The Mummy or Ramses the Damned (24 page)

Three of the vials, he placed in the pocket of his robe. The fourth vial, the one which he had failed to seal, he carried with him into the conservatory. He stood there in the darkness, holding it, peering at the ferns and vines that crowded the room.

The glass walls were losing their dark opacity. He could still see his own reflection clearly, a tall figure in a wine-dark garment, with a warm room behind him—but the pale objects of the outside world were coming visible too.

He approached the potted fern nearest him; a thing of great airy dark-green fronds. He poured a bit of the elixir into the moist soil. Then he turned to the bougainvillea, whose fragile red blossoms were few and far between amid the dark foliage. He poured many droplets of the elixir into this pot as well.

There was a faint stirring; a crackling sound. To use any more would be madness. Yet he moved from pot to pot, pouring but a few drops in each. Finally half the vial remained. And he had done enough harm, had he not? If the magic no longer worked, he would know within a few moments. He looked to the glass ceiling. The first blush of the sun was there. The god Ra sending the first warm rays.

The leaves of the ferns rustled, lengthened; tender shoots unfurled. The bougainvillea swelled and trembled on its trellis, tiny tendrils shooting up along the wrought-iron grillwork, little blossoms opening suddenly, blood red as wounds. The entire glass room was alive with accelerated growth. He closed his eyes, listening to that sound. A dark deep shudder passed through him.

How could he have ever believed that the elixir had lost its effectiveness? It was as strong as ever it had been. One powerful draught had rendered him immortal forever. Why did he think the substance itself, once created, would be any less immortal than he?

He put the vial in his pocket. He unlatched the rear door of the house and went out into the murky wet dawn.

The pain in Henry’s head was so bad he could not even see the two detectives clearly. He had been dreaming of that thing, that mummy, when they awakened him. In cold terror, he had taken his gun, cocked it, slipped it into his pocket and gone to the door. Now if they meant to search him …

“Everyone knew Tommy Sharples!” he said, fury masking his fear. “Everyone owed him money. For this you wake me at the crack of dawn?”

He squinted stupidly at the one called Galton, who now held up that damned Cleopatra coin! How the hell could he have been so stupid? To go off and leave that coin in Sharples’s pocket. But for the love of hell, he had not planned to cut down Sharples! How could he be expected to think of things like this!

“Ever see this before, sir?”

Be calm. There is not a scintilla of evidence to connect you to anything. Let indignation serve you as well as it always has.

“Why, that’s from my uncle’s collection. The Ramses collection. How did you get it? It ought to be under lock and key.”

“The question is,” said the one called Trent, “how did Mr. Sharples get it? And what was he doing with it on his person when he was killed?”

Henry ran his hands back through his hair. If only the pain would stop. If only he could excuse himself for a minute, get a good stiff drink and have some time to think.

“Reginald Ramsey!” he said, looking Trent in the eye. “That’s the fellow’s name, wasn’t it? That Egyptologist! The one staying with my cousin. Good God, what’s going on in that house!”

“Mr. Ramsey?”

“You have questioned him, haven’t you? Where did he come from, that man?” His face coloured as the two men stared at him in silence. “Do I have to do your job for you? Where the devil did the bastard come from? And what’s he doing with all that treasure in my cousin’s house?”

For an hour Ramses walked. The morning was cold and dreary. The great imposing houses of Mayfair gave way to the dingy tenements of the poor. He roamed narrow unpaved streets, like the alleyways of an ancient city—Jericho, or Rome. Tracks of the horse carts here, and the reek of damp manure.

Now and then some poor passerby would stare at him. Surely he should not be dressed in this long satin robe. But that did not matter. He was Ramses the Wanderer again. Ramses the Damned only passing through this time. The elixir still had its potency. And the science of this time was no more ready for it than the science of any other.

Look at this suffering, these beggars sleeping in the alleyway.
Smell the filth of that house, as if the door is a mouth that spews its foul breath while gasping for clean air.

A beggar man approached him. “Spare a sixpence, sir, I haven’t eaten in two days. Please, sir.”

Ramses walked on by, his slippers damp and dirty from the puddles in which he had stepped.

