The Nyctalope Steps In

by Jean de La Hire

  Indy returned to studying the tomb’s walls, running his fingers along a groove, noting dust and plaster falling away. Removing a knife from his pocket, he opened it, inserted the blade into the cracks and wiggled it back and forth, mostly chipping away ancient dust and plaster. After a bit of work, he was able to dislodge the a two-foot long dried mud-brick, hoping some treasure was hidden behind it—perhaps the Lost Treasure of Khufu.

  “Ooophs,” Indy said as the brick fell, shattering on the stone floor, alerting Bruce and Saint-Clair, who watched as their colleague bent down, and noted a collection of brownish bones. “What the …?”

  “Frogs,” Saint-Clair said, “probably Bufo regularis, the common African frog. Thousands of their remains have been found in the ruins of the tombs in this necropolis.”

  “But blood makes poor mortar,” Indy said, shifting through the remains with his forefinger.

  “True,” Saint-Clair agreed, “but when you had a tight time-table, you just dug in the Nile mud and mixed your mortar with whatever was available.”

  “So, there are skeletons in the old man’s closet?”

  Saint-Clair remained silent as he turned back to the slab, clicking a button on the underside of the slab. It slid open, revealing a hidden compartment in the base of the altar. On a bed of excelsior were three working models of the polyphase tube devices amongst a dozen six-inch long duo-tapered crystals.

  “The polyphase devices,” Saint-Clair stated.

  “Polyphasers?” Bruce pondered.

  “Or, simply, phasers,” Indy two-cented.

  Bruce was antsy—all but twirling his thumbs—sitting in the relatively posh suite at the Sheperard’s Hotel, waiting for information—any information!—dealing with their mid-night jaunt two days ago. Saint-Clair had told him to hold tight, while Indy had added: “Just wait, kid. Don’t get cocky.” But that was easier said than done. The residue of the adrenaline rush was only now subsiding. It was a feeling like none other. He doubted if he would want to make a career of adrenaline-rushes. Yet, when a resolution was too slow, action was called for…

  No, that wasn’t for him…

  ….too much night work.

  Yet… the waiting….

  He picked up his letter of introduction to the Egyptian Minister of Antiquities, written by a colleague of his late father, a Doctor Francis Ardan. But it all became a blur; he couldn’t concentrate on the actual reason he was in Egypt: to visit various digs sponsored by the Wayne Foundation’s Oriental Studies Museum and to scope out a few sites—the Gizah Pyramids, Deir de Medina, Luxor, Karnak, the Valley of the Kings, and points in between—the itinerary for the Grand Prize Winner of the Foundation’s “See the Pyramids Along the Nile” contest celebrating the opening of a new wing to the OSM.

  Just being in Egypt had taken a great deal of courage on Bruce’s part. Seven years ago, he had been there with his parents, right after Howard Carter had revealed the “wonderful things” contained within the tomb of Tutankhamun. As wealthy Patrons of the Arts, his parents had toured the cramped chambers of the Boy King. Bruce was denied entrance. Carter explained that he was too young—just passed his 13th birthday—even though many of the fellahin, the workers, were barely out of their nappies themselves. What happened a few months later still sent a chill up his spine…

  Yet he wouldn’t—couldn’t—just sit around and wait for something to happen; he had to get out in the world and hopefully make it happen. Was that being cocky?

  “I’m going out, Alfred.” Bruce decided. “Sit by the telephone… in case we get a call.”

  “Very well, Sir,” Alfred replied, helping the young man into the jacket of his European white silk business suit, dusting off his broad shoulders with a whiskbroom. “Mustn’t have you appear untidy in public.”

  “Yes, Alfred. Though I doubt my shoulders will be clean once I step outside the hotel,” he said, pulling on his cuffs,

  “Alas…”

  Bruce eschewed the easy walk to the Red Light District, proceeding to the Khan el Khakili, dodging the hectic traffic of motorcars, camels and mules, carts, and carriages of various shapes and sizes. The smog and stink of dung blended soothingly with the pleasant aroma of freshly-baked bread, which greeted him from all directions as he strolled through the souk, causally stopping here-and-there to take in the multitudes of shops selling fabrics and rugs, autika, drinks and fruits, geese and ducks. Historic mosques, facades and fountains surrounded the young American, the enormousness of it all made it difficult to concentrate.

