The Mummy (4 page)

Wide.

Alive.

Imhotep touched her cheek; the eyes met his, but she did not speak. She could not speak. Her soul had come back from the dead, but for her full return, her physical return, her organs must be transferred from the canopic jars to their rightful place within her body. And this required one last terrible step.

“There will be no pain,” he told her tenderly.

Though her face held no expression, her eyes spoke to him:
Do what you must, my love, do what you must . . .

Imhotep shifted the massive
Book of the Dead
into his one hand, holding the heavy volume open there, a feat his priests could only marvel at. Then, steeling himself for what he must do, the high priest of Osiris withdrew from under his black robe a sacrificial knife, its long blade wide at the hilt and narrowing to a point so honed that to test it with a touch was to bleed.

And now Imhotep, face clenched with an intense display of emotion his followers had never suspected him to possess, raised high the gleaming blade, fist white around the knife’s hilt, its serpent’s tooth hovering high above the perfectly restored body of his beautiful beloved, her eyes alive and granting him absolution for the vicious penetration he must perpetrate upon her tender flesh.

Anck-su-namun would, upon replacement of her vital parts, be again pristinely restored to her natural, magnificent physical state; there would be no scar, no sign of the invasion of Imhotep’s blade, nor for that matter of the blade with which she had ended her life, forty days before. The foul boiling liquid within her would work its strange sorcery, its mystic healing powers . . .

Around them the droning chant of the priests continued; the beating of her heart in its canopic jar grew louder, as if the organ were anticipating its own return to the home in her lovely breast, providing a drumbeat to their tuneless song. Imhotep’s eyes fell on the obsidian pages of the open volume in his left hand; knife poised to plunge into his beloved’s breast, he began to read the final incantation, almost shouting to be heard about the rising volume of the chanting and the anxious, beating heart . . .

Down the stairway, flooding all around the chamber, they came, rushing, two and three and four steps at a time, bolting down, barreling down, storming the ampitheater, screaming as they made their charge, a tattooed horde:
the Med-jai!

Like locusts they descended, and before his hand could come down, Imhotep had been seized, arms clutching him, banding around him, wrist squeezed in a grip, the knife blade frozen in air; his scream echoed through the cavern, and intensified as he saw the leader of the Med-jai raise a foot and bring it down hard, as if stepping on a huge bug: smashing, shattering, crushing the jar with the beating heart.

Silencing it.

As the tissue of the vital organ oozed like rotten fruit beneath the sandal of the Med-jai leader, something occurred that was so fantastic, and took place so quickly, that those who were to be alive, after this night, would never be sure it had really happened, would never be positive that their eyes in that dark, dank chamber hadn’t played tricks on them.

From every orfice of her body, Anck-su-namun expelled the black slimy fluid; it flew from her, and scattered in the air around those gathered about her, touching none of them, as if the flying black lake that had somehow been within her, and now somehow found its way outside of her, was a beast that could maneuver around them and avoid them. The black fluid found its way to the outskirts and corners of the chamber and rejoined the black boiling brew of human detritus from whence it came.

Anguished, Imhotep, straining as the Med-jai held him captive, looked down upon the face of his beloved, sought her eyes; her eyes sought his . . .

. . . and closed.

And again, the high priest of Osiris screamed, a scream of agony that shook the stony chamber:
He had lost her again!
He had lost her again . . .

All that remained now was for the Med-jai to take their retribution.

“You have condemned yourself, Imhotep,” the Med-jai leader said, the eyes a peculiar mixture of melancholy and ferocity. “But you have also condemned your faithful priests. Before you receive your punishment, you must witness theirs, to carry that guilt with you into the judgment of the underworld.”

So it was that in another chamber of the City of the Dead, in flickering torchlight, restrained by embalmers masked, like Anubis, in jackal heads, Imhotep was made to watch as his loyal followers were embalmed and mummified alive.

The embalmers were as calm as if the men they were using their knives and needles and thread upon were corpses, not screaming, squirming, living men. The final step in the process was to wedge the head of each priest—screams sealed inside sewn-shut mouths—within two strongboards so that a red hot sharp poker could be shoved up the nose, to cut their brains into small pieces before removal through their nostrils.

Insanity preceded death in every case.

Imhotep tried to look away, but his jackal-headed captors would turn his face toward the torture, and hold open his eyelids when necessary. This went on for hours, until all twenty-one of his loyal priests were before him on the chamber floor, squirming within their wrappings, wriggling like caterpillars trying to escape from their cocoons; their brains extracted, this was presumably reflex action—or were they still, somehow, experiencing pain? Yet as unimaginable as the pain his priests had suffered might have been, Imhotep could not fathom any pain worse than the emotional suffering that wracked his body, his spirit, as he was made to view this dreadful sight.

That was when the embalmers pried open his mouth and cut out his tongue, changing his opinion.

It was possible, though difficult, Imhotep discovered, to scream without a tongue, and the pain blinded him, sparing him the sight of the rats scurrying from their crannies to gather up his discarded tongue, scuffle over it and then eat their fair share of it.

