The Mummy (20 page)

O’Connell frowned. “You didn’t go wandering off into another chamber without us, did you?”

“Heavens no! This is something I found in our friend’s coffin.”

She emptied the canvas bag on the sandy ground before her, so both O’Connell and her brother could have a gander at her latest precious find: a pile of big, dusty bug exoskeletons.

Jonathan recoiled. “Those are nasty-looking devils
dead!
I’d hate to meet one that was wiggling.”

“I should say,” Evelyn replied. “These are legendary in their nastiness: scarabs—flesh eaters. They can stay alive for years, feasting on the flesh of a corpse . . . Do you have an extra rat-ka-bob, Mr. O’Connell? I’m famished.”

“I’ll put one on the fire for you,” O’Connell said, raising an eyebrow.

Jonathan was staring at the beetle exoskeletons, aghast. “Are you saying, dear sister, that those abhorrent creatures ate the flesh from that corpse of ours?”

“Yes . . . and no. I’m afraid, where our friend was concerned, he wasn’t a corpse, when they started eating him.”

Jonathan and O’Connell exchanged incredulous looks.

Evelyn, who had her own rat-on-a-stick now, courtesy of O’Connell, was holding it over the flames. “Our theory that he may have been . . . naughty . . . would appear to have some validity.”

“You’re saying he was not only buried alive,” O’Connell said, “but whoever singled him out for that honor also pitched in a handful of flesh-eating bugs? To munch him to death?”

She frowned, thoughtfully. “Rather more than a handful, I’d say.”

“What could he have done to become so popular?” Jonathan wondered.

O’Connell smirked. “Maybe he got a little too frisky with the pharaoh’s daughter.”

“At the very least, I would say.” Evelyn was turning her rat slowly over the flames. “From the evidence at hand, I would hazard an educated guess that our mummy suffered the worst of all ancient Egyptian curses—the
hom-dai.”

She explained to them that the
hom-dai
was reserved only for the most evil of blasphemers.

“The only doubt I have,” she said, “is that scholarship indicates that this curse was never executed.”

Now Jonathan smirked. “Well, our mummy friend was executed, all right.”

“You mean, supposedly this famous curse,” O’Connell said, “was never used? What was the point of it, then?”

She shrugged. “As a threat, a deterrent—as something that could be invoked, should anyone
really
misbehave. But the ancient Egyptians never used the curse—or so it is thought—because they were afraid to.”

“Why on earth?” Jonathan asked. “Isn’t it usually the person
being
cursed who should be afraid?”

Matter of factly, she told them, “It is written that should he who endures the torment of
hom-dai
ever arise from the dead, that entity would return as the bearer of the ten plagues.”

“How many plagues?” O’Connell asked lightly, but Evelyn could see apprehension in his eyes.

Beni, nibbling his rat, had not seemed to be paying any attention to any of this; but suddenly he put in: “Like Moses and the pharaoh?”

“Just like Moses and the pharaoh,” Evelyn said, nodding.

“Let’s see how much Sunday school stayed with me,” Jonathan said glibly, and began ticking off the plagues on his fingers. “You have your frogs, your flies, your locusts . . . dear me, I’m stuck already.”

“Hail,” Burns said, from across the flames. “And fire.”

“Sun turning black,” Henderson added.

“Water turning to blood,” Daniels said.

Seemed the Americans had been listening all along.

“Well, and then there’s my personal favorite,” Jonathan said, “boils and sores all about the body—always a crowd pleaser . . . Can’t anyone think of the other two?”

No one said anything; then some nervous laughter followed, but Evelyn could sense real trepidation among these brave fortune hunters. Men were such children.

She plucked the rat-on-a-stick from the fire, blew on it to cool it off, then nibbled at the warm meat.

“Really not half bad,” she said, chipper.

Later, Evelyn—who had done her best to freshen for bed (she really was quite tired of wearing the Bedouin gown, which was frightfully wrinkled and dirty)—was walking past Dr. Chamberlin’s tent, heading back to her own tent, when she noticed something interesting.

The professor was asleep on his pallet, on his side, one arm cradling the jeweled jar to his bosom, almost tenderly, his other arm and hand draped loosely over the large black ancient book.

