The E. Hoffmann Price Fantasy & Science Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  He heard someone’s breathing. While the colonel pounded his ear, Hong Li was fishing for carp, right in the Jap’s quarters. Who said the Chinese weren’t clever.

  Cooper had his bearings. Walk right up and through—

  Then he heard a hinge squeak.

  Colonel Yoshiwara was padding out in a gray robe. He wore straw-soled slippers. He looked bewildered. He had apparently been aroused by the lights. Seeing Cooper was a shock. Maybe he didn’t really recognize Cooper, for he wasn’t wearing his glasses.

  At the first sound from the other room, Cooper had reached for a grenade and slipped the pin.

  The colonel could not yell for help. That’s against bushido, Jap officers mustn’t ever be scared. But he whirled, kimono skirt trailing. Cooper heaved the grenade after him. It thumped against the floor of the other room and the blast let go.

  “Now you tell one!” Cooper yelled, and headed for the vase.

  He shuddered, he froze as his palms touched it. The same agony, but worth it this time as never before.

  During the instant in which he was neither in normal space nor in the Peach Blossom Paradise, he heard a rattle of musketry, yells and the blast of grenades. The whole town must have been panicked by his quick one on the colonel.

  Then he was through the glaze.

  Hong Li landed his carp. Cooper raised bloody hands. The old man smiled. Tien Yuk came out of the kiosk. Her jade ear pendants tinkled, her headdress flashed colored lights. She ran toward him. She believed even before he could tell her. She cried, “Father, I told you he was right—”

  It all made sense to Cooper now. The old man had faked his daughter’s death, hustled her into the vase, and had used her coffin for cartridge hauling. Then, when things had slipped, he’d headed for the vase himself.

  Cooper could no longer hear the firing and yelling.

  But there was plenty of it in Santo Tomas. Gaunt Americans and ragged Philippine Army men and Ifugaos with head axes were going wild. They’d caught the garrison with its pants at half-mast.

  Captain Breen, seeing that things were in hand, ran for the Jap headquarters. “What the hell!” he said, when he saw the dead sentry. “Who parted his hair?”

  He led the rush up the stairs.

  A mangled Jap in a gray robe crawled out with a pistol. He blazed away wildly. Glass and porcelain shattered. Breen fired from the hip, and that settled things. And then, assured by guerrilla yells that the garrison had been gutted, he paused to look around.

  He was puzzled. It was impossible that the Jap in the gray robe had tangled with a grenade, but he could not laugh off the evidence.

  A ragged scarecrow with a Colt .45 yelled, “Jeez, Cap’n, look!”

  Breen whirled, rifle ready.

  The corner was strewn with fragments of peach-blossom glaze. One of the colonel’s wild shots had shattered the big vase. But that was not what amazed Breen.

  A wrinkled Chinaman sat against the wall. He was smiling. He was looking at a lovely girl with an ornate headdress. A ragged man with bloody hands and a canvas haversack had one arm about her, which was a horrible breach of Chinese etiquette. You don’t clinch a girl before spectators. But for this once, it didn’t make any difference, for she looked as happy as the old man.

  Captain Breen stared. Then he said, “Must be fever. Look at that hatchet. He conked the sentry… He must’ve flung the grenade and not quite killed this little bastard! It simply doesn’t make sense, doing that and then pitching woo with Hong Li’s daughter, and with Hong Li looking on and liking it.”

  The ragged soldier shook his head. “What don’t make sense, Cap’n, is they’re deader’n hell and not a scratch on ’em. Jeez, I’m glad I didn’t drill that Cooper the time I felt like it!”

  THE WOMAN IN THE CASE

  Originally published in Spicy Mystery Stories, January 1938.

  Bint Anath’s small feet were henna-stained; as she danced, they twinkled like amaranth petals in a breeze. Her transparent skirt swirled, revealing all the loveliness of her long, sleek legs. Her hips swayed, her bare stomach rippled, and her arms were coiling brown serpents.

  Tourists cast resentful side glances at their wives. Bearded Arabs licked their lips and applauded, “Ya Sitti!” But Bint Anath was dancing for Eric Walton, and the invitation of her gestures was mirrored in her great black eyes and crimson lips.

