The flame had inched slowly up the strip of cloth. As I paused, it ignited the hair of one man, blazing briefly, illuminating the chamber with flickering white light, filling my nostrils with a terrible stench. When the fire died, I inspected the end of my taper.
Half the strip yet remained. I intended to use its flame, when I reached the summit, to ignite another makeshift taper, which was wound around my neck. This would save me the use of a precious match. The matchbox was tied at my throat, however, so I wouldn’t be at a loss for light should the original expire during my climb.
Without further hesitation, I inched sideways. I swung the burning taper away from the knees of my ghastly companion and let it hang beside him out of my way. Pressing my body to his, I began to climb him. It was a horrible business, all the more so because of my nudity.
I was perched upon his bent knees, one hand pressed to the wall, the other gripping his left shoulder, when the light failed. The sudden darkness unnerved me, but I knew that I would soon fall if I didn’t continue upward. Sliding a foot up his dry leg, I sought the bony protuberance of his hip. I found it. When I felt secure there, I raised my other foot. It too found a hold at his hip. Perched more precariously than ever, I leaned forward, my knees gripping him as if I were a child shinnying up a tree. Carefully, I straightened up, leaning full against him. I felt his face against my belly, then against my privates. I shall not tell of the nightmarish images that passed through my mind as I made my slow way upward.
I was almost onto his shoulders when he moved. My hands sought purchase on the stone wall but found none. The corpse continued to slide out from under me. In an instant I was falling. One foot struck the top body of my grisly platform and punched through as if it were a plank of rotten wood. From there, I tumbled backward through the darkness.
The ground struck me a terrible blow. As I lay there, stunned, a body fell on me. Then another. I flung them aside, and scurried out of their way.
Hunched against a wall, I gazed at the darkness. I listened intently. Beyond the drumming of my own heart, beyond the windy gasping of my lungs, I heard other sounds. Muted, incoherent babbling. The papery sounds of dry flesh dragging across the gravel floor.
I knew they were coming for me.
“No!” I shrieked.
I thought I heard their sandy laughter.
With palsied hands, I unlooped the strip of cloth at my neck. I tore open the box of matches. Poised to strike one, I hesitated. Better to die in the darkness, certainly, than to look upon the creatures—the dead creatures—crawling toward me. But I had to see!
I struck a match. In its sudden glare, I saw one reaching for my foot! Another, sitting upright, grinned. The rest, still in a heap, writhed as they tried to untangle their twisted limbs. It took me several agonizing moments to realize their movements were an illusion created by the fluttering light of my match.
I lit an end of my taper and watched. Finally, I convinced myself that I was in no danger from my companions—that the danger resided only within my troubled psyche. My eyes turned to the shining nickel plate of the revolver.
Time to end it all, I thought.
Time for the kindness of oblivion.
I got to my feet and realized I had lost the matchbox. Lowering my eyes, I scanned the floor until I spotted the small box. As I crouched to pick it up, I noticed an usual shadow at the base of the wall. I dropped to my hands and knees. With my free hand I reached into the shadow… deeper… deeper… A hole!
It was more than two feet in diameter. Inserting my arm as far as possible, I found no obstruction. Surely this was the passage I had searched for!
Such a fool I had been! Such a timorous fool! It had never occurred to me, during my careful search, to look behind the bodies!
I laughed out loud. Had the others, seeking a way out, made the same mistake? Indeed, had Kemwese placed his first victim over the hole on purpose to conceal the passage from his future prey? I shouldn’t put it past the devil.
For the next few minutes, I cut new strips from what remained of the trousers. I tied them around my neck. Once more, I secured the box of matches at my throat. Then, clutching the revolver in one hand, I slithered into the hole and began my quest for freedom.
THE TOMB OF AMARA
I made my way slowly, laboriously, through the narrow passageway. At times, the stone walls squeezed my shoulders and I feared I might become stuck. Turning back, however, was out of the question. I knew what lay behind me: certain death. Ahead, there was hope.
The rough walls pressed in on me. They scraped the naked flesh of my body. Had I been afflicted with claustrophobia, the blackness and suffocating heat and tight, constricting walls would surely have driven me mad. But I kept my sanity and pressed onward.
Finally, my outstretched arms found open space instead of confining stone. I inched forward as far as I dared. Tucking the revolver into the gap beside my chest, I used both hands to free a strip of cloth from my neck and light its end.
I found myself near the ceiling of a chamber. It appeared to be about twelve feet in length and width. The floor, however, was out of sight. Paying out my makeshift taper, I lowered the burning tip as far as possible. I was still unable to see the floor, so I pulled up the strip and tore off the last few inches of it. I let it drop. It fluttered downward for some distance before stopping. I watched it burn on the floor no more than twenty feet below me.
With no choice in the matter, I clutched revolver and writhed forward. As I hung over the lip of the hole, about to fall, I pushed away from the wall with all my strength. I maneuvered myself in midair, much as a diver, and hit the floor feet foremost. My legs buckled, of course. I tumbled forward. The ground dealt me a terrific blow. I remained conscious, however, and a quick survey of my limbs indicated that the fall had bruised and battered me, but nothing was broken.
