The Third Gate jl-1

by Lincoln Child

  The figure continued unwrapping the head bandages. More objects appeared: a resin scarab, a beautiful diadem inlaid with gems. Both went into the bag.

  The first evidence bag was full now, and the figure sealed it and placed it back into the pocket of the lab coat. Time was critical, and the intruder dared not dally much longer. Already it had harvested a dozen items from within the mummy’s wrappings-a dozen more and it would leave.

  It moved back down to the mummy’s chest. A painting of Osiris had still been faintly visible on the body cloth-given such a wildly anachronistic find, was it possible the pharaoh’s crook and flail might also lie buried beneath the layers of linen? If so, it would be a princely discovery indeed.

  The intruder picked up the scalpel-fingers now sticky with unguent, its movements feeling a little heavy and slow-and, no longer showing the least reverence for the long-departed king, sliced deeply into the wrappings that covered the chest. The smell of death grew stronger. Immediately, twinklings of gold peeped out through the cut layers of bandages. The figure identified a dagger, a golden chain, several protective amulets of the most ornate design. And-what was that, barely visible beneath the lowest layers of bandages? Was it possible, remotely possible, it was a large, golden ba — bird, its wings studded with countless gemstones…?

  Working feverishly now, the figure dug into the bandages, feeling around, plucking out the amulets one after another and depositing them in the second bag. These, too, were thickly smeared with a primitive unguent, the color of earth-disgusting, but there would be plenty of time to clean up later.

  The figure wiped its hands together, wiped the stickiness off onto its lab coat. Then, picking up the scalpel again, it bent over the mummy, preparing to slice away the final bandages.

  But wait… something was wrong. What was this strange sensation of prickly heat that seemed to rise from within? What was this horrible smell-of sulfur, or something worse, that grew and grew until it filled the entire room?

  The figure stepped back in alarm. But even as it did so, the feeling of heat turned to one of flame, of roiling smoke. The figure opened its mouth to gasp-but the gasp turned into an escalating shriek, rising in pitch and volume, as the pain quickly spread, wrapping the tomb robber in a vise of intolerable pain.

  45

  This time, when Jeremy Logan descended to the air lock platform at the bottom of the Umbilicus, it was so crowded there was almost no room for him to stand. He counted ten others, including Tina Romero, Ethan Rush, Stone, Valentino-in person, for a change-two of March’s archaeologists, two roustabouts, and two security guards. He nodded at the assembled group. Several-Rush, Stone, the archaeologists-looked rather drawn and ashen. The mood was serious, tense, with little of the fraught anticipation he’d noticed during his first descent to the tomb.

  Logan understood why Rush would look upset-Jennifer was still comatose, having slipped into some kind of hypnotic trance from which she could not be immediately wakened-but not the others.

  “Where’s Dr. March?” he asked, looking around. Nobody answered.

  “Are we ready?” Stone asked after another minute. There was a scattering of nods, murmured assents.

  “Then let’s get started.” As he spoke, Stone took Logan by the arm and went on ahead of the others, moving into chamber one. When they were several steps inside, he leaned in close to Logan. “March is dead,” he muttered.

  Logan looked at him, shocked. “Dead?”

  Stone nodded. His lips were pressed together so tightly they were barely visible. “He snuck into the archaeology lab late last night and violated Narmer’s mummy. Unwrapped the bandages, started looting the corpse of the treasures bound into its windings. There was a small explosion, a fire…”

  “An explosion?” Logan repeated.

  “Two different chemicals were secreted in the strata of Narmer’s bandages. I’ve been informed that, separately, they are inert, but when mixed together-well, they act like an ancient version of napalm.”

  “You mean, a booby trap? What kind of chemicals? How could it still be effective after all these centuries?”

  “My people are still analyzing things, but clearly the compounds were highly stable. Some kind of potassium derivative, it seems, with a primitive form of glycerol or glycol as the antagonist.” Stone glanced back at the others, who were approaching. “Look, Jeremy-only a few know about this. We’re keeping it quiet, for reasons of morale, and… other things.”

