It knew.
In his peripheral, Dara scampered down the hallway in a wounded crab walk, but he didn’t allow his eyes to follow her, tried not to even think about what he saw, because if it became a full thought in his mind, then the ancient dead man would know it as well. Instead, he thrust his head forward, jaws open, and bit into the mummy’s brow, teeth fighting through the creature’s tough skin. Jerking his head away, he took a chunk of the creature with him, a gnarled loop of dried tissue that felt and tasted like tree bark.
Spitting it aside, he growled in the monster’s face, baring his teeth. Its chiseled-stone expression never changed, its lips never parted, and yet a voice spoke, not carried on the air but forming inside his head. It said, “Do I taste like a songbird, boatman?”
And that scared him worse than the pain, or the loss of his hand, or the thought of his coming death; the thought that even such a tiny detail as his desire to taste ortolan had been compromised convinced himany fight he might have left in him was futile. This dead man, this monster, had devoured his entire life, every bit of it, in a few scant seconds. Is that all his life had been? Less than a minute of story to tell? Had he really wasted it all?
The mummy’s powerful hand pressed against his chest and slammed him against the wall, forcing his shoulder blades flat and his arms to extend. Bennie’s scream turned into an animal’s howl, primal and unrestrained, as the pain surging from his arm dug in deeper. In his left hand he still held the remains of his smoldering right arm, disintegrating into ash and slipping from between his fingers. It had snapped off just below the shoulder when he’d hit the wall.
The creature’s mouth, drawn tight by the ages, pulled open, jaws displacing a weave of desiccated muscle and fossilized cartilage, revealing a set of boxy, elongated teeth, dull like bone, the enamel long gone. Inside his head, he heard it speak again, “And you, boatman, do you taste like songbirds?”
It came at his throat, fast, teeth closing around his Adam’s apple, head snapping from side-to-side, teeth working through the tough skin and muscle, blood vessels bursting. Bennie thrashed, trying to push the creature off him, but it was too strong. The image of himself as an insect came to mind, pinned inside a felt-lined box to be probed and tortured.
The mummy’s teeth tore through his esophagus, the strong muscle wall retracting from the puncture, widening the hole. A sandpapery tongue invaded his throat, impossibly long, traveling up, blocking out his air. It slithered past his uvula into his mouth and latch onto his own tongue. Covered in snagging barbs, it retreated back down his throat, dragging its prize, fraying the tough stalk of muscle. When the mummy withdrew its bloody face from his throat, it came away with a trophy: his uprooted tongue dangling from between those hideous horse teeth.
“No, not a songbird,” it said, the voice turning to mad cackling inside his head. The laughter became a throbbing migraine headache, pounding at his temples, as painful as the gaping hole in his throat. “You taste like river fish.”
The mummy dropped him. Spilling to the floor, he felt his heartbeat begin to slow and the blood spray from his neck grow less intense. His lungs emptied. Trying to draw breath, his body convulsed in answer, unable to pucker the throat wound enough to pull air down his windpipe. He knew his end was here and felt a strong mixture of pain and anger and hate and regret and self-pity overtake him. Staring up at his murderer, his vision darkened, his pain numbed, and his fingers twitched.
This is it, he thought, this is it this is it this is it this is it this is it this this is it this is it this is it this is it this is it this-
-is it this is-
-it this-
Chapter 27
Rising up from the far stairwell, thick gray smoke rolled through the hallway, growing like a snake. Priscilla glanced over at Mason as they walked side-by-side, a few feet behind Brigham. The Englishman, still shirtless and wobbling, headed straight into the oncoming fog. “Is the ship on fire?”
“Basically,” Eli answered, a few steps behind them. “The fuel shafts that feed the engines are blowing back. That means the coal stores are smoldering—”
“Like a chimney fire?” she asked.
“Worse than that.” Eli’s voice sounded grim.
“How much worse?” Mason asked, waving wisps of smoke out of his face.
