Evelyn nodded. “Apparently it was not enough that he be condemned in this life—they condemned him in the next, as well.”
“Those ancient Egyptians sure were strict,” O’Connell said.
“Yes, I’m all choked up for the poor blighter,” Jonathan said. “Now—shall we look inside, and see if he’s wearing a golden mask or silver jammies?”
Evelyn, who had given up on these two, was brushing off a large lock on the side of the coffin, which again mirrored the shape of the unfolded, puzzle-box petals. Following his sister’s lead, Jonathan inserted the key-box and gave it a hard turn to the right.
Again, a hiss indicated an airtight seal’s surrender, as it broke after centuries of concealment.
But this time a foul stench emanated from the cracked-open lid.
“Uggh!” Jonathan said, backing away, holding his nose. “This isn’t by chance where you buried Warden Hassan, is it, O’Connell?”
Evelyn took several steps back, coughing, while O’Connell—one hand covering his nose and mouth—tried to open the lid with the other. Then he tried with both hands, putting everything he had into it.
“Damn thing’s stuck,” he said. “Caught on something . . . Give me a hand, Jonathan.”
Both men gave it their all, and the lid slowly began to give way.
“Don’t stop now!” O’Connell said to Jonathan. “I think it’s coming loose . . .”
And the lid popped open!
But with the lid came the coffin’s inhabitant, a hideous, maggot-infested, still-rotting corpse in black-stained oozing bandages, seemingly jumping up from within!
The brave American, the self-composed Englishwoman, and her dapper brother screamed like blithering idiots, scared witless.
And the mummy plopped back into his coffin.
O’Connell swallowed, then laughed nervously. “Some of the bandages must’ve got caught or stuck to the lid or something.”
“Those bandages do look frightfully sticky at that,” Jonathan said.
“There’s something terribly wrong here,” Evelyn said, stepping slowly toward the coffin, then peeking tentatively within, at the twisted, deformed mummy. “I’ve never seen a mummy that looked remotely like this . . . After three thousand years, he’s still—”
“Moist?” Jonathan offered.
“Actually, yes. Even in an air-sealed coffin, this is unheard of—he’s still decomposing!”
O’Connell was examining the inside of the coffin lid. “Take a gander,” he said, pointing to traces of dried blood and deep scratches, dozens of them, on the inner lid. “His fingernails did that.”
“My God,” Evelyn said. “He was . . . buried alive.”
“Very naughty,” Jonathan said, quietly.
“Looks like he left us a message,” O’Connell said, pointing out a cluster of crudely fashioned hieratics—in dried blood.
“ ‘Death is only the beginning,’ ” Evelyn translated.
Jonathan shivered, and O’Connell’s and Evelyn’s eyes locked.
“You planning to stay down here much longer?” O’Connell asked her. “I thought I might go get my gunnysack.”
13
Plague on Both Your Houses
Another starry amethyst night had descended upon the City of the Dead, but now the Carnahan suburb had merged into the American expedition’s city of tents, where members of the rival teams gathered around one roaring campfire. The wary truce was matched by an uneasy calm, as rifles and revolvers lay near at hand, should the Med-jai welcoming committee decide to drop by again.
Arms folded, rather enjoying the chilly evening, Evelyn carried a small canvas bag by its drawstrings, like a kid with a sack of marbles, as she headed toward the campfire. Starting from her own small tent, she passed casually by the much larger tent which served as Dr. Chamberlin’s headquarters.
The Egyptologist, wearing his sun-shielding pith helmet even in the moonlight, stood at a worktable arrayed with various artifacts gathered from below, including one jewel-encrusted canopic jar in perfect condition and another that was in pieces. Half a dozen turbaned diggers sat in the sand nearby like disciples awaiting the holy word from the mousy professor.
“Hello, Doctor,” she said, as she passed, but Chamberlin did not respond.
This wasn’t rudeness on the professor’s part: He seemed wholly absorbed with the examination of a certain artifact—a book—a large, brass-hinged, obsidian volume with a strange, large lock on its face that was keeping Chamberlin from opening the thing.
