. . . and the mummy stopped, as if he’d taken root.
That was funny, Beni thought; he didn’t look Jewish.
Nonetheless, that decaying hand had lowered, and those weirdly familiar eyes were staring at Beni, who blessed himself in Hebrew.
The mummy spoke, his voice a rumbling thing, echoing up like bubbling lava: “You speak the language of the slaves.”
This was spoken in ancient Egyptian, and meant nothing to Beni, but the mummy’s next words, in Hebrew, did: “I am Imhotep . . . Serve me . . . and the rewards . . . will be bountiful.”
The mummy clawed at himself, at his tattered bandages, and withdrew a small object, which he displayed to Beni, in a fetid palm crawling with squirming maggots: a jeweled fragment of the one canopic jar that had been discovered in a shattered state.
In Hebrew, the mummy asked, “Where are Anck-su-namun’s sacred jars?”
And in Hebrew, Beni said, “I will help you find them.”
Above ground, the two expeditions had broken camp, and loaded up their horses and their camels.
Henderson and Daniels helped their blinded friend up onto his horse, putting the reins in his hands, assuring him they would lead him. Burns said nothing, a living dead man in a saddle, but at least he didn’t fall out of it.
O’Connell helped Evelyn up onto her camel. She was looking toward Dr. Chamberlin, saddled up, clutching The Book of the Dead to him as if it were a life preserver that would keep him afloat through the sea of the night and desert that awaited them.
“Let him keep the damn thing,” O’Connell told her. “All we want now is our lives.”
She swallowed, nodded, and said, “You’re right . . . Rick.”
He smiled at her. “Let’s go back to civilization, Evelyn—our civilization.”
And soon O’Connell and Jonathan were astride their camels, as well, heading out into the moonswept, windblown desert, ready to leave the ruins and riches of Hamanaptra gladly behind.
As they rode quickly away, they did not see—none of them—the skeletal hand punch up out of the sand, behind them, in the City of the Dead.
But they did hear the terrible, resounding shriek of the mummy, echoing across the sands, telling them that Ardeth Bay had been right: O’Connell’s mortal weapon had not killed He Who Shall Not Be Named.
That they had indeed unleashed the Bringer of Death.
PART THREE
The Mummy’s Revenge
Cairo—1925
15
Sanctuary
On the southernmost outskirts of Cairo squatted Fort Stack, named after Sir Lee Stack, the assassinated governor general of the Sudan. The mudbrick, courtyard affair reminded O’Connell of a cavalry outpost in the old American West. Great Britain had withdrawn, not long ago, from the actual governing of Egypt—Fuad the First was the elected king—but the British army remained in an advisory capacity.
It was to Fort Stack, where the Union Jack flapped lazily in the dry breeze, that the disheveled, dusty caravan of the combined Carnahan and American expeditions sought sanctuary from the blistering desert sun, not to mention assorted plagues and a resurrected mummy. After a three-day trek from oasis to oasis, they had trudged up to the front gate, displayed their various papers, and were granted admittance.
For two days, the members of the combined parties mostly slept, in the guest quarters of the fort; they had taken their meals in the officers’ mess, at the generous invitation of the commandant, and the only time any of them had left the compound was to go to a nearby tavern whose clientele was largely off-duty soldiers.
On the second day, a steamer trunk of clothing had arrived for Evelyn, which she had dispatched Jonathan to bring from their home, accompanied by her white cat, Cleo. O’Connell had carried the trunk up the stairs to her second-floor quarters overlooking the courtyard while Evelyn carried and petted the purring animal.
Today, the third day, however, she had called O’Connell to her two-room quarters and—in the process of removing her clothing from the closet of the spare, military-style bedroom, and piling them back into the steamer trunk—announced that she was mounting a return expedition.
And O’Connell was invited.
He stood, dumbfounded, watching her parade from the closet to the trunk, her movements brisk and mannish, her attire the same—jodphurs, black boots, and a white blouse. All she needed was a cap and riding crop and a fox to chase.
“Another expedition?”
