Short Story: The Canopic Jar

Short Story: The Canopic Jar

Susan let her fingers touch each symbol and her hands gently glided over the object that stood before her. Her fingers were meticulous with each movement and examined each little nuance in the chinks that had been etched in this nonconformist structure. It was almost as if she was feeling for something different, something new. Although she’d been here many times, she couldn’t help but read the hieroglyphic inscription once more, fashioned to be her sisters’ final epitaph;

"For Stella, life never dies".

Ordinarily, she would marvel at its beauty. The gold of the quail chick and the bronze of the lion had a very precise look about the work carved skilfully into the black granite headstone. It stood out to make Stella’s final resting place gleam and seem majestic. In the garden of the dead, there was a touch of something vibrant and extremely singular here. The vases and pots that adorned the grave had been strategically chosen to complement each other. They matched perfectly, in an exercise reminiscent of how an exquisite painting may have been put together. The combination of colours was aesthetic in their beauty and whatever time of the day you visited, there was always a flush of colour with incredible and unique illustrations, never been seen before.

Susan was more enamoured though by the night time view of her sisters’ grave. The low lighting created by the night lights and small tea light candles, made it seem at its most spectacular and delightfully captivating.

This was the one thing Susan and her mother had agreed on when Stella died.

She would have a final resting place fit for an Egyptian queen and the woman she adored from the moment she began to study Egyptology as a student; Cleopatra VII the Ptolemaic Queen who existed from around 51BC and was the Hellenistic ruler of Egypt. When Cleopatra died it was believed that she killed herself by allowing a poisonous snake to bite her. Stella on the other hand, couldn’t afford such luxuries and died suddenly at the age of thirty-four after suffering from a rare heart defect.

Tonight, Susan felt detached and hated the entire splendour on display at the graveside. It was just too painful a reminder that Stella was gone. She decided instead to focus on the stories that her mother used to tell them about Egypt and the exotic countries she had visited with her father before Stella and Susan were born.

Susan’s mother and father were Egyptologists who travelled the world. They once had a foolish idea that one day like Pierre Montet who discovered the Royal tombs of Tutankhamen, they would be the first couple to discover a "major haul". When her mother first became pregnant with Stella, this put an end to the idea.

After all, how could one be on a digging site with a baby sat in a Moses basket? Susan came along as daughter number two, just after Stella was born.

However her interest in Egyptology was not something she found mesmerizing and by this time anyway, her mother only ever had any real attention for Stella. Susan settled for being a nurse in a children’s hospital, with Egyptology being a hobby on the side.

It had been so hard since Stella's death. Everyone she knew automatically assumed she was coping. Having a child of your own after all, helps to heal the pain. None of this was true. If anything it was worse for her. It made it harder for her to convince others she was grieving too.

Susan’s husband Karl had been used to her going out for long evening walks and coming back well after he had gone to bed. Here at the cemetery she could cry when she wanted and not feel she had to justify her actions.

It was 3am in the early hours of Sunday morning. How on earth was she was going explain to him where she had been all this time?

‘I hate you for leaving me, how am I going to cope without you?’

Susan was really blubbing now. White speckles of froth leaked from out of her mouth as she spoke. She seemed to be expelling a glue-like substance from her nose which was almost inevitable when one of her major crying sessions occurred.

Susan held onto the headstone and slumped down onto the ground in defeat. She had become an old cliché; a lone woman weeping in a cemetery following the death of her sister, finding it hard to take in the fact that her sister had died and believing it had only happened yesterday. It had even started to thunder and as the rain pelted her body, the icy cold trickles made her shiver, adding even more to the truism.

She hadn’t even noticed what she was doing. She had started to scrape away at the soil that covered Stella’s grave. Her fingers suddenly transformed into a claw-like shape for the task in hand. Susan knew she should stop this heinous crime, but it was as if something had taken over from all rational thoughts or actions

Susan began to dig, even faster now and with more speed. She wasn’t even looking down at what she was doing.

