The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny (15 page)

“Just as well,” I said. “We don’t want Sleeping Beauty to wake up. I’ve seen those movies.”

“We can handle him,” said Polly, dismissively.

“Don’t get overconfident,” I said. “After all these years on the Street of the Gods, soaking up worshippers’ belief, who knows what the mummy might have become?”

“As long as my protections are still working, he’s only another stiff in bandages,” Polly said firmly. “If he should sit up, just slap him down again. Larry? Are you listening to me?”

I was listening to something else. I could hear the sound of soft, shuffling feet. I could hear great wings beating. I could hear my own heart hammering in my chest. The sense of some third presence in the burial chamber was almost overwhelming, close and threatening. I kept thinking the statues on the edge of my vision were slowly turning their heads to look at me. They were only feelings. I wasn’t fooled by them. But I was becoming more and more convinced that someone or something knew we were there, in a place we shouldn’t be. That inside the sarcophagus, under the lid, the Pharaoh’s eyes were open and looking up at us.

Polly moved in close beside me, squeezing my arm hard.

“Larry, please calm down. We’re perfectly safe. If I’d known you got spooked this easily, I’d have chosen someone else.”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Fine. Let’s get the lid off, get what we came for, and then get the hell out of here.”

“Suits me, sweetie. The mummy’s holding the wand in his left hand. All we have to do is slide the lid far enough to one side for us to reach in.”

Even with both of us pushing and shoving, the sarcophagus lid didn’t want to move. It ground grudgingly sideways, a few inches at a time. Loud scraping noises echoed on the still air, interspersed with muffled curses from Polly and me. We threw all our strength against the lid, and slowly, slowly, a space opened up, revealing the interior of the sarcophagus and its occupant. The mummified head and shoulders looked shrivelled and distorted, the eyes and mouth just shadows in a face like baked clay. The wrappings were brown and grey, decayed, sunken down into the dead flesh. The body looked brittle, as though rough handling would break it into pieces.

The elven wand was held tightly in one clawlike hand, laid across the sunken chest.

“Well, go on!” said Polly. “Take it!”

“You take it!”

“What?”

“Let’s think about this for a moment,” I said, leaning on the lid. “I have seen pretty much every mummy movie ever made, including that Abbott and Costello abomination, and it’s always the idiot who takes the sacred object from the mummy’s hand who ends up getting it in the neck. In fact, it’s usually at this point in the film that the warning music starts getting really loud.”

“God, you’re a wimp!” said Polly. She grabbed the elven wand, wrestled it out of the mummy’s hand, and stepped back, holding the wand up triumphantly.

The whole burial chamber shook violently, as though hit by an earthquake. Thick streams of dust fell from the ceiling. The floor rose and fell, as though a great rippling wave had swept through the solid stone. The walls seemed to writhe and twist, as though all the hieroglyphics were coming to life and screaming silently. And the wall we’d opened into the burial chamber shot up out of the ground, and slammed into place against the ceiling again. I glared at Polly.

“Next time, listen to the music! Is there any other way out of here?”

Polly waved the Looking Glass back and forth, dust dancing in the brilliant beam of light. “I can’t see anything!”

“Terrific,” I said.

Then the lid of the sarcophagus crashed to the floor. We both looked round, startled, just in time to see the mummy rise out of its resting place. It moved slowly, jerkily, animated and driven by unnatural energies. It was small, barely five feet tall, a shrivelled wretched thing, but it burned with power. You could feel it. The empty eyes in the dead face fastened first on me, then on Polly, and finally on the wand. It reached out a brown bandaged hand, and the arm made dry, cracking sounds as it extended. The mummy kicked the sarcophagus lid aside with one foot, and the lid flew across the chamber to slam into the far wall.

“Maybe we should give him his wand back,” I said.

“Unthinkable!” snapped Polly.

“Hell, I’m thinking it, and so is he,” I said. “Can you use the wand against him? What does it do?”

