The Whispering Sarcophagus

Accession number EA-6957, an Egyptian sarcophagus on loan from the British Museum. Late Nineteenth Dynasty, a cedar outer coffin, 211 centimeters long and 76 centimeters wide, gesso and traces of polychromy surviving on the surface. Insurance valuation undisclosed. In the catalogue it is a royal funerary furnishing of unremarkable specification.

The conditions for a loaned object are written into the agreement: 21°C ±0.3, 50% RH ±5, the display case double-glazed, the interspace nitrogen-filled, independent dehumidification on the outer layer. After closing, a single student on duty does the terminal inventory check and the surveillance handover each night, with the changeover at 22:30. Since the special exhibition opened, the procedure has run once a night and nothing has gone wrong.

But on the bottom of the coffin there is now a passage of inscription. The student on duty had been over the high-resolution photographs of this sarcophagus at least 3 times. That passage was never on it.

After closing, it starts to whisper. First the sound of a fingernail tapping lightly at the coffin wood, the rhythm irregular, coming from inside; by the fourth tap and the fifth the sound comes clear, as if the thing in the coffin had just confirmed that a person was standing outside. Then a phrase, four syllables, heavy on the attack, light at the close, with no direction to it, landing somewhere between the left ear and the right.

Anyone who understands it will find that the whisper uses a language nobody has spoken for a very long time. The worse part is that the meaning arrives with the sound—no translation needed, no way into that language needed, as though someone pressed it into the head and left the moment it was in. Tried a second time the same night, there is nothing; turn to read the hieroglyphs just rewritten on the wall and they are only hieroglyphs.

What that phrase said has been asked over and over since that night. The student on duty did not write it into the paper record she carried; at that line she left one sentence:

That sentence I will not write in the paper notebook. Reason: see the first line of the previous page.

The first line of the previous page is three words: Don't look. The handwriting is her own, the ink is from her own fountain pen, and it had already dried.