Fury From the Tomb

by S. A. Sidor

  I’ve let my fire burn out.

  I was preoccupied by my thoughts of days past, the dead days, memories inhabited by ghosts. Memories are ghosts, I think, that live on in our heads, wandering the numberless rooms, occasionally treading out into the open where we can see them whether we’d like to or not. Hazy creatures most of them are, phantasmal fogs, made as much of imaginings as recorded details. But a few shine hard and bright as mirrors in the sun, don’t they? These special ones sear themselves into the brain tissue. They glare and refuse to be ignored.

  The laboratory is cold, drafty. Damnation! It smells like an icehouse. The air stings entering the nose and throat, and then settles in the lungs like seepage. I am chilled sitting here. I never seem to properly warm up any more. Cold and lumpen, huddled in my overcoat and fuzzy wool scarf, and my hair is but webs on a pumpkin. Where did my life go? Winter outside on the brittle January streets, but winter for me personally too. Oh, the morbid, self-pitying song of old men – is anything more tiresome? I am really not the kind of person who dwells on what is lost. Forever lost. But, understand that I am an archaeologist! I make my living digging up the past and sifting, sifting, seeing what I might’ve missed the last time I looked, staring at my artifacts, and using my special knowledge to breathe life into what appears lifeless. Fear not! I have more birch logs. However, the whisky is perilously low in the bottle. Let me tell you a secret: I have found another bottle behind the ushabti!

  So, I will rake the embers until they glow like the eyes of the damned crying sparks in the pit. Here you go, Log. Burn for us. Make your sacrifice so we may have light and heat to tell our story to the end. It was pitchy then, too, in that cavernous space beneath the desert monastery where evil pooled like tainted water, slimy and rank.

  Have you ever held a handful of squirming night-crawlers – those fat, juicy, liverish ones that are ideal for bass fishing – ever held them close up to your face and taken a deep sniff? No. Well, if you had, then you might understand the smell lingering in the air outside the Ka door. I can taste it now, if I shut my eyes and concentrate.

  Wormstink. Candles fizzling down, smoking grayly, my clothes grown stale and stiff with desert grit and sweat, and McTroy ripe in his poncho… we were quite a pair. Caught in a bad spot. Up against the wall, literally. Where to go next? What to do? We were at a loss. Well, I was. McTroy didn’t talk about himself much. My emotions were wet newspapers wadded up in a corner inside me, a pulpy mess no one cared to read.

  There’s no point sitting here, he said.

  I was doing just that – leaning my back into the splintered Ka door, listening to the hypnotic chants and drumming on the other side, miles away, more than miles. My head felt hollow as a pumpkin and half as smart.

  Let me edge closer to my fire and refill my glass.

  I wish you were here with me, drinking. I wish they all were here. McTroy, Miss Evangeline, Yong Wu, so many others from my adventurous days… forever past. But we have our memories. The ghosts own us, and we shall let them take the stage again.

  April 9th-10th???… I am unsure

  The Gila, Mexico, Underground

  McTroy stood at the bridge, gazing over.

  “There’s no point sitting here,” he said.

  “Suggestions?” I was sounding defeated. He had taken the last of the candles. I sat in shadows, reviewing what I knew of the Duat, or the Egyptian Land of the Dead.

  Vibrating.

  The drums. Voices chanting. The rocks were humming with a palpable energy. My body too shivered as if I had a nasty attack of ague. The earth itself simmered with rage about to boil over. Why would Kek travel to the Duat with his entourage? He had just succeeded in resurrecting himself, becoming very much alive. So why return?

  McTroy beckoned. I joined him, distractedly, at the ropes and chasm.

  “We backtrack to the wine cellar,” he said. “Find another way to the Temple Underneath.”

  “They aren’t there. They’re…” I waved my hand. “Gone… over to the other side. Land of the Dead.”

  I gestured broadly at the wall behind us, the pointlessness of it.

  “Rojo told us the monks go to the Temple Underneath for their black masses. They’ll get to that bullshit before dawn. This mummy death thing can’t go much longer.”

