The Hammer Horror Omnibus

by John Burke

  “Who would want to steal a mummy?”

  “A competitor,” raged King. “Somebody who wants to ruin me.”

  “You have enemies, Mr. King?”

  “Of course I’ve got enemies. I’m in show business. Any one of my so-called friends could be an enemy.” King pointed at Hashmi, who was standing close to the empty coffin. “He threatened me tonight, for one.”

  The Inspector turned to Hashmi. “Is that correct, sir?”

  “Threaten him? No. I merely warned him of what might happen.”

  “That the mummy would be stolen?” said the policeman keenly.

  “That is the last thing I would have wanted.” Hashmi spoke with heartfelt intensity.

  “Ha! It made his day for him,” King snarled.

  “Why would that be, sir?”

  “He wants it tucked away in some stuffy old museum.”

  Sir Giles Dalrymple stepped forward. “And if that’s where it had been,” he said, “none of this would have happened.”

  The Inspector tried to look masterful, but was clearly at a loss. He examined the mummy case and the ground below the stand on which the case had been placed. But reporters and others had been milling about here even before the revelation of the empty coffin, and there was nothing that would help to identify the robber.

  One or two of the newspapermen were getting restless. They hinted that there might be some comments about police methods—or lack of method—in their columns the next day if they were kept here too long. It might have occurred to the Inspector to keep them here until it was too late for them to meet the morning editions; but that would only have been postponing the day of battle, and discretion won. He allowed the audience to disperse after leaving names and addresses with two of his men at the entrance to the tent.

  “Is that all you’re going to do?” spluttered King.

  “I’ll get word sent out, sir, and any information we pick up that might give us a lead—”

  “The mummy could be out of the country by tomorrow!”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much, sir. He’d never get past the Customs.” The Inspector took out his watch and consulted it as though it might hold the key to all his problems. “What I’ll do, sir, is leave two of my men on guard here while I go to Scotland Yard and get some of our scientific chaps to examine the coffin. As soon as there’s anything to report, we’ll be in touch with you. Well . . . goodnight, sir.”

  Speechless, King watched the Inspector leave the tent. At last he moaned to himself. “If that’s an English policeman, I should have asked him what time it was—I’d have got more out of him.”

  Much as she detested the man, Annette could not repress a sympathetic smile. This presentation had meant a lot to him. It was to have been the big moment, the culmination of the time and money he had spent—and it had all gone wrong.

  “Don’t you think you should go home and get some rest?” she suggested.

  “Home? That hotel . . . And how can I rest? I’ve got a show—with no star.”

  Adam stood beside Annette and added his voice to hers. “If there’s anything I can do . . .”

  “Yes,” said King with a return of his old derisive vigor, “you can wrap yourself up in some dirty bandages and get in that box.”

  Adam took Annette’s arm. “Goodnight, Mr. King.”

  “Goodnight.”

  They went down the tent, leaving the furious tycoon pacing round the sarcophagus as though in search of magic doors or a cuneiform incantation which would miraculously put everything right.

  8

  There were lights still on within the tent when John Bray arrived. He walked slowly up to the entrance, fighting off pain and dizziness. Sir Giles had tried to make him stay in bed, but after what the Egyptologist himself had told him, John had known that he must get here and contribute what he could while there was still time. On the way here he had been trying to concentrate, to sort out the muddled memories and tangled theories which had been pounding in his brain while he lay half conscious in bed.

  A policeman stepped from the shadows and challenged him.

  “Must see Mr. King,” John muttered. He was swaying so badly that the policeman obviously suspected him of being drunk.

  “There’s nobody here, sir.”

  “Are you sure that Mr. King—”

  “John! John—is that you?”

  Warily the policeman shepherded John into the tent. King was on the platform, erect beside the empty sarcophagus. It was true, then: the mummy really had gone. The sight of the empty coffin was somehow more appalling than John had expected.

  “So it’s really gone!”

  “I wanted publicity, I sure got it.” King jumped from the platform. “Say, shouldn’t you be in bed?”

  John said: “I think I know why it happened.”

  King stared. “What?”

  “I found out the meaning of ‘the sacred words of life’. The medallion. The old powers of Ra Antef. But they were stolen from me—hadn’t finished, and they were stolen from me.”

  King’s blank face was infuriating. The man had put all that money into the expedition, but knew nothing of the truly important findings. He was a showman to whom the treasures of ancient Egypt were about on the same level as a modern freak from some Indian backwater. He would have been happy with a flea circus if there had been something saleable about the fleas.

  “Whoever has stolen the mummy,” cried John, “may be trying to bring it back to life.”

  Again he felt dizzy. King’s face blurred. And King’s voice rasped in his ears. “That must have been some wallop on the head.”

  “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “Oh, you’re real sick, boy. I’m going to get you a cab.”

  “Look, Mr. King . . .”

