The Edge of Hell: Gods of the Undead A Post-Apocalyptic Epic

by Peter Meredith

  “What are those?” he asked, heading for the yellow crime-scene tape as if it wasn’t there.

  Richards grabbed his wrist. “Don’t go any closer,” the detective said; there was a warning in his voice, backed up by the gun at his hip.

  “I can go to the tape, can’t I?”

  Richards said he could; Jack went to the tape and leaned into it so that he could get an extra three feet closer. “What is that?” The glyphs were interesting; he could read just the closest part of the circles; however, there was something about what they had been written in that made him a little uneasy.

  “That’s blood,” Richards replied. “Human blood.”

  Beyond the room was a corridor that millions of eager wannabe archeologists shuffled through every year, and in that corridor was another set of painted glyphs set in a circle, and in the middle of the circle was something that made Jack hesitate.

  Richards pointed at the disfigured corpse: a man in his mid-forties who had been sliced right up the middle. The skin of his torso was flung out as if it was an open shirt. “Does he look familiar?”

  “No,” Jack said in a whisper. “How…How did you guys get my name? I mean, why would you guys think of me?”

  Loret was quick to answer, as if he wanted Jack to be found guilty. “Robert Montgomery said that you were the only one in possession of these glyphs. That alone is illegal, by the way.”

  It felt as though the floor was starting to turn to sand beneath his feet. “Robert? Where is he? I…I should, uh, talk to him, maybe in private.”

  “I’m right here,” an older man said. He spoke with a London accent in such a way as to suggest that anyone mumbling through an American accent wasn’t much of a person.

  The man claiming to be Robert Montgomery was in his sixties, slightly hunched and with an angry, piercing glare to his mud-colored eyes. He had been nearby the entire time; however, Jack hadn’t paid him the least attention. Jack had never seen the man before in his life. This wasn’t Robert Montgomery.

  After a pause in which he tried to gain some sense of the world, and failed, Jack said: “You’re not Robert. Robert is…is a lot younger. Black hair; kinda greasy. He’s got a bit of a hooked nose. If I had to guess, he looks to be around thirty.”

  “He’s thirty-one,” the older man said. “You’re describing my son, Robert the Seventh. I am Robert the Sixth. I am the financier of this exhibit.”

  Jack and the elder Robert locked eyes. They were related though it was hard to see beyond the sharp intellect and the demand to succeed that burned in each of them, but it was there, buried generations deep. The knowledge passed between them in a blink, as did the knowledge that Robert knew that his son was neck-deep in this murder/break-in and for some reason that Jack didn’t understand, the old man wasn’t upset in the least.

  The elder Robert turned and looked at the crime scene with fresh eyes. They were the eyes of a man calculating, a man scheming, a man not disappointed in his son.

  “Can I have one second,” Jack said to Detective Richards and then pulled the older man away by the arm; it was a frail arm, but Jack wasn’t exactly gentle. Something ugly was happening and he had been sucked into the middle of it.

  “What did Robert do?” Jack demanded in a hiss.

  “He did it,” the old man said with a grin that never touched his eyes. His eyes were dark as night. “I thought you had somehow figured it out, but it was my boy.”

  Jack’s right hand, made strong by ten-thousand hours of fencing, closed on Robert Montgomery’s arm like a vice. “Did what? What did he do?”

  The grin was wider now, stretching from ear to ear. Before he answered in a whisper that only Jack could hear, he glanced at the detective, who was watching them both. “He woke the dead, Jonathan. That’s what he did.”

  Chapter 4

  Brooklyn, New York

  Jack wanted to laugh. He wanted to slap the old man on the back and say: Good one! He wanted to pretend that he didn’t just get a cold shiver up his spine.

  “He woke the dead?” he asked, trying to keep his voice from rising. “Are you saying that...never mind. You are...no, both you and your son are certifiable. The dead did not rise last night, the bodies were simply stolen.”

