“Come off it, Lazarus!” said Henry. “You can’t buy your way out of this by spouting ridiculous fantasies!”
“I’m afraid he is quite right,” said Katarina. “And these are no fantasies. You fiancé does indeed hold the power of life over death.”
“What nonsense is this?” Henry demanded.
“I find this all very hard to believe,” added Inspector Devaney.
“Look,” said Lazarus. “When we were in Egypt we encountered an American scientist who had somehow engineered the technology to bring mummies back to life, after a fashion—they require a great deal of mechanical tinkering and fortifying—but they walk and move as you or I. Why mummies, I don’t know—perhaps it has something to do with the way they were preserved by the ancient Egyptians, or maybe there is something supernatural about the whole business; I honestly don’t know all the hocus pocus behind it. Anyway, Eleanor Rousseau has been in on it and is obsessed with reviving two mummies in particular; that of Kiya and her husband, Akhenaten, whom she discovered last year and has been kept in this museum. It’s all a bit complicated but we must hurry to stop her. Believe me, you don’t want to see these things wandering around. They’re not pretty.”
The French inspector harrumphed at this and rubbed his side whiskers. “I don’t know what all this is about, I’m sure, but I am convinced that somebody here is a lunatic; either you or Miss Mikolavna or Miss Rousseau or perhaps all three. But I’m going to get to the bottom of it. I can’t have all you English fellows causing such a hullaballoo in our capital’s esteemed museum!”
He made to advance into the murky shadows but Lazarus grabbed his shoulder. “Draw your gun, I implore you,” he said gravely.
“Well, that speaks in your favor at least,” Devaney said, drawing his pistol. “You wouldn’t want me armed if you intended to sneak up on me in the dark.”
In fact they all drew their pistols and advanced as one, watching the shadows for any movement. They reached Kiya’s sarcophagus and the table where Eleanor had been at work. Lazarus was relieved to see that the mummy of Akhenaten was still there, immobile.
“First thing is to get some bloody light about the place,” said Henry, looking away from the shriveled brown flesh with distaste.
“Absolutely right,” replied Devaney. “There are a hundred gas lights in this building. Why the people who work here insist on creeping about in the dark is beyond me.”
They headed off into different rooms and set to work lighting the wall lamps. Soon the entire floor was bathed in a warm glow. Lazarus met with Katarina and Henry back at the sarcophagus. “Where’s Devaney?” he asked.
“Haven’t seen the blighter,” said Henry. “He’s been about as useful as a chocolate teapot so far. Why he didn’t just arrest you like I told him to, I’ve no idea.”
“You’re on his turf now, Henry,” Lazarus told him. “Your orders add up to nothing here.”
“Well I’d feel safer if we were all together,” said Katarina. “We should never have split up in the first place.” She peered into the next room and let out an uncharacteristic gasp of shock. The two men ran in to see what she had found.
Lying on the floor, outstretched, his stiffening hand still reaching for the revolver that lay a few feet away, was the motionless form of Inspector Devaney. Henry stooped down to check his pulse.
“Dead,” he announced.
“Look at those marks,” said Katarina.
They inspected his throat and saw the unmistakable imprints of fingers and thumbs, turning a pale shade of purple.
“Lord help us, she’s managed her task!” said Lazarus.
“But we saw Akhenaten on the table,” said Katarina.
“Then she must have succeeded with Kiya. There’s one way to be sure.”
They dashed back into the adjoining room with all the more haste now that they knew a mummy really was lurking somewhere in the museum.
“Help me with the lid,” said Lazarus, grasping the edges of Kiya’s sarcophagus.
They each grasped a side and heaved. Stone grated on stone as they slid the lid off and onto the floor with a dull ‘thud’. They lifted the lid off the coffin within and peered inside. There lay the mummified body of Kiya, just as Lazarus remembered it back in her tomb in Egypt. Only Henry did not seem relieved at its presence there.
