by S. A. Sidor
So it was.
Sickly green fluorescence emanated from the doorway. It was Waterston’s doing, I realized. From his tomb he had chanted the ritual phrases needed to unlock the Duat portal. I touched his coffin and felt no signs he was alive inside, nothing.
“Help me remove this,” I said to Wu.
The occult industrialist had paid dearly for his sarcophagus, and the ornate cover luxuriously designed to portray the man inside in his everlasting glory was sealed too tightly; the fitting matched with precision, and once closed the seam all but vanished. We could find no finger holds. It was impossible to lift without additional help.
McTroy’s bandaged feet slipped in a puddle of his own blood. The arrow wounds, while not instantly fatal, were nonetheless grievous and depleting him of a dizzying volume of blood. His mummy assailant toppled him backward. McTroy lost his sword. The mummy grabbed his throat in a two-fisted vise. McTroy battered him to no effect.
Evangeline stepped from the gloom at the far end of the mine.
With a pickaxe.
She drove the pickaxe into the mummy’s skull with such force that the skull crumpled into itself and disintegrated in a puff of dusty smoke. McTroy threw the mummy’s carcass off. The headless body twitched and curled up as if it had been singed.
McTroy retrieved his sword and used it to dispatch the armless mummy.
“Armless or headless, take your pick, so to speak. I’d go headless myself.” McTroy stripped the wrappings from his face. “I never knew how these suckers could keep their bandages on. Damn. Hotter than a Texas bed nymph with a bad case of–”
“There is a child here,” Evangeline said.
“Hotter than hell,” McTroy said, by way of apology.
“What do you know of hell’s heat?”
The sound of Odji-Kek came from behind me and I turned in time to duck as he hurled the lid of Evangeline’s coffin. It brushed back the hair on top of my head. Wu, who had been standing beside me, was too short to be in danger, yet he shivered involuntarily in pure mammalian fear as the golden weight passed above us, flying.
McTroy was not so lucky.
The lid sent him into the wall. It caught him squarely and took him off his feet. There was an awful concussive boom. His chin lay against his chest and blood poured from his nose and mouth. The lid pinned him in place.
Evangeline, who had barely escaped the projectile, gaped in shock.
“I will make more servants,” Kek said. “I will make you my servants.”
I smelled a horrible smell – excrement and stagnant waters, old filth and death, and burnt things that refuse to be consumed. Kek was not paying attention to the smells.
“I will take the boy first,” he said. “Then the woman. Hardy, I will take you last.”
“No, you will not,” I said.
He reached for me, and I swung my walking stick at him.
He grabbed the stick. It was easy for him as I knew it would be. I never intended to hit him with the stick, I only wanted him to fill his hand so I could take the flint dagger from his belt. As I said before, it was a very, very old dagger. Older than Kek. That monster carved into the ivory handle? Well, I suspected that the creature was what Amun Odji-Kek looked like when he roamed the Duat. His spirit doppelganger, if you will. Monty Waterston had been wrong. This dagger didn’t belong to Kek. It had never been his at all. But he knew it. He knew it because he’d been killed with it a long, long time ago.
I slipped the dagger from his belt.
I stuck it in his heart.
He roared.
He jumped back from me and slammed into Waterston’s coffin, knocking the top loose. He pulled at the dagger, but the dagger would not budge.
The Ka door opened. Out from the portal hopped a white-haired woman with tusk-like fangs. She carried with her the odor of mushrooms, damp earth, and coal dust. Mrs Wu sniffed the air. Her blind eyes floated up like moons. She had detected the warm boy-scent of her son. She spoke to the doorway. Green smoke. Thumping feet. Her husband bounded through and went to her side. They swayed like a pair of snowy wildflowers on a windy hillside. Their finger and toe nails were more claws than nails. Mr Wu lashed out in the direction of Kek. Both vampires hissed and sprayed silvery strands of saliva as long as eels that hit the ground, making loud splats. Yong Wu spoke in a voice cracked with pain but also with joy at seeing his parents when he had believed them to be forever lost. In three hops the family was together again. The older Wus put their boy behind them for protection. They faced toward the other one they smelled, the one who had beaten and locked them away. Lord of Demons. Plague Bringer.
