One Foot in the Grave - The Halflife Trilogy Book I

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  A fool’s plan. . . . The words whispered at the back of my mind like a serpent sliding beneath dry leaves.

  Lie still in your coffin, old man, and keep your thoughts to yourself. You’ve had five hundred years to deal with Kadeth Bey. Your continuing impotence in this matter should curb the tongue of your mind as well as the one in your mouth.

  “Are you all right?” Mooncloud asked.

  I looked at her.

  “You look a little unsteady on your feet.”

  “A headache,” I said. “Nothing more.” And I plan to be rid of it permanently in just a short while.

  Bassarab, if he was still listening, made no reply.

  “I’d better get going.”

  She reached out and put her hand on my arm. “You’re going to need something very soon. . . .”

  I turned and walked through the gate and out onto the field.

  The tiny Kansas airport wasn’t much more than a main building with a two story tower and a couple of runways. A half dozen hangars and metal sheds, a couple of fuel depots, and a chainlink fence completed the layout. Although the sun was still up, it was after six p.m. and the nominal staff had left for the day. Local traffic tended to be light, mostly Cessna 100 series and Pipers with an occasional Beechcraft thrown in. Regional flights usually diverted over to Joplin, where they were better able to accommodate charters and median jets. Large commercial carriers gave both airports a wide berth.

  “You it?” Smirl asked, as I walked briskly toward the plane.

  “Yeah. Let’s move.” While I didn’t necessarily think the old vampire would sabotage our takeoff, I was in a hurry to put a little more distance between us while he was still preoccupied with Dr. Mooncloud. Five minutes later we were off the ground and headed north, toward Kansas City.

  Smirl had provided us with a Beechcraft Baron, a plush, prestigious, and very expensive twin-prop that made me wonder about the Chicago demesne’s resources. What was more important, however, was that the Baron had an average cruising speed of two hundred miles per hour. The clock was ticking and I didn’t want to see the sun come up again before my errand was through.

  “I got the stuff you asked for,” Smirl said. He pulled a leather valise out from under his seat and unzipped it. Reaching in, he extracted a vest of meshed nylon covered with canvas pouches that were all interconnected with insulated wire. “Special Ops, ALICE-type vest with twenty-eight bricks of high propellant C-4 Plastique in canvas utility pouches with wireless system primers tied to a single circuit.” He eyed me as he held out the vest. “You ever work with this stuff?”

  “Years ago, in the service.”

  “What were you? Special Forces?”

  I stopped examining the wire leads and stared at him. “Do my military records say anything about Special Forces?”

  “No . . . but your service records are unusually vague in some areas. And your shopping list—”

  “Weekend warrior stuff, I assure you,” I said. And then I reassured him some more with a little mental push.

  As I refolded the vest he produced a small black box with a hinged cover. “Remote detonator. Range of at least five hundred meters if you’ve got clear line-of-sight.”

  “Range isn’t going to be a problem,” I murmured as he flipped the lid open.

  There were four toggle switches arranged in pairs. He pointed to the top two switches. “Two separate circuits if you want a backup charge. The top switch arms the circuit.” He moved his finger. “The switch beneath it detonates the charge. You want the vest wired to the left pair or the right?”

  I reached out and took the small plastic case into my hand. I closed my eyes and ran my thumb across the switches, trying to imagine the easiest configuration under the most difficult of circumstances. “The right pair, I guess,” I said, opening my eyes. As I did, a sable-brown cat with two tails appeared from beneath a seat at the back of the plane. It ambled up the aisle and jumped into my lap.

  “Where did you get the cat?”

  “She insisted on coming along,” he answered. As if that was any kind of an answer at all.

  I was feeling more than a little disoriented from the combination of sun, Bassarab’s interference, and the sudden change in altitude as I exchanged the vest and detonator for a flashlight with a black, insulated exterior and a ringed spring-clip at the butt end. “Browning submersible Sabrelight,” he said. “Looks pretty much like an ordinary flashlight, but it has a xenon high-intensity lamp with four hundred percent more candlepower. They’re used by U.S. Army Special Forces counterinsurgency strike teams. I got you two, just in case, with three sets of spare batteries, each.”

