Steamside Chronicles

by Ciar Cullen

  “Wow, Emily. How cool would this be if things were different, you know? If we met in Modern, and came here on vacation…”

  “You’re on dangerous ground there, mister. Sounds a lot like relationship talk.”

  “I guess it does. That bother you?”

  She pulled her veil away and smiled. My heart skipped a beat. I couldn’t imagine any time, any place, without her.

  “Jack, we’re here now. Don’t you get it? We don’t need Modern to see the Nile together. We’re doing it this very moment. If it’s an illusion of time, or Purgatory, or Heaven, or a vortex…what does it matter?”

  I choked back tears. I’d put my life on hold to survive, to try to fix something that never needed my help. Could we live, really live?

  “Let’s go, everyone saddle up. We’re going to rescue Claudin. Screw, any idea where he might be?”

  Fen pulled at my sleeve. “Let’s just ask those guys where he is.” She pointed at the workmen high in the hills, excavating tomb entrances and passing baskets of sand and slate down the line. “A few of them are wearing heavy pants and hats. Only Europeans would be that stupid.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Things, wonderful things.

  Jack reminded us we were in Normal, and to keep our story straight. We were two married couples, rich adventurers, hoping to get a glimpse of antiquity.

  As we followed Screw’s lead and zigzagged into the Valley of the Kings, I wondered how many tombs had already been excavated, how many had been robbed, and how many remained for future generations to discover. Somewhere, to my left or right, I had no idea, but close—King Tut lay undisturbed. Would we alter history, stop a discovery that had mesmerized the world, or would we hasten the event?

  Screw held up his hand as a signal to stop our trek and pointed to a man approaching on horseback, as fast as the loose shale and sand would let him. He waved at us and dismounted, running to Screw’s side. We circled round him.

  He was so young—a boy really, obviously American or European, and oddly familiar.

  Jack leaned in to me and whispered, “He was at the lecture.”

  Howard Carter! I gulped back a squeal.

  “I say, do you speak English? I need help.” Carter’s pants were torn, his shirt filthy, and a nasty cut marred his temple.

  Jack dismounted and the rest of us followed suit, revealing our faces and trying to reassure him.

  “I know I look a fright, but you must believe that I’m a scholar and must find help…the authorities perhaps…although that will take too long.” He ran his hand through his dusty hair and stared at us pleadingly.

  A scholar? He was sixteen or seventeen, a skinny clean-shaven Brit looking anguished and lost. I handed him my flask and he drained it with mumbled thanks. Jack poured water into his kerchief and Carter wiped the dust from his eyes and patted at his cut. He took a deep breath and inquired as to our identities.

  Jack told him our fictitious story and asked how we could help.

  “No doubt you’ll think me daft, but a friend of mine is in grave danger.”

  “A tomb collapse?” I blurted out without thinking. The journal had mentioned one collapse with Carter and Fenwick in it.

  “Yes! But I believe the collapse is part of a foul plot to destroy my friend. Just weeks ago I was almost killed in tomb fifteen.” He pointed to his right at a dark rectangular opening in the rock face. “I suspect my companion at the time caused the collapse.”

  God. His companion at the time was Fenwick. My great-something was trying to kill Howard Carter?

  “Now another of my friends is lost, perhaps buried in the newly opened tomb of Tuthmosis III.” He wiped at his tears. “I fear for his life. These men—they are insane, truly insane. Bloody hell, how did I get involved with them?”

  Screw kept his face covered, no doubt fearing his ethnicity would give him away, that Ra had described their former Asian member.

  Carter fell to his knees and wept. “I’m a student, alone. My mentors, Gaspar and Lorraine—I’m worried they want the finds for themselves, that…oh, it’s too hard to explain. The one I fear most is an American.”

  My heart sunk. So the asshole strain did run in the family, and it had my father’s name all over it.

  Jack knelt by him and held his shoulders. “Now, young man, rally yourself. We’ll help you, but you have to have your wits about you.”

  Petti brought him more water and Carter regained his composure. I dabbed at his cut, which thankfully, was superficial.

