Read Short Stories, Crimes, Cults and Curious Cats Page 15

it wouldn’t have mattered as long as it impressed their dinner guests.

  Dr Shah wished the place had already been levelled: the foreboding that this would raise dangerously suppressed demons was becoming more insistent.

  PC Shad unlocked the front door and Dr Shah, D/C.Supt Andersen, Taylor, the unresponsive Daniel Proctor, and his wife entered.

  The DI pulled back, but his wife coaxed him forward.

  Taylor experienced guilt at leaving the man who had helped him five years ago. ‘You remember going in, don't you? You stepped into that hall and I never saw you again.’

  But Daniel Proctor had once more been plunged into that monstrous hell of the Bast cat, swallowed into a whirlpool of disorientating terror, and then – as the ocean became calm - awareness.

  Suddenly he was gazing into the lapis lazuli eyes of his goddess and realised who he was. Expression at last returned to his face.

  His wife was elated and wondered how the others could have doubted that she knew best. ‘He's coming back to us.’

  Then Daniel Proctor started to speak a strange language. His tone was assured, with an edge of authority, but the words were incomprehensible.

  PC Shah shook his head. ‘It's not Arabic or Coptic.’

  ‘No,’ agreed his mother. ‘I believe he is speaking an ancient Egyptian dialect.’

  Daniel Proctor's wife was beside herself. ‘You have to bring him back!’

  ‘I'm not sure that is possible.’

  The DI did not hear the ensuing recriminations. He was where he should be; in his own time and place, standing before the altar of the Bast cat, offering tributes to his implacable, mysterious goddess.

 
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