness. I knew this symbol and I began to shake. This was the seal of Bast the devourer, the lion of Egypt. The same had been repeated on the seal base relieves of the tomb on page 486 nearly fifty times. This was a seal I had stared at a thousand times, yet here it was, carved on the beach at Ogden. Whoever or whatever stalked through the mist, playing this trick on me, hissed, slow and soft, filling the beach, just enough to be heard above the waves.

I ran again. “It couldn’t be far”, I repeated breathlessly. If this were still the beach, my brain finished.

With failing legs, I forced myself onward, head swirling, body shuddering with cold and dread. Soon I will remember this like a nightmare, maybe all I needed was to wake up. I pinched and pulled my face, but I was still t inside the endless gray. A scream welled far down in my lungs, ready to ring out in a last cry for rescue, when a fierce gust slammed me and sent me sagging to my knees. I must run, but I cannot. Hands pressing against the ground, I tried to force myself to stand, but my legs had nothing more to give. Gasping, I dragged myself, hand over hand, through the sand. By inches and fingernails I continued laboring along, dragging myself towards that cup of hot coffee.

After what felt like hours of crawling and begging, the wind weakened and then died. The fog had blown off some, and late afternoon sunlight shone dully around in the fog’s prism.

Before me, a ramshackle hut, seemingly slapped together from driftwood, scrap metal, and broken boats, stood rusting in the sand, its black doorway open and repulsive. Outside the door, tail around her paws, sat the black cat from before, prim and proper as a queen.

Behind me there was nothing, just fog, not even my footsteps to lead me back, beyond there was even less, only the door and the cat, both examining me like a wriggling bug on a pin.

“Go in?” I whispered with spitless tongue.

She narrowed her eyes expectantly.

“Should I go in?”

She continued staring through me, tail-tip twitching, eyes leering, burning, radiating, growing far deeper than the eyes of any cat should, stabbing at me from her smug little face.

“Answer me!” I shrieked, tearing my eyes away.

I heard the tiniest crunch of delicate paws on sand as she rose, and her ghostly tail brushed against my leg as she slipped through the opening. She wants me to follow. Where else am I going to go?

Dim light pooled sickly through the door and windows, barely giving enough light to see the strange resident of the hut, a geometric pyramid of damp sand, nearly as tall as my chest, constructed in the center of the structure. Who would do this, and why here? Slowly. Carefully, I extended a finger towards the pyramid surface but was interrupted by a sharp hiss from around my feet. The cat didn’t like that.

She strutted around the perimeter of the room, careful not to touch the pyramid, my clumsy footsteps struggling to follow her.

Behind the strange construction stood a passage. How did a hut barely big enough for me to stand in have a back hall?

Without waiting for me, the cat trotted into it, not bothering to look back, she somehow knew my curiosity was beginning to overwhelm my dread. The passage was lit, from a dozen candles, hanging suspended in green and blue sea glass balls swaying on narrow chains from the ceiling as if caught by an unfelt breeze throwing wild rainbow shadows along the makeshift walls. Through the shifting shadows we crept, cat and man, on some dark errand.

The hall ended abruptly in a flight of downward stairs, which dove into the darkness, four ancient wooden steps descending onto a landing, with a soft, green glow issuing up from further steps down and to the left. Barely daring to breathe, barely daring to imagine what could be down below those steps, I snuck on the cat’s heels, down into the darkness, step by step, shaking bottom lip clenched between my teeth.

Once we had come to a stop on the landing, I turned and saw something I could not forget, no matter how desperately I tried.

Bathed in the light of an eerie green fire, a circle of cats sat on a red, satin cloth that covered the inside of the basement, both floor, walls, and ceiling, with golden hieroglyphs stitched into its billowy folds. Some hideous and ancient incense, bitter and sickly sweet, polluted the air. In the middle of the circle, the green fire burned, surrounded by golden instruments and symbols of cruel shapes I cannot recall. All the cats seemed to have their attention directed at one cat in particular, one with snowy white fur and black paws with her eyes closed, swaying back and forth to some unheard melody.

