Name of the Beast

by Daniel Easterman

Genres: Ghost

Synopsis

Egypt 1999. Plagues sweep North Africa, terrorists lay waste to Europe. Men all over the globe are haunting by the same portentous dream. Towering over the heart of the apocalyptic upheaval is a mysterious figure known as al-Qurtubi. Is he the Antichrist? The Pope believes so, and is willing to sacrifice everything to defeat him.

Only two people can stop al-Qurtubi. A’isha Manfaludi, a beautiful archaeologist and Michael Hunt, a retired British Intelligence agent. Their pursuit of the mysterious figure leads them on a perilous journey across a blood-soaked wilderness of death squads to the rat-infested sewers of the City of the Dead. But al-Qurtubi is not alone. He and his army of devoted followers are waiting…

Release date: December 4, 2014

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

The Egyptian MuseumCairo3 January 1999

A strange winter had settled on Egypt that year. Not the worst of winters, but bleak and long. The pyramids were shrouded in mist, a thing unheard of. In the tomb valleys, the chambers of long-dead kings were filled with rain. Feluccas lay still and silent on the Nile, their tillers fast in heavy mud. In black fields, barley was sown in silence beneath pale clouds of frosted breath, planted by women with tiny hands and children woken out of sleep in the chill hour before dawn. There was rain where there had never been rain, frost where no frost had ever been. There were spiders in the houses of innocent victims. There were cobwebs across the doors of suicides. It was as though wonders were at hand. Or torments.

In the mosques, preachers warned of the world’s end. From his pulpit in Cairo, Sheikh Kishk prophesied the coming of Dajjal, the one-eyed Antichrist: his footsteps had been heard in a narrow place in the old city. In Alexandria, a butcher had slaughtered a calf with two heads. In Tanta, a Jewish woman with red hair had given birth to a monstrous child. Hailstones the size of pigeons’ eggs had fallen in the desert near Wadi Natrun. In an empty doorway in Sayyida Zaynab, children with old hands and old faces played with the empty, eyeless head of a white goat.

•    •    •

The bandages came away like strips of rotten silk. Her scalpel moved carefully, precisely, almost joyfully, opening a layer at a time, each cut a little death. And the greater death quiet as a July evening, scented and unmoving on the high gridded table. Nip and cut, nip and cut. The strips of ancient bandage were gently pulled away, plotted, and measured. Each had a position against the metal rules that edged the table.

The point of the scalpel struck the first amulet. A’isha removed it slowly, and with a certain reverence. It was a bronze djed pillar, a symbol of power. Near it lay a wedjet eye of blue faience. Then a clump of amulets, without sequence: figures of Maat, Horus, and Re seated, three ordinary scarabs, a heart scarab made of nephrite and set in a gold frame, another djed pillar, two tyet girdles, a papyrus column.

By now she was sure the mummy had been disturbed and rewrapped. There was usually a sense of order to the amulets: the heart scarab on or near the corpse’s heart, a wedjet eye over the seal covering the incision in the flank through which the viscera had been removed, djed pillars on the abdomen and chest. But these were jumbled and misplaced, a sure sign that, at some stage, the wrappings had been tampered with. It was not unusual: tomb robbers had been active in Egypt from the days of the Old Kingdom. It was rare to find a burial intact. Archaeologists thought themselves lucky to come upon the leavings of robbers or bodies hastily reinterred. She had thought herself lucky.

“Definitely re-wrapped,” she said.

Professor Megdi nodded.

“Not another Tutankhamun, then?”

She smiled. “I doubt it.”

He could see the museum from the window of the office if he bothered to look. Behind the museum, he could make out a stretch of river flashing in the sunlight and, further back, the 590-foot pillar of the Cairo Tower rising crazily above Gezirah Island. But he had not come to Cairo to visit museums, sail on rivers, or climb towers to see the view. He was a practical man. A man with no time to waste.

He took off his linen jacket and draped it over the back of a chair. On the floor stood an open wooden case. The man bent down and tore away a sheet of brown waxed paper from the top, then lifted out a heavy object wrapped in thick black plastic sheeting. He laid the object on the table and began to unwrap it.