“Oh, God!” he exclaimed, his hand reaching up to his mouth. “No! It can’t be!”
Chapter Eighteen
In which our heroes engage in a struggle against an ancient evil
Lazarus and Katarina watched Henry with interest. They saw nothing remarkable about the mummy. On the contrary, it was always a relief to them to see a specimen at rest in its coffin, unaltered by modern science.
“It’s Eleanor!” Henry said in a hoarse whisper.
“What?” Lazarus exclaimed. “It’s a mummy! Look, man!”
“No. I would know the face if it had been hacked off and tossed in the gutter. I know those cheekbones, that forehead and those lips, withered and shriveled though they are by some horrible affliction. This is my Eleanor.”
Lazarus looked at the face of the mummy. It looked nothing like the Eleanor he knew. And yet, that might be the very proof that Henry was right, for who knew Eleanor better than her fiancé? Come to think of it, Lazarus had never even seen a picture of her before he had been dispatched on his mission.
“If this is Eleanor,” said Katarina, “what on earth happened to her? She looks the very image of a mummy three thousand years in its tomb. Minus the wrappings, of course. What ailment could have done such a thing?”
Yes, thought Lazarus. There are no wrappings.
“And the more important question is, I fear,” Katarina went on, “if this is Eleanor Rousseau, then who the devil is that woman pretending to be her?”
Nobody said anything. They just remained looking down at the remains of Henry’s fiancé in the coffin, pondering the awful possibilities.
Lazarus walked away and headed back through the room where Inspector Devaney still lay on the floor, murdered by the very creature who had taken the place of Eleanor. But not my Eleanor. That was a strange thought. To have loved a woman who was not at all who she claimed to be, right down to her very name, was a strange feeling. He tried not to think of their night on her boat. He didn’t want to think of what they had done together, the passion they had shared. And he wanted to think even less on who—or what—she really was.
The room beyond was the only unlit room left on that floor. Devaney had evidently been on his way to light the lamps in that chamber when he had been attacked and strangled. And in that darkness, no doubt lurked his murderer.
His revolver gripped firmly in his sweating fist, Lazarus entered the room and peered into the gloom. Statues from Babylon and Akkad stood frozen, witnesses to a thousand wars and murders, utterly unconcerned by this new dreadfulness unfolding before their blank stone eyes. He felt around on the wall immediately to his left for a lamp, but found none. He trod deeper into the darkness, squinting to make out the shape of a lampshade on the opposing wall.
A figure descended on him from the blackness, like a vision from the darkest desert night. Fingers locked about his neck in an agonizing vice. Slim, pointed nails dug in with vicious ferocity. He struggled, fighting against the pressing figure that seemed to possess an ungodly strength. It forced him backwards against a statue. The back of his head struck it hard, causing stars to flit before his eyes.
He brought his pistol up and under the arms that were grasping his neck, and squeezed the trigger. The flame of the round lit up a horrid female visage of rage and hate. The deafening crack of the spent cartridge turned that face to one of agony. She screamed and then all was black once more.
He gasped for air and rubbed at his neck, where the fingers had just released him. He heard the pattering of small feet as his attacker scurried across the room towards the rectangle of light. He scrambled to his feet and took off after her.
Blood mar
ked the floor from the hole he had torn through her abdomen. He followed the trail of gore through one room and into the corridor that led to the stairwell. Up ahead he could see her staggering figure making not for the stairs but the large window to its side. They were only on the first floor, and Lazarus had no doubt that she would survive the jump should she make it.
“Halt!” he cried. “Or I fire again!”
She spun around to face him, and by the moonlight that shone in through the window he was shocked by the change that had stolen over her face. No longer was she the beautifully exotic young woman he had fallen in love with in Cairo. Her face had taken on a terribly gaunt and drawn look. The skin appeared dry and tight and her hair was wispy looking, not the full, lush locks of midnight he remembered. She looked old, ancient even; ironically like one of the mummies she was so obsessed with.