She glanced about, noting that Chamberlin’s loyal diggers were all asleep under the stars, hither and yon, beneath blankets. All concerned seemed sound asleep, and Chamberlin was snoring.

Moments later, Evelyn was sitting in the glow of the campfire, the big book in her hands.

“That’s called stealing,” someone said.

O’Connell crouched down beside her.

“I believe the word you used before was ‘borrowing,’ ” she replied, referring to the archaeologist’s tool kit he’d given her. “Be a dear and go get that puzzle box out of Jonathan’s backpack, would you?”

O’Connell did.

Then she was inserting the key into the book’s huge lock, which shared its shape with those of the sarcophagus and coffin they’d opened.

“Is that the book you’ve been looking for?” O’Connell asked. “That sure isn’t made of gold.”

“It isn’t
The Book of Amun Ra,
either—it’s something else, every bit as precious.”

“Yeah? What is it? King Tut’s little black book?”

“I think this may be
The Book of the Dead.”

O’Connell frowned. “Dead? I don’t like the sound of that . . .”

“Don’t be a ninny. What harm ever came from a book?”

And the librarian turned the big key.

The unlocking click seemed to echo through the night, and she looked around to see if anyone—in particular, Dr. Chamberlin—had been roused. All was quiet, except for the muffled rumble of men snoring, here and there.

Wind blew through the camp—not a gust, this time, more like the expulsion of bored breath by some giant in the sky—but the flames of the campfire shivered, as if they too felt the desert chill.

The two shared a nervous look, then Evelyn laughed. So did O’Connell, though not terribly convincingly. He moved close, putting a protective arm around her shoulder, though somehow she felt he was seeking the comfort of her closeness as much as offering the security of his.

Her eyes slowly scanned the exquisitely rendered hieroglyphs on the first page, lips moving as she read silently.

“So what is it?” he said, finally. “The Hamanaptra—phone book?”

“ ‘Amun kum ra. Amun kum dei.’ ”

“I’m so glad I asked.”

“It speaks of the night and of the day.”

She began to read aloud, still to herself, but wanting to hear the words, compelled, somehow, to speak them . . .

(And she could not know, of course, that within the chamber where their mummy lay, uncovered in his coffin, alongside his granite sarcophagus, his ancient, putrescent flesh and bones stirring, his eyelids opening—Imhotep awoke with a jolt, staring into the darkness with empty sockets.)

. . . and so Evelyn Carnahan, earnest scholar that she was, hopelessly in love with the lore of ancient Egypt, devoted to the memory of her late celebrated father, continued to read the words that roused the mummy.

“No!”
a voice screamed from behind her.

Someone else had been roused: Dr. Chamberlin.

“You must not not!” he shouted. “Cease!”

Like a teenager caught reading a forbidden novel after dark, Evelyn shut the book’s cover as the Egyptologist ran toward her on stubby legs. She noted, rather absurdly, that he was not wearing his pith helmet for once. His hair, white and wispy, was standing straight up from sleeping on it . . . or maybe fright . . .

Then, halfway to the campfire, Chamberlin froze in place, his eyes turning toward the desert behind him, as if he’d heard something.

He had, and soon so had Evelyn and O’Connell: a buzzing, building drone that was streaming in from the desert, as if a plane were swooping somewhere out there, only the sound was more piercing than that, and more of a whine.

Evelyn and O’Connell flew to their feet. In his tent nearby, Jonathan awoke with a start. The buzzing whine was building, like a siren. Over by the cluster of American tents, Beni stumbled out, clutching his stomach.

“Musta ate a bad rat,” he mumbled, then his eyes widened as he perceived the growing drone coming in off the desert.

Henderson, Burns, and Daniels emerged from their tents, revolvers in hand, eyes wild, as the strange, unearthly drone grew louder and closer.

They all stood, in the flickering firelight, watching the darkness of the desert, confused, helpless, the Americans wondering aloud what the hell this could be.

And then what the hell it was became incredibly, dreadfully, apparent, as the living cloud of locusts descended upon the camp, enveloping everything and everyone . . .

Clawing and pawing the air, Evelyn felt O’Connell’s arm slip around her waist and he pulled her through the rain of wings, and they ran—Jonathan at their side—toward the crevice at the feet of Anubis. Frantically waving the bugs off as best they could, they raced to the shrine.

