The Quest of Julian Day

by Dennis Wheatley

  To get away from my thoughts I began to pace rapidly up and down the chamber, but after a couple of dozen turns I had to give up. Hunger had got me now and a beastly pain stabbed in my stomach each time I moved. I drew in the tab at the back of my trousers to its fullest extent but that didn’t seem to ease things very much so I lay down and, undoing my clothes, began to massage my stomach. On and on I went, rhythmically smoothing it up and down until my wrists ached so much that I simply had to stop; but the pain was better and I was able to do two thousand paces which killed a fraction of my day.

  The sing-song did not prove at all successful as my throat was now so dry and parched that it was a strain to get out every note, and my efforts were pathetic compared with those of the day before. Eventually I stopped trying and just repeated the words over to myself while humming the refrains in my brain. When I could not think of any more choruses that I knew I tried mathematics, but the only problem I could think of was: ‘if a herring and a half cost three-halfpence …?’ the answer to which I already knew.

  As I sat there with my back against the Pharaoh’s bath-shaped coffin I realised that my tongue was constantly licking over my dry lips just as one sees a snake flicker its forked tongue while it considers some object which may prove a suitable prey. By eleven o’clock I was muttering to myself half-crazily but soon after, quite unaccountably, I fell asleep.

  It was half-past three when I woke again. I had been entombed for over two days or, to be more exact, some fifty-one-and-a-half hours. I sucked at my mouth spasmodically and, when I popped a fruit-drop into it, only a conscious effort enabled me to move it round my tongue.

  The afternoon seemed never-ending. I did my best to prevent myself from looking at my watch too frequently but in spite of all my efforts I never managed a longer interval than eight minutes between half-past three and six o’clock. Sometimes I walked up and down, sometimes I endeavoured to sleep, sometimes I just sat there staring wide-eyed into the surrounding blackness, swallowing and swallowing and swallowing my ever-decreasing saliva and striving to ease the tension of my gradually-closing throat. For much of the time I must have been light-headed through the pains that constantly stabbed at my belly and my never-ceasing craving for some form of drink.

  It was some time early in the evening when I forced myself to take stock of the situation and the result was only an appalling fit of despair. I was convinced now that Oonas would never come back. There were a score of other schemes which she might have adopted. Her subtle brain was quite equal to devising any number of explanations as to how my body came to be in the tomb when it was discovered there weeks later. It was quite a possibility that they had not locked the entrance-gates on going out and would say that I had gone back to get something which I had dropped, sending them on over the river when I had made my farewells, as it had been arranged that I should set off into the desert that afternoon. In any case the expedition would have to cross the Nile before it started and I might quite well have planned to have my things packed for me and join it only when it reached the western bank.

  Such theories did not account for the withdrawal of the bridge over the pit, but by then my brain was too bemused for me to think clearly. I remember scrambling to my feet and staggering up and down in a semi-hysterical state, cursing Oonas long and bitterly in hoarse, gasping whispers for this thing she had done to me.

  During my hysterics I had lucid intervals but while they lasted the pain in my stomach prevented my thinking clearly. It seemed to gnaw at my very vitals so that at times I rolled in agony upon the floor; my attempts to stop it by further massage now proved futile and I lay there semi-conscious for hour after hour moaning and muttering to myself through my cracked and swollen lips.

  How the time passed I do not know but I came to my senses soon after ten o’clock and I did my very best to get a hold on myself because I knew that if I failed I should certainly go mad. I thought again of taking out my penknife and slashing the veins in my wrist to let the blood flow so that I might sink away into a final unconsciousness, which would have been an overwhelming relief. But it was night again and, if they came at all, I felt convinced that it was by night they would come. With a gargantuan effort I forced the temptation away from me and resolved to support another ten hours in the tomb if I possibly could.

  My mind weakened again and became a prey to strange fancies. I had O’Kieff pinioned under me and was battering in his head; time had gone backwards and Oonas as Cleopatra occupied the throne of Egypt, while I was Caesar, the lover of her youth; I was back in England and a few years had dropped away so that I was throwing a party once more at the Quaglino’s to a few of those many friends I had had before I became an outcast; I was in the Diplomatic Service again, rising by extraordinary feats of skill to the post of British Ambassador in Berlin and, by a brilliant coup, preventing the out-break of another world-war while still under forty.

  The visions faded and I slept. I was awoken by a piercing scream.

  21

  Escape

  Apart from my periods of sleep I had been clinging to my sanity for over sixty seemingly endless hours by the single thread of hope that I might hear that cry at last.

  Now that it had come it cut across my stupor like a clarion call rousing me to instant and automatic action. In one movement I was on my feet, thrusting blindly at the great slab of granite, shoulder-high beside me, which formed part of the coffin-lid; it tilted and went over, crashing to the floor with a thud that seemed to shake the vault. The echoes reverberated round the oval room shattering the momentary stillness which had succeeded that harsh cry of fear.

