The Staff of Moses (Oliver Lucas Adventures)

by Andrew Linke

  Oliver gaped as he lay on the stone floor, examining the thing over the sights of his gun. He knew that he should begin shooting and running, but his finger froze on the trigger at the sight of the ghastly slash that crossed the creature’s chest, exposing layers of bone and viscera that looked as if they would have glistened and oozed were they not coated in a thick layer of dust and sand. Another wound had ripped away a chunk of the monster’s left side, revealing the sagging shape of a tattered heart behind the ragged skin and splintered remains of brittle white ribs.

  The creature advanced on Oliver, raising its sword to strike at him again.

  Oliver fired.

  His shot ripped into the creature’s chest and exploded out the back of its body in a cloud of dark red dust. The undead thing jerked back and seemed to stumble, then got its footing and leapt towards Oliver with its mouth open in a cruel scream that sounded like air tearing through the pipes of a shattered organ. Oliver fired again and rolled sideways, stumbling to his feet and nearly tripping over something buried in the sand as the monster’s sword hit the stone beside him with a terrible rasping clang and a shower of sparks.

  Three more shots echoed through the chapel as Oliver rolled to his feet. He heard the distinct whine of a bullet passing close by his head before it slammed into the stone behind him. Glancing away from the creature, Oliver saw Diana kneeling behind the altar, steadying her aim by resting her gun atop the flat stones. She fired again and this time the bullet hit its intended target, knocking the creature sideways and sending out another cloud of red dust.

  Oliver aimed his gun, trying to line up his sights on the fiend’s head, but it charged towards him, body swaying with an awkward gait. He dodged to the side to avoid another swipe from the sword, firing into the monster’s chest as it swung past him. He gave up on trying to destroy it in a single headshot and instead turned and ran towards the side wall of the chapel. As he ran, Oliver heard more shots booming and assumed that the thing was still chasing him, with Diana trying to slow it down. As much as Oliver appreciated Diana’s help, her presence made this situation more difficult. If he had been facing the undead warrior alone, Oliver would have been in grave danger, but able to focus all of his attention on staying out of reach of the monster’s sword. With Diana here, he also had to contend with the additional risks of being hit by one of her bullets and the chance that the monster’s attention would be drawn to her.

  A moment before he reached the wall, Oliver turned to the left and used his right leg to kick off hard against the wall. This launch him into the air and caused him to twist rapidly around to face the pursuing creature. He brought his gun up as he turned, aiming in the direction of where he expected the monster to be. As it turned out, the thing had been even closer than Oliver had expected. Before he could adjust his aim, Oliver slammed into the floor and skidded across the sand, but not before he saw the monster crash headlong into the wall from which he had just pushed off. Oliver raised his gun and fired repeatedly at the monster, pushing it back against the wall with each shot. He heard more shots and assumed that Diana had intuited his tactic and begin firing repeated shots at the monster’s back as well.

  His trigger clicked on an empty chamber and Oliver saw his slide had locked itself back. He was out of bullets. Two more shots sounded, then Oliver heard a curse from Diana as her magazine emptied as well. He jumped to his feet, ejecting the spent magazine into his left palm. He swapped it for a full spare from the front pocket of his vest and slammed the fresh magazine into his gun.

  The monster’s body was now riddled with gaps, some large enough that Oliver could see the wall through them. Dark red dust poured from the holes and was blown into a foul smelling cloud by the creature’s wild gyrations as it attempted to turn and attack Oliver. Freed from the repeated body slams of hot lead, it managed to spin and swipe out with its sword, as if it had expected Oliver to be right behind it, but Oliver was still a dozen feet away.

  Oliver released the slide, chambering a round. Before the monster had time to recover from its wild swing, Oliver aimed at its skull and smoothly pulled the trigger three times. Just as with the skeleton last night, the monster’s skull shattered with a harsh shrieking sound and a puff of bluish smoke that seemed to wrinkle the air surrounding it as it drifted away. The headless body collapsed, still spewing the foul red dust as it fell.

