Walking the King's Road

The grave stones are old now. Time has pitted them.  The weather has smoothed away their sharp angles. The names they  commemorate are obscure lines in the stone, shallow and smudged.

I look for my own name. I can still make it out.

They  brought flowers, once, and laid them around this monument. There were  weeping women and sorrowful children. It was a good burial. I look back  fondly on it. My memory is as crisp as my gravemarker is faded.

It was a long time ago.

No  one brings flowers to this gravestone any more. The little statues are  unpainted and made shapeless by the years. Were they once cats? Or owls?  I think they were cats.

There are visitors still. They pass the  stones and monuments with ignorant curiosity. The gravestones of  strangers are, after all, just symbols of mortality. The passersby sense  the vast ranks of the dead who have gone before them and then flinch  away from the insight. They hurry on. There is a gift shop to visit.
My coffin lies behind glass, bare to the world, like a strumpet’s modesty.  But it is better this way. Better here, under the alien lights, than  under the sands, in the oven of the earth, like my mother and daughters,  made nameless by cruel history.

I turn away. I pass the  turnstile and the girl who sells tickets. I look up at the images on the  walls, celebrating the grandeur of my tomb Even now, after all these  centuries, my works endure. Look upon them, ye mighty, and rejoice.

I  pass through the streets and the Living walk past me and beside me and  through me, with their sightless eyes and birdlike voices, always  singing. The vendors sell bright fabrics, robes worthy of princes and  queens. I like this place. They call it the King’s Road, a name familiar  to me from my living years. I trod the Royal Road once in sandals of  gold flanked by slaves and courtiers. I tread it now barefoot and alone,  yet the Royal Road stretches on, with years as its milestones, into the  vast desert of the future.

And I, once a king, must walk it forever.

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This was the first story I wrote and it owes a lot to the requirements of the Ghost Hack Roleplaying Game it introduces. But I think it stands up as a ghost story for ordinary readers. The imagined setting is the Saatchi Gallery, which hosts the Tutankhamen 'Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh' Exhibition and is just round the corner from King's Road.

I also enjoyed spinning Shelley's famous line into 'look on my works ye mighty and rejoice' when the wealth and grandeur of Tutankhamun long outlives his troubled personal life and early death. Shelley didn't imagine archaeologists would spoil his lovely poem.