The Mummy (19 page)

“I have read of this,” Chamberlin said breathlessly. “I have heard of this—but no man of the modern age has, until this day, this moment, been sure that
The Book of the Dead
truly existed!”

“A book?” Daniels said, kicking at the sandy floor. “A goddamn book? That’s what this fuss was about?”

“Ah, but gentlemen,” Chamberlin said, running his fingers delicately across the carved surface of the volume’s cover, “this is a most priceless treasure . . .”

“I wouldn’t give you a brass spittoon for the damn thing,” Henderson growled, and kicked the chest with savage anger and frustration.

“Please, no!” the Egyptologist cried, but the damage was done.

If indeed it was damage: Through the splintered wood, a lower compartment had been revealed. Within were four jewel-encrusted canopic jars and a fifth, shattered mate.

Chamberlin shuddered, experiencing the giddy jolt of a cocktail of dread and elation: precious objects, these jars . . . but also the coda to the curse, the preserved entrails of a mummy.

Burns, eyes glittering behind his glasses, was grinning. “Jewels!
Now
we’re gettin’ somewhere.”

Just as the raid last night had only fed the American contingent’s lust for bounty, Evelyn Carnahan’s thirst for knowledge, for discovery, for scholarship, had only surged.

Her thirst the evening before, however, was causing certain problems this morning, as work got under way at the granite sarcophagus that had fallen at their feet yesterday, like a gift from the gods. Evelyn—and, judging by their dark-circled eyes and sluggish demeanor, Jonathan and O’Connell, as well—was suffering from that most ignoble of maladies: a hangover.

At the moment, she was unfolding the puzzle box with a little difficulty, though she’d opened it before, numerous times, easy as pie. “I can’t believe I let my defenses drop to such a sorry state that you two reprobates could get me tipsy.”

“Don’t blame me, Sis,” Jonathan said. “I’d already passed out, like a true and proper drunkard.”

“ ‘Tipsy’ doesn’t quite cover it,” O’Connell said. His eyes were bloodshot and his flesh a sickly gray. “You were drunk as a lord.”

“Well!” Evelyn huffed, and glared at her brother.

Jonathan raised his hands in surrender; he looked even worse than O’Connell. “Don’t ask me for vindication. I don’t even remember being there.”

“Neither do I,” she said, “thank you very much.”

“That’s a shame,” O’Connell said, with a hurt look that was obviously feigned. “Last night you said you’d remember it forever.”

“I never!”

“Until last night.” And he grinned at her.

Horrified, flushed with embarrassment, she fumbled with the box, and O’Connell reached out, took the box, and opened up its metal petals.

“Nothing happened,” he said softly. “Except that you agreed to start calling me Rick.”

Relieved, she smiled; then she was irritated by his teasing and said, “This couldn’t be more serious. Now I want you two schoolboys to behave yourselves.”

“Stand back,” O’Connell said, and he inserted the box-turned-into-key into the large lock, which mirrored the box’s unfolded shape, ducking down, keeping his back to the sarcophagus.

“Mr. O’Connell,” Evelyn said, “I appreciate your concern, but there’s no record of any sarcophagus itself being booby-trapped.”

And Evelyn strode up and turned the key to the right, initiating a series of strange grinding noises, as the mechanism responded; and then a loud hiss indicated the breaking of an airtight seal.

All three of them backed away, glancing at each other with excitement and perhaps some anxiety—finding themselves facing no splashing acid bath, no thrusting steel spikes, no nasty surprises at all.

Soon, they were exercising their aching, morning-after muscles by doing their best to slide the heavy granite lid off the sarcophagus, pushing, shoving, groaning; at first, they seemed not to be getting anywhere at all. But finally, the lid began to budge, only grudgingly, inch by inch.

“It’ll be too heavy for us to lift off,” she said, as they took a break, panting, passing a canteen around. “I’m afraid we’ll have to shove it to the floor, and risk breaking it.”

“It’s that or our backs,” Jonathan pointed out.

And their backs were what they put into their next joint effort, and suddenly the lid slid off its perch and went pitching off the sarcophagus onto the chamber floor with a loud, resounding
slam
that echoed through the chamber, as well as Evelyn’s poor, hungover head. Beside her, O’Connell and Jonathan had reacted similarly—Jonathan covering his mouth, O’Connell his eyes, and with Evelyn covering her ears, the sound had made monkeys of them all.

Within the sarcophagus was a considerably less grand wooden coffin. She bid her two assistants to lift it out, which they did, and she could not have stared down at the ancient object, adorned only with cobwebs and dust, with more avid anticipation and tingling ecstasy if it were fashioned of solid gold.

“I’ve dreamed of this since I was a little girl,” she said.

“You must have been a weird kid,” O’Connell said, still kneeling by the coffin.

“Oh, indeed she was,” Jonathan said, crouching at the other end of the thing, like a reluctant pallbearer.

She flashed them disgusted looks, and asked O’Connell for a rag, which he proffered, and she began brushing away the webs and dirt, clearing the coffin lid, looking for hieroglyphs. What she saw—or rather, what she didn’t see—sent a chill up her spine.

“All the usual, sacred spells have been chiseled off!” she said, pointing this out to the two men.

“What’s the significance of that?” O’Connell wondered.

“The hieroglyphs that would have protected the deceased within this coffin, accompanying him into the afterlife, have been systematically removed.”

“So he
was
‘naughty,’ ” Jonathan said.

Evelyn nodded. “Apparently it was not enough that he be condemned in this life—they condemned him in the next, as well.”

“Those ancient Egyptians sure were strict,” O’Connell said.

“Yes, I’m all choked up for the poor blighter,” Jonathan said. “Now—shall we look inside, and see if he’s wearing a golden mask or silver jammies?”

