Barnabas Tew and The Case Of The Missing Scarab Read online

  Barnabas looked about, wondering where to start. The task set before him was so important, so improbably immense, that he wasn’t quite sure how to approach it. Besides, having seen two examples of Anubis clever deviousness already, cleverly trapping Peter into a silly bet in addition to cavalierly killing Barnabas with a mummy (a mummy!), Barnabas felt himself quite intimidated.

  He thought of Wilfred and of how helpful the young man was to him. Barnabas knew that he was more than capable of making deductions on his own, of course, but having Wilfred to speak to as he worked out his thoughts certainly helped the process along.

  He sighed, then muttered under his breath, “Oh, how I wish Wilfred were here.”

  Anubis looked at him for a moment, then turned to whisper behind his hand to his assistant. The man promptly bowed and hurried away. Barnabas wondered if this had something to do with him, but he immediately dismissed the thought. Surely Anubis had many tasks to perform that had nothing at all to do with Barnabas.

  Anubis looked back at Barnabas and cocked his head impatiently.

  “Well, then,” Anubis suggested. “If you have no further questions, perhaps it’s time to get started?”

  “Oh!” said Barnabas. “Yes, of course. I was merely thinking of my strategy.” This was a bit of a lie, because Barnabas had been thinking nothing of the sort. He had been thinking that, when his head was turned in that way, Anubis looked a bit like a dog waiting for a stick to be thrown. Barnabas was much too polite to say as much, however.

  “Very good,” said Anubis. “I trust you’ll have Khepre found in no time at all, then.” Anubis waved his hand, and thus was Barnabas dismissed.

  Barnabas turned to leave. But as he did so, he took in the strange scenery: the black, jagged rocks, the dark sky with the reddish glow, the complete lack of wind…not to mention the strange fellow with the jackal’s head who presided over all! He was reminded that not all was well. He turned back around to face Anubis.

  “Am I…” he began.

  Anubis sighed. “Yes?” he said. “Are you what?”

  “Am I really quite dead, then?”

  “Oh, well, that,” replied Anubis. “Yes, I am afraid you are. It was necessary that you be dead in order to come here.”

  “Oh dear,” said Barnabas, who was just now realizing that he ought to be very sad at leaving his life behind instead of excited about a new case, however exciting that case might be. It hadn’t been the most illustrious life, to be sure, but it was his life, and he was certain that he would miss it. “Oh dear!” he repeated as the thought of deadness sunk in.

  Anubis looked a bit uncomfortable. (As well he should, thought Barnabas indignantly. He had, after all, had him killed, and quite recently at that!) “Sorry about that, old chap,” offered the god. “It had to be done, though. We can’t have the living running around here in the underworld, you know. It just isn’t done.” Anubis looked over Barnabas’ shoulder and his face brightened. “Here we are now!” he said happily. “Surely this will cheer you up!” He pointed, and Barnabas turned about to look.

  Coming from the same direction from which Barnabas himself had arrived were the same four scallywags who had born Barnabas hence. This time, however, the four little monsters were carrying Wilfred.

  Chapter Five

  “I say!” yelped Wilfred, sounding much aggrieved. “What are you about, you ruffians? I demand that you unhand me this instant!”

  “Wilfred, I say!” cried Barnabas. “Oh, my dear boy, whatever are you doing here?”

  “There has been an accident,” replied Wilfred. “I think I might be quite dead, to tell you the truth.”

  “How? What has happened to you?”

  “I ran out of the museum after we were separated. I thought that perhaps you had come out as well, and so I looked for you. I was just crossing the street so that I might get a better view of things when, as if out of nowhere, a carriage came along…”

  “Oh my!” exclaimed Barnabas. “Are you alright?”

  Wilfred shot Barnabas a sarcastic look. “I suppose I’m alright,” he answered diplomatically, “for being dead and such.” Wilfred looked around, taking in the strangeness of the place. “The odd thing is the driver of the carriage looked to me to be a…”

  “Yes?” prompted Barnabas.

  “Well, I think… I mean, that is to say…”

  Barnabas waited patiently.

