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Sand.
Even as he wiped the sand from his eyes (and a forty-something-year nap would leave quite a lot of it), Crowley’s sight beheld nothing but sand.
It swam away from him in rippling waves as he sat on the left end of a long stone block and gazed upon the Western desert, the place the Egyptians had marked as death.
The dunes layered over one another, fading from fawn to taupe to khaki. They stretched themselves out into a hazy grey horizon that swept up into dramatic curling clouds dappled in cream and silver hues.
The desert seemed to taunt Crowley, an entire ocean of impossibility with not a drop of water in it. To look at it was to encompass the whole of it immediately, but to touch it, to hold it , was futility incarnate; the sand would slip between his fingers before they stretched more than a millimeter apart.
Why would he want to touch the sand? Why would he want to gather the whole of the Sahara in his palm? The same sand that blew at him, in blustery gales of unexpected fervor? That irritated him to no end when it got between his teeth? That warmed the place he would lay his bedroll? That glittered and dazzled as it moved, distracting Crowley from the job at hand? That was so full of life at all times that Crowley couldn’t find it in himself to be mad that he was caught in its orbit? That sand.
Yet, that very sand lay motionless now, piled in little drifts that perfectly mimicked velvet, or tweed, or even a thick wool jacket draped over the seascape.
A cup of water, tipped over and poured out onto the sand, would make no difference to the sand; its contents would seep through the grains rapidly, leaving no trace behind, not even a droplet for the sun to evaporate. But to a man, condemned to wander the desert, whose existence has become wrapped around his thirst like a poorly done taxidermy, all jutting feathers and bones sticking out at odd angles, the pelt stretching thing over where its soft squishy organs should be, sewn up roughly with sulfuric acid and scorch marks, those very drops could be… well, you already know the rest.
But that is the thing of it, the potential. Those scant ounces of water could be.
They mean nothing to the sand, absolutely nothing , but to the man, they could be salvation. To pass this cup from me , would not be condemnation, but exoneration. The man would be freed from his desert, and the giver, the cup-passer, would have given drink to the thirsty.
Two hands would have wound around a clay vessel, cool to the touch but for the gentle spark where their pinkies met. There would have been the length of a forearm between the pair. It would have been so simple, a graceful step in their usual dance of getting just close enough before stepping back, like in a cotillion ball.
But no, the cup had not been passed. Instead of a stepping closer, the giver had fled, and then so too had the thirsty man-shaped being. The space between them had morphed from a cup of water into a gulf of sand.
Crowley stared into the sandy abyss, and the very image of it sizzled as he beheld that monument of absence. Something almost like tears watered in his eyes, but he blinked them back; they would not fall to soak into the uncaring sand. Crowley would be fine, as long as he did not admit that the sand was not sand, that the water was not water.
He plucked at a thread unspooling from one of the cuffs of his three piece suit, which was quite fashionable for the day, and a far, far cry from the loose flowing gallibayas that the native workmen of the dig wore. He had little else to do after all. It was not exactly like he was here in Giza on an assignment.
Still, he was right where Hell wanted him to be.
After falling asleep drunk on a British cargo ship, he had woken up in Lower Egypt, and at the very least a decade late on his latest report to Hell. So, he did what any demon would do, finding themself stuck between an extremely uncomfortable box that made their corporation’s back ache, and staring down the bullet-end of Hell’s gun of punishment.
He again got roaringly drunk, and lied his smarting backside off.
He had sent a not-quite-apologetic and extremely fabricated letter to head office about how he had been studying the rise of archaeology in Egypt over the past decades, and its potential for engorging Hell, and how he’d needed to be rather discreet and uncommunicative due to the political nature of it all.
However, in the process of getting drunk to write this letter, he had found himself in a pub crawl among a group of rather randy French tourists. After the fourth (fifth? Or maybe even sixth…) tavern visit, one of the seeming leaders, Jaques, (or Robes-Pierre, or was his name Eugene?) cried out, “We have come to Egypt to see some pyramids! So let us go see them, the wonders of our dear friend Mariette!” [1]
There among the group rose a great cry of agreement, and off they went in search of pyramids, Crowley throwing his arm around dear Eugene.
The group soon found the pyramids they were searching for, and a great deal of noise later, Crowley and Eugene(?) stood at the entrance to a pyramid’s subterranean chambers. (Crowley was too drunk to pay much attention to the noise, except to note its absence. He would find out, in the next week’s news-sheet, that the main source of this first racket had been an argument between Eugene’s friends and one Howard Carter, about the need for an entrance fee to be paid to see the pyramids.)
“Ssssssally ho!” Crowley called, toasting Eugene with a canteen full of Stella beer. It was not wine, but alcohol was alcohol. Especially when the last time Crowley had had a good bottle of wine had been the Chambertin he’d shared with Aziraphale, the night before… before…
Crowley finished his sentence with a hearty chug of the beer.
“But ve cannot see!” replied Eugene.
“It’ssssss alright,” Crowley reassured, starting to enter the darkened corridor, “I can sssssseeee jussssst fine for all of usssss.”
Of course, Crowley was saying this all in French, drunken French, and so his sibilance was rather easily missed, especially considering that French sounded to Crowley’s ear like a fish choking on seawater, even when enunciated under the most sober of conditions.
Crowley continued further into the passage as the Frenchmen with him debated among themselves. He found he had to focus to switch his eyes more serpentine, to adjust to the thickening shadows.
Then, “There are no torches! Zey ‘ave tricked us!” echoed down the passageway, called a man who was not Eugene.
At this, Crowley turned around and made his way back to the entrance just in time to see that Howard Carter and his men were in fact bringing torches for the tourists.
Except, Carter looked like a bull with a china shop squarely in his sights. His nose flared as he tucked his chin. The sleeves of his loose cut linen shirt were already rolled up to his elbows, and his hands were balled into trembling fists. In the flickering firelight of the torches, Crowley could readily believe a pair of horns had sprouted from the sides of his head.
Carter approached the group slowly step by menacing step, just as a bull prepares itself to charge.
And then, not-Eugene swung at him.
And then, pandemonium broke out.
Fists and curses flew through the air, anger and violence being only another in the list of vices the Frenchmen deigned to partake in that night. In a flash, nearly two dozen men were fighting, and Carter had grappled not-Eugene to the sandy ground.
Having crawled on his belly in the dust for far long enough of his immortal lifetime, Crowley slunk back into the shadows of the corridor.