  The cat formed a furry doughnut in my lap as Smirl took the flashlight back and placed a wooden box in my hands. I opened it and considered the oversized handgun nestled in the green felt interior.

  “Dartmaster CO2 tranquilizer gun with twelve hypodarts and two spare gas cartridges,” he catalogued. “Modifications: Tasco Propoint PDP4 electronic sight, ALS MiniAimer laser sight, Hogue grip.”

  “Perfect.”

  “Something you didn’t ask for.” He exchanged the boxed weapon for a miniheadset and mike wired to a belt/pocket battery clip. “Tracker hands-free comm set. VOX circuitry for voice activation. Two-channel, military issue.”

  “Anything else?” I asked as he repackaged the various items and arranged them in his valise.

  “I still don’t understand how you’re going to get him to put on the vest.”

  “I don’t need Kadeth Bey to wear the vest for the desired effect. I just need him to stand close to me while I’m wearing it.”

  He drew back. Perhaps he even blanched: it’s hard to tell with a complexion like Casper the friendly ghost.

  “Now, what about the books?”

  He fished a sack out from behind his seat, obviously uncomfortable with the turn the conversation had taken. “Explosives and guns—easy stuff. Books are a little different.”

  He pulled six books from the sack and handed them to me. I shuffled through the stack: a glossily pictured text on ancient Egypt, two reference books on general mythology, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and two volumes from Frazier’s original Golden Bough that looked like they might have been from a first edition collection. I turned them over and considered the numbers inked across the bottom of the spines. “These are library books.”

  “I went to three bookstores and nobody had anything like what you wanted. I was running low on time and the library was a safe bet.”

  I turned the books back over. “Three of these are from the reference section. How did you get permission to check them out?”

  “Check them out?”

  I sighed and opened the first. “I’m going to read, now. When we get to Kansas City, I expect to be done and I expect you to return these to the library and put them back on the shelves exactly where you found them.”

  “You’re fixing to blow yourself up, but you’re worried about overdue books at the library?”

  The cat looked up at me.

  “The C-4 is Plan B. I’m still working on Plan A.”

  “I hope it’s a little less fatal than Plan B.”

  “ ’Fatal,’ ” I said, “is one thing.” I turned and stared out the window at cooling twilight. “ ’Permanent’ is quite another.”

  It was quiet for the remainder of the flight.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Well, of course, the popular mythologies have Thoth as nothing more than vizier to Osiris and his kingdom,” Jim Satterfield said. He consulted the crabbed script on the papyrus and counted nine leaves into the boiling water.

  “Nine going to be enough?” I asked.

  “That’s what the formula calls for.”

  “An authentic copy of the formula?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe some Egyptian street vendor copied it off one of the old late-night movies. Maybe some Hollywood scriptwriter made it up straight out of his imagination and Sir Thomas Johnstone Lipton’
s Recipe Book. Maybe the only power you can count on is the power of urban myth and the cybernetics of superstition.”

  “But maybe, just maybe,” I said, taking a large wooden spoon and stirring the mixture, “the movie script did manage to take its cues from actual legend.”

  Susan Satterfield entered the kitchen, surveyed our efforts and reached between us to adjust the burner on the stove top. “Why do men always suppose the only way to cook something is maximum flame? You’re supposed to boil it until the leaves dissolve; that means medium heat. Otherwise the water will evaporate before the leaves do.”

  Her husband smiled. “It’s genetics, hon. Goes way back to our forebears living in caves and hunting mastodons. A nice big fire, the bigger the better.”

  “How many leaves?” she asked.

  “Nine for a full range of motion.”

  “Universal-Lon Chaney, Jr. or Hammer-Chris Lee?”

  “Um, Universal—if I remember correctly. Three to keep its heart beating and nine for the mummy to rise and walk. And something about the cycle of each full moon.”