Smiling privately, Evelyn strode to the campfire, sitting between her brother, Jonathan, and Rick O’Connell, who was perched next to his old Foreign Legion comrade, Beni. Both legionnaires were roasting scraggly meat on sticks, which was producing a rather pungent, even foul, aroma.
Jonathan sniffed the air. “Might I ask what that vile-smelling entrée might be?”
“It might be a rat,” Beni said. “Best the desert has to offer.”
“Want some of mine?” O’Connell asked. “Don’t worry—it doesn’t taste too much worse than it smells.”
“No, thank you.” Jonathan shuddered. “For a moment I thought our old friend Warden Hassan had returned from the dead.”
Across the flittering flames, the adventurers from America—Henderson, Burns, and Daniels—were sitting together, talking quietly, all grins and high spirits. Like Chamberlin, each had a canopic jar, elaborately and valuably jeweled, and the men were turning the jars over and over in their hands, practically fondling the things.
Henderson held his jar up and grinned through the flames at Evelyn and O’Connell. “Miss Carnahan—you’re an expert. What do you think this beauty will fetch on the collector’s market?”
“My expertise is in the realm of scholarship,” she said primly. “I’m afraid commerce is your department, Mr. Henderson.”
“Beni tells us you kids found yourselves a mummy today,” Burns said, flames dancing on the lenses of his wireframes. “Congratulations.”
O’Connell glanced irritably at Beni, who didn’t acknowledge this small betrayal of confidence, focusing on how his rat-on-a-stick was doing.
“I hear he’s nice and ripe,” Burns added.
“Why don’t you dry him out?” the stoic Daniels asked, offering a rare witticism. “We could use the firewood.”
The fortune hunters bellowed with laughter, patting each other on the back, drunk with their good fortune.
Evelyn ignored this uncouth behavior and said to O’Connell, “I made another interesting discovery, after you and Jonathan went topside.”
O’Connell frowned. “You didn’t go wandering off into another chamber without us, did you?”
“Heavens no! This is something I found in our friend’s coffin.”
She emptied the canvas bag on the sandy ground before her, so both O’Connell and her brother could have a gander at her latest precious find: a pile of big, dusty bug exoskeletons.
Jonathan recoiled. “Those are nasty-looking devils dead! I’d hate to meet one that was wiggling.”
“I should say,” Evelyn replied. “These are legendary in their nastiness: scarabs—flesh eaters. They can stay alive for years, feasting on the flesh of a corpse . . . Do you have an extra rat-ka-bob, Mr. O’Connell? I’m famished.”
“I’ll put one on the fire for you,” O’Connell said, raising an eyebrow.
Jonathan was staring at the beetle exoskeletons, aghast. “Are you saying, dear sister, that those abhorrent creatures ate the flesh from that corpse of ours?”
“Yes . . . and no. I’m afraid, where our friend was concerned, he wasn’t a corpse, when they started eating him.”
Jonathan and O’Connell exchanged incredulous looks.
Evelyn, who had her own rat-on-a-stick now, courtesy of O’Connell, was holding it over the flames. “Our theory that he may have been . . . naughty . . . would appear to have some validity.”
“You’re saying he was not only buried alive,” O’Connell said
, “but whoever singled him out for that honor also pitched in a handful of flesh-eating bugs? To munch him to death?”
She frowned, thoughtfully. “Rather more than a handful, I’d say.”
“What could he have done to become so popular?” Jonathan wondered.
O’Connell smirked. “Maybe he got a little too frisky with the pharaoh’s daughter.”
“At the very least, I would say.” Evelyn was turning her rat slowly over the flames. “From the evidence at hand, I would hazard an educated guess that our mummy suffered the worst of all ancient Egyptian curses—the hom-dai.”
She explained to them that the hom-dai was reserved only for the most evil of blasphemers.
“The only doubt I have,” she said, “is that scholarship indicates that this curse was never executed.”
Now Jonathan smirked. “Well, our mummy friend was executed, all right.”
“You mean, supposedly this famous curse,” O’Connell said, “was never used? What was the point of it, then?”