And that is how he received his umpteenth commendation from Hell, and a mandate to stick around in Egypt, for his success with being the primary instigator of the “Saqqara Affair.”
It was at a dinner party that Crowley met the American, George Reisner. It was not as though Reisner were the only American mucking about in the sands of Egypt, but he was the only American at the dinner party, besides his wife Mary.
With the German professor Georg Steindorff, the French Antiquities Service Director Gaston Maspero, and the Italian archaeologist Ernesto Schiaparelli as the guests of honor alongside Reisner, it meant his American-ness stuck out like an apple pie on the end of Jack Horner’s sore thumb.
The dinner party was small, but not small enough that Crowley’s strangeness would be the subject of too much discussion. He had only gotten his “invitation” earlier that day when he tumbled off his camel in front of an Egyptian worker.
He staggered to his feet. “Where can I–” he said, before abruptly getting cut off by a kohl-lined glare from the man in front of him.
“British?” he asked, looking Crowley’s dust covered, but finely tailored suit up and down accusingly.
“Y-yup.” Crowley snapped his mouth shut and nodded.
The man, not breaking eye contact, pointed to a large and slimly decorated dahabiya, floating along the bank of the Nile. The houseboat was long, with a canvas tent covering most of the upper deck. Two masts sprouted from the boat at fore and aft, their spindly booms balanced at angles that would give British shipbuilders nightmares. They bobbed in the hot late-afternoon breeze, reminding Crowley of storks dipping their long necks into the water, looking for food.
The sails were rolled up for the day, a good sign that if Crowley were to get on the boat, he would not find himself a hundred miles back up the river when he got off.
He squinted from behind his sunglasses at the searing sunlight that gleamed on the surface of the Nile, its glare blending with the shine of the houseboat’s wooden railings. The wood gleamed a honey brown, set off against the cream white walls of the boat. Bathed in the sun’s rays, the boat seemed too good to be true. Like a dream, really, with the way the heat of the day simmered in waves on the horizon behind it.
“Go. Dinner,” the worker commanded Crowley, as he stood there staring. He jabbed his pointing finger at the marvelous boat.
And that was how Crowley found himself inside the dining room of the dahabiya, seated next to the Italian, enjoying what he did not know to be the last good glass of wine he would be having for a long, long time.
Crowley had already forgotten the name of the man, but that was alright, because Ernesto was not at all forgetting to refill Crowley’s glass.
“So, Crowlee ,” he said, turning to Crowley, once the salad course had been served.
The salad was something with lettuce quails eggs and stuffed grape leaves, that struck some part of Crowley’s hind-brain as oddly colonialistic cuisine, and a topic of conversation he should mention next time he spoke to Az—
Crowley took a deep drink of his wine, knowing that he would not even be tasting said salad course.
“What is it that you desire?” the Italian asked.
Crowley turned to him and raised an eyebrow. That was not the sort of question humans usually asked a demon .
At the look of confusion emanating solely from Crowley’s eyebrows and downturned lips, one that Ernesto would liken to a commedia del arte mask, he explained. “There must be something that you want. All men want things. You are a digging man, no?” He tilted his head at Crowley’s suit jacket, dulled to a charcoal grey from its usual ink black, due to the amount of sand and dust caught in its fibers. “And you are at dinner with the greatest diggers this country has seen.” He waggled his eyebrows at Crowley and smiled, trying to calm the recalcitrant Brit.
Crowley writhed to attention in a way that was half serpentine, half drunk. The six glasses of wine he had drank since the amuse-bouche course spoke for him.
“I don’t… I don’t sup- pose you gentlemen know anything about digging heads out of arses, do you? There is this one angel in SoHo who has his ‘duty to Heaven’ and his own niceness shoved so far up his…” Crowley looked far enough beyond his own plate and cup to notice the blank stares of the table all focused on him.
He swallowed as he miracled his past two glasses of wine back into his cup.
“Uh,” Crowley said. “That is to say, I’d like to…staymhm in Eghyughpt,” he said into the cup’s rim, punctuating the statement with a deep gulp of the wine that he had already drank once.
“Ah!” the Italian man only seemed to get more cheerful. “You are looking for a dig to join, that is it! You should talk to Reisner then. I am getting out of Egypt, as is good for these old bones, but you, you have the ambition of youth!”
Crowley’s eyebrows did a wiggle. A what-the-hell-are-you-on-about, I’m-obviously-middle-aged wiggle. The Italian did not notice the wiggle.
“Reisner has that ambition too, you really should talk to him, he will have space at Giza for you.”
Crowley was starting to regret not just taking a swallow of his wine and putting more effort into avoiding the Italian’s question.
“Reisner!” Ernesto called, and a man diagonally across the table looked over at them. “Crowley here wants to dig! And he’s British, so you can gargle all your English together!”
Reisner looked over Crowley at the same time that Crowley looked over Reisner. To Crowley, Reisner was a man made of rectangles, which had had all their sharpness sanded off at the edges. His brown hair fell away from his center part in straight, almost greasy tufts, but the shape of it mirrored the broad stretch of his jawline. His shoulders filled out his suit like weathered bricks, and even seated, Crowley could tell that he was tall. His chest might have been the only thing round about him, but it was round like a barrel. No, Reisner was not round like a pillow, not like the supple flesh of a shared oyster, not like the familiar curve of an oxbone swaddled in linen, begging for Crowley to press his own angled and lean frame against it….
Crowley once again took a gulp of his wine, and pretended that the warmth in his cheeks was solely from the alcohol. He pretended like his concentration hadn’t wandered all the way back to Uz.
“What do you do, Mr Crowley?” Reisner asked, in a way that was quite clear he was not as excited about a “digging man” as the Italian was.
There must have been a whole bottle of wine in that sixth glass, as Crowley began to bill himself as an independent inspector from the Victoria and Albert Museum, compiling a report on whether to invest in more egyptological digs, and to send relics back to England. He added whatever detail he could to make it seem legitimate, to convince Reisner to let him stay in Egypt. He carried the conversation for course upon course, expanding upon his college years studying art and history, his past as an antiquities dealer in London, and his midlife dream of being the one to dig up the marvels that he saw sold at auction.
“Why not the British museum?” Reisner asked, at long last. “Surely they would have a larger funding pool should your investigations go well.” He cocked a square eyebrow in such a way that its straight shape did not bend a millimeter.