  Love sprouts from the very dust of Egypt. It is living dust, having for ages eaten the flesh of its people, and blossomed finally into the golden body of Bint Anath. Eric Walton knew this, and he was afraid; for all that lived here was too close to the dead who long for the sun again.

  She was bending far backward, arching herself so that the silver hemispheres that cupped her small breasts quivered from their tremor. Now, incredibly contorted, she was looking up at him, and her arms reached back as though to draw Walton toward her.

  Hofni, that sleek brother of Bint Anath, watched with glittering eyes. He was an inspector of antiquities, dignifying his whole family with his government position. But his pay was small, which he remedied by being his sister’s “manager” in that cafe where no decent Moslem woman would show her face. Hofni was a Christian Copt.

  But neither Bint Anath’s beauty nor the whimpering flutes could warm Walton’s blood. He hated Egypt as only the homesick can hate any land. All that lives in this black valley is too close to the dead; so that fear was blended with Walton’s hatred. Egypt would swallow him if he ever touched those wanton lips.

  Walton tossed Bint Anath a coin and stalked to the door, silently cursing the Universal Press Bureau that kept him in a land whose dead dust would not remain dead. He did not see Hofni’s perplexed glance become knowing; he caught only the blaze of humiliation in Bint Anath’s eyes when she flexed upward.

  Once in his room, Walton had a way of shutting out the voice of the Nile. He poured two ounces of ancient brandy into a great bell-shaped goblet. The glass was paper-thin. It yielded when he cupped its curves in his two hands, twisted it so that the warmth of his palms made the fragrant liquor exhale a faint, subtle fragrance.

  He drank in the sensuous fumes, picked out first the full-bodied sweetness, then a thin spiciness, finally the exquisite ethereal soul of brandy, which itself is the soul of wine. There, between his two hands, was a small resurrection.

  At last, when he swallowed a drop of the liquor which air and human warmth and gentle rotation had made magic, the taste and the odor blended. This was like no other intoxication that man has ever devised.

  Contentment enveloped him, and the fear of Egypt remained outside. Long experience enabled him to do his work in a few hours, every day, and thus he seldom set aside the liquor whose fumes were food and drink and wisdom and expansion of the soul.

  But tonight, a thin, delicate mockery tinkled finally in his inner ear. “This is like savoring the sweetness of Bint Anath. That goblet swells like her small breasts.”

  He hurled the paper-thin glass against the wall and heard the dry tinkle of protest. Then he heard another tinkle, silvery and feminine. He blinked, cursed Hassan, the doorkeeper, for letting a woman slip in from the street. He looked up, and for a moment it seemed that he had first to leave some outer space before he could enter his own body.

  His eyes focused, and he saw a woman who had come down some long, dusty corridor of time, out of the blacknesses of feared and forgotten Egypt. In that dim light she resembled Bint Anath, and for the first time he knew why that lovely dancer made his flesh crawl instead of burn. Like Bint Anath, this woman seemed like a tomb painting in her statuesque posture. Her haughty, high-bridged nose and sweet mouth were modeled after some sculptured queen.

  Her breasts were young pomegranates, and her golden body moved sensuously as though swayed by music. She knelt wordlessly beside him, and the warmth of her flesh burned through the frail garments that hid so little of her beauty. He
was too fascinated to repel her, now that she had once touched him.

  “Hofni,” she abruptly began, “is letting two English scholars loot my grandmother’s grave. Help me prevent the sacrilege.”

  “Your grandmother?” he groped.

  “Maât-ka-Ra, the queen, was my grandmother,” she explained. “But during those twenty centuries, the name was somewhat slurred, so I am called Makkara.”

  He could believe that. Her fine, narrow feet, the sleek legs that gleamed through her gown left him no doubt. And the pyramid builders had small hands. So he nodded and asked, “How can I help?”

  “Come with me. In my family we are Copts—it has never been forgotten, that secret passage into the buried tomb of our ancestors. You are tall and strong as two men. You can get the mummy of Maât-ka-Ra before that accursed Hofni helps ghouls desecrate her grave.”

