Also by Lorne Dixon
Snarl
The Lifeless
Hound: Curse of the Baskervilles (with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Coscom Entertainment
winnipeg
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual places, events or persons living or dead or any known mummies is purely coincidental.
ISBN - 13 978-1-926712-89-5
Eternal Unrest is Copyright © 2011 by Lorne Dixon. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce in whole or in part in any form or medium.
Published by Coscom Entertainment
www.coscomentertainment.com
Text set in Garamond; eBook Edition
Cover Art by C.J. Hutchinson and Jesus Morales/Dark Riddle
Author Photo by Randy Piazza
For Mommom
Eternal Gratitude:
Jennie,
A.P. Fuchs,
Randy and Jessy Piazza,
Harrison Howe,
Mike and Melissa De Kler,
+R.J. Cavender+ and +Boyd Harris+,
Nick Cato, &
Susan and David Kolan.
Apologia
This is a work of fiction, not an attempt at a scholarly history lesson. Serious students of history—both of ancient Egypt and World War Two—will without doubt find that I’ve taken liberties with both time periods.
No Love for the Bandaged Ones
An introduction by Nick Cato
Most zombie fans became quite excited back in 2003 when a certain zombie novel by an author who was about to explode started gaining popularity. And when said novel was taken from the small press and placed into the mainstream, things began to snowball. Quickly. Being a zombie fan, I was thrilled to see so much zombie fiction coming from both the small and large presses. It still is. And while it’s safe to say zombies have become about as played out as vampires (both in films and fiction), both still continue to sell.
A few years ago, there was a push (of sorts) around the horror fiction scene to find the new “it” monster. It seemed the push was on for werewolves to have their turn. And sure enough, there’s been plenty of werewolf fiction to go around, from serious horror stories to ridiculous “paranormal romances” featuring over-sexed lycanthropes (and everything in-between).
And yet werewolves still don’t have the fanatical following vampires and zombies do (at least not on as grand a scale). For every werewolf novel or film released, there are over a dozen vampire and zombie yarns to make sure their hairy nemesis’s stay in their place.
Part of the problem also lies with the “push.” Vampires have always had a strong following, even before Anne Rice revolutionized how we perceive them and before certain authors made them as loveable as your neighborhood youth minister. Zombie fans grew by the thousands since George Romero’s second zombie film hit screens in 1979, and even those who rarely read have at least heard about that zombie novel from 2003, or the one written by Mel Brooks’s son. In both cases, vampires and zombies simply “happened.” No one was telling anyone, “Here’s your new it monster … bow to them or face the consequences!”
I believe part of the reason werewolves (despite how popular they’ve become in horror fiction over the past few years) still haven’t reached that certain height (at least among horror fans) is that the hairy beasts have been forced on us … we’ve all been told this is the thing we should be liking at the moment.
During a conversation at a horror convention sometime in 2008, I remember telling the group I was with, “Why can’t mummies be the new ‘it’ monster?” True, I said it as a joke, but a few eyes were opened, including my own. Sure, mummies have been around as long as vamps and zombies both in film and fiction, but in my humble opinion they’ve always been the true underdog of monsterdom (despite George Romero’s claim of this title for zombies). Everyone has seen one of Christopher Lee’s Hammer vampire films, but how many can recall 1971’s Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb (also released by Hammer Films)? Most everyday readers can recall Anne Rice’s 1976 novel, Interview with the Vampire, but how many realize she tried her hand at a mummy story in 1989 with her novel, The Mummy?
See, mummies have always been the underdog.
No one has ever tried to tell us they’re the new “it” monster. Because they never have been, even after Boris Karloff delivered his famous portrayal in 1932—even when Abbott and Costello used one in their 1955 comedy classic—even when Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) used one in its adaptation of the Joe Lansdale novella—even when 1981’s euro-trash gore-flick, Dawn of the Mummy, tried to make them as cool as zombies (but, despite its attempt, failed)—and for us fiction freaks, even when the legendary Richard Laymon unleashed a nasty female mummy in his novel To Wake the Dead.