  A few steps further down the mall, Bruce picked up a cat figurine of the goddess Bastet when he felt a tug on his sleeve. Turning he saw a raggedly boy’s face as dirty as his linens, who he figures was just asking—begging?—for baksheesh.

  “Many pardons, sahib, you are Master Wayne?” the boy said politely. Bruce nodded and the boy handed him a note. Unfolding the note Bruce read:

  Mr. Wayne,

  You were not at the hotel so I sent this runner to find you and deliver this message. We have found a clue to the problem facing us. Meet us in the Abbasia Quarter. The boy will lead you.

  Dr. Jones.

  “Lead away,” Bruce said with a sweep of his hand. Tucking the note in his pocket, he followed the boy weaving in and out, ducking under, almost losing him here and there, but managed to keep up, even though something was nagging in the back of his brain. What was in the Abbasia Quarter indeed? Only military barracks and an insane asylum, if he remembered his Baedeker guide correctly. Like Arkham back home?

  While in his thoughts, Bruce lost the boy and stopped, looked around. Then the boy popped up and waved. “Over here, sahib. This way.”

  Rounding the corner he found himself in a long, narrow alley way—or was it a street? Alone. The boy was nowhere in sight. The hairs on the back of his neck began to tingle. That was what had been bugging him: he had been set up, sent on a wild goose chase, but by whom? And why?

  Turning back Bruce froze.

  Blocking the entry to the street were two large men, muscles upon muscles, dressed in priest kilts, sandals and colorful papier-mâché masks: hawk-headed Horus and ibis-headed Thoth. Each hefted an apparently hollow six-foot long tube, attached to wires leading to a metal case on the backs. But—of more direct importance to Bruce—the tubes were aimed at him.

  It had been a trap. The note from Indy, a fake. If truly from Indiana Jones, it would’ve be addressed to “kid,” nor “Mr. Wayne,” and signed “Indy,” not Dr. Jones. First, the false telegram from Professor McElroy before leaving Gotham, and now…

  Too late…

  Turning round, Bruce dashed down the alley, weaving to and fro, stopping and starting as best he could through the narrowness, as beams of concentrated light flashed, tearing chunk of debris from the mud-brick walls, vaporizing the chips into exploding dust, to rain down upon the fleeing American.

  Zig… Zag…

  His legs pumped. His muscles burned up lactic acid, fatiguing them. Breathing came fast, in huffs and puffs. Primitive instincts had reacted to the influx of adrenaline, and he unconsciously took the “L” passageway.

  A mistake. It was a dead end…

  All that flashed through his mind as he turned, his back to the wall, was Indy’s reprimand: Don’t get cocky, kid! And this was way pass being cocky…

  His feet spread. His fist balled. He waited tensely as the two “demi-gods” leisurely walked towards him. They had been playing with him like a cat with a mouse, knowing his prey was trapped, just waiting to be tortured to death. And they just stood there, holding out their power-sticks. What had Indy called them? Polyphasers? No: phasers. That tidbit helped him not at all as the ends of the tubes neared him. Should he charge them? Try his best to make Ted Grant proud? Then, suddenly, Horus and Thoth stopped and parted like the Red Sea, allowing a jackal-headed Anubis to step between them, his phaser tube held aloft like Moses’ staff. He stepped forward.

  Bruce held his ground.

  “Well, if it isn�
�t Young Master Bruce,” Anubis said, his sarcasm evident as it echoed in the hollow of the mask.

  “What’s your game, Professor McElroy?” Bruce bravely and boldly said.

  “No games.”

  “But dressing up like a tin-plated god? Why? You had prestige. You were in charge of the Amarna dig. You were…”

  “…Nothing!” Anubis/McElroy exclaimed, stamping a gold-gilded sandal on the stone path. “People laughed behind my back! Hell, they laughed to my face!” Bruce knew this was accurate, to a degree, and he understood some of the Professor’s anguish, but not his fanaticism: his anti-Akhenaten rants, allowing not a quarter for opposing views. His “my way or the highway” obsession had cracked him. Bruce could see that now. “But…”

  “No buts, Mr. Wayne. I will determine what is to be done. And that is the complete annihilation of Akhetaten… of Tel el Amarna.”