When he could scream no more, held forward by his captors so that he would not drown in his own blood, Imhotep heard the voice of the Med-jai leader, informing him, “You are to enjoy a rare honor, Imhotep. You will be the first upon whom the curse of
hom-dai
has ever been bestowed.”

That worst, most horrible of curses, an ancient curse no one who had walked the earth had yet sinned severely enough to earn. A rare honor, indeed.

Like his priests, Imhotep was wrapped alive, holes cut for his eyes, nostrils and mouth. His bandages were slimy with muck from a boiling cauldron whose contents had been scooped from one of the ponds of human black detritus. As he squirmed within his bindings on the cavern floor, Imhotep’s bandages were patted down with the fetid slime by the embalmers, who made sure his bandages were drenched with the foul liquid.

Then the jackal-headed embalmers lifted him like the object he’d become and dropped him into a simple wooden coffin; that coffin was then placed within a granite sarcophagus. Numb from pain, barely conscious, Imhotep stared up at the high rocky ceiling and waited for the lid to be placed over him; the darkness, and the death it would bring, would be almost a relief.

But there were more pleasures awaiting him first.

A jackal mask looked down on him. A large jar was in the embalmer’s hands; one last indignity to be rained down upon him—more muck, maybe?

The jackal-headed embalmer began to pour the contents of the jar down upon the living mummy, and it was not muck.

Beetles.

Living, wriggling scarabs, rancid dung beetles that scampered upon him, like a living vest, scurrying across his chest and up across his throat and onto his face to cover it like a black writhing mask, many of them vanishing into his tongueless mouth and up his nostrils.

Imhotep would have laughed if there hadn’t been beetles crawling in his throat: He was eating them, and they were eating him; by so doing, Imhotep would be cursed to live forever . . . and the bugs were cursed the same. They would go together, through eternity, companions forever.

And now the coffin lid was slammed shut. Imhotep, in the darkness, invaded by beetles, of course did not see the Med-jai leader step from the darkness to lock the coffin lid tight, with eight gold keys connected as one. The embalmers lilted the heavy sarcophagus lid and set it into place, sealing it airtight with a
whoosh;
the Med-jai leader again used the strange eight-sided key, locking the sarcophagus lid.

“Here you will remain,” the Med-jai leader said softly,
(and yet Imhotep, within the sealed coffin heard these words, echoing within his small world).
“Sealed within, undead for all of eternity.”

The deed complete, the Med-jai leader folded the many-sided key into a small, octagonal, golden puzzle box.

As his followers gathered about him, the Med-jai leader said quietly, “We must take all precautions that He Who Shall Not Be Named never be released from his imprisonment, for he would be a walking disease, a plague upon mankind, an unholy eater of flesh with the strength of ages, power over even the sands themselves, with the glory of invincibility.”

Around him, the Med-jai priests nodded gravely; they knew—
even as Imhotep himself, trapped with his beetle friends within the slime-sealed sarcophagus knew
—that such was the price of that most horrible of curses, the
hom-dai.
That was why, never before, no matter how severe the infamy, had any villain ever been so punished.

Using many ropes, into a pit where the black slime boiled and roiled, the embalmers lowered the heavy sarcophagus, the muck splashing up over it, then streaming down its sides like melting candle wax, only to be sucked into the seams of the granite casement, until—as when the black liquid had vanished into Anck-su-namun’s mummy—the sarcophagus had drunk the pit dry of the viscous fluid, its sides clean,
all of it
clean and dry, not a bead of dampness remaining.

The embalmers, pulling upon the many ropes, withdrew the sarcophagus from the now parched pit and, at the Med-jai leader’s bidding, carted the granite casement to its chosen burial site.

Within his cold hell, the skittering beetles upon him and within him, Imhotep knew the ramifications of the portentous curse his burial carried with it, the
hom-dai.
If he were to raise himself, and his beloved Anck-su-namun, from their respective places in the underworld, they would together be unconquerable; they would unleash upon the world an infection so vile, so indomitable, that a cataclysmic ending would come to all living things . . . all but Imhotep and Anck-su-namun.

Perhaps, like his priests before him, Imhotep had been driven insane by the torture of living mummification.

And yet the muffled, tongueless screams that emerged from the living mummy in the coffin within the granite sarcophagus, onto which sand and dirt were rudely being shoveled, seemed to threaten revenge and were tinged with a chilling promise of inevitable triumph.

They buried him in the temple courtyard, near the base of the looming statue of Anubis (
The Book of the Dead
returned to its hiding place), where the jackal-headed death god could look sternly down on He Who Shall Not Be Named. For many hundreds of years Anubis, and armed generations of Med-jai, watched the grave of Imhotep, until the sands of time and the Sahara had all but hidden the ruins of Hamanaptra, the decayed head of Anubis barely visible above the shifting desert’s dry tides.

And yet, as civilizations lived and died, came and went, sealed within his coffin, with his scarab companions . . .

. . . Imhotep lived!

 
PART TWO
 

The Mummy’s Return

The Sahara—1925

 
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