From somewhere, perhaps up through cracks in the floor, they had come, and now they came spilling out of what had seemed to be a pile of sand, but was really a pile of them: scarab beetles!
Hundreds of them, chittering dung beetles boiling out of the sand to form a quick crawling army that moved toward them in a black, wriggling wave.
Evelyn screamed, and so did Jonathan, and even O’Connell, though he was actually forming the words: “Come on!”
And, his torch showing the way, he led them into a passageway, even as the scarab army advanced on them.
Elsewhere in the underground tunnels, the Americans had similarly moved away from the locusts into the darkness; but early on, racing down a passageway, Burns—initially leading the way—had lost his footing, his wire-rims slipping from his face, skittering across the rock floor and winding up in the path of the stampede of his comrades.
Without his glasses, Burns couldn’t find his glasses, and even if he could have, they were crashed beyond use; and now he had lagged seriously behind. Without a torch, half blind anyway, he squinted toward the blurry figures up ahead of him, watched them vanish into the darkness of the tunnel.
“Wait!” he called. “Wait!”
But they either didn’t hear him, or didn’t care.
Burns did his best to navigate in the darkness, running one hand along the wall, holding the other out in front of him, groping. Up ahead was light, not the light of a torch, but moonlight filtering down through the crevice above. He moved toward the light, and suddenly he could make out something, someone: An indistinct figure had stepped out in front him, perhaps ten feet away.
“Daniels?” he asked. “Henderson, is that you?”
Burns staggered toward whoever it was, then tripped, stumbling forward, throwing his hands out in front of him, to stop himself, to brace himself against the figure.
But his hands sank in!
It was as if he’d pushed his palms into mud, foul sticky mud, and he yanked them out with an awful slurping sound, and even with his bad eyes, he could see that his hands were covered in a jellylike slime. His brain finally informed him that this was a living mummy standing before him, and the slime on his hands consisted of a soup of maggots and rotten flesh from a putrid chest cavity, and as Burns started to scream, a skeletal hand clamped down over his mouth, muffling the sound.
The noisy insects in pursuit, O’Connell led Evelyn and Jonathan down several tunnels which they had never before traversed, and soon they found themselves in a chamber with stairs carved into the stone, a tall narrow staircase leading up, which was the way the three headed.
The mass of scurrying, chittering scarabs apparently thought that was a fine idea, too, and stayed right on the heels of the humans.
Halfway up, on the left of the staircase, chiseled out of the wall, was a pedestal where some icon or urn had once stood. O’Connell leaped onto it, and Jonathan followed; a similar indentation was on the right, and Evelyn leaped onto it, and perched there like the statue of a goddess—a frightened one.
A moment after the trio had vacated those stairs for their respective roosts, the herd of insects clambered between them, scrambling on up the narrow stairs like a moving black carpet.
O’Connell and Jonathan watched until the insects were out of view.
Trembling, Jonathan sighed in relief. “Gone.”
“Hell!” O’Connell said, looking past him. “So’s Evelyn!”
The pedestal where she’d stood was empty.
14
Bringer of Death
O’Connell’s fingers fumbled over the wall in the recess of the pedestal where Evelyn Carnahan had stood.
Just below, on the chamber floor, Jonathan, holding the torch, asked, “Anything?”
“Nothing—but there’s got to be a goddamn hidden switch, or a trap door, or—”
Somebody screamed—not a woman, not Evelyn: a man. Several men, in fact, as scream layered upon scream came echoing down from the top of the stairway. O’Connell glanced at Jonathan in confusion, and—elephant gun in tow—hopped down from the pedestal and began to climb the stairs . . .
. . . and out of the darkness above came Henderson and Daniels, followed by several native diggers, and all of them, including the hardy Americans, were scrambling frantically down, spooked as hell, hurtling the stairs, two and three and four steps at a time, screaming their lungs out.
Henderson yelled down to O’Connell and Jonathan, “Out of the way, you sorry sons of bitches—run for your lives!”
And from behind these new arrivals, and above them, came that awful sound again, the hungry chittering of the herd of scarabs, making their inexorable way down the stairs in a wave of wriggling black.
