Spirit and Dust - By Rosemary Clement-Moore Page 0,50
St. Louis museum. And the flash drive we hadn’t yet unlocked.
There were all those things, waiting for me to get up off the floor.
There was also a pair of worn leather boots right in front of my nose. Sand-dusted boots that I could see perfectly well in the pitch-dark, what-did-I-summon blackness.
16
“YOU RANG?” SAID the shade standing over me. My eyes traveled up her boots, her jodhpurs, and her really great jacket and scarf and found her looking back down at me, one red brow wryly cocked.
This was not how I wanted to meet my idol. I jumped to my feet, but they were still tangled in the cordon, so I just managed to make a lot of noise. “Stop moving!” shouted the docent, and from the dark someone else called, “We’ll be right there. Stay put until the lights come back on.”
“Who are you?” Aunt Ivy asked. She looked as she did in our family photo—late twenties, totally confident. Not nearly as surprised to see me as you might expect. She took in my red hair and amended, “The better question might be when are you? And where are we?”
No wonder I’d had to call so hard. The trace of her must have been faded almost to nothing. It figured a Goodnight wouldn’t stick around anywhere she didn’t want to.
I’m Daisy. Even without the audience I would have spoken silently to her, because it was quicker that way—the speed of thought, literally. Your great-great … Well, it doesn’t matter how many because I’m in trouble and I need to know anything you can tell me about something called the Oosterhouse Jackal.
“I don’t know what that is.” Before I could curse, silently or aloud, she continued. “I know a Professor Oosterhouse. He is—was—faculty here.” She rubbed her forehead, a very living sort of gesture. “Sorry. My times and tenses are all messed up.”
Don’t sweat it. That happens. What could you expect when your past and present and future had all already happened?
She sweated it anyway, as if she sensed my urgency. Her shade flickered with the effort of pulling her memories together, but as I poured more of myself into the psychic link between us, she steadied.
“There was something about him,” she said, “and jackal is sticking in my mind. He left the Institute in the early thirties, under a dark cloud.”
That would be the nineteen thirties. I added together the timeline with the professor’s German last name and made a wild guess. Was he a Nazi sympathizer?
“Not at all,” she said, and that seemed to spark a connection. “I was away when he left, but I came back to wild stories that he’d started a cult and swore he’d found something that would defeat the Third Reich.”
My mind went off in some very insane, very Indiana Jones directions. Like a weapon?
A face-melting Lost Ark kind of weapon? The idea shook me down to my curled-in-horror toes.
“I don’t know. Bollocks!” The air went crisp at her frustrated curse. “I only remember gossip I heard when I came back, and that’s just bits and pieces in my head.”
It’s okay, I assured her. Except that the security guard with the flashlight had finally gotten around to us. As the beam cut across the gallery I curled up in the shadow of the statue, where the guard would miss me until he’d helped the others.
Tell me all the gossip, I urged Ivy. His bio in the archives says nothing about when or why he left.
She spoke fast as the guard went by. “Officially, it was hushed up, but the rumor was he went batty. Got loony ideas based on a translation he’d made of the Book of the Dead.”
I knew what that was. I’d be pretty sucky at my job if I didn’t. It was an instruction manual for how to mummify the body and prepare the soul for its journey into the afterlife. There was no definitive edition because the process and the rituals changed across dynasties.
Ivy went on in a rush. I could see the tumble of memories coming back to her now. “Oosterhouse said he had found a version written by an ancient cult who believed in the magical power of the soul after death. But there was no proof of such a book—not that I could find, and believe me, I looked.”
Of course she would. A Goodnight couldn’t let that sort of thing go uninvestigated. So you don’t know if it was genuine magic or just the professor being fanciful?