  Carter’s eyes were rimmed in red from crying and exhaustion. I didn’t dare lock gazes with Jack. We were in for an interesting time. My ancestor was trying to kill his. Tricky situation.

  “My companion is a Frenchman named Pettigrew, Claudin-Henri Pettigrew. I call him Henry. Henry and I are at odds, I imagine you’d say, with the other archaeologists. He and I have both suffered a few too many mishaps for it to be coincidental, and now…now he’s trapped. I saw the American running away from the excavation, and I’m now convinced he’s responsible for the mishaps. This one may have killed Henry.” He eyed us suspiciously for a moment as we took the information in. “You’re Americans, aren’t you?”

  “My good man,” Jack helped him to his feet. “We may be Americans, but we don’t condone murder. Lead us to this place so we can try to assist your friend.”

  “It may be too late.” He ran his hand through his hair and sighed. “I should not wish to put the ladies at risk, perhaps they should stay behind.”

  “We will protect them,” Jack answered. He glanced at me to ask if I was ready to shoot if I needed to, and I inclined my head. Hell. I wasn’t ready to kill a Fenwick. I tried to do a quick calculation of whether the idiot had already fathered the child who would father the child who would father… Then I cursed for not listening more carefully to Grandma’s stories.

  We tied the camels and their clanking bells to a rock and proceeded up the hill, stopping many yards from the tomb entrance.

  “Where are they?” Jack asked Carter.

  “They’ll be in their tent on the other side of that outcropping. They don’t know I escaped. I’m sure they think we’re both dead.”

  Jack signaled me to join him out of reach of Carter’s hearing. “Fen, if Claudin is dead already, then we know there’s no affect on us—no paradoxical result, get me?”

  “Yep. Then we just walk away from the whole mess? And take Carter with us. If we see Fenwick or Gaspar or Lorraine, I’m to shoot them?”

  “Don’t kill Fenwick. No matter what. Try not to kill any of them, unless they fire first or try to bury us, but leave Fenwick to me.”

  “You going to tickle him into submission? Come on, Jack, they’re armed and dangerous.”

  “So are we.” He leaned in and kissed my forehead. “We’ll get out of this, okay?”

  “I love you too.” I turned on my heel, but Jack pulled me in for a kiss. Screw broke us up.

  “Look, guys, Petti’s still suffering in this heat. She needs shade and water. I suggest she and Carter stay together. He knows how to get home if they have to make a run for it.”

  “Right,” Jack said. “Mr. Carter?”

  Howard approached us. “We must hurry.”

  “We will. Mr. Carter, I want you to stay here and keep an eye on Mrs. Corwin.” He indicated Petti with a nod of his head.

  Petti brushed the dust off her hat. “I’m coming with you.”

  “We don’t have time for this, Petti. Stay with Carter. It’s important that as many of us as possible return.” He put an emphasis on the last word, and Petti nodded in acquiescence.

  “I hate this shit.”

  Carter raised his brows at her curse.

  “How do you make it in there, Carter?”

  “There are two openings. They dug into the main vault from the doorway you see from here. And there’s another entrance from the side. I don’t know if that is now blocked with fallen debris, but that was my route of escape.”


  “Good. Carter, I’m depending on you. If you sense that things have gone south, beat a fast retreat.”

  “Gone south?”

  “Gone badly. It’s American slang.”

  We hugged the hillside and tread as lightly as we could so as not to start a rockslide, not even a small one. I broke into a sweat of nerves and wiped at my forehead. After twenty minutes or so, we were at the tomb’s side entrance. My heart fell when I saw the debris, but the men started at it without hesitation, clearing sand, rubble, and the heavy wooden beams that had propped up the excavation.

  “Try to be quieter!” I hissed at them as I stood guard.

  Screw whispered back as he flipped me the bird. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  My laugh was cut short by the unmistakable feel of a gun barrel pressed into the back of my neck. I dropped my pistol and put up my hands. Jack and Screw both cursed and raised their hands.

