'Was it an Osiris-pattern copycat murder? Head, legs, hands...' (THE OBELISK PROPHECY)

London

 

The bleak atmosphere of the stainless steel zone wrapped itself around them like the cold stink of formalin.

“You recognize him?” the morgue technician said after sliding out the tray for the two visitors, a young man and woman, a policeman from a London antiquities unit, Jon Lawlor, and a young British Museum curator and Egyptologist, Jennefer Jollife.

She tried not to breathe in the chilling air. It was like looking at cuts in a butcher’s shop, the severed portions of the body arranged to the best advantage on a tray. Yet the expression on the dead man’s face made him appear to be resigned to his fate, almost as detached from the situation as the head was from its body.

She felt a choking grief. Martin had been a mentor, a kindly light in her sea of inexperience when she had begun as a junior curator in the multi-universe of civilizations that made up the British Museum.

“Which part of him?” Jon said. “The arms, hands, legs, feet, head…?”

Jennefer looked at Jon with her wide-spaced eyes that some took for innocence but they were the wideness and watchfulness of a falcon’s stare. He was showing his characteristic levity, she thought frowning. This was no time or place for it.

“That’s him all right,” she said. “Professor Bailey. I worked with him at the British Museum. This is too horrible. Poor Martin.”

“Some kind of elaborate suicide, no doubt,” Jon said, undeterred. She had long ago nicknamed him Metro Man, a good-looking London metrosexual and sharp dresser, with slightly thinning hair, who liked to belie the sharpness of his mind. “I see what’s happened here. This man threw himself on a stack of carefully arranged blades. Or maybe he did it piece by piece. Tricky lopping off pieces of yourself one at a time until you get to your head, but then you’ve got a bit of a problem with no arms.”

“This is hardly the time for levity, Jon.”

Jennefer regarded him with almost as much horror as she did the remains on the tray.

She had to remind herself once again. This was Jon’s way of working. He liked to voice the impossible first ‘to get it out of the way so that he could move on to the possible and probable,’ he’d say, but sometimes his outrageous theorizing made her stretch her mind and question her grasp on reality.

Was it possible? Could she entertain the idea for a second that this was a case of suicide?
The gruesome body parts said no.

Quite impossible.           

“This has to be murder. Worse, an execution.”
“You think?”

She shuddered. Catching a whiff of mortality, she moved a little closer to Jon. He had a relieving tang of an aftershave or a bracing liquid soap.

As a museum curator, she was used to setting out objects and ideas neatly and carefully and labelling them correctly. Clean swept and willowy, even her beauty was ordered, her long hair drawn back on one side of her head and allowed to tumble in curls on the other side of her face.

“There is of course a precedent for this,” she said. “The Egyptian devil-god Seth murdered his brother Osiris and cut the body into fourteen pieces. It's almost as if this is designed to echo an event in mythology.”

“A murder in fourteen parts,” Jon said. “Interesting, Jennefer. If the Professor didn’t do this to himself, then who did? A rival academic, jealous of his research?”

“Seriously,” she said.

“A scholarly terrorist who’s read up on mythology?” 

“Not even terrorists butcher people this way.”

The technician cleared his throat and glanced at the young lady.

“One body part was missing,” the technician said. “Thirteen pieces were found.”

“Being a female, she’s probably spotted that essential missing part already,” Jon said.

“That confirms it,” she said. “When Seth cut Osiris into fourteen pieces, he threw one piece into the River Nile.”

“Which piece?” He was making her say the word.

“The penis.”

He winced.

“Hate that word. So, a mythological copycat killing,” he said.

She shook her head.

“More complicated and sinister than that. Such an elaborate execution is sending a message.”

Detectives and archaeologists worked in kindred professions, Jennefer recalled. Both dug for answers, but their team of oddly matched investigators was like a pair of disputing scholars learning the Talmud by arguing eyeball to eyeball. He liked to stretch possibilities and speculate exploratively, even wildly, at times. She liked to pin things down to reality. That was how they rolled, she thought.

