Take me, I'm Yours

Flecks of gold fell from the sky. It was early October, there was a chill in the late afternoon breeze. Reginald Wilcox sat on a bench in the middle of Russell Square Park contemplating the end of the only life he’d ever known. What next?

The British Museum was a grand old building. Wilcox, as head cleaner, with over forty years of service to the Museum, knew every door and window, every passageway, storage space, every nook and cranny. Not to mention the vaults. How could the Museum operate without him? The new operations manager was an ignorant fool. Wilcox’s hands were clasped so tightly that his knuckles whitened.

He was nothing without the Museum.

The sun set behind the Georgian row houses, dulling the foliage. A flock of pigeons descended like litter from the sky, landing nearby on the path, looking for worms or crumbs. All Wilcox had in his green overall pockets was an old iron key.

The key to the vaults.

They took the other keys from him.

When Barrett called him into the third floor office, Wilcox assumed that it was to help the new operations manager find his bearings. Wilcox came to the meeting with a long list of ideas for improvement, but instead was handed an envelope.

“I think you’ll find the separation package very attractive,” said Barrett, avoiding Wilcox’s eyes.

Just thinking about it made Wilcox’ chest tighten. His teeth ached from clenching.

“I can imagine how you must feel,” said Barrett, a pale-faced, mirthless man.

All Wilcox could feel was the ground giving way beneath his feet. He felt his knees weaken.

Wilcox was met by a security guard. The guard took Wilcox’s ID card, his key ring - all the keys, except one.

“But I’m the only person that knows which key fits which lock.”

“Just doing my job,” said the guard, who was a new recruit.

The guard escorted Wilcox out of the building.

“What about my colleagues? I need to tell them,” said Wilcox.

“Sorry, mate, but strict orders. We don’t want you damaging the merchandise now, do we?”

Wilcox had spent forty-odd years protecting the merchandise, not just the exhibits upstairs, but the forgotten treasures below. It was a dreadful mistake, a misunderstanding. The Museum needed Wilcox.

Wilcox was given a cardboard box containing the contents of his locker, and shown the door.

What now? Home was just a place, a bedsit four stops north on the Piccadilly line. It was a place to sleep and eat and prepare for the next day of work. A bed, a chair, a single-ring gas stove. He shared a bathroom with two other tenants; men, loners, who neither combed their hair nor polished their shoes. Holidays and vacations were torture; and more often than not, he’d come to work anyway. The British Museum was his home, and the staff were his family.

He was still wearing his green overalls. The shame of it; an old man wearing scruffy overalls carrying a cardboard box without a place in the world. No family, no friends. Four stops on the Piccadilly line during rush-hour, Wilcox would face the judgment of the young, the married, the successful - old men in suits, old men with status. He’d be the only person on the tube wearing overalls in rush hour, common and vulgar, and at his age. It was pathetic! He’d rather die. He’d rather throw himself on the tracks than suffer the humiliation and indignity, and he wasn’t being melodramatic; it was a cold and calculating decision. A sob caught in his throat, the tightness in his chest intensified.

“Oh sweet lord, take me, I am yours.”

Wilcox was not a religious man, and the prayer went unanswered.

The pigeons, spooked by something, suddenly panicked, and flew up into the early evening sky, now indigo overhead; they did not take Wilcox with them. The air tasted metallic, as it does before and after a storm. He would have gone willingly. Anywhere that he might belong.

It was nearly dark, pedestrian traffic was scant. Cars drove with their lights on. Russell Square Park is not a destination and at night it is a place you go around not through. Wilcox was cold to the bone. He needed to… He needed to…

He needed nothing.

Until this moment in his life, he was needed, not needful.

He was nothing now.

The air seized - like isinglass, frozen.

There was a man-hole cover in the pathway that cut diagonally across the park. The cast-iron cover tilted up to the side, a giant paw emerged and edged the metal plate onto the ground, rasping it clear of the hole.