He noticed the steady stream of blood that pumped through the hole in her silk bodice, leaking between her bony digits and pooling on the floor.
“You are finished, Eleanor,” he said, using the only name he could bring himself to apply to her. His mind refused the other possibility until some further proof presented itself.
She gave it to him.
“Surely you know who I really am, Lazarus,” she said, every word an effort for her tightening lips. “You helped me bring my coffin here to Paris to rest beside that of my husband.”
“Kiya…” he said. It was neither a question nor a statement. He wasn’t sure why he said it. Perhaps his lips needed to speak that final confirmation.
Her eyes twinkled with the starry knowledge of the ages and the burning desire for life that had been denied her for three times a thousand years. These were the eyes of a soul that had lived before Alexander had roamed the world, before Rome was even dreamed of. They had presided over sacred ceremonies in the dark, snake-haunted temples of the desert to ancient gods that are now known only through the crumbling statues and dusty relics of that forgotten age.
“Who brought you back?” he asked her. “Lindholm?”
“Hardly,” she replied. “He may have been a brilliant scientist but a scientist he was only. He did not understand the true science—what he would have called magic—the science that my people have known since before the pyramids were raised. It was Eleanor, that wonderful enquirer with the brilliant mind, that could see that there is no division between science and the power of the gods. It was she who found my tomb as she had found the tomb of my husband.
“Lindholm provided the technology to reanimate the dead, but as you know his experiments resulted in soulless creations. They are merely animated flesh, dead on the inside. I was his first experiment, and Eleanor persuaded him to complete the transformation; to pursue the power to its full fruition. But he never wanted to really bring the dead back, not to restore them fully. He merely wanted puppets to dance on his strings. I was far more than he intended and much more than he bargained for. He wanted to dispatch me back to the Well of Souls, curse him.”
“So you took Eleanor’s place in order to survive,” said Lazarus. “Did Lindholm know?”
“Of course. I could drain the life force from Eleanor to fill out my flesh and expand my dried up old veins with blood so that I could be the very image of my youthful self, but I hardly looked like Eleanor. It was too late for Lindholm to do anything about it. He had seen how powerful I was and knew that I could destroy him, so he bargained with me. We worked together for a time until I was ready to make my move.”
“And that was when I came along,” Lazarus said. “A fool at the right moment whom you could bend to your will, and dispose of Lindholm into the bargain.”
“Yes, your arrival was most opportune. A willing servant. And all I had to do was fuck you.”
“And I went running about seeing to the smuggling of your possessions out of the country because you needed somebody to do your dirty work, breaking the law and going against every moral my soul still considers sacred.” A thought suddenly occurred to him. It should have struck him sooner but his entire view on how the universe functioned had been challenged in the last five minutes. His mind hadn’t made accommodation for smaller revelations. “How do you speak English? Or know enough about the modern world to function at all in it? You know far too much for an ancient Egyptian priestess...”
“An unexpected side effect—or bonus, if you will—of my rejuvenation. In sucking the life force from Eleanor to refill my veins and plump out my flesh, I seem to have taken in bits of her Ba; memories, knowledge. I can recall her childhood on her father’s estate in Villiers-sur-marne. I remember her schooling and her discovery of Wilkinson’s Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians which sparked a lifelong interest in the culture and history of my people.”
“Would that she had left that volume untouched,” said Lazarus, “and had never come to Egypt. I too was fascinated by your country as a child, and like Eleanor have spent a good part of my adulthood in searching for answers in dusty tombs and crumbling monuments. But I would to God that she had halted her research before it became entwined with Lindholm’s evil.”
“Evil?’ hissed the priestess. “You people know nothing of evil! I have seen real evil. I am of a time when the world was but a plaything of the gods. I have seen pharaohs murder their children and wives, I have seen cities burn and whole families put to death at the insistence of a mere omen. This world I have awoken in is a child’s playpen compared to that which I knew when temples rose to the sky and the tombs of kings were reared block by block over a lifetime. You with your miniature wonders—steam, thinking machines, flying ships and all the rest of it—toys! Mere toys! There is no glory to the Aten anymore. You are all hollow! A hollow world of hollow men and women raising hollow children who will grow up to know only ‘science’ and ‘logic’ without even touching the feet of the true wonders of the universe!”