  “Any idea what his motive was?” Logan asked. “Surely it wasn’t simple venality.”

  “It’s too early to tell. But it just might be as depressingly simple as that. I’ve started conducting some inquiries back in the States. It seems March had run up staggering debts over the last year, living far beyond his means. He might have been in the employ of one of my rivals, trying to spook our workers, faking up elements of the curse. Or maybe he was just hoping to line his pockets with as much gold and jewels as possible.” He sighed. “I should have had him vetted again, like everybody else. But I’d worked with him so often before. I trusted him.”

  Logan nodded toward the tomb that stretched ahead of them. “Are you sure you don’t want to postpone this?”

  Another, brusquer shake of the head. “We can’t. With the dam so far ahead of schedule, we can expect an official delegation to visit any day now to discuss the termination of our stay here-and we’re too advanced in our work for any more dissembling. We have to remove what grave goods we can and leave before it’s too late.”

  Remove what grave goods we can. Logan glanced in the direction of Tina Romero. It seemed that, even from beyond the grave, March’s acquisitiveness had rubbed off on Stone. Logan wondered what the Egyptologist would think of this.

  As the others assembled around them, Logan glanced over chamber one. His eyes stopped at the heavy, ornamental bed, now in ruins, its canopy collapsed onto the sleeping platform. There were still a few dried bloodstains marking the spot where the luckless Robert Carmody had met his end. The heavy gold bolts holding the canopy in place had been deliberately loosened-had that been March’s handiwork, too-prepping them for later removal?

  The hand that touches my immortal form will burn with unquenchable fire — Narmer’s words, once again. And, once again, the curse seemed to be coming true. Ironic, he thought-if March had been giving Narmer’s curse a boost of his own here and there, it had ultimately played out in a way the archaeologist would never, ever have desired.

  Silently, the group made their way toward the opened gate in the rear that led to the next chamber. Chamber two was also almost completely empty; the only things remaining were the two shrines, physically built into the structure of the chamber, and the immense blue granite sarcophagus at the center. Logan glanced again at Tina Romero. Her expression was set, unreadable.

  Rush came up and Logan turned to him. “How’s Jennifer?”

  The doctor looked as if he hadn’t slept in a long time. “We’ve moved her to the medical suite. Her vitals are strong, and she’s stable. I’m uncertain why she hasn’t regained consciousness.”

  “Do you think it could be a reaction to the stress of that last crossing? Some kind of hysteric catatonia?”

  “I sincerely doubt it. She’s never shown any indications of that before.”

  Logan looked around. “I assume it was you who pronounced March-right?”

  Rush’s bleak look grew bleaker still. “My God. What a thing.”

  Stone had moved ahead to the golden wall at the rear of chamber two. It looked the same as the other three walls, save the large seals placed along one edge and the design embossed in the gold. As Logan drew closer, he was able to make out the image: a huge, leering face that-disconcertingly, unlike the normal profiles seen in Egyptian art-was staring directly at them, seemingly half jackal, half human. The rest of the wall, Logan now noticed, was covered with very faint hieroglyphics, beautifully and cunningly embossed in the precious metal.

  “Tina?” Stone mur
mured. “Can you make out the message in those glyphs?”

  Romero drew closer. “It’s the final part of the curse, repeated over and over,” she said after a brief examination. “ ‘Should any in their temerity pass the third gate, then the black god of the deepest pit will seize him, and his limbs will be scattered to the uttermost corners of the earth. And I, Narmer the Everliving, will torment him and his, by day and by night, waking and sleeping, until madness and death become his eternal temple.’ ”

  A brief silence settled over the collective company.

  “And that image?” Stone asked. “That god-face?”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Romero answered.

  “What about the seals?”