That was when it happened. Her fingers touched something that made her stop digging. At first she thought it was one of the vases scattered around Stella’s grave and disturbed in the mêlée. Susan knew for certain this wasn’t the case. She had definitely dug this object up after finding it buried underground and it was not at all like anything she’d encountered that evening. The yellowing and soil laden object Susan had stumbled across was an Egyptian Canopic Jar.

She’d seen pictures of this type of jar before when studying Egyptology in the past, but actually holding one in the context of this scenario, left her completely disorientated. Her body began to react to the enormity of what she’d done. She couldn’t stop shaking and was panic-stricken by her discovery.

She knew the significance of the jar. It was one of four jars made to contain the internal organs of a person that had passed away. This particular jar featured the face of the god Duamutef on the lid and was supposed to protect the stomach organs of a person when they died. Egyptians believed this would guarantee their place in the afterlife and some believers even thought it could help to bring back the dead. Her mother must have asked them to bury this with her sister and so it was inevitable that what was contained in the jar had to be the remains of her dead sister.

In her fragile, jittery state Susan’s hand could hardly hold the jar upright. She accidentally knocked it over, resulting in the hollow lid plopping to the floor and rolling around a circle before landing face upwards in front of the mess. A small clear plastic bag could be seen and was hanging from the jar, partially exposed to the rain.

‘Oh my God!’

Her voice was loud and vociferous. She babbled inaudibly under her breath. Susan was too scared to open her eyes and tears began to run down her cheeks. In an attempt to will her body into a state of collapse, she swayed gently, rocking from side to side. She wanted her body to immediately fall into a comatosed state. This find was far too disturbing for her to take it all in; she didn’t want this horrendous night to carry on any more.

In her profession as a nurse in a children’s hospital, she’d also seen this item many times. A brand new gastrostomy tube was sealed in the bag. Its purpose was to allow nourishment to be given directly to the patient, into their stomach and therefore bypassing their mouth and throat. Susan eventually opened her eyes. She knew that she would have to look at the object in order to convince herself of what was in the jar. She was tentative in her movements and as she pulled the object from the jar in disbelief, she uttered the words;

‘What’s going on?’

There was no time for answers. Susan felt a pang of urgency to get out of there fast and a sudden fear that her crime would be discovered if she didn’t move. She tried to sweep up the mess with her hands. Her fingers had now become clumsy and instead of gathering up huge clumps of soil, she found that only small bits were fitting back into the jigsaw she had dissembled. It was going to take a long time to undo the damage she had created.

It could be put down to the heavy rain she thought. Her desperation grew as she frantically tried to scoop the soil back into place and pick up the vases scattered everywhere. It was pathetic the way she tried to repair the withered flowers laying strewn around Stella’s headstone.

Eventually she finished the macabre task and scooped the last bit of soil into place and patted it down as best as she could. Susan stood up dazed and exhausted by the enormity of the job she had just completed. She briefly surveyed her efforts and without a second glance, ran wildly into the night.

When she got home she was grateful that Karl and her daughter were asleep. There were too many questions needing a rapid response and there was no way of giving a plausible answer to any of them. She was dishevelled, soaked to the skin and mud appeared to be plastered over every inch of her body. Any reasonable explanation to account for where she had been would have exacerbated the situation.

The shower was not the soothing relief she craved. However hard she tried her mind could not forget the events of the night. Susan crept into bed and immediately felt the cocoon of the blankets envelop her.

The dreams began almost immediately. Her face was contorted and the tube began to coil around her neck. Susan was foaming at the mouth. Her eyes had copious amounts of fluid in them and as they detached from their sockets, a terrifying scream woke her from the nightmare.

‘Wake up love. Susan, it's just a dream.’

For the next few weeks Karl wondered what was wrong with his wife. The rows increased due to the nightmares she was having and the lack of sleep. He feared Susan was loosing her mind.

‘What the hell's the matter with you? You're bloody mad!’

He would yell at her when he didn’t know what else to do or say to put her mind at ease. One evening when the phone rang she was certain the things she had done that night had been found out. She received an unexpected phone call from her mother.

‘Have you been to the cemetery recently?’