  Walton did not like Hofni. But neither did he like tomb dredging, which had been his avocation until the fear of Egypt had bitten into his heart; for so many have died in the valley of the Nile that there is no dust but that of the dead.

  Makkara laughed softly when she read his qualms, and snuggled close to him, like one of the cats that were sacred to Bast. When she kissed him, she drew all of his life to his lips. She dizzied him as no brandy ever had; when his arms closed about her, he knew why that strange little voice had compared a brandy goblet to Bint Anath’s breasts.

  But Makkara’s small hands repulsed his sudden surge of ardor, and she breathed, “No—first you must help me do my duty to the dead—”

  She slipped from his arms, leaving him atremble from the ruinous and all possessing desire that burns the soul away from whoever touches what has sprung from the Nile. This Walton knew and for the first time understood, but he no longer cared.

  He flung the snoring Hassan’s coarse cape about her white shoulders and followed her across the courtyard. A moment later, Walton was driving through deserted streets, crossing the Abbas II Bridge. Then he headed south, with Makkara silent beside him. At times he could scarcely distinguish the whiteness of her face, or the outline of the cape that swathed her lithe body. He had not shaken off the brandy fumes; though sober, his thoughts were as light as his flesh, and as agile.

  Sometimes Makkara leaned against him, but he could scarcely feel the contact of hip and thigh; only a fleeting, fragile touch that was the ghost of beauty. He’d have to quit sniffing brandy… No, he’d better take twice as much… It cured him of fear…

  Makkara’s thoughts became his own. Without being told, he parked his car just outside the village of Abu. The cluster of whitewashed mud houses was a ghost town lulled to sleep by the murmuring palm fronds. Not even the dogs were aware of his approach.

  Wispy clouds dimmed the pale moon, and he could barely distinguish Makkara in that shifting desert glamour. She led him among dunes, lightly down ravines eroded into the barren rock. She wound in and out among crumbling pyramids and ruined tombs.

  At last she halted in an angle where crumbled masonry barely peeped above the jealous sands. There Walton began to dig with his bare hands. Makkara, crouched beside him, whispered, “Hurry—hurry—”

  Soon he reached a slab that was balanced on pivots. It swung inward at his touch. He laughed, wondering why he had brought a pistol. He no longer feared the dead.

  Walton stumbled over debris that uncounted ages of dust seepage had coated inches deep. Makkara followed, cautioning him against obstacles that were ahead.

  Finally, at the foot of precipitous stairs, he stepped into the burial vault. There were other chambers, but they must have been looted, ages ago. He lifted the narrow sycamore case from its granite sarcophagus. Maât-ka-Ra must have been slender as her namesake. Her bones, all swathed in linen, were scarcely a weight in Walton’s arms.

  Outside, a jackal howled at the setting moon. Desert rodents scurried in the shadows when Walton reached the surface with his burden. The carved portrait mask of the case was gilded, and Maât-ka-Ra smiled cryptically at the sky she had not seen for twenty centuries.

  Then a suave voice purred from the shadows, “Set it down very gently, Mr. Walton. You are too bold for good sense. You might have known that I would wonder why you snubbed Bint Anath tonight. It never occurred to you that I noticed your interest in my conference with those two Englishmen in Daoud’s cafe, a few days ago.”

  It was Hofni, the inspector. His white teeth gleamed beneath the black smudge of his moustache.

  Makkara did not cry out. Hofni did not sense her presence; but Walton did, and he could not bear the thought of her dismay and sorrow.

  “Fortunes of war, Mr. Hofni,” Walton lightly, half ruefully laughed. “Well then, help me take her to your car instead of mine.”

  The Copt appreciated suavity. He hinted, “Maybe we can arrive at an understanding. I might overlook this raid of yours. Particularly if my sister interceded in your favor.”

  “I fancied you’d be reasonable,” agreed Walton, though he knew that he would be blackmailed into going native; installing Bint Anath in a house of her own. There was no escape from ruin. “Give me a lift. I’m fairly well all in, climbing those stairs.”

  Hofni extended his hand to steady the case as Walton set it end up. He may have noted the gleam of blued steel, but he could not have seen the spurt of purple-reddish flame, nor heard the small dry crackle of the automatic pistol.

