Now that I’m out of academia, out of the field of archeology altogether—I feel I can finally write about this: this what? Experience. Abomination. Hallucination, they’ll say; but I assure you it was no hallucination. It was real. That horror was real.
It happened in Sudan in 2016.
I was there as a post-grad on a joint Sudanese-Canadian archeological dig searching for an example of what is sometimes called the Pillars of Humanity. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of it. It’s essentially a dramatic name for a type of ancient Egyptian architectural element consisting of columns (usually three) depicting four animal-headed figures with upraised arms supporting a beam adorned with human faces. It’s of niche specialist interest. Even I wasn’t particularly interested in it, except for that it was the only real work experience I could find.
The dig was headed by a relatively famous archeologist to whom I’ll refer as Q.
He had a Sudanese counterpart, X, and—counting myself—seven post-grad students, five Egyptian students and innumerable local labourers.
I, Q and the other students stayed in a hotel.
It was there the first odd thing happened, although it was odd only in hindsight. At the time I thought nothing of overhearing X speaking at night to a hooded man about the need for twelve spherical glass containers. Perhaps I would have wondered why he wanted the containers if I had felt comfortable enough to talk to one of the other post-grads about it, but in truth I had felt alienated from them from the very beginning. I was the latecomer, the stranger; and despite being from different North American universities they all seemed somehow to be bound together in a way which excluded me. I felt tolerated but separate. So I did not mention the conversation to anyone, and soon forgot about it altogether.
In terms of actual archeological work, I participated but only to a point. I was allowed to work alongside the others during the day but wasn’t invited to any of their social events or—a phenomenon I discovered by accident due to my inability to sleep—nighttime excursions to the dig site and to neighbouring historical sites, including the burial chamber of a minor ancient nobleman.
It was around this time I saw one of the Egyptian students covered in blood.
She was coming out of her hotel room, saw me—stopped, then hurried down the hallway faster than I could follow. I’ve always detested the sight of blood, and the sight of it on her had my heart beating particularly fast as passing the open hotel-room door I looked in and saw two other students, the hooded man, and what appeared to be the headless carcass of a goat writhing in the final agonies of death on a bloodied sheet of plastic.
The door closed.
And I continued walking, with the image of the dying goat fixed in my mind: my mind attempting to rationalize it or convince itself that it had been deceived. It couldn’t be…
I was scared—a fear that’s never entirely left me.
I eventually went to my own room, shut the door and sat on my bed, sweating in the obnoxious heat. I was jumpy; every sound rattled me. I think I expected someone would come for me, knock on my door and explain what I had seen. Explain—or worse. But I also thought: that’s crazy. The students weren’t dangerous. They were just kids really. Did I honestly believe they might harm me? It was my imagination, my vivid imagination, that was the problem.
Which is what Q told me a few days later. Along with: failure to understand a different culture, not being used to the climate. He wasn’t concerned. Until, more out of jealousy than concern, I mentioned that I also knew about the nighttime trips to the dig site and the burial chamber he and the other students were going on. That got his attention; his eyes flashed with a kind of lightning violence, “How?” he asked, and when I mentioned my insomnia he said that was nonsense and accused me of spying. Although Q is not a large man, as he rose from his chair I felt towered over by him, which is why I said nothing more in my defense as he pronounced that from now on I was unwelcome on the dig site. “I’ll write you a sparkling reference letter,” he said, “but I don’t want you anywhere near us.”
Perhaps because I am and have always been a coward, I respected his decision despite knowing it was wrong.
I passed my suddenly empty days in the hotel or wandering the city.
It was like a vacation.
Yet everywhere I went: I felt watched, uneasy. The heat oppressed me and the feeling of loneliness became overbearing. I tried a few times to approach the other post-grads, but they were cold to me, ignoring my presence and sometimes even my greetings. More than once, one of them turned his back on me. I didn’t try approaching the Egyptians. I tried once to speak to X, but he merely spat at my feet and walked away. I spent many hours wondering what lies Q must have told them all about me. Or perhaps it was just the one: I was a spy. I wasn’t to be trusted.
I spent my nights with the windows open, listening to the sounds of the never-sleeping city and the wind—driving the desert sands on and on…
“I want you gone,” Q said to me one day. “Here.” And he thrust an envelope at me, which I took, opened and saw contained a plane ticket to Toronto dated tomorrow. The envelope also contained a fair amount of cash. When Q saw that the cash puzzled me, he said, “That’s so you forget everything. Understand?”
I said I did, thinking he was paying me off to keep quiet about his expelling me from the job site, but when I thought about it later that afternoon I decided that couldn’t be the case. It’s not like he’d made advances toward me. There was no question of academic or professional misconduct. Nothing he’d done was worth paying me to keep quiet about. In his mind, I was the guilty one. There had to be more to it. He had to suspect I knew something more than I did, and so it was really because of the money and the comment (“…so you forget everything.”) that I decided to stay—secretly.
I should not have stayed.
I should have gone.
As God is my witness, I swear I should have gone.
I checked into another hotel under a different name and began spying on Q and the others for real. I followed them during the day and night. I observed what they did, with whom they spoke and the hours they kept. One afternoon, I saw the arrival of the glass containers to the hotel lobby, before Q shepherded them quickly to his room. I noted their meetings, increasingly frequent and sometimes shockingly loud, as if arguing, as if screaming, leading me to suspect they might be engaging in orgies. I hypothesized they’d always wanted me gone. I hypothesized they were playing a joke on me, gaslighting me, laughing at me. I decided they weren’t serious scholars at all, just superficial idiots having a great time together without me! And everywhere—everywhere, there was the hooded man: whispering, watching, always with his back turned and his face obscured. I was jealous and excited and incredibly fearful at times: fearful they’d catch me; fearful I would catch them doing something I didn’t want to see.
