NEW. PREVIEW 'THE CROCODILE GOD' MYTHOLOGICAL THRILLER

Forthcoming new novel in 'The Egyptian Mythology Murders' series

CHAPTER 1

Far below the British Museum, in an underworld of silence, they moved through sewers and storm drains.

A young man and woman, a pair of urban explorers, they had penetrated the stone, brick, concrete and bitumen skin of the city like a syringe needle entering plaque-bound arteries and veins beneath.

Secretly and illegally.

Above them, in the night street, a red double-decker bus rolled past the dark iron gates and illuminated columns of the British Museum.

A poster on the bus showed a mummified crocodile, an Egyptian queen and a crocodile-headed god.

A blockbuster exhibition was just days away from opening.

TREASURES OF EGYPT’S

CROCODILE QUEEN

Inside the museum, in slow-motion choreography, cranes, stackers and palette trucks carefully moved hundreds of artefacts in orange crates into place.

‘Great Russell Street is up there’, the girl thought, shining her flashlight up at the roof of the gullet where plaster stalactites hung down like teeth.

It had been no easy feat injecting themselves into the world beneath London in an age of terrorist paranoia and extra security, with one CCTV camera for every dozen people in London. Urban exploration was increasingly clandestine and risky. It took stealth, patience and skill.

She pictured the museum bustling in preparation for the opening day of the exhibition. Were the workers disturbing the Egyptian mummies asleep in their wooden coffins?

‘Mummies used to creep me out as a kid,’ she remembered. Staring at those stiffened forms, she’d felt her own body stiffen with dread and fascination.

That was a long time ago, before she’d met daredevil Kel and followed his extreme pursuit of subterranean exploration.

Debris in the dank-smelling tunnel reminded her of mummies. In her peering yellow beam, festoons of rags, threads, plastic and paper streamed like rotted bandages from branches in the tunnel and clung to pipes, steps and ancient ladder rungs and between cracks.

“I wonder if the Egyptian mummies above us would ever dream there’s a man-made underworld underneath them?” she said to her companion.

“They’d feel quite at home,” he said. “Especially those croc mummies in the new exhibition. Did you see the posters – and that Egyptian god with a croc’s head?” His voice gave a sinister twist in the gullet. “You wouldn’t want to meet him in an alley… or a sewer.”

A hiss and gargled roar suddenly exploded in the tunnel, followed by insane, ringing laughter.

She jumped in fright.

Kel was a joker.

“Did you have to?” she said.

The laughter rattled into the distance.

“Some day a croc or alligator is going to find its way down though a sewer or a lost river system,” he said. “Only a matter of time. But probably not here in London, so relax. Unless it escapes from the zoo.”

“Okay, you can go in front,” she said.

“And leave you trailing behind?”

She caught up.

Water dripped plink, plink, plink around them in the next brick-lined section. They walked for a time in silence.

Disguised in orange luminous vests of maintenance workers and wearing protective rubber boots, they moved over a floor pooled with inky water, yet she could not resist turning back her beam to check behind them.

Nothing.

Just bricks in the curving walls, the joins darkly delineated like scales, stretching away into blackness. Endless blackness.

Victorian age engineers, like whiskered, demented moles, had tunnelled an astonishing 1,100 miles of brick-lined sewers, reservoirs and storm drains.

The thought of reptilian scales made her shiver.

She steeled herself.

Think of adventure. Discovery.

From her first descent, urban exploration had opened up an adrenaline rush like a flood through her body. It left archaeology, once her planned career, for dead, she thought.

UrbEx, or Urban exploration, was mystery under a lid, the lid being a manhole cover.

It had taken them to surprising places. They had emerged from a manhole cover under the MI6 building and in the grounds of Buckingham Palace.

They had entered Winston Churchill’s war rooms, a series of bunkers where they had come upon the statesman’s personal bathtub. They had found ghost stations, including the almost mythical British Museum underground rail station, mothballed before the Second World War.

