by Paula Guran
“Masters opens the door for them, and asks them where they want to go, and O’Connell gives directions; it’s up past the Valley of the Kings, to where the dig is, of course. He drives them up there, and drops them off where the road gives out; off they slink, and Masters is left with orders to wait for them—they’ll be back just after dusk.
“So, Masters waits and waits, till the sun’s going down, and all of a sudden there’s gunshots, and yelling and shouting, and a fearful hullaballoo from up where the dig is. Naturally, he’s out of the car, and haring off to see what’s what. He gets there just as the whole thing goes up in smoke. Literally: there’s smoke and flames coming up from the shaft down into the tomb, and Masters says there’s a screeching that sounds like about fifty men down there, all being roasted alive. Well! The Egyptian guards are standing round the top of the shaft, looking down: they want to know who Masters is, of course, and he shows them his press credentials and manages to get round them somehow—I told you he was a resourceful beggar. It turns out that O’Connell and MacVeigh were down there, and that it must have been them doing all the screaming: apparently, MacVeigh had actually held up the guards at gunpoint, if you can believe it, while O’Connell went down into the tomb. Some security! The guards said they could hear him chanting and singing down there—that was how they put it, Masters says—and one of them said that he thought there must have been somebody else down there already, because it sounded as if there was somebody answering him toward the end. Then there was the most frightful shout, the guards said, and MacVeigh jumped like a rabbit and ran down into the tomb as well; so right away they slammed the gate shut at the top and put the padlock back on, so they’d have them prisoner at least till they could send for reinforcements—and it was just then that the fire broke out. They thought it must have been a lamp, or some such, that got turned over down there: there were all the mummies, remember, and I daresay they’d go up like dry tinder. Bingo! Off goes Masters like a shot; he finds a telephone somewhere, and manages to get through to me at the paper—and here I am, hotfoot.”
The professor had been listening to this extraordinary narration as if spellbound; only now could he find words to express his feelings. “The fools!” he swore, through clenched teeth. “The damned idiotic vandals! Think of the research—think of the opportunities, everything lost now forever—”
“Just so—think of the opportunities,” said Cox. “I’ve got an opportunity here, if you like: the biggest story I’ve ever had a sniff at, and they’re holding the front page for me now, while we go down to Rowlandson’s. I mean to have a look inside that crate now if it’s the last thing I do: there’s the whole story intact, from illegal exporting of relics through to armed robbery and death by the mummy’s curse. What a headline—what a headline!”
Dusk was settling over the Thames-side suburb by the time the taxicab deposited them in Rowlandson’s yard; at the back of his mind, Professor Mellis reflected that Cairo was two hours ahead of London, and that the whole unbelievable affair had sprung up in just that short period of time, since the sun had sunk over the western shore of that other great river in the East. Cox set up a clamor on the bell, and soon Dalton was opening the door to them, in some consternation. They lost no time in explaining the situation to him, in much the manner described above. Dalton demurred over one point only, which was the opening of the crate. “It’d cost me my job, sir,” he said, doubtfully. “I don’t know that I can let you do that without permission.”
“Oh, hang it all,” said Cox impatiently, “the man was a villain—a common crook! He held up these guards at gunpoint! Now, the crate was damaged a little at one corner, wasn’t it?”
“Yes—a little—I noted it down in the paperwork—”
“Well, there you are, then,” urged Cox, persuasively, “we’ll just damage it a bit more, till we can get a look inside and the professor can tell us what it is he’s got in there—because it’s one of these new-fangled mummies of his, or I’m a Dutchman. He got one out, before they sealed up the dig, and MacVeigh helped him do it: now are you going to let us have a look in that crate, and see for yourself why they’re so special that two men lost their lives over a tomb-full of ’em, just this very evening?”
With this desperate cajoling, and much more to the same point, Dalton’s strength of character was tried to the sticking-point, and eventually beyond: at last, he agreed to let them open the crate just enough for them to see inside, and without further ado they set off through the half-lit echoing corridors toward the goods lift.