  “The Egyptians made a royal production out of death. You’d be surprised.”

  He ignored me.

  “I’d like to ambush them in the Temple. We’ll make ourselves a cute sniper’s nest before they arrive. Set up in the choir loft or what-have-you. Catch them with their pants down, if they ever put any on. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a couple rifles on the way.”

  “I don’t feel lucky,” I said.

  “Luck changes on a dime, Doc. Don’t forget that. I don’t give two licks about our odds. Let them come for us. We’ll show those cutthroats how goddamned mean we are.”

  “What did you say?”

  He cocked a speculative eye my way. “Luck changes–”

  “No, the other part.”

  “We’ll show them cutthroats just how mean we are–”

  I snapped my fingers.

  “That’s it.” I practically danced a jig. “That’s what Kek is doing in the Land of the Dead. He’s showing the gods how mean he is: how he defeated their priests and their curses, their violations of his burial, how he survived them. He’s gone back to show them what a true bastard looks like. He wants them to see him alive. He’s off bragging.”

  “How long you reckon that will take?”

  “I have no earthly idea,” I said.

  “We best move on then.”

  I had no argument. In the moment I was basking in the satisfaction of knowing that Kek had done something predictable or at least decipherable, and in his arrogance, we might find a solution to his capture and eventual delivery to Los Angeles. He had human-like faults because he was human too. I had forgotten that fact. And another: he had been imprisoned once by men of law, and therefore he might be confined again. So with a renewed confidence I followed my guide as we backtracked to the wine cellar.

  We never did find it.

  It should have been a simple walk down a dozen steps and then a ninety-degree turn to the right where we expected to encounter the following: the bloody-foot-printed corridor, the monk’s wine cellar, the passageway leading to the well – and our only known way back up to the surface. But none of these expectations were met. It was not so simple, you see, the opposite of straightforward. Yes, the lack of light played a role but not as much you might think. We had the stub of a candle, and before it snuffed out, McTroy did a clever job constructing a firebrand from a length of rope he sliced off the bridge rail and a piece of the shattered Ka door.

  “Doc, lemme see your left hand.”

  I held my arm out, the palm turned upwards.

  He took hold of my wrist.

  With a quick swipe of his knife – I had returned the horn-handled blade to him – he slashed the shoulder of my only shirt and pulled the cotton sleeve completely off. He wrapped the cloth around the torch and poured the melting candle over it. When the wax was spent, he used the last of the glowing wick to light the torch. It burned with a steady, confident flame.

  “That’ll work,” he said, his face smiling in the orangey shadows.

  “My word! Why didn’t you ask me first?”

  “Would you have said, ‘Yes’?”

  “I might have.” I rubbed my naked arm.

  So we had light. Plenty of it.

  We did not have any steps.

  None whatsoever presented themselves. They had vanished. Where they should have been there was, instead, an unbroken, mineral smoothness that I found sinister despite the fact it was rock, only rock, I told myself.

  “Where’s the damn stairs?” McTroy said.

  Before us lay a corridor much narrower and deeper channeled than the one where we had watched the monks and mummies parade and where we had followed them in secret. I migh
t have walked in this new passageway almost brushing both walls with my shoulders. It reminded me of school dormitories or hospital hallways, that same sealed-off, smothered feeling which results from cramming too much into one place. It made my chest tingle. The subterranean darkness had done some good for my fear of enclosure. I could imagine space around me. And the many passages, even the worm’s vertical crevice, suggested the possibility of escape.

  In the torchlight I could see more.

  I tried to focus on the puzzle before me.

  No obvious doorways appeared along the corridor. Nor any steps up or down, nor any turns, except for a possible change of direction far off, like an enticement. The effect reminded me of my farm days and the slaughterhouse chute. I planted my feet. My neck hairs prickled.

  “This is wrong,” I said. “We haven’t come this way before.”

  “I know it,” McTroy said. “But it’s the only path this side of the bridge. I can’t figure it.”