Nope. There’s just never been that certain wide-spread love for mummies that vampires, zombies, and even werewolves have received over the years.
So imagine my surprise in September 2010, while I was at a Horrorfind convention in Pennsylvania, when author Lorne Dixon told me he was working on a mummy novel. He mentioned this right after I told him I had managed to turn a 90-minute vampire panel the night before into a 10-minute vampire panel, with the remaining 70 minutes spent on the discussion of mummies! The topic of said panel was on how un-scary and commercial vampires had become (primarily in film). One thing led to another, and somehow I mentioned the horribleness of the film, Dawn of the Mummy, and before long several people in attendance (and on the panel) were all asking, “Yeah! Where are all the mummies?”
Perhaps a small seed was planted in the minds of this room full of (mostly) horror authors and publishers. Lorne Dixon, however, was not at this panel, hence why I was so surprised when he told me about the novel you’re now holding in your hands.
Dixon does something here that the twice-mentioned euro-mummy flick doesn’t; he does something here that most Hammer mummy films—as good as they are—failed to do; and most impressively, he does something that Anne Rice, Joe Lansdale, Richard Laymon, and a host of other mummy novelists failed to do: he has delivered a mummy novel that’s actually scary … a mummy novel that’s fast-paced, rich in speculative history, and that’s nearly impossible to put down. There’s no arguing with Rice’s mastery of the English language, or Lansdale’s clever humor and wit, or the ultra B-movie violence Laymon made sure to deliver. Yet Dixon, with Eternal Unrest, has crafted a chilling, claustrophobic, straight-forward horror story set during World War 2 that manages to portray mummies as they were meant to be: physically, they’re similar to zombies, and spiritually, they’re the embodiment of ancient curses that are the staple of most mummy stories. The three mummies in this novel mean business. They don’t play games. They’re not your friends and will never be your lover. And if you’re lucky enough to kill one, it won’t turn into pretty sparkles.
This is a modern horror novel with much old school appeal. There are no quirks or gimmicks at play that made the aforementioned mummy stories incomplete in certain ways (and I know I’m in the minority here when it comes to my disappointment with Bubba Ho-Tep, so no offense if you’re a fan). Eternal Unrest is a mummy novel and it’s proud to be one. It doesn’t attempt to apologize for having bandaged, supernatural monsters running amok, but embraces them and lets them do what they were meant to do: scare and entertain fans of horror fiction. Most importantly, Dixon’s novel is a serious, long overdue example of a no-holds-barred mummy story done the right way.
No one that I know of (including myself) is claiming mummies will now be the new “it” monster. But if a strin
g of like-minded novels (and films) follow Eternal Unrest, there’s no doubt in my mind there may finally be some wide-spread love for the Bandaged Ones.
Nick Cato
Staten Island, NY, October, 2011
١
1153 B.C.
Caught in the invisible, jostling hands of the Sinai desert winds, the restless sands danced, rising off the cracked and barren flatlands as a sparkling, glassy mist. Petosiris shielded his eyes and drew a swatch of weather-beaten cloth across his mouth. The desert could be unforgiving and cruel. Even experienced travelers lost their bearings staring out at an endless golden horizon. Too easy to let the sands in, to inhale the coarse grains with each breath, and begin to dehydrate and die.
Petosiris had not come to die. The opposite, actually: he had been charged with a horrible responsibility: to harvest lives at the scale of a plague. Usermaatre Meryamun Ramesses III, was dead—murdered—and every drop of his blood would need to be accounted for with a life.
The assassins were already dead, struck down by Petosiris’s blade in the Pharaoh’s temple moments after their attack. Their deaths did not begin to pay their debts.
Twenty days’ journey from the city’s Northern outpost, the conspirators’ home was a village of conscripted men in the shadows of three high dunes. As Ra moved the light across the sky, the soldier’s wives and children remained protected from its burning rays by the three peaks. The village was named Ra’s Shadow. Although shielded from the burning sun, they would not be protected from Petosiris and his men. He gave the order for the five dozen archers in his company to surround the town and block off all escape routes. There was to be no exit from Ra’s Shadow but death.
