The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead 2 A Post-Apocalyptic Epic (14 page)

The car rattled and shook for the next hundred miles of empty desert road as they drove out to Nekhen, midway between Luxor and Aswan. At one time, many thousands of years before, Nekhen had been the center of Egyptian culture. Now there was nothing to it but ruins: beige stone buildings that were mostly caved in on themselves, a few rock walls, a leaning obelisk, steps that ended suddenly as if there were invisible buildings just beyond them.

As American students and European tourists tended to drop from sunstroke in the July heat, the remains of Nekhen were deserted when they arrived. It was an eerie feeling.

“What do you think?” Jack asked. “Can you sense anything?”

Cyn got out of the car and stood for long minutes with her eyes closed and her skin slowly turning pink from the heat and the burning sun. “I don’t feel anything, but then again, I didn’t feel anything back at Meroe.”

“Let’s try the necropolis,” Jack said. A few miles beyond Nekhen was the “necropolis”—the city of the dead. It wasn’t a city in any sense of the word; it was a vast and ancient graveyard, though it didn’t look like much. There were a few odd stone buildings that had been crumbled by time and a rickety perimeter fence that the Egyptian government had put up years before but had never maintained. The real city was hidden beneath the desert and although Nekhen had been deserted, the city of the dead was horribly alive.

The moment Jack stepped out of the Volvo, he felt the eyes on him coming from beneath the sand. Robert’s calling card. Just like at Attamhim, he had raised the dead, but this time it didn’t seem like they had come out of the ground to do Robert’s bidding. The ground was rock-hard and unmarred by the hands of ghouls.

“You were right,” Cyn said, clutching her shotgun and staring all around them. “Robert has certainly been here.”

“We should spread out and check for signs of a dig,” Jack said. “Go to the left, I’ll go to the right and we’ll meet on the other side. Just like at Meroe, look for tracks.”

They looked for new piles of dirt or the scrapings of a thousand skeletons. There was nothing, the dun-colored rock and sand in the cemetery looked exactly like the tired desert on the other side of the fence. They met at the far side, perplexed.

“Maybe a wider search pattern?” Cyn suggested.

After a thirty minute walk in a wider circuit, they again found nothing. At this point, they were both dripping sweat and chugging the nickel tasting water they had picked up in Wadi Halfa. “I think we should go a little further,” Jack suggested. This wasted another hour and they were gasping from the heat by the time they circled back to the Volvo.

Jack volunteered to climb a hill that he thought was only a mile away. The desert air made it seem much closer than it was. Three miles later, he stood looking down at a wide flat area of desert; it was a moment before he realized that this was an immense river bed. The Nile, like every other river in the world, had changed course a number times and it had run here thousands of years before.

He squinted into the glare of the afternoon sun, trying to see anything out of place. When that didn’t work, he did the smart thing and let his mind feel what couldn’t be seen. There was evil near. He reached out and felt it down in the river valley where there weren’t any roads.

The land was flat and baked hard by the sun and Jack figured the Volvo wouldn’t be too inconvenienced. It was an hour walk back to where Cyn was laying on the ground in the “shade” of the Volvo and panting. “I’m dying,” she said. “Let Robert win. He can have this world. It’s just too bloody hot.”

“I found it,” Jack said. The news didn’t excite her into action. Grumbling, she climbed into the car as Jack
rowed, rowed, rowed
the engine until it finally caught. He took it off road, avoiding the deeper sands and the sharper hills. It chugged on, growing more and more unhappy, but it made it to the river bed and after a mile they found a lonely hole in the ground, marked only by a pile of rocks and a hunk of flesh.

“What is that?” Cyn asked. “Is that…is that a piece of intestine?” It was three inches of grey yuck that stank. Jack had his sword out by then, but he would sooner lick the hunk of flesh than let it touch the blessed metal. He nudged it with his shoe.

It was intestine and the wet smear beneath it suggested that it had been “left” there recently, maybe even earlier that day.

