Fury From the Tomb

by S. A. Sidor

  Whatever did that mean? It was true my boyhood had been truncated, bookish, and to a large degree solitary. I was an only child who grew up on a farm. I could hardly be blamed for that. After quick self-review, my school days were less occupied with acts of immaturity and impish pranks than with diligent library work and preparation for a life in academia. Other boys simply bored me; I antagonized them. I was better off alone. Romantically speaking, I had never been inspired to be one of those starry-eyed, amateur poets who follow debutantes around scribbling sonnets, odes, and whatnot, but… but… oh, I feared Evangeline was right again. My view of the world was cast in sepia tones. Very like the pages of a book on a shelf in the dimmest-lit corner of the library.

  That did not mean that I never intended anyone to read me!

  Or read of me, for that matter. Perhaps I will write a book, I thought. Gothic romance because no one will believe this is history. If I claimed it were true, they would lock me in an asylum. I would lay under a pile of blankets all year round, and mumble to myself as I watched the sunlight bleed across the wall. Mice would befriend me. But if I said: Here’s a novel to terrorize and titillate your senses. Well then, perhaps…

  We proceeded through the archway, and a prickling gnawed at my skin as if I had passed under an icy cataract. Moonlight’s skin quivered. At the corners of my vision blue undulations swam like vertical eels. Once we left the arch’s shade, the visual disturbances and the chill subsided completely. It was hot desert again. I did not have to ask my companions if they felt these sensations, for McTroy had gone temporarily rigid in the saddle, and Evangeline and Wu were shuddering like a pair of newborn puppies. No lasting damage appeared on our bodies, so my assumption was that we had tripped an alarm set by a spell, and something like sleigh bells were ringing in Odji-Kek’s ear.

  McTroy pointed at the sky.

  Half a dozen wobbly check marks revolved beyond the arch.

  “Vultures,” Wu said. “They smell the dead. I’ve seen them follow my parents.”

  “Who else do we know might smell like Mr Reaper?” McTroy clucked his tongue. “Here comes the end of the line, boys and girls.” He pulled up and dismounted. Freeing his rifle from its leather scabbard, he never took his eyes off the notch’s exit. “I don’t like us flushing out of this split with no cover. Damn hairy. They know we’re due to arrive.”

  “What is your plan?” I asked.

  “I’m gonna take a scramble.” He pointed the barrel of his rifle at an ugly collection of boulders, stacked high and off to the right. “From there I can see the whole mining camp.”

  “What should we do? I’m not waiting here,” Evangeline said.

  “Miss, could you make your way discreetly over to that ledge – the one stabbing out like a crooked witch’s finger?” McTroy asked.

  “I could,” she said, swinging off her saddle.

  “I could too,” Wu said.

  “Then we’ll go together,” Evangeline said before I raised any objection.

  “Am I to stay with the horses?” I asked, trying not to sound dejected.

  “Doc, if the mummies kill these two horses it won’t matter what we do. There’s no walking out of here. The birds will eat us for dinner. That’s about the sum of it.”

  I nodded and, climbing down, took hold of Moonlight’s and Neptune’s reins.

  McTroy started his ascent.

  Likewise, Evangeline and Wu crept along the reverse side of the ravine.

  Hardy, old inside, forever old, remained with the horses. He was a bookman first, a scholar second. He swore he would never fire a gun, even in the face of his enemy. Did you know he was afraid of tight spaces? How odd for him to seek the profession of tomb raider. Odd, indeed. But isn’t “odd” the perfect word for the man? He lived mostly in his head. The one expedition he supervised brought back unspeakable foreign monsters that had been imprisoned in the earth for millennia…

  Internal thoughts go better with a pipe full of tobacco. I had lost mine in the train wreck. The horses eyed me with suspicion. I was talking to myself. Aloud. Too long in the sun, too little sleep… too much thinking and too little doing… my gaze ventured back toward the arch…

  Amun Odji-Kek stood at the apex of the span.

  He looked straight at me.

  He wore a yellow skullcap. His amber eyes shined, their outlines had been rimmed in black, and the black smudges extended far into the corners. The eyes appeared to float in darkness. They stared at me from within pits dug into his skull. Dressed in a long, golden robe – he was motionless. The robe’s hem brushed the ground. His arms hung at his sides. I could not see his hands. His sleeves flowed into the robe so he seemed like a carved block of yellow flashing stone come to life, his smooth head glowering from atop a tower of great height. His lips closed together in a cruel line.