“Ngk!” Crowley said, a bite of mille-feuille, caught between his fork and throat. Crowley swallowed, and then waved the question away, saying, “They don’t understand the true artistic merit of what you gentlemen are doing here. They only want to give glory to England, and would never think about pairing up with non-english egyptologists, never mind how cunning and modern-edge your archaeological methods are.”
Crowley was laying it on thick , but egotism had landed as many in hell as lust, and, Crowley reflected, it came at a much cheaper cost to his own ego.
And that was how Crowley ended up stuck at Giza for the next four months, watching men dig in the dust for scraps of pottery day in and day out, all the while nearly dying of boredom.
He spent most days wandering the dig site, making pretend notes about this or that object that the workers had revealed, keeping his “artistic expertise” wrapped around him like an isolating cloak.
He spent most nights wandering too, looking for some scrap of something to fill the chilling ache within him that seemed to grow only larger by the day, that mummified him from the inside out.
The ache, in truth, was a drink called loneliness, and it tasted like salt and far too much sand.
One night during Crowley’s wanderings, a thunderstorm kicked up over Giza. The rain fell in great drops, pounding the ground and him, the pelt of them stinging Crowley even through the layers of his suit and jacket.
He had gone too far to run back to his tent unscathed. As lightning cracked in a large arc against the sky, even the smallest sliver of Crowley’s hope that he could make it back to his bedroll smoldered and died.
To escape the rain, he entered into Khufu’s Pyramid, the Great Pyramid of Giza itself, ducking under the outstretched wing of stone that formed the archaeologists’ entrance.
For reasons Crowley could not say, he continued deeper into the pyramid, picking his way through the tunnels as if pulled by some force. At the threshold of the ascending passageway, he picked up a torch and lit it with a snap of his fingers.
In almost a trance, he wandered to the very center of the pyramid, the King’s Chamber. It was an echoing room, as large as the entire interior of the dahabiya Crowley had first met Reisner on, and from Crowley’s many experiences over the past months of being dragged through the pyramid by Reisner, he knew it was made entirely of smoothed red sandstone, without a marking in sight.
That was why, that night, Crowley’s eyes flickered and turned snake-like as he beheld the intricate portraits painted on the wall. He tore off his shaded glasses; he simply had to absorb every detail of the scene, as it rippled before him in the scant torchlight.
Those were not there before, he thought as he regarded the two figures that took up the largest part of the wall. He would have known, would have seen these two on the dozens of times he had been in the King’s Chamber on visits and tours with the other egyptologists over the long months he had camped with Reisner’s team.
Hell, Reisner and Steindorff would have been arguing late into the night about the reasoning for this single tomb painting when not a single other tomb surface had been marked.
Convoluted vandalism? Reisner would propose.
Vhat kind of vandal vould decorate instead of plunder? Ze paintz vould haff cost him a fair fohrtune! Steindorff would have shot back, obviously irritated at Reisner’s endless ability to, as the youths called it, “spitball”.
Crowley nearly smirked. The Germans had something going for them, with their level-headed practicality, but their wine… urghk.
Besides, a graduate student that looked rather like Eric in Crowley’s imagination would interrupt, the Egyptians were not even in the habit of painting tomb walls until over a millenia later. The memory of Khufu would have been as dear to the vandal as William the Conqueror is to us!
But ve are not… British, Steindorff would reply, with heavy emphasis on ‘British’.
Uh… exactly! the grad student would exclaim, trying to desperately cover up his tracks. We are not British. What would we care about the tomb of William the Conqueror? Egypt would have been like an entirely different kingdom when the Great Pyramid was built versus when our supposed vandal would have done this.
The conversation would fade into more old men grumbling and arguing from there.
But it didn’t matter, as neither Reisner nor Steindorff nor any plucky grad student had laid eyes on the painting Crowley now stood transfixed by.
The likenesses were unmistakable.
Two men faced each other in the limestone, pigments staining the crevices of the etchings, as bright as the day they had first been painted.
On the right there was a man with long red hair and golden eyes, dressed in black robes like one had rolled the wings of Isis in charcoal, and then bound them all together with a red belt. His one hand held onto an ankh, life, and his other reached out towards…
Crowley’s breath hissed out of him, as though he had been the one punched at Saqqara.
The man on the left faced him , the painted Crowley, but kept his hands at his sides. He had short, curling white hair, and the artist had made his eyes the gleaming blue of the Nile on a sunny afternoon. The figure was shirtless, but a gaudy gold collar and a gold-embroidered white shendyt loincloth framed the round softness of his stomach and torso.
Aziraphale.
Crowley lifted his hand as though to touch, but his breath caught on the way it mirrored his hand in the painting, reaching towards Aziraphale. The painted hand danced in and out of the firelight from Crowley’s torch, wavering. Hesitating. Waffling over whether to truly reach out. To hold…
Crowley scowled. Look at him, look at where ‘reaching out’ had gotten him. No insurance, no (good) alcohol, no Aziraphale.
He ground his teeth as he retracted his hand; it fell naturally to his side in a clenched fist.
Fraternizing! If that was how his angel saw them, then Crowley was simply never going to try reaching out again. Asking questions had given him one fall from grace, but it seemed that asking for favors had given him quite another.
Besides, he thought bitterly to himself, Aziraphale owed Crowley an apology dance, for the way he had stormed off from St. James’ Park.
Crowley would simply hold out, until Aziraphale came back to him and paid his apology-dance-ridden debt. He would not be some disaster of a puppy dog and go chasing after Aziraphale. Even if that meant holding out for a century. Or a millenia. Or until some bird sharpening its beak once a millennium had worn down all 147 meters of the Great Pyramid he was standing in right that moment.
Crowley had plenty of other people to “fraternize” with in the meantime, after all.
“So then I told that sporting fellow to give them a run for their money,” Reisner had said over the dinner fire the previous night, “and what do you know it, but in the last down of that game, Charley-boy reached into his heart and pulled out some of that good old Indiana pluck and ran the ball a whole thirty yards! We were already up by one, but oh ho ho! Charley got a steak dinner that night, for certain. You should have seen the way he stuck the mud to those damn Yalemen’s faces.” He had chuckled, the scene of that (superfluous, but) winning touchdown relegated only to his own imagination, and then had taken a long puff of his pipe.