They had known from the beginning that the tomb had been broken into. The original necropolis seals on the concealed entrance had been tampered with. A priest from the temple of Amun at Karnak had placed fresh seals over them. And those in turn had been broken. A’isha had expected to find little inside: a smashed coffin, some strips of rotten bandage, a leg or arm torn off and abandoned in a robber’s haste. All about them the tombs had been hollow, desolate; the valley had smelled like an undertaker’s yard. She had been impatient. Impatient and afraid.

As she wielded the scalpel, she remembered the final entry to the tomb, the grating sound as the stone slab moved reluctantly aside. There had been steep steps cut into the rock, and suddenly bright painted walls on either side, burning in the light of her lamp. The flame had wakened a sleeping world. She remembered the first faces, the gods pale and silent on her left. And a long corridor stretching down a slope towards a broken door.

He finished unwrapping the gun. It was the short version of the Walther MPK sub-machine gun, a German-manufactured heavy-duty weapon first introduced as far back as 1963 and still popular. He raised the gun gently, cradling it in his hands, feeling a light coating of oil on his fingers.

On the table in front of him lay four briefcases. Black, impersonal, identical, they had been stacked in a rectangular pile. He lifted the first case from the top and laid it on the table. It seemed very heavy. With long, practiced fingers he spun the case’s combination lock. It sprung open to reveal a molded tray with shaped indentations in which samples of mining equipment had been laid, solid metal pieces carried out from England in the hope of opening a new market with the Egyptian State Mining Corporation.

Megdi watched impassively as she used tweezers to pick out fragments of dead insects and slip them into little plastic bags. A small beetle, Necrobia rufipes, had worked its way into the bandages. There were several puparia and larvae of other, unidentifiable predators: each was labeled, numbered, and put away for future microscopic analysis.

There was very little resin on the bandages. She could be grateful for that. Earlier researchers had been known to take a chainsaw to mummies whose coverings had solidified to rock-hard casings. Such procedures were not only inelegant, they were potentially risky, and, with so few mummies left to open, to be avoided where possible.

The museum had agreed to this unwrapping only with the greatest reluctance. Ever since the unwrapping of the royal mummies found at Dair al-Bahri and the Valley of the Kings, the trustees of the Egyptian Museum had refused permission to carry out further work on bodies in their possession. The last unwrapping carried out anywhere had been at the Bristol Museum in England in 1981, when the mummy of Horemkenesi, a minor priest of Rameses III, had been stripped to prevent further damage from alkali salts.

A’isha had argued her case along similar lines. They had found eight bodies in the tomb, none of them in good condition. Wrappings had been disturbed in a frenzied search for gold and jewels. One had been pulled apart almost entirely. At some point, damp had crept in and caused further deterioration. The present mummy, for whom they had no name, only a code-number, J3, had shown signs of rot. The bandages had clearly been disturbed, yet the remains inside had been shown by X-ray to be intact. The X-rays, improved by the use of an image-intensifier, had shown the skeleton of a man of about fifty-five, five feet ten in height, without fractures or signs of skeletal disease. An excellent specimen for investigation which would simply rot if left in a storeroom in the museum basement. The trustees had assented.

Although there had been no magazine in the gun, he took no chances. He moved the selector to its “D” setting to uncock the action. Next, holding the body of the gun in one hand, he pressed the locking spring that held the connecting pin. The pin came out gently, allowing the barrel and action to lift free of the grip unit.

She had found the tomb, not by chance, but by a careful sifting of clues, a tortuous pursuit of an uncertain pathway. There was a possibility—not great, but exciting nonetheless—that she had stumbled upon the remains of several pharaohs missing from the caches previously discovered. It had not been unusual for priests in later periods, finding royal tombs opened and their riches pilfered, to transfer the shriveled bodies of their kings and queens to more modest resting-places, safe at last from predators. The discovery alone might make her career.

She made another incision. Behind her, her assistant Butrus aimed his video camera at the table, recording each step in the investigation. In England in 1975, Dr. Rosalie David had unwrapped a mummy in full public gaze, before television cameras. That idea had been considered and rejected by the museum authorities: the government would not approve. Orthodox Muslim opinion had always been opposed to the dissection of corpses, and there were fears that, in the present climate, the public unwrapping and examination of a human being, however ancient, however decayed, might excite unnecessary outrage. The board of trustees could not forget that, in 1981, President Sadat had closed the museum’s mummy room out of fear of Muslim displeasure. Not many months afterwards, he was dead, riddled by an assassin’s bullets.