“A message for whom? And saying what?” he said.

She shrugged.

“We’d have to do some digging.”

“That’s what we both do, as a detective and an Egyptologist.”

“Who could have done this, Jon? Seriously.”

“Somebody seriously disturbed,” he said.

“And dangerous,” she said.

“With unearthly attention to detail. Either they’re a surgeon, or they've done this kind of dissection before...”

(Excerpt)

"The Obelisk Prophecy" - No2 in the trilogy (AMAZON PAPERBACK AND KINDLE)

Thoth, Seshat... Egypt's Forbidden Words of Power

Thoth, The Magical Ibis, Master of Words of Power

Thoth, the magical ibis and Master of  Words of Power, is at the heart of several of my adventure thriller novels, including The Ibis Apocalypse and more recently, The Forbidden Glyphs.

The lethal librarian Seshat in The Forbidden Glyphs

Imagine a cache of glyphs of unthinkable power.

Renegade Egyptologist Anson Hunter does. In fact he has a controversial theory that somewhere in Egypt lies the Lost Library of Thoth, guarded by his consort the goddess Seshat.

In legend, this library contained all the forbidden knowledge of ancient Egypt, both human and divine, including secrets of lost technology that built the pyramids.

Anson’s theory throws him into conflict with international seekers who have dangerous agendas for the world.

To save a loved one, Anson Hunter must seek the forbidden glyphs in an ingenious lost sanctuary guarded by traps set by the calculating goddess Seshat.

The Forbidden Glyphs... one of the novels in my ancient Egypt adventure series.

“Fiction can’t be used to teach” vs “Is there any other way?”

You can’t give truth from the outside, transmitting it from one head into another. 

It can only be found/taken from within a living context.

For example, the parable stories.

They used fiction to teach, so that truth could be found and ‘owned’.

Egypt's dizzying abyss of time... and the dangerous Stone Book of Thoth

THE AUDIENCE in the Washington auditorium saw these words flashed up on a screen behind him.

THE DESTINY STELA

They also saw a stone relief of the Egyptian god Thoth. Part avian, part man, the shoulders bulked in stone, while above it reared the thin snake-like neck and head of an ibis with a crescent beak. Thoth held a reed pen in his fingers, reflecting his role as the god of writing, wisdom and magical words of power.

“How old is the Destiny Stela?” he began. “The Palermo Stone - a recorded Canon of Kings - and other testaments of the ancient Egyptians speak of divine beings and demigods who ruled Egypt for thousands of years before the first human kings, beginning with Menes, also known as Narmer.

Let’s begin by trying to grasp a sense of the dizzying abyss of time we must span in order to reach the age of Menes and beyond.

Try picturing a line-up of Egypt’s rulers stretching into the distance. Imagine we are moving past this assembly on a river of time, like a water ride in a theme park, journeying back to the first historical dynasties and earlier.

We’ll ignore more recent history -a string of one hundred and forty seven Ottoman rulers, fifty seven assorted Mamelukes, over one hundred Fatimid, Abbasid and non-Abbasid rulers, scores of Byzantine Period Christian rulers and a line of forty three Roman Emperors.

We’ll start with Cleopatra, for, although Greek, she actually went native, spoke the language and adopted the religion.

Ready? We’re off.

We build up momentum and Cleopatra glides by in her Love Boat, arm in arm with Marc Anthony, her sails making the wind drunk with their perfume, but wait, there’s a cavalcade of six earlier Cleopatras and a fleet of fourteen Ptolemies stretching into the distance before we pass the monolith of Alexander the Great and the Macedonian kings.

Now the Persian hordes engulf us in the Second Persian period before we reach the last Egyptian born pharaoh, the magician-king Nectanebo II, working his magic on model wax ships floating in a bowl of water.

We’ve still got around two thousand, two hundred and seventy years to go before we get back to the pyramid age.