  “Looking for something, gents?” I turned and watched anger turn to amazement as Fenwick realized I was a woman in Egyptian male clothing. He was small, and thin, and didn’t look much like anyone in my family, including me, thank God.

  “Who are you?”

  Jack took a step forward but Percy waved him off. “Stay right where you are, mister. What are you three doing?”

  “Just a few tourists taking a look around,” Jack quipped.

  “And you guard your backs with a useless woman?”

  Oh. He. Did. Not. I knew that tone. I’d lived with that tone for seventeen years. God knows how many generations of Fenwick males had taken that tone to deride, derail, and demean women. I didn’t give a shit what century it was. This was no gentleman.

  “You coward. You worthless, piece of shit, coward. Greedy, tomb-robbing, murderous son of a bitch. Let me tell you something, Percy. You’d better mend your ways, or someone’s going to put a bullet through your brain and stop you from breeding scumbags just like you. Son of a bitch.”

  “Emily, stop!”

  “I’m just getting started.” I saw red. And a flash of something else, someone else. My grandfather, the nasty drunk. Telling tales about his father, the nastier miser. Percy saw it in my eyes, that I’d lunge at him given half the chance, and he took a step back. And slid on the loose shale onto his back right into a sharp rock. It split his skull open like a knife to a watermelon with a sickening crack.

  I closed my eyes and felt the world spin. I’d killed him. I’d killed him with words. There was a wife, kids, weren’t there? Oh my God. Was I still alive?

  Jack’s hug brought me around. I looked toward Percy but Jack turned me back. “Don’t look. It’s messy. Sugar, he had it coming.”

  “I killed him.” Sort of. It felt like I had.

  “No you didn’t. Even if you shot him, you’d probably be saving others by doing so. Including Howard Carter, and if we’re lucky, Claudin. Come on now, brave heart. Let’s see if we can get into this tomb.”

  I helped clear debris, but couldn’t clear the picture of a pool of scarlet staining the sand. We stopped to listen for signs of life, but heard nothing. Jack went in first, shimmying over loose rock on his belly.

  “It’s black in here,” he called out.

  Screw and I looked at each other and cursed. Not a flashlight in sight.

  We called back and forth to Jack to stay in contact with him. He went silent for a few minutes, and Screw started in after him.

  “Be careful,” I warned.

  But he backed out, followed by Jack, who brushed himself off, held up a scarab on a chain, and shook his head.

  “Oh.”

  Jack sat on the ground and pulled his own scarab from his pocket and compared it to Claudin’s. The same scarab, of course. Not alike, not copies, but the same one, side by side. “Imagine that,” he said. He brushed the dust from his eyes and I thought perhaps a few tears with it.

  Screw sat next to him. “He was a damned nice guy, actually. Remind me to tell you about him some day.”

  I looked down at Percy Fenwick, his blood staining the sand red, the sun already drying it.

  “He wasn’t as nice, Fen. I’m sorry. I think this will end Ra.”

  That helped a little, I guess. “Maybe we can have a little chat with Carter now, get him to rat out Gaspar and Lorraine.”

  “A kid’s word against that of the French Archaeological Service? Dunno.” Jack sighed, still weighted down with the loss of someone he never knew.

  “Then he’ll just have to start his own dig, with some trustworthy Brits,” Screw suggested.

  “Something tells me that’s just what he’ll do. I remember his photo at the Tut exhibit. He didn’t age well. We could save him a lot of time if we told him King Tut is here.”

  “Where’s the fun for him in that?”

  In fact, Carter was made of stronger stuff than we originally imagined. Young, beaten down, and grieving for his companion, he put his foot down when Screw revealed himself as former Ra and that we would return immediately to New York.

  “I can’t go back yet. I must do one thing.”

  Screw tried everything in his power to talk sense into the youth, but he wouldn’t budge.

  “Look, Corwin, you don’t understand. You were here only once. We unstopped a flask that must be sealed again. As I am the only one left of the archaeologists, it is upon me to put things right.”

  I knew right away what he meant. “The jars, the canopic jars containing Tuthmosis III’s organs.”

