Inside the cutting, sand and dust began to settle. I could just see that the blast had ripped a hole in the dig, a deep yawning blackness that stretched down and into the depths of the dune.
I was torn between helping the lad and following Johnson into the hole. I’d actually chosen to stay with the lad when his eyelids fluttered and he looked up at me. He grabbed my arm, tight.
“You must stop him,” he whispered, his voice throaty. He’ll destroy the site.”
He tried to stand, but dizziness forced him back to his knees. He pushed me away from him.
“Go, and please stop him. I’ll be all right.”
I didn’t need any more prompting. I went down into the dune.
My lantern was barely strong enough to pierce the dust that still hung ahead of me, but there were two sets of footprints on the floor of the passageway. By crouching and holding the lantern close to the ground I was able to follow them downwards.
After ten yards the dust was less dense in the air. I was able to see that the walls to either side of me were no longer just compacted sand; they were stone blocks. We had been close.
Part of me wanted to tarry, to pore over the pictographs that covered the walls, but the sound of a deep chanting from below forced me to carry on downwards. The air got colder, and increasingly more stale and musty. And still the chanting got louder. A chill ran up my spine, and I don’t think it was from the cold.
I woke with a start, knocking my ashtray over onto the carpet. It was just after 11:00 p.m. and the room sat in pitch darkness. I rose from the chair, and bent to lift the ashtray. And that’s when the creaky floorboard in my bedroom groaned as someone stepped on it.
I stood still, but the noise wasn’t repeated. I stepped over to the door and put my hand on the handle...just as it turned from the other side.
I stopped and held my breath.
From far away I heard chanting, a guttural drone that shook through my body as if I stood too close to a bass speaker at a concert. The brass handle went cold in my palm, and when I did finally breathe mist formed in the air ahead of me.
Thud! Something heavy struck the door, then another, shaking the wood in its frame.
“I’ve called the police,” I shouted, realizing even as I said it how lame it sounded.
The door shook once more.
All went silent.
The door handle suddenly felt warm, and I knew, I don’t know how, that the room beyond was empty. I turned the handle and stepped inside.
I almost gagged at the stench. My nose told me that something had died, and not too recently, but by the time I reached the window the smell had already faded.
A quick visual tour of the room told me what I knew—it was empty. I tried to open the window, and found it to be locked from the inside. I didn’t know whether to be happy about that or not. After I opened it I stood at the open window and gulped air until my heart slowed.
By the time I stepped back into the living room, I had almost written the experience off as a waking dream brought about by my night’s reading.
Almost, but not enough to allow me to go back into the bedroom.
I filled a glass with whisky, lit a cigarette, and went back to Dunlop’s story. To start with, I had one ear on any noise, and when a car alarm went off outside I must have jumped nearly a foot. But the story had me gripped, and it wasn’t long until it took me away once more.
The chanting got louder still, and part of me wanted to turn and flee, to get back to my tent and my gin. But the thought of what might await, and what damage Johnson might do before we could catalogue it properly, drove me onwards. I rounded a corner and found myself confronted with a nightmare.
A sarcophagus had been thrown to the floor, its contents broken and strewn across a wide space. I groaned when I saw the bones mingled with the remnants of clothing and binding—a priceless artifact had already been destroyed.
Johnson was on his knees, holding something small and misshapen in front of him, as if in supplication. The old Arab stood above him, his arms flung wide as he sang his chants into the echoing chamber.
Echoes and shadows ran in the space of their own accord. Statues of great serpents writhed in a crude semblance of life. I felt that if I only once averted my eyes, then dark things would pounce on me and devour me utterly.
The chanting got more strident, deeper and resonant. The thing in Johnson’s hands began to glow, at first dimly, like a luminescent moss. Then the light flared between his fingers, so much that I could see his bones through them. The light grew steadily brighter until the sickly green glow it cast was stronger than that of my lantern. Its baleful glare filled the room.
The Arab took the thing from Johnson, and it was then I noticed it was an amulet, a figurine hanging on a heavy gold chain. The Arab pulled the chain over his head, letting the amulet lie on his chest. Once more he raised his arms. He shouted, just one word, and the very air seemed to darken around him. For a second it seemed that he grew swollen and distended. Snakes seemed to writhe in the shadows cast round him, but when he dropped his arms, he was only an old Arab.
The Arab looked around the room and smiled. His expression was one of triumph. He smiled, nodded, and handed the amulet back to Johnson. As he brushed past me on his way out my skin crawled at his touch, as if I had been in contact with evil incarnate. He merely smiled a crooked-toothed grin at me, a smile that never reached his eyes.
“Well, Dunlop, we have our treasure,” Johnson said.
I fought down an urge to punch the man, and hurried to the rest of the sarcophagi. There was much to preserve before the desert air did its work.
The phone rang, and I jumped. The book dropped to the floor and I soaked my left leg with spilt whisky.
It was my client.
“Mrs. Dunlop. Is something wrong?” I asked.