We travel through ten more dynasties and over fifty kings, including a detour of a hundred years as we see a line of Nubian, or Kushite, pharaohs mount the Horus throne, before we tumble into the darkness and chaos of the Third Intermediate Period.

Then we enter the New Kingdom and a new golden age in a line of three dynasties and thirty-three kings.

We rush by eleven Rameses kings alone, including Rameses the Great and his colossal seated statues at the Temple of Abu Simbel.

We see the boy king Tutankhamun posing for his golden mask.

It’s still almost two thousand years before the pyramid age.

Now we pass the sun-drunk pharaoh Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti in their brand new city of Akhetaten mushrooming magically in the desert wilderness of Amarna, then a parade of other pharaohs, including multiple Amenhoteps.

And then it’s on to the Thutmosids and Pharaoh Thutmosis the Third in his chariot and blue war crown, leading his armies out of Thebes to conquer the Levant.

Moving back in time before Thutmosis, we find the female pharaoh Hatshepsut applying her strap-on symbol of kingship, a false beard.

Dynasties seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen and a parade of over ninety kings passes by - compare this with the mere sixty six monarchs of Britain.

We find ourselves in darkness and turmoil as we hit the Second Intermediate Period and the Hyksos conquest of Egypt. Foreign rulers take over for two centuries.

We rise on to meet classical times, an austerely refined age called the Middle Kingdom. Eleven pharaohs slide past in all their gravitas, including Amenemhat III, builder of the Great Labyrinth.

Astoundingly, there’s still around eight hundred years to go before we get back to the Old Kingdom pyramid age.

Then a veritable chaos of kings tumble by, not quite ‘seventy kings in seventy days’ as in the first intermediate Period, but something very like it.

We plummet into an age of chaos called the First Intermediate Period and we hear screams. It’s a horror section of three hundred years, where emaciated figures of death and famine leap out to terrify us like ghoulish animatrons.

As we regain speed, we come upon a line of thirty-six more kings. Dynasties six, five, four... flash past like numbers in a rapidly descending lift.

We have finally arrived at the age of the pyramid builders and the Early Dynastic period.

Worker hordes pitch stone pyramids like immense limestone tents on the plateau of Saqqara, including the Great Pyramid of Khufu and the Step Pyramid of Zoser.

We’re over five thousand years from our present day.

But have we hit ground zero yet?

Not quite. Other shadowy kings, as many as thirteen, with names like ‘Crocodile’, ‘Catfish’ and ‘Scorpion’, are beginning to emerge from the darkness of prehistory. There seems to be an unknown number of basements beneath.

We have just reached the borders of myth and history.

Conventional Egyptology places this period before the invention of writing.

Yet we keep pushing back the date of Egypt’s invention of hieroglyphs with new discoveries. Writing goes back further than Egyptologists previously once believed. This is the age of the Destiny Stela…

He paused. “I hope you aren’t feeling giddy after that ride," he said to the audience. "What is the Destiny Stela? Before I unleash the spectre of an apocalypse, let’s warm up with a quiz. What do the following individuals have in common: the ancient Egyptian Prince Khaemwaset, Pharaoh Rameses the Great, Adolf Hitler - and a mysterious individual we'll call ‘X’?”

He clicked through a series of images on the screen.

The audience saw:

A red standing statue of the ancient Egyptian Prince Khaemwaset.

A fallen colossus of the prince’s father, the Pharaoh Rameses the Great.

An image of Adolf Hitler bristling with moustache and Nazi iconography.

Finally, a shadowy silhouette of a person that contained within it the letter ‘X’.

“Anyone? There’s no prize for guessing correctly, but there could be a nasty surprise for humankind if we get it wrong.”

At the next click, the images coalesced into a montage.

“The answer: all of these people, Prince Khaemwaset, Rameses the Great and Hitler had one thing in common, I believe. They all got their hands on an apocalyptic tome known as the Stela or Stone Book of Thoth, the most powerful composition ever written, apart from the Bible but a far more volatile book than the Bible, as I’ll come to later...”