There was a sandstorm the night I followed them for the last time to the burial chamber of the ancient nobleman.
I nearly lost my way, having to shield my face from the elements.
I kept slipping and getting up.
When I arrived I saw that the entrance to the chamber had been forced open—the boulder blocking it rolled away, the stairs leading downwards dark but for the faint touch of deep and distant torchlight. I remember too the intense noise of the wind, which battered me as I neared, and which gradually subsided as I descended, until it was gone and all I could hear was the sound of my own echoing footsteps: silence punctured by—
a scream!
I hugged the wall.
I clamped my hands across my mouth to keep from screaming too, and held my breath. Listening through the sound of my heart pumping blood, I managed the few remaining steps, and gazed inside the chamber itself:
Full of figures and meat and buzzing flies.
The six post-grads, five Egyptian students and Q stood in a circle, each wearing the head of a decapitated animal. Goat, antelope, leopard, alligator…
The smell was indescribable.
I wanted to retch—
As within this circle twelve naked women glistened in the hideously unstable light cast by the torches hanging upon the walls.
A voice spoke in a language I neither understood nor recognized.
But I knew it spoke of violence, of blood dripping from animal heads, running down the bodies of these people I had known, I had worked alongside, I now saw becoming beasts, knife-wielding beasts!
From under a lion’s head Q said: “Succumb!”
And they… slit their throats!—
They slit their naked throats, cleanly; unimaginably smiling faces—the cutters and the cut— sharp blades spilling life and slicing, slicing—heads held up by fisted clumps of hair—until the unity of each was ended. Until the bodies dropped with heads remained aloft.
“Succumb!” Q said.
Placed the heads upon the ground and went to work on the bodies, cutting open chests, abdomens, spilling forth the viscera, plunging bare hands into the steaming innards of their willing sacrifices and pulling out the organs, one by one, depositing them into those accursed glass containers.
I pushed my fist into my own mouth. I was too scared to run, too scared to do anything but watch.
They pushed the organs into the glass spheres.
Packing them.
God, the sounds—I’ll never forget those squelching, gaseous sounds!
My heart was a war drum.
My skin was cold and wet as sickness.
When each sphere had been filled, the unknown voice speaking its violent tongue incanted some spell or instruction, and from somewhere rose a sound so high in pitch I thought my mind would burst; but what burst were the glass containers:
Shattered, they left upon their beds of shards twelve oozing orbs of compressed organ-flesh, which pulsed…
And beside each, a headless, voided she-corpse.
They laid down the knives and returned now the heads and put them beside the flesh-orbs, so that before each was one orb and one head. Next, the hooded figure emerged from somewhere deeper within the chamber, dragging from the shadows what appeared to be a long and yellowed construction of bone, like a monstrous spine, rigid and sharpened on one end, and as he began to chant—it was his voice I had heard!—the post-grads and the students and Q impaled the heads and flesh-orbs on the bone in alternation, one after the other…
Having completed this act, the hooded figure removed his face, revealing another: the face of X, and the twelve others arranged themselves in three groups of four, each four standing back-to-back-to-back-to-back, and lifted their despicable creation above their animal heads. The sounds emitted by X were like a revocation: of life, of the natural order, accumulating in the chamber the way paint accumulates on a canvas, layer upon layer. They animated—they animated that thing held above their heads, that horror—
It was not a hallucination!
It was not!
I saw it. I saw it. I swear to Almighty God, I saw it—
come alive before my very eyes. The rigid bone began to flex, to squirm; the heads: their eyes opened and mouths snarled; the heads melding together, head to flesh-orb to head to flesh-orb, so as there became a oneness to the abomination.
It squirmed, and they dropped it.
They dropped the Caterpillar of Humanity!
How they scattered!
Scurrying—scurrying—it leapt at one of them, at the Egyptian student I had seen in the hotel hallway covered in blood, and latched itself to her face. That sucking sound. That ghastly sucking sound. When it detached—her face was gone and she’d no clothes or skin upon her body. Walking musculature. Transfixed by the abomination, one of whose bloody faces was licking its swollen lips. Transfixed: even in death. Psychomother of the child that killed her. They’d lost control, the idiots! They’d lost all semblance of control!
In that moment: I regained mine.
I ripped my fist from my mouth, turned and ran-crawled up the steps and out of the burial chamber—
into the sandstorm.
The last thing I’d seen was the abomination, or at least several of its drooling heads, consuming the decapitated, emptied bodies of its victims—of… itselves.
Nobody followed me through the desert, into the city.
By morning I was on a plane headed home.
My hands shook and I kept asking the stewardess for drinks. My mind vacillated between horror and disbelief. The woman sitting next to me kept asking me questions, which I answered rotely, but what I really wanted to tell her was: “Succumb!”
I was glad to be off the plane.
As far as I know, all but one of the students and post-grads involved in what I’ve described is still alive. The sole death, the bloodied girl from the hotel hallway, was ruled an accident. Q remains actively involved in the teaching and practice of archeology. I don’t know much about X other than that his academic profile is unchanged. None of them have contacted me. I haven’t contacted any of them.
OK. Exhale.
I actually feel better now. I really needed to get that off my chest.
There’s just one additional thing.
Something that tends to keep me up at night. Something my vivid imagination can’t always cope with. Caterpillars are larvae. They’re unfinished. They turn into something else.
Does that mean the abomination is still out there—creating its chrysalis? And What in God’s name will it metamorphose into…