“I’m pretty sure that this makes absolutely no sense to me,” Cyn said, her throat working and her lips so thin and drawn back that they had practically disappeared. “What is this doing here? Did it fall out of someone’s picnic basket? Was it caught on someone’s shoe? Does this make any sense?”

“No,” Jack said, absently, forgetting the piece of intestine already. The hole down into the earth was calling to him in a way that wasn’t natural.

Chapter 13

Nekhen, Egypt

Cynthia Childs

To Cyn, the piece of  “somebody” so carelessly left behind was worrisome. It meant that there had been someone standing right there at the edge of the hole very recently. So very recently that there was a chance that the person or persons could even then be somewhere close by; perhaps watching them.

The Volvo, out in the open, couldn’t possibly be missed, and anyone with a good pair of binoculars would have no problem picking the two of them out. She felt like a mouse on an open plain with hawks circling above.

Any smart mouse would hop down in that hole just as fast as they could, but the smell coming from it was the smell of death. Something rotting and foul, and from her experience, likely very evil was down in that hole.

Next to her, Jack was buckling on his Kevlar armor, sweating and cursing under his breath. It was hot as blazes and only reluctantly she copied him. She then checked the load of her shotgun, made sure that her Holy Water was in place on her hip next to the extra shotgun shells, and then picked up her flashlight.

Jack had his sword, two bottles of Holy Water and his magic…he also had one of the old plastic jugs that they had bought in Wadi Halfa, and was pouring water right down in his throat. With a final splash on his head and a gasp, he gave it to her. “Drink up,” he said, and then knelt down at the edge of the hole. He touched a few of the rocks, sniffing one. “This is the spot, Cyn. This is where our great-great grandfather discovered our birthright. Can you feel it?”

She could. The smell in the air was familiar, like a long forgotten memory, but it wasn’t a good memory; there was death down in the hole.

After drinking until her belly sloshed; she doused herself and turned on her flashlight.

Jack nodded, flicked his on as well, and took a step down into the darkness, the beam from his light catching little except for the floating particles that hung in the air. It was a tense moment but then, unexpectedly, Jack laughed. Cyn flashed the light in his face. “What is it?” she asked, slightly alarmed at his odd behavior.

“The spell!” he cried. “I remember it. It just came to me. Man, that’s been eating at me for days.”

“And what spell is that?” she asked, thinking that he meant the healing spell he had been able to manifest in his sleep.

He grinned and then set aside his flashlight. “Truong’s spell. Watch.” He picked up a pinch of the hot sand. A mumbled word escaped him and then he blew on the sand. It swept out of his hand as if he had not blown sand but a handful of dust. It swirled down into the darkness, each grain suspended in the air, glowing like a firefly, lighting up a finely chiseled set of stairs.

Cyn kept waiting for the sand to fall to the ground, but the grains floated in the air, lighting a good twenty foot stretch of the stairs. “Will it go away?” she asked.

“Oh I guess, eventually,” Jack answered, somewhat vaguely. He was already past the spell and now his mind was centered on the stairs. “Look at these. Look at the workmanship. It’s exquisite, especially for tomb. I know the ancient Egyptians were all about death worship, but these stairs don’t make sense. This is fantastic.”

Despite declaring the stairs fantastic, he turned away from them and the hole to squint all around the river valley. For some reason, he seemed dissatisfied by the view as if empty desert wasn’t what he had expected or wasn’t right in some way.

“How do the stairs not make sense?” Cyn asked. “They’re stairs, stairs go up or down; they don’t have to make sense.”

Jack took a walk around the hole and the rubble outside of it, his boots crunching grit underfoot. “It doesn’t make sense because they’re the stairs of a palace not a tomb. Look how wide they are. You don’t see that even at Giza.”

“Styles changed even in the ancient world,” Cyn suggested. “Maybe this was how they used to do it until someone decided it was a waste of time to bother with such an elaborate staircase when there were pyramids to build.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” he answered, running a sleeve across his face one last time. Stooping, he pocketed a handful of sand and then stepped down into the darkness where it was cold enough to shiver their souls.