Evelyn, who had given up on these two, was brushing off a large lock on the side of the coffin, which again mirrored the shape of the unfolded, puzzle-box petals. Following his sister’s lead, Jonathan inserted the key-box and gave it a hard turn to the right.

Again, a hiss indicated an airtight seal’s surrender, as it broke after centuries of concealment.

But this time a foul stench emanated from the cracked-open lid.

“Uggh!” Jonathan said, backing away, holding his nose. “This isn’t by chance where you buried Warden Hassan, is it, O’Connell?”

Evelyn took several steps back, coughing, while O’Connell—one hand covering his nose and mouth—tried to open the lid with the other. Then he tried with both hands, putting everything he had into it.

“Damn thing’s stuck,” he said. “Caught on something . . . Give me a hand, Jonathan.”

Both men gave it their all, and the lid slowly began to give way.

“Don’t stop now!” O’Connell said to Jonathan. “I think it’s coming loose . . .”

And the lid popped open!

But with the lid came the coffin’s inhabitant, a hideous, maggot-infested, still-rotting corpse in black-stained oozing bandages, seemingly jumping up from within!

The brave American, the self-composed Englishwoman, and her dapper brother screamed like blithering idiots, scared witless.

And the mummy plopped back into his coffin.

O’Connell swallowed, then laughed nervously. “Some of the bandages must’ve got caught or stuck to the lid or something.”

“Those bandages do look frightfully sticky at that,” Jonathan said.

“There’s something terribly wrong here,” Evelyn said, stepping slowly toward the coffin, then peeking tentatively within, at the twisted, deformed mummy. “I’ve never seen a mummy that looked remotely like this . . . After three thousand years, he’s still—”

“Moist?” Jonathan offered.

“Actually, yes. Even in an air-sealed coffin, this is unheard of—he’s still decomposing!”

O’Connell was examining the inside of the coffin lid. “Take a gander,” he said, pointing to traces of dried blood and deep scratches, dozens of them, on the inner lid. “His fingernails did that.”

“My God,” Evelyn said. “He was . . . buried alive.”

“Very
naughty,” Jonathan said, quietly.

“Looks like he left us a message,” O’Connell said, pointing out a cluster of crudely fashioned hieratics—in dried blood.

“ ‘Death is only the beginning,’ ” Evelyn translated.

Jonathan shivered, and O’Connell’s and Evelyn’s eyes locked.

“You planning to stay down here much longer?” O’Connell asked her. “I thought I might go get my gunnysack.”

 
13
 

Plague on Both Your Houses

A
nother starry amethyst night had descended upon the City of the Dead, but now the Carnahan suburb had merged into the American expedition’s city of tents, where members of the rival teams gathered around one roaring campfire. The wary truce was matched by an uneasy calm, as rifles and revolvers lay near at hand, should the Med-jai welcoming committee decide to drop by again.

Arms folded, rather enjoying the chilly evening, Evelyn carried a small canvas bag by its drawstrings, like a kid with a sack of marbles, as she headed toward the campfire. Starting from her own small tent, she passed casually by the much larger tent which served as Dr. Chamberlin’s headquarters.

The Egyptologist, wearing his sun-shielding pith helmet even in the moonlight, stood at a worktable arrayed with various artifacts gathered from below, including one jewel-encrusted canopic jar in perfect condition and another that was in pieces. Half a dozen turbaned diggers sat in the sand nearby like disciples awaiting the holy word from the mousy professor.

“Hello, Doctor,” she said, as she passed, but Chamberlin did not respond.

This wasn’t rudeness on the professor’s part: He seemed wholly absorbed with the examination of a certain artifact—a book—a large, brass-hinged, obsidian volume with a strange, large lock on its face that was keeping Chamberlin from opening the thing.

Smiling privately, Evelyn strode to the campfire, sitting between her brother, Jonathan, and Rick O’Connell, who was perched next to his old Foreign Legion comrade, Beni. Both legionnaires were roasting scraggly meat on sticks, which was producing a rather pungent, even foul, aroma.

Jonathan sniffed the air. “Might I ask what that vile-smelling entrée might be?”

“It might be a rat,” Beni said. “Best the desert has to offer.”

“Want some of mine?” O’Connell asked. “Don’t worry—it doesn’t taste too much worse than it smells.”

“No, thank you.” Jonathan shuddered. “For a moment I thought our old friend Warden Hassan had returned from the dead.”

Across the flittering flames, the adventurers from America—Henderson, Burns, and Daniels—were sitting together, talking quietly, all grins and high spirits. Like Chamberlin, each had a canopic jar, elaborately and valuably jeweled, and the men were turning the jars over and over in their hands, practically fondling the things.

Henderson held his jar up and grinned through the flames at Evelyn and O’Connell. “Miss Carnahan—you’re an expert. What do you think this beauty will fetch on the collector’s market?”

“My expertise is in the realm of scholarship,” she said primly. “I’m afraid commerce is your department, Mr. Henderson.”

“Beni tells us you kids found yourselves a mummy today,” Burns said, flames dancing on the lenses of his wireframes. “Congratulations.”

O’Connell glanced irritably at Beni, who didn’t acknowledge this small betrayal of confidence, focusing on how his rat-on-a-stick was doing.

“I hear he’s nice and ripe,” Burns added.

“Why don’t you dry him out?” the stoic Daniels asked, offering a rare witticism. “We could use the firewood.”

The fortune hunters bellowed with laughter, patting each other on the back, drunk with their good fortune.

Evelyn ignored this uncouth behavior and said to O’Connell, “I made another interesting discovery, after you and Jonathan went topside.”