  But without a background of historical knowledge how could King be expected to understand the significance of the medallion and its probable message? To take him step by step through the story of Ra Antef at this time of night was impossible. John was simply not up to it. But he wanted to impress on someone the need to act now. He was haunted by the vision of ancient sorcery doing its work, of an ageless terror being released into the modern world—of the blasphemous restoration of life to someone . . . something . . . which should have been allowed to rest throughout eternity.

  “Officer, do you think you could call a cab for this gentleman?”

  King was steering John towards the tent flap.

  “If someone really wanted revenge,” John persisted, “what better instrument to use than the mummy brought back to life?”

  “Sure. Now come on.”

  “What better way to cover the real motive than to blame the legend?”

  “Sleep on it,” said King solicitously. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “You don’t want to listen to me, do you, Mr. King?”

  “Not right now. What I want to figure out,” King confided, “is how Hashmi did it.”

  “Hashmi?”

  “It must have been him. It’s got to be him. That’s the only thing that makes sense. You only had to look at his face tonight—”

  “He was here tonight?”

  “Don’t ask me how he did it. But the police have got his address. Once I can figure out how he pulled this off, it won’t take long to break him down.”

  The policeman who had brought John in now escorted him along the path to the road, where a hansom was waiting. Before they reached the gate, John said:

  “Did you take Hashmi Bey’s address?”

  “Which one would he be, sir?”

  “Hashmi Bey. Mr. King says you’ve got his address—I want to drive round there and see him at once.”

  The policeman stopped under the flickering gas lamp above the gate, and took out his notebook. He fingered his way down a scribbled list of addresses.

  “May have been my mate, sir. We had a job getting them all down, I can tell you. No . . . here it is.”

  He turned the p
age towards John. John read the address and nodded his thanks. Then he turned to the hansom cab and got in.

  9

  Alexander King was very tired. He was also very angry. But the tiredness was winning. There was nothing more he could do tonight. The mummy had gone, and no matter how much he fumed and paced round the exhibition tent he wouldn’t be able to bring it back. Tomorrow he would start afresh. Tomorrow he would stand over the London police and lash them into some kind of activity.

  As he went out of the tent, the policeman near the entrance stepped forward.

  “Want a cab, sir?”

  “Thanks, no.” A brisk walk through the quiet streets might help to calm him down. He needed calming if he was to get a good night’s sleep.

  King set out.

  A wispy fog swirled up from gratings in the street and clung to the walls. Gas lamps became blotches of fuzzy yellow light through the drifting tendrils. A clock struck, its note oddly muted by the fog.

  A woman stepped from a doorway into King’s path.

  “You in a hurry, guv?”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Nothing, dearie. I wondered if there was anything I could do for you?”

  King shook himself out of his trance. “No. No, thanks.”

  He walked round the woman and went on his way. It took him another ten minutes to realize that he was lost. He thought he knew London pretty well, but his mind had been so occupied with thoughts about the mummy and about the ridicule that was likely to be heaped on him in the newspapers that he had not been paying much attention to the streets down which he walked.

  He stopped on a corner, baffled.

  Still doubts and speculations jangled in his mind. Maybe the publicity would be a good thing. Crowds would flock in to the exhibition. If the mummy came back . . .

  He had to find the mummy. Without it, the exhibition was just not good enough.

  When it came back . . . if it came back . . .

  He tried to make himself concentrate on his route. There was no street name on the wall above him. He crossed the road, to where an archway opened on to what might be a mews. But as he came closer he heard the faint lapping of water, and there was a sudden mournful groan from a ship’s foghorn.

  He must be close to the river. It was incredible that he should have walked so far in the wrong direction.

  King hesitated, then turned back.

  Another archway swam out of the fog. It was growing thicker here, mingling with a river mist and producing strange shapes in the shifting darkness. There was an almost solid shape framed in the archway.

  As he drew level, King found that the shape did not dissolve into wisps of fog. It remained substantial—the figure of a man, motionless, apparently waiting for him.

  He cleared his throat from the prickling discomfort of the fog. “I reckon I’ve lost my way. Where would I be right now?”

  There was no reply.

  “Look”—King was in no mood for further difficulties after what had happened tonight—“I don’t know who the hell you are, but don’t just . . .”

  The figure stepped out of the archway. The diffuse light gave it features which had been concealed in the shadows. King saw the bandages strain as the arms were raised, looked into the travesty of a face—and was utterly unable to accept what he saw.

  A cracked laugh burst from his throat. “If you think this is a joke . . .”

  But the mummy was no joke. The mummy was real and powerful and relentless. It was a solid, vengeful ghost from remote ages; something which ought to have been dead but was alive with a fearful supernatural force.

  The arms closed on Alexander King. They lifted him high from the pavement, and he spun round until he was staring into the eye sockets of what had once been a prince of Egypt.

  He screamed.

  The buildings seemed to reel past him. The archway spun dizzily, a flight of steps fell away from him at an angle. The mummy threw him . . . threw him so that he fell in a vertiginous arc without end . . . until he crashed with a sickening final agony against solid stone, rebounded from it, and sank into the river without another sound.

