by Kevin Hearne
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 explained 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 the 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.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t get his until he showed up. I checked my cell phone on the way down: no messages from Yusuf in Cairo.
I parked myself next to the stairs on the floor where I’d found Hamal and settled down to wait. Elkhashab would be coming, I felt sure, to try out the Grimoire of the Lamb as soon as possible. And he’d do it at the altar with the Amun idols, not anywhere else, and when he did, I’d take a pound of flesh for Hamal and those other poor kids.
If Elkhashab didn’t come back soon, the authorities might swarm down here and take care of everything, because Hamal would eventually start talking. I’d rather inform the authorities myself, though, after the grimoire was safely back in my hands.
It occurred to me to wonder why archaeologists had never found these chambers. They were buried deep, no doubt, and there wasn’t a convenient pyramid above ground shouting, “Here’s where all the plunder is!” but they had all kinds of little electromagnetic radar scanner doodads these days to search for chambers like these. My guesses were that Elkhashab had spoofed their findings with his ritual practice or greased some palms—or else the real Sobek was exercising himself to keep his treasures hidden. Considering how eager Bast was to have her book returned to her, I didn’t think it unreasonable to expect Sobek to be just as protective of his legacy.
During the archaeological orgy at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Egyptian gods reveled in the attention they were getting around the world. But I knew that not everything had been found, and I’m sure the joy of the gods ebbed away when they saw that the new attention they received did not translate into new worshippers. They were still keeping plenty of secrets. This place was one of Sobek’s.
The more time I had to think, the more I began to respect Elkhashab’s cleverness. He clearly had the talent and the stomach to do what was necessary to deal with demonkind, but he must have realized that continuing to kidnap and kill kids was simply unsustainable to do all he wanted to do. But if he could accomplish basically the same sorts of things by dispatching lambs instead of children, well, he could continue that ad infinitum. Nobody cared if you slaughtered lambs. They expected you to slaughter them when they sold them to you.
A splash and a terrified bleat let me know that Elkhashab had finally arrived, lamb in tow. He’d feed his giant croc and then enter the room directly below. I drew Fragarach as silently as I could to get ready and crouched near the staircase.
The bleating continued and grew louder, and Elkhashab’s quiet cursing could be heard underneath it.
“I’m going to tranquilize the next one and have done with it,” he muttered. “Can hardly wait to sacrifice you. There. Stay there.”
More bleating, then a soft plop as Elkhashab dropped something—perhaps the grimoire?—on the altar. “There, Nebwenenef. I have brought it, you see?” he said, his voice full of victory. There was rustling from what sounded like several plastic bags being set down and dull impacts from the contents inside hitting stone. A sharp metallic ring announced a knife being yanked from its sheath.
“But, first, I have older business to conduct. Hamal!” He crooned the name, lengthening the last syllable. I nearly snarled aloud. Most serial murderers don’t want to know the names of their victims. It’s easier to sleep at night if you have killed only victims instead of people with names and families. Elkhashab was a different kind.
I hadn’t planned on him coming up here—I imagined sneaking down while he was busy doing something else—but if he wanted to stick his head up through that hole, so be it. It would be a cleaner and quicker death for him than I’d anticipated.
Silently shifting so that I’d be behind his head when he came up the stairs, I cocked my sword hand back. His boots made a dull, hollow sound on the stairs. His white cap rose out of the hole like a giant marshmallow, then the back of his neck, and I swung—but he must have heard or sensed something, because he ducked back down and Fragarach whiffed, clanging loudly against the staircase’s main support.
“Shit! Who’s there?” Elkhashab cried.
I cursed silently and moved away from the stairwell. Only an idiot stays where the enemy can locate him.
“Is that you, Hamal? How did you escape?” The sorcerer thought about it and then realized that didn’t make much sense. A ten-year-old boy wouldn’t hang around to ambush him when he had an escape route handy. Elkhashab’s conscious mind slowly caught up with what his subconscious had absorbed.
“No. That was a sword. It’s you. The American wizard.” He switched to English. “I know you’re there, O’Sullivan. I don’t know how you found this place, but you’re going to die here.”
He didn’t say anything else, and I was faintly disappointed. I’d been hoping for a longer monologue. Perhaps he was waiting for me to respond? Fat chance of that. I wasn’t going to sneeze or fart or do anything else to give away my position, least of all stick my head down the hole. Nor was he going to give me another free strike. It was something of an impasse.
He was listening hard. I heard nothing but the occasional bleat of the lamb. Elkhashab grew weary of that after a while and began to move. He struck a couple of matches to light some candles on his altar. A bowl or two got picked up and put down again. He muttered unintelligibly; either it was just very low volume or it was a language I didn’t understand.
A sharp intake of breath—a hiss of pain. What the fuck was he doing? The mumbling resumed, but it quickly rose in volume until it was distinguishable as a chant in an absurdly old language, one with lots of gutturals and fricatives.
Gods below! He was summoning a demon, using his own blood so he could send it up here to off me. If he was occupied doing that, then he couldn’t be watching the stairwell to take a potshot at me; he had to concentrate on the ritual. I decided to risk a peek.
Padding forward to the well, I stretched out prone on the floor, then held on to the edge with my right hand as I dropped my head and left shoulder
down into the stairwell far enough to steal a quick look.
The light coming up from the lower chamber was a yellow-orange, but as I descended it turned red, and a sound like someone slamming a refrigerator door really hard foomped and rattled the staircase.
“Yes!” Elkhashab cried, and the light turned yellow-orange again. My eyes dropped below the ceiling to catch the crocodile priest in the midst of an ecstatic fist pump. He faced a demon in his circle of summoning, ignoring the choking brimstone fumes that filled the chamber. I could tell he was winding himself up for a cackle of glee before he told the spawn to eat me, but then a deep-fried gravel voice answered in much the same tone of victory, and Elkhashab’s face went slack as he realized something had gone horribly wrong.
“No!” His tone had changed to the raw falsetto of pants-crapping panic. He was discovering that he could not cow his personal demon into submission with a broken seal, or coerce it to do his bidding with the seal of coercion broken as well, or indeed even banish it now. The scratch of my fingernail and his hurry to kill me had slain him. All he could do anymore was scream as the demon’s claws opened up his belly and his guts slithered out. He screamed for a long time. The demon made sloppy chewing noises as he ate Elkhashab alive.
Justice.
I pulled myself up as silently as I could, but the demon had to know I was there. A demon’s ability to sense prey was unmatched. He’d come for me next, but if I tried to escape up the stairwell, he’d come for me sooner and I’d be in a poor position to defend myself. As it was, I had a couple of advantages most mortals did not: I had a cold iron amulet bound to my aura, which protected me from most magic, and my sword cut through any armor. Demons didn’t wear chain and plate or any other kind of traditional armor, but some of them had magical armor that made them immune to conventional weapons. Fragarach wasn’t conventional.