She shrugged. “As a threat, a deterrent—as something that could be invoked, should anyone really misbehave. But the ancient Egyptians never used the curse—or so it is thought—because they were afraid to.”
“Why on earth?” Jonathan asked. “Isn’t it usually the person being cursed who should be afraid?”
Matter of factly, she told them, “It is written that should he who endures the torment of hom-dai ever arise from the dead, that entity would return as the bearer of the ten plagues.”
“How many plagues?” O’Connell asked lightly, but Evelyn could see apprehension in his eyes.
Beni, nibbling his rat, had not seemed to be paying any attention to any of this; but suddenly he put in: “Like Moses and the pharaoh?”
“Just like Moses and the pharaoh,” Evelyn said, nodding.
“Let’s see how much Sunday school stayed with me,” Jonathan said glibly, and began ticking off the plagues on his fingers. “You have your frogs, your flies, your locusts . . . dear me, I’m stuck already.”
“Hail,” Burns said, from across the flames. “And fire.”
“Sun turning black,” Henderson added.
“Water turning to blood,” Daniels said.
Seemed the Americans had been listening all along.
“Well, and then there’s my personal favorite,” Jonathan said, “boils and sores all about the body—always a crowd pleaser . . . Can’t anyone think of the other two?”
No one said anything; then some nervous laughter followed, but Evelyn could sense real trepidation among these brave fortune hunters. Men were such children.
She plucked the rat-on-a-stick from the fire, blew on it to cool it off, then nibbled at the warm meat.
“Really not half bad,” she said, chipper.
Later, Evelyn—who had done her best to freshen for bed (she really was quite tired of wearing the Bedouin gown, which was frightfully wrinkled and dirty)—was walking past Dr. Chamberlin’s tent, heading back to her own tent, when she noticed something interesting.
The professor was asleep on his pallet, on his side, one arm cradling the jeweled jar to his bosom, almost tenderly, his other arm and hand draped loosely over the large black ancient book.
She glanced about, noting that Chamberlin’s loyal diggers were all asleep under the stars, hither and yon, beneath blankets. All concerned seemed sound asleep, and Chamberlin was snoring.
Moments later, Evelyn was sitting in the glow of the campfire, the big book in her hands.
“That’s called stealing,” someone said.
O’Connell crouched down beside her.
“I believe the word you used before was ‘borrowing,’ ” she replied, referring to the archaeologist’s tool kit he’d given her. “Be a dear and go get that puzzle box out of Jonathan’s backpack, would you?”
O’Connell did.
Then she was inserting the key into the book’s huge lock, which shared its shape with those of the sarcophagus and coffin they’d opened.
“Is that the book you’ve been looking for?” O’Connell asked. “That sure isn’t made of gold.”
“It isn’t The Book of Amun Ra, either—it’s something else, every bit as precious.”
“Yeah? What is it? King Tut’s little black book?”
“I think this may be The Book of the Dead.”
O’Connell frowned. “Dead? I don’t like the sound of that . . .”
“Don’t be a ninny. What harm ever came from a book?”
And the librarian turned the big key.
The unlocking click seemed to echo through the night, and she looked around to see if anyone—in particular, Dr. Chamberlin—had been roused. All was quiet, except for the muffled rumble of men snoring, here and there.
Wind blew through the camp—not a gust, this time, more like the expulsion of bored breath by some giant in the sky—but the flames of the campfire shivered, as if they too felt the desert chill.
The two shared a nervous look, then Evelyn laughed. So did O’Connell, though not terribly convincingly. He moved close, putting a protective arm around her shoulder, though somehow she felt he was seeking the comfort of her closeness as much as offering the security of his.
Her eyes slowly scanned the exquisitely rendered hieroglyphs on the first page, lips moving as she read silently.
“So what is it?” he said, finally. “The Hamanaptra—phone book?”
“ ‘Amun kum ra. Amun kum dei.’ ”
“I’m so glad I asked.”
“It speaks of the night and of the day.”
She began to read aloud, still to herself, but wanting to hear the words, compelled, somehow, to speak them . . .