On the edge of one strip lay a long hieroglyphic inscription, a passage from the Book of the Dead: “He is established upon the pillars of Shu and joined to the raptures of Ra. He is the divider of the years, his mouth is hidden, his mouth is silent, the words he speaks are secrets, he fulfills eternity, he has everlasting life as the god Hetep.”

In a little while, she thought, in just a little while she would look on his face. Alone of ancient peoples, the Egyptians had preserved their bodies for future generations to see. No-one would ever look on the face of Caesar or Constantine, but she had stood once in a quiet room, stone-cold and shivering, alone in the stillness of a dead evening, gazing on the features of Usima’re’-setpenre’, Rameses the Great. Alexander was dust, Saladin was dust, Napoleon was dust; but in a moment of sorrow she had seen the sleeping face of Tuthmosis the Third, the victor of Megiddo. Face to face, the living and the dead, the brittleness of bone and the liquidity of blood.

Carefully, he pulled the bolt unit out of the rear of the gun body, then dismantled the spring guide rod. Now he dismounted the barrel, holding the body of the gun firmly while he pressed the pawl inwards with one finger. Unscrewing the nut at the end of the barrel, he removed it from the action.

She took the first layer of bandages from the neck and head. He lay like a lover while she undressed him. His limbs received her caresses in silence. The patience of death.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” her mother had asked her when she was nine. A strange question to put to an Egyptian girl. What could most girls in that world hope for? Marriage and a family. The stumbling caresses of men much older than themselves.

But A’isha’s parents had been educated and progressive, eager exponents of Nasser’s Pan-Arabism, beneficiaries of Sadat’s policy of iftitah. She had answered her mother’s question without thinking: “Athariyya”—“an archaeologist.” A female archaeologist, to be linguistically precise.

Every year since she was four, she and her parents had picnicked at the Giza pyramids, on the spring festival of Shamm al-Nasim. She had eaten colored eggs and salted fish, and played alone in the shadow of Khufu’s monument. She had looked up every few moments at the towering mass of stone, diminished, frightened by its implacable presence, yet eager to know what lay inside, what darknesses, what lights, what shadows. It was almost as if it stirred memories in her, bleak memories no child could possibly have.

On her ninth birthday, she had been taken for the first time to the Egyptian Museum, through the high, white-pillared portals into halls of wonder. Her mother had led her directly to the first floor, up the north-east staircase to the rooms where the treasures of Tutankhamun were kept. In a long room to the right of the stairs, a glass case held the young king’s death mask. It was the most beautiful thing A’isha had ever seen. She had stood staring through the glass, unable to tear her gaze away. That face, that face, those gold-surrounded lips, those eyes of black obsidian. And her own face reflected in their depths.

She had walked for hours through high, enchanted rooms bright with the imprint of the past. Everywhere masks of gold, boxes of ivory, lamps of carved alabaster, vases of lapis-lazuli. And as she walked, her childhood seemed to fall away from her, and the dead weight of the pyramids was lifted from her little heart and turned to gossamer. The gold of centuries and the painted images of ancient gods had awakened in her something that would never sleep again.

She had become a surgeon now, using a scalpel to cut through time itself, to take it to the bone. She was at the last layer now, she was certain. The wrappings were loose, they came away at a touch. He would belong to her soon: it was like a seduction, he was her bride. She wanted to bend and kiss his covered lips, as though to resurrect him with a single breath. With great care she ran the scalpel from the left shoulder to the wrist. She would leave the face for last.

He lifted one of the equipment samples from the briefcase and laid it on the desk beside the disassembled gun. The sample broke cleanly into two exact halves. Inside, the metal had been molded into a shape that matched precisely the trigger group unit of the Walther. He slipped the trigger group into the recess, then replaced the top half of the sample. He did this with each of the metal pieces in turn, then took them across to a worktop on which welding equipment was waiting. Each of the pieces would have to be welded together, then filed until it looked as good as new.

At the other end, the whole procedure would be reversed. The magazines would be shipped separately. It was worth the trouble, he thought. Worth any amount of trouble.