  “Wait a minute,” I protested. “How can the potion keep a mummy’s heart beating when the heart is removed during the embalming process?”

  “The heart wasn’t always removed,” Jim answered. “And sometimes it was removed and then replaced during the embalming process.”

  “Egyptian embalming techniques evolved and changed with time and class differences,” his wife added, rummaging in the pantry and emerging with a bottle of wine. “The processes you’re probably familiar with are the royal ceremonies practiced during the New Kingdom period, between 1738 and 1102 b.c. Herodotus gave a detailed description of the technique back in the fifth century b.c., including the use of canopic jars for the various organs to be stored outside the body.”

  “But all of that’s moot in regards to your question,” Jim said. “In the movies, the mummy was Kharis, who, as high priest, was entombed alive for his violation of sacred taboos. So his heart was never removed in the first place.”

  “But did he die?”

  They both looked at me.

  “I mean, did the tanna leaves bring him back to life? Or did he remain in some form of suspended animation during his burial and never taste of true death in the first place?”

  They both looked at each other. Then back at me.

  “I mean, will this stuff work on something that is already dead? Or only on something that never died to begin with?”

  “Something that never died to begin with?” Susan asked slowly.

  I nodded.

  “Well,” Jim mused, “I suppose that would depend on just exactly which it was and what effect you wanted.”

  “Something that is supposedly dead and still walking around,” I said. “Something that is not alive by the prevailing definitions.”

  “Yet, not undead in the vampiric sense?” Susan qualified, working a corkscrew into the mouth of the wine bottle.

  I nodded.

  “And the desired effect?” Jim asked.

  “To make it alive once more.”

  Now neither of them would look at me. Or at each other. After a long silence Susan cleared her throat. “We, um, understand that you lost your wife and daughter last year.”

  My throat felt like it needed clearing as well. I nodded.

  “This, uh, potion,” Jim said, “assuming Hollywood tapped into an arcane truth and actually got it right. . .”

  “Which is highly unlikely,” Susan interjected. The cork came free with an audible pop.

  “ . . . well, at best, it was only supposed to restore a semblance of life, of animation.”

  “Three leaves to keep the heart beating,” I said. “Nine to grant the power of movement. Semblance of life? What if we used more leaves?”

  “Not recommended.” Jim Satterfield pulled his pipe from his pocket. “I can’t recall the specific warnings from the movies but it was assumed that adding more than nine leaves to the potion was dangerous.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t remember.” He unfolded a penknife and began scraping at the bowl of his pipe. “Maybe it made Kharis too powerful. Or maybe it would destroy him.” He looked at his wife. “You going to pour that?”

  “I’m letting it breathe.”

  “Oh.”

  “Or maybe it would make him too human and therefore beyond the control of his master,” I said, reaching for the bowl and dumping the remaining leaves into the bubbling pot on the stove.

  “Maybe,” Jim conceded. “But if you were wanting to bring someone back from the dead—someone you really cared about—you’d be a lot better off using the Scroll of Thoth.”

  “Why?”

  “Stronger magic, I guess. Not to mention the theological angle. You familiar with the Osirian myths?”

  I nodded. My little study session on the flight up had covered the basics. According to mythology, Osiris was the grandson of Ra, the chief of the Egyptian gods. Since the Big O was a real peacenik and didn’t believe in violence of any sort, he was an easy target for his brother Set. In a fit of jealousy, Set killed him—twice, according to some versions of the legend—and the final time he hacked Osiris into fourteen different pieces. Although Isis, who was Osiris’ wife, and Thoth, his grand vizier, were able to resurrect him, he decided to go with the momentum and become ruler of the Egyptian underworld.

  “So,” I said, after repeating the basic outline, “Osiris is now the god of the Underworld and Thoth, in some aspects of their theology, serves as the gatekeeper between life and death.”

  He rapped the bowl of his pipe against the counter as Susan produced three wineglasses from a side cupboard. “Mmmm. A bit of an oversimplification, but the interpretation holds.”