The lift hummed and coughed as it rose through the levels; they were about to gain the topmost floor when disaster struck, and the engine gave out with a very definite, and very final, clanking noise. The light went out in the cramped compartment, and now the only illumination was admitted via a slit some fifteen inches or so high at the very top of the meshwork lift doors, opening on to the top floor. By standing on tiptoe, Cox could just see the shadowy bays from his vantage point at floor level: a large black cat strolled over to him and regarded him gravely, eye to eye, before turning away to sit and wash itself.
“Damnation!” said Dalton vehemently, and jerked without success at the levers. “The blasted thing’s always doing this—”
“Then what do you usually do when it happens?” enquired Cox, patiently and not unreasonably.
“Well, there’s usually someone downstairs who can start up the emergency generator—that powers all the electrics, independently—” began Dalton, then stopped as the situation became more clear to him.
“Is there?” said Cox, his hands on his hips. “Is that a fact, now? Then I jolly well wish he’d stayed on and done a bit of overtime tonight, because I can’t see how we’re going to get out of this otherwise, you know.”
Dalton stared at the newspaperman for a second, then turned to his levers and applied himself with fresh urgency. “You go ahead and try those by all means, old chap,” said Cox, without rancor, “but I rather think we’ll have to see if we can’t squeeze through the gap at the top, here, if we don’t want the day shift to find us—and the dear old Rocket to scoop us, confound them!”
Now Professor Mellis had been observing the predicament as it developed with increasing alarm. “But—but,” he interjected at this point, “I can’t—that is to say, there’s not the slightest possibility—”
“Not you, Professor,” said Cox, appraising his ample girth with cocked head and half-closed eye: “no, I don’t think you’d make it, quite. That burial chamber of Tutankhamun’s must have been a good bit wider than this, or you must have been a good bit narrower back then—eh? what? No—I think I’ll try it, or perhaps you, Mr Dalton—do you fancy it? Then we can go down and start up the blessed generator, and then, perhaps—”
“Hark!” said Dalton. He stopped the newspaperman with a gesture, and nodded upwards, to the top floor. “Did you hear that?”
They had all heard it: a loud bang, as if caused by the overturning of some large object. Now came a series of smaller thumps and bangs, and a kind of dry rustling. The three men in the lift looked at one another in mute perplexity, as the noises echoed through the deserted warehouse. Cox, as ever, was the first to speak.
“Well, I don’t suppose it was rats, at any rate,” he said, his usual jauntiness a little forced. “Come, Dalton, hoist me up so’s I can see what’s going on up there.”
Dalton made a back for him, and Cox sprang to the gap at the top of the lift doors, pulling aside the gates so that he could put his head through and see more easily. At first he noticed nothing unusual—except for the cat, which was stood bolt upright, arching its back wildly, its fur up on end, spitting and hissing in the direction of a far corner of the room. Cox twisted awkwardly to follow its gaze, and saw what it had seen: he let out an involuntary gasp, and Professor Mellis called up, “Cox! What is it?”
His voice came back down to them: “It’s the crate—over in the far bay there—it’s fallen over, face down, so as to
jut out into the aisle. I don’t know how, but—wait a minute—there it goes again—it’s rattling, and moving about by itself somehow, as if something had it by an end and was shaking it—ugh!” He came down from his perch precipitately, and stumbled to the floor; in an instant he was up on his feet again, consternation over his thin keen features. “It just moved by itself,” he said. “A great kind of jerk, so the end came clear off the floor and banged down again. I know I said it looked as if something had hold of it—well, it wasn’t like that, really; it was more as if there was something inside it that was alive, and moving around . . . ” He tailed off, conscious of what he was saying, and of the effect it was having on his companions in the trapped lift. “I know how it sounds,” he said, after a short period in which no one spoke, “but that was what it was like. Here—I’ll go up again, and see what it’s doing now—make a back, Dalton, there’s a good fellow—up she goes—”
Again, he put his head through the gap, and this time his in-drawing of breath was clearly audible from down below. “It’s rattling around like the dickens now—can you hear it? Thumping and rattling . . . there’s something in there, all right, you can take my word on that, and it means to get out, if I’m any judge in the matter.”