Kek did not bother to look at them. He pawed at the blade in his chest. His muscles swelled as he struggled to free the dagger. He quaked. He screamed. The handle won out. He slumped against a wall to regain his strength for another attempt. Panting.
The Wus talked. Mr Wu hopped away from his family, jumping into the green smoke from the Ka door. The smoke thinned. I glimpsed a ruby glow behind the green.
Kek had been some combination of dead and undead for so long it really was improbable to think we would kill him off for good. Not by any ordinary means. Annihilation seemed overly optimistic. One could hope. But I feared he was only injured. “We should think about leaving. Up the tunnel,” I said to Evangeline. “When Mr Wu comes back,” I added.
“What about McTroy?”
“I’m afraid he’s–”
“No! We are not leaving.” She strode away from me, to the beam where I had been shackled. She picked up the chains. Before Kek realized what she was doing, she had locked his wrist, turned the key, and tossed the key into the Duat.
He raised his proud head.
“Fool.” The word rasped. The effort to keep his head upright grew too great. He chuckled and tore away his skullcap. His bald head glistened. A delta of veins spread over the bone. I watched it pulse. What might he have been without the lure of sorcery?
I grabbed the end of the chain. Together we tried to drag him toward the Ka door.
“Spirited fools,” he said. “Stop.”
But he came away from the wall. He resisted. Yet we were making progress.
“I will NEVER GO BACK!”
We edged him closer to the door. Where the green smoke had vanished was a reddened gateway now. Kek noticed the change. He dug his heels in, wrapped the chain around his fist and wrenched it from our grips. “Never going back,” he said quietly to himself.
Mr Wu leaped through the doorway. He sniffed and pointed a long finger at Kek.
He had not returned alone.
A procession of dark-eyed men followed him into the mine.
“No.” Odji-Kek fell on his back and, flipping over, began to crawl.
The men were judges. They carried… instruments. And rolls of bandages.
I will not offer much detail about what happened next, partly because some stories are too gruesome to tell, and more so because I did not, could not, watch. For the historical record, in an effort to give simple facts, I will go as far as to say this: the judges seized Kek, they bandaged him in linen, but they did not embalm him. They cut out his tongue. They removed the dagger from his chest and out of the hole they plucked a living scarab beetle the size and color of a human heart. The judges put the beetle in a jar. Rods of heated iron were inserted into Kek’s ears and a steaming liquid followed (here is where my curiosity ended; I looked away). The judges did not want Odji-Kek communicating with anyone as he had with Monty Waterston. This time they took precautions.
But the judges were not the only ones to cross over from the Duat that day.
It is said that if a human views a god, death is the result. I refute this claim. It may be that there are no gods at all, or it may be that we, each one of us, are godlike. Either way, I witnessed a being who I cannot classify as… typical. Mythological might ring correct. I do not ask you to believe me, but really, if you have come this far in my tale, is a god going to stop you?
&nb
sp; “Don’t look, Rom,” Evangeline said as she squeezed my hand.
But I am the One Who Remembers – a scribe, a brusher of facts. I peeked.
So help me I did.
It was as though I viewed her through a different medium – water or smoke – but my vision was not clear. It wavered. I can tell you this: the judges opened the jar and fed Kek’s scarab heart to a female beast. The beast was demonic. Part crocodile, part lion, and the hindquarters of a hippo. I know the mythological name for this beast is Ammut. Devourer of the Dead. She is real. She ate his heart in one gulp. When the judges took Kek back into the Duat she went with them.
Before the Ka door closed, I saw a lake in the distance.
A lake of fire.
Then the door shut.