“I
don’t
know!”
said Polly, backing quickly away from the mummy as it advanced upon her with slow, shuffling steps. The whole chamber was still shaking, making loud, groaning sounds as the heavy stone walls flexed, but the mummy’s attention was still fixed solely on the wand in Polly’s hand. I took out my gun and gave the mummy six rounds rapid. Three to the body, three to the head. Puffs of dust burst out of the bullet-holes, but the mummy didn’t even stagger or interrupt its pursuit of Polly as she retreated before it. Her back slammed up against the wall behind her, and she had to stop. I thought about jumping the mummy from behind and wrestling it to the floor, then thought better of it. Some plans you know aren’t going to float. I ran past the slow-moving figure, and grabbed the elven wand from Polly. The dead face immediately turned to me, and I smiled. Because the moment I had the wand in my hand, I knew what it could do and how to use it. The knowledge was suddenly there, in my head, as though I’d always known it but only just remembered. I said the activating Words silently, inside my head, and the wand’s power leapt forth and took hold of the world.

Time stopped.

The mummy was still, and so was Polly, caught reaching out to snatch the wand back from me. The burial chamber was still, caught between one moment and the next. Falling dust hung suspended in mid air. I moved slowly forward, and Time did not move around me. I considered the mummy, the shrivelled face wrapped in yards of decaying gauze, like a mask baked from ancient Egyptian mud. Scary, yes, but take away the supernatural energies that drove him, and the mummy was a small, fragile thing. I considered the elven wand in my hand. Two feet long, carved from the spine of a species that no longer existed in the waking world, it shone with a brilliant light while it did its work. There were all kinds of tricks it could play, with Time. I jabbed the wand at the frozen mummy, and Time accelerated around it. The bandaged body decayed and fell apart and became dust, all in a moment.

I hefted the wand in my hand. Why had it spoken to me and not to Polly? Perhaps because it didn’t trust her. I knew how it felt.

I started Time going again, and Polly yelped loudly as she saw only a pile of dust on the floor where the mummy had been a moment before. She looked at me, glared at the wand in my hand, and gestured for it imperiously.

“No,” I said. “I think I’ll hang on to it for a while. It wants me to.”

“What happened to the mummy?” she said, studying my face intently.

“Time caught up with it,” I said. “Can we get the hell out of here now, before the whole bloody place collapses?”

Polly was a practical soul. She wasted no time with arguments, just hurried over to the entrance wall and studied it through her Looking Glass. Only took her a few moments to work the mechanism again, then we vaulted over the lowering wall and ran back through the shaking stone passages, trying not to listen to the increasingly loud groaning sounds all around us. Dust fell in thick sheets, and we both coughed harshly as we ran, holding our hands over our mouths and noses to keep out the worst of it. I don’t know how long we ran, following the light from the Looking Glass, but it seemed like the journey would never end. For years afterwards I had dreams where I was still there, still running through the dark and the dust, forever.

But finally we came to the side-door again and made our way back out onto the Street of the Gods. We kept running, and didn’t stop until we were safely on the other side of the Street. We looked back just in time to see the tip of the pyramid crumble and decay, and fall in upon itself, until there was nothing left but a great hole in the ground.

“All that gold,” I said.

“All your fault,” said Polly.

“How do you work that out?” I said, honestly curious. “Everything was fine until you grabbed the wand from the mummy.”

“It’s your fault because you hurried me!”

You can’t argue with logic like that. “Sorry,” I said.

“Now, give me the wand. You don’t know what to do with it.”

“It wants me to have it,” I said firmly.

Polly looked at me.

We took a taxi to our next destination. Most people don’t trust taxis, but I find you can always rely on the driver as long as you keep a gun pressed to the back of his neck. Polly had promised the next item on our list would be much easier to acquire, and I relaxed a little as we headed into Uptown, with its many up-market clubs and bars. You meet a much better class of scum in Uptown. We were looking for a pair of chaos dice, simple probability changers, and according to Polly, the very best example of their kind were to be found in Wu Fang’s Garden of Delights.

Everybody knew Wu Fang’s scandalously decadent establishment; one of the most exclusive and expensive gambling dens in the whole of the Nightside. Which took some doing. The Garden of Delights had been around since the early 1930s, and so had Wu Fang. My father knew them both, back in the day, and swore the Oriental Gentleman hadn’t aged a day in all those years. There were many rumours about the man, most of them quite unsavoury, and Wu Fang encouraged them all. Especially the nasty ones.