Jonathan fell in with the running men, but one turbaned native tripped and fell, offering himself in unintentional sacrifice, flung across the bottom of the stairway. O’Connell turned to go back and help the man, but the beetles had already swarmed over the digger, covering him, consuming him, and the metallic music the beetles made seemed to intensify, to grow almost deafening, as in moments the creatures had reduced the poor bastard to a half-eaten corpse whose skeleton provided a stark white contrast to the black dung beetles devouring his flesh.
And now O’Connell—who was brave, but not stupid—ran, too, as the men darted into the catacombs, dividing up, disappearing into the darkness of various tunnels, taking advantage of the precious moments they had as the raucous army of insects finished their meal.
Evelyn found herself enveloped in darkness. She’d leaned back so hard against the wall behind the pedestal where she’d perched, the panel—like a trick door in a haunted house—had moved under the weight of her, pushing open, sending her tumbling backward, dumping her rudely onto the sandy floor of an adjacent chamber, and closing again behind her!
She called out, “Jonathan! Mr. O’Connell . . . Rick!”
But there was no response. So, shaking the sand out of her hair, she got to her feet and began tentatively feeling her way along the wall, her eyes trying to adjust to the dark. At least there were no scarabs in here, or locusts, or frogs . . .
Rounding a corner, she entered a chamber where she was relieved to see moonlight filtering down in through a long crack in the ceiling, the last gasp of the crevice that granted entrance to this underground world. An even greater relief was the sight of one of the Americans—the one called Burns, she thought—his back to her, standing in the moonlight, head back, staring upward.
“Thank goodness,” she said, approaching him. “I was just beginning to get worried . . .”
As she neared him, she suddenly heard a sobbing, a whimpering.
Touching his shoulder, she asked, “Are you all right?”
And Burns careened around and stared at her with gory gaping sockets where his eyes had been, streaks of blood like tears streaming down his pain-distorted face.
Evelyn did what any self-respecting Englishwoman in that situation would do: She screamed like a banshee.
Moaning, Burns dropped to his knees, as if he were praying to her. Evelyn backed away, her scream subsiding into deep, hysterical breaths, and bumped into something, or someone, just behind her. She wheeled and looked into the slimy, bandaged face of the awakened mummy, who looked at her through freshly harvested, recently inserted eyeballs.
The mummy squinted at her—Burns’s eyesight hadn’t been the best, after all—and a decayed hand pawed the air.
“Anck-su-namun?” the mummy rasped at her.
Evelyn’s reply was another bloodcurdling scream as the young woman backed into a wall and the mummy stumbled toward her, its skeletal legs shedding rotting bits of flesh, its slime-soaked bandages loose and oozing.
As the mummy closed in upon her, a walking nightmare in the moonlight-dabbed darkness, Evelyn edged down the wall, horror-struck. Beyond the mummy, in the shaft of moonlight, knelt Burns, and she cried out to him for help, and his response was to lower himself even further, as if he were bowing down to
the mummy.
“Please!” Evelyn cried, as the mummy staggered toward her.
Burns looked up, with his blood-streaked, eyeless countenance, and opened his mouth, as if to reply to her, but he could only moan and gurgle, frothing blood—his tongue missing, ripped out!
As this appalling fact dawned upon her, Evelyn—still sliding along the wall in the semidarkness—saw the mummy stretching out his arms toward her, as if to embrace her, and even under the filthy wrappings, his face seemed contorted with emotion.
“Kadeesh pharos Anck-su-namun!” the mummy cried, and she looked past the fetid lips, beyond the rotten teeth, to see the fresh tongue flapping there—Burns’s tongue.
Almost paralyzed with shock, shivering with cold fear, Evelyn still managed to make her way along that wall—the mummy was moving slowly, shambling toward her, bandaged hands outstretched—and then she ran out of wall, and realized she was at the entrance of a tunnel.
Relieved, she turned and bumped into somebody, and screamed!