  “It’s already in ruins.” Bruce tried to reason with this… madman.

  “Not completely…yet,” McElroy’s voiced boomed from beneath the mask.

  “What do you mean? Can’t we reason…?”

  “Shut up!” Bruce could hear Elroy breathing beneath the mask as he continued: “You and your meddling friends have already cost me dearly, robbing me of my only supply of back-up crystals. But not to worry… much. Ha!” He waved his phaser tube. “I can always get more dough… more crystals…”

  So, we did get his back-up supply of crystals, Bruce thought. Not that that did him any good in his present predicament. Aloud, he tried calmly to ask: “And what do you want with me?”

  “Well, I expect you to die, Mr. Wayne.”

  With that, Anubis drew a pistol from beneath his kilt and fired. A noisome gas sprayed out, engulfing the young American, dropping him coughing to his knees. Before losing full consciousness, he heard Elroy laugh: “But not just yet.”

  Bats. It had to be bats! These were Bruce’s first conscious thought when awakening from the knock-out gas from Professor McElroy’s pistol.

  Bats.

  They seemed to have been his constant companions since childhood. And here the flying mammals—these “overgrown mice”—hung overhead as Bruce’s meandering thoughts were suddenly interrupted by the full realization of his predicament, like being rapped on the knuckles by the teacher’s ruler when she caught you daydreaming. Not that it had ever happened to him. Not the Kid Genius. The Boy Wonder. Bruce Wayne.

  Yeah, sure…

  His wrists were bound together, the joining leather strap hung over a hook driven into the stone wall above his head, the toes of his boots barely scraping the limestone floor of the cold, damp, swarthy chamber, illuminated by only a burning torch in a sconce. The only sound was that of a ticking clock.

  A ticking clock?

  The flickering flame’s light revealed the clock: the hour hand was near 12 as the second hand sweep past it and the minute hand jumped a notch towards denotation time. High noon? High midnight? The clock mechanism was attached to a blasting cap wired to a small stick of dynamite atop a large wooden barrow, with fading red letter: NH4NO3. Fertilizer, ammonium nitrate. With the added phosphorus and nitrogen in the bat guano when ignited the tomb would go up like Krakatoa…

  Tick…Tock…Tick…Tock…

  “Monsieur Saint-Clair… Leo,” Alfred said anguishly into the telephone, “I am worried about Master Bruce…”

  “Did you manage to plant…,” Saint-Clair said, his last words indecipherable due to the poor connection.

  “Yes,” Alfred replied, guessing the answer to the Nyctalope’s unheard question.

  “Fine. Then, don’t worry, Pennyworth. We’ll find him.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “Of course.”

  The minute hand clicked nearer 12 as the second hand continued to sweep.

  Breathing in deeply and slowly, Bruce pressed his shoulders against the damp stone wall, bracing himself, willing his legs up to a “L” with the wall. His hands gripped around the hook nailed into the wall, his biceps bulging. Steadily, he commanded his stressed, spasmodic, oxygen-starved muscles to perform beyond impossibility as his legs inched higher, until the toes of his boots where over his head.

  He allowed himself a brief second rest…

  Tick…

  …then, with all his fortitude, the toes of his boots pushed up and off the wall. The leather strap binding him wiggled, pushed up…

  Tock…

  …and off the hook. He came crashing down.

  Tick…Tock…Tick…

  Though dazed, Bruce managed to stumble to his feet and rush towards the barrel of nitrate, grabbing for the clock, and tripped…

  An elderly—but spry—couple, dressed for the desert heat, walked around a couple huge boulders, a destination in mind.

  “It has been a while since we visited his tomb,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, his voice booming. “It’s about time we paid our respects, though one wonders where the old boy himself may be.”

  “An enigma in his own time, and still remains one.”

  “You and your romantic novels.”

  Stumbling over a discarded piece of masonry Bruce managed to catch himself before falling. He closed his eyes and inhaled and exhaled a couple time, calming himself, and finally…

  Tick…Toc—

  …grabbed the clock and ripped it from the blasting cap in mid-tock. The explosion had been averted. Sinking to the cool stone floor, Bruce stared at the clock in his shaking hand. He had 15 seconds to spare. Hardly exciting…

  Then the flickering torch went out.