  “I’m almost certain that it was a mummy driving the carriage. A mummy!” Wilfred shook his head to and fro in confusion. “But that cannot be. This…” He gestured to the black rocks, dark sky, and four animal-headed kidnappers. “This cannot be. I must be seeing things. I’m sure that I must have bumped my head.”

  “A mummy, you say?” asked Barnabas.

  “Yes, a mummy. It was quite terrifying, really,” replied Wilfred. “I’m glad that it was just a hallucination brought on by my head injury.”

  Barnabas looked from Wilfred, who was struggling with the four little man-handlers, to Anubis. An awful realization came over Barnabas. Not only was this, as Wilfred had declared their now shared dilemma, entirely real but the cause of it all was sitting behind him, trying to appear quite busy.

  “You!” he accused Anubis. “You killed Wilfred, too? How? Why?”

  Anubis looked uncomfortable and pretended as though he hadn’t heard Barnabas. He suddenly took a great interest in his fingernails, studying them carefully whilst whistling a happy tune and sneaking little glances at Barnabas and Wilfred.

  “Oh!” said Barnabas, irritated that the god refused to meet his gaze. What sort of merciless person ran about having people killed by mummies willy-nilly? He reminded himself that Anubis was most dangerous indeed.

  However, he was also very annoyed with Anubis for murdering first Barnabas himself and now Wilfred. “Anubis!” he yelled so that the god, reluctantly, was forced to acknowledge him. “Why did you kill Wilfred?” he demanded. “And don’t try to say you didn’t. People aren’t typically run over by mummies every day in London, you know.”

  Anubis affected an innocent expression. “You said that you wished Wilfred were here,” he replied in a tone that suggested he couldn’t understand what all of this fuss was about. “And so,” he said, opening his arms and holding his hands palms up beneficently, “here he is!” He widened his eyes and blinked like an amiable puppy, but Barnabas wasn’t fooled.

  “Ah!” he cried. “You... You can’t keep killing people!” Anubis smiled, still blinking with his puppy eyes.

  “Oh!” said Barnabas. “You are simply incorrigible! But if I am going to work for you, there must be no more killing people with mummies.” Anubis hesitated. “You must agree or find yourself another detective,” Barnabas said with no small measure of righteous indignation.

  “Very well,” sighed Anubis. “No more mummies.” He appeared to be contrite, but Barnabas saw that mischievous glint in his eye again and suspected that he might just have been tricked, just as Peter had been. He thought back over what was said but failed to see a loophole in the agreement that Anubis might exploit.

  “Well, alright then,” he said doubtfully. He turned to Wilfred and sighed. “I suppose we are both here now, so we may as well get on with it then,” he said. He began to walk (he wasn’t quite sure exactly where he was heading, but he felt a strong urge to get away from Anubis and his awful minions), and Wilfred, now free of the four minions of Anubis, fell into step beside him.“We have a case, you see.”

  “A case?” asked Wilfred. “What sort of case?”

  “Anubis wants us to find Khepre. It seems he has gone missing.”

  “And who is Khepre?”

  “Hmm,” said Barnabas a bit smugly, as he was enjoying the feeling of knowing something that Wilfred did not and wanted to prolong the moment. It did not bother him in the slightest that he himself had only just found out about Khepre only minutes before. “Khepre,” he continued, making a slight flourish with his hand for dramatic effect, “is the scarab bee
tle god of the Egyptian pantheon…”

  “Oh!” interrupted Wilfred eagerly. “The one who rolls the sun about like a ball of dung?”

  “Harumph!” said Wilfred, a bit petulantly. Really, he thought, Wilfred could be quite the know-it-all at times. It was a most annoying habit. “Yes, that’s the fellow. However did you know that?”

  Wilfred sensed his employer’s displeasure and blushed. He quickly tried to soothe Barnabas’ bruised pride. “I’m sure I only knew it from working on Mr. Kesim Kafele’s case with you. That and the Egyptian Studies course at university…” His voice trailed off.

  “Yes, well, that’s the fellow. He rolls the sun around the horizon, and without him to do so the sun will not move. It will be stuck up there…” He gestured towards the bright sun frozen at the high noon position. “Forever.”