The staircase hung in golden light for the first eleven steps and as he progressed, he whispered: “So beautiful.” He wasn’t wrong. The stairs looked as though a master craftsman had chiseled each one from a separate piece of marble. The walls were white, again marble, and so smooth that it couldn’t be believed.

As they descended, Cyn swept her hand along it, feeling for any blemish; there wasn’t a single one. “Impossible. This isn’t possible. Have you ever read about anything like this…like this level of perfection?”

“Never. It’s why I wonder if this is really a tomb.” He took the next step down, slow and careful, his hand on the hilt of his sword. She knew what had him concerned: there was evil down there. Eyes in the dark. Spells woven of an unknown nature. Questions beyond answers, and time out of mind. Time of such an age that the years couldn’t be counted and the seconds so infinite that they washed over their consciousness like the individual atoms that made up the air in the wind.

They were descending into another era. The beautiful stairs gave way to an equally beautifully tiled floor, again in marble. It was beautiful, but not perfect. Blood marred the tile. Jack bent and let his fingers run over the brown smears. He made a questioning noise in his throat.

“New blood,” he said.

Cyn touched it and knew immediately that it had been there almost a hundred years and yet, compared to the age of the tomb, it was as if it had been spilt yesterday. “It corresponds with our great-great grandfather’s time frame.”

“Yeah,” Jack said in a whisper. The evil was closer now. He pointed his sword. at a doorway that was open but not at all inviting. Beyond it was a heavy darkness that ate up the beams of their flashlights, showing them nothing. He stuck the light down into a loop at his hip and then brought out more of the warm sand.

When he blew the grains out into the room, the golden light lit up a simple marble walled room. In the center was a square of black rock seven feet long, five wide and four feet tall. It was a box of sorts; Cyn could see the lip of the lid.

On top of the black stone was a green metal box with the letters CCC stamped on it. Below that, in peeling paint were the words
Continental Can Company
. It was about the size of a bread-box and it was the first thing that showed the least bit of dust.

They ignored the green box for the moment, because to the right of the black stone was a pile of long decomposed bodies. There were eleven in all and it was obvious that their deaths had been brutal.

Cyn guessed that they were locals, judging by remains of their attire and dark complexions. They had been there a long time. Their blood was brown dust and their eyes were long ago decayed into nothing. Their faces were wizened like old apples and their bones were starting to poke through the thin remains of their skin.

“Dr. Loret said that only one of locals lived through the expedition,” Jack whispered. “I guess here’s proof that he was telling the truth.”

“It’s always nice when you can trust the undead.” Cyn tried to laugh at her joke but the feeling in the air wouldn’t let the sound come out, and so she settled on a smile that didn’t feel all that jovial. Jack didn’t notice one way or the other. He had turned from the bodies and was now eyeing the green box.

He started to reach for it and Cyn grabbed his hand. “Don’t touch it. We both know that there’s not going to be anything good in it. If I had to guess, there’s something disgusting inside. Maybe a last joke from Robert; who knows?”

“Where’s your sense of adventure?” Jack asked. “It could be a box of jewels.”

“Please! At best it’s a box of hundred year old cans of...of...whatever they canned back then,” she replied. “It could be turn of the century liverwurst or peaches.”

“Also very valuable,” he said. When he picked the box up, something shifted inside and the sound it made was that of bare bone on tin. No other sound on earth was quite like it. “There’s a head in there.”

Cyn rolled her eyes. “Is that right?” she asked sarcastically. “You sure that wasn’t the sound of gold doubloons? Or the Hope Diamond? Pop it open and check, Jack, you never know.”

He put the box back on the black stone lid. “Ok, so sue me. I’m a kid at heart sometimes. I like adventure and I like discovering the unknown. And we have discovered something. Now we know there’s a skull in the box, but did Robert put it in there? That’s an entirely different question and I think the answer is no.”

Jack didn’t elaborate and Cyn knew well enough to know that he wanted her to figure out what he was hinting at. Normally, she would just stare at him until he explained himself like any normal person, but she was also caught up in the excitement of discovery and had it not been for the evil coming from the place, she would’ve had the same gleam in her eyes that Jack had.