“I wondered if you had made any progress,” she said. This time I didn’t need to see her eyes—I heard the lie. She wanted to ask me something else entirely, and my clients were not in the habit of calling me after midnight. I started to pay attention. This case had depths I hadn’t started to fathom.
“I’ve been doing some background work,” I said. “I’ll know more tomorrow.”
“And everything is okay?” she asked. “Nothing out of the ordinary?”
Strangely I thought of the typewriter in my office. She had known of that.
Did she also know about the presence that I had felt in the bedroom?
“No,” I said, then a thought struck me. “But if any ancient Arab sorcerers turn up I’ll be sure to let you know.”
There was a sharp intake of breath at the other end of the line.
“Tread carefully, Mr. Adams. We’ll do what we can to help you, but we’re relying on you to find the amulet for us.”
“We,” I said. “You and Mr. Dunlop?”
She cleared her throat.
“Yes. Arthur is here. I couldn’t lie to him, and I told him about the burglary.”
Another lie. She was storing them up.
“I’ll phone you tomorrow,” I said.
“I’ll look forward to it,” she said, and hung up on me.
After that the book didn’t appeal. I turned on the television and watched a very old hospital drama while smoking cigarettes, drinking whisky, and trying not to think about Mrs. Dunlop. After a while the weeping and wailing from the television forced me to get up to turn it off, and I stood by the window, watching the raindrops find their way down the glass and not seeing the life in the city beyond.
I nearly had a life once. It was back when Doug and I were just getting to know each other, and Liz was still alive.
I was a student—Organic Chemistry and Molecular Biology with a view to majoring in the biochemistry of cancerous cells. I managed to hold down the studies, and had plenty of fun between all the work. Liz and I had met the previous summer...one of those thunderbolt things that blew us both together. We were living together within a week, and had been i
nseparable ever since. We studied together, discussed our studies together, and partied together.
That all changed during my third year of studies. Although marriage had never been mentioned, we were pretty much a couple, and my old bed was seeing plenty of action. The night my life changed—the 30th of January—started like many others. Doug and I left another dull chemistry lecture and had a few pints in the Student Union. I was several sheets into the wind when I got back to the flat, and that was always a recipe for disaster.
She wanted to talk, I didn’t want to listen, and a blazing row ended as it usually did...I slammed the door behind me as I went back to the bar.
I got involved in a darts match against a team from Edinburgh University, and I was having fun, even although I was so bad at the game that I was the one who ended up buying most of the drinks. At some point in the evening the barman called me over and offered me the phone handset.
“It’s your girlfriend,” he said. “She says she needs you right now.”
The drink had spoken for me.
“Tell her she needs her head examined. I’ll be back when I’m good and ready.”
And so help me, I’d enjoyed myself. While she sat in an empty flat and decided on the future course of our lives, I enjoyed myself. I drank a lot of beer, I sang bawdy songs about the Mayor of Bayswater’s daughter—and the hairs on her dickie-die-doh—and only have a vague memory of getting back to the flat.
I’ll never forget the next hour, though.
I wandered into the kitchen, bumping into tables and knocking over chairs. That took a minute.
I put on the kettle, and stood beside it while it boiled. That took three minutes.
I took the coffee into the front room and watched the end of the late night news. Ten minutes.
The beer told my bladder it needed to get out. I put down my coffee and got out of the chair—slowly—I wasn’t very steady. One minute.
She was in the bath, and she had used my razor on her wrists, her ankles and her throat. She hadn’t wanted to make any mistakes. This wasn’t a cry for help—she’d tried that earlier and I hadn’t answered. For the past fifteen minutes she’d been dying.
By the time the police arrived I was nearly sober, but after they found her note and showed it to me, I got drunk again quickly. She had been three months pregnant.
Doug took me in that night. It was he who cleared out the flat and got me somewhere new to live, and it was he I leaned on through the funeral as I tried to avoid the tear-stained eyes of Liz’s family. But he couldn’t persuade me to stay on in my studies.
The road from there to here was long, and well-traveled. I stood by the window and let self-pity take over, pity for lost opportunities and lost loves. I was still there when the sun started to come up.
It was too early to start hitting the streets. I made some coffee and went back to Dunlop’s book. Old Joe had opened up the paper shop downstairs, and it was only a matter of time before the strains of ‘Just one Cornetto’ wafted my way again. But the coffee revived my spirits, and the book stole my thoughts away again, this time to the Mediterranean and a stifling hot day eighty years before.
It was nearly a fortnight before I saw the old Arab again, and then it was in a place where I never expected him.
Things had been hectic since Johnson’s find. Young Campbell and I had worked non-stop; cataloguing sarcophagi, desiccated bodies, and more golden statuary than even Carter had managed. Johnson had somehow magicked up a coterie of journalists, and even the London Times had managed to get a representative on site.
Johnson was desperate to get his ‘trophies’ back to Glasgow, and some items were being boxed and shipped even as we catalogued them. As I said, we were very busy, so it was some time before I noticed that the amulet I had seen was nowhere on the manifests. It wasn’t until we were on the boat and leaving the docks at Alexandria that I managed to catch up with Johnson.
He laughed when I asked for the piece.