As it passed the wrist, the scalpel blade scraped over metal, the band of a bracelet that had shown up on the X-ray. She caught a glimpse of gold beneath the narrow incision. The position of the bracelet was unusual and had already excited comment. It was not uncommon to find jewelry on mummies, both male and female; but it was rare to find pieces on the body itself, rather than outside, on top of the bandaging.

She laid down the scalpel and began to peel away the linen cloth like a thin rind. Her fingers moved quickly, methodically, as though long accustomed to their task. Deep down, very deep down, her mind began to register that something was wrong, that things were not as they should be. The bandages came away, loosening as she pulled on them. What lay beneath was not withered flesh but cloth, the dark cloth of a heavy sleeve. And the weave and the fabric were wrong, all wrong.

She felt her heart race, felt it slip and slide away from her. Her fingers became blunt and clumsy, heavy things that acted without her will. She watched as they pulled the rotten bandages apart, watched the dark cloth spill from the opening they made. She could feel Megdi’s eyes on her, his puzzlement. But she herself had passed beyond puzzlement to something quite different, to fear, to denial, to disbelief.

The gold bracelet came into view, the gold bracelet on the arm of her dead prince, yellow against white bone. She lifted the arm gently and turned it a little to one side. The room began to spin, she could hear her heart pounding a long way away.

“A’isha,” a voice was calling, “A’isha, are you all right?”

She smiled and frowned and shook her head. With one hand, she held herself steady against the table’s edge. In the other, the dead wrist lay like sin, bleached and unexpungeable. She heard Butrus’s sharp intake of breath as he saw what she had seen, the crash as he dropped the camera.

And in her hand, circling a wrist of bone, its fingers set at half past five, a Rolex watch caught the hot white light from the ceiling and threw it back again.

A strange winter had settled on Egypt that year.

The call came through at 5.23 in the afternoon. It lasted exactly seven seconds and was not traced. There had been twenty-six calls that day already, all of them hoaxes, but this one cleared the decks. For one thing, the caller had used an up-to-date INLA code word, “Carryduff.” For another, he had known the difference between British Transport Police and their Home Office counterparts, and he had possessed the number for the BTP control room. Anyway, there had already been two explosions at mainline stations that week. Nobody was in a mood to take chances.

The earlier bombs had gone off at Euston on Monday, killing three “bystanders” and badly injuring forty-two others; and at Paddington on Tuesday, maiming a police-woman who had been helping clear the main concourse. Wednesday and Thursday had seen scares throughout the capital and in several provincial stations from Newcastle to Portsmouth. British Rail were doing their best to keep the country moving. The ever-worsening state of the motor-ways coupled with heavy fog made it imperative that the rail network stay open. The hoax merchants were having a field day, but nobody else could see anything to laugh at.

There had been an oddity about the phone calls. The warnings of bombs at Euston and Paddington had employed authentic code words known to Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist squad. But the code words in question had belonged to radically different organizations: the first to the PFLP, the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the second to ASALA, an Armenian guerrilla group formed in Beirut in 1975. Neither had any obvious motives for planting bombs in public places in London. The INLA did.

By 5.28, the Station Master at King’s Cross had been alerted to the possibility of a bomb or bombs in his station. Police officers were already on duty in and around the station, both Transport Police and six men on loan from the Met. Both they and the station staff had had plenty of practice that week in clearing the platforms, shops, and buffets of travelers, but it still took over four minutes to get the last civilian out of the station and onto the street.

It was the rush-hour on a Friday afternoon, and nobody was happy. There had already been enormous queues for the 1800 to Edinburgh, a train that carried the bulk of the commuters heading back to the North East and Scotland after a week’s hard labor in the big city. They had wives and children waiting for them at home. Around the back, short-distance commuters to Cambridge and Ely had been even more disgruntled to be delayed for the third day running. It was the worst possible day, the worst possible time.

As the last passengers trudged wearily out into a gray drizzle, the first sirens could be heard racing along Euston Road past St Pancras. Traffic was backing up all along the Pentonville, Caledonian, and Grays Inn Roads. Lights flashing in the faces of lonely people standing in the rain, the emergency units began to arrive in a mixture of police cars and unmarked Sierras.

The first to arrive were members of the Anti-Terrorist and Bomb Squads, followed about fifteen minutes later by Special Branch and Home Office Explosives Experts. The military were still on their way. Grim-faced men in plain clothes stepped out into the drizzle. Senior police officers joined them in quick, huddled consultations.

