The Mummy (31 page)

Edging through, O’Connell dropped to the floor of the chamber. Without his torch, he was enveloped in darkness—almost. A shaft of light, shooting through a small hole in the ceiling, was hitting the wall, high up, right next to an oval object. Squinting, O’Connell wondered:
Is that what I think it is?

He withdrew a revolver from a shoulder holster and aimed, precisely, up through the darkness, firing, catching the pedestal of what turned out to be, as he had guessed and hoped, another of those mirror disks. His shot moved the mirror into the path of the shaft of light, which reflected off other disks high above them, turning on the ancient lighting system, saturating the chamber with reflective light.

Reflective light, was right: Light was bouncing here and there off golden surfaces, off glittering jewels, gilded statues, ebony ivory-inlaid furniture, an array of treasures, overflowing, unimaginable treasures, shining, sparkling before him.

Within moments, after Ardeth Bay had handed down the gunnysack arsenal, the warrior and Evelyn’s brother had dropped down into the chamber—and their mouths had dropped open, too.

“Seti’s riches,” Ardeth Bay uttered.

“Egad,” Jonathan burbled, “it’s all the wealth of Egypt, stuffed into one chamber! It’s a bloody fortune! . . . I say, what’s that peculiar odor?”

And the three men turned to look away from the piled treasure, taking in the rest of the chamber, seeing where one of several passageways that fed into this place had provided entry to a pair of filthy, bandage-wrapped mummies who seemed unhappy by the intrusion of these outsiders, and shambled toward them with arms outstretched.

“I’m gonna take a wild guess,” O’Connell said, slowly reaching into his gunnysack for the elephant gun, “and say that’s mummy rot.”

“The priests of Imhotep,” Ardeth Bay intoned somberly. “Returned from the dead to do his foul bidding!”

“Foul is right,” O’Connell said, and blasted away with the elephant gun, smoke and flame shooting from its snout, blowing the upper torso off the mummy at the right. Pumping the gun, a huge spent cartridge flying out, O’Connell fired again, taking the top half of the other malodorous mummy clean off, as well.

The loud reports echoed in the chamber, and as the smoke cleared, O’Connell gasped at the most bizarre sight he’d been subjected to yet: The lower halves of both mummies were walking toward him, undeterred, legs stumbling forward!

And then the goddamn blown-off upper torsos of the two creatures stirred, and started crawling toward the three men, who were backing up in amazed horror.

“The hell with this!” O’Connell snarled, and reloaded and blasted, and reloaded and blasted, and reloaded and blasted, turning the sons of bitches into mummy powder. A few mummy fragments were still squirming, and, grimacing, O’Connell went around and squashed them with his boot, like big ugly bugs.

Jonathan had backed into a golden throne, where he was sitting, stunned. “You don’t see that every day,” he admitted.

The floor beneath their feet began to rumble, and a hand punched up through, bursting the stone.

“That, either!” O’Connell said, reloading.

Then two more mummies had crawled up out of the ground, skull faces grinning, bandages drooping, their foul stench filling the chamber as they lumbered toward the three outsiders.

Jonathan, sitting in his throne, eyes wide, asked, “I don’t suppose anyone thought to bring a bag of cats!”

Then the things were coming out of everywhere, the floor, the walls, even up out of the piles of gold and jewels, disgusting, reeking creatures, grinning skull-faced monsters whose grasping, clawing arms reached out for them, and only the slowness of the attackers’ staggering gait gave O’Connell’s party a prayer.

Backed up against the wall, O’Connell said to Ardeth Bay, “Let’s welcome these sons of bitches to the twentieth century!”

And he helped Ardeth Bay position the Lewis gun, and thread in the ammunition belt. Then the Med-jai warrior opened fire with the machine gun as O’Connell pumped and fired away with the massive elephant gun, pulverizing the mummies with their firepower, while Jonathan did his Wild West best with a revolver in either hand, shattering mummy kneecaps, exploding skulls.

But the mummies just kept coming, crawling from around and beneath and everywhere, and O’Connell and his cohorts, weapons in hand, dashed out of the chamber into the passageway, O’Connell yelling, “Go! Go! Go!”

They did not see Beni enter from another passageway, to eye the scattered mummy fragments, some of which twitched with the resiliency of the undead. But Beni overcame any fear or revulsion with the sight of all that wonderful, beautiful plunder.

Laughing, Beni fell backward into a pile of jewels and gold baubles and lolled about, as if bathing in the booty.

Within the labyrinth, where at least no mummies were emerging from walls, the O’Connell crew raced, often running backward, to fire at the oncoming, relentless horde of mummies.

“I’m out!” Ardeth Bay yelled, the mighty Lewis gun finally falling silent.

With no compass in hand, no idea where the hell they were going, other than away from those mummies, O’Connell led Ardeth Bay and Jonathan through a passageway and around a corner and into a small chamber where a falcon-headed statue loomed over a claustrophobic domain.

“Horus, old boy!” Jonathan said, summoning a mildly crazed smile. “Hello!”

“We’re cornered,” O’Connell said.

Mummies, more mummies than the mind could imagine, were plodding down the passageway toward them.

Reaching into his gunnysack, O’Connell withdrew a stick of dynamite, saying, “This may cave us in, too, but it’s all we’ve got,” and struck a match off the stubbly cheek of Ardeth Bay, who winced but didn’t complain.

Then O’Connell lit the fuse, pitched the dynamite down the passageway, yelling, “Hit the deck!”

Which he and the warrior and Jonathan did.