“Oh no. Not that one. That’s my reward for my patronage, and my promise for the future.”
“I’ll expose you when we get home,” I said, but even as I said it I knew that it was an empty threat. Johnson was not going to worry about the opinions of some old archaeologist. Not when he was going to be front-page news.
Young Campbell was enraged when I told him. I found him pouring over the large collection of gold serpents we had found.
“Professor,” he said to me, “I think we have something here. I think there was a serpent cult. Not just that, I think their main god was serpentine.”
I had to agree with him. Too much of what we had found pointed in that direction. There was one particularly squamous sculpture with a multitude of snake-like heads that made my skin crawl just to think about it. That thought also brought to mind the shadows that had seemed to follow the old Arab. I told Campbell about my conversation with our sponsor.
“It cannot be allowed,” he said, his face flushed. The bruising around his head was only now beginning to fade, but it still lent a yellow cast to his skin. “It clearly says in the contract for the dig that all finds will be the property of the museum.”
“Aye,” I said. “But what can I do?”
A sly look came over the young man’s face.
“Don’t worry, Professor,” he said. “I think I know what needs to be done.”
Would that I had stopped him there, I might have saved him. But if truth be told, I didn’t think he would cause any mischief.
I had miscalculated the desire for revenge brought on by the blow to the head.
We spent the next hours going over the manifest and checking that all the boxes were secure before Campbell professed himself tired. He took his leave, and I wandered up to the foredeck to watch the sunset and smoke a last cigar of the day.
There was a slight coolness in the air, a hint of the welcome awaiting us back in Glasgow. I was actually looking forward to a slate-gray sky and endless drizzle. I could think of nothing finer than a walk through Kelvingrove Park in the rain with my lovely wife. It was while I was in this reverie that I heard the first scream.
I dropped the cigar overboard and ran down the inner stairs to the lower decks, taking three at a time.
The screams came from the vicinity of my own cabin, and they rose louder, then suddenly cut off. I turned a corner a bit too sharpish and barreled into a figure coming the other way. We raised our heads at the same time, and I found myself staring into the smiling eyes of the old Arab. He pushed me away and left at a run. I considered following, but it hadn’t looked like he was the source of the screams. I turned and headed towards the cabins.
My cabin door was open and Johnson was on his knees beside a body. As I entered he took something from the body’s hand and secreted it in his suit jacket pocket. But I had no time to consider that.
Young Campbell was not going to get time to prove his serpent theory.
He lay in a crumpled heap, and his body looked strangely deflated. It was only when I turned him over that I could see the extent of the damage that had been done. He had been eaten.
Eaten by something with a very small bite. A lot of very small bites.
After confirming the lad had passed on, I raised the alarm. The ship was scoured, but no old Arab was ever found.
Two
I woke, having slept all night upright in the armchair. It took me several seconds to realize that the phone was ringing, and several seconds more to answer it.
“Is this Adams Detective Agency?” a young voice asked. They sounded far away, and their accent was more California than Glasgow.
“Yes “ I said, warily...I got my fair share of crank calls.
“I think I’m being followed “ the voice said. “And I’d like you to find out who it is.”
“You mean you don’t know?” I asked.
“No. I sometimes catch a glimpse of him, but they’re too good at what they do and I can never catch them at it.”
I thought
about my caseload. The amulet case was all I had—it wouldn’t hurt to take on another.
“Where are you?” I said. “I’ll come and have a chat.”
“Just off the San Diego turnpike “ he said. “It’s....”
I stopped him.
“I’m not an American “ I said.
“That’s okay “ he replied. “Nobody’s perfect.”
I laughed.
“No “ I said, “I mean I’m not even based in the US. You’ve got a number in Glasgow, Scotland.”
There was a silence at the other end of the line, then he hung up without saying anything else.
It was to be the start of a day when everything was slightly off-kilter, a day I never got the hang of.
Dunlop’s story still resonated in my head an hour later as I made my way to Maryhill. It was obvious that the archaeologist believed that the amulet was in some way involved in Campbell’s death—what else could Johnson have put in his pocket? But if a search of the boat hadn’t found any old Arab, maybe he had never been there at all? Maybe Doug was right—the old man had caught too much sun out in the desert. All the same, I hadn’t taken the picture from my pocket yet, and the thought of just looking at it again made me uneasy.
The walk up Byres Road didn’t help any. Besides thinking about Dunlop’s book, I just couldn’t get Liz, and the past, out of my head. Every shop I passed, every pub, reminded me of that time. The facades might have changed, and students were certainly better dressed now than then, but the mood of the street stayed the same.
Liz had called it “Urban Bohemian”. Charity shops and batik specialists, vegetarian cafes and art-house bookshops, you’ll find them all in most University towns. It’s just that in Glasgow they’re concentrated in one street, a street that’s shared with bookmakers, drinking men’s pubs and off-licenses. The non-academics and the students share an uneasy existence that sometimes breaks out into acts of sudden violence, but this morning, with the sun shining and the wind only a breeze, all was quiet.
The Midnight Eye Files Collection Page 3
