by Kevin Hearne
On top of the crocodile head was the tall yellow headdress and red disk signifying Amun-Ra. Instead of the customary crook and flail held by the pharaohs, this carved figure held a was scepter in the right hand, signifying power, and the ankh in the left, held by the loop and with the base pointing up to the figure’s right shoulder. The human body was carved from limestone with tiles of colored stones inlaid, mosaic fashion, to provide color. Some of these were gilded, and jewels still gleamed around the neck. The crocodile head was polished basalt and skillfully carved. The teeth were limestone but had been painted white at one time. Much of that paint had deteriorated, but a few discolored flecks hinted at what it must have looked like when new. The scepter and ankh were not carved of stone but appeared to be gilded bronze.
I wasn’t an expert on Egyptian artifacts by any means, but these sarcophagi couldn’t be older than the Middle Kingdom period—and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were from the time of the New Kingdom, judging by the craftsmanship on display. Normally the limbs and feet on sarcophagi were mere suggestions, painted on or highlighted with the slightest of bas-relief sculpting, but these were fully sculpted.
Miraculous that it hadn’t been plundered—not only by Elkhashab but by centuries of grave robbers. Yet there was no other treasure in the room, so if it was a traditional burial chamber, then quite a bit of stuff was missing. But why take everything else and leave these untouched? Most curious.
I was about to reach out and touch the ankh when I heard the swirl of water and an animal grunt from the next chamber down, traveling and echoing the way sound will when water and stone is involved. I froze.
There was much more than Elkhashab’s handiwork to fear here. Aside from whatever made that noise, untold ancient hoodoo could be waiting to descend upon my head—perhaps from this very sarcophagus. Though my cold iron aura would most likely protect me, prudence dictated that I shouldn’t touch it without checking it in the magical spectrum first, and I let my hand drop. These weren’t going anywhere; I could come back to examine them later. I had much more reconnaissance to conduct.
I crept down the hall in front of the line of sarcophagi, my eyes toward the center of the room. Elkhashab’s string of bulbs, spaced at odd intervals, created puddles of yellow like streetlamps, allowing the edges of the room to languish in shadow. Past the first set of pillars, I saw some familiar markings on the floor: a circle enclosing another circle, and inside that not a pentagram but a mixture of lines, Hebrew characters, and mystical symbols straight out of The Greater Key of Solomon. The White Knife and the Black Knife were there, the Sickle, the Sword, and all the rest too. Elkhashab was definitely more than a crocodile priest. He dabbled extensively in the dark end of the magic pool, like Nebwenenef before him.
A supporting wall forced me to move toward the center. A doorway there led to another room, decorated with bas-relief doodads heralding Sobek’s spiffiness. At least, I inferred as much from the gaping maw of a crocodile sculpted at the top.
The next room was poorly lit. A single light made a half-assed effort at fighting the darkness from the edges. The scent of water and fetid rot twitched at my nostrils; something had died in there. Maybe many somethings. The pervasive miasma was enough to make me draw Fragarach from its sheath.
Two steps into the room, I heard the water gurgling again. Cursing the weak effort of the token bulb, I recast night vision to better see what I was missing. The chamber was of a similar size to the one I had just left, except that in the center of the room there was no floor with mystical symbols scrawled across it; rather, a black pool with ripples betrayed recent movement. Pillars rose out of it to support the ceiling.
There was no great mystery about what awaited me in the gloom. Elkhashab, that pantweasel, had left me with one or more crocodiles to deal with. A faint electric hum drew my attention over my left shoulder.