  “Royal seals. Like the others we’ve seen, only much larger and more ornate. Serekhs, with echoes of the curse woven in among the primitive symbols for the pharaoh’s name.”

  Super seals, Logan thought to himself.

  “The ground-penetrating radar readings for the room beyond were anomalous,” Stone said. “According to the scans, it’s as if there’s nothing in there-which, of course, can’t be right.” He stared at the wall for a moment, lost in thought. Then he recovered himself. “All right,” he said, turning to Rush. “Go ahead, Ethan.”

  The group waited in silence as the doctor drilled a test hole in the gold, inserted his instruments, sampled the air beyond, and pronounced it safe. Then Stone himself stepped up to the seals, and-with Romero standing by with an artifact storage container-carefully cut through first the upper necropolis seal and then the lower, more ornate royal seal. As he carefully pried them away from the gold sheeting, there was a loud click, followed by a sighing, grinding sound, and to Logan’s surprise the entire rear wall pivoted inward about two feet, like a door moving on hinges. The group stepped back in unison, and there were gasps of consternation. But when nothing else occurred, Stone stepped forward once again-a little gingerly-and shone his light into the blackness of chamber three. After a moment, he glanced back at the roustabouts.

  “Stabilize this entrance,” he told them. “Then we’re going in.”

  46

  Once again, Stone went in first, barely waiting for the roustabouts to complete testing the integrity of the entranceway. His movements were quick, even brusque, as if the recent troubles-and the ticking clock-had given him an unseemly sense of haste. He ducked past the workers and through the narrow opening, disappearing beyond the wall of the third gate. For a moment, all was silent; the only indication anyone was in chamber three was the reflected glow of Stone’s flashlight, lancing here and there through the darkness. Then Logan heard Stone clear his throat.

  “Tina? Ethan? Dr. Logan? Valentino?” he called in a strange voice. “Please come in.”

  Logan followed the others through the gap in the wall and into the final chamber. At first, he thought his flashlight was malfunctioning-it didn’t seem to provide any illumination. And then he realized: the entire chamber was clad in what appeared to be onyx, walls and floor and ceiling, black and unreflective. The stone seemed to soak up their flashlight beams, pulling the light from them and leaving the small chamber so dim that its contents could barely be made out.

  “Jesus,” Tina said, shivering. “How creepy.”

  “Is that your professional opinion, Tina?” Stone asked.

  “Kowinsky,” Valentino called out through the gap in the third gate. “Bring up one of those sodium vapor lamps.”

  For a moment, everyone fell quiet, examining the chamber. To Logan, it did seem remarkably bare, compared to the opulent rooms that had come before. There was a single ornamental table placed along the left wall, enameled in gold, containing a dozen papyri, each carefully rolled and set in a line. In the rear of the chamber was what looked like a small bed, quite narrow, that had once been covered by some kind of linen coverlet and a pillow, both now sadly decomposed. Across from the table, placed along the floor by the opposing wall, were three small boxes-apparently of solid gold-along with a single urn.

  But everyone’s attention quickly turned to the artifact sitting in the center of the room. It was a large chest, about four feet square, fashioned of some black stone-perhaps onyx again-and set upon a fantastically carved plinth of dark, dense wood. Its edges were lined in strips of gold. On its sides were reproductions of several of the designs they had already seen in chamber one-the box-shaped artifact topped by an iron rod; the bowl-like object trailing wisps of gold from its edges. But this time, the images were fashioned out of a multitude of brilliantly colored gemstones, set into the surface of the chest. Across its top was an elaborately fashioned serekh.

  “Tina?” Stone said, pointing at the serekh, his voice almost a whisper. “That’s the rebus for Narmer’s name. Right?”

  Tina nodded slowly. “Yes. I think so.”

  Stone turned to her. “You think so?”