Crowley had swirled his too dry and too hot wine in the simple tin camp cup it had been served in. He’d hid his sneer in the cup as he had taken a swallow, only to be interrupted by Reisner clapping a meaty hand on Crowley’s shoulder. Crowley had choked and spluttered as the sour wine had filled his nostrils and all the wrong parts of his throat. What part of it that had not been burning Crowley’s insides had promptly made its evacuation from his cup to the sands below.
“Now you,” Reisner had said, unable to let even such a small thing as a silence repose long enough in the dig camp to become such thing as ‘comfortable’, “ Tony , you have the usual anemic complexion of your countrymen, of course, but you are rather more of the ‘scrawny’ build. Come, come, tell us, they must have loved you on the cricket team, back in your Eton days, was it? You must have been a lightning strike of agility around the wickets.”
“I didn’t do sports,” Crowley had enunciated, the acerbity in his voice a near match for that of the wine. At that moment, he had used a minor miracle to usher the spilt portion back into his glass before taking a much slower sip, one that was long enough to discourage further attempts at conversation. He’d used another to clear his mouth of the taste of the wine.
Reisner had stared Crowley, seemingly undecided on how much to regard him, and puffed on his pipe in a manner somewhere between angrily and contemplatively, striking an expression quite like a discounted Theodore Roosevelt portrait. He had then turned his regard to his underling, Johnson, or Peter-Roberts, or Eugene, whatever his name was, and asked, “What about you boy? Were you a man of the pigskin before you became a man of the pyramids?”
Crowley had stopped paying attention then, and thankfully Reisner had stopped paying attention to him.
Crowley was quite the fraternizer, yup, that was him, always fraternizing.
“Obviously,” Crowley parroted himself, the syllables dancing with constrained rage as his typically British stiff upper lip turned into a stiff upper snarl. His hesitating, flesh and blood, corporeal hand, the one that would suffer and melt into nothingness if touched by holy water, came up from its clenched fist by his side and slammed into the wall.
But then, underneath the resounding thud of it, there was another noise. The subtle contrabass vibration of stone sliding against stone.
Crowley banged on the wall again. And again.
“Ow ow ow ow!” he hissed, and waved his hand around and sucked on his soon to be bruised knuckles. He met his own painted eye, and then his gaze skittered over the hieroglyphic scarab near it.
No more minor miracles, he reminded himself . He shivered, though not from the chill of the billions of tons of granite and limestone surrounding him. He had already been visited by one of Beelzebub’s flies three times that week.
He was being watched.
There was no need for him to draw further attention to himself. Not when this would be the first thing Hell would find when they checked in on him.
So, Crowley grit his teeth and wound up his fist and banged on the wall one last time.
The sliding rock sound echoed, and out came a hissing noise too, like an airtight container had just opened.
Crowley lifted up his torch and saw that the sun, at the center of a pair of wings above the paintings of Aziraphale and himself, had shifted out of the wall by an inch.
Oh.
A secret compartment, just like the ones so often touted in those detective novels of Reisner’s.
Whilst with Reisner, Crowley had made a habit of stealing whichever one of them Reisner was about the finish reading, and spoiling the ending at breakfast a day or two later. It scratched an unnamed itch in Crowley to see the irritated cloud that would hang over Reisner’s actions for the rest of the day.
But, all that reading did leave Crowley with some opinions of his own. Namely, that the whole concept of “secret drawers” was a cheap trick, one most often employed by hacks who pretended to be authors so as to cash in on the genre craze. And well, he was impressed by the sheer intellect and human creativity that went into writing mysteries such as the ones Sherlock Holmes faced.[2]
Still, Crowley thought, the one good thing about secret drawers was that while stupid, Hell was even stupider, and likely wouldn’t be able to find a secret compartment if it had a neon sign pointing to it.
Crowley nearly dropped the torch in his scramble to get his hands around the sun and pull it out of the wall.
As he pulled, the drawer was revealed to be a stone cylinder, about the size of his palm in radius, and nearly as long as his forearm. It had no decoration except for the sun painted on one end, and when Crowley pulled it down to eye-level, he saw that the inside had been carved out. In its place lay a scroll of papyrus that looked as though it had been pressed the day before.
Half formed questions flew through Crowley’s mind. Who… what… when… why?
Crowley placed his torch in a holder before scrambling to peel the papyrus out from its resting place and read it. He had almost unrolled the entire scroll when his eyes landed on the first line of text, that read:
𓎡𓂋𓄿𓅱𓃭𓇌
Krawli, the hieroglyphs rearranged themselves into in Crowley’s mind, in a distinct copperplate script that he would recognize anywhere.
Crowley snapped the scroll shut and hopped from foot to foot in burning fury. The one , singular, solitary interesting thing to happen to him in this Hell-forsaken desert, and it had to be because of Aziraph-
Crowley stopped jumping and glared at the scroll. He gripped it in both hands with half a mind to tear it to pieces, half a mind to burn it to ashes.
He could not, would not read it. He meant what he’d promised himself about not reaching out for Aziraphale. And that meant Aziraphale’s stupid letters, too.
“Oh Mary, I will make a queen out of you tonight!”
The voice echoed from the Grand Gallery, the only hallway leading to the King’s Chamber where Crowley stood. It was also the only exit.
“Georgie, I do not need to be a queen!” came a higher, more feminine voice. A giggle like silvery bells bounced back and forth. “I just- ack! Oh, Georgie! ” The last exclamation was filled with amused pleasure.
“An enchantress, then,” came the reply. “For you have bespelled me—with the need—to kiss you— and kiss you— and kiss you.”
Both voices faded out then, presumably too busy with… other activities.
Still, the ensuing silence was quickly filled with the beating of Crowley’s heart. The sound ricocheted around the near barren room. The torch flicked on the pristine red stone walls, giving them a pulse. It was as though the pyramid itself was a living beast, and had trapped Crowley inside its beating heart, a hundred times larger than Crowley’s own. Or perhaps Crowley was only an outgrowth of the pyramid, a parasitic tumor given consciousness, whose only point was to manifest the panic of the behemoth that birthed him.
Crowley’s breath hitched and the sound echoed over and over itself, folding into resounding layers of intensity until it beat like a marching of war drums to Crowley’s ear. He was Jonah, in a beached, stone cold whale.
He was about to be caught dead in a tomb, and he knew, with all the certainty of Huckleberry Finn, that there was no afterlife for him. He was going to go to Hell.