Susan was struck dumb by the words she’d just heard.

‘They've thrown the pots around and damaged the flowers and they found …’

Susan’s mum had suddenly stopped speaking.

‘What did they find Mum?’ Susan probed her mother a little further.

‘I m-meant I’m glad they didn't find the scissors I keep there to cut the flowers when I bring fresh ones.’

Susan didn’t hear the rest of the conversation. She was just so relieved that she hadn’t been found out. But there was no doubt about it. She would have to go back to try and discover the truth. Why did someone put a brand new gastronomy tube there? What did they intend to use it for?

The night she could go back came as a total surprise to Susan.

‘Darling I've got to go to the firm's annual conference in Birmingham’ Karl said one evening whilst they were having dinner.

Susan heard to him talk about figures and targets. It was all muffled. She was too busy planning in her head what she had to do tomorrow evening.

She arranged for her daughter to stay at a friend's house for the night and just in case Karl decided to ring her, she told him she planned to go out with her friend that night.

Susan got into the cemetery by using the broken back gate. It was a secret entrance that only a few people knew about and was there because the owners of the cemetery had forgotten to fix it.

She sat under a tree with her torch poised and for when she felt it was reasonably dark. It gave her time to think and reflect back on what Karl and her daughter had said to her before they parted this evening.

‘I love you Mummy, see you tomorrow,’ her daughter chimed in her usual chirpy self.

‘See you love, I’ll call you tomorrow morning.

Susan wasn’t sure about what would happen tomorrow. I wonder if they would still love me if they knew what I was about to do? She thought ruefully.

The time passed quickly and soon she found herself finally taking the walk by torch light, down the pathway and towards her sister’s grave. She was feeling extremely anxious and fretful about what she imagined was about to happen. Her hand was so unsteady and the beam of the torch created bizarre images as she walked.

As she approached the grave, there was something immediately different about the scene. The subtle low lighting that Susan was used to seeing at Stella’s grave could not be seen. It had been overshadowed by an austere light pointed very close to the spot where Susan had once sat and unearthed those strange objects.

There was someone knelt over the grave. They were so preoccupied with what they were doing and didn’t hear Susan.

‘M-Mother what are you doing?’

‘Oh hello Susan. I wondered when I’d see you here.’

Her mother was nonchalant in her tone. She briefly

acknowledged Susan with a glance. She continued to carry on with what she was doing. Susan couldn’t move and just stood there, completely taken aback at the startling discovery.

She moved closer and saw something brown in a type of pit. It was surrounded by a light coloured substance, very similar to sand.

In this shallow grave, Susan could see the decaying body of her sister. There in the pit, was a very life-like form of Stella.

Susan jumped and shuddered. She had spotted the shining glint of the large Egyptian style ring she had placed on Stella’s finger just two days before she died.

Susan’s mother attached the gastrostomy tube to the stomach area of Stella’s corpse. She opened one of the ports on the tube and began to squeeze a liquid substance into the tube via a syringe.

'Susan darling, could you give me a hand?'

She momentarily paused with her arm extended and moved the syringe towards Susan, waiting for a response.

'This is the bit of Egyptology you should have studied, but then again you were always a Silly Billy when it came to this dying stuff. It really is still such a shock to me that you managed become a nurse.'

Her mother continued to talk. She appeared to be unperturbed by Susan’s reaction. Susan was weeping and completely stunned by the horrific scene.

‘You see I had to do it. Stella told me to.’

Her mother explained how one could achieve the effective and life-like mummification of a body by placing it in a shallow pit covered in a special type of sand. By pumping the body with a preserving liquid, it would help to further the process.

Stella had apparently discussed this type of burial with her mother before she died. Her mother believed this would have been Stella's dying wish.

‘Well, are you going to help me or not?’

Her mother once more extended her arm in a gesture to give the syringe to Susan. She waited for a reaction.

Susan closed her eyes hoping she was dreaming and the nightmare would soon end. When she looked down once more she realised she had climbed down into the pit and with the syringe in her hand, Susan had begun to squeeze the liquid substance into the dead corpse.