  “You’ve been in the cave?” Carter shuddered and looked as if he might break down. “I spent one night there, and would not do so again if it meant giving up my life. He came, he came cursing and howling and demanding reparations.”

  “He? Then we really saw a mummy?”

  “Indeed, the spirit of one at least. These kings wrote warnings to all would-be plunderers, but as cultured archaeologists, we do not believe in such curses. Until they breathe death upon your face. I only want to put things right. Fenwick and Pettigrew are both dead, and I take it as a sign that we trespassed where we were not meant to go.”

  Jack groaned. “Fenwick slipped and Pettigrew was caught in a tomb collapse. Howard, they were accidents, ones that could have happened in Britain or America.”

  “No, these things are said to carry into the future. The locales have a saying that to rob an ancient tomb is to bring misfortune for seven generations, culminating in a soulless wandering for the seventh.”

  Well, that shut the four of us up fairly quickly. Soulless wandering? Is that what we were doing? If we put things right somehow, would we stop our soulless wandering?

  Jack reached for my hand and squeezed it tightly. I imagined, I hoped, that he thought if only for a moment what would happen to us. Would we end up back in Modern, not knowing one another, forgetting our lives Steamside, never meeting? Would he and Petti die on the Turnpike, would I slip into a coma in the ambulance?

  We set Carter up in the shade and moved out of earshot, the four of us.

  Screw spoke first. “Just saying, does anyone else think this might do the trick?”

  No one answered.

  “Do we want it to do the trick?” Ah, there was the million dollar question. Of course, we all wanted our old lives back, we wanted our jobs, our families, some assurance that normalcy would be with us the rest of our days.

  Petti grabbed Jack’s hand and he looked at her and smiled. “Jack, I don’t want to go home. I like my life. I like the adventures. I like 1890.”

  Jack looked at Screw. He shrugged. “That’s two of us. I have no one at home. The job’s a bore, I was never in prison, and I like the Punks.”

  I was next, and I looked away, to take time to look inside. I thought of Steamside, and Sweet Pea. Fatty and Calliope. The Reverend and Albert, and forty others who made the best of purgatory, day in and day out. It didn’t matter what we wanted. They deserved this. And I knew Jack would think the same.

  “We have to do this.” I brushed Jack’s cheek with my
hand. “The Punks would want us to try.”

  He pulled me in and I died a bit. How many more embraces would we have?

  “It’s all I have,” Jack said. “The promise I made to try to get them home.”

  Screw nodded. “Who’s to say it will do a thing except let Carter sleep better at night.”

  Jack turned from me, and I knew this time to let him be. He was the Man, and I, no matter what we shared, I couldn’t take that burden from him.

  “Carter, let’s get to the cave and retrieve the King’s guts.”

  As the sun set on King Tuthmosis’ crushed tomb, with his canopic jars placed near the corpse of Claudin Pettigrew, we rode back to the spot of the vortex, ready to claim our futures.

  Howard looked a trifle surprised when Jack pulled us all in tightly. “I love you, Emily. If I never see you again, I hope somehow you’ll remember that.” No one else spoke, and Screw took Jack’s scarab in his palm and closed his eyes.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Home is where the heart is.

  By the time we had Howard cleaned up and installed in the Hotel Henry with a good amount of cash in his pocket and a new suit of clothes, the shock had worn off a bit. The four of us had our wish, and fortunately for Howard Carter, it was still 1890.

  I’d taken a real liking to Carter and wished we could care for him Steamside, but figured we’d tempted fate and paradoxes enough for a while. He swore up and down that Ra would come crashing down around the few remaining members who were rotten eggs, but I imagined he’d need to earn a bit more of a reputation in the archaeological community before anyone would listen to him. And be older than sixteen. He’d rest up and book passage to the UK to finish his studies.

  My real concern was Petti. She’d rested at the Henry, and still wasn’t herself. I sat next to her bed and watched her sleep. She stirred and sat up.

  “I’m sorry, Jack. To have put you through that.”