One tunnel took them to a hoary burial catacomb tucked underneath Brompton cemetery, crammed to the roof with wooden coffins, rotted and splitting, one coffin smashed to splinters.

A vandal?

Urban explorers were normally careful not to give their sport a bad name.

They left things as they were. ‘Take nothing. Leave nothing behind but your footprints,’ was the mantra.

But no coffins tonight, please.

Anything was possible though.

It was a bewildering underground labyrinth of interlinked train tunnels, subterranean rivers, reservoirs, deep-level shelters and utility tunnels for data delivery, gas pipes, and serpentine electricity, where an army of aliens could breed and nobody would ever know.

Until the occasional sewer or gas worker went missing.
Eaten perhaps.

We always imagined we were irresistible to alien tastebuds, she thought.

But why did we suppose that monsters wanted to hide in places like this anyway? If they’d travelled across the cold darkness of the universe, wouldn’t they prefer to sun themselves on remote beaches rather than skulk in city drains?

They reached a fork in the storm water drain where a mass of paper and threads had collected and jammed. As she turned her light on it, a spectral image jumped into her beam.

A thing out of mythology appeared like a fish hidden among seaweed, a standing figure that was human and yet not human, its stained cloth wrappings blending in with a mass of trailing tatters. But where was its head? Raised in hiding, revealing only a yellow, scaled reptile’s throat?

Her torch beam trembled.

Now the head came down from the tatters like a drawbridge to reveal craggy and powerful jaws and teeth. The bulging rocks of eyes split open to reveal slitted yellow moons.

It hissed softly and stepped out, emerging from the waste and effluvium of urban existence.

“Kel. Your light! There’s something...”
His beam flew to meet hers, flooding the mass in a bright glare.

“What?”

 I thought I saw something... weird -”

No creature lurched out at them.

“Phantom of the sewer,” he said.

Their lights revealed no more than a wastepaper coronary in a drain.

“Sorry.”

The pair moved on past the blockage, taking their lights away with them.

But a fear lurched after her and the tunnel’s breath chilled her.

Too much talk of crocodiles, she thought.

It showed the power of suggestion, especially down here among the shadows and coruscating lights in tunnels.

CHAPTER 2

She spotted Jon crossing the Great Court of the British Museum.

“Come for a sneak peek at the exhibition, Jon, or is this an official visit?” Jennefer said.

The sharply dressed young Londoner had been her partner in several mysterious investigations, a policeman from the Metropolitan Art and Antiques unit, Jon Lawlor. He gave a flirtatious smile and a glance around the famous internal courtyard. “Or maybe I’ve just come a-courting. But no, I’m hoping the BM’s best young curator can take me behind the scenes. It may have a bearing on my visit.”

He eyed an exhibition poster splashed across the luminous white interior of the Great Court. It showed a crocodile mummy inset with the image of the crocodile-headed god Sobek sitting beside an Egyptian queen.

“Those croc posters are unsettling.”

“Thanks. I’ll tell Lynn.” Lyn was the exhibition’s curator. She knew Jon and was a close friend of Jennifer’s.

“Coffee first?” he said. “The heady combination of fresh coffee and ancient artefacts always calls.”

“All right. I’m due for a break.”

They climbed the circular staircase of the white tower to the Courtyard Restaurant and ordered.

“What is it, Jon?”

She prepared herself to be shocked. Jon had a habit of surprising her with outrageous statements of the improbable or the impossible, which he later qualified or moderated. He liked to get the impossible out of the way, he always said. Trouble was, he was fiendishly clever and she could never quite ‘unthink’ what he’d planted in her thinking.

He rarely disappointed.

“I think we have a monster on the loose in London,” he said.

“A monster?”

“A creature out of Egyptian mythology you could say.”

“I’m not an animal catcher. I’m a curator of Egyptian antiquities.”

“Well, this creature is not unrelated. There’s a certain synchronicity at work here. You see, the creature in question appears to be crocodilian, like the theme of your exhibition. Or so the Royal Veterinary College expert is telling us.”