43
Strange Futures
The Wus lifted the gold coffin lid off McTroy. He was not dead, not yet, but I had no question as to whether or not he would be dying soon. His breathing shallowed. He did not rouse when we said his name. Internal damages plus the arrowheads still lodged in his shoulder and upper thigh were more than sufficient to kill a man. Even the bleeding from his mouth and nose slowed to a trickle, as if to say, “Enough.” His skin turned as ashen as the bandages he had stolen from the mummy assassin who attempted to finish him in the rocks. Yong Wu told us how McTroy foiled his attacker, sent him headfirst into the ravine bottom, and rolled a boulder on his head for good measure. Evangeline was gone from the ledge by that time. Captured, carted off into the mine. It only was Wu and McTroy. The bounty hunter evaluated his wounds, and broke the arrow shafts. Together they unraveled the mummy and dressed McTroy in the bindings. He smeared his bloody hands on Wu’s face to give the appearance of grave injury. The blood was warm. Yong Wu clutched McTroy’s limp, rough hand as he talked to us.
“Is he dying?” Tears dripped down his cheeks. He hiccupped.
“Yes,” I said. “He needs a hospital, and a real doctor, not like me. But I don’t think he feels anything. It’s like he’s sleeping right now, and that sleep will get deeper and deeper. Then he will drift off.”
“People shouldn’t drift off,” Wu said. “They… they just shouldn’t.”
Wu’s parents stood away at a polite distance. Their noses twitched. The scent of blood, which filled the air with a smell like rain falling on old iron machinery, must have been overpowering. In the Duat, they had nothing to drink.
Wu’s mother asked him something in Cantonese.
I feared the worst. I understood the why of it, but an anger rose in me.
And revulsion. While I had a strong sympathy for Wu’s parents, I did not relish the thought of them feeding on a half-dead McTroy. As it turned out, I was wrong in my prejudiced assumptions. Ashamedly so.
“My mother knows a way to help McTroy,” Wu said. “She has good medicine.”
“What curative could she possibly have?” Evangeline asked.
“She will show you. But, please, do not interfere with her.”
“McTroy is doomed,” I said. “We have no better options.” I waved my arm in invitation for Mrs Wu to make contact with our fallen guide and friend.
She couldn’t see me, but she hopped to McTroy’s side. With a rapier fingernail she pierced his shoulder wound. A deft swirl of her wrist, and the arrowhead emerged. She extracted it. Crouching, sniffing, she repeated the operation on his upper thigh. For his part, McTroy did not stir. Then Mrs Wu did the strangest thing: she extended her left arm on a downward angle so the crook of her elbow rested on McTroy’s chin. With the index fingernail of her right, she sliced open her vein. Her blood defied gravity; rather than flowing toward the ground, it traveled up, and followed a channel between the taut muscles of her forearm. It behaved like no liquid I know. The stream seemed, well, intelligently controlled, as if a string pulled it from the incision in the vampiric arm to the slack parting of McTroy’s lips. It had the hue of an aged tawny port. As soon as the blood touched McTroy’s lips, Mrs Wu massaged his throat. And he drank. Very eagerly, like a suckling infant.
After he had a few good swallows, Mrs Wu broke their connection – though McTroy’s mouth continued to pucker and root, his tongue sweeping the last drops. She lowered her sleeve and hopped back to her husband.
In a hush, we waited.
McTroy’s eyelids fluttered. He yawned. Stretched. He scratched his whiskers.
“Why are you all sitting there smiling? Is it my birthday?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes, I believe it is,” I said.
“Well, I hope somebody baked a pie.”
We had a good laugh at that.
McTroy did not transform into a vampire because he had never been bitten. Wu informed me, and Evangeline concurred, that it takes more than a thirsty drink of vampire blood to achieve the full metamorphosis. As a subsequent note, McTroy had no memories of his near-death, or of the sarcophagus lid that had crushed him, and especially no recall of sipping Mrs Wu’s blood; though in the years after, he developed an increased fondness for the night, which he remarked upon often, claiming to be able to see farther in the dark than in daylight.
“I can almost smell the moon,” he told me once.
“Is it cheese?”
He ignored my jest.
“A man just lighted a campfire. He’s cooking beans with smoked hog jowl. Five miles. Thataway.” He pointed in a direction of absolute onyx obscurity.