  “Kek, you are here,” I said, my mouth turning as dry as if I had been eating sand.

  He nodded.

  “We knew you would come here,” I said. My words seemed to float away from me, and my mind felt loose and not altogether under my own power.

  I put my hand over my mouth to stop myself from talking.

  “I have been in darkness for ages,” he said. “Yet I tire of the desert. I want to go to somewhere green. I want to see water. I saw water on that ship. Do you remember?”

  I had first met Kek’s apparition at night on the deck of the tramp steamer Derceto. We had watched the waves together. It felt like years ago, lifetimes.

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “I would like to see water again. To visit a place that is green.” He looked out across the Sonoran landscape. “Is there water in Los Angeles, California?”

  “Yes… some… there is the Pacific Ocean,” I muttered through my fingers.

  “Are there tall palm trees?”

  I nodded. My body trembled uncontrollably.

  “I will live by the Pacific Ocean,” he said. “I will have many sons born to me.”

  The sun flared above us. Separate tendrils of fire whipped out across the sky, uncurling, reaching earthward across the solar system; millions of pulsating suction cups covered each tendril. Upon further inspection, the cups were mouths. Mouths filled with pin-sharp teeth. What was I seeing? The heavens in revolt of their natural order – an unholy god unleashed. This was a glimpse of Kek’s vision for the future. His paradise.

  Gazing at the sorcerer injured my eyes, but I could not look away.

  Kek’s shadow fell into the ravine, where it multiplied, stretching out of proportion to its source, and although he remained quite still (only his eyes and lips moved), his shadow-self twisted and writhed over the rocks. The hot rocks hissed as if a liquid had spilled onto them. I smelled burning cedar wood. Myrrh. Water lilies.

  And rot. He might have left the tomb, but it would never leave him.

  He looked down at me again, smiling a ridiculous, jackal-toothed smile that spread his face as if it were about to tear apart. Anger dwelt there. Pain too.

  “I will be the King of Los Angeles,” he said.

  Where was McTroy? Could he not hear Kek? And Evangeline and Yong Wu? Did no one but me hear his voice booming all around?

  “Soon you’ll know what it is to be dead.” He laughed. “But that woman intrigues me. Tell me, good doctor, has she ever been with a king?”

  Wild, canid giggles. Tee-hee. Tee-hee. Tee-hee.

  Growing louder, echoing in the ravine. His head went tipping back, the wide mouth opening, eyes hooded as they pinched and glittered. His laughing face: sharp teeth and hard, pink gums, the wavy folds of lips like salt water taffy pulled and pulled; his sloping tongue creased down the middle, lolled fatly, then obscenely flexed as if it had a life of its own – the rough shrieks poured out from canyons deep within him–

  TEE-HEE-HEE-HEE-HEEHEEHEEEEEEeeeeee

  The sun exploded.

  I threw my arms around my head. I knelt, shielding myself. However, I did not die as I expected I would – in a scorching bla
st of flesh-melting, bone-blackening wind.

  Instead, spotty bits of vision swam about as if they were trapped in a fishbowl around me, and shaking my head only made them spin more furiously than they had before. Slowly they returned to me – little, broken bits of landscape, irregular chunks of sandstone and sketchy palo verde scrub – like a swirling jigsaw puzzle. I struggled to assemble things in three dimensions, not knowing what final picture they would make. The desert phosphoresced white. I kicked at stones in frustration and, losing my balance, barked a shin and cried out, swearing. Blurs darted around me – ranging from jackrabbit in size to a full-on shaggy buffalo – unfocused, ocular phantoms hindered me from drawing any conclusion until they settled. Blinking, I blotted tears. I looked and looked. But there could be no doubt.

  The arch was empty.

  40

  Arrastra

  I had to find my party. To warn Evangeline, McTroy, and Wu. It was a mistake to have come to La Mina Resurrección. Odji-Kek was more powerful and unpredictable than we had thought. Waterston didn’t control him. No one controlled him. In fact, we knew next to nothing about his powers. We were walking into a slaughter, or worse. If we left now we might be able to contact someone in the US government and get an army to Mexico. It seemed absurd. But even an army might not be enough to stop Kek. We needed scholars, experts on the occult. We needed Egyptians! Ancient Egyptians!

