The Ka of Gifford Hillary (35 page)

‘You said just now that in the earliest times the Egyptians got as near the facts as any people have ever done. If that is so, surely it would have been more in keeping with the natural progress of mankind for them to have become still more enlightened, rather than to have lost sight of the truth. After all, it isn’t as though they fell into a state of barbarism; it was not until the later Pharaohs that they reached their highest peak of civilisation. Don’t you think it possible that there may have been some foundation for their later beliefs?’

‘No, in the light of modern knowledge I certainly don’t. They were misled into over-elaboration of their beliefs by ambitious priests who were out to make a name for themselves. Theologians of all religions have been tarred with the same brush. Look how our own faith has been split into a score of different sects, all calling themselves Christians; and at the palpably absurd doctrines postulated by some of the early Fathers. They even disputed amongst themselves how many angels could stand on the point of a needle.

‘The same sort of splitting up into sub-religions occurred in Egypt; so that some people worshipped Osiris as a man and others as a Bull, and others again identified him with the sun god Ra. By the time they finished they had associated every animal and natural phenomena with some aspect of the godhead, and each had its retinue of priests who declared that their brand of soft-soaping the gods offered the surest way of getting to heaven.’

Johnny smiled again. ‘Yes, I quite see your point. How about their original faith, though? What was it exactly?’

‘They believed in a Holy Trinity of Father, Mother and Son—Osiris, Isis and Horus—all of whom had lived on earth.
That Osiris had been murdered by his brother Set—the embodiment of evil in human form. And that they would be brought before Osiris to be judged by him when they were dead. They believed that their spirits were immortal and they knew that they had etheric doubles which left their bodies when they slept. That is a very brief résumé but it covers the essential points.’

‘And modern students of the supernatural still subscribe to the belief that man has no other non-physical attributes than his spirit and his etheric double?’

Little Mr. Tibitts nodded.

‘And that the one could not possibly be mistaken for the other?’

‘That is so.’

‘How, then, do you explain this appearance of my uncle’s double in the face of such incontrovertible evidence that he is dead?’

‘I don’t. I don’t believe it was your uncle’s Ka that this young woman saw.’

‘I am satisfied in my own mind that it could not have been anyone else’s.’

‘Then either your uncle is still alive, or, for some purpose of her own, the young woman is lying to you. As, from what you tell me, the first is outside the bounds of all reasonable probability, the second must be the answer.’

‘I find that very difficult to believe,’ Johnny said after a moment. ‘You see, she had never seen my uncle, and she described him so accurately. Besides, his message to me contained a reference to a matter about which she could not possibly have known.’

‘Ah!’ Mr. Tibitts gave a chuckle. ‘That is just the bait by which so many people who lack experience in such transactions allow themselves to be led up the garden path. You think you know what she knows and what she doesn’t; but how can you be certain? How could you even start to prove that she never met your uncle? For all you really know she may have known him intimately, but kept it from you.’

‘The odds are extraordinarily high against that. And she is a very honest, straightforward girl; the sort that couldn’t be bothered to go in for trickery.’

‘My friend,’ the rabbit teeth flashed again. ‘You must come
to see me some other evening and let me show you my casebook. You would be amazed, positively amazed, at the tricks the most innocent seeming people sometimes get up to. My investigations into poltergeists are crammed with examples. Children who have only just entered their teens are among the worst offenders. The way in which they succeed in hoodwinking their parents into believing themselves the victims of a haunting is absolutely astonishing. I investigated a case at Letchworth only a couple of months ago, and …’

Now that Mr. Tibitts was launched on his favourite subject there was no stopping him, and the tales he had to tell were certainly a revelation to me. I had no idea that so many apparently normal people exercised in secret the most ingenious cunning to satisfy some strange quirk which obsessed their minds. For over an hour Johnny listened to him, asking only now and then a question on some point that might throw further light on his own problem; so it was well after eleven when he rose to go, although by ten he had already secured the information that he had come there to get.