A large old-fashioned freezer lurked there, a thick cable snaking from underneath it to the room I’d just vacated. He must have run the electricity behind all the sarcophagi. I opened the lid and saw that it was full of steaks and roasts. Oberon would have approved. I took a few out and threw them to the edge of the pool, then tossed a final one into the pool itself. Something responded in the dark, and I slid along the wall counterclockwise, holding my sword point in front of me. Anything that wanted to eat me had to eat my blade first. Once I’d started to move along the longer wall, a splash sounded from the space I’d vacated, followed by serious macking noises. I saw gold glinting in the dim light, and then an enormous pocked back stretched sinuously into the water: It was the largest crocodile I had ever seen, festooned with enough metal to make reestablishing the gold standard plausible. I hurried to the next supporting wall and another doorway. There was nothing that I could see to keep the crocodile from entering the next room, but perhaps it didn’t want to leave its comfy mini-swamp with easy-to-hunt rump roasts.
The subsequent chamber was fairly well lit, like the first one, allowing me to dispel night vision, but its contents were entirely different. Instead of sarcophagi along the walls, there were boxes—the wooden kind you used to see a lot of before the planet started to run low on trees and people figured it might be better to use recycled cardboard instead. They were probably full of the treasures missing from the burial chamber. I left them alone, figuring it was best to leave it all conveniently packaged for the Ministry of Antiquities. I was much more interested in the creeptastic vibe coming from the far side of the room.
Elkhashab had repurposed an ancient stone worktable, perhaps originally intended as an embalming station, by turning it into a makeshift altar. It was stained with fluids that were supposed to stay on the inside of bodies, and there were a couple of smallish skulls on either end. Around the altar itself he’d drawn a couple of large circles, symbols of invocation and protection written along the circumference and ritual materials placed carefully inside. Adjacent to these were other circles—the summoning kind. Circles of binding with pentagrams. A telltale whiff of sulfur confirmed that he’d successfully summoned physical demons here, not just the spirits suggested by the first room’s circles. He had the seals of calling, binding, coercion, submission, and banishment painted perfectly between the points of the stars. Almost too perfectly.
I scanned the altar again with a new suspicion. The two skulls were facing at exactly the same angle. He had some bowls full of ritual ingredients—salt and salamander tails, that kind of thing—and those bowls were precisely equidistant from one another. The candles were brand new and of the same kind. The ritual knife was placed perpendicular to the edge.
I thought back to the guest bathroom with the air freshener and the primly folded towels. The order of the library. Even the studio, meant to look sloppy and spontaneous, had been carefully arranged that way. This guy was an obsessive–compulsive.
It made sense. The precision required to be a practicing magician was no joke.
I decided to mess with him. A fingernail’s scratch across the seals of coercion, submission, and banishment would drive him crazy. He’d spend hours repainting just to make sure everything was perfect. That is, if I didn’t kill him first.
Golden figurines of Sobek, Amun, and Amun-Ra stood impassively on the altar, their dead painted eyes calmly awaiting tribute and sacrifice. I smirked; Elkhashab appeared to be hedging his bets on which form of Amun would get all the love. Amun had been a headliner in the early Egyptian dynasties, but he had to share top billing with Ra later on, and Sobek was considered in some tales to be a manifestation of the combined god Amun-Ra. Elkhashab must be harboring doubts about which was to receive sacrifices from the Grimoire of the Lamb.
This room was the last one. Nestled in the corner behind the altar, off to my left, a spiral staircase twisted up into the ceiling. If it led all the way up to the surface, that was how he smuggled stuff out of here. He would never leave his house with contraband when he was under surveillance; he would choose to emerge elsewhere.
It also ex
plained why he never went for the big score with a sarcophagus; never mind that it would invite too many inconvenient questions, there was no way he’d get one up through that wee well. I doubted he could get one up through the steep tunnel that led to his studio either. I wondered why he hadn’t installed a rudimentary lift instead. Too conspicuous?
The staircase bore investigation. It was probably my best way out, after all. But the altar needed a closer look first. I circled it and discovered a small table nestled against the far side, almost like a hallway desk, yet lower in height so that it was invisible while looking at the altar from the direction I’d entered. Stacked on it were two sheaves of paper—no, parchment. Incredibly old stuff too, mostly illegible, the ink having faded and flaked away after centuries. In the magical spectrum, the writings were quite clear, however; they glowed with ancient hoodoo. I’d bet five biscuits that these were the writings of which Elkhashab had spoken—the writings of Nebwenenef.