  Robert Montgomery’s cold grin remained unfazed. He pulled Jack towards the sarcophagus of Hor. “Look. It doesn’t take a trained eye to see the signs. No one broke into that sarcophagus...” He left the idea unfinished so that it could fester in Jack’s mind.

  No one with any sense had broken into the sarcophagus, the lid of which could have been simply lifted off. Instead, it was torn open perhaps using what was either a crow bar or the back end of a hammer—both of which were terrible tools of choice.

  Don’t be stupid, those aren’t hammer marks, those are claw marks—the idea popped into his head and another shiver struck him. He looked closer, leaning well over the tape. There was some debris scattered all around the sarcophagus and one good chunk of it was only three feet away. It was part of the sarcophagus, but not the finely painted outer portion that drew the tourists by the thousands, it was the dull brown inner aspect. There were marks on it that made no sense whatsoever. There were deep groves...scratches that appeared to have been made by the boney claws of a skeleton...

  “Please stand back, Mr. Dreyden,” Detective Richards warned.

  Jack straightened, blinking and shaking his head, feeling stupid. “This is some sort of stunt, isn’t it?” he asked Robert. “You’re trying to set me up. You and your son are in on this together.”

  “No,” Robert said in a low tone. “This is just my son’s doing and he’s not trying to set you up, he’s trying to reclaim his birthright.” The pride in his eyes was a gleam that vied with the wickedness that also lurked there.

  “Birthright?” Jack exclaimed. None of this made sense to him and likely never would. “I’m done with the games, Mr. Montgomery. Detective!” Jack called, waving Richards over. “I wanted to let you know that the person I translated those glyphs for was Robert Montgomery. Not this Robert, but his son. He came to my apartment last evening and paid me five-thousand dollars for the work. I have a check back at home that will attest to this.”

  “Would’ve been nice if you had showed me that when we were there,” Richards groused. “Come on, let’s get this check.” As they left, Robert smiled as if without a care in the world.

  Christmas traffic was still amazingly light and they were able to speed across the Brooklyn Bridge and into Greenwich Village in no time, and in no time they were unlocking Jack’s triple locks, and in even less time, they discovered that the five-thousand dollar check was missing.

  “I’m going to need you to come back to the precinct with me,” Richards said, his hands on his hips, the right one very close to his holstered pistol. “And I’m going to get a warrant to search your premises. It would look better for you if you volunteered to let me search. If you have nothing to hide, I would definitely go that route.”

  Jack wanted to say yes. He didn’t have anything to hide that was true, but someone had been in his place. Someone had taken the check and if someone could’ve taken something that person could also have planted something, the murder weapon, perhaps.

  “I don’t know,” Jack said, looking around, suddenly suspicious of his dresser—was there an Idiot’s guide to Rituals and Sacrifices in his sock drawer? And his bathroom door—was there a pile of mummified remains in the shower? And under his bed—was there a bloody knife in among the dust bunnies? And his refrigerator—Jack’s skin crawled at the thought of what could be in there.

  “Can you give me a minute?” Jack asked. “I’d like to change.”

  Richards shook his head. “You can change, but I can’t leave you alone. Whatever is here is going to be found one way or another.”

  “Then look, I guess,” Jack said. “But…but there was a check here and that meant someone has been in here and they might have, you know, planted evidence.”

&nbs
p; “I’ll take that into consideration,” Richards said.

  Jack didn’t know what he meant by that, but his manner suggested that he believed Jack, at least about the check.

  While Detective Richards went through the room, drawer by drawer and inch by inch, Jack stood clutching himself in a perfect state of terror, absolutely sure that Richards would discover something damning, but he did not. He bagged a few more of Jack’s books mainly because they had to do with hieroglyphics and they had titles that were indecipherable to him, or so Jack supposed.

  When he was done, Jack breathed an audible sigh of relief. “I was sure there would be something here. I mean, why go to the trouble of taking a check and not adding the coup de grace? It seems unlike Robert.”

  “The old man?” Richards asked. “Or his son? The only evidence I have to implicate either of them is your word and that’s not going to go very far.”

