The Mummy (22 page)

“Oh!” Jonathan said. “So you’re not going to kill us, then?”

Evelyn glared at her brother.

“Killing you is no longer a remedy,” Ardeth Bay said. “We must now go on the hunt, and find this creature—and find a way to kill
him.”

Leaving the cowering Egyptologist behind, and the slumped Daniels, too, the Med-jai warriors—robes flapping in the wind—strode toward the crevice near the shrine of Anubis.

“Ardeth Bay!” O’Connell called.

The Med-jai leader stopped, turning to look back.

“You’re wasting your time,” O’Connell insisted. “I told you—I already blew the bastard to Kingdom Come!”

Ardeth Bay’s expression conveyed pity at first, then contempt, before settling into a somber mask, as he said, “Know this—He Who Shall Not Be Named is the Bringer of Death. He Who Shall Not Be Named does not eat, does not sleep, and does not stop until he has consumed the earth in pestilence and flame . . . Allah be with us all.”

Then the Med-jai were sliding down the ropes into the crevice.

O’Connell gathered the two expeditions, taking a head count, telling them, “We better break camp, what’s left of it—and get going while the going’s good. Say—where’s Beni, anyway?”

After the locusts had driven them underground, Beni had broken away from the American expedition, at his first opportunity, and had hidden away in the darkest corner he could find. Sounds of screams echoing through the catacombs had not encouraged him to come out of his hiding place. But now things seemed quiet—the worst, apparently, was over—and Beni began to make his way back.

Moving cautiously, gun in hand, Beni crept around the base of the statue of Anubis, knowing the ropes dropped down the crevice by the Carnahan expedition were just one chamber over—moonlight seeping in from the start of the crevice above paved his way. Then he rounded the base and almost bumped into somebody.

Something.

Some
thing.

Beni looked at the rotting mummy in the loose, slimy bandages, a mummy with a huge gaping hole in its side, as if a cannonball had blown through there, and for a moment wondered how this artifact had been propped up like this. Then the mummy took a step forward, and Beni screamed and raised his gun to fire, and a bony decomposing hand batted the gun from Beni’s hand.

Beni backed up and found himself immediately cornered. Quivering with fear, he clutched at the chains around his neck, where symbols and icons from many faiths dangled; Beni was not a religious man, exactly, just hedging his bets. He held out a Christian crucifix, as if this were a vampire not a mummy, and uttered the opening phrases of the Lord’s Prayer.

The mummy shambled forward, apparently not a Christian.

Beni fumbled with the other icons, trying to slow the mummy’s progress: an Islamic sword and crescent moon, a Hindu Brama medallion, a small Buddhist Bodhisattva statue, blessing himself in Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, and even Latin, just in case this crumbling monstrosity staggering toward him was Catholic.

The mummy’s skeletal hand was outstretched, not to make the sign of the Cross, but to reach out for Beni’s throat.

Weeping, hysterical, Beni displayed a Star of David and began to pray in Hebrew . . .

. . . and the mummy stopped, as if he’d taken root.

That was funny, Beni thought; he didn’t look Jewish.

Nonetheless, that decaying hand had lowered, and those weirdly familiar eyes were staring at Beni, who blessed himself in Hebrew.

The mummy spoke, his voice a rumbling thing, echoing up like bubbling lava: “You speak the language of the slaves.”

This was spoken in ancient Egyptian, and meant nothing to Beni, but the mummy’s next words, in Hebrew, did: “I am Imhotep . . . Serve me . . . and the rewards . . . will be bountiful.”

The mummy clawed at himself, at his tattered bandages, and withdrew a small object, which he displayed to Beni, in a fetid palm crawling with squirming maggots: a jeweled fragment of the one canopic jar that had been discovered in a shattered state.

In Hebrew, the mummy asked, “Where are Anck-su-namun’s sacred jars?”

And in Hebrew, Beni said, “I will help you find them.”

Above ground, the two expeditions had broken camp, and loaded up their horses and their camels.

Henderson and Daniels helped their blinded friend up onto his horse, putting the reins in his hands, assuring him they would lead him. Burns said nothing, a living dead man in a saddle, but at least he didn’t fall out of it.

O’Connell helped Evelyn up onto her camel. She was looking toward Dr. Chamberlin, saddled up, clutching
The Book of the Dead
to him as if it were a life preserver that would keep him afloat through the sea of the night and desert that awaited them.

“Let him keep the damn thing,” O’Connell told her. “All we want now is our lives.”

She swallowed, nodded, and said, “You’re right . . . Rick.”

He smiled at her. “Let’s go back to civilization, Evelyn—our civilization.”

