The Night's Legacy

by P. T. Dilloway

  “You gave me quite a scare,” Dr. Johnson said. “I thought you might—”

  “Kill her?”

  “You wouldn’t, though, would you?”

  “I don’t know,” Lois said. “How long have I been out?”

  “Six hours.”

  “Oh.” Lois put a hand to her head. She still felt a bit fuzzy from the knock on the head and the shot. “Did you tell her that I’m sorry?”

  “I’m sure she knows you didn’t mean it. You were upset.”

  “How’s Mom?”

  “Still in critical condition. She’s still unconscious. That’s probably for the best.”

  “And still crippled?”

  “We don’t know. It might be a while until we know for sure how bad it is.” He patted her on the knee. “They showed me some of the X-rays. It looks bad. Really bad. I’m not sure how she’s still alive right now.”

  If anyone else had said that she might have wrung his neck too, but she couldn’t do that to Dr. Johnson. He was the closest to a father she’d ever known. “Thank you for not sugarcoating it,” she whispered.

  “But look, your mom’s a real tough customer. She’s already made it this far. There’s no reason to think she can’t get through this.”

  “Now you’re sugarcoating it.”

  “I just don’t want you to lose hope. That’s all we have at times like this.” He pulled up a chair to sit next to her gurney and then took her hand. “You weren’t here when Betty got sick. Trust me, it was a lot like this. Sometimes we were sure she was going to die within the hour. Sometimes I thought she would live another ten years. Even at the end, when she was wasted away and her hair all gone, I thought she could make it. She did too. The last time I saw her, she talked about wanting to go to Paris, like we did for our honeymoon.”

  Dr. Johnson was crying now. It was Lois’s turn to comfort him. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here for that. Betty was a good woman.”

  They were sitting there in gloomy silence when Melanie came barreling through the curtain. She threw herself against Lois, clamping her arms around Lois in a hug. “Oh my God, I just heard! I’m so sorry! How’s your mom?”

  “Resting. The surgery was successful.”

  “That’s great! How about you? Are you all right?”

  “I’ll be fine. It’s just a bump on the head.”

  “It’s so sad about poor old Stan. How could someone do that to him?”

  “I don’t know. What about the other guards?”

  “They were just tied up for a while. They should be fine.”

  Lois nodded, glad to know no one else had been killed—so far. There was still a chance Mom might take a turn for the worst. She looked over Melanie’s shoulder. “Did Tony come with you?”

  “No, I haven’t seen him since we left work.”

  “I tried calling,” Dr. Johnson said. “No one answered.”

  “He’s probably at a bar or something,” Lois said, unable to conceal her disappointment. For a moment she had hoped he might come in with flowers and a card—and a kiss. Instead he was probably out at the Brass Drum or somewhere else picking up more girls.

  “Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll be here,” Melanie said. She pulled up a chair to sit on the opposite side of the gurney from Dr. Johnson. “I still can’t believe it. Why would someone want to rob the museum and steal a bunch of old junk? No offense, Dr. Johnson.”

  “None taken,” he said. “There are plenty of jewels and such worth a lot of money.”

  “Oh. Well, it still seems weird. And poor Dr. Locke. Why would anyone want to hurt her? She was such a super-nice lady, you know?”

  “I know,” Lois said. She felt another wave of tears coming on. Melanie was right that it didn’t make much sense. Why had they killed one guard but not the others? Why had they killed the guard but left Mom alive? What about Lois? She had been up in the gift shop and no one had touched her. Where had the smelly man gone? There were enough questions to make her head start spinning again and very few answers.

  The bald doctor opened the curtain. He glared at her, his voice icy when he said, “Your mother has regained consciousness. Laura says you can see her for a couple of minutes. But these gentlemen are going to accompany you.” Two burly orderlies appeared to stand behind the doctor.

  Lois nodded and let Dr. Johnson and Melanie help her off the gurney. One of the orderlies swung a wheelchair into the cubicle for her to sit on. “Giddyup,” Lois growled as they pushed her towards the elevator.

