Seti's Heart (5 page)

Logan felt himself begin to tremble as icy cold droplets of fear trickled down the center of his back. He knew that handsome face. He’d seen it only a short while before – cast in gold on the lid of the sarcophagus.

Suddenly, with a low moan, the man’s legs shook and he fell to his knees, his hands sliding down the door frame, fingers digging into the jamb. Logan realized that they were all that held the man up. He was shaking, worse even than Logan.

Logan’s feet paid no attention to the warning being shouted in his head. Instead, they propelled him forward, to the stranger’s side. Logan crouched down next to him and insinuated a shoulder under the man’s arm, bearing a good portion of his substantial weight, helping him stand.

The larger man’s weight staggered Logan as he led the man to a shrouded chair. With his free hand, Logan ripped the protective sheet off the Queen Anne chair so that the man could sit down.

The man collapsed into the chair, slumping to one side, breathing hard. Those dark, flashing eyes never left Logan’s, nor could Logan break contact with them. It was as if he was spellbound, unable to look away.

“Was it you who freed me?” The man’s voice was raspy, and he winced as if speaking was painful. His accent was unlike any Logan had heard before, although his words were clear.

Logan answered with a barrage of questions of his own. “Who are you? How did you get into that room? Is there some sort of secret passageway in there? Where the hell are your clothes?”

“I am Seti.”

“Yeah? Okay, Seti. You sit right here. I’m going to call security.”

“Summon no one.” The command in Seti’s voice was so strong that Logan froze, his feet rooted to the floor. His mind screamed at him to run to the nearest phone and dial 911, but his body wouldn’t obey his brain’s command. “What is your name?”

“Logan. Who are you?” he asked again.

“I have told you my name. Do you not know of me?”

“No, should I?”

“I am Seti!”

“So you said before. And that should mean what to me, exactly?”

Seti’s face slackened, as if hit with a terrible truth. “You truly do not know of me?” He tipped his face upward, shouting at the ceiling. “Damn you, Whore of Horus! Was imprisoning me not enough? Did you need to wipe the memory of me from the face of the earth as well?” He shot Logan a sharp look. “If you know not of me, then how then did you know what was needed to free me?”

“Free you? Pal, I don’t know what loony bin you broke out of, but I assure you that I had nothing to do with you escaping whatever rubber room they had you locked up in. This is the National Museum of Natural History. I’m Assistant to the Curator of Relics, and you’ve just destroyed some very valuable private property!” Logan replied with a lot more confidence than he felt, jerking his thumb toward the shattered remains of the door to the Vault. “Did you touch that sarcophagus? Man, if you so much as scratched it, you are in for a world of trouble with Dr. Perry-”

“SILENCE! You jabber like a tent full of old women.” Seti tipped his head from side to side, cracking his neck. In the silence of the basement, each pop sounded like a gunshot. “Where is this National Museum that you say I have found myself in?”

“The moon,” Logan said, sarcastically. Who the hell did this guy think he was, anyway? “This is a restricted area of the Museum. You must have set off a half dozen alarms when you broke in here. The police are probably already on their way.”
 

Seti fired Logan a look that made Logan think twice about his flippant answer. “Listen to me very carefully,” he said, his black eyes snapping with anger. “I have spent the last five thousand years in a box, unable to move, unable to speak, but fully aware of the passing of time. I could hear everything that went on around me. That was the worse part of my curse. The awareness. But it is how I learned to speak your language. It is also how I know what the moon is, and why this Museum could not possibly be on it. Do not lie to me again.”

Logan swallowed hard. Not that he believed the crazy part about Seti being in a box for five millennia, but because there was something in Seti’s eyes that belied the sternness in his voice. For all of Seti’s posturing, for all his size and obvious strength, the man was afraid and that struck a chord in Logan’s heart. He felt sorry for the poor nut.

“Look, if you hurry you can probably make it out of the Museum before the cops get here-”

“The police are not coming, Logan. I did not set off any alarms, because I did not break in. I was already in here,” Seti said. His shoulders slumped and he sighed deeply. “In the sarcophagus. My tomb.”

“Your tomb? So, you’re telling me that…what?” That you’re the mummy?” Logan smirked. “Please. Do I look like I fell off the turnip truck yesterday?”

“You do not look like you’ve been injured recently, no,” Seti replied, looking Logan over. Logan could feel those ebony eyes ghosting over his body no less than if Seti’s fingers had touched him. He shivered as Seti’s sloe eyes awoke parts of Logan that were better left sleeping.

Something wicked sparked in Seti’s eyes as they met Logan’s, a hot ember that flared for an instant, one that matched the fire that had been kindled in Logan’s core. Then it was gone, replaced by the same mask of cool conceit Seti had worn since he’d first begun to speak.

“Go look,” he ordered in a smug voice. “See for yourself, so that you will not again doubt my words.”

“This is ridiculous,” Logan murmured. Yet he felt a sudden, strong, irresistible urge to do just as Seti had ordered. Before he knew it his feet were moving toward the Vault. His muscles bunched as his body fought itself, his brain issuing stern commands to stop, but his legs paying absolutely no attention.