I never shared the source of his heightened senses. But it pleased me to know something about McTroy that he obviously did not know about himself. Another result of the transfusion gave me more than amusement. I was overjoyed to recognize the close bond that instantly deepened between McTroy and Wu. He became a mentor to the boy. No substitute for his true father, of course, but about as caring a replacement as any father could ever want for his son. You see, the Wus knew that they could no longer stay together as a family. We covered Mr and Mrs Wu with tarps so the sun wouldn’t burn them, and they hopped out to the stonewall equipment shed. The boy remained with them and they talked. For the first time, I heard Wu sobbing loudly and uncontrollably, and I attempted to enter the shed, but Evangeline stopped me. When Yong Wu emerged, he had regained composure. At nightfall, he said, his parents would head for the mountains. He tells me they still live there.
Monty Waterston was another matter altogether. He never died in his sarcophagus. The lack of oxygen caused him to faint. But when Kek, in his throes of agony, knocked the top off his coffin… Monty slowly revived. He had helped us in his own way, though I was never sure helping us was his intention. I think he wanted revenge. Pure, simple revenge. While we were reviving McTroy, Monty slipped out of his tomb and creeped back to the surface. Evangeline was the one who noticed he was missing but decided not to look for him. That solution didn’t satisfy McTroy. He and I climbed to the high rocks. We spotted Monty leaving the notch, his weak and stumbling steps kicking up dust. McTroy had his rifle back from the crack between the boulders. The stock was broken, but he assured me it would still fire. He aimed for Monty’s cowardly, fleeing back.
I lowered the barrel.
“Let him go. He’s more dead than alive. The desert will finish him. Perhaps he will think about the magnitude of what he’s done before it’s all over. I don’t want to see Evangeline standing over her father’s coffin again. Do you?”
When Evangeline came out of the tunnel we told her Monty got away.
She tried to hide it. But what I saw was relief.
“He wasn’t always this way,” she said.
“He loves you,” I said. “Despite his… faults.”
I informed them about Hakim and the dead miners. We carted all the bodies back down into the mine. We took nothing. McTroy and Wu set the box of dynamite between the sarcophagi.
At dusk we finished.
“You ready, Doc?”
I nodded.
McTroy struck a match off his boot heel.
“Wait!” I said, pinching the flame. “I’ve forgotten something.”
I ran back down into the mine and came up a minute or two later.
“Now you can blow it,” I said.
McTroy lit another match and touched fire to the fuse.
I watched the sparks flying from the bundle of dynamite sticks in my hand.
I tossed it into the mine.
The four of us ran like hell.
Late April, 1888
Arizona Territory, Riding on a train to Yuma
“Going through life is like riding a train backwards,” McTroy said.
“Really? How is that?” I asked, amused.
Evangeline raised her eyebrows. Wu readied himself to receive wisdom.
“Time’s the train. Movin’ one way.” He jerked his thumb toward the engine, “Forward.” His finger shot out. “But we look at life backward. It’s like we’re sitting on a train, facing the caboose. We look out the windows trying to figure what’s coming round the next bend, but all we see is pieces of what we already passed up. Not much to go on, if you ask me.”
“Interesting metaphor,” I said.
“Call it what you will, Dr Mummy. The next bend is always a mystery.”
“Given certain facts, I think we can make reasonable–”
“Horseshit,” he interrupted. “Nobody knows what’s coming.”
McTroy tipped his hat, hiding his eyes. He put his boots up on the seat beside me and crossed his ankles. Our conversation was over. Within a minute, he was snoring softly, hands folded on his chest, as content as a cat in his bright wedge of sunlight.
Wu, in true apprentice fashion, followed his mentor into napping.
Trains will do that.
I, for one, was wide awake.
I tilted my head toward Evangeline. “What will you do now?”
“Sleeping looks like a pleasant choice for today,” she said.
“I don’t mean now on the train. I mean once we get to Yuma.”
I could tell she knew what I meant, but she was having her fun. Her expression turned serious. “I will return to Los Angeles. The Waterston Company requires new leadership. I plan to be that leader. Someone needs to put the house in order.”