  Wilfred shuddered at the thought. “Why, it will overheat everything. Crops will burn. Rivers will dry up. It will be terrible!”

  “Indeed!” agreed Barnabas. “That is why Anubis himself has chosen me…I mean us to find Khepre and set things back to normal again. Oh, Mr. Kesim Kafele is dead, by the by.”

  “Oh dear! Really? Mr. Kafele? Dead?”

  Barnabas nodded.

  Wilfred paused to consider. “Was it something … Was it our fault?” He uttered those last words in a loud stage whisper, looking around to make certain that no one else could hear.

  Barnabas shrugged and raised his hands as though to say, “Well, what can you do?” Wilfred cringed.

  “Oh no,” said Wilfred. “I do hope that he’s not too put out with us about it.”

  “On the contrary!” said Barnabas. “He recommended us to Anubis for the good work that we did. We couldn’t help it if his ankh killed him, after all. Which reminds me. We have a scarab beetle to find!”

  Wilfred looked around at the bleak landscape of the Egyptian underworld. “Well,” he said doubtfully, “where shall we start?”

  “The locals around here seem to suspect Set,” said Barnabas.

  “I know who that is!” exclaimed Wilfred. He searched his memory for anything he may have learned about Set in his Egyptian Studies class. “Let’s see. Set is related to Anubis and Isis and Osiris somehow. I can’t remember exactly how…” His voice trailed off for a moment. “But no matter. I remember that he once chopped up Osiris into little bits and Isis had to run about the underworld finding his parts in order to reconstruct him.”

  “Yes, well, that story sounds quite familiar,” said Barnabas (although, in truth, it did not sound familiar to him at all). “But I think we should explore other suspects first. You see, the solution to a case is never the most obvious, or logical, one. The solution is usually quite convoluted and difficult to reason out.”

  Wilfred nodded agreement, although secretly he was quite sure that it was the other way around. However, it was not his place to correct his employer whilst he thought a case through, and so he kept his silence.

  “So,” said Barnabas. “It was the maid who stole Mr. Kafele’s ankh, was it not? It stands to reason, then, that perhaps Khepre’s maid stole Khepre himself!” He paused, overcome with his own genius.

  Wilfred nodded again. He was quite certain that the god’s maid probably hadn’t kidnapped him (did Egyptian gods even have maids?), but he did think that it was a good idea to investigate Khepre’s abode. They could interview the members of his household and perhaps glean some information from them. “Very well, then!” he said brightly. He hailed a man with a sheep’s head who happened to be passing by them just at that moment. “I say, good sir, do you know the way to Khepre’s residence?”

  The sheep-man turned and pointed in the direction of a large, craggy mountain on the other side of a very wide river. It looked to be quite far away, and Barnabas and Wilfred groaned in unison at the prospect of walking such a distance. However, there seemed to be no other choice at the moment (there were no hansoms for hire in the underworld, it seemed, or at least not in this particular part of it), and so they set off without further complaint.

  As they walked, Barnabas glanced at Wilfred. “Did you happen to come here by boat?” he asked.

  “Why, yes. You?”

  “Indeed. I suppose that must be the standard way one gets here,” said Barnabas.

  “Quite so. The ferryman to the Land of the Dead and what not,” agreed Wilfred.

  “And what did you think of the ferryman?” asked Barnabas.

  “He seemed an amiable enough fellow,” said Wilfred.

  “Yes, of course,” said Barnabas. He thought for a moment. “But did you find him a bit, er, disconcerting at first?”

  “You mean because of the falcon-ness of him, the missing toes, and such?” said Wilfred.

  “Precisely!” said Barnabas. “I fear that I may have been quite rude, but I was a bit taken aback, I must admit.”

  “Perfectly understandable,” said Wilfred. “It’s not every day one finds oneself in the company of a giant falcon man, after all. I’m sure he must understand, if not expect, a bit of a reaction to his unusual presentation.”

  “He must, indeed!” said Barnabas, feeling relieved. His less-than-polite initial reaction to the boatman had been bothering him, and he was pleased to be reassured that he hadn’t behaved too improperly.