  She had set down her video camera, the room being too dark to film, and was peering more closely at the chest. “The glyphs match, all right. But these scratches, here, through the head of the catfish… I don’t know. It’s most unusual. But it’s all unusual. That cotlike structure in the rear, the shrines in chamber two, the strange emptiness of this room…” She paused again. “It’s like I said once before. It’s almost as if this entire tomb was used as a rehearsal for Narmer’s death, for his passage to the next world, the Field of Offerings.”

  “Have you come across anything like this before?” Stone asked.

  “No.” She looked around the dim space for a minute, brow furrowed in confusion. “It’s almost as if… but, no, it couldn’t be.” She peered again at the chest. “If only I could get a better look at this.”

  “Kowinsky!” Valentino bawled. “What’s up with those lights?”

  “Not enough room to get them through this opening, sir,” came the disembodied voice of Kowinsky.

  “You might want to take a look at those papyri,” Stone said to Tina. “Maybe they can shed some light on things.”

  She nodded, moved away with her light.

  Now Stone, followed by Dr. Rush, moved over to the series of small golden boxes set along the right-hand wall. Stone crouched down and began to carefully remove the top of the first with latex-gloved hands.

  Logan watched, hugging himself against the chill and a feeling of growing dismay. Ever since entering the chamber, he had been aware of the malignant presence. It sensed them-he was sure of that-but the overpowering evil he had felt several times before was being held in check for the time being. It was almost as if it was watching, waiting… and biding its time. He reached into his duffel, pulled out the air ion counter, and swept it slowly around. The air in here was significantly more ionized than normal-in fact, the air had grown increasingly ionized as they’d penetrated deeper into the tomb. What this meant he wasn’t certain.

  Stone had removed the top of the box. Reaching in, he gingerly pulled something out: a curl of metal, beaten very thin. “It appears to be native copper,” he said. “There are at least half a dozen small sheets of it in here.” Moving on to the next box, he removed its lid, peered inside, then pulled out something that in the faint light looked almost like a small bayonet, brownish and badly corroded. “Looks like iron,” he said.

  “If so, it’s probably meteoric iron,” Tina said, drawn back from the papypri. “And it would be the earliest known use of iron among the Egyptians by at least a few hundred years.”

  But Stone had already moved on to the third box. He opened it, placed a hand inside, then removed it again. In his cupped palm he held dozens of thin filaments of beaten gold, tangled together like Christmas tinsel.

  “What the hell?” he muttered.

  Tina Romero stepped over to the black-edged urn. She carefully lifted it, shone her flashlight inside. “Empty,” she said. Then she raised it to her nose, took a gingerly sniff. “Odd. It smells sour, like-like vinegar.”

  Stone came over, took it from her, smelled it also. “You’re right.”
He handed it back.

  “Bands of copper, iron spikes, filaments of gold,” Logan said. “What could this all mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Stone said. “But that will answer all your questions-and more.” He pointed at the onyx-colored chest that stood in the center of the chamber. “That will be what makes all our careers-and puts me in the history books as the greatest archaeologist of all time.”

  “You think…” Rush paused. “You think the crowns of Egypt are in that chest?”

  “I know they are. It’s the only answer. It’s the final secret of the final chamber of Narmer’s tomb.” Stone turned to Valentino. “Frank? Have your men give me a hand with this.”

  Slowly-as if possessed by a single thought-the group drew together, forming a silent ring around the ebony chest.

  47

  Amanda Richards walked into the forensic archaeology lab and turned on the overhead lights with a flick of her fingers. She stood in the doorway a moment, taking in the racks of instrumentation, the carefully scrubbed lab desks and work surfaces. Then she stepped over to a table in one corner. The room smelled faintly of formaldehyde and other chemical preservatives-and, more chillingly, of sulfur.

  Taking a seat at the table, she plucked a folder from beneath her arm and opened it. For several minutes, she examined the sheets within: X-ray fluorescence reports, the all-important CT scans, radiographies, and a brief summary analysis by Christina Romero, all pertaining to the same subject: the mummy of King Narmer.