The worst part was about to begin: the painstakingly slow, inch by inch scouring of the huge station while somewhere a clock ticked nearer and nearer the time of the next explosion. If there was a bomb at all.

King’s Cross is no place to sit out a bomb scare. The few cafés and sandwich bars in its vicinity are down-market dives, some the haunts of pushers, pimps, and prostitutes. There are no shops to speak of, and none at all open at this time on a Friday night. None of the innumerable guest houses and cheap hotels that fill the side streets at the top end of Euston Road have facilities for so much as a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits.

But there was no way out, unless you wanted to walk out. The underground entrances had been closed within minutes of the warning. Buses and taxis were caught in an ever-lengthening jam in every direction. And what, after all, was the point of leaving? Almost everybody gathered in the streets outside the station was there for one thing: to get home for the weekend, a weekend that was growing shorter every minute.

Inside the station precincts, the bomb disposal team was waiting for the order to go. There were four ATOs—ammunition technical officers—complete with EOD protective suits, and sets of Allen probes, extension rods, mirrors, magnets, and lock viewers. They were neither patient nor impatient. If there was a bomb, they would deal with it. If it could be dealt with. For the moment, it didn’t matter whose bomb it was or why it had been planted. All that mattered was whether it was there at all and, if so, how big and how ugly it was. Or how big they were. Plurality was the other possibility.

In accordance with a routine set down during the railway station bomb scares of early 1991, King’s Cross had already been cleared of any obvious depositories for explosive devices: wastepaper bins, letter boxes, charity collection tubs. The left-luggage office had been closed for days. Trawling the concourse and platform was a matter of routine. The shops and cafeterias would present more difficulties. But they had to be sure. Above the huge display board announcing now-abandoned arrivals and departures, the hands of the clock moved forward remorselessly. The searchers moved in silence, to the sound of their own heartbeats.

Just who was responsible for the oversight would be the subject of half a dozen inconclusive inquiries. In the end, the buck would be passed so far down the line it would vanish from sight forever.

Along the edges of the pavements all around King’s Cross, the local council had thoughtfully placed a wastepaper bin on every lamppost, in the interests of hygiene, civic pride, and as a minor but handy source of revenue from the advertisements they carried. There were twenty-seven wastepaper bins, each three feet deep and emptied every day.

Tonight, the bins were circled by crowds of miserable commuters. Men and women leaned against them, slipped their suitcases underneath them, rested their briefcases on top, knocked ash into them from the ends of their cigarettes without thinking. And the rain fell on them and on their contents gently, like a sort of sleep.

They exploded, not in unison, but at intervals of ten seconds, just time enough for panic to set in, not long enough for anyone to start running, if anyone had known where to run to. If there had been anywhere worth running to.

They heard the explosions in the station, one after another, crumping through the evening air until it seemed they would never, ever stop, like a nightmare detonating again and again without ever bringing the relief of waking. And then, at last, silence fell, a thick, creamy silence that smothered the streets. Moments later, they became aware of the screaming. The screaming that would never stop in any of their heads so long as they lived.

Tom Holly was late. He was one of those unfortunates who contrive never to be on time for anything, to whom Fate has allotted the role of last in line. At school, he had spent many sunny hours in the misery of detention, writing lines of apology for his late arrival at Assembly or PE. As an adult, he had been late for his own wedding, both his daughters’ births, and his mother’s funeral. In cinemas, theaters, and churches, he was certain to make a nuisance of himself fumbling for a seat in the dark while others tried to watch or stood to sing.

Today it did not matter. Today everybody was late, the whole city was running behind. The bombings at King’s Cross had thrown the capital into pain and disarray. Every mainline railway station had been cleared and the nearby streets evacuated. The tube stations were being shut down rapidly, by strict rotation. Police cordons were cutting off major thoroughfares everywhere. There was not a taxi to be had anywhere, and anyone who had thought himself lucky to get one was feeling envious of the rainsoaked pedestrians outside as traffic backed up in street after street or jammed entirely at crucial intersections.