  Next second there was another scream from the corridor but unlike the first, which had been deep and guttural, this was high and shrill. It was followed by further cries of terror and the noise of stampeding feet as those who had come to get me fled in utter panic.

  My head was light and buzzing while my tongue, now thick and swollen, clung to the roof of my dry mouth. For an instant I lost my sense of direction and, missing the candle stump in the darkness, fumbled wildly for it; yet I knew I must force myself to act calmly. Life and death alternated on the balance. Only by keeping my head and drawing unsparingly on any reserve of strength that I might have left could I hope to reap any advantage from this one chance of escape that had been given me.

  I found the candle, lit it and went out into the passage. Propped up against the wall there I saw the thing that I had made over two days before when I still had my full wits and strength about me. Seen in the dim light cast by a candle I did not wonder that the sight of it had filled Sayed and Oonas with stark terror. By balancing the smaller fragments of the great coffin-lid one upon another against the wall, I had managed to construct a rough pillar of broken stone. On this I had draped my white shirt and drawers, crowning the pile with my panama stuck up on end so that on its crown, with spittle and dust, I had been able to draw the bold outlines of a face.

  Coming upon it suddenly round the corner from the pit-shaft and finding it barring their path only six feet distant in the uncertain light, first Sayed and then Oonas had, as I intended, taken the effigy for my ghost. The loud thump of the coffin-lid which I had engineered immediately afterwards must have completed the impression that my angry spirit was active there and about to exact vengeance on my murderers.

  Such an experience might well have shattered the nerves of two tough European criminals and, knowing the superstition-ridden mentality of all Egyptians, I could well imagine the devastating effect it had on Oonas and her thug. I could still hear their flying footsteps in the distance as small portions of rock and rubble clattered down the steep slopes above.

  Although I knew that in their panic they would never have paused to withdraw the bridge over the pit again, I was unutterably relieved to find it in place, and I hurried across it.

  Everything depended now on whether they would have recovered themselves sufficiently, by the time they had reached the entrance of the tomb, to lock the
iron gates behind them. In an attempt to spur them on through an access of fresh terror so that they would not pause to do so, I tried to shout; but only a husky whisper would come from between my cracked lips, and every time I took a breath a frightful pain seared like a hot iron down my burning throat.

  Whether they heard me coming after them or not I do not know but since I could not use my voice I made all the noise I could by stamping my way along the corridors and banging at the walls with my free hand. Even if I had been capable of running I should not have dared to do so as my candle would have gone out, and it would have been almost impossible to negotiate the half-fallen stairway without it. Swaying from side to side, groaning and gasping, I staggered up the steep ramps and broken stairs with all the speed I could muster.

  At last a faint lightening of the darkness ahead told me that I was nearing the entrance of the tomb, and almost before I knew it I was there. The gate was open and I was through it, staring up from the bottom of the twenty-foot hole where the entrance lay, past the dark cliffs on either side, to the blessed stars above.

  I would have given the world to have sunk down there on the jagged rocks and just sucked in the fresh night air which was so gloriously refreshing after the close stuffiness of the tomb; but I was not yet out of danger. If they returned to find me lying in the tomb entrance they would slit my throat, as in my hopelessly weakened condition I could not possibly put up a fight against them.

  I listened intently for any sounds which might indicate that they were still about but once out of the tomb they must have fled up the ladders as though all the devils in hell were after them. Somehow, I had to mount those ladders myself as they were the only way out from the deep rock gully in which I stood; and if I could not secure water the chances were that I should be mad or dead before morning.

  How I accomplished it I shall never know. I must have been within an ace of falling and breaking my neck a score of times, but somehow I managed to drag myself out of the deep hole, scale the ladders and reach the cliff-top. The friendly starlight showed me the rough track round the tongue of the gully and across its further precipice. Aching in every limb, my eyes protruding from their sockets, I stumbled along, falling at times and crawling on my hands and knees until, by a new effort which every time seemed the very last, I succeeded in dragging myself to my feet again.

  I slid and tumbled the last two hundred yards down into the valley bottom; another hundred yards and I had crossed it. The last effort, which all but finished me, was a fifty-foot climb up a steep slope to the little building above Tutankhamen’s tomb where the guardians of the valley have their quarters. Most of them sleep in the village several miles away but a few are always left on night-duty; and, unable to cry out, kneeling there in the dark utterly exhausted, I hammered with my fists upon the wooden door until I roused them.

  It was fortunate that they were Arabs. Europeans might have given me the great draught of water for which I was so desperately craving, and that would have killed me. Instead, knowing the proper treatment for a man found in the desert dying of thirst, they only bathed my face and lips. One of them put some fresh dates in a cup with a little water and pounded them up into a soggy mass, after which he forced small portions of it into my burning mouth.

  It was not until, with the most frightful agony, I had swallowed a good part of this moistened mixture that they allowed me to drink a few drops of water from a bottle of Evian taken from the excavators’ stores; and then, my pain having eased a little, I fell asleep.