Turning, he faced them and assessed their fatigue after the long ride from the city. Ankhhaf, Khaemweset, and Siatum—his most trusted soldiers—wore tired faces, but the fires of their faith burned strong in their countenance. He said nothing to them. They needed no orders. Trained since birth, they were more warrior than man, a separate creature bred for the highest art of worship and devotion: they were warrior priests. Only bloodstains on their hands could appease the angry gods.
The remaining sixty soldiers looked worse, beaten down by the elements and exhausted by the long journey. Some would surely die on the long walk home once the rationed water ran out; even well-trained soldiers would succumb to the limitations of their bodies. The priests would pray for them. But before that, today, they would hold their positions and take aim at Ra’s Shadow with their bows as he and his fellow priests delivered the wrath of the gods.
Kneeling down, Petosiris bowed his head to the sun, closed his eyes, and listened to his three companions dropping to the soil. They recited their favorite war prayers, voices overlapping, and asked the gods to accept the offerings the day would bring.
Finishing his prayer, Petosiris opened his eyes and ran a hand over his neck and traced the raised ink on his flesh—a holy inscription in the shape of a crocodile curled around a dark woman. Rising to his feet, he raised the mask of Sobek to his face, a forged metal sculpture of the crocodile god’s elongated face. The others tied heavy canvas scarves over their faces, leaving only a thin slit for their eyes.
They entered the village through crude wooden gates. The town was busy—elderly men tending to a center market, slaves cleaning and fetching, women shopping, with children dangling from pouches on their bellies. Beyond the market there were rows of shabby thatched-roofed huts and shaded desert garden tents. The villagers whispered, alerting each other to the priests, and stared at their visitors with blank faces. Some of the old men had served in the army, still wore scars from Hittite swords, but even they did not recognize the emblem sewn into the priests’ black robes. Whereas the Pharaoh’s official guards’ crest was the jackal with nine captives, the symbol on Petosiris and his men portrayed the prisoners dead, limp bodies impaled on wooden spikes.
Marching into the market, Petosiris surveyed the goods on sale on the dealer’s tables: ox flesh, dried fish, and plant roots. Others sold dining utensils, cooking pots, and clothes. At the end of the market, an old man with a stump for a right arm displayed a variety of painted papyrus leaves. Leaning in, Petosiris struggled to decipher the primitive dialect. The village’s hieratic writing probably hadn’t changed since the beginning of the New Kingdom.
But Petosiris recognized enough to understand he was looking at a page of text from the Book of the Dead. Rage burned through his body and forced his muscles to clench. Selling the Word was illegal.
He turned to his men and said, “Pay no mind to their numbers. We are in the midst of the gods’ enemies and they are all worthy of our blades. They all die.”
Unsheathing his sword, Petosiris snatched the old man from behind his table, dragged him over his wares, and held him overhead. The Trojan War hadn’t only taken the vendor’s arm, but also both his legs. He squirmed, his one hand wrapped around Petosiris’s thick forearm, thrashing like a snake. Drawing his scimitar blade across the old man’s throat, Petosiris showered himself in the vendor’s blood, drenching his robes.
The market came alive. Vendors and customers alike ran screaming from the booths, abandoning their purses and purchases, kicking up sand.
Ankhhaf was already in motion, spinning on his heels, short blades in both of his skilled hands. Plunging one knife into a young woman’s chest, he used the other to penetrate the back of her neck and slice downward along her spine. Screaming, she flailed as the blades darted deep through her flesh and muscles and met inside her. Ankhhaf twisted the woman as he retracted the knives. Her flesh tore away from her skeleton as he fell.
Siatum fired his bow into the fleeing crowd, his deft fingers reloading before the arrow hit its mark, and fired again. Fueled by prayer, the arrows sliced through flesh and bone, often continuing through several bodies before lodging in their final victim. He alternated his shots, covering the entire range of the crowd, not allowing any safe exit path.