Tom had heard about the bombings just before leaving Vauxhall House. For a dreadful moment, he had thought they might all be kept back, in case the combings might turn out to be the work of a Middle Eastern group. But word was already being passed round that this had been an Irish job. Relief was everywhere in the department, tempered by mounting outrage and pity as the dimensions of the massacre became better known. Pausing only to ring Linda with a warning to stay at home, Holly had locked his office—he was the Head of Egypt Desk within British Secret Intelligence—and made his way out into the steady drizzle. It had then been 6.45 P.M.

Vauxhall House was situated just south of Lambeth, not far from the now-dilapidated Century House that had served as the headquarters for the SIS until only a few years earlier. The new building stared out across the Thames onto the Tate Gallery and the roofs of Westminster. Holly had crossed the river on Vauxhall Bridge and weaved his way east of Buckingham Palace, across the Mall to St James’s. Once, faint in the distance, he had heard the sound of sirens. Security near the palace had been noticeably stepped up.

The Royal Overseas League in Park Place had served as Tom’s club for well over a decade now. It suited him well enough: neither too smart nor too stuffy, it was inexpensive, an important factor for a man on an SIS salary with no independent income, but respectable enough for his occasional informal meetings with friends and contacts. It lay almost exactly equidistant between the Foreign Office and the Egyptian and US Embassies. Men and women were admitted without distinction. It was not a place where people would be readily recognized, but if they were, their presence would excite no comment.

Tonight’s meeting was to be a little different from the usual. Tom would not want to be seen by the wrong people, would not want questions asked. A more clandestine venue might have been advisable, but he had decided against it. If he was being followed—and during the past two weeks his suspicions of the possibility had grown almost to certainty—an obviously secret rendezvous with Michael Hunt and Ronnie Perrone would be bound to invite closer scrutiny. Getting together in the ROL, they would just be three old friends sharing an evening of drinks and reminiscences. It wasn’t much of an alibi, but he wasn’t in much of a position to throw it away.

Michael was waiting for him in the foyer wearing an old, creased raincoat that must have been brought out of mothballs for this London trip, shoes that were much too light for the weather, hair that showed signs of gray where Tom remembered only deep black. Michael stood and smiled awkwardly as Tom came through the door.

“Michael, I’m so sorry. I should have telephoned. I had to walk. The whole city’s snarled up.” He glanced at his watch. It was nearly 8.00. “God, I’d no idea it was this late. Thanks for staying put.”

“Nowhere else to go,” replied Michael.

“Well, you could have tried the Ritz. It’s just round the corner.”

“Not my sort of place. As you well know.”

They shook hands a little nervously. It had been three years. Almost four. Tom’s smile faded as he let go of his friend’s hand.

“I’m sorry, Michael. About your father.”

Michael nodded. He had arrived from Cairo that afternoon. Tomorrow morning he had to be in Oxford, to attend his father’s funeral.

“It’s at eleven tomorrow morning. You going to be there?”

Holly nodded.

“I’d like to, yes. If Paul doesn’t object to my being there.”

Paul was Michael’s brother, a Catholic priest who rather disapproved of Tom and his sometimes voluble atheism. He would be performing the burial.

“He won’t mind. You’re an old friend. Father liked you. Which is more than can be said for a lot of people. There won’t be a crowd at the graveyard tomorrow.”

“No. No, I suppose there won’t. Look, Michael”—Tom had started removing his own dripping raincoat—“why don’t we go in? We can have a few drinks first, then see about a bite to eat. Or are you very hungry?”

Michael smiled and shook his head.

“Excuse me a moment, Michael.”

Tom turned and handed his raincoat across the wooden counter on his left, took a ticket, and spoke to the porter.

“Has a gentleman called Perrone been asking for me?”

The porter shook his head.

“Afraid not, Mr. Holly. Nobody but the gentleman you’ve just been talking to.”

“I see. He must have been held up as well. When he arrives, show him up, will you? He knows the way. We’ll be in the bar.”

“Very good, sir.”

Holly turned to go, then doubled back.

“What’s the latest from King’s Cross, John? Anything?”

The porter’s face grew grim.

“Eighty-three bodies last I heard, sir. It’ll be well over a hundred, by the time it’s done. Like the blitz, that’s what it’s like. Only that was war. This is cold blood. Wicked it is. Worse than wicked. They should send all the Irish back home.”

“Yes, it is worse than wicked, John. Very much worse.”

Holly took a deep breath and turned back to hi