In the meantime, Beni and his American employers were running toward their own entrance to the underground, though Dr. Chamberlin—wearing a shroud of locusts—had retrieved
The Book of the Dead,
and stood asking the sky, “What have we done?”

Then, spitting out the locusts he’d just let into his mouth, Chamberlin followed the rest of his expedition into the underground.

O’Connell, Evelyn, and Jonathan had moved through the darkness of the now familiar embalming room into the tunnels, slowing down to slap at themselves and pick locusts out of their hair. O’Connell, who’d had the presence of mind to grab and bring along that gunnysack arsenal of his, lighted a kitchen match off his fingernail and set fire to the nub of a torch.

“I never saw so many goddamn grasshoppers in my life!” O’Connell said.

“Not grasshoppers,” Evelyn said, doing her best to regain her composure, “locusts.”

“That’s one of the ten bloody plagues, isn’t it?” Jonathan demanded of his sister, rather hysterically. “Locusts!”

“This is not a plague, Jonathan,” she said calmly, plucking a locust from her ear, “it’s a natural phenomenon—a generational phenomenon. Every so many years the locusts of this country have a population explosion and they all take flight . . . They’re probably gone by now, they’ll have moved on.”

Evelyn took a step back the way they’d come, and felt something squish under her sandal.

“Ick,” she said. “I’ve stepped in something.”

“Not
in
something,” O’Connell said, frowning, lowering his torch.
“On
something.”

The floor was covered in frogs—slimy, awful frogs!

Evelyn held back her scream, which allowed her to hear O’Connell asking, “Okay—so are the Egyptian frogs breeding, too? And did they fly here?”

Before she could answer (though what that answer would have been is hard to say), the ground under them began to shake; the floor was covered with sand, and that sand began to swarm, not unlike the locusts above.

In the light of the torch, they witnessed the impossible: The sand gathered and grew into a mound, rising in front of them, like a man materializing; but it wasn’t a man or sand, either.

From somewhere, perhaps up through cracks in the floor, they had come, and now they came spilling out of what had seemed to be a pile of sand, but was really a pile of them:
scarab beetles!

Hundreds of them, chittering dung beetles boiling out of the sand to form a quick crawling army that moved toward them in a black, wriggling wave.

Evelyn screamed, and so did Jonathan, and even O’Connell, though he was actually forming the words: “Come on!”

And, his torch showing the way, he led them into a passageway, even as the scarab army advanced on them.

Elsewhere in the underground tunnels, the Americans had similarly moved away from the locusts into the darkness; but early on, racing down a passageway, Burns—initially leading the way—had lost his footing, his wire-rims slipping from his face, skittering across the rock floor and winding up in the path of the stampede of his comrades.

Without his glasses, Burns couldn’t find his glasses, and even if he could have, they were crashed beyond use; and now he had lagged seriously behind. Without a torch, half blind anyway, he squinted toward the blurry figures up ahead of him, watched them vanish into the darkness of the tunnel.

“Wait!” he called. “Wait!”

But they either didn’t hear him, or didn’t care.

Burns did his best to navigate in the darkness, running one hand along the wall, holding the other out in front of him, groping. Up ahead was light, not the light of a torch, but moonlight filtering down through the crevice above. He moved toward the light, and suddenly he could make out something, someone: An indistinct figure had stepped out in front him, perhaps ten feet away.

“Daniels?” he asked. “Henderson, is that you?”

Burns staggered toward whoever it was, then tripped, stumbling forward, throwing his hands out in front of him, to stop himself, to brace himself against the figure.

But his hands sank in!

It was as if he’d pushed his palms into mud, foul sticky mud, and he yanked them out with an awful slurping sound, and even with his bad eyes, he could see that his hands were covered in a jellylike slime. His brain finally informed him that this was a living mummy standing before him, and the slime on his hands consisted of a soup of maggots and rotten flesh from a putrid chest cavity, and as Burns started to scream, a skeletal hand clamped down over his mouth, muffling the sound.

The noisy insects in pursuit, O’Connell led Evelyn and Jonathan down several tunnels which they had never before traversed, and soon they found themselves in a chamber with stairs carved into the stone, a tall narrow staircase leading up, which was the way the three headed.