The Mummy (15 page)

Evelyn felt helpless, wanting to stop this, not knowing how, and her gaze dropped to her feet, where she noticed, for the first time, a wide crack in the floor. She lowered her torch, as inconspicuously as possible, toeing some pebbles into the crack . . . and faintly she heard them hit bottom.

There was a second chamber, below this one!

“Boys, boys, boys!” Evelyn said, in her most charming, chiding manner. “Behave yourselves—this is an enormous site, and you are such a large group, and we are so pitifully small . . . We’ll concede this statue to you, and press on. After all, there’s plenty here to go around.”

The tension eased, but suspicion still clenched the faces of the Americans, in particular Dr. Chamberlin’s.

Eveyln’s laughter was gentle, if brittle, as she latched on to O’Connell’s arm, guiding him away, back toward the passageway, giving him a pointed look that directed him to go along with this, as she said, “If we’re going to play together, we must learn to share.”

Moving backward, keeping their guns trained on Beni and the Americans, Jonathan and the warden followed after Evelyn and O’Connell.

Evelyn’s group did not see the Americans lowering their weapons, but heard their derisive laughter and stinging remarks about cowardice.

O’Connell was scowling, burning under that manhood-questioning onslaught, but Evelyn clutched his arm, halting him (and her brother and the warden) in the passageway. She lifted a finger to her lips, in a shush gesture, and they listened.

The voice of the Egyptologist, Dr. Chamberlin, echoed down the passageway to them: “The next step is for me to translate these hieroglyphs—they should lead us to the location of Seti’s treasure!”

These words made Evelyn smile, and she motioned for O’Connell and the others to follow her back to the embalming chamber, still illuminated by the mirror-ricocheting sun rays.

“Dr. Chamberlin apparently is ignorant of the secret compartment in that statue,” she told the little group. “They’re searching for Seti’s treasure, not
The Book of Amun Ra.”

“That’s what we should be seeking!” the warden said, frustration seizing his sweaty face.

“The book she’s talking about,” O’Connell told Hassan, “is made of solid gold—get it?”

The warden considered that piece of information, as Evelyn informed the group of the chamber she’d discovered, below the statue.

“Let’s find our way down there,” she said, and they headed back into the labyrinth, with O’Connell, torch in hand, in the lead. Within minutes, he had found a tunnel heading downward, and—after another crouching, cobweb-clawing journey—they were in a vast, spare, low-ceilinged chamber, similar to the embalming room, less elaborate in its hieroglyphs.

“This is another preparation chamber,” Evelyn said, “probably for the mummification of figures less important than royalty.”

“Why?” O’Connell asked, guiding his torch around the room. “Don’t tell me they had different levels of mummy-making?”

“Three, actually—pharaohs and princesses got first-class treatment. I’d say this room prepared the dead to travel by, well . . . steerage, you might say. Bodies would be thoroughly cleaned and soaked in salt and stored in a chamber like this for seventy days. But it’s good for us—we can reach this ceiling without much effort. According to my calculations—which have been pretty precise so far, you must admit—we should be right beneath the statue.”

Jonathan looked upward at the cracked ceiling, grinning. “And when those damn dirty Yanks go to sleep . . . oh, sorry, O’Connell.”

“You were talking about those other dirty damn Yanks.”

“Precisely,” Jonathan said. “When they’ve called it a day, we dig our way back up there, and steal that book right out from under their noses.”

“They’ll have guards posted, up top.” O’Connell was pacing, his torch fanning the walls in orange and blue designs. “We can’t risk being seen—we have to get that book without them knowing we have it—without them even knowing the damn thing exists . . . Miss Carnahan—you
can
find that secret compartment, can’t you?”

“Yes, unless Dr. Chamberlin gets lucky and stumbles onto it.”

“Good, then we’re all agreed,” Jonathan said, and pointed at the ceiling. “We’ve got digging tools . . . Let’s find a soft place and dig up through.”

Evelyn frowned at her brother. “They just might notice a fresh hole in the floor, Jonathan.”

O’Connell strode across the chamber, holding his torch high, examining the ceiling. “We can dig over here . . . The stone is fragmentary, and it should take us up into one of the tunnels.”

“Do we dare start digging?” Jonathan wondered. “Or will they hear us?”

“They expect us to be digging,” O’Connell said, reaching into his backpack for chisels, “and we won’t be right under them . . . I say we get started.”

“I’ll take one of those things,” Evelyn said eagerly, referring to the chisels, loving the adventure of this.

Jonathan hefted the tool, sighed, and said, “Physical labor finds me at last . . . At least it doesn’t smell so bad in here.” And then he realized why, glancing all around him, adding, “I say! Where’s our fragrant friend gone off to?”

O’Connell flashed his torch around the chamber.

Jonathan was right: The warden was gone.

 
10
 

Plenty to Go Around

G
ad Hassan had not risen to the high position of warden of Cairo prison by following the initiative of other men, much less a woman. Hassan had had quite enough of Miss Evelyn Carnahan’s leadership, particularly since the unveiled hussy had made it clear that finding the pharaoh’s treasure was not her objective.

In this underground city of boundless treasure and endless possibilities of wealth, the lady librarian was looking for a book! Yes, yes, a book fashioned of gold; but when King Tut’s tomb had been found, what
hadn’t
been fashioned of gold?

The woman was right about one thing, that much the warden would grant her: There was plenty of plunder here to go around.