We had no trouble getting in; Polly showed the tuxedoed bouncers a handful of platinum credit cards, and they all but fought each other for the privilege of opening the door for us. The Garden of Delights always stood ready to welcome anyone with more money than sense. Like many establishments in the Nightside, the interior was far bigger than the exterior. It’s the only way we can fit everything in. Or, as my father likes to say, space expands to accommodate the sin available.

Inside Wu Fang‘s, the Garden of Delights stretched away for as far as I could see; a veritable jungle of Far Eastern trees and vegetation, where huge pulpy flowers blossomed in the perfumed air. Tiny birds of startlingly bright colours fluttered over our heads, or hovered over pouting petals. A river meandered through the jungle, with delightful roofed bridges crossing it at regular intervals. The rich scents hanging on the air buzzed inside my head. It was like breathing in heaven itself.

Polly and I wandered unhurriedly past a tumbling waterfall, enjoying the faint haze of water droplets in the air, and nodded calmly to the celebrities and high-rollers we passed, as though we belonged there just as much as they did. And they nodded politely back, because since we were there, we must belong.

Set out in little clearings were the gambling tables. Every game of chance you could think of, and some Wu Fang had imported specially from other realities. The traditional games predominated, of course, from poker to craps, roulette to vingt-et-un. You could bet money, futures, your life, or your soul on the outcome; and Wu Fang would be right there to cover your bet. You’d find every single way there is of parting a sucker from his money somewhere in Wu Fang’s celebrated Garden of Delights.

Amongst the delicate trees and the glorious foreign growths were statues and works of art, modern sculptures that ranged from the seriously abstract to the disturbingly erotic and displays of weapons from all times and places, including some that didn’t exist yet. Suits of medieval armour stood at regular intervals, pretending to be decorative. Wu Fang’s body-guards and enforcers; ready to step in and get violently physical at a moment’s notice. Sore losers were not tolerated in the Garden of Delight. Curious guests in the know occasionally lifted the gleaming helmet visors and looked inside the armour; but it was always empty.

There were any number of trophies on display, prizes acquired by Wu Fang down the years. A severed hand holding aces and eights; Wild Bill Hickok’s actual hand, stuffed and mounted, holding the cards he was dealt just before being shot in the back. The cards known forever after as the dead man’s hand. Howard Hughes’s death masque, smiling a very unsettling smile. The actual roulette wheel ball that broke the bank at Monte Carlo. And a pair of chaos dice. Two small cubes of night-dark ivory, with the points picked out in tiny blood-red rubies.

I couldn’t see any protections, but I had no doubt they were there.

I spotted my brother Tommy, sitting at one of the main poker tables.

A lot of things about this surprised and horrified me. First, Tommy had always been famously bad at gambling. Lady Luck wouldn’t recognise Tommy if she stumbled over him in the gutter. He could bet on the Nightside staying dark, and the sun would come up just to spite him. Second, Tommy had no card skills whatsoever. Anything more complicated than Snap was beyond him, and he couldn’t count to twenty-one without dropping his trousers. And third, to my utter despair, Tommy was sitting in with some really major card-players. Famous faces from the gambling fraternity, men who made the cards dance and change their spots at will.

I was debating whether or not to rush over and shoot Tommy repeatedly in the head, as a kindness, when Wu Fang himself glided over to greet me. A rare honour indeed. Wu Fang bowed courteously, and I bowed back. Polly sank into a deep curtsey. Wu Fang ignored her, his attention fixed on me. A slight and delicate oriental gentleman, in a suit that undoubtedly cost more than I made in a year, Wu Fang was politeness personified. And for a man who had to be at least a century old, he didn’t appear much older than me. There were lots of stories about Wu Fang, and most of them had blood in them. His brief smile showed yellow teeth, and his eyes were very dark.

“Larry Oblivion, son of Dash,” he said, in a quiet and civilised tone that could somehow still be heard clearly over the general clamour of his Garden. “So kind of you to drop in. Avail yourself of my facilities. Deny yourself nothing. And do give my kindest regards to your father. An honourable foe from times past and a most determined pain in the arse.”