“Yes,” she said crisply. “I’m arranging for a full team of diggers and this time we’ll have proper equipment, and proper weapons . . .”
“Evelyn, I shot him with an elephant gun.”
Her cat had crawled inside the trunk; she lifted the white animal out and placed some underthings within. “Now, I want you to find some brave, competent men, regular soldiers of fortune—”
“What do you call Henderson and that bunch? And you saw how well they fared! Listen, for all we know, that mummy is dead, or anyway dead again . . . I blasted the bastard! Pardon my French.”
She frowned at him. “You heard that terrible scream as we rode off!”
He followed her to the closet. “Maybe that was his death rattle, or maybe it was just the desert wind playing tricks on our ears.”
“Fine.” Dresses folded over her arm, she marched to the trunk and deposited them. “Then if the mummy is dead, why not return and properly excavate the site? We’d barely scratched the surface, you know.”
“And risk the wrath of those Med-jai warriors again?”
She shrugged, heading back to the closet. “They had every opportunity to do us ill, and they didn’t.”
Watching her as she made the journey from closet to trunk and back again, O’Connell gestured melodramatically. “Do you really think that walking dead man is going to come after us? It’s been days, and where’s the rest of his plagues? Have you noticed the sun turning black, or seen any water turn to blood? Can’t say I have.”
Tucking some shoes away, she looked up, arching an eyebrow, a teacher explaining something to a particularly dim student. “The curse is very specific—he will seek us out, if we don’t seek him out. It’s those who disturbed his slumber who—”
“I thought you didn’t believe in curses.”
“I was wrong.”
“You now believe your parents died as a result of King Tut’s curse?”
She paused, halfway between closet and trunk. “I . . . I believe I do. You see, Mr. O’Connell, once a young woman has had a tête-à-tête with a walking, talking corpse, her outlook on life tends to change.”
He followed her along as she packed. “All right, I understand all that, but no new expedition—why borrow trouble? Maybe you’d like to see Chicago; we’ll go rowing on the lake. Or maybe you could give me a tour of London; I always wanted to see the clowns at Picadilly Circus.”
She gazed at him and the affection showed through. “Rick . . . we can’t run away from this.”
“Who’s running away? I just don’t see the point of running back to where we just barely escaped with our lives.”
Her expression turned firm, her voice, too. “We woke him—and it’s our responsibility to try to stop him.”
“We woke him?”
“All right—I woke him. And I intend to stop him. If you don’t want to help me, well, that’s your decision . . . Cleo! Bad girl.”
The cat was in the trunk again.
“Listen,” he said, “I’m no coward, but you heard that Med-jai chief, Ardeth What’s-It . . . He said no mortal weapons can kill this thing.”
That stopped her, but only to mull over his words, as if he’d provided her telling food for thought. “Then perhaps we need to consider what would constitute an ‘immortal weapon.’ Perhaps another incantation in The Book of the Dead . . .”
“I want no part of this.” He went to the trunk and grabbed a handful of her clothes and marched back to the closet with them. “And I can’t allow you to—”
Hanging her dresses back up in the closet, he said, “Evelyn, it’s too goddamn dangerous.”
“Rick . . . I need your help. Now that this creature has been reborn, his curse will spread, like a terrible infection. The mummy himself is the real plague, a plague that could destroy the entire world.”
He snatched some underthings from the trunk and marched them to the chest of drawers. “That’s not my problem.”
She stepped in front of him. “Are you insane? It’s everybody’s problem!”
“I’m not insane—that’s why I want no part of this. Look, I appreciate what you did for me, buying my freedom, saving my life. But the agreement was I’d take you to Hamanaptra. I did that, and I brought you back, too.”
She snatched the underthings from him and marched them back to the trunk, and dropped them in. “Oh, and so what’s the American term? We’re ‘square’ now? We’re ‘even’?”
“I didn’t say that . . .”
Hands on her hips, chin high, she peered down her nose at him, in that familiar, infuriating way she had. “Is that what this has been to you, what I’ve been? A business arrangement?”
“Hey—you got a choice: Come with me, and leave this insanity behind; or hop a boat back to hell, and try to save the world.”