And so it was that Gad Hassan had slipped away, and gone crawling down a tunnel of his own choosing, with Jonathan Carnahan’s torch in hand. His girth made passage difficult, but not impossible, and a few cobwebs were nothing to a man who dealt on a daily basis with the worst thieves and murderers in Arabia. What danger could await him that compared to even a slow day at Cairo prison?

Within minutes of the inception of Warden Hassan’s private expedition, he had made his own mindboggling discovery. Wheeling about, he took it in, gape-mouthed, his torch lighting up another of these fabulous chambers, carved from rock by ancient engineers, walls straight and smooth and dancing with geometric decoration. Then his torch stopped, held in place, and Hassan stared as the firelight glittered upon the face of a mural that combined exquisite hieroglyphic storytelling with embedded jewels . . .

The warden, awash in greed and self-satisfaction, withdrew a pocket knife and began to pry the purple stones from the mural. Had Evelyn Carnahan been present—the woman of whom his recent thoughts had been so contemptuous—she could have told Hassan that these were only semiprecious amethyst quartz stones, and not really worthy of his effort, certainly not of defacing so elaborate and unusual a mural.

Evelyn would also have pointed out the mural’s bizarre subject matter, an image that the warden was standing too close to perceive. If he had noticed, superstitious man that he was, the warden might have continued on in his treasure hunting, and let this be, this mural depicting an ancient Egyptian priest covered in scarabs, screaming in pain as the deadly dung beetles consumed his flesh.

Hassan dropped the first pried-loose amethyst into a pouch on his belt, then began carving away at the wall, loosening another. It was an awkward one-handed procedure, as he must do his work by the light of the torch in his other hand.

But he repeated this process, again and again, forehead gleaming with jewels of perspiration, his eyes glimmering with greed as he murmured to himself a song of riches and wine and beautiful women, a hymn to his own resourcefulness. He did not notice one of the amethysts missing the pouch and dropping, almost silently, to the sand-dusted stone floor at his sandaled feet.

Nor did he notice the scarab-shaped jewel begin to glow, to pulse, to transform, as something within it began to wake and wiggle and wriggle, as if the amethyst were a cocoon. The warden’s eyes were fixed upon the latest jewel he was chiseling loose, and could not be bothered with the sight of the amethyst at his feet splitting open, and a living scarab beetle scurrying out.

The hideous black bug moved as if with a purpose, as if doing the bidding of some unknown, unseen presence that sent it nestling, burrowing inside the leather sandal of the man self-contentedly prying at the face of the mural, muttering his own praises.

That muttering, those praises, ended abruptly, as the warden felt the sharp bite—not a sting, but a bite, more like a small animal than an insect—and the sensation was a burning one, as if hot lava had been injected into him with a needle, but hot lava with gnashing, hungry teeth. He began to scream, a scream of fear and agony that accompanied his every action that followed. He dropped his knife and his torch and clawed at his trousers, as the bug—somehow he knew it was a bug—crawled up his left pantleg, but no, not up the pantleg,
inside
his leg, burrowing up in his flesh, sending searing pain along the way of its excavation route.

His screaming was coming in shorter bursts now, gasps of anguish and terror, as he felt the bug making its steady, swift way up across his groin; he ripped at his shirt, popping buttons, and up the rise of his belly it came, a moving lump under the skin, and then down the hill and up under the forest of his hairy chest, like a mole rooting.

Clawing and scratching at it did no good; the bug’s progress was both steady and inexorable, and his screams turned to whimpers and tears as he felt the bug furrowing up the tender flesh of his throat, and then, under his chin, it disappeared, no longer a presence just under his skin, but tunneling up inside his head.

For a man of the warden’s size, the insane dance he began to perform was quite nimble; and there was an eerie music to the ascending and descending nature of his renewed screaming, as he left the torch behind, and his pocket knife, and the jewels he’d plundered, abandoned in that chamber, as he pranced into the darkness of the labyrinthian tunnels, in the company of his unseen dancing partner.

• • •

The warden’s screams were not heard by the American expedition, who were still gathered around the base of the statue of Anubis. Dwarfed by his burly partners, Dr. Chamberlin stood staring at the base, a hand on his chin. These men of action were frustrated by their dependence on this man of science, of scholarship, and Chamberlin was aware, at every moment, of their volatility.

Still, some matters could not be rushed.

“Well,” Henderson said impatiently, “is there something in the base of that thing or not?”

Using a small sable-hair paintbrush, the Egyptologist gently cleared away sand from the seams he’d discovered, seams that could well indicate a secret compartment.

“The hieroglyphs indicate that a valuable treasure is at the feet of Anubis,” Chamberlin said slowly, thoughtfully.

“Then stand aside,” Henderson snarled, and jammed the tip of a crowbar into one of the seams.

“No!” Chamberlin said, clutching the American’s arm, a powerfully muscular arm that might have pried that compartment door off—if indeed that was what it was—in a single tug.

Henderson’s eyes were tight with menace. “You better have a good reason for layin’ hands on me, Doc.”

Chamberlin loosed his grasp, but said, “If this is a secret compartment, consider: These hieroglyphs virtually dare a looter to attempt just what you’re about to do.”

Henderson thought about that. He, and his crowbar, withdrew a step. “What would you suggest?”

Beni stepped forward, with a smile as thin as his mustache. “May I offer a humble alternative,
barat’m?
You are paying good money to these men to dig.” He nodded toward the half dozen turbaned diggers standing just behind the Americans, then shrugged elaborately. “So have them dig.”