  They walked for a very long time in the direction of the mountain. Wilfred looked about doubtfully as the place seemed quite deserted. It had been a long time since they had seen any other people about (the afterlife was not nearly as populous as one might assume, he thought) whilst Barnabas chatted single-mindedly on the subject of Khepre’s hypothetically evil maid and her alleged crimes.

  Wilfred paid little heed to Barnabas’ ramblings; he was too concerned with where they were, where they were going, and whether or not either place was entirely safe. And moreover, he knew his employer well and therefore surmised that Barnabas would soon be distracted by something else and forget all about his fixation upon the poor maid, who may or may not even exist.

  At last they came to the river that they had seen before setting out. Now that they had come to it, however, it seemed a great deal more impassable than they had thought. For one thing, the water flowed rather swiftly, so swiftly that they thought it might not merely buffet them about but knock them off their feet entirely. For another, the river was also very wide, and therefore it was impossible to tell from where they now stood how deep it might be in the middle. Neither was very keen on getting wet up to their necks, or their chins, or their eyebrows.

  But the worst aspect of the whole thing was the hippos. There, in the middle of the slimmest and shallowest-looking spot they could see, wallowed a great lot of the beasts. They were huge creatures, and whilst hippos seemed to be quite adorable, lazy creatures when seen from afar in a proper zoo, here in the wild they seemed a fair bit more daunting. The beasts had enormous sharp-looking teeth that were used quite liberally upon each other; indeed, the things went after each other mercilessly whenever one happened to bump into another, or indeed to encroach upon another’s space by just floating by a little too closely.

  Barnabas and Wilfred shared a trepidatious glance as they shared the same thought. Those teeth looked wickedly sharp and the jaws snapped to with tremendous force. Neither relished the idea of one of the giant beasts running after him with a wide open mouth and murderous intent in its eyes. Since the hippos all seemed to be somewhat cranky and very free with their teeth, such an occurrence seemed not only possible but quite probable. Even now, some of the hippos on the edge were eyeing them with nasty looking expressions, as though daring them to come any closer.

  Still, their destination lay just on the other side of the river, and there were only two choices: cross the river somehow or give up their quest entirely. So they stood on the bank, scratching their heads and thinking about how they might get across the river unmolested by angry hippos whilst also not getting too terribly wet.

  “I wonder if the hippos might not just up and leave at s
ome point,” ventured Barnabas at last. “Surely they must go places sometimes.”

  Wilfred frowned as he considered the hippos that barred their way. “They seem to be quite settled in at the moment,” he said doubtfully. “Look. That one is having a proper nap.”

  Barnabas noticed that not just one but several of the hippos had closed their eyes and looked to be settling in for a good long sleep.

  “I’m certain they’d wake up quick enough if we were to try to pass them by,” he said somewhat resentfully, as though the hippos had placed themselves in the way solely to thwart himself and Wilfred.

  “We could try walking upstream a bit,” suggested Wilfred. “See if it gets any narrower or less, well, filled with hippos.”

  Barnabas looked upstream. “A good plan. But look, there,” he said, gesturing. “That’s a good sized cliff. We’d have to either climb it or go entirely around, and who knows how long that would take or how far we would have to stray from our path to that mountain?”

  “Hmm,” said Wilfred. “Perhaps downstream?”

  “It only gets wider, it seems.” Barnabas thought for a moment. “Perhaps we could throw things in the river and startle the hippos away.”

  Wilfred frowned. “It might just make them angry with us. I don’t know how fast they can move on land, but I certainly don’t want to find out.”

  Altogether it seemed that, for all of their ideas, they were making very little progress on their problem, and at last they gave up and simply stood there. They were growing more and more disheartened, feeling as though they had failed before they had even properly begun, when the monkey-things came.

  Barnabas and Wilfred heard them before they saw them. A low whine thrummed through the air. It had, in truth, been audible for some time, but their attention had been so fully focused on the hippos and the problem of crossing the river that neither had paid it any mind.

  However, the sound had steadily grown louder until it was so intrusive that it at last caught their attention.

  “Whatever is that terrible racket?” griped Barnabas.