“Us?”

“Arts and Antiques, and Scotland Yard. And they’re also telling us.”

“Us?”

“You keep saying that.”

“What has all this to do with me?”

“Not you. Us,” he said, correcting her. “They’re calling on our combined talents once again.”

“To find an escaped crocodile? What’s it got to do with ancient Egyptian antiquities?”

“There’s been a spate of killings. The British Museum’s upcoming exhibition may have triggered it. Three people have been killed.”
“You mean the exhibition has inspired a serial killer?”

“I told you the posters were unsettling.”

“And you of course have a theory.”

“I do. Whose mummy is at the centre of this exhibition?”

Why was he asking?

All of London knew. The Crocodile Queen.

“The Middle Kingdom Queen Sobekneferu, a queen who came to rule as a pharaoh. The discovery of her tomb near the oasis city near Crocodilopolis made world headlines and this is a special touring exhibition to boost Egyptian tourism.”

“Yes, but she’s famous for something else.”

“She extended the lost labyrinth of her father Amenemhat III in the Faiyum Oasis area. She also had a unique affiliation with the crocodile god Sobek. In fact her name, Sobekneferu, means ‘Beauty of Sobek.’”

“And what was the special role of the crocodile god Sobek?”

“Jon, you have an air of a coaching professor. I’m the Egyptologist, you’re the gifted amateur.”

“Sobek, the crocodile god, was the ferocious protector of the pharaoh. Someone, or something, is killing people around the British Museum.”

“Hang on, these killings happened around the British Museum? I’ve heard nothing about this.”
“No, it’s been kept quiet. The killings happened beneath the museum. In the sewers nearby, in fact. There’s been an electrician killed, a fibre optic cable worker, a sewer maintenance worker.””

“Attacks by a crocodile?”

He swayed in indecision.

“Well, let’s just say the remains had the marks of a crocodile’s teeth. Skulls crushed in by powerful jaws. Protective hard hats offered no protection.”
“But how could a crocodile get down into the sewer?”

“Ah, but is it a crocodile..?” he said.

“What else? A serial killer with a croc’s head? Oh great, Jon. Why don’t I have a go at the impossible for a change?” she said. “Let’s see. The killer is actually the ancient Egyptian god Sobek, half man, half crocodile and he’s been dormant all these years. Maybe some Victorian amateur archaeologist brought him here from Egypt when the sewers were first built and then decided to get rid of him. But now the mummy of Queen Sobekneferu pops up in London, so he’s suddenly come awake and he’s mad as hell and creating havoc. Doing his job of protecting the female pharaoh...”

Jon gulped his coffee.

“Where do you get this stuff from?”

She kicked him under the table.

“The unadorned facts, please.”

He shrugged.

“You have the basics. But the synchronicity keeps thickening. An esoteric organisation is sniffing around London to complicate matters, their interest sparked by the Queen Sobekneferu exhibition. Do you know that certain European families and organisations still take their impetus from this little-known ancient Egyptian Queen, Sobekneferu and her cult of Sobek? They claim to be descendants. Have you heard of the Dragon - or Sacred Crocodile - Court, known as The Societas Draconis? The royal houses of Europe followed its rituals and ceremonies. One of the more infamous members of the society was Vlad, of Vlad the Impaler fame.”

“Count Dracula? You’ve been at the Dan Brown again.”

“Fact.”

“That’s what Dan Brown always says.”

“This is apparently some radicalised, highly occult, breakaway cell of the Societas Draconis that’s treading over the police investigations into the murders.”

“What are we supposed to do?”

“We’ve got to get to work.”

“I can’t just walk out of here,” she said. “There’s an exhibition about to open.”

“It’s all been cleared with the museum.”

Things were happening above her head, Jennefer thought, and apparently under her feet in the sewers below as well.

“But why did Scotland Yard come to you?”

“Us.”