“Hey, take it easy,” O’Connell said, taking her by the arm and moving her back toward the moonlit chamber. “Where have you been? This is no time for exploring. Let’s get out of here, already—”
And that was when he looked beyond her and saw the tall creature in grimy bandages, with rotting flesh and exposed bone and glittering eyes, moving toward them.
“Jesus!” O’Connell said, grabbing Evelyn and pulling her close to him, then stepping in front of her, protectively.
This seemed to irritate the living mummy; that seemed to be a look of rage distorting the decaying face, and just as the mummy was lurching toward them, reinforcements arrived—unintentionally, but they arrived, as into the chamber burst Jonathan, Henderson, and Daniels, emerging from a tunnel behind the mummy, whose towering if deteriorating presence was highlighted by the moonlight.
The men skidded to a stop at this remarkable sight, and any exclamations of surprise caught in their throats as the dire consequences of their greed stood wrapped in filthy bandages before them, tottering, but menacing.
The mummy cast its newly acquired eyes about the room, taking in the grave robbers with loathing and scorn, looking from face to face, as if he were making an inventory, and wondering where to start . . .
The mummy’s borrowed eyes bore in on O’Connell, who stood protecting Evelyn, and He Who Shall Not Be Named unhinged his skeletal jaw, his nearly skinless mouth stretching to an inhuman size, as does a snake when devouring larger prey, and he emitted a primordial shriek that would have been loud enough to wake the dead, had the dead not wakened already.
This prompted screams from everyone else in the chamber, not just the young woman, but every brave man, including O’Connell, who—immediately embarrassed by his fearful behavior—shrieked right back mockingly at the mummy, and blasted the bastard with the elephant gun, a resounding explosion in the enclosed space that nearly shattered the eardrums of all concerned.
But it did much worse to the mummy, tossing it to the far wall like a rag doll, a limp pile of putrescent flesh and stained, mucky bandages, his ribcage half torn away, exposing the ooze and sludge of rancid organs within, leaking out.
No one, however, stayed around to take the mummy’s pulse. O’Connell latched on to Evelyn’s hand and pulled her into the darkness of the nearest tunnel, and she went along gladly, and the others followed after.
O’Connell’s torch showing the way, they were soon in the embalming chamber beneath the crevice where the Carnahan expedition’s dangling ropes provided an exit. They clambered up, stumbled out into the moonlight, sucking in the cold, fresh air of a night free of locusts now, though wind was whipping through the ruins, stirring sand, the campfire long since extinguished; and they huddled, disheveled, disheartened, in the shadow of the half-buried statue of Anubis.
From the darkness, through the stirring sand, emerged Med-jai warriors, on foot, rifles at the ready. O’Connell’s weapon was empty, and around him the other men—those tough Americans included—were putting their hands in the air. Dr. Chamberlin, holding on to The Book of the Dead, was already the prisoner of one of the warriors, being dragged along on his knees.
The angular-faced leader stepped forward, wind tugging at his black robes like a child seeking attention. “Who did this? Who read from The Book of the Dead? Who invoked the sacred incantations?”
Evelyn took a step forward, chin high. “I did. Evelyn Carnahan.”
“Carnahan,” the Med-jai leader said, as if tasting the word, and finding its flavor unpleasant. “I know of your father . . .”
“My father was a great man.”
“Your father was a great fool. And his daughter has proven even more foolish than he who unleashed the curse of Tutankhamen upon the world.”
O’Connell stepped up beside Evelyn. “Who are you?” he demanded.
“I am called Ardeth Bay.” The Med-jai leader’s eyes narrowed as he regarded O’Connell. “How are you known?”
“O’Connell.”
“You are the leader?”
Evelyn started to speak, but O’Connell, touching her arm, said, “Yes.”
Ardeth Bay sighed dramatically. “You were told to leave, or die. You refused. And now you may have killed us all—and many more. You have unleashed the evil we have held at bay for more than three thousand years.”
“Yeah, well maybe we ‘unleashed’ him,” O’Connell said, nodding toward the crevice, “but we stopped him, too. I let him have it with this.”
And O’Connell hefted the elephant gun.