“Then why are you still here?” Lazarus demanded. “Why not return back to your tomb, to eternal sleep and leave the lives of us ‘hollow mortals’ alone?”
“Because that which has been awoken will never willingly return to sleep whilst there remains a chance to right the wrongs done to them an eternity before! In that other room lies the remains of my beloved, who was stolen from me by my enemies. I was moments away from bringing him back across the gulfs of time and death to be by my side once more. Together we shall put the great lovers of history to shame.”
“Not while I can help it,” Lazarus said and aimed his revolver at her forehead.
Her eyes blazed defiantly as she turned and leaped forward towards the window, hurling herself through the glass. He dashed to the sill and poked his head out. On the lawn below, Kiya had landed in a heap of crushed silk and shards of glittering wreckage. She staggered to her feet and took off through the darkness. Lazarus assessed the jump. Kiya had survived and she was clearly mortal, evident by the trail of wet blood on the grass. He leaped and rolled on impact before setting off on her trail.
It was not a hard trail to follow. Her wound bled copiously and the slick stains of blood on the gravel were easily visible by the light of the hissing gas lamps. She had made her way across the courtyard towards a set of arches that faced the Quay des Tuileries.
Good God! thought Lazarus. She will be loose on the streets of Paris!
The moonlit river lapped at the quay, the reflections of the lamps dancing like fireflies as couples walked up and down the waterfront in their evening dress. A carriage nearly ran him down as he bolted across the street. He heard terrified screams up ahead as the rapidly deteriorating priestess crashed into people, bowling them over in her bid to escape into the night.
But she was flagging. Her life was literally seeping away from her, drop by drop. Lazarus gained on her by the second, confident that she could not hold out much longer. Sure enough, she stumbled and fell ungraciously against a bench which she clutched as if it were the only stable thing left in the whole swirling universe.
By the time Lazarus caught
up with her there was little left of the Egyptian priestess but a skeleton dressed in skin, feebly eying him through mournful sockets. The crushing decay of millennia had caught up with her. Lazarus decided to help her on her way. The shot from his pistol rang out on the nighted street and drew cries of alarm.
The decay seemed to hasten around the bullet hole he had put in her forehead. Second by second, before his very eyes the skin withered and fell away from her body, the flesh curled and flaked and the very bones sank to the stone and crumbled. By the time the nearest passersby had approached, there was nothing left but a silken dress and a large amount of dust which the night wind was steadily sweeping away across the Seine.
He holstered his Enfield and armored himself to answer the probing questions of the police who would no doubt arrive promptly.
“It’s over, then,” said Katarina appearing at his side.
He turned to her. She was alone. “Where is Henry?”
“He didn’t follow. He’s still weeping over the remains of Eleanor.”
Lazarus looked down at the empty dress on the ground. “Perhaps he did love her, after all. I’ll be damned. And I tried to take her from him. I’m not much of a chap, am I?”
“That wasn’t her you loved. That was... Kiya.”
“You knew?”
She shrugged. “It wasn’t too hard to piece together after we found Eleanor’s corpse in that coffin. I always knew that there was something off about this woman.”
“And you tried to warn me, but in vain,” said Lazarus. “God, what a damnable fool I am! Every woman I love dies. What the hell is wrong with me?”
She gripped his elbow. “Stop feeling so bloody sorry for yourself, Lazarus. When are you going to realize that the only woman for you is right under your nose?”
He turned to her sharply, not sure if he had heard her correctly.
Then she kissed him.
Chapter Nineteen
In which the last days in Paris are bittersweet for our heroes
Silver Tomb (The Lazarus Longman Chronicles Book 2) Page 17