The Mummy or Ramses the Damned (45 page)

Ramses was clearly stymied. Reluctantly, he turned, looking past Julie with dull, crazed eyes. He moved back sluggishly to the chair and sat down.

Julie wiped her tears with her handkerchief and took her chair again.

“Where and when?” Ramses asked.

“Seven tonight. The Babylon, it’s a French night club. I know it. I can take you there.”

“I cannot wait until then!”

“Ramses, tell us what all this means. How can we help you if we don’t know?”

“Sire, Julie is right. Take us into your trust now. Allow us to assist in this. If you are captured again by the police …”

Ramses waved it away in disgust. His face was working silently with emotion.

“I need you, and when I tell you, I may lose you. But so be it. For I have wreaked havoc with your lives.”

“You will never lose me,” Julie said, but her fear was mounting. A great dread of what was to come was building in her soul.

Until these last few moments she thought she understood what had happened. He had taken the body of his love from the museum. He had wanted to see it properly put in a tomb. But now, faced with the vial and these strange words from Elliott, she considered other more ghastly possibilities, denying them in the same instant, but returning to them again.

“Put your trust in us, sire. Let us share this burden.”

Ramses looked at Samir, then at her.

“Ah, the guilt you can never share,” he said. “The body in the museum. The unknown woman …”

“Yes,” Samir whispered.

“She was not unknown to me, my dear ones. The ghost of Julius Caesar would have known her. The shade of Mark Antony would have kissed her. Millions once mourned for her.…”

Julie nodded, tears rising again.

“And I have done the unspeakable. I took the elixir to the museum. I did not realize how much her body had been ravaged, that whole hunks of flesh were no longer there. I poured the elixir over her! After two thousand years life stirred in her ruined body. She rose! Bleeding, wounded, she stood upright. She walked. She reached out for me. She called my name!”

* * *

Ah, it was better than the finest wine, better even than making love, racing over the road in the open American motor car, the wind whistling past her, the American shouting convivially as he jerked the “stick shift” this way and that.

To see the houses flying past. To see the Egyptians trudging with their donkeys and camels and to leave them in a spray of gravel.

She adored it. She looked up at the open sky above, letting the wind lift her hair completely as she kept one hand firmly on her hat.

Now and then she studied what he did to make this chariot move. Pump the “pedals,” as he called them, over and over again; pull the stick; turn the wheel.

Ah, it was too thrilling; too marvellous. But suddenly that horrid shrill sound caught her off guard. That roaring she had heard in the “railway station.” Her hands flew to her ears.

“Don’t be frightened, little lady, it’s just a train. See there, the train’s coming!” The motor coach came to a jerking halt.

Metal pathways side by side in the desert sand before them. And that thing, that great black monster bearing down from the right. A bell was clanging. She was dimly aware of a red light flashing, like a lantern beam. Would she never get away from these hideous things?

He put his arm around her.

“It’s all right, little lady. We just have to wait for it to pass.”

He was still speaking, but now the great rattle and clatter of the monster drowned out his words. Horrid, the wheels rumbling by in front of her, and even the long procession of wooden wagons, filled with human beings who sat inside against the wooden slats as if this were the most simple thing in the world.

She tried to regain her composure. She liked the feel of his warm hands on her; the smell of the perfume rising from his skin. She watched dully as the last of the cars rolled by. Again the bell clanged. The light atop the pillar flashed.

The American pumped the pedals again, pulled the stick; the car began to rumble, and they drove over the metal pathways and on into the desert.

“Well, most people in Hannibal, Missouri, you tell them about Egypt, they don’t even know what you’re talking about. I said to my father, I’m going over there, that’s what I’m going to
do. I’m taking the money I’ve made and going over there, and then I’ll settle down back here.…”

She caught her breath. She was settling into the pleasure of it again. Then far away to the left, on the horizon, she saw the pyramids of Giza! She saw the figure of the Sphinx coming into view.

She gave a little cry. This was Egypt. She was in Egypt in “modern times,” but she was still at home.

A lovely sadness softened her all over. The tombs of her ancestors, and there the sphinx to whom she had gone as a young girl, to pray in the temple between its great paws.