And now comes a young woman, look at her; listen to the cough rattling deep from her chest.

“Want to have a good time, sir? I have a nice warm room, sir.”

Oh, yes, he did want her services, so very much that he could feel himself hardening immediately. And the fever made her all the more fetching; she thrust out her small bosom gracefully as she forced a smile despite her pain.

“Not now, my fair one,” he whispered.

It seemed the street, if it was in fact a street, had carried him into a great wilderness of ruins. Burnt-out buildings reeking of the smoke, with windows empty of drapery or glass.

Even here the poor camped in alcoves and shallow doorways. A baby cried desperately. The song of the hungry.

He walked on. He could hear the city coming alive around him; not the human voices; those he’d heard all along. It was the machines which awoke now as the dirty grey sky grew brighter and became almost silver overhead. From somewhere very far away, he heard a deep-throated train whistle. He stopped. He could feel the dull vibration of the great iron monster even here through the damp earth. What a beguiling rhythm it had, those wheels rolling on and on over the iron tracks.

Suddenly a spasm of shrill noise threw him into a panic. He turned in time to see an open motor car hurtling towards him, a young man bouncing on the high seat. He fell back against the stone wall behind him as the thing rattled and bumped over the ruts in the mud.

He was shaken, angry. A rare moment in which he felt helpless, exposed.

Dazed, he realized he was looking at a grey dove lying dead in the street. One of those fat dull grey birds which he saw everywhere in London, nesting on the windowsills and on the rooftops; this one had been struck by the motor car, and part of its wing had been crushed under the wheels.

The wind stirred it now, giving it a false semblance of life.

Suddenly a memory, one of the oldest and most vivid, caught
him off guard, ripping him from the present, cruelly, and planting him squarely in another time and place.

He stood in the cave of the Hittite priestess. In his battle garb, his hand on the hilt of his bronze sword, he stood looking up at the white doves circling in the sunlight under the high grate.

“They’re immortal?” he asked her. He spoke in the crude, guttural Hittite tongue.

She had laughed madly. “They eat, but they do not need to eat. They drink, but they do not need to drink. It is the sun that keeps them strong. Take it away and they sleep, but they do not die, my King.”

He had stared at her face, so old, shrunken with its deep wrinkles. The laughter had angered him.

“Where is the elixir!” he had demanded.

“You think it is a great thing?” How her eyes had gleamed as she approached him, taunting him. “And what if all the world were filled with those who could not die? And their children? And their children’s children? This cave harbours a horrid secret, I tell you.
The secret of the end of the world itself, I tell you!
”

He had drawn his sword. “Give it to me!” he had roared.

She had not been frightened; she had only smiled.

“What if it kills you, my rash Egyptian? No human being has ever drunk it. No man, woman or child.”

But he had already seen the altar, seen the cup of white liquid. He had seen the tablet behind it covered with tiny wedgelike letters.

He stepped up to the altar. He read the words. Could this possibly be the formula of the elixir of life? Common ingredients which he himself could have gathered from the fields and riverbanks of his native land? Half believing, he committed it to memory, never dreaming that he would never forget.

And the liquid, ye gods, look at it. With both hands he lifted the cup and drank it down. Somewhere far off he heard her laughing and laughing; it echoed through the endless chambers of the cave.

And then he’d turned, wiping his lip with the back of his hand, his eyes wide as the shock coursed through him, his face throbbing, his body hardening as if he were in his chariot before the battlefield, on the verge of raising his sword and giving the cry. The priestess had taken a step backwards. What had she seen? His hair stirring, writhing, as if lifted by a swift breeze; the grey
hairs falling away as the strong brown hair replaced them; his black eyes fading, turning the colour of sapphires—the stunning transformation that he would verify later when he held up the mirror.

“Well, we shall see, shan’t we?” he had cried, his heart pumping fiercely, his muscles tingling. Ah, how light and powerful he’d felt. He could have taken flight. “Do I live or die, priestess?”