  When I woke it was full day. I was naked and lying on a low bed wrapped in blankets. I vaguely remembered, as in some hideous dream, the tomb guardians stripping my pain-racked body the night before in order to sponge it all over with cool water; and the clothes in which I had escaped from the tomb were folded in a neat pile beside me.

  As I stirred, an Arab who had been sitting cross-legged on the floor at the foot of the bed rose and gave me a drink; then he left me to return a few minutes later with an elderly Englishman.

  My visitor asked me how I had come to be in such a state but it was all I could do to croak out my name; and in any case I wanted a little time to think out what sort of statement I should make.

  ‘All right, old chap,’ he said kindly. ‘Don’t bother to talk just yet.’ And taking a bowl of stuff like junket from the Arab who had just come back into the room, he began to feed me with it.

  ‘When you’ve had some of this you’ll feel better,’ he went on. ‘It’s leban zebadi, the curdled milk of the female gamoose. It’s light as a feather on the tummy but crammed full of every sort of vitamin; some Arabs have it for their evening meal during the month of Ramadan, when they have to fast from dawn to sunset each day, instead of gorging themselves half the night as the stupid peasants do.’

  He gave me another drink of water, then left me to sleep and I did not wake again until late in the afternoon. The Arab was no longer there so I had a chance to concoct an account of myself which would prove adequate for the enquiries which it was certain I should have to face. If I told the truth, it meant charging Oonas with attempted murder and, in spite of the way in which I had suffered at her hands, that I was not prepared to do.

  I had no reason to believe that she would ever have attempted to injure a hair of my head if I had stuck to her and, even after her passion for me had died down, the chances were it would have remained a pleasant memory, so that I should have at least retained her goodwill if I had dealt fairly with her. She might have ratted on me and sold us out to Zakri, but I had no proof of that and felt it was only just to give her the benefit of the doubt. As things were, it was I who had ratted on her by telling her of my intention to leave her at only a few hours’ notice. It was not unnatural that a girl of her violent temperament should have been quite convinced that Sylvia was the reason for my doing so.

  If Oonas had had more time she might still have plotted my death rather than give me up to another woman, but it would probably have been a quick ending by poison or the knife in the good old Eastern tradition. The torture she had inflicted on me during those incredibly dreadful hours in the tomb was not through any deliberate desire to cause me a slow and painful death, but had occurred because at such short notice she could think of no other way in which to stop my going on the expedition without laying herself open to a charge of murder.

  In consequence, when the English excavator visted me again, about five o’clock, I told him that I had made a visit to the Valley with Oonas three days earlier during which I had decided at the last minute not to go with some other friends on an expedition into the desert which was due to set off later in the day. Not wishing to tell them myself of my decision to back out, I had left her to inform them of it and, after visiting the Valley, we had parted on the track which led over the hills to Deir el Ba’hari; our arrangement being that she would return to Luxor at once while I was to wait there until my friends had departed. During the afternoon I had got bored with sitting up there on the cliff-top so I had gone off to explore a ravine some few miles distant. Night had overtaken me before I could get back to the Deir el Ba’hari track and in trying to find it I had got lost and had wandered about without food or water for over sixty hours until, on the third night, when I was virtually at the end of my tether I had once more stumbled on the Valley of the Kings.

  This story seemed to fulfil most of the possible contingencies and the excavator, whose name I learned was Mason, swallowed it readily enough. He then asked me if I felt up to making the journey back to Luxor that evening and when I said I did, he went off to make arrangements.

  As I pulled on my things I wondered if he had noticed that, except for my vest, I lacked underclothes but he appeared not to have spotted my strange shortage of garments, and it was a fairly safe bet that it would not have meant very much to the Arabs who had undressed me. Later, of course, the shirt, pants and hat with which I had decked out the effigy of my ghost were certain to be discovered and would doubtless raise some in
teresting speculations in the minds of the people responsible for looking after the tombs. By that time I hoped to be out of Luxor and on my way to join the Belvilles, if not already with them hundreds of miles out in the desert. If the worst came to the worst and they were found almost immediately, I could always put up a yarn that I had a vague recollection of having found the tomb open during my delirious wanderings and had taken refuge there from the scorching midday sun, not realising how near I was to the Valley of the Kings; but that my undressing there and rigging up a guy with part of my clothing must have been owing to some mad freak of my thirst-crazed brain of which I had no remembrance.

  I was still so weak from my ordeal that the journey back to Luxor proved a trying one although the kind Mr. Mason did everything he could to make it as easy for me as possible.

  The hall porter at the Winter Palace looked almost comically shocked and upset when I arrived back there at half-past seven, and he certainly had good reason to be so in view of the state I was in. The Arabs had dusted down my clothes as well as they could but they were incredibly dirty and torn in half-a dozen places from my attempts at turning somersaults in my prison and the many falls I had sustained after my escape. As I saw, too, when I had a chance to look into a mirror a little later, my experience seemed to have aged me by ten years, there were great, dark hollows under my eyes while my cheeks and temples had fallen in and the whole of my scalp was in-grained with dirt. I looked a positive caricature of my former self and I was not at all surprised at his amazement.