  “Can’t you take fingerprints?” Jack asked, but then remembered that Robert hadn’t taken off his gloves, even when he had written the check.

  Richards’ hound dog look deepened. “We can and we will, but first, let’s go back to the precinct and take your statement.”

  That was his very long Christmas day. Jack sat in a Brooklyn police station for twelve hours answering the same questions over and over as the authorities tried relentlessly to trip him up. Eventually, as he stuck to his story, they let him go.

  The only evidence they had was the hieroglyphics in Jack’s possession which matched those found at the crime scene which wasn’t enough to bring charges. Jack was warned not to leave town without alerting Richards and then he was released to find his own way back home.

  “Merry Christmas to me,” Jack said as he stepped out into the cold. He couldn’t imagine his Christmas getting any worse, but it did.

  With the holiday schedule in effect, it took him an hour to get back to the residence hall and it was deep dark outside by the time he undid his triple locks and let himself into his apartment. His small room felt different. It felt ugly and foreign. It no longer felt even remotely safe.

  Jack went around the room and inspected everything, looking for clues that would point to someone having been there. He found none which didn’t make him feel the least bit better. The opposite was true. He knew someone had been there and that someone was very, very slick. The idea set up a nervous thrumming in his chest that never left him. He was so anxious that not only did he sleep fully clothed; he also slept with his saber in bed with him.

  Footsteps at midnight woke him. The residence hall had never been quieter and so the strange clack-scrape, clack-scrape, clack-scrape permeated his dreams. In the span of a second, he was fully awake and listening, but to what he couldn’t tell.

  This wasn’t Robert’s fancy shoes and nor were they the thick-soled ones that Richards wore, and they definitely didn’t belong to any of the semi-hippie wannabes that infested his floor with their hemp sandals.

  He didn’t know what was making the clack-scrape sound; he just knew that whoever was making the sound was coming for him. It was a dread certainty and he had never in his life been so scared. His heart quailed, running fast but also bounding within his chest. He found he could barely breathe and when he could, he was nearly overcome with nausea. A horrible smell was accompanying the clack-scrape noise coming up the hall.

  The steps ground on, moving closer; his stomach started to heave. The smell was over-powering; it was literally a hellish smell. Nothing on earth was as horrible. It drained his strength and he couldn’t resist the urge to heave up the meager dinner he had eaten the night before: hours-old pizza he had bought from a sleepy vendor in Grand Central Station.

  He puked over the side of his bed in three great volleys and when he could sit up again there was a sheen of sweat across his forehead and a look of pure terror on his face.

  Clack-scrape, clack-scrape, clack-scrape. It was a skeletal sound. The very thought should have sent him into hysterics; however, once he was able to catalog the sound, his mind pulled back from the brink of terror just enough for him to reach over and grab his saber. For the next few seconds, he could only sit there in bed, holding the sword with two shaking hands.

  And then the thing was right outside his door and he did panic. He jumped out of bed and rushed to his desk where his cellphone was charging. With shaking, fumbling hands, he picked up the phone and tried to dial; however, there was sweat streaming into his eyes and his stomach wouldn’t stop heaving, and when the first colossal crash struck the door, the phone fell out of his jittering hands and the screen shattered.

  The door was struck again with the sound of thunder and even in his panic, he knew that his triple locks wouldn’t stand up to this great of an assault. Unthinkingly, he rushed to the door and put his shoulder to it just as the third strike bent the locks in the frame and nearly sent him flying.

  There was now a quarter inch gap between the door and the frame. Through it, he saw something that wasn’t possible: there was something…someone dead on the other side. Someone long dead. Its skin, like brown hide, was stretched tight as a drum over its bones. The skin wasn’t fully intact and where there were rents and tears, Jack could see the creature was hollow inside.

  It was empty. Its innards had been pulled out eons ago and yet it was moving and it was strong.

