The Mummy

by Max Allan Collins

  “ ‘And the rivers and waters of Egypt,’ ” Jonathan intoned, “ ‘went red . . . and were as blood.’ ”

  A sick feeling clenched O’Connell’s stomach—not the nausea of the taste of blood in his mouth, but the realization that if one of those plagues was suddenly here, then . . .

  “He’s gotta be here,” O’Connell said.

  “Who?” Jonathan asked.

  “Who?” Henderson asked.

  “The creature, you goddamn owls!” O’Connell growled, jumping off the stool, heading quickly for the door. “The mummy!”

  As he ran out into what had been a sunny afternoon, O’Connell found—in this land where it rained perhaps once a year—a sky roiling with black clouds, flashing with lightning. Running across the road through the front gates into the compound, O’Connell spotted a spooked Evelyn, walking with some books in hand, her white cat tagging along, staying close.

  Suddenly the sky thundered, startling Evelyn, and she dropped her handful of books; O’Connell grabbed her arm and she jumped like a scared cat—like the scared cat next to her, in fact.

  “You were right,” he told her, breathlessly. “It is my problem, too.”

  She frowned at him, trying to make sense of that, but before she could, a barrage of hail and fire hurtled from the sky, assaulting the courtyard like an air raid. O’Connell grabbed Evelyn, pulling her under the eaves, as a wooden trellis just in front of them caught fire.

  And then the courtyard was filled with panic—soldiers, servants, camels, horses, running in every direction, the men doing their best to duck the baseball-size hail, dodging the fireballs, a few running to the central fountain to get buckets and start fighting the small fires that had broken out all around the fort.

  O’Connell clutched Evelyn by the arms and spoke above the din of hysteria around them: “He’s here! The mummy is here!”

  An alarm caused by more than the maelstrom around them leaped like flames in her eyes. “Are you sure?”

  A ball of fire crashed within inches of them.

  “Call it a hunch,” he told her.

  Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the hail ceased; the fireballs abated. Only the whinnying of horses, braying of camels, and crackle of flames remained, and then those noises too settled and stopped and gave way to silence—a dead, unearthly silence.

  The silence did not last long: A scream of pain and terror unlike anything O’Connell had ever heard—and in recent days, he’d heard a few—ripped the stillness like a sharp blade through thin fabric.

  Right above them.

  “Stay here!” O’Connell said, and raced up the open wooden stairway to the living quarters above; and, of course, Evelyn followed.

  A turbaned servant, who’d gone in to check on his master, was in the process of running back out, wild-eyed, screaming, and when O’Connell entered the quarters of the blinded American, Burns, he immediately saw the man, what little was left of him, sprawled upon the floor: shriveled to a human husk, drained of its bodily liquids, organs sucked away as well.

  O’Connell was suddenly aware of Evelyn’s presence, because she had hugged him, as if holding on for dear life. Then a loud moaning emanating from the far side of the room, beyond the bed, by the window, drew their attention to a bandaged head-to-toe figure standing there, loosely draped in a dark robe.

  The mummy was skeletal, at first. Then as the adventurer from Chicago and the librarian from Cairo held each other close, in an embrace of terror, the creature began—incredibly, challenging their eyes—to regenerate.

  A powerful new musculature formed upon the bones, like raw red flowers blossoming; then a thick skin grew, forming over the rippling tendons. Missing bones, including the hole O’Connell had blown in the mummy’s ribcage, renewed themselves, and yet this muscular figure was somehow still clearly a corpse, wrapped in bandages, skin sickly gray, as if hell had sent its best soldier to wage war on those above.

  “Did you see that?” O’Connell whispered. “Or am I crazy?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  And then the mummy stretched, as if he’d woken from a long nap.

  “We do have a problem,” O’Connell admitted.

  The mummy was moving toward them, slowly, but with a renewed confidence; and his eyes were fixed upon Evelyn.

  O’Connell yanked the revolver from under his left shoulder and trained it upon the creature. “You get one chance to stop.”

  But the mummy kept coming, and O’Connell blasted away, stepping in front of Evelyn, blocking her, emptying the gun into the creature, which didn’t seem to mind at all, the bullets making entrance wounds but no blood welling out.