  Oliver stepped back, keeping his gun aimed at the monster. He kept moving until he felt the solid stone of the altar behind him.

  “Do you think it’s... dead?” Diana said.

  Oliver looked around and saw Diana, still crouching behind the altar. An empty clip lay on the carved stone and she was in the process of inserting another into her gun. He turned back to face the prone body of the monster. The cloud of dust had mostly dispersed, but a faint haze of the foul substance still hung around the shattered remains of the creature’s head. It reminded Oliver of the spores of a large powder mushroom, drifting lazily through the air after the mushroom was kicked.

  He shrugged out of his backpack and dug in a side flap to find a handkerchief. He tied it around his face and put on a pair of rubber gloves from his first aid kit, then advanced on the body. He knelt on the floor beside the now restful corpse and started to examine it.

  What clothes the creature had once worn had deteriorated over the ages, leaving little but a brass belt around its waist and a gold signet ring on the middle finger of its right hand. The deep gash cutting across the monster’s chest had been nearly obliterated by the many gunshot wounds dealt to it in the last couple minutes. Oliver slipped a gloved hand inside one of the wounds and pulled back the leathery skin to reveal the remains of the creature’s stomach and kidneys, all perfectly preserved and completely dry. It was as if they had been transformed into resin molds of their original forms without withering in the process. He had never seen anything like this before, but assumed that it was the result of whatever magical forces had transformed the once proud soldier into an undead fiend.

  “What’s all that dust?” Diana asked, coming up behind him.

  “I’m not sure, but it was probably his blood. See, all of the organs are in place and undamaged, except where we shot it and here...” He pointed at a deep gash in the lower part of what might have once been the monster’s liver. “That’s not a gunshot wound. My guess is he was slashed and stabbed several times before being transformed.”

  “What could cause him to dry out like that?”

  “I don’t know. Probably some form of magic, combined with the dry air of the desert. My guess is that he was preserved exactly as he was in the moment the magic took hold, except that all of the moisture drained from his body over the next few thousand years.”

  Diana shivered and looked around suspiciously. “Do you think there are any more?”

  Oliver shook his head. “This fiend is different from the skeleton that attacked us last night. I bet that this was once Sephor and he was somehow transformed after being cut with a sword.” He pulled the signet ring from the creature’s hand and passed it to Diana. “Can you read this?”

  She held the ring up so the sunlight shone on the hieroglyphics embossed in the flat surface of the ring. “These symbols look similar to the markings over the household altar we examined yesterday. We can’t be sure based on just this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you just killed the corpse of Sephor himself.”

  Oliver nodded and surveyed the wrecked body of the once great warrior. It seemed a shame for someone who had fought so hard for his pharaoh to end up like this, a shriveled wreck of a creature, destroyed so swiftly after spending millennia trapped in this small chapel. Moments like this gave Oliver pause, causing him to wonder if he should stop in his pursuit of relics, especially the fragments of the mechanism. Some powers he encountered were simply too dangerous and the humans who dared to meddle with them ended up like this. He shook his head, coughed, and turned his mind back to the task at hand.

  Oliver got to his feet and looked D
iana in the eye. “Are you alright?”

  She nodded. “Fine. I was scared for you when I saw that thing try to slice you with its sword, but now that it’s gone... it was kind of exciting.”

  He smiled and slapped her playfully on the shoulder. “That’s normal. At least, it’s normal for me.”

  Diana grinned and slipped her gun back into its holster. “Want to get a look in that room?”

  Oliver nodded. He stripped off the rubber gloves and stuffed them into a pocket and pulled down the handkerchief covering his nose, then trod back to where his flashlight had fallen and picked it up, wincing as he bent. The first bruises from his wild tumbles across the floor would begin to form in a few minutes and he would have to keep moving or he might stiffen. The day had just begun and there was no point letting pain bring him to a halt now. As he lifted the flashlight, Oliver saw a scrap of tattered blue cloth sticking out from underneath the sand. He paused, remembering how he had tripped while getting back to his feet after Sephor’s reanimated corpse had burst out of the doorway.