Curved, serrated daggers protruded from rings on each of Khaemweset’s fingers. He danced through the center of the crowd, slicing out throats and disemboweling as he went. Wrestling a vendor to the soil, he gouged out the man’s eyes before driving his claws through his temples. Leaping off the dead man’s chest, he extended both arms wide and tunneled through the villagers, leaving severed limbs in his wake.
As a child, Petosiris learned to hunt like the hawk, the cat, and the crocodile, to lie in wait and allow the opponent to reveal his weaknesses, to avoid wasting energy by using only the most necessary motion, to see every fight through to victory or death. He also learned how to hand off his emotions to his shadow as a gift. A man without guilt, fear, or repulsion was a true warrior: a being near to the gods.
Later, he would watch his shadow weep for the innocents who died by his hand. But that was later.
He ran to a long, thatch-roofed home in the center of the village and kicked in the door. Rushing in, his ears were assaulted by a chorus of screaming children. The dark-skinned boys ran to the far wall and cowered there. A large woman in a maternal gown stepped between Petosiris and the children. In her hand she clutched a wavering, wood-handled kitchen knife. She screamed, “LEAVE THEM—THEY’RE ONLY THE YOUNG HERE, ONLY—”
Petosiris lashed out, severing her fingers along the edge of the knife’s hilt. The blade fell to the earthen floor, drawing up a small whirlwind of sand. The nurse dropped to her knees, cradling her hand, and begged him to spare her—to spare them all.
Petosiris rested his free hand on her face. His fingers slid upward to her hairline and gently pushed her head wrap off. Holding her in his hand, he whispered a prayer to Sobek and squeezed. Her eyes glazed over.
He watched her free will drain away. She stood and stared into his eyes, awaiting his orders. He was quick to oblige her. “Kill them.”
She reached down and retrieved the kitchen knife from the sand. Although forced to use her untrained hand, the blade no longer wagged. Her grip was true. Straightening up, she glan
ced back at Petosiris and whispered, “Hail our duty unto Re.”
He smiled and turned as she approached the children.
As he slid back outside, he added to her orders without speaking, merely by thinking. He could hear her respond in his mind, eager to appease him. The order was, And then kill yourself.
They slaughtered the village. Moving from the market to the houses, they kicked in doors and destroyed the lives of those they found cowering inside. A few tried to resist, clumsily fighting with farming tools and kitchen utensils. It made no difference; they died just as quickly and were added to the burning mound of blackened bodies in the center square.
Those who ran were cut down by archers’ arrows.
In the marketplace, they died.
In their homes, they died.
In the fields, they died.
Today was a day for death.
Chapter 1
Even deep inside the offices, she could hear the war.
Priscilla Stuyvesant curled her nose and the hag in the mirror did the same. She wasn’t old by anyone’s count, thirty-four in September, but the crow’s feet on her temples had already begun to dig in like trenches, a reminder of the long journey across the Atlantic. The mirror was old, however, and she told herself that it was the culprit, a slight discoloration on its surface, some warble in its face, and some dust: an antique mirror could tell lies.
Curator Teasdale glanced over his shoulder as he sipped from a large mug. For an Englishmen, he drank more coffee than tea; perhaps it was because of his surname. She could imagine the schoolyard ribbing. “Oh, that,” he said, gesturing toward the mirror. “It’s not part of any collection. It’s old, an antique, but it’s not from true antiquity. More likely, I would say, it spent a few spare generations squirreled away in some patriarch’s attic or cubby. Embarrassing as it may be, the truth is I find my treasures at the Sunday markets.”
His office shook as another explosion echoed through London. The bombing was incessant, day and night, but so far the British Museum remained untouched. The expression on Teasdale’s face told her he knew it wouldn’t be long before that record would be retired. In fact, it was the reason she was there.
Eternal Unrest: A Novel of Mummy Terror Page 1