  Behind O’Connell, Jonathan came running into the room, with Henderson and Daniels close on his heels. The three men froze in place, stunned by the sight of the new and improved mummy that O’Connell was emptying his other revolver into now, to no apparent affect, as the thing closed in on him.

  O’Connell pitched his guns to the floor, thinking, What the hell, and he threw the best right hook he had in him, smack into the mummy’s face . . .

  . . . and his fist went through the flesh and bone and sank into the mummy’s head, getting stuck deep within!

  O’Connell stared at the head into which his hand was sunk wrist deep, thinking, That must’ve been a hell of a right hook!, and yanked his hand back out, like he was pulling it from thick, sticky mud, making a similar slurping sound. Evelyn was screaming behind him—or was that Jonathan? Before all of their eyes, the mummy’s face—the area that had come into contact with O’Connell’s fist—quickly degenerated, every bit as fast as the mummy’s body had regenerated minutes before, decaying down to the bone, as if O’Connell’s hand had infected it.

  The mummy roared with rage and grabbed onto O’Connell by the shoulders, as if to shake him. O’Connell grabbed one of the mummy’s hands, but could not budge it and then he was hurled across the room, into Jonathan, Henderson, and Daniels, knocking them down like milk bottles at a carnival.

  But the mummy’s hand had touched O’Connell’s flesh and that hand too began to shrivel and decay, as if it were O’Connell who were the plague.

  As O’Connell dazedly pushed himself up into a sitting position, the mummy was closing in on Evelyn, backing her up against a wall, where she raised the back of a hand to her mouth, eyes wide with fright.

  The mummy was smiling at her! He spoke softly, tenderly, in a language that O’Connell figured was ancient Egyptian. The goddamn monster was leaning in to kiss her!

  O’Connell was on his feet, and ready to infect that bastard with his touch again, when Cleo, Evelyn’s white cat, revealed its presence atop a dresser, hissing, showing its teeth, hair standing up on its arched back, interrupting this tender moment between corpse and damsel.

  The mummy reared back, shrieking like a scared old woman.

  Then the balcony doors blew open with a sudden gust of wind and—though those who witnessed it questioned, later, what exactly they’d seen—the mummy seemed to spin into a tiny twister of sand and wind and speed, whipping himself into nothing except a spiraling sandstorm that went swirling out the doors.

  Gone.

  Everyone stumbled toward the center of the room and huddled, like confused football players, seeking a quarterback.

  “What did he say to you?” O’Connell asked her.

  She was trembling. “He . . . he said, ‘You saved me. I am grateful.’ ”

  White with fear, Henderson said, “We’re cursed . . . all of us . . . cursed.”

  And the hardbitten American stumbled over to the shriveled shell of his dead friend, and knelt beside him, and began to weep—whether for himself or Burns, no one knew, and certainly no one asked.

  16

  Strange Bedfellows

  Evelyn knew of only one person who might provide them with the answers they needed to combat He Who Shall Not Be Named, that walking plague carrier who had performed unspeakable acts and dark magic in the room where Burns had died.<
br />
  She had to admit that, to his credit, O’Connell did not display any silly masculine pride when it came time for her to step forward and take the initiative. He had dutifully followed her lead as she instructed Jonathan to bring his Dusenberg around (when her brother had gone to their house to fetch her steamer trunk, he had returned with the convertible) and the entire lot of them—O’Connell, Jonathan, Henderson, Daniels, and herself—had piled in and roared off from the fort to her old place of employment.

  Returning to this familiar facility made an eerie homecoming for Evelyn. Their feet echoing off the marble floors of the Cairo museum, she led the men through the halls, past galleries displaying the coffins of ancient kings, and the mummified kings themselves, who seemed to watch them pass by. In all the many months she had worked here, Evelyn had never found these premises, well, spooky . . . but now that she had met a mummy, in the rotting flesh, the nature of this huge haunted house, this repository of grave robbing, finally sank in for her, and her skin crawled.

