The Mummy (24 page)

The mummy was skeletal, at first. Then as the adventurer from Chicago and the librarian from Cairo held each other close, in an embrace of terror, the creature began—incredibly, challenging their eyes—to regenerate.

A powerful new musculature formed upon the bones, like raw red flowers blossoming; then a thick skin grew, forming over the rippling tendons. Missing bones, including the hole O’Connell had blown in the mummy’s ribcage, renewed themselves, and yet this muscular figure was somehow still clearly a corpse, wrapped in bandages, skin sickly gray, as if hell had sent its best soldier to wage war on those above.

“Did you see that?” O’Connell whispered. “Or am I crazy?”

“Yes,” she said.

And then the mummy stretched, as if he’d woken from a long nap.

“We do have a problem,” O’Connell admitted.

The mummy was moving toward them, slowly, but with a renewed confidence; and his eyes were fixed upon Evelyn.

O’Connell yanked the revolver from under his left shoulder and trained it upon the creature. “You get one chance to stop.”

But the mummy kept coming, and O’Connell blasted away, stepping in front of Evelyn, blocking her, emptying the gun into the creature, which didn’t seem to mind at all, the bullets making entrance wounds but no blood welling out.

Behind O’Connell, Jonathan came running into the room, with Henderson and Daniels close on his heels. The three men froze in place, stunned by the sight of the new and improved mummy that O’Connell was emptying his other revolver into now, to no apparent affect, as the thing closed in on him.

O’Connell pitched his guns to the floor, thinking,
What the hell,
and he threw the best right hook he had in him, smack into the mummy’s face . . .

. . . and his fist went through the flesh and bone and sank into the mummy’s head, getting stuck deep within!

O’Connell stared at the head into which his hand was sunk wrist deep, thinking,
That must’ve been a hell of a right hook!,
and yanked his hand back out, like he was pulling it from thick, sticky mud, making a similar
slurping
sound. Evelyn was screaming behind him—or was that Jonathan? Before all of their eyes, the mummy’s face—the area that had come into contact with O’Connell’s fist—quickly degenerated, every bit as fast as the mummy’s body had regenerated minutes before, decaying down to the bone, as if O’Connell’s hand had infected it.

The mummy roared with rage and grabbed onto O’Connell by the shoulders, as if to shake him. O’Connell grabbed one of the mummy’s hands, but could not budge it and then he was hurled across the room, into Jonathan, Henderson, and Daniels, knocking them down like milk bottles at a carnival.

But the mummy’s hand had touched O’Connell’s flesh and that hand too began to shrivel and decay, as if it were O’Connell who were the plague.

As O’Connell dazedly pushed himself up into a sitting position, the mummy was closing in on Evelyn, backing her up against a wall, where she raised the back of a hand to her mouth, eyes wide with fright.

The mummy was smiling at her! He spoke softly, tenderly, in a language that O’Connell figured was ancient Egyptian. The goddamn monster was leaning in to kiss her!

O’Connell was on his feet, and ready to infect that bastard with his touch again, when Cleo, Evelyn’s white cat, revealed its presence atop a dresser, hissing, showing its teeth, hair standing up on its arched back, interrupting this tender moment between corpse and damsel.

The mummy reared back, shrieking like a scared old woman.

Then the balcony doors blew open with a sudden gust of wind and—though those who witnessed it questioned, later, what exactly they’d seen—the mummy seemed to spin into a tiny twister of sand and wind and speed, whipping himself into nothing except a spiraling sandstorm that went swirling out the doors.

Gone.

Everyone stumbled toward the center of the room and huddled, like confused football players, seeking a quarterback.

“What did he say to you?” O’Connell asked her.

She was trembling. “He . . . he said, ‘You saved me. I am grateful.’ ”

White with fear, Henderson said, “We’re cursed . . . all of us . . . cursed.”

And the hardbitten American stumbled over to the shriveled shell of his dead friend, and knelt beside him, and began to weep—whether for himself or Burns, no one knew, and certainly no one asked.

 
16
 

Strange Bedfellows

E
velyn knew of only one person who might provide them with the answers they needed to combat He Who Shall Not Be Named, that walking plague carrier who had performed unspeakable acts and dark magic in the room where Burns had died.

She had to admit that, to his credit, O’Connell did not display any silly masculine pride when it came time for her to step forward and take the initiative. He had dutifully followed her lead as she instructed Jonathan to bring his Dusenberg around (when her brother had gone to their house to fetch her steamer trunk, he had returned with the convertible) and the entire lot of them—O’Connell, Jonathan, Henderson, Daniels, and herself—had piled in and roared off from the fort to her old place of employment.

Returning to this familiar facility made an eerie homecoming for Evelyn. Their feet echoing off the marble floors of the Cairo museum, she led the men through the halls, past galleries displaying the coffins of ancient kings, and the mummified kings themselves, who seemed to watch them pass by. In all the many months she had worked here, Evelyn had never found these premises, well, spooky . . . but now that she had met a mummy, in the rotting flesh, the nature of this huge haunted house, this repository of grave robbing, finally sank in for her, and her skin crawled.

She was leading the little group—the men in their white shirts, holstered guns, and chinos looking like a safari seeking a wild beast to shoot (which wasn’t far from the truth)—toward the curator’s office at the back of the museum. But as they rounded a corner, in the gallery to the left, there stood Dr. Bey—and not alone.