Crowley estimated that he had less than a minute until ‘Georgie’ found him there.
He had less than a minute to… to what? Come up with an explanation for his midnight wanderings? Or why there was suddenly a painting of well, Crowley , on the side of a pyramid that had been reopened for nearly a century?
Somewhere , no.
Even if he had vowed not to read another word of the letter clutched in his fist, it, and the mural, were for Crowley himself. Alone.
What he and Aziraphale… had had , past tense, was for themselves alone. For their own side.
So, that meant… Crowley’s mind fizzed and sparked as it attempted to keep up with his galloping heart, the thumping growing faster by the second, setting the pyramid’s heart around him to spinning. Its pace rivaled the finely bred Arabian horses that Reisner’s workers bet on, in the city.
Crowley, the horse . He snorted at the mental image.
Give me forty gallons of vodka, and I could keep up in a heartbeat. Half a heartbeat, even, Crowley thought, but then he grimaced. Like there was even that much vodka in the entire country. Or that what little vodka he would find wouldn’t go down like an antiseptic. [3]
Crowley, it could be said, was fantastic at thinking under pressure. He was not, however, always fantastic at thinking about the situation causing such pressure. Or about anything important, really.
“ Ohh, Georgie,” came the feminine voice, sounding much closer, and much more satisfied. Crowley felt his need for vodka double in that moment.
But what also doubled was his need to hide himself and the evidence!
Crowley stuffed the letter back into the stone cylinder and the whole package into his pants, where he could have been making more of an effort, but couldn’t be arsed to. He scrambled around the room to find a hiding spot.
“ Mmmm!”
Crowley looked up frantically from a pot he had been debating whether he could fit his snake form in, but the lovers had not yet made their arrival. Instead, just at the edges of Crowley’s circle of torch light, was the empty doorway and an utterly blank wall. The hard rock stuffed down Crowley’s trousers, filled with secrets, and anger, and a curiosity that pulsed just beneath Crowley’s spiking panic was the only trace that there had been anything at all on the red sandstone’s surface.
Well, that settled that. The mural had just been for the pair, the two of them, themselves.
“Oh, Mary! ” Thud. “Rrrrawrr….” Georgie’s voice echoed. Crowley did not have time to wipe the pitiful imitation of a lion’s roar and all its implications from his mind, as dust and pebbles rained down on his shoulder.
Crowley glanced up. The shaft to the upper chambers.
In a blink, he scrambled up it, his every lanky limb working to his advantage to propel him up the dynamite-hewn crevasse.
And not a moment too soon, as when he doused his torch, the true vodka-need-inducing sonic torture began. In the complete darkness, there was no escape from it.
“Ah, the King’s chamber at last!” Georgie proclaimed. “And oh, do I feel like a king tonight, with such a feast—”
A delighted shriek.
“—set before me. I shall simply have to unwrap its beauty—”
The zip of laces being torn from their eyelets resounded, before two dull thumps clattered.
“—piece by piece, and consume every morsel—”
Another whoop of delight. “That ti-i-i-i-ickles!” Mary cried, the sincere joy in her voice turning the stutter melodic.
“Let’s see, this little piggy—”
Crowley gagged suddenly, the taste of what was left of the previous night’s wine covering every millimeter of his mouth. It seemed that the wine was so bad that he could not even miracle it out of his corporation. Not that he had many miracles to spare, that such “frivolity” would go unaccounted for. No, Crowley was the odd one out, for being so undemonic as to consume things, when it really only made him better at tempting souls to gluttony, if Hastur could get his head out of his—
A distinctly wet smack echoed.
Crowley forced the sounds of the pair out of his eardrums and he replaced it with the rustle of his thick Victorian get-up against rough stone. He slithered, still in human form, further up the shaft to the second of the weight-bearing chambers above the King’s Chamber.
Once he had left the spectacle behind, Crowley collapsed along the smooth floor of the chamber. The cold of the rock, bit by bit, sunk its tendrils and claws into him. For a while, in the utter darkness, it was the only thing that tethered him to reality.
After his heart rate slowed and his lungs petered out to their typical not-breathing, Crowley smacked his mouth. Somewhere in his scramble the taste of wine had turned into the taste of fear, but it was all the thick sourness of expired milk, so it made no difference to Crowley.
Except for the part where it did.
He didn’t…. Used to get so afraid like this, did he?
When did he start breathing , of all things? When did he lose control of his heart? When did he become so…. so human?
It is easy to lay the blame that Edinburgh was when all this started. Where he…. fell off the bandwagon, as it were.
Even though the bandwagon was what had led to him falling.
But really, it could be said of Crowley that he had gone native the first time he had crawled.
And here he was, once again, on his belly. Though his attempt to become one with the stone slab beneath him was being rather rudely interrupted by a rather large and rather not smooth stone jabbing into his stomach and nether regions.
The letter.
From Az-
No. He would not speak the name, he would not even think it.
Crowley growled, but the blackness swallowed the sound before it could travel a meter.
“Bollocks,” Crowley muttered, but that too died a quick death, coming out as only a muffled “Bsss.”
Once again, the sense that he was inside the gullet of some large creature crept up Crowley’s spine. Before he had been in the heart, cruel pounding thing, but now, he was surely inside the intestine, being squeezed of all sight, all sound, all warmth, until there was nothing of him but his own thoughts.
“Oh Descartes, you bastard,” Crowley chuckled darkly, half sarcasm, half hysteria.
It sounded in the chamber more like, “Oh, ssss.”
And once Crowley was nothing but his thoughts, his existence could be easily smeared away, digested uncaringly by the pyramid, to pass through the annals of history, leaving not even a trace of indigestion as his legacy. There would be not even a mote of dust to remember him by. Death would come for him; it hung over Crowley like a specter in that absolute darkness.
The same darkness that Crowley had been trapped in once before.
That had lasted for days , in the very same Egypt.
The sun had simply snuffed out when the marketplace was an undulating sea of bodies, when the farmers were astray in the farthest fields, when children were chasing balls down streets they had just learned to navigate.
It made for all the trappings of a quotidian day, and then the corpse of the sun fell out of the sky. One moment, the world exists, and the next it does not. And in the next moment after that, the world is screaming.
The dark gave sight to the blind, and blinded all who could see.