  * * *

  Lois had seen a few medical television shows that gave her some idea of what to expect. She still wasn’t prepared to see her mother lying on a bed, surrounded by an army of machines. Some of these beeped to indicate Mom was still alive while others hissed as they breathed for her. Lois gripped the armrests of her wheelchair tightly to keep from falling out.

  The first thing she noticed was that they had shaved Mom’s head, leaving only a bit of gray down. That was probably to keep her hair from getting in the way while they operated. Mom was also lying on her side, facing away from the door. Lois could see the heavy bandages on Mom’s back stained with blood from the gunshot wounds. She thought of what Dr. Pavelski had said about Mom not walking again and then what Dr. Johnson had said about the X-rays. No, she didn’t look good.

  Yet when she got out of the wheelchair and made her way unsteadily around the bed, she saw Mom’s eyes open. They looked just as blue and clear as before. She couldn’t talk with the mask over her mouth. Nor did it seem she could move her arms. The bandages on her chest were just as thick as those on the front. Despite the bandages, Mom’s chest looked flatter than before. Had they removed her breasts?

  Lois wasn’t sure what to do. She touched Mom’s cheek and was relieved to feel warmth there. “Hi, Mom.” Asking Mom how she felt seemed pointless at the moment. “I’m here. I’m still here.”

  Though it was hard to tell, it seemed Mom nodded slightly at this. Lois wanted to take her mother’s hand, but she wasn’t sure if Mom would feel anything. She moved her hand up instead to touch Mom’s shorn hair. “You’re going to make it, Mom. I know you are. You’re too strong to die on me now.” She couldn’t keep a brave face anymore; she started to sob as she had back in the cubicle. “I’m sorry, Mom. I should have warned you. I should have got you out of there. It’s my fault.”

  Through her tears, she saw Mom shake her head. She could hear her mother making a croaking sound against the mask. “Don’t try to talk, Mom.”

  But her mother didn’t listen. She kept trying to speak into the mask. Lois finally risked pulling the mask from her mother’s lips. “Go,” Mom said. “Not…safe.”

  “I can’t leave you, Mom. Not now.”

  “Go!” Mom hissed. Her eyes looked the angriest Lois had ever seen. If it were possible, she would probably be shouting right now. Was she that angry at Lois that she wanted her to go away? “Hide. Please. Love…you.”

  When Mom’s eyes closed Lois’s heart stopped. Listening to the monitor, she was relieved to hear that her mother’s heart was still beating. She slipped the mask over Mom’s mouth so that she could get more air.

  One of the orderlies opened the door. “Time’s up,” he said.

  “I’ll be right there,” she said.

  They took her as far as the waiting room. Apparently her doctor had decided she was healthy enough to be released. Not that she planned on going very far. She sat on a thinly-padded chair, thinking of her mother’s words. Mom wanted her to go and hide. Not safe, she had said. Which meant she thought the thieves might try to eliminate her as a witness. Not that she had witnessed very much. Or maybe mom knew about the smelly man and thought he might come back for her.

  If she didn’t come for him first. Maybe he wasn’t friends with the robbers, but that man had known about the robbery, had been there before any alarms had gone off. He hadn’t called the cops either. Why not? Why hadn’t he called for help? Mom might still be walking and breathing on her own i
f he had.

  As soon as she could, she was going to find him. She would find him and get some fucking answers. Mom might want her to run and hide, but she wasn’t going to. Not anymore. She had spent too much time running and hiding already. She was going to stay and find the people who had done this to Mom. Then she was going to make them pay.

  Chapter 10

  It took nearly a week before Dr. Johnson went back to his office. None of the Thorne Museum employees could get into the building during that time. The police had the whole placed locked down while they investigated the robbery and the security guard’s death.

  There was some talk of Dr. Johnson taking over as the interim director. No one had been with the museum as long as he had, so it would only be fitting. He had quickly shot that idea down. He wasn’t an administrator. Even if he was, he couldn’t spend time running the museum, not when Jessie and Lois needed him.