The round little man with the round face, a red fez atop his oily thinning black hair, in his usual dark suit with string tie, was speaking to an unusual guest: an angular-faced figure in dark, flowing robes, from under which gleamed the handle of a golden scimitar . . .

. . . Ardeth Bay—the chieftain of the Med-jai warriors—standing tall, like a figure from a museum exhibit come to life.

“You!”
everyone said, in an echoing chorus of surprise and outrage.

Revolvers flew into the hands of O’Connell, Henderson, and Daniels; but Ardeth Bay merely glowered at them, a scowl touched with a contemptuous smile.

The curator gestured to Evelyn and her contingent. “Miss Carnahan. Gentlemen.” And he gestured to the Med-jai leader. “May I introduce Ardeth Bay . . . a guest from out of town.”

“We’ve met,” O’Connell snapped.

Evelyn stepped forward, facing her ex-boss. “What is he doing here?”

“Do you truly wish to know? Or would your impulsive American friends prefer to react as they always do? With swift, stupid violence, and no thought as to consequences whatsoever?”

And indeed the guns of the Americans were raised and trained upon the curator and the warrior, the tension in the air crackling.

Pieces fitted quickly into place within Evelyn’s mind, and she said, “As opposed to your considered, astute violence, Dr. Bey?” She gestured to Ardeth Bay.
“You
told the Med-jai that I possessed the puzzle box, the key . . .
You
sent them to steal it from me—and kill me!”

“It was not my desire for you to die—and here you stand alive before me.”

“But if I had been killed, and the key box retrieved, that would have been an acceptable price to pay, I suppose?”

“Frankly, Miss Carnahan . . . yes. The life of one silly, headstrong, incompetent girl in trade for saving the world from what, in your religion, might be called Armageddon? Oh yes—yes and yes, a thousand times.”

O’Connell stepped forward, uncocking his revolver, returning it to his holster; he nodded to Henderson and Daniels and the men frowned, but lowered their guns—they did not, however, join O’Connell in holstering their weapons.

“I don’t think threats or insults are productive, at this point,” O’Connell said, in a reasonable, intelligent tone that surprised Evelyn. “The genie’s out of the bottle, so to speak. Maybe we need to work together.”

Dr. Bey’s smile was patronizing, his tiny mustache twitching. “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer just to shoot us?”

“I’m not saying that doesn’t sound like a good time, pal.” And O’Connell gave Ardeth Bay a nasty smile. “But I just saw my fist vanish into the skull of some walking dead ‘thing.’ So I’m willing to go on faith here, at least for a little ways.”

“You would not be capable of comprehending—”

“Hey. I saw a guy turn into a sandstorm and blow himself out the window. You might be surprised what I’d buy, at this point.”

The curator studied O’Connell’s face, as if it were an inscription he was translating, and then Dr. Bey said, “Follow me,” leading the group through the gallery, Ardeth Bay at his side.

As if a tour guide, the curator led them down a sun-dappled aisle under high skylights, past displays with which Evelyn was most familiar, splendid mummy caskets of fine woods, exquisitely carved and painted with pictures telling the stories of the lives of their occupants.

Dr. Bey was saying, “This is King Rameses, who went to school with Moses—the pharaoh who oppressed the Israelites, who set in motion the tyranny that would your bring your God to afflict Egypt with plagues.”

The well-preserved, iron-jawed Rameses seemed to look back at them, the teeth in his black face as white as if they’d been brushed this morning.

“And this is Seti the First, father of Rameses—a great warrior, who built a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea.”

On display with his chariot and sword, Seti was propped up in his casket, his black arms folded, his black head resting on yellow grave clothes, features peaceful.

The throne of Seti was nearby and the curator sat in it, crossing his legs casually. “As you can see, Seti sleeps well—unlike his faithless high priest, Imhotep, who successfully conspired with a traitorous wench to murder him. This is why Imhotep was buried alive.”

“And cursed with the dreaded
hom-dai,”
Evelyn whispered.

“My dear,” the curator said, “we will make a scholar of you yet.” He gestured toward Ardeth Bay, who stood beside the seated-in-the-throne curator like a faithful servant. “We are members of an ancient sect—”

“The Med-jai,” Evelyn said.

“I am impressed. But I doubt you were aware, my dear, that this secret society had endured, pursuing its sacred mission down through these three thousand years. For all that time, the Med-jai have guarded the City of the Dead, protecting it from the desecration of grave robbers, in part . . . but also to protect the world from the living curse buried there. You see, we are sworn at manhood to do all in our power to prevent High Priest Imhotep from returning into this world. And for thirty-nine generations, we have prevailed.”

“But now because of you,” Ardeth Bay said, thrusting a finger at Evelyn, “we have failed.”

Appalled, Evelyn said, “And this justifies killing innocent people?”

“To stop this creature,” the warrior said, “I would gladly kill you now.”

O’Connell stepped between them and said to the seated curator, “Let’s just keep it friendly, okay, pops? You want to try to pin the blame-tail on some jackass, or do you want to help us stop this son of a bitch?”

Evelyn frowned at O’Connell, wondering if she’d just been insulted.

A small smile traced itself beneath the curator’s mustache; he nodded. “I believe you are right . . . Mr. O’Connell, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. You know, for instance—why was this big bad monster afraid of a little bitty kitty?”

“Cats are the guardians of the underworld. He Who Shall Not Be Named will fear these harmless animals until he is fully returned to his perfect state.”

“Regenerating himself, you mean.”

“Yes. Once he has . . . regenerated . . . he will fear nothing. And nothing will be able to stop him.”