  Moonlight and Neptune appeared asleep. I stumbled past them, pausing only long enough to slip my walking stick from Moonlight’s saddle. I used the stick to steady myself. Pik pik pik – the stick’s ferrule dug shallow craters in the sand as I proceeded.

  My head was still ringing with the sorcerer’s laughter. The sound penetrated my bones. It was as if a part of him lingered inside me. Feeling soiled, I tried to throttle my racing mind, because Kek lurked in me like a spy. How could we combat such a creature! I looked left and right, seeking my companions amid the high rocks. I saw no trace of McTroy among the lumpen boulders, or Evangeline and Wu – the ledge where they were to climb lay barren, and as McTroy had noted, it pointed like a witch’s gnarled finger toward the goldmine.

  “McTroy! Evangeline!”

  My shouts brought no replies.

  Without thinking, I walked straight out of the notch and into the mining camp. My limbs felt heavy, my whole body did, as if I had fishing sinkers sewn into my clothes. I was flapping my arms, waving my stick, trying desperately to get them to see me.

  “Hello, search party!” I called out. “Yong Wu, are you there?”

  A dark shape zipped overhead.

  A buzzard? Did one of those high-circling scavengers decide to swoop down for a closer look? I scanned the air, squinting. I saw nothing but washed-out sky. The golden orb of the sun stole away the colors. My eyes were left temporarily damaged by the vision I’d had of Kek and the hallucinatory solar explosion. The world around me was rendered in pencil sketches and smudges of charcoal – a grayness that for some unnamed reason caused my level of panic to rise steadily like steam rattling inside a tea kettle. If colors were now bled away, all but vanished, could death be far behind? It was irrational. But my rational mind had been sorely tested.

  The mining camp was smaller than I expected. Two buildings constructed of flat, stacked stones, mortared together with mud, and topped off by rust-eaten tin roofs that curled at the edges. The smaller of the two was closer to me. I went there first.

  A door of rough planks that had been hammered hastily together hung askew. When I pushed it inward, it dropped from its hinges and clattered to the ground, sending up a dust cloud that choked me. After the dust cleared, I stepped inside. It was a good thing the door had fallen off, because the building’s only window was boarded over, and the airless room was hot as a furnace. A solid block of shadows was packed inside. I used my pocket watch to reflect the sunlight, probing the corners of the room.

  Mining equipment.

  Shovels and picks. Hammers, chisels. A battered ore bucket with a huge dent kicked into it. I moved my light around shakily. A huge snake lay sleeping in the farthest corner, and catching sight of the reptile made me jump inside, my heart pounding, until I realized it was only a pile of chains. A torn burro harness hung from a nail. A wooden ladder missing two steps leaned against the wall like a tired, skinny, brown man.

  That was all I found in the first building.

  When I walked outside I saw another flicker in the air, moving toward the high rocks on the left side of the notch. It was too fast to be a bird. I rubbed my eyes. I stood there for a full minute, watching. I saw no movement in the rocks or above them.

  I turned to the second building.

  As I went closer I noticed, between the buildings, a circle of stones like the wall of a well. But it was no well. A thick post in the center attached to a longer horizontal arm, and a chain ran through the wooden arm and hung down; the other end of the chain hooked to a decently-sized boulder with a hole drilled through the top. Flat stones lined the bottom of the circular pit. Bits of broken quartz lay scattered inside. This was an arrastra – a Spanish grinding mill used for thousands of years, dating back to the ancient Mediterranean. Mexican miners introduced them to the American southwest. The end of the arm extended outside the pit, and miners would harness a burro to the arm to drag the boulder over the flat stones, crushing any rocks they dumped into the pit. They would sift through the crushed remains looking for signs of gold. That explained the chain in the storehouse and the torn harness I’d found. But arrastras had been replaced by stamp mills, which crushed rocks more quickly and in greater quantity. Why was there an arrastra at Mina Resurrección? Two reasons. One: the mine was old – old enough to have been discovered by Mexicans long before any Americans explored this desert, thus the arrastra might have been here for a hundred years, or more. Two: a stamp mill required water to power it – a great deal of water. This place was far too dry for a stamp mill. Waterston’s mine managers must have taken their ore elsewhere to pulverize it. Yet the bits of quartz in the arrastra’s pit sparkled. No dust covered them. Dust, in the Gila, covered everything in no time at all. Someone had been looking for gold… recently. They didn’t want any curious minds at the stamp mill knowing what they were doing. Well, I knew who ordered the search for gold to continue. I only wondered why he had kept it a secret. It made no sense. Well, whatever surreptitious mining had been taking place at Resurrección was over now. This place was deserted.