  “It’s as if the landscape changed behind us.”

  “We came up those steps before and could see the bridge. Now we’ve backtracked more than that and there’s nothing familiar.”

  “It doesn’t feel safe. Let’s go back to the bridge. Perhaps we missed something.” The suspicion crept over me that we were stepping into a cleverly laid snare.

  “Start at the bridge?”

  “That’s my opinion,” I confirmed.

  McTroy’s pride was hurt. He took the attempt to fool us personally. Yet I could see his senses as a hunter were engaged. “Doc, I know I didn’t miss anything. Something weird is at work. Whether it’s in our heads from that crazy medicine man smoke I can’t say. You go first. Take the torch. I’ll put my hand on your shoulder so we don’t get going in different directions.”

  “That’s a plan.” I forged on. We would start over.

  But I could not find the bridge.

  We walked without seeing evidence of ropes or spans, no crevasse, and no Ka door. I counted fifty… sixty… seventy steps. I could still hear the chanting, but as we moved, it moved with us. Eventually, I came upon a turn neither of us recalled making. It was sharp to the left, and we took it. Another turn presented itself, also to the left. After which we encountered a split in the pathway shaped like a Y.

  “Why, indeed!” I stamped my foot, staring at the entrances of two identical tunnels. “This is confounding. We’ve never come this way before this very moment.”

  McTroy crouched and passed his torch close to the floor.

  “Circles. They got us walking in circles.”

  He touched the dust. He brought his fingers to his mouth and tasted them.

  “Boot prints. Could be yours, or mine. Too shallow to tell,” he said, and he spit.

  “We’ve never passed here.”

  “Uh-huh. Glad you’re so sure of yourself.”

  “I only express what I observe.”

  His eyes narrowed in the firelight. “See these other footprints crossing back and forth. Naked like an Apache’s, moving on their toes, like they were in a hunt. Tracks go in one tunnel, then the other, back they come again. Lost, I’d say. Hard to get an Apache lost. The devil marchers we saw with the mummies had blood on them. I don’t taste blood. Just dust.”

  “The monks were shoeless. Perhaps when they are not engaged in their ceremonies, they travel this route. It may lead to something.”

  “I’d like to know what ’fore I get there.”

  “Which tunnel?” I asked.

  “Neither,” he said. He cocked a pistol and poked the barrel back the way we had come. “I don’t like the smell of them.”

  I tested the air for worm stink, for monkish incense, even for Evangeline’s summer blossomy perfume. “I smell nothing of consequence.”

  “It’s the feels, Doc. I got them and I don’t like them.”

  He turned and waited for me to lead the way.

  I edged past him; torch held high, chin up, and straining with all my acumen to solve our predicament. Strange, I thought, this dungeon lair was riddled through like a termite mound.

  What did it mean?

  That question was too abstract.

  How did it function?

  That was more scientific. I took slow steps, McTroy’s hand grasping my shoulder. A Dante’s Inferno, I thought, but that didn’t seem the correct literary allusion. I fumbled for a better one. It would be lost on McTroy, of course. Lost. Damned, imprisoned, confused, and lost in a house of monsters. Dante and Virgil met the Minotaur when they trekked through Hell.

  Who would we meet?

  I placed one foot forward.

  Down.

  And I felt it.

  Movement. Subtle. Greased. But I sensed it underfoot – a shifting, a change of horizontal plane, then a bump of resettlement – the gentle pressure of the floor dropping a few inches; followed by the barely perceptible motion of counterweights, levers, gears, and pulleys turning. I spun and watched the floor lowering behind us. The wall to the right swung on silent hinges until it fit snugly across the path, blocking the way we had come but offering a different course now, in a direction we had not traveled before, or perhaps we had, it was hard to judge. But I began to understand what I was seeing – a moving maze that altered as a person walked through it.

  I was correct earlier.

  The landscape had changed behind us.

  “Don’t move,” I said.

  “What the devil?” McTroy said, noticing the alleyway heading to the two tunnels was gone and replaced by a new lane.