(And she could not know, of course, that within the chamber where their mummy lay, uncovered in his coffin, alongside his granite sarcophagus, his ancient, putrescent flesh and bones stirring, his eyelids opening—Imhotep awoke with a jolt, staring into the darkness with empty sockets.)
. . . and so Evelyn Carnahan, earnest scholar that she was, hopelessly in love with the lore of ancient Egypt, devoted to the memory of her late celebrated father, continued to read the words that roused the mummy.
“No!” a voice screamed from behind her.
Someone else had been roused: Dr. Chamberlin.
“You must not not!” he shouted. “Cease!”
Like a teenager caught reading a forbidden novel after dark, Evelyn shut the book’s cover as the Egyptologist ran toward her on stubby legs. She noted, rather absurdly, that he was not wearing his pith helmet for once. His hair, white and wispy, was standing straight up from sleeping on it . . . or maybe fright . . .
Then, halfway to the campfire, Chamberlin froze in place, his eyes turning toward the desert behind him, as if he’d heard something.
He had, and soon so had Evelyn and O’Connell: a buzzing, building drone that was streaming in from the desert, as if a plane were swooping somewhere out there, only the sound was more piercing than that, and more of a whine.
Evelyn and O’Connell flew to their feet. In his tent nearby, Jonathan awoke with a start. The buzzing whine was building, like a siren. Over by the cluster of American tents, Beni stumbled out, clutching his stomach.
“Musta ate a bad rat,” he mumbled, then his eyes widened as he perceived the growing drone coming in off the desert.
Henderson, Burns, and Daniels emerged from their tents, revolvers in hand, eyes wild, as the strange, unearthly drone grew louder and closer.
They all stood, in the flickering firelight, watching the darkness of the desert, confused, helpless, the Americans wondering aloud what the hell this could be.
And then what the hell it was became incredibly, dreadfully, apparent, as the living cloud of locusts descended upon the camp, enveloping everything and everyone . . .
Clawing and pawing the air, Evelyn felt O’Connell’s arm slip around her waist and he pulled her through the rain of wings, and they ran—Jonathan at their side—toward the crevice at the f
eet of Anubis. Frantically waving the bugs off as best they could, they raced to the shrine.
In the meantime, Beni and his American employers were running toward their own entrance to the underground, though Dr. Chamberlin—wearing a shroud of locusts—had retrieved The Book of the Dead, and stood asking the sky, “What have we done?”
Then, spitting out the locusts he’d just let into his mouth, Chamberlin followed the rest of his expedition into the underground.
O’Connell, Evelyn, and Jonathan had moved through the darkness of the now familiar embalming room into the tunnels, slowing down to slap at themselves and pick locusts out of their hair. O’Connell, who’d had the presence of mind to grab and bring along that gunnysack arsenal of his, lighted a kitchen match off his fingernail and set fire to the nub of a torch.
“I never saw so many goddamn grasshoppers in my life!” O’Connell said.
“Not grasshoppers,” Evelyn said, doing her best to regain her composure, “locusts.”
“That’s one of the ten bloody plagues, isn’t it?” Jonathan demanded of his sister, rather hysterically. “Locusts!”
“This is not a plague, Jonathan,” she said calmly, plucking a locust from her ear, “it’s a natural phenomenon—a generational phenomenon. Every so many years the locusts of this country have a population explosion and they all take flight . . . They’re probably gone by now, they’ll have moved on.”
Evelyn took a step back the way they’d come, and felt something squish under her sandal.
“Ick,” she said. “I’ve stepped in something.”
“Not in something,” O’Connell said, frowning, lowering his torch. “On something.”
The floor was covered in frogs—slimy, awful frogs!
Evelyn held back her scream, which allowed her to hear O’Connell asking, “Okay—so are the Egyptian frogs breeding, too? And did they fly here?”
Before she could answer (though what that answer would have been is hard to say), the ground under them began to shake; the floor was covered with sand, and that sand began to swarm, not unlike the locusts above.
In the light of the torch, they witnessed the impossible: The sand gathered and grew into a mound, rising in front of them, like a man materializing; but it wasn’t a man or sand, either.
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