Wilcox froze.

A liquid shadow emerged from the hole.

Wilcox knew this shadow. He could neither run nor hide from it.

It was Sekhmet, goddess of war.

This was one kind of ending. Wilcox hoped it might be quick, and painless. He was not scared; he was resigned. He stopped breathing, he could feel his heart pounding in his chest.

The shadow was incarnate. The giant black cat, sleek and powerful, crouched low to the ground, her Yellow eyes glowed, her fanged teeth flashed. Her jaws gaped wide, she hissed at a passing along the perimeter of the park, then, satisfied that the danger had passed, she looked directly and unsparingly at Wilcox, as if measuring the distance she must leap.

Wilcox felt his soul being drawn forth from his body as he stared at Sekhmet’s tongue and convulsing pink throat. Any moment he would be engulfed and engorged, and his cranium would crush like an egg-shell.

“Not so soon, Wilcox,” said Sekhmet. “Not so soon.”

Sekhmet circled him, her tail flicking back and forth, closer and closer, and as she approached Wilcox she became fluid again, but still incarnate and substantial, and then she stood rampant, then resolved into a beautiful raven-haired young woman, wispy and slender, and then she was a crone, dressed in black shredded rags that flowed, and then she sat next to Wilcox on the bench, on the far side from the cardboard box. For a moment, her new form seemed hesitant, she was neither old nor young, neither woman or cat, and then she was all and none.

“Sekhmet!” said Wilcox, his throat dry, his voice shaking. When she touched his arm, he felt the same terror and thrill that he’d experienced when she brushed by his leg or nuzzled his hand unseen in the darkness of the vaults. Forty years, Wilcox was aware of her presence, but he’d never seen more than a glimpse of her by Earwig’s candlelight. But that she was flesh, he knew for sure, because how else could there be so much carnage and death in the streets of Bloomsbury? How else to explain the disappearances, the corpses, the trails of blood. Sekhmet preyed on the weak, the lonely; she preyed on animal and human alike. She exacted vengeance on those that betrayed the vaults. Until this moment, she had tolerated Wilcox, Earwig’s friend, the little ferret-faced man that came and went from the vaults. Perhaps it was because Earwig, the vault keeper trusted him? Perhaps it was because he, Wilcox, brought Sekhmet tribute when he could? But now he was of no further use. Wilcox nervously placed his hand into his right pocket and caressed the key.

“I don’t want the key,” said Sekhmet.

Wilcox scarcely dared look her in the face, but he stole a quick glance. She was not looking at him; she appeared to be staring into the distance, one leg crossed, her arm rested on the back of the bench, behind his head. One flick and she might kill him.

“You’ve been a faithful servant, Wilcox.”

Wilcox had been a faithful servant! No one had spoken to him in this way for years - perhaps ever. It was a salve to the ache in his heart to hear these words. Blood, sweat and tears, he had shed them all in equal measure over the years. He’d worked unpaid. He’d found lost children and reunited them with their parents. He’d cleaned the toilets, unbidden, countless times.

Moisture welled in his eyes, his shoulders shook with relief. He wanted to hold Sekhmet, and be held by her. Dare he touch her hand? When he looked into her eyes, they were still the eyes of a cat; unfathomably strange and distant, black slits in yellow pupils. There was no empathy or sympathy, just judgment.

“You kept the gray from the vaults.”

The gray could only mean Barrett and his ilk; men and women that destroyed serendipity and magic with organization and explanation. Wilcox could remember the days when the Museum was more like the vaults; when the world’s history was something discovered by chance, interpreted by the imagination. He could remember when the display cases were made of wood, when Greece and Assyria lived cheek by jowl, when children and pensioners stopped and stared in awe at the Mummies, and the text and context went unread.