  “Not the devil. But perhaps the Minotaur.”

  I shifted my weight carefully and shoved at the wall. It was solid, unmovable.

  “Wait,” I said. “Do not stir until I say.”

  I stepped behind McTroy.

  “Walk backward with me. Left foot, then right. Keep going. Nowww… Stop. Hold your position.” We stood together. I counted in my head to one hundred.

  “Are we going to stand here like a couple of–?”

  “Give it time.”

  I counted to fifty. That should do it, I thought.

  “Forward again, slowly.”

  As we approached the juncture where the wall had shifted, our flickery fire preceded us until– “There! Look!” The lane that had opened was no more. Again we had the Y and the two tunnels.

  “How… how did you know?” McTroy asked.

  I dodged around him for a closer look at the wall.

  “It’s ingenious. Devious is a better word. I’ve seen something like this before. In the tombs of Egypt. In Amun Odji-Kek’s tomb under the skull rock. Traps engineered to preserve treasures, to keep people from stealing what’s been buried. In Kek’s case, his tomb was cursed. But it was also manually secured against those who would attempt to save his corpse and revive him. He had a defender in his mausoleum to protect him, a kind of guard dog – a guard worm to be precise, a baby one, apparently, and kin to El Gusano. It is no accident that the necrófagos robbed the mummy train and stole the sarcophagus. They brought the mummies here for a reason. This monastery and the skull rock are connected. I don’t yet know how.”

  “What does that have to do with this witchery?”

  “Not witchery. Unless you count mathematics as a warlock’s domain.”

  I stamped my foot as I had the first time I approached the tunnels. “This solid seeming rock is not so solid. Slabs of stone weighing tons. We could not possibly lift them. But… they pivot and rock. You can’t see it. Not now. Yet walking on them springs them into action. Yes, yes… ah-ha!”

  I ran crazed from one end of the hall to the other. The floor moved visibly. Not by much. But we saw it creep. I saw it creep. McTroy wore a mask of skepticism.

  “I presume the chanting hides the sound,” I said. “But they’re quiet machines, no squeaking whatsoever.”

  I pointed downward as I tripped along.

  “You see, the mechanisms cause the floors and walls to make, let’s call them adjustments. Open and cl
ose. Reveal and hide. You doubt me? How do stairways appear and then vanish? Stone blocks move, making new angles. The joints fit so perfectly it would take a magnifying lens to spot them. Gorgeous work, really, a marvel of ingenuity and geometry. I’d love to study the plan under more leisurely circumstances. I’ll bet if I worked my way along this…”

  I tapped my knuckles on the right wall and tried to push it. Nothing happened.

  “I wonder if they use steam–” I said, before being cut off.

  “Doc?”

  “Yes?”

  “What treasure are they guarding here?”

  “Oh, if I’m right they’re not guarding anything. Someone has decided to put these mechanisms to another use. Allow me to explain.”

  “That’s what I thought you were doing.”

  I nodded.

  “Can you imagine yourself thrust into these tunnels in pure ignorance? Not knowing that you were entering a maze. In the dark? Perhaps with a candle, perhaps with nothing. No map. No sense of what was waiting for you around the next bend?”

  “I can only wonder what that must feel like,” he said.

  “Yes, of course. Sorry.” I realized it did not take much to envision mentally the very situation in which we found ourselves. Yet I indulged my illustration of our predicament as though it were something I was observing from outside, from a safe distance, in a controlled laboratory. “It does not take long. Panic sets in. Essentially blind, you walk on. Hunted. You suspect you are prey, perhaps for a worm or the bloodletting monks. Or both. Your heart pounds. In the darkness and the smoke, you hear the hypnotic chanting. Your senses are overtaxed. It is easy for you to make mistakes. Perception fails. Misdirection is the key to any magician’s art. You look but you do not see.”

  McTroy looked around. “Where are they?” he asked, his voice a barely contained growl.

  “I do not know. And that is the point.” I clapped my hands together, glad as any teacher who has broken through to her thickest student.