And soon O’Connell and Jonathan were astride their camels, as well, heading out into the moonswept, windblown desert, ready to leave the ruins and riches of Hamanaptra gladly behind.

As they rode quickly away, they did not see—none of them—the skeletal hand punch up out of the sand, behind them, in the City of the Dead.

But they did hear the terrible, resounding shriek of the mummy, echoing across the sands, telling them that Ardeth Bay had been right: O’Connell’s mortal weapon had not killed He Who Shall Not Be Named.

That they had indeed unleashed the Bringer of Death.

 
PART THREE
 

The Mummy’s Revenge

Cairo—1925

 
15
 

Sanctuary

O
n the southernmost outskirts of Cairo squatted Fort Stack, named after Sir Lee Stack, the assassinated governor general of the Sudan. The mudbrick, courtyard affair reminded O’Connell of a cavalry outpost in the old American West. Great Britain had withdrawn, not long ago, from the actual governing of Egypt—Fuad the First was the elected king—but the British army remained in an advisory capacity.

It was to Fort Stack, where the Union Jack flapped lazily in the dry breeze, that the disheveled, dusty caravan of the combined Carnahan and American expeditions sought sanctuary from the blistering desert sun, not to mention assorted plagues and a resurrected mummy. After a three-day trek from oasis to oasis, they had trudged up to the front gate, displayed their various papers, and were granted admittance.

For two days, the members of the combined parties mostly slept, in the guest quarters of the fort; they had taken their meals in the officers’ mess, at the generous invitation of the commandant, and the only time any of them had left the compound was to go to a nearby tavern whose clientele was largely off-duty soldiers.

On the second day, a steamer trunk of clothing had arrived for Evelyn, which she had dispatched Jonathan to bring from their home, accompanied by her white cat, Cleo. O’Connell had carried the trunk up the stairs to her second-floor quarters overlooking the courtyard while Evelyn carried and petted the purring animal.

Today, the third day, however, she had called O’Connell to her two-room quarters and—in the process of removing her clothing from the closet of the spare, military-style bedroom, and piling them back into the steamer trunk—announced that she was mounting a return expedition.

And O’Connell was invited.

He stood, dumbfounded, watching her parade from the closet to the trunk, her movements brisk and mannish, her attire the same—jodphurs, black boots, and a white blouse. All she needed was a cap and riding crop and a fox to chase.

“Another
expedition?”

“Yes,” she said crisply. “I’m arranging for a full team of diggers and this time we’ll have proper equipment, and proper weapons . . .”

“Evelyn, I shot him with an elephant gun.”

Her cat had crawled inside the trunk; she lifted the white animal out and placed some underthings within. “Now, I want you to find some brave, competent men, regular soldiers of fortune—”

“What do you call Henderson and that bunch? And you saw how well
they
fared! Listen, for all we know, that mummy is dead, or anyway dead again . . . I blasted the bastard! Pardon my French.”

She frowned at him. “You heard that terrible scream as we rode off!”

He followed her to the closet. “Maybe that was his death rattle, or maybe it was just the desert wind playing tricks on our ears.”

“Fine.” Dresses folded over her arm, she marched to the trunk and deposited them. “Then if the mummy is dead, why not return and properly excavate the site? We’d barely scratched the surface, you know.”

“And risk the wrath of those Med-jai warriors again?”

She shrugged, heading back to the closet. “They had every opportunity to do us ill, and they didn’t.”

Watching her as she made the journey from closet to trunk and back again, O’Connell gestured melodramatically. “Do you
really
think that walking dead man is going to come after us? It’s been days, and where’s the rest of his plagues? Have you noticed the sun turning black, or seen any water turn to blood? Can’t say
I
have.”

Tucking some shoes away, she looked up, arching an eyebrow, a teacher explaining something to a particularly dim student. “The curse is very specific—he will seek us out, if we don’t seek him out. It’s those who disturbed his slumber who—”

“I thought you didn’t believe in curses.”

“I was wrong.”

“You now believe your parents died as a result of King Tut’s curse?”

She paused, halfway between closet and trunk. “I . . . I believe I do. You see, Mr. O’Connell, once a young woman has had a tête-à-tête with a walking, talking corpse, her outlook on life tends to change.”

He followed her along as she packed. “All right, I understand all that, but no new expedition—why borrow trouble? Maybe you’d like to see Chicago; we’ll go rowing on the lake. Or maybe you could give me a tour of London; I always wanted to see the clowns at Picadilly Circus.”

She gazed at him and the affection showed through. “Rick . . . we can’t run away from this.”