Stunned, he stared at the London street before him. As if it were only hours ago! The moment whole and entire, and he could still hear the flapping of those wings against the grate. Seven hundred years had passed between that moment and the night he’d entered the tomb for his first long sleep. And two thousand since he’d been awakened, only to go to the grave within a few years again.

And now this is London; this is the twentieth century. Suddenly he was trembling violently. Again, the damp smoky wind stirred the feathers of the grey dove that lay dead in the street. He walked forward through the sludge and knelt down beside the bird and scooped it up in his hands. Ah, fragile thing. So full of life one moment, and now no more than refuse, though the white down fluttered on its warm, narrow little chest.

Oh, how the chill wind hurt him. How the sight of the dead thing pierced his heart.

Holding it in his right hand, he drew out the half-full vial of the elixir with his left. He pushed open the hinged cap with his thumb and poured the shimmering liquid over the dead creature, forcing one heavy drop after another into its open beak.

Not a second passed before the thing quickened. The tiny round eyes opened. The bird struggled to right itself, its wings flapping violently. He let it go, and up it went, circling as it soared beneath the heavy leaden sky.

He watched until it had disappeared from sight. Immortal now. To fly forever.

And another memory came, silent and swift as an assassin. The mausoleum; the marble halls, the pillars, and the gaunt figure of Cleopatra running beside him as he walked on, faster and faster, away from the dead body of Mark Antony lying on the gilded couch.

“You can bring him back!” she screamed. “You know you can. It’s not too late. Ramses. Give it to us both, Mark Antony
and me! Ramses, don’t turn away from me.” Her long nails had scratched at his arm.

In a rage he’d turned, slapped her, knocked her backwards. Astonished, she’d fallen, then crumpled into sobs. How frail she’d been, almost haggard, with the dark circles beneath her eyes.

The bird was gone over the London rooftops. The sun grew brighter, a shocking white light behind the rolling clouds.

His vision blurred; his heart was pounding thickly in his chest. He was weeping, weeping helplessly. Ye gods, what had made him think the pain would not come?

He’d wakened after centuries in a great luxurious numbness; and now that numbness was thawing, and the heat of his love and his grief would soon be wholly his once more. This was but the first taste of suffering, and what was the blessing, that he was alive, heart and soul, again?

He stared at the vial in his hand. He was tempted to crush it, and let its contents drip from his fingers into this foul and rutted street. Take the other vials out someplace far away from London where the grass grew high surely, and only the wild flowers would witness; and there pour all the liquid into the field.

But what were these vain fancies?
He knew how to make it
. He had memorized those words off that tablet. He could not destroy what was forever engraved on his own mind.

Samir left the cab and walked the remaining fifty yards to his destination, hands shoved in his pockets, collar turned up against the driving wind. Reaching the house on the corner, he went up the stone steps and knocked on the peeling door.

A woman draped all in black wool opened the door a crack, then admitted him. Quietly he entered a cluttered room where two Egyptians sat smoking and reading the morning papers, the shelves and tables around them covered with Egyptian goods. A papyrus and a magnifying glass lay to one side on the table.

Samir glanced at the papyrus. Nothing of importance. He glanced at a long, yellow mummy, its wrappings still quite well preserved, lying carelessly, it seemed, on a nearby shelf.

“Ah, Samir, don’t trouble yourself,” said the tallest of the two men, whose name was Abdel. “Nothing but fakes on the market. Zaki’s work, as you know. Except for that fellow.…” The man pointed to the mummy. “He’s real enough, but not worth your time.”

Nevertheless Samir took a closer look at the mummy.

“The dregs of a private collection,” Abdel said. “Not in your class.”

Samir nodded, then turned back to Abdel.

“I did hear, however, that some rare Cleopatra coins have surfaced,” Abdel said, a bit playfully. “Ah, if I could get my hands on one of those.”

“I need a passport, Abdel,” Samir said. “Citizenship papers. I need them fast.”

Abdel did not immediately answer. He watched with interest as Samir reached into his pocket.

“And money. I need that too.”

Samir held up the glittering Cleopatra coin.

Abdel reached for it before he was out of his chair. Samir watched him without expression as he examined it.

“Discretion, my friend,” Samir said. “Speed and discretion. Let us discuss the details.”