Logan reached the Vault and, taking a deep breath to collect his frazzled nerves, peered inside.

 
Chapter Four

The Vault was better lit than it had been the first time Logan had opened it, even without flipping on the light switch, thanks to the gaping hole Seti had made in the door. Bright light from the main room streamed in, glinting off the golden sarcophagus.

The lid had been tossed to the side, landing end up against one of the walls. A spider web of long, jagged cracks laced through the golden effigy, heaviest at the head where they obscured the sculpted face.

One look told Logan that the sarcophagus was empty. Nevertheless, Logan ducked into the room, first peering carefully into the empty tomb then into all the shadowed corners. He crawled behind the sarcophagus, checking every inch of the floor, looking for the mummy. He banged on the walls, listening for any hollow echo that might indicate a hidden doorway or passage.

But there was no trace of the mummy anywhere, and no way that Logan could find for it to have been spirited out. For that matter, there was no way he could find for Seti to have gotten into the locked room except through the door he had shattered. It was as if the mummy had vanished into thin air. That unbelievable but undeniable observation posed a problem for Logan’s pragmatic mind.

Logan was a scientist, a researcher. Methodical, unlikely to jump to conclusions, he had been trained to carefully study the evidence long and hard before posing an hypothesis. In this case, however, the facts spoke loud and clear – the mummy was gone.

Poof.

The facts were irrefutable, and the conclusion Logan began to draw - however outlandish - seemed the only valid explanation for the series of events.

Fact: The mummy had been locked behind a closed door, safely sealed within its golden tomb. Logan had seen it with his own eyes, had locked the door himself.

Fact: In the next moment it had vanished like an assistant in a magic act. Unlike said assistant, however, the mummy hadn’t fallen through a trap door, or scuttled off behind a curtain. Logan had thoroughly checked the floor and walls for any sign of a hidden entrance, and had found none. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Just solid, immoveable concrete block walls and a poured cement floor.
 

Fact: A man had appeared in the very same closed, locked room, as naked as the mummy had been, and bearing a startling resemblance to the effigy sculpted on the lid of the sarcophagus.

Conclusion A: Seti was a member of a subversive, futuristic nudist society and had been beamed inside the room at the same time the mummy had been beamed out by way of some top-secret, highly questionable, utterly improbable transporting device.
 

Conclusion B: The man who called himself Seti was the mummy, just as he purported himself to be. He looked like the golden effigy because he had been the model the artist had used to render it.

Occam’s Razor, Logan thought. “Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem,” which translated stated, “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.” In other words, all things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the correct one.

Seti, the naked man who had a face and body that could make the angels weep at its beauty and who was sitting not twenty feet away from Logan, was…
 

“…a five thousand year old dead guy,” Logan whispered in awe.

Logan felt himself begin to shake as he stepped outside of the Vault and stared hard at Seti, not certain at all how to handle the subject of his newly formed hypothesis. On one hand, if it was true then Seti possessed a wealth of first-hand knowledge that would be invaluable to the scientific community. Simply put, he was a history-geek’s wet dream. On the other hand, he was a walking corpse who had last seen the light of day before the birth of the pyramids.

He didn’t look like a corpse. In fact, he looked like one of the men who graced the covers of the skin magazines that were stacked in Logan’s bottom dresser drawer at home. The kind that had inspired one-handed orgasms over the years – tall, handsome, with a hard, sculpted body.

Seti was still slumped in the Queen Anne chair where Logan had left him, looking drained and worn-out. No wonder. Rejuvenating from a state that was only one step up from dust must have been exhausting.

“Now do you believe?” Seti’s voice sounded as weary as he looked.

“Maybe,” Logan hedged. Saying out it out loud was a step Logan wasn’t yet prepared to take. “You need to understand how impossible this all seems.”

“Impossible?” Seti sniffed. “Nothing is impossible where the gods are concerned.”

“God did this to you?”

“No, your Jehovah had nothing to do with this. At the time I was cursed he had not yet made his presence known in the pantheon of the Immortals. It was Setekh,” Seti said, venomously. “Demon bastard of a mongrel’s whore.” There was obviously no love lost between Seti and the god whose name he bore.

“Setekh cursed you? That’s why the canopic jar bore the head of a crocodile! I was right. It was meant to represent Setekh!” Logan couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice as his deduction was validated. He’d thought that the jar symbolized Set, although he hadn’t known why. “But you were mummified. What happened to the other canopic jars?”

“Must we have this conversation now?” Seti growled. “I am hungry, thirsty, and grow impatient with your questions.”

“Look, Boris Karloff, I think I’m entitled to a few answers,” Logan said, sarcastically. “I was living in a nice, safe, rational world up until a few minutes ago. If you’re going to expect me to believe that you are who you say you are, then I think I deserve a few details.”

“I will tell you all you wish to know after we leave this place.”

“Leave? Where do you think you’re going to go? You can’t run around New York in nothing but your skin. People don’t do that anymore. We’re civilized now.”

“Civilized? How is covering yourselves with cloth from neck to ankle when it is not needed for protection from the elements a mark of progress? It seems idiotic to me, as if your people wish to keep secret the fact that they have genitals.”