Ardeth Bay’s smile was like an unhealed wound in his face. “No mortal weapon can kill this creature. He is not of this world.”
Two Med-jai warriors dragged Burns up. Slumping, barely conscious, the blood-spattered American stared at nothing out of the ghastly red holes where his eyes used to be.
Horrified and outraged by their friend’s condition, Henderson and Daniels lunged forward, Henderson yelling, “What did you bastards do to him?”
Daniels spat, “Goddamn savages!”
Ardeth Bay backhanded Daniels with a casual viciousness, and Daniels fell to the sand, landing on his wounded arm-in-a-sling, and howling. Henderson seemed ready to act, but a warrior’s rifle pointed at his head made him reconsider.
“We helped him, you fools,” Ardeth Bay growled. “Saved him before the creature you unchained could finish his work. Your friend is a lucky man—he lost only his eyes and his tongue.”
Henderson helped Daniels up. Evelyn was holding on to O’Connell’s arm, not so proud now.
As if delivering a death blow with his golden scimitar, Ardeth Bay gestured forcefully yet dismissively at the group of infidels, saying, “Now leave! All of you! Quickly—before He Who Shall Not Be Named returns to finish you.”
“Oh!” Jonathan said. “So you’re not going to kill us, then?”
Evelyn glared at her brother.
“Killing you is no longer a remedy,” Ardeth Bay said. “We must now go on the hunt, and find this creature—and find a way to kill him.”
Leaving the cowering Egyptologist behind, and the slumped Daniels, too, the Med-jai warriors—robes flapping in the wind—strode toward the crevice near the shrine of Anubis.
“Ardeth Bay!” O’Connell called.
The Med-jai leader stopped, turning to look back.
“You’re wasting your time,” O’Connell insisted. “I told you—I already blew the bastard to Kingdom Come!”
Ardeth Bay’s expression conveyed pity at first, then contempt, before settling into a somber mask, as he said, “Know this—He Who Shall Not Be Named is the Bringer of Death. He Who Shall Not Be Named does not eat, does not sleep, and does not stop until he has consumed the earth in pestilence and flame . . . Allah be with us all.”
Then the Med-jai were sliding down the ropes into the crevice.
O’Connell gathered the two expeditions, taking a head count, telling them, “We better break camp, what’s left of it—and get goi
ng while the going’s good. Say—where’s Beni, anyway?”
After the locusts had driven them underground, Beni had broken away from the American expedition, at his first opportunity, and had hidden away in the darkest corner he could find. Sounds of screams echoing through the catacombs had not encouraged him to come out of his hiding place. But now things seemed quiet—the worst, apparently, was over—and Beni began to make his way back.
Moving cautiously, gun in hand, Beni crept around the base of the statue of Anubis, knowing the ropes dropped down the crevice by the Carnahan expedition were just one chamber over—moonlight seeping in from the start of the crevice above paved his way. Then he rounded the base and almost bumped into somebody.
Something.
Something.
Beni looked at the rotting mummy in the loose, slimy bandages, a mummy with a huge gaping hole in its side, as if a cannonball had blown through there, and for a moment wondered how this artifact had been propped up like this. Then the mummy took a step forward, and Beni screamed and raised his gun to fire, and a bony decomposing hand batted the gun from Beni’s hand.
Beni backed up and found himself immediately cornered. Quivering with fear, he clutched at the chains around his neck, where symbols and icons from many faiths dangled; Beni was not a religious man, exactly, just hedging his bets. He held out a Christian crucifix, as if this were a vampire not a mummy, and uttered the opening phrases of the Lord’s Prayer.
The mummy shambled forward, apparently not a Christian.
Beni fumbled with the other icons, trying to slow the mummy’s progress: an Islamic sword and crescent moon, a Hindu Brama medallion, a small Buddhist Bodhisattva statue, blessing himself in Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, and even Latin, just in case this crumbling monstrosity staggering toward him was Catholic.
The mummy’s skeletal hand was outstretched, not to make the sign of the Cross, but to reach out for Beni’s throat.
Weeping, hysterical, Beni displayed a Star of David and began to pray in Hebrew . . .
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