When the explosion had stopped echoing, and the dust had begun settling, they got to their feet, brushing themselves off as they looked at the beautiful sight of the sealed-off passageway, clogged with rock and dirt.

“If there’s anything left of those bastards,” O’Connell said, “let’s see them dig through
that.”

“Please, Richard,” Jonathan said. “Let’s not give the opposition any ideas.”

A way out still remained: another dark, narrow passageway. O’Connell gestured toward it, with his torch.

“Jonathan, stand watch—if you see anybody coming down the tunnel in full-body bandages, point it out, would you?”

“Righto.”

To Ardeth Bay, O’Connell said, “Now—let’s see if we can find, and open, that secret compartment,” nodding toward the base of the statue, “and find that gold book . . .”

O’Connell did not make the connection that the diggers who’d died, in a acid-spray booby trap, had done so in a similar attempt.

So, thinking he had nothing to worry about except the occasional murderous mummy, O’Connell headed for the base of the statue of Horus, where he and Ardeth Bay soon found the outline of the compartment, detecting its seams, and began doing their best to pry it loose with crowbars from the gunnysack.

 
21
 

The Mummy’s Bride

E
velyn awoke abruptly, as if from a horrible nightmare, realizing with startling clarity that she had woken to a reality worse than any dream her subconscious might fashion for her. She knew, at once, that she’d been laid out atop that sacrificial altar in Imhotep’s vast chamber; she was aware, instantly, that she was bound to the thing, arms pulled up, hands over her head, her wrists shackled by ancient chains—her ankles, too.

But Evelyn was a strong woman, not physically perhaps, but mentally; she prided herself on an ability to summon intellect over emotion. As she stared up at the cavern ceiling so high above, she buttressed herself, knowing that Rick was nearby, that he would rescue her. She had faith that this man she had come to love, whom she had seen outwit and outfight anything that had been thrown in his path so far, would prevail. Even though she knew that Imhotep had summoned by sorcery the undead mummies of his bygone priests, she believed, she had to believe, that Rick would save her.

And so she determined she would show Imhotep no fear, she would not give him the pleasure of her pain. There would be no concessions to girlish fright, she assured herself, and then she glanced to her left into the rotted face of a corpse placed beside her on the altar, and screamed her lungs out.

When her shrieks had subsided, and reason settled back in, Evelyn noticed the headdress on the shriveled, mummified carcass beside her, the sheer, skimpy, feminine garb, and knew:
Her companion was the corpse of Anck-su-namun!

Evelyn looked away from the gray grinning face of Pharaoh Seti’s late mistress, and pulled at her chains, struggling against them, hoping beyond hope that the metal had lost its tensile strength over these thousands of years. As she made this futile effort, she became aware of a faint, ominous chanting in a dialect of ancient Egyptian her scholarship could not penetrate.

The chanting grew louder, but no more understandable, until she saw the shambling shapes emerging from the darkness into the orange glow of the chamber:
more of Imhotep’s undead priests—shuffling toward her!

Soon they had surrounded her, bodies swaying, or trying to, the awkwardness of their ancient bones denying their grotesque choreography any grace. And then she realized that this was not some unknown ancient Egyptian dialect at all: She was unable to understand the words because these bandaged-draped, rancid chanters lacked tongues, in every case, and jaws and even mouths in many others.

She smiled; she laughed.

It was funny. So horrific was it, that she found it just dreadfully funny, and—unaware how close she was teetering to madness—she accidentally glanced, again, into the face of the grinning corpse beside her, as if looking in a laughing mirror, and it snapped her back to reality: ghastly, horrible, unimaginable reality . . . but reality.

Alongside her—on the opposite side from the withered corpse of Anck-su-namun—had been arranged, in a perfect row, the jewel-encrusted canopic jars, including the broken one. Now the swaying mummified priests made a path and Imhotep stepped through, princely in his dark flowing robes, the formidable
Book of the Dead
propped open in one hand, as if featherlight. The high priest seemed to reach a hand toward Evelyn, and she recoiled . . . but instead he tenderly touched the decayed cheek of his long-dead love.

Imhotep began to read from
The Book of the Dead.
She could not see, from where she lay restrained on the altar, the eerie results of his utterances; but she heard the strange sound, as if an immense broth were being brought to a boil. She could never have guessed that the fetid black bog, whose pools formed a sort of moat around the chamber at its periphery, had begun to seethe and gurgle, to churn and burn and foam and fume.

She could not see the black sludge, like a living being, slip up over its boundaries and slither across the ampitheater floor, coating it, oozing around the bony, bandaged feet of the droning mummy choir, and the sandaled feet of Imhotep himself, as he intoned the incantation from
The Book of the Dead.

But she did see, to her wide-eyed amazement, to her mind-numbing horror, the ooze slipping up and in and over and out of the canopic jars beside her!

Not knowing whether to cry or laugh or scream, she did nothing, nothing but watch in bewilderment and dread as the slime crossed over her, warm and bubbling, drifting across her as if she were a beach and it were the tide, sliding over the hills and valleys of her and onto the deteriorated corpse of the concubine, enveloping the gray husk, turning it black, like a shining ebony statue . . . and the the liquid seemed to be sucked down inside the corpse, disappearing into every available portal—eye sockets, mouth, gaps between ribs—every black drop of it.

That was when Anck-su-namun’s mouth opened, and gasped for air.

Evelyn’s mouth opened, too—in a scream so loud, so spine-chillingly shrill, that even Imhotep was momentarily taken aback, pausing in his recitation.