You call these beasts, Youssef? she might have said, laughing in breathless relief. You dont know from beasts.
She didnt laugh. She whispered, Sphinxes.
Pardon me? asked Dr. Amhali.
They look like sphinxes, she clarified, raising her voice but not lifting her eyes from them. Her fear was gone. It had been snatched away and replaced by fascination. From mythology.
Woman-cats. Two of them, identical. Panthers with human heads. Eliza stepped through the door, immediately feeling a reprieve from the heat. The tent was cooled by a loud AC unit, and the sphinxes were on metal tables set atop drums of dry ice. Their furred, felid bodies were soft black, and their wings wings were dark and feathered.
Their throats had been cut, and their chests were dark with dried gore.
Dr. Chaudhary stepped past Eliza and removed the helmet of his hazmat suit.
Doctor, said Dr. Amhali at once, I must object. But Dr. Chaudhary didnt appear to hear
him. He approached the nearest sphinx. His head looked small and disembodied above his suit, and his expression was poised at the edge of skepticism.
Eliza took off her helmet, too, and the stench hit her at oncea much purer form of the smell that had wafted up the hill, but she could see the creatures with much greater clarity. She joined Dr. Chaudhary beside the body. Their escort was agitated, scolding them about risk and regulations, but it was easy to tune him out, considering what lay before them.
Tell me what you know, said Dr. Chaudhary, all business. Dr. Amhali did, and it wasnt much. The bodies had been found, more than two dozen of them in an open pit. That was what it boiled down to.
I hoped to dismiss it easily as a hoax, said the Moroccan scientist, but found that I could not. My hope now, I will admit, is that you can.
By way of reply, Dr. Chaudhary only lifted his eyebrows.
Do they all look like this? Eliza inquired.
Not remotely, replied Dr. Amhali, twitching a stiff nod toward a sheet of white canvas humped high over a much greater bulk than the sphinxes.
Whats under there? Eliza wondered. But Dr. Chaudhary only nodded and returned his attention to the sphinxes. She joined him, ran a gloved finger over a feline foreleg, then leaned over one dark wing. She lifted a feather with a fingertip and examined it. Owl, she said, surprised. See the fimbriae? She indicated the feathers leading edge. These flutings are unique to owl plumage. It is what makes them silent in flight. These look like owl feathers.
I hardly think these are owls, said Dr. Amhali.
Are you sure? Eliza quipped inside her head, because I heard the owls in Africa have lady heads. She felt high. Dread had walked down the hill with her. At the mention of the word beasts , it had coiled itself around her and squeezedthe dream, the nightmare, the chasing, the devouringand now it was gone, leaving relief in its wake, and exhaustion, and awe. The awe was on top: the top scoop in the ice-cream cone. Nightmare ice cream , she thought, giddy.
Lick.
Youre right. They are not owls, agreed Dr. Chaudhary, and probably only someone as familiar with his tones as Eliza was could have detected the dryness of sarcasm. At least, not entirely.
And what followed was a cursory head-to-toe inspection with the aim of ruling out a hoax. Look for surgical seams, Dr. Chaudhary instructed Eliza, and she did as he asked, examining the places the creatures disparate elements conjoined: the neck and the wing joints, primarily. She couldnt share Dr. Amhalis hope; she didnt want to find surgical seams. If she did, for one thing then whereor who had the heads come from? That would be a horror movie rather than a momentous scientific discovery. And anyway, it was a pointless exercise. She knew that the creatures were real. As she knew that the angels were real.
These were things that she knew.
No, you dont , she told herself. Thats not how it works. You wonder, and you gather data and study it, and eventually you posit a hypothesis and test it. Then maybe you begin to know.
But she did know, and trying to pretend otherwise was like screaming at a hurricane.
I know other things, too.
And with that, one of the other things presented itself. It was as though a fortune-teller flipped over a tarot card in her mind and showed her this knowledge, this truth that had been lying facedown in there all her life. Longer. Much longer than that. It was there, and it was a very large thing to suddenly know. Very large. Eliza took a deep breath, which is not an excellent idea while standing corpse-side, and she had to stagger back, taking a succession of quick, purposeful breaths to clear the miasma of death from her lungs.
Are you all right? inquired Dr. Chaudhary.
Fine, she said, struggling to cover her agitation. She really didnt want him thinking she was squeamish and couldnt handle this, and she really really didnt want him wishing hed brought Morgan Toth instead, so she got right back to work, assiduously ignoring the tarot card now lying faceup in her mind.