“This isn’t a missing arts and antiquities matter. I know we’ve had experience with some cases beyond the normal that still baffle me and give me nightmares...”
“We have a reputation and there’s a fear that somebody may be out to steal antiquities.”

“Rob the exhibition?” she said.

“Could be.”

“Are you planning on dragging me on a hunt through London’s sewers?” Jennefer said.

“Police and search teams have been sweeping the sewers, but they’ve found nothing.”

Probably not surprising, “If it is an escaped crocodile it could be underwater. Like us. I think we’d be in over our heads on this.”

“I agree that we need help.”

“A crocodile catcher?”

“We need expertise the law doesn’t have. We need some illegal help. I’ve made contact, through a friend, with a couple of urban explorers. One of them actually used to be an archaeology student.”

“I’ve heard of that breed. Illegal explorers who haunt the sewers.”

“More than a thousand miles of sewers, hundreds of miles of storm drains, moth-balled train tunnels, bunkers and utility tunnels, not to mention river systems. Just think of it as urban archaeology. Or visiting the ancient Egyptian underworld.”

“Without the Egyptian gods of judgement...”

“Or maybe with one.”

“What do you really think is going on, Jon?”

“You’re forcing it out of me.”

“The truth. Who is doing this?”

“I’ll tell you. The killer is actually the ancient Egyptian god Sobek, half man, half crocodile and he’s been dormant all these years. An amateur Victorian archaeologist brought him here from Egypt when the sewers were first built and then decided to get rid of him. But now the mummy of Queen Sobekneferu pops up in London, so he’s suddenly come awake and he’s mad as hell and creating havoc. Doing his job of protecting the female pharaoh...”

Now she gave him a glare.

He chuckled.

“Sorry. I’ve gone as far as I can figuring out the impossible. But the possible is a little harder to reach. That’s why we’re going underground.”

“What about sewer rats?”

“Preferable to snakes and scorpions in Egypt, I’d have thought. They can kill you. Rats just scurry away.”
“And squeak.”

“So what now?”

“Show-me-the-mummy!” Jon said.

CHAPTER 3

Museum assistants, electricians and lighting experts were painting a diorama of Middle Kingdom Egypt in light.

“Not too dark, please,” Lyn the exhibition curator said to the team, under the watchful eyes of the Egyptian official overseers.

“The Egyptians think the BM gets too moody and atmospheric,” Jennefer said in a whisper.

“And I take it they’d prefer fairground lights.”

Sobekneferu’s mummy was already in place in her climate controlled display case. Shifting lights cast swaying shadows over her mummy.

Jon studied the form in thoughtful silence as she stirred in the fluttering shadows and light.

“The beauty of Sobek,” he whispered at last. “I hope she was less scary than her god.”

Sobekneferu’s mummy wrappings looked the colour of cured tobacco leaf, tightly wrapped as a cigar and revealing a slender, tapering form within.

Typically ancient Egyptian, he thought, high-waisted and long-legged.

A queen who rose to become a king.

“There were of course other queens, notably Hatshepsut, who ruled as a king,” she said, “but ancient records establish Sobekneferu securely as the first. We actually have something of hers in our own collection. A glazed steatite cylinder like a rolling pin covered in text. It’s the queen’s seal. Which reminds me, I’ve got to get it out of its case and add it to the exhibition display.”

He interrogated the stretched out mummy silently.

She remained just as silent.

If Sobekneferu knew anything about the string of murders, she was keeping it under wraps, he thought.

Her mummy lay in a rectangular painted cedar coffin in the severe Middle Kingdom style, its outer walls painted in palace-facade design and bearing painted udjat-eyes like solar full-eclipses, allowing her to stare out at the world.

Perhaps this inner wooden coffin had once nested inside a golden outer, he thought, but this might have disappeared in ancient times during the chaos of the Second Intermediate Period that followed immediately after her reign.

They moved on to view an image of the queen in milky calcite standing beside the enthroned figure of the crocodile god Sobek.