“Mr. Leland warn you about the pops and moans you can hear and feel through the decks? It’s the engine burning dirty. Makes the whole ship vibrate sometimes. Well, the ash burns hot enough, the furnace will blow, and then we have a room full of coal going up.” He pantomimed an explosion with his hands.
Priscilla added speed to her steps. “How long?”
“Don’t know,” Eli said, coughing. “Seen a few small engine fires, nothing like this, not with all this smoke floors up. I’m just a cook, y’know, nothing more, but I know what heat off a five-hundred-degree frying pan looks like and I’m gonna tell you, I don’t think we got much time at all.”
“Wonderful,” Mason said. “We gotta get off this ship.”
Without turning, Brigham called back, “You three want to go, you go, but I’m not leaving without Owney.”
“Owney?” Eli blurted out.
With that, Brigham stopped, closed his eyes, and swore under his breath. As Priscilla and Mason came up beside him he tapped the side of the revolver against his temple. “Dara, I meant Dara, of course. I’m fine … just a little scrambled up from … . I’m fine.”
Brigham shook his head and growled, not only left to right, but shuddering it up and down and at diagonals; a wooly sheepdog shaking off rainwater. Priscilla raised a hand to run it down his cheek, but froze when his eyes shot open, and he muttered, “I said, I’m fine.”
And he took off again, finishing the hall and climbing the smoke-filled stairwell, Priscilla, Mason, and Eli in close pursuit. Rolls of billowing smoke made it a blind journey, the metal stairs under their feet visible for only fleeting moments. Ears guiding her, the heavy clank of Brigham’s feet let her know when the next rung was clear. She kept her eyes trained on her feet, obscured in cloud except for quick glimpses when the smoke thinned out between swells. She saw blood on the rungs, not much, just a few speckles. Emerging from the stairwell, all four of them coughing, Priscilla saw where it had come from. The back of Brigham’s pants were soaked through. She winced at the thought of the pain he must have endured—must still be enduring. But he struggled on, leading them down the hall where the smoke wasn’t as thick, leaving drops of blood behind him.
Priscilla’s feet stopped moving halfway down the hall.
Mason overran her by a few steps, then stopped when he noticed she had stopped. Eli, coming up behind her, called up to Brigham, “Wait, man, wait—”
Brigham turned, his face wrapped up in an annoyed grimace, lips already forming words, but then he, too, skidded to a stop.
Priscilla turned and faced the cabin door. Open only a crack, it shouldn’t have been distinguishable from any of the others; she wasn’t accustomed to the ship enough to differentiate between floors, let alone rooms, but this cabin called to her. It was the cabin where they had brought Buddy Martin.
“Maybe you shouldn’t.” Mason’s face was as sullen as a prisoner facing his last confession before execution. She knew that look, had seen it in the mirror on the night her father died.
Priscilla pushed open the door with her palm and stepped through. She wasn’t followed and that was good. None of the others had really known Buddy, certainly not as well as she had, and there was nothing as transparent and false as a goodbye between strangers.
He was on the bed.
She slid the door closed behind her; not completely, but enough to give her the illusion of being alone with him. Approaching, she reached out for his dangling hand and slid her hand inside his. His skin was neither warm nor cool, not at all like a living thing, but like the temperature of furniture. Avoiding the ragged hole in his chest, she stared at his face, jaw locked and brow furrowed, as if he’d d
ied fighting an enormous amount of pain. At least his eyes were closed. It would have been worse had they been open.
On her seventeenth birthday, her father away at a dig site, she had awakened in Buddy’s bed. Camping sixteen miles outside Lima, Peru, she hadn’t meant to share his tent, let alone his bed. They were between flings, still friendly and flirtatious, but not actively involved. She had a boyfriend back home—his name now long forgotten—and had set her mind on fidelity. A loud thunderstorm had ended her resolve. Waking before him, she spent an hour listening to him breathe and watching his naked chest rise and fall. That was the image of Buddy she’d always kept closest to her heart.