  Jack suddenly realized that the locks would give any second and that even if they didn’t, the door wouldn’t hold. In that moment, he also realized that he was a dead man. All he had to fight this thing, which was already dead, was his sword, his pathetic, useless sword. The blade was deadly sharp and the edge like a razor, but what good could it possibly be against something that had had all of its blood and organs removed five-thousand years before?

  Closer to four-thousand years, the last part of his rational mind said, making him blink. It was an altogether useless point. It was the very definition of the word pedantic and yet Jack clung to this tiny island of rationality. From there he was able to leap frog to another actual thought: Robert did this to me.

  Yes. The creature had come from the museum, brought back to life by...well, he didn’t know how it had been done, but it was Robert for sure who had done it. “And that knowledge does me what good?” he asked as the door was struck a fourth time. Now, he was the only thing keeping the creature...the mummy from barging right in.

  It was Hor on the other side of the door. Jack had been to the exhibit the year before when it was being advertised as: Under the Bandages! They had brought in a medical team to run CAT scans and X-rays on the two mummies and Jack remembered the x-ray images of Hor; the mummy had been missing a foot and the calcified ends of his tibia suggested that he had lived a long time without it.

  “Hor?” Jack asked in a trembling voice.

  There was a pause from the constant scraping of the bone, and there was even a dampening of the terrible odor. It was almost as if Hor, a creature without ears was listening. “Stop, Hor,” Jack demanded. “Don’t touch the door.”

  You are not the master, it said, though Jack did not think it actually spoke the words because again, how could it? It had no tongue or lips and no lungs, and that meant it had no breath to form words. Jack heard Hor speak in his mind with a voice like the whispering of wind over desert sand.

  “I am the master,” Jack said, grasping at straws. “I translated the papyrus. I am the one who was responsible for bringing you back. You should, uh, be grateful. You should be thanking...”

  You are not the master. The door was struck again and Jack was sent flying back where he tumbled over his desk, scattering papers and books. He landed in a crouch and, like a child, he wanted to hide in the little foot cubby of the desk with the hope that the dead creature would just go away. He was so afraid that it boggled his mind...in fact it nearly addled his mind, so much so that he almost missed the fact that the fear was unnatural.

  Hor was making him be afraid. It wasn’t simply cause and effect that was making his heart seize in h
is chest—it wasn’t just the fact that he was being confronted by an impossible, undead creature. Hor was doing something to him.

  A thought rippled through his head: It’s magic. The very idea should have made him petrified with fear. After all, the only thing worse than a creature raised from the grave sent to kill him was one that could also wield magic. That was some hardcore logic but instead of making him more afraid, as it should have, the thought centered his thinking.

  “I don’t believe in magic,” he said, and then stood, gripping the saber and faced the obviously magical creature in front of him.

  Hor, what was left of him, was five feet away on the other side of the desk. It was evil. There was no doubt about that. The evil came off of it in waves. It was in the horrible stench and in the mind-numbing fear and in the deep pits where its eyes had once been. There was a darkness in its eyes that had nothing to do with the light in the room. It was deeper than was possible in the physical universe that Jack understood.

  Although he was still undecided over the concept of magic, Jack believed in evil. Hor was the embodiment of evil. It was what had drawn its ancient husk of a body together. Nothing else could have. The meat of its muscles was no longer woven and banded; it was stringy and loose. Its flesh was patched and worn, no longer holding in its innards. The wispy remains of its hair floated above it, defying gravity as did the gauzy, almost ethereal death shroud it had been buried in.

  The shroud billowed around it, waving as though rippled by a wind that wasn’t blowing on this plane of existence.

  Jack did not have time to believe or not to believe his eyes. Hor suddenly flew at him with his hands outstretched, seeking Jack’s throat with his claws. Jack reacted from years of training, slashing his saber right to left, hacking at the bones of Hor’s wrist.

  The razor-sharp blade struck Hor’s left hand clear off and when it did, an ugly feeling zinged up the blade. It was a malignancy, coursing like electricity right up Jack’s arm, settling into his teeth and tongue, leaving a taste of death there. It was as bitter as the ash that had rained down on Auschwitz.