The gold light from the magic motes was not keen enough for what she needed, and so she shone her light on the green box. She read the dull label and noted the dust...and noted that it had been recently disturbed. Someone had handled the box recently, but hadn’t lifted the lid.

That suggested that the head had been in the box for a while. Cyn said. “Ok, I agree, the head was left by our great-great grandfather. Why?”

“Because it’s part of a ghoul or demon,” Jack said. He pointed at the bodies and shone his light at the dull brown smears on their long white shirts and the tears in their flesh. “The expedition was attacked by a ghoul, killing all the locals but one. It must have been overcome by my great-grandfather and the pieces placed in boxes to keep them from reforming.”

“Your great-grandfather?” Cyn asked. “Why not Robert Montgomery or Lord Blackburn?”

“Because the three spells are
my
birthright. I am more in tune with all of the spells than either you or Robert. I believe the original Jonathan Dreyden defeated this ghoul and claimed the spells as was his right as victor. He must have then divided the spells, keeping one and giving the other two to his cousins, who later passed them on to you and Robert.”

That made sense, but what didn’t was why the spells hadn’t been destroyed in the first place. It was something that they hadn’t been able to puzzle out. “Without further evidence, I think we can assume you’re correct,” Cyn said. She gave him a wan smile. They had figured out one puzzle, but a much darker one lay in front of them. Across from the black stone was another opening, and the golden light particles showed more old blood.

Jack led the way down a short hall to a second room, which again had white marble walls and floors. Judging by the sprays and pools of blood, the room had been the site of a long ago battle. Other than the dried blood, there was only an elaborate stone sarcophagus in the room.

“The necromancer,” Jack said in a whisper. The lid of the sarcophagus had been cast to the side and had broken into a number of large pieces, but the image painted on the front was the same as the one that had been painted on the golden sarcophagus back in Meroe.

The remains of the coffin were empty and yet the fear in the room was palpable. Both Jack and Cyn flashed their lights all over the room. Cyn saw nothing but the blood, the lower, intact section of the coffin and the larger chunks of the upper part.

Jack saw something else. With excitement in his voice, he whispered: “There’s a secret door! Look at the chips and crypt dust from the broken lid.” He shined his light down at the floor near the far wall. “Look at this straight line!”

The scatter pattern from the broken upper portion was star shaped and properly random—except near one of the walls, where there was a neat line as if the debris had been brushed back. Jack went down in a squat and shone his light at the stone splinters and then at the wall. He then reached out and first felt the air and then the wall.

It didn’t budge. Not even when he threw his shoulder into it. He came away from it, rubbing his arm, but he wasn’t the least bit upset. “There’s either a lock or it’s magically held.”

“Then why are you smiling?” she asked. “If we can’t get in then…wait! The opening spell that Robert used to try to trap us back at the pyramids! But what if it doesn’t work? We’ve never tried it before.”

Jack’s knife was already in his hand. “There’s only one way to find out,” he said, unbuckling his left arm guard and rolling up his sleeve. He made a cut just above his elbow and then half-closed his eyes as the blood ran to the point of free fall. The drops changed in midair, going from rounded blobs to fully formed glyphs, each glowing white for a fraction of a second until the next landed right on top of it, erasing it.

In seconds the spell was written and the words spoken. Cyn expected something out of the movies: a white light around the edges of the door which would then swing back to reveal a treasure room piled in gold and jewels. Reality was much more mundane. There was a simple click as part of the wall swung back showing only another dark tunnel and letting in a noxious odor that made Cyn want to gag. Strangely, Jack looked even more ill than she did. Normally, he was tougher in these sorts of situations.

Now, he looked ghostly.

“Was it a difficult spell?” she asked, digging in the tight pack on her back. The town of Aswan had never heard of
Junior Mints
, but they had heard of
M&Ms
which were better in the heat, anyway. She shook out a rainbow of candy into his hands. He swallowed them with a strange look in his eyes.