  The waters closed over his head.

  10

  John Bray said: “I believe you have a foreign gentleman staying here?”

  The unshaven man who had opened the door to him peered round it and grunted suspiciously: “And what business is that of yours?”

  John took a handful of coins from his pocket and jangled them slightly. Behind the man he caught a glimpse of a woman with stringy hair and a sallow face. The only gleam of hope or happiness in that face was in her eyes as she heard the rattle of money. She stepped past the man and elbowed him so that he had to open the door wider.

  “An Egyptian gentleman,” John prompted her.

  She held out her hand. He dropped money into it. She said: “Yes, that’ll be him on the first-floor back.”

  “Thank you.”

  John went past her and up the narrow stairs, stubbing his toes against the torn linoleum. Behind him he heard an argument break out between the man and woman over the money. There was the slam of a door as they shut themselves away to thrash it out.

  John walked along the first-floor landing to the back of the house. Fog clawed at the grimy window. There was only one door at this end of the passage. He tapped on it with his knuckles, then hammered louder.

  “Hashmi! Open the door.”

  There was no reply. John looked back towards the stairs. If he made too much noise, the couple below might call a truce to their bickering until they had got him out of the house. He listened. There was no sound now from downstairs, and no sound from within the room.

  He banged again, then tried the door handle. The handle and the lock itself shifted. The house was shabby, the door fitted badly, the lock was loose. John applied his shoulder gently to one of the panels and increased the pressure.

  At the second attempt he pushed the door open and staggered into the room.

  It was empty. He struck a match and lit the gas jet. It sighed mournfully as he began to search the room.

  Hashmi had brought very little with him. His battered case contained only a few clothes, and one suit hung in the musty wardrobe. The furniture here was sparse and there were few places of concealment. John was tipping back the mattress on the bed when Hashmi came softly, cat-footedly into the room and drew a knife.

  “Have you found what you’re looking for, Mr. Bray?”

  John straightened up. The mattress fell back on to the frame of the bed with a dull thump.

  He said: “Where is it?”

  Hashmi advanced, the blade of the knife jutting towards John. “If I knew what you sought—”

  “You know very well. The medallion. Where is it?”

  Hashmi drew in breath with a hiss grotesquely like that of the gas jet.

  “So . . . ! It does exist.”

  “And you stole it from me,” said John.

  Hashmi studied him for a moment, then tossed the knife on to the washstand. He closed the door.

  “We are speaking of the same thing, are we? The sacred medallion of Ra Antef, conferrer of life, presented to him by his nomad people? The medallion which never fell into the hands of his brother Be . . . Be, whose hired assassins did their foul work and brought back proof, but who knew nothing of the greatest of all Ra Antef’s possessions . . .”

  John said: “As I suspected, you know all about it. You have known about it from the start. And when I began to get too close to the truth—”

  “You fool!” snapped Hashmi. “If I possessed the secret of reviving the dead do you think I would have misused it in such a stupid way?”

  John did not know what to think. Without knowing the purpose behind this baffling sequence of events, he could not fit Hashmi or anyone else into the pattern. There was a burning integrity in the man which seemed to rule him out as a thief, particularly where it was a matter of stealing a holy relic of his country’s past; yet the
integrity could be that of a fanatic, capable of taking any violent steps which would lead to the mysterious end.

  John said abruptly: “Will you come with me to the police?”

  “I shall be happy to cooperate in any attempt to stop further useless violence.”

  At the door John could not resist asking: “Do you know who is behind this whole weird business?”

  “I know there are forces at work,” said Hashmi solemnly, “which the most highly developed scientific mind in this country could not hope to comprehend.”

  11

  Sir Giles Dalrymple took the stopper from the brandy decanter and reached for a glass. Then he replaced the stopper. He pushed the glass away from him. It was important that his head should stay clear. He had a lot of work to do. He ought to have started on it the moment young John Bray came here with his suspicions. The young man had been on the right track. It was up to the older one, now, to follow that track wherever it led.

  John had left a few scraps of paper on the desk when he was struck down. Sir Giles recognized the outlines of certain hieroglyphics, but was not so sure of others. There were, however, resemblances to sketches which he had once seen—sketches to which he had referred John.

  These scrawls here, in the corner—from the medallion? Sir Giles pored over them. The sacred words of legend . . . No, that was absurd. The sacred words of life.

  Absurd, said one part of his mind. But in another part there was a growing sense of awe.

  Sir Giles sat back. He badly needed a brandy. But he was still strong. Temptation of that kind must be resisted. He would show them all that he was still what he had always been—the great interpreter of ancient Egypt, the man who could solve every riddle of the past.

  He began to write with laborious precision a line of hieroglyphs that would make sense of John Bray’s scattered jottings. As he wrote, he murmured over them, caught in a strange spell which grew more vibrant minute by minute.

  It was broken by a crash of shattered glass. Sir Giles sprang to his feet as the window disintegrated and the mummy shambled into the room.