Just off Tavistock Square he picked up a taxi, and it set him down before a brightly lit portal in a narrow turning on the Soho side of Oxford Street. The doorman touched his cap and a reception clerk in a dinner jacket gave him a smiling, ‘Good evening, Wing Commander. Nice to see you again. It’s quite a time since you’ve honoured us.’ So I guessed at once that this must be the night-club at which Daisy worked.

Downstairs, on a square of brightly lit parquet at one side of the otherwise darkened room, the cabaret was in full swing. And there was Daisy, her admirable legs encased to the thighs in black fish-net stockings, doing her stuff with ten or a dozen other lovelies. The place was fairly full but there were still the usual few tables adjacent to the dance floor that had been kept free by the management for regular patrons. As Johnny came through the doorway the head waiter, recognising him, would have led him to one of them, but he said that he would prefer one of the banquettes at the far end of the room. Having been ensconced in one of the little alcoves that were almost in darkness, Johnny ordered Scotch and asked that as soon as the show was over Miss Williams should be told that he was there.

About ten minutes after the cabaret had ended Daisy, now
wearing a full-skirted dance frock of blue taffeta that rustled as she threaded her way between the close-packed chairs, joined him. As she sat down, she said:

‘Johnny, I can’t stay long, my steady’s here. What is it you want to see me about? I suppose you’re still worrying about what happened this evening?’

‘Yes; I’m very worried indeed,’ he told her. ‘In fact I’ve never been more worried in all my life. The Physical Research chap I went to see bore out all you said; and I believe there really is a terrible possibility that my uncle has been buried alive.’

‘No! No!’ The ring in Daisy’s voice conveyed her antipathy to even considering the idea. ‘That couldn’t have happened! It really couldn’t.’

‘It could, however unlikely it may seem. In fact it is the only logical conclusion if one accepts the premises that our bodies house intangible substances, and are not merely lumps of animated matter.’

‘If they were I wouldn’t ever have seen night-walkers or the spirits of my Mum and Dad, would I?’

‘No; and that’s just the point. Have you?’

She turned on him angrily. ‘Are you suggesting that I’m a liar?’

‘Not a deliberate liar. But are you absolutely sure that you haven’t been imagining things?’

‘If you’d been brought up in the sort of home I was, you’d know better than to talk such nonsense.’

‘Daisy, my dear’—his tone, at first soothing, became very earnest—‘this is terribly important. Are you prepared to swear to me that you told me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the apparition that appeared to you this evening?’

‘Yes, Johnny. Cross my heart, it happened just as I said. I wouldn’t lie to you about such a thing, really I wouldn’t.’

Johnny took a long pull at his whisky. ‘Thanks, Daisy. I didn’t really think you had. There are too many facets to this affair for either imagination or lies to account for them all. Still, I had to explore every possibility. And now I have there is only one thing for it. As soon as you can get away from here I want you to come with me to Scotland Yard.’

‘Go to the police!’ Daisy exclaimed. ‘Whatever for?’

‘Because we’ve got to get an order to exhume my uncle’s body. Only the Home Secretary can give us that, and the police are the right channel through which to approach him.’

‘Not likely. I won’t! In all my life I’ve never been mixed up with the police, and I’m not going to start now.’

‘Don’t be childish, Daisy. Just because you work in a nightclub, the police aren’t going to try to frame you as being a member of a dope ring, or anything like that. This is a perfectly respectable legal issue.’

‘I’m not childish!’ she retorted indignantly. ‘It’s you who are acting silly. I think you must have gone out of your mind. Exhume your uncle’s body indeed! I never heard of such a thing!’

‘Then you don’t read the papers; otherwise you would know that exhumations take place at least a dozen times a year. But, of course, the Home Secretary has to be given reasonable grounds before he will sign such an order. And that is where I require your help.’

‘Well, you are not going to get it; and that’s flat.’

‘Listen, Daisy …’

‘No. I’m not going to listen. I’ve already told you that my steady is here tonight. That’s him, sitting at one of the floor-side tables smoking a long cigar. I can see he’s getting impatient for me to join him, and I’m not going to risk my rent cheque just to hear you go all over this again for the umpteenth time.’