My immediate impulse was to destroy them, but I decided against it, figuring that Elkhashab would notice right away and know that someone had been there. Like everything else around the altar, the sheaves were placed and organized with attention to detail, and I didn’t want to give myself away yet. I’d definitely come back and take care of them before I left, however.
I turned my attention to the staircase. It was a sturdy metal one; it didn’t creak or shiver as I ascended, and my inner ninja approved. My stomach, however, began to rebel as I got closer to the ceiling. Something smelled foul up there—but it was a different stench from the one in the chamber of the crocodile god.
Once I got my head in the space between the ceiling and the floor, I paused. The smell was definitely coming from the room above, but I couldn’t see very much. Silently, I withdrew a dagger from my satchel and poked it up through the hole to see if it set off any kind of trap. I wiggled it around. I swirled it all around the edges. Nothing.
I did a quick peekaboo, feeling silly, but whatever—I didn’t want to end more than two thousand years of existence as a victim to one of Elkhashab’s booby traps. No reaction, and I didn’t see much of anything. It was fair-to-middling Stygian darkness in there.
Casting night vision, I took a longer peek and did a complete survey, three-sixty. There was a break in the railing of the staircase so that one could enter or exit on this floor. It appeared to be a single chamber, smaller than the ones downstairs. There was a lone sarcophagus here, but a more conventional type rather than one of Sobek. It was situated conventionally as well, resting prone instead of leaning upright against the wall. Three large cages filled the rest of the room, and it was from them that the stink emanated. Behind me, there was just the bare stone wall, and the staircase continued to wind above into farther unknown levels. I put my dagger away.
I climbed and left the stairs to check out the cages. The first one held a small skeleton without a skull. The next held a rotting corpse, also headless, dressed in tatters of once-white linen that had been chewed on by rats. Or maybe by those flesh-eating scarab beetles from The Mummy, which still gave me nightmares. I couldn’t tell if the body was male or female, but it was young. I remembered the two skulls resting on the altar; I’d thought them there for gravitas or a sense of theatre, but the bastard had actually sacrificed kids. Sure, demons would let themselves be bound for one of those.
Another still form lay in the third cage. The legs faced the door and the rise of shoulders concealed the head—if there was one. The reek was awful; there was a bucket filled to the brim with waste in one corner. Strangely, it gave me hope.
“Hey, kid,” I whispered. Then I realized I didn’t need to whisper and I should probably speak in Arabic. “Wake up!” I called. No reaction. My throat tightened, but I shouted it again. The child didn’t move.
Concentrating on the lock, I bound the metal tumblers to the unlocked position, swung open the door, and entered the cage. The boy—for it was a boy, about ten years old or so—still had a head. He was alive but unconscious, and the pulse I felt at his neck was weak. He was probably dehydrated and starved. Elkhashab had just left him in here while he went off to America to steal an ancient grimoire.
I couldn’t let him stay here any longer. He needed medical attention now. As I had done before with Oberon, I created a binding so that this boy could use the magic stored in my bear charm for energy. Once the binding was complete, his eyes popped open and he scrambled away from me until he was at the back of the cage, his hands raised defensively as he begged in Arabic not to be killed.
“Salaam,” I said in the same language. The poor kid had every reason to be terrified. “I’ve come to take you out of here. Let’s get away from that man.” I backed out of the cage and left the door open, speaking to him from freedom. “Come on.” Belatedly, I remembered that he probably couldn’t see anything. He might be thinking that I was Elkhashab. I cast night vision on him and spoke again. “Let’s go. Up the stairs. Let’s get you home. Your parents are worried.”
I hoped he wouldn’t take too long to decide. The energy in my charm wouldn’t last forever and was already getting low.
The boy’s eyes grew wide. “You don’t work for him?”