  She was leading the little group—the men in their white shirts, holstered guns, and chinos looking like a safari seeking a wild beast to shoot (which wasn’t far from the truth)—toward the curator’s office at the back of the museum. But as they rounded a corner, in the gallery to the left, there stood Dr. Bey—and not alone.

  The round little man with the round face, a red fez atop his oily thinning black hair, in his usual dark suit with string tie, was speaking to an unusual guest: an angular-faced figure in dark, flowing robes, from under which gleamed the handle of a golden scimitar . . .

  . . . Ardeth Bay—the chieftain of the Med-jai warriors—standing tall, like a figure from a museum exhibit come to life.

  “You!” everyone said, in an echoing chorus of surprise and outrage.

  Revolvers flew into the hands of O’Connell, Henderson, and Daniels; but Ardeth Bay merely glowered at them, a scowl touched with a contemptuous smile.

  The curator gestured to Evelyn and her contingent. “Miss Carnahan. Gentlemen.” And he gestured to the Med-jai leader. “May I introduce Ardeth Bay . . . a guest from out of town.”

  “We’ve met,” O’Connell snapped.

  Evelyn stepped forward, facing her ex-boss. “What is he doing here?”

  “Do you truly wish to know? Or would your impulsive American friends prefer to react as they always do? With swift, stupid violence, and no thought as to consequences whatsoever?”

  And indeed the guns of the Americans were raised and trained upon the curator and the warrior, the tension in the air crackling.

  Pieces fitted quickly into place within Evelyn’s mind, and she said, “As opposed to your considered, astute violence, Dr. Bey?” She gestured to Ardeth Bay. “You told the Med-jai that I possessed the puzzle box, the key . . . You sent them to steal it from me—and kill me!”

  “It was not my desire for you to die—and here you stand alive before me.”

  “But if I had been killed, and the key box retrieved, that would have been an acceptable price to pay, I suppose?”

  “Frankly, Miss Carnahan . . . yes. The life of one silly, headstrong, incompetent girl in trade for saving the world from what, in your religion, might be called Armageddon? Oh yes—yes and yes, a thousand times.”

  O’Connell stepped forward, uncocking his revolver, returning it to his holster; he nodded to Henderson and Daniels and the men frowned, but lowered their guns—they did not, however, join O’Connell in holstering their weapons.

  “I don’t think threats or insults are productive, at this point,” O’Connell said, in a reasonable, intelligent tone that surprised Evelyn. “The genie’s out of the bottle, so to speak. Maybe we need to work together.”

  Dr. Bey’s smile was patronizing, his tiny mustache twitching. “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer just to shoot us?”

  “I’m not saying that doesn’t sound like a good time, pal.” And O’Connell gave Ardeth Bay a nasty smile. “But I just saw my fist vanish into the skull of some walking dead ‘thing.’ So I’m willing to go on faith here, at least for a little ways.”

  “You would not be capable of comprehending—”

  “Hey. I saw a guy turn into a sandstorm and blow himself out the window. You might be surprised what I’d buy, at this point.”

  The curator studied O’Connell’s face, as if it were an inscription he was translating, and then Dr. Bey said, “Follow me,” leading the group through the gallery, Ardeth Bay at his side.

  As if a tour guide, the curator led them down a sun-dappled aisle under high skylights, past displays with which Evelyn was most familiar, splendid mummy caskets of fine woods, exquisitely carved and painted with pictures telling the stories of the lives of their occupants.

  Dr. Bey was saying, “This is King Rameses, who went to school with Moses—the pharaoh who oppressed the Israelites, who set in motion the tyranny that would your bring your God to afflict Egypt with plagues.”

  The well-preserved, iron-jawed Rameses seemed to look back at them, the teeth in his black face as white as if they’d been brushed this morning.

  “And this is Seti the First, father of Rameses—a great warrior, who built a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea.”

  On display with his chariot and sword, Seti was propped up in his casket, his black arms folded, his black head resting on yellow grave clothes, features peaceful.

  The throne of Seti was nearby and the curator sat in it, crossing his legs casually. “As you can see, Seti sleeps well—unlike his faithless high priest, Imhotep, who successfully conspired with a traitorous wench to murder him. This is why Imhotep was buried alive.”