“I’ve already booked passage, thank you.”
“Fine,” he said.
“Fine,” she said.
He searched for just the right, telling remark, to really put her in her place, to state his case in a manner so articulately that later, upon reflection, she would just have to come around to his way of thinking.
“Fine!” he said, and slammed the door behind him.
Then he realized he had some of her underthings in one hand, opened the door, pitched them in, and went off to get drunk.
Within minutes, O’Connell was sitting at the bar in the dingy dive near the fort, where even in the middle of the afternoon, business was good. Within these mud walls, in the dim gas lighting, soldiers of His Majesty and ex-soldiers of His Majesty and soldiers of fortune mixed bad women and bad booze in search of good times. A ceiling fan stirred the stale air as O’Connell sat between Jonathan and an old friend of Jonathan’s, Winston Havlock of the Royal Air Force, who’d been stationed here for years.
The walrus-mustached Havlock, his eyes nearly as bloodshot as his nose, was in fact the last of the RAF still assigned to Cairo. The “rest of the laddies,” as he put it, had either died in the air and been buried in the sand, or been transferred to better duty. A fighter pilot who now served as a taxi for British officers, Havlock spent more time in the bag, these days, than in the air.
Ten minutes into a bottle of whiskey, Havlock was O’Connell’s “old friend,” as well.
“Rick, old sport,” Winston said, “ever since the Great War ended, there’s been nary a challenge worthy of men like us.”
“You might be surprised,” O’Connell told him.
“At times I wish I’d’ve gone down in a blaze of glory, like the other lads, ’stead of sitting around this foul watering hole, rotting from boredom and booze.”
Jonathan was lifting a shot glass to his lips when Havlock reached out, plucked it from Jonathan’s fingers and drank it down.
“Bloody hell, Winston!” Jonathan said. “What’s the idea?”
“That rotgut’s not worthy of you, lad,” Havlock told him, climbing off the stool, barely able to stand. “Never let it be said Winston Havlock was not willing to sacrifice for his friends.”
“Thank you, ever so,” Jonathan commented dryly.
The pilot slapped both O’Connell and Jonathan on the back, said, “Right-o, lads! It’s back to the airfield with me.”
And he staggered off.
O’Connell raised an eyebrow. “How would you like to have him as your pilot?”
“Winston’s never really needed a plane to fly higher than a kite. Bartender!”
As O’Connell and Jonathan sipped their whiskey (Havlock was right: It was vile rotgut, at that), Henderson and Daniels sidled up to the bar. Daniels still had an arm in a sling and both men—though shaved and bathed, in fresh shirts and chinos—had a hangdog, bedraggled look.
“Well,” Henderson sighed wearily, “we’re all packed up. Booked a steamer to Alexandria, for tomorrow morning.”
Jonathan, who was a little drunk, said, “Going back home to mummy?”
Henderson bared his teeth, and it wasn’t a smile.
O’Connell touched Henderson’s arm, gently, and said, “Don’t mind him. He’s just a fool.”
“A bloody fool, I’ll have you know,” Jonathan insisted. “Sit down, gentlemen. My sister will buy you a drink.”
Henderson took the stool next to O’Connell, but Daniels—who was scowling at Jonathan, as if trying to decide whether to brain him or not—just stood there.
Henderson said to O’Connell, “So—you think that walking maggot pile is really coming after us?”
“I don’t know,” O’Connell said. “Plague season seems to be over, anyway. Funny . . . now that we’re away from that ungodly place, it’s like it . . . never happened.”
“Tell that to Burns,” Daniels snapped, still just standing there.
O’Connell asked, “How is he?”
“How the hell do you think he is? He had his goddamn eyes and tongue ripped out. How would you be?”
And Daniels, shaking his head, stormed out of the tavern.
“Don’t mind him,” Henderson said, his turn to apologize for a friend’s behavior. “It’s just . . . hell, can you imagine? Your eyes, your tongue, torn out like pages from a goddamn book. If I was Burns, I’d feed myself the barrel of a gun.”