Excerpt from the novel "The Ibis Apocalypse"

AMAZON Paperback and Kindle

'They were on the eastern side of the step pyramid, sprinting alongside the heb sed court. A dark irony', he thought.

Egyptian tour guides will tell you that it’s good luck to walk in a complete circle around the Step Pyramid of Saqqara.

It’s even luckier if you’re able to run, Anson Hunter, thought after two bullets in quick succession spat dust from the ground at his feet.

The independent Egyptologist felt his skin tingling in shock like the effects of a close lightning strike.

 “What was that?” the girl said.

“Gunshots.”

He swept the courtyard and sandy perimeter of the monument. The pagan mass in stone was already twisting in the early morning heat.

The place was empty of visitors today, except for the girl. It looked like an abandoned building site with scaffolding clinging in places to the pyramid’s sides, evidence of uncompleted restoration work on the crumbling outer blocks, but somebody unseen was out there and had fired at them.

A guard? Why? It made no sense. Besides there were no guards in evidence today.

Some extremist taking pot shots at visitors?

The shots had been a little too carefully placed perhaps.

The question in his mind: was it meant to send them running? Or was it an instruction to stop?

He grabbed the girl’s hand and broke into a zigzag run, tugging her after him.

They were on the eastern side of the step pyramid, sprinting alongside the heb sed court.

A dark irony, he thought.

The heb sed court was a ceremonial running course that a reigning pharaoh used to complete at a Jubilee held every thirty years in order to prove his athleticism and his continued fitness for office. Failure to complete the run successfully in an earlier epoch saw the old king murdered.

Now they were running a circuit of survival too, not around a course with pre-set stone markers, but around the world’s first stone pyramid, a protest against death and a monumental stake in the sand for the belief in an eternal afterlife.

He flicked a glance at the girl he’d only met minutes earlier.

Her dark hair was flying and the anger in her face said: ‘it’s happening again…’

Excerpt from THE GOD DIG (Amazon paperback and Kindle)

NEW RANGE UPDATE IN THE ANSON HUNTER SERIES

THE SMITING TEXTS' (In paperback and Kindle). 'HATHOR'S HOLOCAUST'. 'THE IBIS APOCALYPSE'. 'THE NIGHT OF ANUBIS'. 'THE FORBIDDEN GLYPHS'. 'THE GOD DIG'. 'EGYPT EYES'. 'ARTEFACT'. 'ORACLE OF SIWA'. 'KHUFU'S CURSE'. 'THE SON OF GOD EGYPT TOMB'.

(excerpt) THE HERO VIRUS... A population infected by courage is an easier target...

5-star Goodreads. Amazon Kindle and paperback - mystery adventure

Chapter 1

Three armed looters stood in front of our silver RV motorhome, unafraid that the engine was running.

“They want our van,” my wife Belinda said.

“I’ll talk to them.”

A soft answer turneth away wrath, my father used to say.

But would it be enough to save my family?

“You can’t reason with them. Just run them over. Quickly, before they come around and stick guns in our faces.”

Belinda did not need to be infected with courage. It was the high tensile core of her nature.

But that didn’t make her wrong.

Courage agreed with her and said I should do what she said.

Mow down these looters.

But fear… fear whispered something else.

Fear said ‘stay alive. Seek safety.’ Fear revved the muscles for flight, keyed up hearing, sight, smell, reasoning - and the drive for survival.

And I was one of the very few who still had fear. An anxiety sufferer and so-called Afghanistan war hero suffering PTSD, I’d been hiding from the world with my family and now I was out in the open after buying supplies in town, trying to flee with them to a safer place where we could bury ourselves, literally... in an opal mining town in the outback of Australia where the people lived in dwellings dug underground, a place of sanctuary called Coober Pedy.

The looters were expressionless.