“But Cox—the crate was lead-lined—airtight,” called up the professor, now exceedingly uncomfortable and anxious. “You saw as much yourself. What can it be that could live in an airtight container?”
“I think that’s more in your line than mine,” came the reply, above the now-steady tumult of rattling from above. “Perhaps it’s something that can do well enough without any air to breathe—perhaps it’s the same sort of thing that could prevent two able-bodied men from getting out of the way of a fire down inside a tomb, just a couple of hours ago. Or perhaps I’m just talking a lot of stuff and nonsense—but don’t you think we’d better try to get out of this confounded death trap of a lift before it gets out of its crate—whatever it is?”
So saying, Cox began a violent series of wrigglings and contortions, with the object of getting a shoulder through the gap, as well as his head. This he succeeded in achieving, at the cost of the greater portion of his coat, which snagged on a protruding edge as he hoisted himself up on to the top floor. In an instant his hands came through the gap, and he called, “Dalton—quick—we haven’t much time, I think—it’s almost dark up here.” Through the gap came a waft of that incense scent from the night before last: stronger now and all-pervasive, all but overpowering.
His face white and set, Dalton took the newspaperman’s hands, and struggled through the gap. Professor Mellis, much against his inclination, was left alone in the dark lift-shaft, and shouted up, “Cox! Dalton! What’s happening? What’s up there?” But neither man answered.
Both were staring, speechless, at the crate in Bay Seven. The impression Cox retained, and later described, was of some great engine, closed up inside a container far too small to hold it, in the process of shaking itself to pieces. Dalton thought of a magic trick he had seen once, in which the magician had himself chained, bound, and sealed in a sack, which was then lowered into a tank of water; the writhings of that sack, in which the escapologist struggled to escape, came to his mind now as he beheld the shuddering and jerking of the crate, which was slowly working its way out from its bay into the aisle with the violence of its motion.
Cox turned to Dalton with an effort, his eyes standing from his head. “What are we to do with it?” he said, in a half-whisper, as if it might overhear. “This is frightful—if it should get out—”
“I don’t know,” Dalton whispered back. “Should we open it?”
“Open it? Not on your life. We’ve got to get rid of it, somehow—put it somewhere it can’t get out of. Think!”
Dalton cast around the familiar warehouse surroundings, as if seeing them for the first time. His mouth opened, and closed without making a sound; and then he saw a possibility. “There,” he managed to get out, in a voice little above a croak, “look there.”
Cox looked where he pointed, and saw a large pair of double doors set in the farther wall, secured with two great padlocks. “What on earth does that lead to? We’re on the top floor—” and he jumped involuntarily at a fresh barrage of poundings from inside the crate.
“It’s the old loading platform, right out above the river—they used to use it to winch stuff up, in the days when most of the freight came by boat. If we can push it that far, and get the doors open—”
“I’ll push it,” said Cox grimly; “you see to the doors, and jump to it.”
Dalton hastened to the doors, rummaging through the keys on his ring; meanwhile, Cox screwed his courage to the sticking-point and approached the crate, from which now proceeded a series of convulsive rhythmic knocks, one every second or so. He set his hands to one end of it, and was repulsed by a warmth that went far beyond any conditions prevailing on the top floor of the warehouse; it was as if the crate had stood all day beneath a blazing desert sun, he thought, and it cost him no little effort to resume his stance, this time with the shreds of his ruined coat between his hands and the splintering plywood. He began to push, and Dalton called over to him, a rising panic in his voice.