  “Hey, Diana, take a look at this.”

  He began brushing away the sand, uncovering more of the cloth and the desiccated body that it covered. Diana joined in and they soon had all of the sand cleared away to reveal the body of a man dressed in a red and gray tunic and a blue jacket with tattered gold fringes dangling from pads on each shoulder. The dark blue fabric of soldier’s jacket was ripped and stained a deep reddish brown where he had been stabbed right beneath his ribcage.

  “That’s a French military uniform!” Diana exclaimed.

  “Looks like you were right about the expedition.”

  “I wonder who he is. Gabriel de Pujul listed the expedition members in one of his letters.”

  Oliver began rifling the dead man’s pockets. He found several coins, a handful of tattered wax paper powder cartridges, and a bundle of letters. He passed the letters to Diana and stood, looking towards the dark doorway that Sephor’s reanimated corpse had come through.

  “The French expedition must have tried to enter the inner sanctum of the chapel, like I was about to.” He flicked the flashlight on and wave it towards the dark doorway. “I’m going to head in there.”

  Diana looked up at Oliver from where she was squatting beside the body of the French soldier, flicking through the folded letters. She shoved the letters in the breast pocket of her shirt and stood.

  “I’m coming with you. I don’t even know his name yet, but I can look through these later.

  “Don’t you want to stay here and finish translating the altar inscriptions?” Oliver asked.

  “I’m not finished, but from what I’ve seen so far they appear to be fairly typical temple altar prayers. The only thing unusual about them is that they address both Osiris and Setesh, so you’re probably right about Sephor following a strain of the Egyptian religion that was obsessed with death.”

  Oliver nodded and strode towards the doorway, shining his flashlight ahead of them and keeping his gun pointed in the same direction, ready to fire the instant anything undead appeared in the beam of light. They slipped through the doorway between the relief carvings of Osiris and Setesh and continued down a corridor barely wide enough for them to walk head-on for about five feet. With each step, Oliver’s light revealed more of the brightly colored mural ahead of them.

  Finally they stepped out into a chamber about ten feet deep and twenty wide. All four walls and the ceiling were painted in an intricate series of murals. While the paint was faded from exposure to oxygen over thousands of years, its location in this dark chamber had protected it from exposure to the ultraviolet rays of sunlight. That had done much to preserve the paint. As a result, the murals in this room were shockingly vivid compared to those in the main chamber of the chapel, except at the base of the walls, where the murals had been violently chipped away. Two tall bronze lamp stands flanked the doorway and the wall above them was darkened with soot, but not so much that it obscured the flow storytelling in the mural. Two small niches were cut into the stone, one on either end of the chamber, but these appeared to be empty.

  Oliver was not particularly experienced reading Egyptian murals, but they followed a similar structure to the Mayan images that he had studied extensively during his first expedition to South America, so he had little difficulty following the general flow of the story. There were no dividing lines between the scenes of the story, and the ancient Egyptian artistic convention of drawing nearly all characters in profile could make it difficult for the inexperienced viewer to identify where one scene ended and another began. However, a carefully observant eye would quickly unlock the key: By watching for the same key characters repeating, as well as images of servants changing their facing direction from left to right and back again, it was possible to identify the key element of each scene, even as the edges merged together into a continuous flow of storytelling.

  Each scene in this mural occupied a stretch of wall between two and four feet in length and about a foot high. Following the narrative of the mural from where it began, just to the left of the doorway, Oliver concluded that it retold essentially the same story as the scroll that Diana had translated a few days before. At the center of the wall facing the door was a scene that showed Sephor slaying numerous foes and taking a long shepherd’s crook in his hand. Due to its position directly opposite the door, where a little bit of sunlight just managed to cast its destructive glow upon the painted stone, this scene was the most faded, but Oliver could still sense the triumph in Sephor’s body language as he took hold of the staff.