Eagerly, I lit a match and ignited one of my cloth strips. I found, to my relief, no unwelcome company in this pit.
I also found the door of a tomb.
A strange, golden disk decorated with the scepter of Osiris had been applied as a seal to the stone door, held in place by hemp. My feeble light showed several kinds of hieroglyphics engraved on the door. Under my father’s tutelage, I had learned to read the language as if I had been born to it. Unfortunately, someone had chiseled and scratched the glyphs, rendering them indecipherable.
I had seen such work before. This, no doubt, was the tomb of an outcast, or heretic, one whose name was anathema.
The realization made hackles rise on my naked flesh. As a skeptic in matters supernatural, I should not have been unsettled to find myself at the tomb door of one damned by the ancient priests. Unsettled I was, however: I could feel malevolence like vapor rising from ice. It chilled me to the bone.
Stepping away from the door, I began to search the walls for a way out.
There was none.
None that I could find.
This came as no great surprise; my route to this chamber was surely the only manner of entry or exit.
I was glad for the revolver. At least it would give me a speedy end, not the slow and maddening agony of death by dehydration.
I blew out the light and sat in a corner. Not yet time to end myself. There would be plenty of time for that later. I tried to push aside the grim thoughts and consider possible avenues of escape. My mind found no answers.
At last, I decided to try my luck with the tomb. Though I dreaded the thought of the place, I was quite curious about it. Besides, there was only one way to find out, with certainty, what lay beyond the sealed door. Anything was possible, even my salvation.
I moved across the black chamber to the door. Fighting my reluctance to touch it, I lit one of my tapers and set to work.
I started calmly enough. As I progressed, however, my frenzy grew. What if I should be unable to force the door? What if I should succeed, only to find myself no closer to escape? All the while, I fought against my dread of the unholy person ent
ombed within. I wanted only to huddle in the chamber’s farthest corner, but my fevered mind told me that my only chance of survival lay in opening the door. I raged as I ripped the hemp loose. I yelled and roared like a lunatic as I strained at the stone slab.
At last it groaned.
Dust fell from the sealed edges of the door.
The door moved.
Swung open.
I cringed away as a foul gust of hot air breathed into my face and extinguished my light. The rank odor made me gag. It had the smell of dead, decaying snakes. In the darkness, I pictured the tomb to be a charnel house where dying vipers waited eagerly to swarm over me. Where hooded cobras swayed. Fangs dripping venom. I knew this was impossible: the nightmare of an overwrought mind. Only renewed light could still my fears, however. With shaking hands, I struck another match. I lit my taper, and peered through the door’s opening.
There were, of course, no snakes.
Gazing at the small area revealed by my light, I stepped into the tomb.
At first, I thought it was empty. Surely, robbers had cleared the room of all its treasures: the countless necessities secreted with the corpse to assure its comfort in the afterlife—the utensils, the weapons, the furniture, the effigies of servants. No doubt, the sarcophagus and mummy had also been removed.
I looked around at the walls. Normally these would have been covered with paintings, depicting the life of the deceased: hunting fowl, fishing by spear for the fat fish found in the Nile; or there would be representations of the deceased with members of its family. Also, there should have been hundreds of hieroglyphics describing the life of the individual entombed here, the victories, the names of their children. There should also have been prayers and verses from the great Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Instead, the walls had been covered entirely with some black pigment. It still contained a reddish-brown tinge. This too I had seen before. In the tomb of one of the priests of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, the heretic king, who banished Egypt’s vast family of gods in favor of a single deity, the Aten. I recalled standing in the disgraced priest’s tomb and hearing Howard Carter describe how later priests would have erased the name of the evil priest, then painted the walls with pig blood. An animal considered unclean by ancient Egyptians. This and the destruction of the dead priest’s identity would have destroyed his soul in the afterlife.
This had happened here too. The erased name on the tomb door. The painting over of wall paintings and hieroglyphics in the despised blood of swine.
Whoever had been buried here must have been truly hated by later generations, who had set out so thoroughly to seek vengeance on the spirit of the deceased.
I comforted myself with the thought that the evil one had long ago met the same fate as countless other mummies. Even now, perhaps, it was residing in a far-off museum. Or, like so many others, it had been ground into powder by some luckless European, now long dead, as the miracle cure of his day. Or it may have simply been used as kindling for some Bedouin’s fire.
As I proceeded across the chamber, however, my light fell upon a Canopic chest. Nearby lay the stone lid of the sarcophagus; near that, the mummiform lid of a coffin.
A chill penetrated my body. My bowels cramped, my privates shrank as if trying to retreat into my groin. For a long time, I simply gazed at the open sarcophagus, afraid to move.
My taper grew short. I realized that if I didn’t act quickly, I would be plunged into darkness. That thought quickened me to action. I unwrapped a length of cloth from my neck—the last such strip—and lit it; the dried blood walls seemed to feed on the light, making the chamber gloomier and gloomier.
With only the slightest hesitation, I stepped to the side of the sarcophagus and gazed into it.
I wasn’t shocked, at first, by the strange sight below me.
