The Passion of Cleopatra (Ramses the Damned 2)

Ever since then, he had visited the train stations whenever there was an arrival from Cairo. Searched for the woman's face in the crowd.

And today, just as he'd grown weary of this pursuit, he had spotted her emerging from the morning train on the arm of her handsome companion, and he had followed them throughout their wanderings.

He had been ordered to follow her long enough to establish a detailed report and nothing more. She was dangerous, this woman, or so these British thought.

He had seen enough.

He fell back into the crowd, then hurried in the direction of the nearest telegraph office.

4

Chicago

Sibyl Parker was desperate to record the contents of the dream that had just awakened her. She pulled her diary from the nightstand drawer without turning on the lamp.

In the pale sliver of light coming through the cracked bedroom door, she wrote feverishly.

Again, I saw the woman, a beautiful woman with skin darker than my own and raven hair and blue eyes. She stood with the sea behind her in a city I did not recognize. She gazed back at me. She even reached for me at the very moment I seemed to reach for her. And then the dream ended. In this dream, there was no violence like the others. A blessing, it

seems. Could my plague of nightmares be coming to an end?

Scribbling just these few sentences exhausted her.

The first peaceful dream since the nightmares had begun. She should savor this relief, she knew. But as soon as she blinked, images from her other nightmares filled the deep shadows around her canopied bed.

The first one had been the most awful. The one in which she'd stared up at a handsome Middle Eastern man who seemed terrified by the sight of her. His fear baffled her until she saw the hands with which she reached for him were withered almost to the bones. She'd heard splintering wood and breaking glass, and then, in the moment before she woke, she realized she'd been crawling out of some sort of display case.

Then, a week later, she'd dreamed of closing her hands around a Middle Eastern woman's throat, of watching the life drain from her eyes. And if those two had not been disturbing enough, she'd then suffered another nightmare. In this one, two giant trains bore down on her out of night darkness, coming from opposite directions, the lights from their locomotives like the eyes of angry gods. Then she'd found herself sailing into the sky on a bed of flame, and had awakened with a scream that had drawn everyone in the house.

Impossible to forget, these nightmares. But a part of her did not want to forget. She was sure these dreams were elements of some sort of experience for which she did not yet have a name or a true understanding, and so documenting them in their entirety was absolutely essential.

After several minutes, Sibyl's shallow gasps turned into deep, sustaining breaths, and her bedroom seemed to be her own again.

Had she cried out in her sleep?

Probably not. If so, Lucy would have come. Or one of the housemaids. Or perhaps one of her brothers, Ethan or Gregory, whichever one had not yet drunk himself into a stupor.

Powerful winds off Lake Michigan battered the immense house. A few of the shutters had come loose, and now they were tapping out a rhythm against the stone walls that sounded like the loping gait of an injured giant.

Parker House was one of the first mansions built on this former patch of swampland north of Chicago's commercial district, and her parents had left it to her, and her only, to ensure that its maintenance would not become prey to the vices of her younger brothers. They'd done much the same with the family business, installing Gregory and Ethan in vanity positions which gave them the illusion of power and control while those more qualified kept them from making a mess of things.

All her life she had been a woman of distinct and powerful dreams. But up until recently, they had been long, languorous experiences, fueled by the books she'd consumed voraciously ever since she was a little girl. Dreams of romance and adventure and faraway lands. Recording them in her journals the following morning had been a delight. And many of those older journals still provided inspiration for her little stories, as her brothers sneeringly referred to them, despite the fact that those little stories now provided the most substantial sum of income their family had left.

For as long as she could remember she had dreamed of Egypt. She'd lost count of how many times she had ridden Cleopatra's pleasure barge on a cushion of blossoms. The gleaming streets of Alexandria were as real to her as Michigan Avenue, and as a young girl she would often shed tears over the cold reality that the latter was not the former.

Too much Plutarch, her mother had scoffed.

But she'd read far more than Plutarch. She had devoured everything she could find on Egypt's last queen, from slender little volumes for children to the largest collections of archaeological photographs she could find in the library. And every artifact, every illustration of gleaming Alexandria and its lost library and museum, inspired dreams and fantasies in her that were as vivid as they were fevered. In these obsessions and fantasies, only her father had seen the first stirrings of talent.

"You will learn as you get older, my dear girl, that not everyone reads as you do. Not everyone has the same encounter with language. There is a heightened sensitivity in you, to be sure, but you can embrace it. It's far more than just a nervous condition, these tears you shed when you read of Cleopatra and Marc Antony's fall. You are a rare and beautiful thing, Sibyl. For most people, words are just symbols for sounds, made on paper. For you, they can create all new worlds in your mind."

And her dreams were a reflection of this, her father had insisted, and so he encouraged her to write them all down, so that a journal of dreams became her first real writings. Now the author of some thirty popular romances set in ancient Egypt, she knew more perhaps than her parents ever had about how people respond to language. Hers might not be the haute literature of the age, but she moved her loyal readers, outselling H. Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle and a legion of other popular American writers.

The role played by her dreams, however, was her secret. And of late her dreams were full of fear and torment. It was as if some dark and once-buried part of her had been unearthed by a great upset she couldn't identify.

Could grief for her parents be the cause? But it had been three years now since the terrible boating accident that had drowned them both.

Were her brothers and their drunken antics to blame? If so, why were so many of them strange dreams of a faraway place, viewed through a stranger's eyes, a stranger capable of murder? And if her brothers were the cause of these nightmares, why didn't they appear in any of them?