Their confrontation reminded me of a fire-fight in Afghanistan, where a pair of insiders, Afghan soldiers, coolly turned their weapons on my comrades, blowing away four in front of my eyes.

After a moment of paralysis, I squeezed the trigger that killed the turncoats with barely a twitch of fear, but later, when there was no reason to be afraid any more, a quake zone took the place where my courage used to be and it moved incessantly setting up weakening tremors night and day.

The quake now brought on a tsunami of nauseating adrenalin.

The looter on the right hand side of the windscreen lazily waved his gun barrel to tell me to get out of the vehicle. No fear in the face. As wooden as a bored traffic cop’s.

Petty thieves had grown to become daredevil criminals.

I thought: ‘what will we do if they take away our escape machine?’

The contagion of the population began with the arrival of meteorites that flashed through the sky around the globe, hitting the ground and spreading clouds of dust.

They brought something else…

The spread of a reckless new mood.

Unalloyed courage.

It swept through the population in the form of a contagion that destroyed ‘caution’, the basic survival switch in the amygdala, a pair of almond sized regions deep in the brain.

Was it a prelude to some attack?

I’d wondered why, if an unknown assailant lay behind the viral outbreak, they would choose to spread courage rather than fear among the population.

But the reason became evident.

Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.

Madly brave.

Fired with courage without the caution of fear they fronted enemies they once feared, sparked reprisals, conflict and bloodshed in the streets - and raised the threat of reckless wars between nations. And for those that remained after the carnage? History had shown that it was harder to kill a shadowy enemy, the terrorist, the guerilla, the coward, those who shrank into the cracks like spiders.

Bring them out into the open instead.

In this new world of courage, the brave ended up dead.

I saw an example of this now.

The armed men flicked their eyes skywards as they heard a cry.

A faller from a building top.

People were standing on the ledges of buildings watching the confrontation down below and one had lost his footing and slipped.

They called these human missiles Perchers - people who took to standing on the ledges of tall buildings and sitting on balcony railings to watch fights and mayhem down below.

The body slammed into the street near the front of the van with the packed thud of a cement bag.

“Yuk!” our pre-teen daughter Tash said from the back.

“At least he missed us,” her little brother Toby said gruesomely. His eyes were alight behind his plastic batman mask. Toby was always playing the superhero, ironic since he had been infected like all the family, except me.

I seized the distraction. I slid the stubby automatic gearshift down to reverse and jammed the accelerator pedal down, sucking us back down the street, which brought boos and whistles from the onlookers above.

“You’re running away!” Belinda said, appalled. “Mike, run them down!”

A spray of bullets threw up tarmac as I swung the RV into a side street, lurching over a kerb.

The jolt triggered a crockery fight in our motorhome’s overhead cupboards.

I winced, but the kids in the back seat club-lounge cheered.

“Go, Silver Bullet!”

That’s what they called the RV, although it possessed anything but the velocity of a projectile; it was just a four-cylinder diesel engine, its rear-wheels driving a 7.5 metre Mercedes Sprinter van.

The reverse camera threw up a growing image of smashed cars jamming up the street behind us.

No way back.

Damn.

We’d have to go forward again and that meant opening us up to a gauntlet of crossfire.

My hands were shaking on the wheel.

“Do you want them to come down after us?”

The future's most dangerous weapon - from ancient Egypt

The latest Anson Hunter archaeological adventure
 

 AMAZON KINDLE and PAPERBACK.  http://amzn.to/oWVTPV

'Death  in Egypt LIVE'

A live tomb-opening event broadcast to the world... at Egypt’s remote Siwa Oasis, in the Western Desert, site of the legendary Temple of the Oracle.
But who could predict the turn of events?
A panel of experts, ‘modern day Oracles’ - historical theorists and Egyptologists - gather to make astonishing predictions about the contents of a mysterious tomb.
Including Anson Hunter, independent Egyptologist.
He fears the discovery of the most powerful, and dangerous, military weapon in history. The Oracle Stone - source of infallible prophecy that inspired arduous desert treks by Alexander the Great, Lysander the Spartan, Hannibal... and just possibly by Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps?
Alternative scenarios - and mysteries - thicken and swirl like a violent dust storm as deadly crisis strikes.