Wilcox took the key and held it for Sekhmet to take. The key to the vaults was nearly as old as the museum. The blue door was lost for years, buried in war rubble, but Wilcox was head cleaner and it was from the prior head cleaner that he inherited the key, and the knowledge of the door, of Earwig and Sekhmet and the forgotten treasures. The vaults, where history’s secret and forgotten history lay amassed; the whereabouts and provenance, known only to Earwig and the ledgers, and to Sekhmet.

“I tried to protect the vaults, Sekhmet… from the gray… from everyone and everything.”

“Wilcox, you fool, it is not the vaults that needed your protection, it is the Museum.”

“But the key, I have the key.”

“It depends on which side of the door the key is used, does it not? It was never the vaults that needed protection.”

It was for Wilcox like up was down, and day was night. He frowned at the effort of understanding. Every incident, every thing, above and below meant something completely different depending on which side of the blue door you stood. Truth, beauty and justice were the things concealed, not the things on display. The Parthenon, the Benin bronzes, the Ethiopian tabots; they were lies and which did not belong, whereas the things in the vaults were forgotten and in need of remembrance and revelation. Which had he served? Which should he serve?

Wilcox could feel Sekhmet, she was changing again. The arm behind his head was now a powerful foreleg, the hand a claw, he felt the needle-sharp prickle at his neck; he dare not look at her. If it was affection, and if she was a cat, it might turn to appetite.

“I’m nothing now,” said Wilcox. “Oh sweet Sekhmet, take me, I am yours.”

“That is true, Wilcox, you have always been mine, but you can still be your own man. Gods and humans occupy different realms, when we meet we share the air but nothing more, unless we - the Gods - decide otherwise. How could we? You can kill a mayfly, it is nothing to you, unless you invest in it your love.”

“The mayfly has no idea, though…”

“The mayfly has its own idea… it lives a life of meaning.”

“I am old. What meaning I had was in my service to the Museum.”

“Then be something else. Let the people upstairs taste the wonder and awe that they’ve forgotten.”

Sekhmet was a cat again. She looked once over her shoulder, back at Wilcox. She hissed. “Bring the key. We will need it.”

Wilcox sensed it was thin gruel. To be attendant to the blue door, just as Earwig was attendant to the ledgers. With nobody but Sekhmet and Earwig as witnesses, it was a meager role for a man of his standing and experience.

“And we will need you,” said Sekhmet. “We will need you to help right the wrongs and restore a balance between worlds.”

Sekhmet slipped down the man-hole, and was gone.

Wilcox hesitated. He glanced at the cardboard box; it contained his 25th work anniversary clock, a gift from the then director of the Museum. There was a photo too, of Wilcox waiting in line to meet the Queen; ages ago now, and she didn’t stop to talk to him, she didn’t even see him. He thought of the white envelope with the very attractive retirement package. Wilcox thought of Barrett, ignorant and smug in his silly little office, tending to things that he barely understood.

Barrett would never know how Wilcox felt, but he could be made to suffer a different kind of fate.

Wilcox thought of the lonely bedsit.

He thought of the vaults, of the treasure-trove.

Wilcox followed Sekhmet to the open man-hole. It descended into pitch black, except for two flashing yellow eyes. Wilcox gave the cardboard box a glance. It was useless to him.

Wilcox was old, but wiry and nimble.

“Pull the cover back across the hole,” hissed Sekhmet. “I find it helps conceal the screams.”

Wilcox, descending the ladder, froze.

“For goodness sake, Wilcox,” growled Sekhmet. “Stop taking things so seriously.”

Wilcox bowed his head, exhaled; restored, he pulled the heavy metal plate back across the top of the man-hole, and was pitched into total darkness.

When he got to the tunnel, when his feet were on firm ground, Wilcox whispered something under his breath. “Take me, I’m yours. ” He hoped that Sekhmet could not hear him.

Wilcox felt himself embraced by Sekhmet. Whether she might crush him or cradle him, he no longer cared, and he cried simply, like a child.