I snorted and shook my head. “No. I prefer life over death. If anyone dies today, it will be him, not you. Come on.”
“Who are you?”
What a great straight line. A few different superhero names rushed through my head, Whiskey Man being my favorite for its rather dubious heroism, but he might not have ever heard of whiskey here. “Call me Atticus,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Hamal.”
“Are you from Al Fayyum, Hamal?” He nodded. “Good. Home is upstairs. Let’s go.” I held out my hand to him and he moved at last. He rose to his feet and shot toward me, leaping into my arms and wrapping his legs around my waist like a much smaller child. He held me tightly around the neck.
“Okay, that’ll work too,” I said, and carried him up the staircase. It rose past another darkened floor, a chamber full of more wooden boxes, then another, and then a period of traveling through solid rock. We arrived finally in a small room, clearly modern, and just as clearly a changing room. Several different outfits hung on hooks, to allow Elkhashab to emerge into the world looking completely different from however he’d entered his house. A small bank of TV monitors showed four different views of some barren desert, no doubt the area around our exit point. No one was currently pictured. I dispelled our night vision.
There were no giant red buttons here to tempt people; Elkhashab was confident that no one would find this place by accident. A simple switch on the wall next to the staircase opened a sliding trapdoor that turned out to be a piece of a fake boulder. Said boulder was hidden inside a thicket of thorns, which made our emergence a tad painful. but also completely hidden from view.
I wondered who had built all this cloak-and-dagger shit for Elkhashab. I wondered if they were still alive or if they had turned into dinner for the crocodile god below.
Once out of the boulder, I waited for the trapdoor to slide closed automatically, but it didn’t. That meant that there must be a switch around somewhere to close it. After a bit of searching—made more difficult by Hamal’s refusal to let go of me—I found a small painted button at the base of the same boulder. That closed the door.
Following some footprints, I took the path of least resistance out of the thicket. We were on a rocky outcropping in the desert north of the lake. The center of Al Fayyum was a few miles away to the south.
“There, you see?” I said to Hamal. “Sunlight. You’re safe now.” The boy said nothing, but he began to cry. No tears, though—that was a bad sign. He needed fluids desperately, and the lake wouldn’t provide any. It used to be freshwater, in ancient times, but today it’s a saltwater lake, cut off from the flow of the Nile.
With earth under my feet again, I replenished my bear charm and drew more to run quickly. I had no idea where to find a hospital.
I hugged t
he lakeshore and headed south until I hit the suburbs of Al Fayyum and found a bazaar. People were looking at me curiously—what was that white man with the sword doing carrying that filthy boy?
It was a good time to gamble on basic human decency. I began to call for help in Arabic. “This boy needs water! I found him in the desert!” I was surrounded in no time by four or five locals. Outside Al Fayyum’s oasis, the desert was harsh and unforgiving, and the people knew it well.
I broke the binding that fed magical energy to Hamal, and his grip about my neck slackened enough that I could lay him down and kneel by his side. Somebody had a canteen of water and put it up to Hamal’s lips.
“Not too much. He really needs medical attention. I’m a stranger here. Is there a hospital nearby?” I wanted to keep things moving along before people started asking me questions like, “What were you doing in the desert?”
An argument broke out regarding the wisest course of action—calling an ambulance, or grabbing a doctor one person knew a block away, or carrying him all the way to the hospital ourselves because, you know, who knew when the ambulance would get there? For just a moment nobody was looking at me, so I cast camouflage and backed away.
They noticed me disappearing, but they couldn’t figure out where I’d gone to. I stayed still and heard them quickly dismiss me, because the kid was what mattered. Exactly. Satisfied that Hamal would be taken care of and returned to his family, I hoofed it back to the ruins and gingerly crept into the thicket, where I pushed the button on the bottom of the proper boulder. The smooth mechanism slid aside and I began my second descent into darkness, fully recharged, lips pressed tight in a grim line. It was far past time for the crocodile priest to get his.