It was thick, yet elusive, like sand through an unending hourglass. Stay still, and it just might suffocate one with their own fear. Move, take trembling hand off whatever it was grasping, because the moment the sun had hit the ground one was reaching out, was grabbing, was grasping for a single thing to hold onto in the meantime as the world fell off its axis—be it wall, or table, or child clutched in hand—loosen one’s grip for but the span of a breath, and in the blackness, one could very well drown. It slipped around wrists like manacles, and around ankles like a cat, sinuously tripping any who dared to wade through its depths. One moment of being off-balance, and one could start to fall and never stop.
The dark cut like a knife and swaddled like a blanket.
Not lamp, nor match, nor fire in the grate could chip away at the darkness’ armor. And those who tried, who tried and tried and tried, they burned . Their skin bubbled, not with boils that pulsed angry and red, but with burns from the fires they could not see. They wrapped themselves in scars, screaming in a way that the stillness of that endless night carried, but not a single neighbor dared move to their rescue, lest they become unmoored themselves. Blood ran like water, and water ran like blood, but neither could douse the fires that crackled and snarled, their flames blacker than char.
The dark awoke the mind, and put the dreamer to sleep.
The night had always been for sleeping, but this was not night. Only darkness. Not the tiniest pinprick of a star broke through, as hour stretched into hour into day. Not a single star to comfort, to feed hope by faint ray. There was naught to do but sit and think and fear, and hold, graspingly, on. Husband clung to wife, teacher to student, noble to servant. But still, the darkness wove its hand through, and it cleaved brother from sister, shepherd from sheep, mother from child .
It had been a test.
A taste of what was coming next.
Crowley shook. It had been 5000 years, and yet that darkness still lived in his mind, right next to the pools of boiling sulphur.
“Buck up, Hamlet,” he whispered, and it deserved the title, coming out as only a shaky exhale.
Crowley with a great deal of effort and writhing— squirming, his mind supplied, like the dirty pathetic— rolled over and snapped his fingers. At the end of one lit a flame, just enough to light a pipe. A yellow flame. A flame that Crowley could see.
The night was not that darkness.
A snaking feeling unwrapped itself from where it had been coiled snugly, ensnaring Crowley’s heart.
He watched the flame flicker and dance for a stretching minute, until its flicker caught on the walls of the miniature cavern.
Stretching out his hand, Crowley saw markings painted all along the walls. Numerous cartouches were lassoed within their ovals, boasting the name of Khufu, while meandering hieroglyphs proudly proclaimed the titles of the various work gangs that had built this very pyramid.
The gang, the white crown of Khnum-Khufu is powerful , one of them read as Crowley traced it out, the hieroglyphs slowly melting into modern language before his eyes.
It was just the reminder Crowley needed. Humans were, well, human , and they would survive whatever was thrown at them.
Whatever She threw at them.
“Ohhhhhh!” the pleased groan echoed.
—more than survive, even.
And that was the reminder Crowley needed to remember that he was stuck, literally, between a rock and a hard place.
It was okay though. More than okay, even. All he had to do was wait for George and Mary to finish , and then he could slither back out of the pyramid like nothing had happened. Like he hadn’t gone wandering in the middle of the night, looking to feel something. Like he hadn’t found the most important discovery of his admittedly short archaeological career.
Like he didn’t actually care about—
No . Crowley would not spend another moment of his time thinking about that bastard.
No, what he was going to do was wait for George and Mary to wrap up their… feasting, head back to the campsite, and pack his bags for England.
There was nothing for him in Egypt.
Crowley stubbornly refused to acknowledge the fact that there was nothing for him in England, either, unless one counted… well. His name is not to be said. Instead, Crowley resolved that he would head straight back to his Mayfair flat and tuck himself into a proper bed and wake up forty years later still in it.
As for his sudden departure from work, he would jot a note to Beelzebub that his dastardly deeds had been completed, having inspired such lust into these humans’ hearts that their souls would surely be for Hell in a couple of decades. Long enough for Beelzebub to forget the matter, and for Crowley to get in an actual nap.
With what he had already heard, Crowley would bet that these two, George and Mary, would even have fun with Asmodeus.
He snorted and rolled his eyes. Americans. They really loved to act like such prudes on the surface.
All he had to do then was wait.
It was fine.
He would be fine.
It would only be a couple of minutes for the very-not-newly-weds to be done with their… activities.
Yep.
Just a couple of minutes.
A dozen at most, right?
All Crowley had to do was…. wait.
There was nothing for Crowley to do.
Absolutely nothing.
And really, how long could their… coupling take?
Crowley had seen Adam and Eve go through the whole process in less time than it took to microwave an egg.
George and Mary were certainly more experienced than Adam and Eve, so certainly their…
Crowley ran out of euphemisms. But they would be done by the time he found another one, wouldn’t they?
He could just keep… doing nothing.
As there was nothing, Not A Thing that Crowley could be doing instead of—
Crowley tore open the letter.
The letter, just like the painting, was something only for Crowley’s eyes.
A while later, Crowley finished reading the letter over for the third time. He let the parchment slip from his grip to flutter the short distance to his chest.
In light of the pure trust and friendship that had filled the encounter Aziraphale described in the letter, Crowley could not help but think of where it had all gone wrong.
The damned Holy Water.
Suicide pill. That's what Aziraphale had called it. That wasn't what Crowley had wanted it for. Not at all.
How could Aziraphale not see that Crowley was trying to protect life, not destroy it? Their life.
But Aziraphale wasn't the one who took decades-long naps, who traded the pleasures of quotidian life for the discount version of non-existence, who traipsed through the years with such asceticism it could be said that his bag was already packed for the other side. Crowley was the one packing light, that was for certain. But against Maat’s feather of justice on the scales, an empty bag could not possibly compensate for a heart of stone.
When the time came, Ammut would have a very crunchy snack in Crowley. *
Crowley closed his eyes. Pretended the water seeping from them wouldn't leave tracks on his sand-crusted face.
Pretended that the tears that fell would make any difference. That they wouldn't just be swallowed up by the sand and forgotten before the sun could even touch them.
Crowley exited the pyramid, and he nearly gasped at the sight of the plain night sky, the one he had been living and sleeping under for the past several months. How anyone could call this darkness, when it was so utterly carpeted in stars, was beyond Crowley.
In turn, the stars beheld Crowley indifferently, the whole blanket of them spinning in their spheres like a wind chime set to drift aimlessly, echoing out an ineffable song.