Here was a person—a dead person, to be sure—but not so different from myself. He had brown hair. He wore a shirt and trousers, a leather belt, boots with neatly tied laces. Since he was laying facedown inside the inner, wooden coffin, I was spared the sight of his face.
Only when I looked more closely did I notice the mummy beneath him. A portion of its head was visible. I saw its red hair, lots of red hair that filled the spaces between the body and coffin wall. Saw its eyeless sockets. I had the impression, for a moment, that it was kissing the dead man’s neck.
The odors also. Through the smoke of my burning tapers I caught musty scents of ancient spices. Probably the ones that had been placed into the body cavity of the mummy to mask the smell of postmortem decay.
I raised the man’s head. The mummy’s head also lifted, and I realized its teeth were buried in his throat.
Stepping away from the coffin, I put the revolver to my temple.
Pulled the trigger.
SALVATION
Had the revolver discharged and ended my life at that moment in the tomb of Amara, many would have been saved from the miseries later visited upon them. But if there are gods, they are wily devils, tricksters that toy with our fates. They saw fit to let the hammer drop on an empty chamber.
I drew back the hammer for a second try.
As my finger began to press the trigger, I heard the distant, echoing call of my name. It was the voice of my companion, Maged.
Backing my way out of the tomb, I turned my eyes toward the tunnel high on the chamber wall. There, I saw the shaky, dancing beam of a flashlight.
“Maged?” I called.
“Robert!” The delight in his voice made me smile.
My desperation, my madness, my suicidal helplessness fell away, vanishing as the morning mist on the Nile vanishes before the dawn sun. I felt the sudden joy of a man who, chased by nightmare demons, awakens to a golden dawn.
Finally, the light beam fell upon my face.
“Ah, my friend!” Maged called. “Always the explorer. I thought I should never find you.”
“You certainly took your time about it.”
“I went for a rope.” It dropped from the tunnel’s mouth. “Coming up?” he asked.
“Are you alone?”
“Most surely.”
“Secure the rope then and come down. I’ve found a bit of something you ought to see.”
A few moments later, I saw my young friend sliding down the rope. He hurried to my side. His joy was such that he embraced me.
“I ought to bash your head,” I told him, grinning.
“Were not the sisters everything I promised?”
“They were marvelous, marvelous. Only you neglected to mention their father.”
“A tyrant, that man.”
“Tyrant? He’s a murderous lunatic! But enough of that. Let me show you what I’ve found.”
I showed him the door of the tomb with its defaced hieroglyphics. His mood turned somber. He was reluctant to enter the tomb, but I persuaded him at length. I took his flashlight and led the way. Even with his olive skin, his face paled when he saw what gory blacks and rust browns painted the walls.
“Truly this is the tomb of a despised one,” he said. “Never have I seen every inch of tomb wall painted with hog’s blood before.” He made sure his body made no contact with the unclean blood of the swine.
“Come along,” I said. He joined me beside the sarcophagus. I shone the light inside and lifted the man’s head so that Maged might see the mummy’s teeth embedded in the throat.
He backed quickly away. “We must go.”
“What’s the hurry?” I asked, rather enjoying his fright.
“The Bride of Set,” he muttered.
“What?”
He was gone. In spite of my refreshed humor, I was not eager to remain alone with the ghastly pair. I hurried after Maged. I was no sooner outside the tomb than he began to push its door shut.
“Don’t bother,” I said, stopping him. “We’ll only have to open it again.”
“Please! It must be sealed.”
“Must it?”
“She will arise from the dead to seek the
blood of her slayers.”
“Nonsense.”
“It is true, Robert.” He pointed to the defaced glyphs on the door. “Much has been destroyed, but this was once her name. Amara!”
I peered at it. True, the little that remained legible might have been part of the name Amara.
“We must leave at once,” Maged told me, “and find a holy man to re-seal the entrance.”
“What we will do, Maged,” I said firmly, “is figure out how to take her and her coffin out of here.”
His eyes widened with fright. “We must not. You don’t understand, Robert. You have broken the seal of Osiris guarding the doorway. Its magic is destroyed. Without it, Amara will walk the night.”
“She’s dead, fool.”
“She is of the dead who lives.” Maged pushed the tomb door shut and leaned his back against it. Perspiration glistened on his face. His eyes were large… frightened. I’d never seen him like this before. “Please listen, my friend. I will explain.”
“Speak your piece,” I told him rather impatiently.
“The banished god Set, slayer of Osiris, is the one recognized by both Jew and Christian alike as the one you call Satan.” He took a breath and continued. “Set came in the night to Amara, who was the favorite wife of Pharaoh Mentuhotep. He gave her the seed of his loins, that she might bear him a son. In return for her favors, he promised Amara the gift of eternal life.”
“Bunk,” I said in contempt.
Maged ignored my remark. “The god Set, the evil one, he wished his son to be Pharaoh after Mentuhotep, and lead the people of Egypt to their doom. When Amara gave birth, Mentuhotep suspected treachery, for the son had wicked eyes… snake eyes. He put Amara to death.”
“What about the baby?”
“It also was executed, and entombed with Amara.”
“I didn’t see it.”
TO WAKE THE DEAD Page 20