A nasty brute, Jon thought. Lethal jaws, the reptile’s head made even more repellent by the powerfully muscled man’s body beneath. He could rip you part even without the jaws and teeth.

Jon lingered in front of the carved image of the queen. It showed a strong faced woman. She wore a mixture of male and female regalia, a vee necked dress as well as a man’s kilt over the top, together with a pharaoh’s nemes headdress and a royal cobra on her brow. The queen had pronounced ears, a convention to say that she had ears for her god, her people... and also for the whispers of any enemies.

Jon gave her calcite crocodile companion one more look. The croc god was a giant. Even seated, he was higher that the standing figure of the queen.

‘The Snatcher, He Who Loves Robbery, Pointed of Teeth’ they called the violent Nile crocodile.

They passed on to displays of blackened mummified crocodiles, cloth bound torpedoes with pointed jaws, they stretched out their jagged lengths. Illuminated CT scans showed remains of their last meals inside their stomachs. A beef portion, a cow’s foreleg...

In ancient Egypt, the cultic manifestation of Sobek took the form of a giant crocodile that lived a pampered existence in a temple lake, adorned with gold and jewels on its scaly body and hand fed by the priests. People would journey from all parts Egypt to watch it feed just as they did today at crocodile parks in Africa and Australia.

He hid a shudder.

CHAPTER 4

“Where are we going?” she said.

“We need to see a vicar.”

“This is sudden.”

“Not marriage... although I have hopes.”

“I’ll get my bag.”

They came out of the exhibition area and went though the white marbled courtyard, under the tessellated glass roof.

Jon hailed a rattling black cab outside the museum and they jumped in the back.

“Holy Trinity, Brompton,” he told the driver.

The Anglican Church grew faces like Rev Kevin Hibberd’s, Jon thought.

Mild and scrubbed, greying hair carefully parted, blue eyes like a pale stained glass sky that had looked down on too many christenings, marriages and funerals.

Jon introducing Jennefer and accepted the invitation to enter the rector’s parlour at Holy Trinity, Brompton.

“Do make yourselves comfortable.”

Heavy Victorian furniture didn’t quite lend itself to that. It imposed rather than yielded.

“Thanks for seeing us. As you know, I’m with the Metropolitan Police Arts and Antiques unit and Jennefer is a curator at the British Museum.”

“Yes, yes. But as I said to the police, it wasn’t an antiquity theft. Perhaps more an act of vandalism.”

He sprang up and came back with a journal, its covers foxed and stained, which he opened on his knee. “One of my early forbears was a former vicar at HTB. An independently wealthy man, he was an amateur archaeologist with a passion for visiting the sites of ancient Egypt. He was also quite the collector. In the Victorian age, when that sort of thing was less frowned upon,” he added with a nod to Jennefer.

“He had certain acquisitions sent back to England by steamer, including a prized early coffin from the Fayoum region, apparently. It was a remarkable piece by all accounts. With disturbing contents. A large Egyptian mummy replete with a crocodile mask.”

Jennefer sat up.

“I’ve seen a hawk-headed coffin, the silver coffin of Sheshonq II and that was eerie enough, but a crocodile head?”

“Very ancient. Primordial, Horatio Hibberd believed. He wrote here in his journal...

‘I came by the mummy in Crocodilopolis in the Fayoum region of Egypt. I cannot decide whether it is an embodiment of an Egyptian deity or an Egyptian demon. In my view, to be a Christian, let alone a minister of the church, one has to believe in a spirit world, in a world of good and evil entities... This acquisition fell into the latter camp for within weeks of setting it up temporarily in my rectory study, great misfortune befell my family and even parishioners who called on me. It has a malefic presence that began to torment me in my dreams. I value antiquities too highly to destroy it and I would not have wished it upon a revered institution such as the BM, so I elected to have it shut away in a hidden catacomb, beneath the cemetery among the underworld of drains and tunnels beneath London, where I sensed it belonged.’

He closed the book.