  “And cursed with the dreaded hom-dai,” Evelyn whispered.

  “My dear,” the curator said, “we will make a scholar of you yet.” He gestured toward Ardeth Bay, who stood beside the seated-in-the-throne curator like a faithful servant. “We are members of an ancient sect—”

  “The Med-jai,” Evelyn said.

  “I am impressed. But I doubt you were aware, my dear, that this secret society had endured, pursuing its sacred mission down through these three thousand years. For all that time, the Med-jai have guarded the City of the Dead, protecting it from the desecration of grave robbers, in part . . . but also to protect the world from the living curse buried there. You see, we are sworn at manhood to do all in our power to prevent High Priest Imhotep from returning into this world. And for thirty-nine generations, we have prevailed.”

  “But now because of you,” Ardeth Bay said, thrusting a finger at Evelyn, “we have failed.”

  Appalled, Evelyn said, “And this justifies killing innocent people?”

  “To stop this creature,” the warrior said, “I would gladly kill you now.”

  O’Connell stepped between them and said to the seated curator, “Let’s just keep it friendly, okay, pops? You want to try to pin the blame-tail on some jackass, or do you want to help us stop this son of a bitch?”

  Evelyn frowned at O’Connell, wondering if she’d just been insulted.

  A small smile traced itself beneath the curator’s mustache; he nodded. “I believe you are right . . . Mr. O’Connell, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. You know, for instance—why was this big bad monster afraid of a little bitty kitty?”

  “Cats are the guardians of the underworld. He Who Shall Not Be Named will fear these harmless animals until he is fully returned to his perfect state.”

  “Regenerating himself, you mean.”

  “Yes. Once he has . . . regenerated . . . he will fear nothing. And nothing will be able to stop him.”

  Daniels stepped forward, gesturing with his revolver at the curator. “I don’t need this clown in a Masonic cap to tell me how this creep is doin’ that! He’s killing everybody who opened that chest! He’s sucking all of us dry!”

  “A very astute observation,” the curator said, “from so unlearned a man.”

  O’Connell glanced sharply at Henderson, who nodded, and went over to settle his fr
iend down.

  Evelyn approached the throne-perched curator. “At Hamanaptra, Imhotep addressed me by an ancient name.”

  Alarmed, the curator asked, “What was that name?”

  “Anck-su-namun.”

  The curator and the Med-jai chief exchanged dire looks.

  O’Connell said, “I think the slimy bastard was about to try to kiss her, when that cat spooked him.”

  Nodding, absorbing this, Dr. Bey said, “That is the name of the mistress for the love of whom He Who Shall Not Be Named was cursed. Could it be, even after these three thousand years, even after suffering unending death, flesh eaten away by scarab beetles . . . that even now he loves her?”

  “A love that spans the ages,” Evelyn said. “How sad . . . how romantic . . .”

  “Are you kidding?” O’Connell said, wide-eyed.

  Her brother was shaking his head, smirking at her.

  Embarrassed, she looked away.

  Ardeth Bay said, “He Who Shall Not Be Named will try to raise Anck-su-namun from the dead.”

  “Yeah,” O’Connell said, “and how the hell will he manage that, exactly?”

  “With a human sacrifice,” the curator said. Then he nodded toward Evelyn. “And it would appear He Who Shall Not Be Named has chosen a subject.”

  Evelyn felt a sudden chill—and every eye in the room, including those of the dead pharaohs, upon her.

  Jonathan made a clicking sound in his cheek. “Bad luck, Sis. Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to be popular.”

  “Jesus,” O’Connell breathed. “Just when I figured things couldn’t get any worse . . .”

  “On the contrary,” Dr. Bey said. “This may give us the time we need to find a way to kill this evil creature.”

  “That’s why we’re here, doc,” O’Connell said. “You’re the expert—can we read some other incantation from that Book of the Dead?”

  “Possibly—if it could be retrieved. But I know of nothing, either in ancient writings or modern scholarship, to confirm that assumption.”

  The gallery, lighted only by gas torches, had grown dark.