  “We’re here,” the lady archeologist said to her husband, from under her parasol.

  “Let’s see if anyone’s home,” the man said with his trademarked riotous laugh, flicking on his electric torch.

  Then—as if in direct action to the light—a thundering bawl of high-pitch screeches pieced the air.

  A dozen… a score… a hundred bats shot out of a hole in the hill. Flying, flapping at the archeologists, forcing them to duck, to hold their hats down, to protect their hair. When they looked up they saw a… mirage? A scene from Dante’s Inferno? No… it was real.

  The last of the bats had flown the coop and a man stepped out, his clothes in tatters, his hand groping, finding the side of the tomb’s entrance for support. He looked up, smiled.

  “Hello, Professor and Mrs. Emerson,” he said.

  “Ramses… Walter…?” Amelia Peabody Emerson gasped, thinking Bruce was her son.

  “Good Gad, Peabody,” Radcliffe Emerson exclaimed, calling his wife by her maiden name as he was wont to do.

  “This is Akhenaten’s tomb?” Bruce asked, rubbing his bruised wrists, brushing bat-ticks off his shoulders. Bruce had read Emerson’s definitive work on the subject: Excavation at the City of Akhetaten.

  ”Yes, my boy,” replied Emerson, slapping the young man on the back, almost wounding Bruce further. “Yes, indeed.”

  As the Emersons and Bruce trudged through the arid, barren and crack-potted wasteland towards the ruins of Akhetaten—el Amarna—the American filled them in on the activities of Professor McElroy--“crackpot” was the kindest thing Emerson had to say about his fellow colleague—the Anubis Gang, the bomb and his escape from the former tomb of King Akhenaten.

  When the light had flickered out, he had followed the fleeing bats through the tomb complex as they were activated by the blowing of his Galton or Dog Whistle. The supersonic sound had driven them... “batty,” as Peabody joked.

  Coming out of the desert, they walked along the ledge running in front of the series of tombs hewed into the cliff wall for the wealthy and courtier of the ancient capital of the 18th Dynasty’s so-called “heretic.”

  Passing one tomb, Bruce saw a man and he froze. Then he chided himself. It was only his own reflection in two highly-polished dressing mirrors, each six-foot tall and three wide, set on bass rollers. Emerson explained he used the mirrors as light sources while working in the tombs, to elimi
nate the damage caused by the pollutants released by magnesium flares and common fire torches, which further contributed to the deterioration of already fragile artworks. Bruce learned, also, that even human breathing could harm the delicate balance of ancient pigments. Though, these days, archeologists used flashlights and portable battery-powered lanterns, the Emersons still had a fond preference for the old methods, the ones used when they had first met and fell in love.

  At the bottom of the ramp leading down from the cliff tombs, they settled under the shade of a canvas umbrella, where Amelia tended to Bruce scraps and scratches, after a drop or two of “medicinal” brandy from the flash attached to her “belt of tools.” Bruce admired her belt, how utilitarian it was with its many items: sewing kit, pen and paper, first-aid kit, and other practice items needed on a dig.

  As Amelia mumbled something about “another ruined shirt” and made use of cotton swabs, iodine and more traditional alcohol to treat Bruce’s wounds, he explained about his adventures during the last three days. The Emersons were especially rattled to learn of McElroy’s poaching from the Amarna dig; they believed the past belongs to the present… to Egypt.

  Neither of the Emersons mentioned the death of Bruce’s parents—seven years back—but since then the Emersons and the Wayne Foundation had been in constant communications, both on a personal and an academic basis, there was no need to go over old ground. Emerson has always “hmph’ed” at the notion of the “Curse of King Tut,” claiming that it had nothing to do with his parent’s death by a street thug, within months of the Waynes tour of Tut’s tomb; that Carter, himself, the Emersons and scores of others were still among the living. That there was no inscribed curse on the entrance to Tut’s tomb, but a piece of fiction created by a popular romance novelist: “The kind Peabody reads,” he added slyly. Amelia “shushed” her husband, ever if it was true. Bruce, himself, didn’t believe in the Curse of King Tut either. Yet…

  The mending done, Bruce and the Emersons settled in under the umbrella for tea and scones, perhaps a couple whiskey sours…