  He was especially concerned with the latter. Lois had always been wild, that much had been obvious ever since she climbed atop Jeff when she was a child. She had her mother’s raw intelligence but not the patience to go with it. Lois could memorize entire books in hours, but she couldn’t stand digging in the sand and hoping to find something or staring through a microscope at an ancient artifact. She wanted instant results, to know everything now.

  But her wildness had never been dangerous, not until he saw her choking the life from Dr. Pavelski. There had been something in Lois’s eyes, something feral as she attempted to ring the neck of her mother’s doctor. That Lois didn’t seem to remember the incident he found even more concerning.

  She hadn’t acted like that again. Not that he knew of. For the most part she stayed in the waiting room until Dr. Pavelski cleared her to go inside and visit her mother. Jessie woke up for a few minutes every few hours. She was breathing on her own now, which was a miracle in itself. From what they could determine she had feeling in her hands. Her legs were another story. She couldn’t move them at all. Despite Dr. Pavelski’s assurances that this might be temporary, Dr. Johnson doubted it. The damage to her spine had been catastrophic; that she had any feeling left anywhere was the greatest miracle of all.

  When the hospital did kick her out for the night, Lois refused to go very far. She stayed in a motel—a flophouse really—nearby. He had offered his house and her new friend Melanie had offered her apartment, but Lois didn’t want to stray too far. He couldn’t blame her; she felt so guilty about running away for seven years and then about not finding a way to save her mother during the robbery.

  She had gone home when he decided to check in on the museum. His assistants had already gone over the exhibits and offices to inventory the missing items, but he wanted to check for himself. They might have missed something. For the museum’s sake he hoped not.

  The police had gone, leaving things more or less normal. He tried to imagine the pool of blood by the front door from the security guard, Stan Stevens. It still seemed impossible that anyone would want to shoot Stan, who had worked at the museum nearly as long as Dr. Johnson. There was a lot of crime in Ren City, but to attack an institute of learning and murder an innocent person and cripple another seemed especially bloodthirsty.

  The museum was quiet as he walked through the great hall. Everyone had gone home for the day except for the security guards, hired from a private agency to replace the others who had failed to protect the museum. One of these stopped him in Jeff’s shadow and demanded to see his badge. Dr. Johnson handed it over. “Thank you, sir,” the guard said.

  The exhibit off the great hall was a disaster area. The glass had been cleaned up, but there were still empty pedestals and items hanging crookedly on the walls. Dr. Johnson tried to right a tablet hanging at a thirty-degree angle at the moment.

  As he walked through the exhibit, he jotted down notes on a pad of paper. The thieves had taken the gold necklaces, bracelets, and other jewelry he’d dug up from the Valley of Kings more than a decade ago. The mummies and sarcophaguses had been left intact, probably deemed too bulky to take.

  At the end of the hall he came to a shattered glass case with a mannequin decapitated and its chest lying at its feet. The right arm had been yanked off as well and thrown into the corner. The right hand was empty.

  So it was true: the Staff of Set had been stolen. As had the corresponding headdress. Dr. Johnson shook his head at this. The public gravitated towards the mummies, but the staff and headdress were the most valuable artifacts in the exhibit. He had found them thirty years ago in a remote corner of Egypt, not far from the ancient city of Alexandria, which was mostly underwater now.

  It was the only time in his long history as an Egyptologist when he’d followed a vision. He had been staying at the new city of Alexandria for a conference. He had been fast asleep that night when he saw an ancient temple. At the altar inside he saw two figures. One wore the dog-faced headdress and carrying the staff of the god Set. The other wore the eagle-headed headdress and carrying the staff of the god Horus. The two gods were traditional enemies, which made the dream—the vision—seem especially odd.

  Odder was when he began digging and found the temple, looking just as in his vision. A temple as large as a shopping mall, its stone walls adorned with images of all of the Egyptian gods. The hieroglyphics on the wall told all of the stories of Egyptian mythology, from creation to an apocalyptic end to everything. That final story featured a war between Set, the god of chaos and Horus, the god of war that wiped out everything. A statue of each god stood on a dais, each god with a headdress and golden staff.