Time of Plagues & Pestilence - can one bowman hunt down the Destroyer Sekhmet-Hathor?

Sekhmet-Hathor, she-devil and lioness Lady of Terror...

A young bowman is given the most dangerous task in creation to hunt down the rampaging lioness-goddess Hathor-Sekhmet, the Destroyer of Humankind sent by an angry Ra.

Then he meets a mysterious young woman, a crawler in the reeds.

What had he heard? Something was dragging itself through the reeds. Crocodile? Or that other force of elemental chaos, a hippopotamus?

In a smooth, protective action, he drew an arrow from a quiver, attached to a belt around his kilt, and nocked it to the string of his bow. He searched the base of the thicket, looking for the scale-net pattern of a crocodile’s flank. He drew the bow to be ready, edging nearer, using the tip of the arrow to move aside a tall papyrus stem, its umbel a feathery triangle like the delta of a woman.

The bowman’s eye, narrowing to focus beyond the bronze arrow tip, widened in surprise. Instead of an animal, he found himself regarding the slithering form of a young woman on her belly. She was moving down the bank to the water. He went still closer, parting the reeds with an elbow. She was splattered with blood.

Someone - still alive.

A fish jumped. A dragonfly darted away. He saw her stretch her neck. Long hair swung down in lappets to trail in the water, hiding her face. He heard lapping and sucking. Was she a chance survivor or another dying victim of the pestilence? A dying one, he guessed. She must be injured for she was splattered with blood. The soles of her feet were crimson as if stained with henna, but it was blood. There had been no other survivors in the trail of destruction he had been following for days.

Maybe he should end her suffering quickly with an arrow. All it would take would be a slackening of his fingers. Oblivion would slide into her body with little more shock than the cold ache of water going into her stomach.

But his spirit had become stretched taut as his bowstring against death. No more killing. It was as if he had been walking through the scene of a battlefield for weeks. Bodies of the dead choked villages and towns and fields like rising mud-waters of the inundation.

He could taste death along with dust in his throat. The desert that on two sides hemmed in a land that was green and sweetly verdant - the oasis civilization of Egypt - was now like the sides of a coffin entombing a dying people. Too late, inhabitants had fled to the hills to hide, but the scorching eye of destruction had followed them there too, striking with claw and with fever, leaving some to die in their own blood, others in the rictus of plague. The path of destruction was moving upstream, the hunter observed.

He watched the survivor. A young woman, probably a noblewoman or a temple priestess, judging by the remnants of a sheer linen dress, now blood-splattered and clinging to her body, and by the turquoise bracelets on her arms. She made soft gasps and snuffles as she drank.

Here was Egypt, all of beautiful, dying Egypt, captured in one young woman crawling on her belly to suck at Mother Nile. Unexpectedly tender feelings stirred and grasped the strong young man, like the thicket of papyrus plants that crowded him, murmuring and shushing as though to calm a distressed child.

Se-Sheh-Shet, the reeds whispered softly in the breeze...

(Excerpt from "Hunting Hathor' (Kindle). 

This story also appears as a tale within a novel, in "The Smiting Texts" (Amazon Kindle and paperback)

Finding an exciting Egypt mystery read WITHOUT DIGGING

Finding an enthralling mystery fiction read shouldn't be as hard as archaeological digging, nor call for ground penetrating radar...

JUST CLICK HERE

Classifying my range of around 30 novels would even tax the Shakespearean windbag Polonius in 'Hamlet' who speaks amusingly about a choice of...

 “...tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited...”

Are my novels:

Historical Fantasy Science Fiction Adventures Mystery Action & Adventure Occult Thriller & Suspense  Literature & Fiction, Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Science Fiction & Fantasy
 ?
Yes, and... yes.