This same cat, the leader or so it seemed, put back her head and let loose a frightful caterwaul, enough to grind my teeth together. The other cats followed in suit. The bestial litany continued, loud and long, slowly gathering momentum and definition. First a pattern, then a tune, and then finally words. No matter what anyone else says. No matter what anyone else tells you. No matter how many books tell you cats cannot speak, I heard a wailing chant: “Henu Bastet, dua Ubasti, Henu Bastet, dua Ubasti” over and over, building in volume and pitch, golden instruments glowing, scarlet drapery flapping wildly, until the chant reached a high wild screech.

I knew the words! “Hail Bast. Adore Bast!” It was a prayer and a demand rolled into one ancient tongue. I was hearing what no man had heard for a thousand years.

Then silence. The sweet-stinking air settled. Nothing below moved. I, unsure of what I had just seen, turned to slip back up the stairs when I heard a plaintive meow from my feet, the cat from earlier. As if cued by some offstage director, the cats all turned to look at me, their eyes orbs of fire and ice, ocean and amber in the flickering fire. It was then, I realized, despite the dancing fire, not a single cat cast a shadow. “What are you?”

The majestic black footed cat stepped forward and slunk to the base of the stairs, her eyes, somehow different from the other cats, smaller, less reflective, but somehow understanding more. Those eyes were almost human. Almost. I clung desperately to that almost.

She sat and licked a paw, daring me to run. Unconcerned, she spoke: “Sesheshet.”

“Placation,” I whispered.

“Sesheshet,” the other cats repeated, pressing in towards the stairs, seeming to multiple as they came closer, turning from a coven to a herd, to a horde. “Shesheshet, henu Bastet, Shesheshet, henu Bastet.” they repeated over and over, driving themselves onward with their mantra. My nerve broke, and I ran, I ran as I never had before and never would again. I would not be their prey.

Down the hall of spinning sea glass lights I sped, fleeing the fevered chanting behind and predatory step of a dozen sharp-clawed feet. Gasping, I raced around the pyramid and stumbled out into the same island in the fog where I had begun. Perhaps they wouldn’t follow.

Into the fog, headlong, body shaking, mind struggling to grasp anything solid, I ran, pelting until my sides ached and my chest throbbed.

I screamed at nothing as I ran back to the safety of the Chamberlain Hotel, back to the safety of dead men’s dreams.

The fog was clearing up ahead. I must have been coming back to the starting place, Ogden was just at the top of the hills, yes, I was coming back to where this all started and where it would end. I stepped out of the fog at the edge of town and thirteen luminous pairs of eyes stared back at me, one for each guardian of lost Thinis.

“Shesheshet,” the black-footed cat called, and her minions answered, slipping across the sand towards me, her human eyes scouring me as the tabby, looking fiercer every second, padded forward, one of the strange instruments caught in her teeth.

The wind rises again from the sea, bringing back the voices of the waves, but now they came with words, words of that ancient language, words from beyond time and beyond graves, beyond the thunder of all sunsets and all the trumpets of all the dynasties that ever blighted the face of God’s earth. The doom had descended on me. The voices kept growing and growing.

Oh merciful God, the voices, the voices. My eyes screwed shut, fluttering up from the bottoms to throw one last glance into the empty sky. There was only gray and the nearly silent breathing of a black cat.

Someone found me and dragged me back to the hotel. They thought I would not wake up, they said the fever was too high, that my lungs were filling. The doctor left for medicine, but I doubt it will do much good. I have been coughing up water, dark water, silty river water, full of age and the fur of cats. Merilee, when they bring you back these notes, burn them, burn the whole thing. I’m sorry. I’m so terribly sorry.

About the Author

A. Bastedo is an  author of weird fiction, speculative fiction, horror, and fantasy. He graduated from Arcadia university with an MFA in Creative writing in 2021. His debut story: \"The Christian Dead\" appeared in this Halloween\'s issue of Witch House Magazine. He lives in Eastern Connecticut with his wife and cat, Luther and has a small but growing presence on Bluesky Social.