“Ah, yes, that’s a pretty sight, isn’t it? I tell you, if people in Hannibal, Missouri, don’t appreciate it, it’s their tough luck.”

She laughed. “Their tough luck,” she said.

As they drew closer, she saw the crowds. A great field of motor cars and carriages. And women in frilly dresses with tiny waists, like her own. Men in straw hats like the American. And many Arabs with their camels, and armfuls of cheap necklaces. She smiled.

In her time they had sold cheap jewelry here to the visiting Romans. They had peddled rides on their camels. They were doing the very same thing now!

But it took her breath away, the great tomb of King Kufu looming above her. When had it been that she had come here, a small girl, and seen this huge structure made up of square blocks? And then with Ramses, later, alone in the cool of the night, when she’d been wrapped in a dark robe, a common woman, riding with him along this very same road.

Ramses! No, something horrid that she did not want to remember. The dark waters rushing over her. She had been walking towards him, and he had been backing away!

The American motor car jerked to a halt again.

“Come on, little lady, let’s get out and see it. Seventh wonder of the world.”

She smiled at the chubby-faced American; so gentle with her he was.

“Okaaaay! Super!” she said. She jumped down from the high open seat before he could give her a helping hand.

Her body was very close to his. His chubby nose crinkled as he smiled at her. Sweet young mouth. She kissed him suddenly. She stood on tiptoe and embraced him. Hmmmm. Sweet and young like the other. And so surprised!

“Well, you sure are an affectionate little thing,” he said in her ear. He didn’t seem to know what to do now. Well, she would show him. She took his hand and they walked over the beaten sand towards the pyramids.

“Ah, look!” she said, pointing to the palace that had been built to the right.

“Ah, that’s the Mena House,” he said. “Not a bad hotel, either. It’s not Shepheard’s, but it’s okay. We can have a bite to eat there later, if you like.”

“I tried to fight them,” Ramses said. “It was impossible. There were simply too many. They took me away to the jail. I needed time to heal. It must have been a half hour before I managed to escape.”

Silence.

Julie had buried her face in her handkerchief.

“Sire,” Samir said gently. “You knew this elixir could do such a thing?”

“Yes, Samir. I knew, though I had never put it to such a test.”

“Then it was human nature, sire. No more and no less.”

“Ah, but Samir, I have made so many blunders over the centuries. I knew the dangers of the chemical. And you must know those dangers now too. You must know if you are to help me. This creature—this mad thing which I’ve brought back to life cannot be destroyed.”

“Surely there is some way,” Samir said.

“No. I’ve learned this through trial and error. And your modern biology books, they’ve sharpened my understanding. Once the cells of the body are saturated with the elixir, they renew themselves constantly. Plant, animal, human—it is all the same.”

“No age, no deterioration,” Julie murmured. She was calmer now, she could trust her voice.

“Precisely. One full cup made me immortal. No more than the contents of that vial. I am eternally in the prime of life. I don’t need food, yet I am always hungry. I don’t need sleep, yet I can enjoy it. I have perpetually the desire to … make love.”

“And this woman—she did not receive the full measure.”

“No, and she was damaged to begin with! That was my folly, don’t you see! The body was not all there! But damaged or no, she is now virtually unstoppable. I understood that when she came towards me through the corridor! Don’t you see?”

“You’re not thinking in terms of modern science,” Julie said. She wiped both her eyes slowly. “There must be a way to halt the process.”

“On the other hand, if you were to give her the full measure-more of the medicine, as the Earl put it …”

“That’s madness,” Julie interjected. “You can’t even consider it. You’ll make the thing stronger.”

“Listen, both of you,” Ramses said, “to what I have to say. Cleopatra is only part of this tragedy. The Earl knows the secret now with certainty. It is the elixir itself that is dangerous, more dangerous than you know.”

“People will want it, yes,” Julie said, “and they will do anything to get it. But Elliott can be reasoned with, and Henry is a fool.”

“There’s more to it than that. We are speaking of a chemical which changes any living substance by which it is absorbed.” Ramses waited a moment, glancing at both of them. Then he went on: “Centuries ago, when I was still Ramses, ruler of this land, I dreamed I would use this elixir to make food and drink aplenty for my people. We would have famine no more. Wheat that would grow back instantly after every harvest. Fruit trees that would bear forever. Do you know what came to pass?”

