Lesser Nefertiti

By Jon Jacks

Why does the freshly excavated Egyptian tomb have a second, sealed door? And why has it been desecrated, and the mummy’s head severed?
As Clary illustrates the recovered artefacts, she forges a deepening connection with a young girl who’d become pharaoh when the wolf-headed Anup was being worshipped.
Can they stop the rites that will lead to the birth of the very first werewolf?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jon Jacks
• Release date: Apr 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463706695

Jon Jacks

While working in London as, first, an advertising Creative Director (the title in the U.S. is wildly different; the role involves both creating and overseeing all the creative work in an agency, meaning you’re second only to the Chairman/President) and then a screenwriter for Hollywood and TV, I moved out to an incredibly ancient house in the countryside.On the day we moved out, my then three-year-old daughter (my son was yet to be born) was entranced by the new house, but also upset that we had left behind all that was familiar to her.So, very quickly, my wife Julie and I laid out rugs and comfortable chairs around the huge fireplace so that it looked and felt more like our London home. We then left my daughter quietly reading a book while we went to the kitchen to prepare something to eat.Around fifteen minutes later, my daughter came into the kitchen, saying that she felt much better now ‘after talking to the boy’.‘Boy?’ we asked. ‘What boy?’‘The little boy; he’s been talking to me on the sofa while you were in here.’We rushed into the room, looking around.There wasn’t any boy there of course.‘There isn’t any little boy here,’ we said.‘Of course,’ my daughter replied. ‘He told me he wasn’t alive anymore. He lived here a long time ago.’A child’s wild imagination?Well, that’s what we thought at the time; but there were other strange things, other strange presences (but not really frightening ones) that happened over the years that made me think otherwise.And so I began to write the kind of stories that, well, are just a little unbelievable.

Book preview

Chapter 1

‘It just seemed to me that he has an almost human intelligence,’ Clary explained when Mrs Davis asked why she had drawn the jackal as if he were more man than beast.

‘You see things so oddly, my dear,’ Mrs Davis replied with a nervous laugh. ‘You will have to temper this oddity within yourself if you are to render the Egyptian artefacts accurately.’

‘I’m sure that I can portray them truthfully, Mrs Davis,’ Clary reassured the much older woman, slipping her sketchpad and pencil back into the panniers straddling her horse.

The jackal had followed them all the way from the outskirts of the city, easily keeping pace with their unhurried journey across the sands as their camel-mounted guides led them out towards the Valley of the Kings. Even now, as their small column wound its way through the rocky hills, and they more frequently encountered the odd worker taking a break from the digging, the jackal insisted on closely accompanying them, slinking low across the hill tops.

It wasn’t until they reached the camp itself, and were helped to exhaustedly slide down from the backs of their horses, that the jackal seemed at last to tire of his task, loping off along an ancient track that seemed to lead to nowhere in particular.

*

‘We’ll get you some refreshment first, before taking you down to the tomb; we’re not quite through the second door yet anyway.’

‘A second door? But my husband sent someone out to tell us you’d already broken through?’

‘Ah, yes; but unusually – no one’s ever come across this before – there was this other door. A far more formidable one than the first one we encountered too!’

The kaki-clad man escorting them towards the gathering of low-set, mud-brown tents had taken Clary by surprise when he had introduced himself as Arthur Weigall. Mrs Davis had quickly taken her through the main characters she would be meeting in the camp without addressing their ages, and so Clary had naturally assumed that anyone holding the exalted position of Chief Inspector of Antiquities would be much older than this young man in his mid-twenties.

Vainly attempting to dust off the sand that seemed to have magnetically attached itself to every part of her clothing, Clary followed him, briefly looking back over her shoulder to check that the men unloading her travel bags from the overloaded camels were also bringing along the panniers containing her sketching materials.

She always carried a small pad and stubby pencil in the pocket of her dress, but she hadn’t wanted to leave her equipment in more careless hands, fearing she might be left with broken leads in her pencils, or scuffed papers.

The camels grunted nosily in complaint as they were made to kneel, a harsh braying that almost drowned out the excited cries coming from beyond the tents that, it seemed to Clary, were muted by distance.

‘Hah! It seems we’ve broken through after all!’ the young man grinned elatedly, perhaps unconsciously increasing his pace. ‘Once we’ve got you settled–’

‘Settled nothing!’ scoffed Mrs Davis, hitching up her long skirt so the hem pulled clear of the ground, revealing the most unladylike of boots. ‘My thirst is to see what my husband’s discovered out here!’

Her own pace picked up, so set on keeping close to the young man that she displayed not even an inkling of concern that her much younger companion might have preferred to take a quick drink before progressing on to the excavation.

Fortunately, Clary was every bit as eager as the old woman to see the recently uncovered entrance to the newly discovered tomb. They had been regularly given water on the journey out here, and although that could never have completely eradicated her sense that the heat made her feel forever parched, it meant she could wait a while longer before slaking her thirst.

‘The seal on the second door is quite wonderfully clear, Miss Davis!’ Weigall gleefully pronounced as he looked back towards Clary with a beaming smile. ‘It’s a jackal; a black jackal!’

*

Chapter 2

As Weigall had no doubt intended, he had grabbed Clary’s interest by mentioning the jackal seal, although perhaps not in the child-like thrill he had probably expected of her. Even though she realised there couldn’t be any possible connection, she couldn’t help but link the presence of the seal to the strange way that the jackal had so closely followed them all the way out here.

It was a coincidence, that was all, of course.

‘She’s not my daughter,’ Mrs Davis irritably sniffed back at Weigall. ‘I brought her out here with me because she has an undoubted talent in quickly and accurately rendering objects in the most precise detail.’

‘Oh, er, sorry, Miss, er…’ a flustered Weigall stammered, his apology directed more toward Clary than Mrs Davis.

‘Clary; just call me Clary,’ she replied; for she had never warmed to the second name given to her by the orphanage, accepting only that pinned to the basket she had been found in.

‘How was it discovered? The tomb, I mean,’ she said, hoping to change the direction of the conversation.

‘That’s the trouble or the beauty of the wind’s control of the sand, depending on how you view it,’ Weigall explained excitedly. ‘It regularly changes the whole landscape, perhaps maliciously hiding a tomb for centuries; then suddenly decides on a whim that it’s going to reveal everything after all.’

*

They arrived at the dig far sooner than Clary had expected.

The elated cries had not been muted by distance, as she had assumed, but by the surrounding walls of rock the workers had uncovered as they had dug their way deep into the hillside.

A steep and long flight of steps had also been revealed, originally cut into the bedrock and now dangerously littered with all kinds of rubble. The stairs descended past what were now the remains of the first door the work teams had carved their way through, limestone blocks that had for the moment been pushed aside if not completely shattered.

Beyond this, down yet more steps, men were still ferociously hacking at a second set of firmly enjoined blocks. Towering above the men frenziedly seeking to break their way through it, this doorway still retained for the moment its plasterwork, along with seals and hieroglyphics of various kinds.

Three white men, their jackets cast aside, their shirt sleeves rolled up, were avidly joining in with the enlargement of a hole that had already been cut into the doorway. They were each covered in a thick sheen of dust that made their hair every bit as white as the oldest amongst them, a man of at least seventy that Clary took to be Mrs Davis’s husband, Theodore.

Their patinas of limestone ensured that the other two men were indistinguishable, though – with Mrs Davis’s earlier descriptions in mind – Clary presumed one must be Edward Ayrton, an English archaeologist hardly older than Weigall, making the other Joseph Smith, an American painter and photographer.

Much to Mrs Davis’s obvious chagrin, everyone was far too busy and excited to notice her approach.