‘But don’t you see that if I go to Scotland Yard on my own with a story like this they’ll think I’ve got bats in the belfry?’

‘So you have! Why can’t you be sensible and accept the explanation I gave you: that it was some evil person’s double impersonating your uncle?’

‘Because it’s too far-fetched; and for several other good reasons. But if I state them on my own the police will take me for a nut. Besides, it wasn’t I who saw the apparition. It was you. And it’s essential that they should be given a firsthand account of it. That’s why you must come and say your piece while I vouch for the other side of the story. They might think one of us was a lunatic but they can’t suppose that of us both.’

Trembling with agitation, Daisy stood up. ‘No Johnny, I
can’t do it. If you want to go to the police, then go. But count me out. What’s more, if they pull me in and question me I’ll deny the whole thing.’

As she hurriedly left the table, she turned her head and threw at him over her shoulder: ‘I mean that, Johnny! If I am questioned I’ll swear to it that you’re crackers, and that all you’ve said about me is just silly lies.’

For a while Johnny stayed on in the Club; but I could see that his thoughts were miles away from the square of parquet, now packed with dancers, and the dimly-lit tables at which parties were laughing together or couples discreetly making love.

It was about half an hour after midnight when, evidently having decided that any further appeal to Daisy would prove useless, he paid his bill, had the door porter get him a taxi and was driven in it back to his rooms. Setting his alarm for six o’clock he undressed and went to bed, while I settled down for the night in his sitting-room.

For the past six hours or more I had been so concerned with not missing a word that Johnny, Daisy or Mr. Tibitts said that I had had little chance to ponder their implications to myself, but now these flooded upon me with full force.

In the light of Mr. Tibitts’s expert opinion it seemed no longer possible to doubt that Daisy was right about my being what the ancient Egyptians had called a Ka. That she believed the Ka she had seen to be that of some evil individual attempting to impersonate me was beside the point. Every fact about my own death and that of Evans’s was known to me. No third man had been concerned in either, and Ankaret was the only living person who knew the whole truth. To suppose that she was a witch with powers to leave her body and assume my shape at will was palpably absurd. To me it had been self-evident from the first that Daisy’s theory was right off the mark, and these factors entirely ruled it out. But she had seen a Ka, and the Ka was mine. Therefore, unless the conclusions of everyone who had made a serious study of the occult from the earliest ages to the present time were wrong, there was still life in my corpse.

It was a terrifying thought. To have had to regard myself
for the past four days as an earth-bound spirit had been bad enough; but this was infinitely worse. Now it was even conceivable that if the energy with which my Ka was imbued gave out, it might be forced back into my body. Swiftly, I thrust that horrifying idea from me.

But what of my future? Would Johnny succeed in getting my body exhumed? I thought it most unlikely. Even if he had been able to persuade Daisy to tell her story, the difficulty of inducing the Home Secretary to sign an exhumation order solely on the psychic evidence would be immense; and if Johnny went to the police without her support they would put him down as a liar or a lunatic.

But say he did, after all, manage to cajole or bully her into giving her help, and secured the order; what then?

If they removed my body from its coffin, would my Ka be able to get back into it? The possibility that it might opened up a whole new field of speculations. I saw at once that my return from the grave as a living person would start an endless chain of fresh complications; but now was no time to think of that, as the odds were all against my ever being called on to deal with them. It seemed as good as certain that I must continue as a Ka. But for how long?

The body and the Ka being so intimately connected, I judged it reasonable to suppose that as the body decayed so the Ka too would gradually become more nebulous. As against that I had felt not the least diminution in my powers of movement, or my faculties, since my Ka had left its body at the presumed moment of death.

What, though, if the Egyptians had been right after all about Kas having souls of their own, and I had become a Ba; so must wander the world in my present state for ever? Few conceptions could have been more depressing and I did not see how the immortality of the Egyptian Bas could have been rendered much more attractive by being given Ka figures in their tombs to live in.