"But then I dreamt of the Ankh. Of her calm gray eyes and her small, strong hands as she faced me across a massive chessboard. With a flick of her wrist, she set a large fire around us. I was somehow chained to my chair, and she forced me to play chess... and then she reached out, smiling, and patted me on the head as the flames roared and licked at the backs of our chairs... and the black tendrils of smoke snaked around us like an evil vine, as if binding us together... Checkmate, she whispered. Checkmate... checkmate... checkmate..."(Gleason 109).
In Colleen Gleason’s The Chess Queen Enigma, the quote listed above helps to illustrate an insight to the conflict in the plot of the story that the narrator, Avermina Holmes, is possibly facing.
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The dream attempts to tell that the Ankh is continuing her evil deeds and getting closer to finding the chess queen. After every successful progression, she taunts, “Checkmate...checkmate... checkmate...” (Gleason 109). Similarly, Miss Holmes uses symbolism when calling her enemy the Ankh. An ankh is an ancient Egyptian object shaped like a cross with a loop on the top that symbolizes life. The ankh was associated with Egyptian afterlife certifying a promised everlasting life and immortality due to mortal sacrifice. According to the novel, vampires sustained their eternal life by killing living organisms and feeding on its blood. Therefore, this indicates Miss Holmes’s assumption of the Ankh as a powerful and almost impossible-to-stop bloodthirsty corpse using the power of the Egyptian cross to strengthen her power and immortality. The narrator of the quote also uses figurative language through personification to describe the fiery scene of the nightmare encounter as “the flames roared and licked at the backs of our chairs…”. The narrator visualizes the flames while facing Ankh in her dreams giving them