  “So, let me ask you a hypothetical question,” I said as he swept the detritus of ancient tobacco into the wastebasket. “Let’s say that there was a high priest of Set. And this necromancer was using tanna leaves to animate dead bodies. But these dead bodies are not really alive—just . . . animated. Could the Scroll of Thoth be used to restore these dead bodies to life? To real life? Not just animated corpses?”

  Susan hesitated in her pouring to cock a coppery eyebrow. “Hypothetically?”

  I stared back. “Of course.”

  Her husband began packing his pipe with fresh tobacco. “Hypothetically . . . it might. Or it might merely negate the animating effects of the tanna or tanis leaves. On the other hand, it could destroy those same corpses as they are ensorceled by Set or his magicians: the power of Thoth is antithetical to the influences of Set.”

  I nodded. “Set was an enemy of Thoth and his master.”

  “Well, of course there’s that. After Osiris went to rule in the Underworld, Thoth served Isis and her son Horus. He intervened to save Osiris’s child on several occasions, including attempted assassinations by Set’s minions. Later he served as judge between Horus and Set when they were brought before the tribunal of gods. The fact that he ruled in favor of Horus and against Set cemented their enmity.”

  “So, if an Egyptian necromancer were an acolyte of Set,” I asked, “he wouldn’t be too inclined to use the Scroll of Thoth in his incantations?”

  “Good God, no. Set is the very incarnation of Evil, the god of opposition to all things good. Thoth is the god who supposedly invented all the arts and sciences: arithmetic, surveying, geometry, astronomy, soothsaying, magic, medicine, surgery, music, drawing, and above all, writing. As the inventor of hieroglyphs, he was named ‘Lord of Holy Words.’ As first of the magicians he was often called ‘the Elder.’ ”

  “But that’s just one version of the old boy’s credentials,” Susan said, handing my glass to me. “According to the theologians at Hermopolis, Thoth was the true universal Demiurge, the Divine Ibis who had hatched the world-egg at Hermopolis Magna. They believed that the work of creation was accomplished by the sound of his voice alone.” She handed a glass to her husband and then raised her own. “The Books of the Pyramids a
re a bit ambiguous about his pedigree, as well. . . .”

  The Burmese with the bifurcated tail jumped up on the counter and sniffed the air adjacent to the open bottle. I set my glass by her and tipped it just enough to bring the wine within reach. The cat lapped delicately at the lip of the glass and purred, twin tails twining and untwining in rhythmic contentment.

  “Sometimes he’s listed as the oldest son of Ra, other times he’s the child of Geb and Nut, the brother of Isis, Set and Nephthys. . .”

  “But normally,” her husband concluded, “he’s merely friend and not member to the Osirian family. But, by any account, Thoth was a heavy mana-dude.”

  “Good,” I said. I looked down at the blushing contents of my wineglass. I was thirsty. But not for wine.

  “I’m not sure we answered your question,” Susan said.

  “I’m not sure you can.”

  “Well, if there is anything we can do in addition to the tanis leaves,” Jim said, “don’t hesitate to ask.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’d like to borrow your Scroll of Thoth.”

  Ahhh, Csejthe, you return. . . .

  I had been staring into the inky blackness that seemed to stretch into infinity. Now my eyes refocused, expecting to see Dracula floating just outside the Beechcraft’s wing window.

  But it was only his voice fluttering in the back of my head.

  Did you find what you need?

  Maybe (I thought back at him.) I sent a mental picture of vest loaded with pockets of C-4 explosives.

  This is your plan?

  This is my fail-safe.

  Fail-safe?

  I’ll be wearing this stuff the next time I go toe-to-toe with Kadeth Bey.

  The Devil! You are serious?

  As a heart attack. But the plastique is Plan B.

  Plan B?

  Just in case Plan A doesn’t work.

  Plan A?

  And I want you right beside me.

  For this Plan A of yours?

  That’s right.

  So what is it you need for me to do?

  Nothing. Just hang. I want you close to me.

  For Plan A?

  You could say that.

  Then tell me of your plan.