  To get permission and funding for the dig, Dr. Johnson had joined forces with the Field Museum in Chicago. Thus when it came time to divide the spoils, the headdress and staff of Horus went to Chicago while those of Set went to Ren City. On a few occasions they had swapped, but at the time of the robbery they had been in their usual homes.

  Now the staff and headdress of Set were gone. According to the hieroglyphics in the temple, those items had been created by the god himself. Dr. Johnson didn’t really believe this, but he always had an uneasy feeling whenever he spent time around the items. In a way he should be glad they were gone.

  The doors at the other end of the exhibit slammed shut. Dr. Johnson looked back, wondering if it were one of the guards. He didn’t see anyone. “Hello?” he called out. “Anyone there?”

  “There’s no one,” a voice hissed. “Just you and me.”

  A pair of red eyes appeared from the darkness. Dr. Johnson gasped at the outline of a dog’s head. The Staff of Set tapped him on the chest a moment later. The staff’s eyes glowed red too. “Hello, Dr. Johnson.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Don’t you recognize me? I am Set.”

  “Set isn’t real. He’s a myth.”

  “My power isn’t a myth.” Set moved the staff to the right and fired a bolt of lightning at the mannequin that had formerly held it. The plastic mannequin melted into a puddle. “That will be you if you doubt me again.”

  “What is it you want? Money?”

  “I care not for your money. I want your knowledge.”

  “Knowledge?”

  “Everything you know about me. I want all of your research notes. Every slip of paper and computer disk. Do you understand?”

  “It’s up in my office.”

  “I know. That is where we will go.”

  “Security—”

  “Has been dealt with.”

  “What did you do?”

  “That is not your concern. Your concern is doing as I wish.”

  “Fine. Let’s go.” Dr. Johnson went first, the man calling himself Set following behind, the staff leveled and ready for use. Getting it to shoot lightning was a neat trick. Maybe this man was some kind of special effects whiz. In which case he should be working in Hollywood.

  In the great hall he found the guards lying facedown on the floor. They appeared to still be breathing, which meant Set had just knocked them out. Apparently he wasn’t as blood
thirsty as whoever had robbed the museum.

  They took the elevator up to the third floor. Along the way Dr. Johnson didn’t hear any alarms. The other guards they came across were unconscious. No one was going to help him. He would just have to hope Set only wanted his notes.

  Egyptology had a block of offices near the end of the hall. He stopped at the frosted glass door with his name stenciled on it as the department head. He had hoped someday Lois’s name might be stenciled beneath his as the assistant head of the department. He thought of her and hoped again this character only wanted his notes.

  Newcomers often mistook his office for a vacant one. He had never bothered with decorating it or replacing the furniture he had inherited. Most of his time he spent in the field, where a good Egyptologist should be. He sat down at his desk, seeing the picture of Lois and Jessie next to his and Betty’s wedding photo. It might not be much longer until he was reunited with her. Would Jessie be far behind? Then poor Lois, who had already lost so much before she was even born, never knowing her father.

  While he waited for the computer to boot up, he unlocked his desk drawers. Set motioned for him to roll back while he rooted through the papers inside. The supposed god leaned his staff against the wall. Dr. Johnson considered trying to grab it, but he doubted he could make it in time. Even then he didn’t know how to use the thing.

  Once the computer’s welcome screen came up, he typed in his password. He wheeled back even farther so that Set could ransack the computer for whatever he wanted. Dr. Johnson watched the man claiming to be a god, trying to figure out who this person might be. He wore a black jacket, pants, and gloves with the headdress covering his face so that nothing was visible. If he told the cops a man with the head of a dog had accosted him they would probably throw him in the loony bin.

  After a tense half hour, the dog headdress turned to face him, its red eyes glowing. “Is this everything?”

  “Yes. Everything I have. I swear.”

  “Good.”

  “Now can I go?”