Selket Hara

And her Earthen companion

In the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe ~ but the women have arrived…

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The trouble with science, as any sensible person knows, is that it never once stops to consider whether it should….

It was half past two in the morning when Doctor Ponnonner, flushed with that heart soaring excitement that overtakes small men in possession of large ambitions, applied the second galvanic current to the mummy upon the table. The first had accomplished little beyond a general twitching. It startled Mr. Gliddon and forced him to knock over his wine. The second one, however…that second one accomplished far more than any of them had bargained for.

Morally and physically. Figuratively and literally ~ the effect was electric.

The larger of the two figures opened her eyes. A slow, deliberate unveiling. The way a judge lifts her gaze before sentencing. Dark eyes swept the room with the efficient contempt that catalogued exactly how many fools stood before her.

The smaller figure, no larger than a child's toy, wrapped in its own diminutive linen, tucked against the larger one's side, also opened its eyes. Two small, black, unreasonably steady eyes that fixed upon Doctor Ponnonner with an expression that made him step backward into Mr. Buckingham.

No one in the room spoke.

It was, perhaps, the first silence that chamber had known all evening.

The larger figure, she whom the cartouche identified, as Selket Hara, Purifier of the Western Lands. Servant of the Scorpion Goddess, sat upright with slow, deliberate grace. She looked down at her unwrapped hands. Then she looked at the linen in disarray around her.

Selket Hara turned to her companion.

Something passed between them. Communication of two ancient beings.

Selket Hara spoke first.

Her voice did not creak or rasp as Doctor Ponnonner had hoped. It was low, and carried the quality of a pronouncement rather than a greeting.

She spoke in Egyptian. Mr. Gliddon, who prided himself enormously on his facility with the language, went the color of old papyrus.

“She says,” he managed, after a moment, “that she is — that she wishes to know — that is to say —”

“I am aware,” said Selket Hara. In English that carried three thousand years of patience ground down to its sharpest edge, “that you speak this tongue. I have been listening to you butcher my own language for the better part of an hour. I chose to spare you the embarrassment of Mr. Gliddon's translation.”

Doctor Ponnonner gasped.

“I must say,” she continued, casting her gaze across the assembled company of men, “that I am unsurprised. You are not the first small men to unwrap what they do not understand. You will not be the last. This is, I find, the eternal character of your kind.”

She glanced at Axomamma, who had not yet spoken. Her small dark eyes had not moved from Doctor Ponnonner's face. Yet.

“Where,” said Selket Hara, “are my instruments?”

No one answered.

Mr. Buckingham looked at the floor.

“My instruments,” she repeated, “The alabaster vessel. The seven bound reeds. The oil prepared from the night-blooming lotus.” She surveyed the table upon which she had been laid. Scattered linen, the galvanic apparatus, the half-eaten supper pushed to the corner. “I see that you have made free with my belongings. I see that you have stripped my protections. I see…” here her voice dropped by precisely half a degree. “…that you have separated me from my work.”

“Your…work?” said Doctor Ponnonner. “My dear creature, you have been…that is, you have been at rest for some three thousand…”

“I was not at rest.” The words fell like stones into still water. “I was murdered. There is a considerable difference. I would thank you to observe it.”

The room went quiet.

Then Axomamma finally spoke.

Her voice was not what any of them expected. It was not diminutive, as her form was small. It was the voice of deep earth and dark soil.

She said, in words that arrived beneath the floor, “The land is still unclean.”

Selket Hara closed her eyes briefly.

“You must understand,” she said, opening them again and addressing the assembled scientists with what might, generously, have been called restraint, “that I was in the middle of something. The Western Lands ~ your culture does not have a word adequate to the concept. Imagine, if your imaginations extend so far, a border. A threshold. A place where the living end and something else begins.” She folded her unwrapped hands in her lap. “That place is poisoned. Corrupted by a particular human talent for cruelty. It transcends all epochs, all empires, all the little sciences with which small men console themselves for their small lives.”

Doctor Ponnonner opened his mouth.

“I am not finished,” said Selket Hara.

He closed it.

“I was three days from completion when I was killed by those who did not wish the cleansing to succeed. They buried me with my instruments to mock the work. They placed Axomamma beside me because they thought it funny. A servant of the scorpion goddess and a potato spirit, tucked together in the dark.” For the first time, a shadow of grief caught her eyes. “They did not know Axomamma is older than their gods. They did not know earth endures everything. They did not know patience is power.”

Axomamma said nothing. Her small dark eyes moved, from Doctor Ponnonner to the window.

“The work,” she said, quietly. “It waits.”

Selket Hara stood.

She did not wobble. She rose from the table as though rising from a chair at a dinner party. She looked at each man in the room in turn, and each man, when her eyes reached his, found something urgent to examine elsewhere.

“You have done,” she said, “an extraordinary thing tonight. Not the thing you believe you have done. You did not triumph over death. Or unlock the secrets of the ancients.” She lifted Axomamma from the table. The elder spirit settled against her with ease. “You woke someone who had unfinished work. Whether that is fortunate or unfortunate for you remains to be seen.”

She turned toward the door.

“You cannot simply…”Doctor Ponnonner began.

“I have cleansed lands,” said Selket Hara, without turning back, “of considerably worse than this filth.”

The door opened on its own. She walked through it.

Axomamma, from her place against Selket Hara's shoulder, looked back at the assembled scientists. Her expression was unsettling.

It was patient.

The door closed.

Doctor Ponnonner sat down heavily in the nearest chair. Mr. Gliddon stared at the empty table. Mr. Buckingham looked at the galvanic apparatus with the expression of a man reconsidering several major life choices.

Three thousand years had not stopped the cleanse. It began again.

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Written for Hazel & the love of POE…🥔