Crowley could not hear said song, it being ineffable and all, but he could marvel. He could feel some tangent thread of connection, like a piece of spare lint that the Creator had forgotten to tear off Her socks, to the thousands of pinpricks of light so distant from him. Their distance stretched onwards and onwards, in space and time and language and sentience, such that it was incommunicable as to why Crowley felt less alone standing underneath the mantle of their cold and glittering apathy.
Not a note of theirs could reach Crowley, but he could, for an aching moment, wonder if Aziraphale missed the stars, surrounded as he was in Soho by glaring gas lamps and eclipsing electrical lights. Did Aziraphale ache for the stars, too?
If Crowley brought Aziraphale to see the stars, would he smile again? That giddy one, that lit up his face brighter than ten galaxies?
Crowley sighed as the star Pollux winked at him from its place in Gemini. It was unlikely that he and Aziraphale would be on such good terms again, would even be close enough to each other to stand side by side and dip their feet in the milky way, as Pollux and his other half Castor did in the sky far above.
That version of Crowley and Aziraphale was so far away, it was in another sphere entirely.
And what was a sphere to a pyramid, anyway? A sphere would only roll away.
Crowley completely ignored how a cube and a cylinder, in contrast, could be very easily placed on a shelf together, within mere centimeters of proximity, and stay that way for eternity.
“Hello.”
“Ngk!” Crowley replied as he jumped in surprise.
He turned to view the speaker, doing a double take when he found the space to his right was empty.
Instead, she stood to his left, and was about twelve feet tall. Though a blindfold covered half of her face, Crowley felt every single one of her innumerable metaphysical eyes settle on him. Her three pairs of snow white wings shifted and floated behind her, shining against her grey robes. The robes rippled in a breeze that Crowley could not feel, dancing in and out of reality like they were woven of twilight itself.
A single one of her wings could have swept out at any moment and effortlessly sent Crowley tumbling down the side of the pyramid. He would then land in a heap at the bottom and not be found until dawn, still a long ways away.
“ Justice ,” Crowley greeted, his throat parched.
She laughed. It sounded surprisingly human. “ Death,” she corrected. “But it is funny how often she and I get confused,” she continued in a light, musing tone.
For a second, Crowley did not feel the weight of her gaze on him, and he surreptitiously gulped down the tangle of emotions clogging his throat.
All too soon, however, her attention was back on him in full force. On instinct, Crowley pulled out his wings, materializing them from the metaphysical plane. Whether it was to balance the scales of power between them, or to get ready to run, he could not say.
“Ah, crow’s wings. A good choice,” she said, still in that musing tone. “You were made for all that sparkles.”
Unbidden, an image of Aziraphale’s eyes appeared in Crowley’s mind, twinkling with joy and just a hint of desire.
“Doesn’t matter what I was made for,” Crowley snapped. “Fell out of that business a long time ago, anyway.”
In response, she tilted her head, considering.
Less sullenly, Crowley asked, “Why are you here?”
“You called.”
Crowley spluttered. “Hrgk! I did not-! I’m not the Antichrist ,” he settled on, when he could make words again.
“And I am not a horseman, brother,” she replied calmly.
Oh.
Oh.
The other Death. Death, the Angel of , in the phonebook. [4]
“Then why are you here?” Crowley asked. “Why risk ‘fraternizing’ with the enemy? Somebody knows the sort of upbraiding you’ll get, if upstairs gets word of this, this, this rendezvous. ” His tone easily retreated into a tartness that he could, to his own emotional compass, pass off as disinterest.
A quick trip through several layers of the stratosphere was a very effective method for stripping any magnetic field off of such a compass.
She smiled at him, in a closed-lip way that only half-hid her mirth. “And who is there above who would dare ‘upbraid’ me?” She placed a strange emphasis on the word, her very being seemingly far more suited to celestial speech than the messily human idioms that perpetually peppered Crowley’s palette.
“The Big Kahuna,” Crowley retorted. “Thought you were still on that payroll.”
She shot Crowley a knowing look from behind her blindfold.
One that said: We both know how long the Out of Office sign has been up.
Crowley dodged the look like it was a cannonball.
The idea that he and she could be a ‘we’ was preposterous. Beyond preposterous. Perhaps even the idea that Crowley could ever be a part of a ‘we’ was preposterous, too.
“You still haven’t answered my questions,” Crowley said, directing his line of thought safely away from ‘we’ to ‘you’.
“I came to give you a warning, brother.”
“I’m not your brother.” Crowley’s hackles rose, and so did his wings.
She seemed to stare at Crowley’s feathers, assessingly.
Crowley got the impression that she did not agree with him, but she was not going to press the matter.
“There is death in the air. I can smell it.”
“Yes, well, welcome to the West of the Nile, the land of death. There’s mummies everywhere. Tombs, too. And great stinking camels, if you hadn’t noticed.” Crowley knew he was being petulant, but he couldn’t help it. His patience for this night, for Egypt, was gone. He swore, Angel of Death or not, if she even started to say the word “ineffable”, he would—
“Have you taken a sniff of yourself, lately?” he added. That was Crowley alright. Always had to get in the last jab. Not unlike someone else he once knew…
She did not rise to his bait. “It is the scent of death yet to come,” she explained. “There is so much of it. And not just in Egypt. It will be the world over. Men, women, children.”
Before Crowley could get in another snark, she held up a hand.
“It worries me.”
Crowley paused, mouth half open. This… these future deaths worried the Angel of Death?
“It will not be by plan of Above or Below. There will be so, so much death, Crowley. All by human hands. It will be a mess.” She gazed out, facing east. Facing the dawn, long awaited, long to come.
Crowley blinked, absorbing the news. “Why…”
“-Tell you?” Her mouth quirked, flitting through a number of emotions Crowley had never bothered learning the words for. Her wings continued to shift in an unreal breeze. “I recall, the last we had seen of each other, you were busy running around, and your hands were drenched in sheep’s blood.
Immediately, Crowley was dragged back to that night in his memory. The full moon puddled in the streets, casting shadows everywhere, acting as a midnight sun. She had had all the light in the world to carry out unspeakable darkness. The will of the Almighty, it had been called.
“So? ” Crowley asked. So what, if he had then recently added butcher to his specialties along with obstetrics and shoemaking? Lambs weren’t kids. With lambs, one didn’t have to deal with the horns.