Fascinated, they stared at him in silence.

“My people could not digest this immortal food. It stayed whole in their insides. They died in agony as if they had eaten sand.”

“Ye gods,” Julie whispered. “Yet it’s perfectly logical. Of course!”

“And when I sought to burn the fields and slaughter the immortal hens and milk cows, I saw the burnt wheat spring to life as soon as the sun shone on it. I saw burnt and headless carcasses struggle to rise. Finally it was all cast into the sea, weighted and sent to the very bottom, where surely it remains, whole and intact, to this day.”

Samir shuddered; he folded his arms over his chest as if he were cold.

Julie looked steadily at Ramses. “So what you’re saying is … if the secret fell into the wrong hands, whole regions of the earth could be rendered immortal.”

“Whole peoples,” Ramses answered soberly. “And we who are immortal hunger as much as the living. We would crowd out the living to consume what has always been theirs!”

“The very rhythm of life and death would be endangered,” Samir said.

“This secret must be destroyed utterly!” Julie said. “If you have the elixir in your possession, destroy it. Now.”

“And how do I do that, dearest? If I hurl the dry powder into the wind, the tiny particles cleave as they fall to the earth, waiting for the first rain to liquefy them and carry them down to the roots of the trees, which they will make immortal. If I pour the liquid into the sand, it pools there until the camel comes to drink. Pour it into the sea and I give birth to immortal fishes, serpents, crocodiles.”

“Stop,” she whispered.

“Can you consume it yourself, sire, without harm coming to you?”

“I don’t know. I would imagine that I could. But who knows?”

“Don’t do it!” Julie whispered.

He gave her a faint, sad smile.

“You care still what becomes of me, Julie Stratford?”

“Yes, I care,” she whispered. “You’re only a man; with a god’s secret in your possession. I care.”

“That’s just it, Julie,” he said. “I have the secret in here.” He tapped the side of his forehead. “I know how to make the elixir. What happens to the few vials I possess does not ultimately matter, for I can always brew more.”

They looked at each other. The full horror of it was impossible to encompass steadily. One had to view it, draw away from it and then reexamine it again.

“Now you understand why for a thousand years I shared the elixir with no one. I knew the danger. And then, with the weakness of a mortal man—to use your modern phrase—I fell in love.”

Julie’s eyes again filled with tears. Samir waited patiently.

“Yes, I know.” Ramses sighed. “I’ve been a fool. Two thousand years ago, I watched my love die rather than give the elixir to her lover—Mark Antony, a dissolute man, who would have hounded me to the ends of the earth for the formula itself. Can you imagine those two, immortal rulers? ‘Why can we not make an immortal army?’ she said to me when his influence had thoroughly corrupted her. When she had become his pawn. And now, in this day and age of astonishing
wonders, I overruled her last words to me and brought her back to life.”

Julie swallowed. The tears poured down silently. She no longer even wiped at them with the little handkerchief. She reached across the table and touched the back of his hand.

“No. Ramses, it isn’t Cleopatra. Don’t you see? You’ve made a terrible mistake, yes, and we must find a way to undo it. But it isn’t Cleopatra. It cannot possibly be.”

“Julie, I made no mistake on that account! And she knew me! Don’t you understand? She called my name!”

Soft music drifted from the Mena House. There were twinkling yellow lights in its windows. Tiny figures moved back and forth on its broad terrace.

Cleopatra and the American stood in a dark tunnel, high up on the pyramid; the burial shaft.

Feverishly she embraced him, slipping her silk-covered fingers into his shirt. Ah, the nipples of men, so tender; such a key to torment and ecstasy; how he writhed as she twisted them ever so gently, her tongue darting in and out of his mouth.

All the bravado and high spirits were gone now. He was her slave. She ripped the linen fabric back off his chest, and plunged her hand down under his leather belt to the root of his sex.

He moaned against her. She felt him gathering up her skirts. Then suddenly his hand stopped. His whole body stiffened. Awkwardly she turned her head; he was staring down at her naked leg, her foot.