“Maybe you can get him some help back in the States,” O’Connell said, swirling whiskey in his shot glass.
“You ask me,” Henderson said, “the only way to help the poor bastard is . . . kill him.”
And Henderson threw back a shot glass of whiskey, then called for another.
Sunlight filtered in through the closed curtains, but the quarters inhabited by the third American—Burns—were dark. The fort had electric lighting, but those lights were off. Only those few rays of sun were available to dance on the precious jewels decorating the canopic jar that sat in the midst of a table like a centerpiece. The man staying in this spartanly furnished guest room was, after all, blind, sitting at that table in dark glasses.
He had heard a knock at his door, and bid whoever-it-was enter. And whoever-it-was had turned out to be Beni, his expedition’s missing guide, who had somehow made his way back to Cairo, too. With Beni was an honored visitor who, informed of the valuable canopic jar, wished to make Burns an offer.
Or so Beni had hurriedly said.
And now, attended by Burns’s turbaned native servant, the three men sat at the table—Burns, in white shirt and chinos, Beni in his black pajamalike apparel, and (as Beni had introduced him to Burns) Prince Imhotep, a tall presence in a dark hooded robe, his face covered in a white mask, sculpted to his features, eyes glittering out of almond-shaped holes.
But, of course, Burns could not see this strange, forbidding figure, and for the first time since his eyes and tongue had been taken from him, a small kindling of hope grew within him: a buyer for his artifact! Money to take home, in seeking aid, therapy, nursing, for his new deformities . . .
“So varee peased too mee choo,” Burns said, by way of tongueless greeting. And the American, almost eagerly, thrust his hand out in the Western world’s ritual of friendship and trust, the handshake—a ritual his visitor refused.
Beni said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Burns, but the prince’s religion does not allow him to touch one beneath his station. A silly Eastern superstition, but we must honor it.”
“Mah ahpaw-low-gees,” Burns said.
The native servant poured tea for the group, but when Burns reached for his cup, he spilled it.
“Oooh!” Burns said. “Sa
w-ree. Eyes am whaa they use taw be.”
“The prince sympathizes with your loss of sight,” Beni said, shooing the servant away, using a harsh look to send him from the room. “The eyes he’s using aren’t the best, either.”
Long, tapering fingers reached for the canopic jar—the flesh of the hands bandaged, and strangely withered. Imhotep picked up the jar, and Beni rose, backing away.
“Mr. Burns,” Beni continued, “the prince humbly thanks you for your hospitality . . . not to mention your eyes.”
“Mah . . . eyes?”
“Oh, yes, and your tongue.”
Confusion blurred into fear within the darkness that was the world Burns lived in.
Beni was saying, “But I am afraid we must ask you to contribute even more, sir. You see, the prince must consummate the curse that you and your friends have brought down upon yourselves.”
Burns stood, seized by fear, stumbling backward, losing his way in this small room he’d memorized, as lost as if he were wandering in the desert. The only mercy Imhotep had granted him was ripping out his eyes, days before, which spared Burns from the horror of seeing the robed mummy remove his strange mask to reveal the hideous visage beneath: a skull whose flesh had rotted largely away, a gray grotesque mask-beneath-the-mask enlivened only by bright eyes and rotten teeth and a pink darting tongue.
• • •
In the dingy dive near the fort, three men seated at the bar—bound together by the adversity of the Hamanaptra adventure—raised shot glasses, clinking them together, in one last farewell drink.
“Good luck, fellas,” Henderson said, and simultaneously he, O’Connell, and Jonathan threw back their shot glasses of whiskey . . . and then, just as simultaneously, spat the liquid back out, onto the sand-and-sawdust-covered floor.
Around them, other patrons were doing the same—spitting out their drinks onto the floor, onto tables, onto the bar—and everywhere the liquid glimmered red.
“Sweet Jesus!” Henderson said, rubbing his face with a hand, streaking his flesh scarlet.
“Blood,” O’Connell whispered.
The floor of the tavern looked like the aftermath of a slaughter, a bloodbath . . .
The Mummy Page 16