“When news of the crocodile exhibition’s arrival at the British Museum, I decided to track down this piece of shadowy family history.”
“You found the coffin?”

“Yes, yes, after some difficulty, but it was in pieces, the ancient wood smashed to splinters and powder as if in an attack of rage. And the mummy itself gone. Tossed into the underground sewers and storm water drains, I suppose...”

“Not stolen?”

“No, no, here’s the thing. The crocodile mask, in beaten sheet gold was left among the dust and splinters.”

“O.M.G,” Jennefer said, conscious of their surroundings. “Do you have it? May-we-examine-it?”

She sounded afraid of her blurted out request in case it spooked him. It also carried the risk of refusal.

Jon sensed, and shared, her suspense.

“Well it’s not here in the parlour, I can tell you that.”

He saw Jennefer’s shoulders slump fractionally, but Jon noticed the tone of squeamishness in the churchman’s voice.

“You remembered the cautionary tales about its malefic effects.”

“Exactly. I’m a pragmatist. Come with me.”
Jennefer shared a look of relief with Jon.

They followed the vicar out of the back of the rectory and along a flowered path in the garden. He stopped at a stone shed.

“My potting shed,” he said.

God in a shed, or an Egyptian one at least, Jon thought.

The vicar opened the padlocked door and they followed him into an area brightly lit by a glass greenhouse roof.

An object under a white cloth sat on a bench beside empty terracotta pots.

The cloth revealed an unmistakeable form within its folds.

He heard Jennefer catch her breath as they approached it.

Crocodilian. Hugely wide at the jaws, long attacking snout. There seemed to be a glow beneath the cloth in the sunshine slanting in from the roof.

He thought of the mummified saurian torpedoes in the exhibition. The calcite statue of the croc god enthroned beside Queen Sobekneferu.

In a slow reveal, the vicar drew off the cloth and a new sun broke out of the white cloud. With a final flourish, he pulled off the rest.

It jumped out at them in a flashing attack of threatening jaws... a malignantly brilliant crocodile’s head in beaten gold.

“OMG, again,” Jennefer said, taking a step back.

“Not your god, I hope,” the vicar said. “A malevolently pagan one.”

“Sobek!”

Here was the god linked with the Egyptian devil god Seth and with Apophis the Great Snake of Outer Darkness, a splashing, rampaging monster, yet also the pharaoh’s fierce protector.

It dazzled like the sun, yet not a warm embracing sun, rather the sun of scorching destruction.

Within its fierce radiance were two more suns, eyes of blazing yellow rock crystal with slitted pupils of obsidian.

It was one of the most terrifying things Jon had ever seen. Not even the most grotesquely decaying mummy, its mouth gaping in rictus, could strike this fluttering dread in his heart.

Had this golden mask burnt in torch flames in a temple once, or perhaps within the heart of Egypt’s great Lost Labyrinth?

Jennefer was thinking the same thing.

Provenance.

“Did the journal say exactly where he found this?” she said in a whisper.

“I’m afraid not. Only that he came by it in the Fayoum area. Crocodilopolis. He may simply have purchased it.”

“This should be at the heart of the exhibition!” she said, bending to examine the golden form closely. The gold had been beaten so finely that even the sharp ridges of teeth emerged from the sides of the jaws.

“It’s breathtaking.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible. I am planning to write a book telling the story of this find and I don’t want to pre-empt myself.”

“May I take a photo on my iPhone?” Jon said.

“I’d rather not.”

As if suddenly wary of their keen attention and almost regretting his disclosure, he threw the cloth back over the head.

Jon felt an inconsolable sense of loss as the cloud settled back over the glittering image and also relief as if he had been staring too long into the sun.

“Your wildly impossible theory is not looking so impossible now,” he said in a murmur to Jennefer.

“My theory? It was yours. I just know how your mind works.”

“Please keep this to yourself,” the vicar said. “Very few know about its existence.”
Then some people did.

He wondered who.

(Excerpt from THE CROCODILE GOD)

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