  Hofni clutched at his chest, recoiled, then lurched forward. There was no cry; just the faint reverberation when the open tomb caught and cast back that sharp report; then the crunch of sand as his feet jerked and twitched.

  Walton watched it all as impersonally as if someone else had pulled the trigger. Once sure that Hofni was dead, he pocketed the pistol, picked up the mummy, and stalked toward his car.

  But Makkara was not at his side. He felt suddenly alone. The lightness left him, and when he reached his destination, the palm fronds whispered accusations. He was no longer sure that any woman had been with him. The vagrant breeze had blotted out his own footprints and hers, and Hofni’s as well. But Hofni’s car gleamed from the shadows; the encounter had not been entirely mirage.

  Walton, desperate, bundled the mummy into his own machine. He dared not wait for Makkara, nor call her. His insane act had frightened her. But she would seek him, to claim the dead.

  When Walton crossed the Abbas II Bridge, he tossed his pistol over the rail. Though the Nile revived the dead by kissing their dust into fresh verdure and new flesh, she could not raise a thing of steel from her rich mud…

  Walton set the mummy of Maât-ka-Ra in the closet of an inner room. He had another tulip-shaped goblet. He poured two ounces… He was way behind schedule with his brandy sniffing…but he could catch up, while waiting for Makkara.

  Strangely, murder did not unnerve Walton. Hofni deserved death, the penalty his ancestors had decreed for tomb violation, ages ago. And what clues does the desert leave? Only the picked bones that the jackals leave.

  * * * *

  Work interfered with sniffing brandy, so Walton stayed at home the next day. He was not disturbed when Hassan, the doorkeeper, muttered about the loss of his cape. Walton flung him a pound note, and the black fellow agreed that some evil spirit must have stolen his garment.

  Hofni’s disappearance was not mentioned in the evening paper. But noon the next day, Walton read how Hofni’s car, abandoned outside the village of Abu Sir, had led to an investigation. The police had found what remained of a man. Near him was a coarse woolen cloak, not far from the mouth of a tomb; the uncharted opening of Queen Maât-ka-Ra’s recently discovered vault.

  It was plain that the zealous inspector had been murdered by the looters he had surprised. The villagers of Abu Sir were jailed en masse. The headman was soundly bastinadoed. Several inhabitants with records of previous tomb looting were likewise flogged. This would continue until one confessed, or implicated othe
rs.

  The Egyptian fellah is not a bad sort. Walton was distressed that evening, when Cairo was abuzz with the news that a villager had confessed to the crime, though he would not tell where he had hidden the pistol.

  That night, Hassan announced a woman. Walton’s heart pounded, and anticipation made his limbs tingle. She came in, veiled. Her feet were small, like Makkara’s; the great, black eyes, smoldering behind those long, close spaced Egyptian lashes, were like Makkara’s. He could not speak; he rose, swallowed his heart, extended his arms.

  The dark eyes widened. Then she was close to him, and he could feel the soft, intimate pressure of her breast, the thump-thump of her heart against his. He gestured and said when he caught his breath, “All is well—I have been waiting—”

  But he checked himself in time; what was on his mind did not entirely escape. Hunger for the lips of Makkara had almost betrayed him. Something warned him, even before she lowered her veil. When he saw the olive beauty of Bint Anath, he was cold and numb, shaking like a horse brought up just in time on the edge of a precipice.

  “I have been waiting for this honor,” he fumbled, then backed away, his hands on her arms, his glance, shifting, picking the lines of her figure from the shapeless cape that enveloped Bint Anath.

  She must know now that her beauty had dazed him. His pantomime could mean nothing else. Bint Anath joined him on the cushioned mastaba and said, “You wounded me last night, but Hofni told me that you were so engrossed with business. Forgive me for annoying you.”

  She looked up at him, shrugged the outer cape from her shoulders. Bint Anath wore but a thin gown, and no silver hemispheres cupped her breasts. He viewed her beauty as through a mist, and he marveled at the way she could curl her crossed legs under her, so that her henna-stained soles were turned up. Such flexibility was more inflaming than her warmth against him.