  And haunted. Or so it began to feel to me. Spirit-laden, and oppressive.

  I left the arrastra and walked to the second building.

  This had been the miners’ living quarters. The front door was missing. The unkindness of ravens from the stone archway had relocated to the roof. They followed me with their oil-drop eyes, their feathers like charred wood. Inside, I surprised a turkey vulture. His red, bald head bobbed. And his red feet hopped until he reached an open window, and flew out. Skeletal frames of bunks were built along both long walls of the rectangular house. Sand heaped on the floor. Tiny, sculpted dunes like a miniature desert spread from one end of the bunkhouse to the other. Several windows gaped free of boarding. Even now a stray breeze carried grit over the sills into every crevice of the former lodging. I approached a rear window. Gazed out. Here I found a small graveyard. Dead miners. Their bodies were buried in unmarked graves; each grave bordered by loose stones gathered from the edge of the plateau. I was willing to bet that the humble adornments were the doing of the other miners and not Waterston’s company overseers. The miners would have been largely illiterate and unable to write names on tombstones other than their own. These tombs had plain, unpainted crosses. Waterston probably saw the deaths as a nuisance, the cost of doing business; a broken chain, a dented bucket, a dead man killed in the mine – they all amounted to the same thing: replaceable parts in the Waterston machine. Like the other Egyptologists who came before me – Ned Krazwell and the rest – I too was an interchangeable piece in Waterston’s quest to locate the skull
rock and the tomb of Amun Odji-Kek. We were only means to an end – his end.

  Gold and mummies. Treasure.

  I could not bear to look at the graves any more.

  I returned my attention to the bunkhouse. Its interior was surprisingly barren. There was no indication of any previous human occupation. Nothing left behind. Not a book or a cracked bottle, not so much as a candle stub or soup pot… no chair to sit in, or even an ill-fitting, odd boot. As an archaeologist I found this strange. People leave things behind. We always do. But not here. In this place humanity had been utterly erased. The storehouse had its old tools. This was an empty shell. And that was all.

  But there was a bad odor to the bunkhouse.

  I hadn’t noticed it before. Probably because of the breeze. Or my senses being overtaxed. The odor came from the far end of the room, where I’d seen the vulture.

  There was a door there. Shut. No doorknob, only a round hole where it should have been. I went to the door and pushed.

  The odor was overpowering. This is what brought the vulture indoors, what attracted the ravens to the rooftop: a half dozen dead Mexican miners. Their bodies piled atop one another. All of them shot once or twice. At close range. They had been dead a few weeks by my estimate. Flies had come and gone and done what flies do. Rodents obviously had access to the office. That’s what this room had been in times gone by. A table stood against the wall. Away from the dead men.

  Well, away from all but one dead man.

  This corpse was fresher than the others, although technically he had been dead the longest. His neck was broken. His head twisted the wrong way around, so despite the fact his body was lying on its stomach, he was facing up. I knew the face. I’d seen him only a day ago, driving the midnight coach and a team of jet-black stallions. It was Hakim, my Egyptian friend and foreman. I knelt beside his body. His eyes were cloudy, as if fog had crept inside, and finding no way out, gathered at the windows. His jaw stuck open in a last gasp of surprise. I flipped the body over. His head moved loosely, like a doll’s. Most of us will die but once. Hakim had died twice, and it didn’t look like it got any easier the second time. I hoped everything was finally over for him. He was a good man, and whatever perversity Kek’s magic had made of him, he bore no more responsibility for that post-mortem change than he did for lying here with his neck screwed in a helix. As I turned him, I noticed a lump under his jacket. In the pocket I found something about the size and shape of a large cigar, wrapped in clay-colored paper. I held it under my nose. The tube gave off a strong, burnt fruit smell that nauseated me. I rose to my feet and stepped nearer the table.