  “There’s something missing, Oliver.”

  He turned to see Diana examining the niche cut into the north wall of the chamber. Oliver walked over and saw that the niche was set at chest height and surrounded by hieroglyphs carved into the six inches of uncolored stone that surrounded each niche.

  “I don’t completely understand what’s missing. There’s not enough context, but these hieroglyphs seem to indicate that key of some sort was stored in this niche. Key isn’t really the right word though. Maybe more of a token?”

  Oliver put his gun away and pulled out his camera and a wireless remote flash to begin photographing the room. He gestured at the south wall of the room.

  “What about that? There’s another empty niche there.”

  Diana went over to examine the hieroglyphs surrounding that niche while Oliver set to work photographing the chamber. Even if the empty niches meant that the clues they sought were long gone, he would almost certain be able sell photos of this place to archaeology magazines. He didn’t like the idea of giving up hope, but in the relic hunting business, it paid to be pragmatic. By its very nature, the job required one to accept the existence of things that many people thought mere myth, so there was no sense in deceiving oneself about things that actually were black and white. Oliver had to make money from this adventure somehow.

  He began with several establishing shots of the chamber, using the remote flash to get some dramatic light and shadow effects. He then set about photographing each panel of the story, framing his shots carefully so that the entire mural could be digitally reconstructed as a continuous narrative. This took a while and midway through the process Diana announced that she was going back out to finish examining the body of the French soldier. Oliver nodded distractedly and continued working in contemplative silence until he reached the bottom row of the mural. This seemed to elaborate upon the narrative of the scroll a little. Oliver began to grow excited as the painted figures were shown constructing a temple and performing rituals around an altar in an underground chamber, upon which lay the staff that Sephor had captured in battle. The exact nature of these rituals was obscured, however, by numerous shallow marks gouged roughly into the stone.

  Oliver had noticed the damage to the mural when they first entered the chamber, but such was common in ancient monuments and he hadn’t paid much attention to it. But now, after spending nearly an hour carefully photographing the rest of
this remarkably well-preserved mural, the chips and scratches struck Oliver as odd. Unlike so many other ancient sites in Egypt, this place had been left practically untouched in the thousands of years since its original occupants had abandoned it, except for this one patch of vandalism.

  “Hey, Diana!” he shouted.

  “What?” she called back.

  “I may have found something. Can you come take a look?”

  Diana popped back into the chamber a few seconds later. Oliver pointed out the marks scratched into the wall and explained why he thought them unusual. Diana crouched down and gazed at the marks for a few moments, running her flashlight back and forth across them.

  Finally she looked up at Oliver and said, “It’s writing. A form of hieratic.”

  “Can you read it?”

  “Give me a few minutes. Hieratic was essentially cursive to the Egyptians. They used it for personal documents, tribute records, things like that. The flowing nature of the text made it less suitable to stone carving than hieroglyphs, which is why both writing systems persisted in parallel for over a thousand years.”

  Oliver grinned and gave Diana a “get to the point” look.

  She swatted at his leg and continued, “Anyway. I’ll need to look this over carefully. It’s not only in hieratic, which is more difficult to read than hieroglyphs to begin with, but it looks like it was scratched into the wall with a knife.”

  Oliver nodded and began packing up his camera equipment. “I’m going to poke around the courtyard and main house while you’re busy with this.”

  “You aren’t afraid of the skeletons?”

  “I’ll mainly look through windows. If I do go in, I’ll take it slow and keep my gun out.” Oliver bent down and squeezed Diana’s shoulder. “I do this for a living. Don’t be afraid for me. You though...” He pointed down at the gun on her thigh. “Keep that thing at hand. I’ll announce myself before I come through the passage. Keep your ears open and if you hear anything coming that isn’t me, shoot it in the head.”