She turned to look at him. So? the look said in reply.
Crowley swallowed. How she did that, without eyes or even an eyebrow showing to convey her thoughts, unnerved him.
Crowley pulled his demon-ness close to him, like a fig leaf. “Agricultural wastage. Vandalism.” Crowley made excuses. “And general thwarting.”
He looked out at the campsite. A lamp lit up in one of the tents.
“Thwarting is in my job description, you know. It is most of my job description,” he said.
“What if I am asking you to thwart?” she asked.
“I’m no double agent,” Crowley nearly hissed. “I’m already in Hell’s bad graces. Besides, humans have always killed each other. What is there to thwart? And why would you want it thwarted, anyway? Don’t you miss having a job to do?”
She didn’t respond for a moment. It was rather as if she were taking a long drag of an imaginary cigarette.
“There is a ‘we’ in this, Crowley,” she said, sardonic. “Did it ever cross your mind that it is possible that I, too, am a ‘lazy bum’ ?”
It caught Crowley off-guard, and he actually choked out something like a laugh.
She grinned, smiling with teeth that were just a smidge too pointy.
A fire started to smoke in the camp, outside the tent with the lantern.
Pre-pre-dawn was turning to dawn.
At last, Crowley replied, “I thwart as I must.”
She accepted the response, her metaphysical eyes roaming over Crowley’s posture. Her half-dozen wings flapped in unison as if pleased.
Crowley shifted into a slouch and nearly scowled. It had been less of a non-answer than he had been hoping to give.
“She is coming too, though, my namesake,” she continued. “On the heels of the Antichrist. And she is bringing her friends. ” The angel’s words dripped with distaste. “I am not looking forward to any of it.”
She sounded tired.
Crowley felt the pressing need to lighten the mood. “‘S not like you can look forward to anything with that…” he gestured to his own face, uselessly.
She snorted, and her wings fluttered with something like amusement.
“It will only be a century until she and the others show up, more or less,” she said, once again somber.
Crowley froze. The fact that he had slept away the past forty years suddenly speared into him.
“That’s not a lot of time.”
“Do any of us have as much time as we think we do?”
Crowley fidgeted, watched another lantern light up in the camp below.
As the grey of true dawn crawled over the horizon and sunk its murky fingers into the pudding pie of the milky way, they stood together. She on the left, and Crowley on the right.
Just as the sky slipped into the hue of her robes, Crowley looked over at her, only to find that she had melted into the aether.
He tucked away his wings as bare rays of sunlight traced over them, revealing them for the gash of sin and darkness and irredeemableness that they were, in the plain light of day.
Crowley began to climb down the pyramid.
At camp, a telegraph just arrived from London awaited Crowley.
C-
Meet me. Nat Hist Museum. London.
May XX, 1905. 13:00. A surprise.
- A
He had the time.
Crowley stood between the most not dead thing he had ever seen, and the most alive being he had ever met.
“And guess what they call it?” the latter said, that downright cherubic grin twisting up his features in a way that the apples of his cheeks gleamed. Crowley traced his tongue over his canines and swallowed back the desire to bite. If there was anything sinful in this world, it was that upturned nose, that rounded chin, those overlarge and over-expressive eyes that could turn so easily from puckish delight to pouting moue. To say nothing of those lips, the plush lower one jutting out in said moue, practically begging Crowley to sink his teeth in, tempting him.
When Crowley had landed in London, at the telegraph’s request, he had been expecting something much different for his “surprise.” A filled canteen, perhaps. Or an apology dance. Or even a jaunt over to lunch at Wilton’s, though the Natural History Museum would be an odd place to start the walk.
Not…
“A diplodocus!” Aziraphale proclaimed giddily.
…. Dippy .
“Dippy” was the gauche name for the gauche dinosaur whose gauche exhibit Aziraphale had dragged Crowley to the gauche grand opening of. [5]
Dippy wasn’t even an actual diplodocus skeleton, but merely a very involved plaster cast of one, strung up so that it towered meters above museum-goers’ heads. Not that there was such a thing as an actual diplodocus skeleton, merely those fancy rocks that She had planted in the earth’s crust, as a sort of inside joke.
Of course Aziraphale enjoyed Her jokes.
Crowley wasn’t jealous at all.
“They claim the name is Latin, but they actually created it by sticking two Greek words together!” Aziraphale chirped, oblivious to Crowley’s not-jealous streak and general uncharitable mood. “The first part comes from diplos , meaning “double,” and the second part is from dokos , meaning “beam”.” Aziraphale twisted his fingers nervously, nearly pulling the joints to popping.
Perhaps he was not so oblivious to Crowley’s dark aura..
His voice became pitchy as he rambled on, “The beam refers to the chevron bones in its tail region, which is said to be unique to this, er, species.” Aziraphale glanced at Crowley.
“Mmm,” Crowley replied.
Somehow, this afternoon was turning out more awkward and stilted than if one of them had just up and performed the apology dance.
Before Aziraphale could recite the rest of the plaques in the gallery, Crowley decided to stick his neck out.
“I’m headed to America,” he said.
“Oh?” Aziraphale asked. His face dropped from forced cheer to that mask of uncertain neutrality he always seemed to wear around his superiors.
“Yeeeep,” Crowley drawled. “‘M packing a bag for Hollywood. Heard there’s lots of bad to be done there. A whole industry of sin.”
“Oh,” Aziraphale uttered, and it came out as wobbly as a robin being pushed out of the nest. “What happened to Egypt?” he inquired, tentative.
“Too many memories,” Crowley said brusquely, even as he kicked himself internally. Repeatedly.
“Oh.”
“You could head West too. Plenty of farmers needing blessing and whatnot. There might even be some evil to thwart in Hollywood.” The offer sounded pathetic, even to Crowley’s ear.
“I– I have the bookshop, to look after,” Aziraphale replied haltingly.
Crowley simply nodded.
He then discreetly pressed a polaroid picture into Aziraphale’s palm, in the same manner a Prussian delegate passed off a military strategy file to an Austrian minister at the other end of the gallery.[6]
Aziraphale looked down at the photo, a snapshot of Crowley from behind, standing and gazing out at pyramid and Sphinx in the background. His thumb traced over the back of Crowley’s jacket in an effortless caress.
“One last memory, then,” Crowley said, “for the road.”
Crowley left, and Aziraphale wiped and wiped at the sand in his eyes.