“I can’t find the keys—they’re not on this ring—there’s some old ones down in the office—”
“Damn it, man, how long do you think we’ve got?” panted Cox, beginning to gain momentum as he heaved away at the crate. “Get out of the way, if you can’t get it open—I’ll come at it flat out, and see if that’ll do it.”
Dalton said nothing, but turned and put his shoulder to the doors. There was a creaking that spoke of rotten wood, and of nails coming loose; he redoubled his efforts, and called out: “Flat out it is, then: watch you don’t go through with it.” Again he barged at the doors: one of the hasps shivered loose, and there was a glint of light at the bottom of the join.
Cox was by now moving at top speed; he tried to ignore what he could feel through the palms of his hands, the thumps and bangs and scrabblings, and he looked directly ahead, lest he should see the panels of plywood come clear away, and the lead foil beneath giving way to a volley of blows. His one great fear, overmastering all the lesser ones, was that the crate might come apart completely before he reached the doorway, and shatter to pieces while still on the inside. He fancied he knew what was inside it, now, and he did not know what he should do, if it got loose.
With one last desperate heave, he reached the doors: they sprang apart at the collision, coming almost off their hinges with the momentum of it. The crate, still substantially intact, sailed out into the night sky; Cox might have followed it if Dalton had not grasped him firmly around the waist and hung on to him. They both saw the crate describe a great falling arc, and splash end-on into the river: a furious bubbling and steaming erupted briefly as it went under, and then subsided as bits and splinters of the crate popped up again to the surface, shattered entirely to pieces by the impact. Cox thinks he may have seen something else—he cannot swear to it, or will not—in the swirls and eddies of black water; it might have been an arm reaching up, he says, and will go no further. It is a fact, though, that anything inside the crate would, like the fragments of plywood to which the outside was reduced, have been borne down the Thames on the strong ebb-tide to the estuary, and the sea, and it is at least a strong supposition that nothing retraced its path that way, to the not inconsiderable peace of mind of all concerned.
Professor Mellis was, you will be pleased to hear, freed without undue delay from the trapped lift. Mr Dalton, for his part, was obliged to effect certain repairs on the fabric of the warehouse, and to engage in a little creative reordering of his paperwork in the matter of the MacVeigh deposits. The only real loser in the affair was, sad to say, Mr Gilbert Cox, who did not at last get the scoop he so keenly anticipated. It transpired that the Honorable James MacVeigh was a second cousin, once removed, of the then Prime Minister. We may never know what orders were handed down that night, or what s
ums of money changed hands, both in distant Egypt and nearer home, but the next day’s headlines read “Tragic Death of Englishman in Bizarre Archaeological Accident,” sub-headed “Irish Citizen Also Mourned as Freak Blaze Kills Two,” with editorial comment headed “The Need for Better Organization Abroad.”
It was small consolation for Cox to be given the job of accompanying Professor Mellis to Cairo, where he had been seconded as part of the team working under Professor Al-Qawwani on the site of Redmond O’Connell’s ill-fated dig. The bodies, of mummies and interlopers alike, had long since been removed from the chambers by this time, but from what remained of the wall paintings the professor was able to ascertain that the tombs had been used by a breakaway religious sect of about the time of the Hittite invasion—an era of great turbulence and upheaval in Egyptian history—who referred to themselves as the Children of Set. It seemed that this sect had turned away from the worship of the great pantheon headed by Ra and Osiris, and given allegiance solely to evil Set; further, that its practice of mummification had indeed differed significantly from the traditional method. There was an incantation, done in hieroglyphs on the wall, which Professor Mellis was at some pains to translate, which had to do with the ceremony of the Opening of the Mouth alluded to previously; sadly, though, the fire had rendered the latter part of it illegible, and so it is impossible to say what interest it may have held for such as Redmond O’Connell. It began, “When the night comes on, and the great darkness falls on the banks of the river, then journey forth toward the Western lands . . . ” The rest is silence, so to speak.