“I know I’ve always been difficult,” she told him now, holding his hand, feeling no pulse, and watching his still chest. Tears sprouted. “You were always perfect. I must be an idiot. You told me earlier that I push away the things I need the most. I guess that’s true. You were there for me through every immature, stupid tantrum. All those times I cried over … nothing, it was on your shoulder. And I wasn’t even here for you while …”
Her throat quivered and her sorrow spilled over into sobs. She could speak no more. She folded herself over him, wishing she could feel his body heat, but there was none. The contour of his chest, so familiar, was now alien as well, like a rural childhood town gone residential.
Rising, she wiped his blood off her face, and whispered, “Goodbye, Buddy … you have no reason to believe me … but I always loved you.”
Walking away from him, she slid her fingers under her eyes to chase away the tears. With a deep breath, she opened the door and stepped into the hallway.
Overstepping, she stumbled, legs wobbling, and started to fall. Mason caught her and held her to him, and against his body she could feel heat. That brought more tears, uncontrollable tears, and she buried her head on his shoulder and cried.
What she saw next didn’t happen. It couldn’t. Even with everything she’d seen and felt and heard over on this journey, she knew there was no magic at work here, no miracles, no real ghost. Buddy opened his eyes, rolled off the table, and came to the door. She reached over Mason’s shoulder for him—did she? No, but she saw herself reach all the same—but he was just beyond her reach. She understood that he couldn’t pass beyond the doorway, as if that portal wasn’t only between cabin and hall, but one the world of the living and the next. He smiled, lips pressed close together, and whispered, “It’s okay.”
He closed the door.
Chapter 28
The door was open. Buddy lay dead on the cot.
Priscilla pulled back from Mason’s shoulder, ran her sleeve over her face, and cleared her throat. The sound was wet and rough, like an influenza cough. “We can go now.”
Brigham didn’t wait for any more permission. He turned to the length of the hallway and took a first step, time suddenly seeming to accelerate, all actions blurring and overlapping into a single moving, indistinct image.
Something spilled out of the stairwell at the end of the hall, something small and curled into a ball, reaching up with tiny hands.
“DARA—” Brigham yelled and began to run.
At the same time, the clatter of boots came from the opposite stairwell. Priscilla whipped her head around. Out of a bale of smoke, Dr. Oelrich and Horst appeared, side arms drawn.
Priscilla screamed for Brigham, a sound, not a word.
Dara crawled toward Brigham.
Priscilla, Mason, and Eli ran toward them.
Brigham scooped Dara off the floor, pulling her to his chest as he straightened up, his face pressed against hers.
A gunshot echoed through the hallway.
Eli fell with a shout.
Priscilla dropped, scampered over to him, eyes glancing up at the advancing Germans. The shot had hit him in the lower back, just left of his spine, a little black pucker hole in his shirt. Wrapping her arms around him, she fought to drag him as he screamed, but like the shipping crates, he was too heavy. Mason returned to her side, skidding, and leaned down to help.
“If any of you move, you die,” Dr. Oelrich called to them. They complied, gently setting Eli down on the floorboards. As he came closer, the doctor said, “Horst is a marksman, even with a handgun. And fast. Don’t let the glasses fool you, they’re for reading. He’ll put a bullet in each of your heads before any one of you—”
Brigham, balancing Dara in one arm, raised the revolver. “Before what? Before I can pull this trigger? Are you sure?”
“BRIGHAM, NO—” Priscilla yelled.
Dr. Oelrich grinned. “My eyesight is not as keen as Horst’s, Englishman, but I do well enough. I see that you’ve taken the captain’s gun from Mr. Lane. I suspect you’ve saved me the effort of killing him. Thank you. But you should know, that gun does not function.”
“You’re lying.” Brigham pulled Dara closer. The little girl hid her face in his chest. Priscilla nodded toward him to confirm it was true.
Mason stepped between the guns and Priscilla.
A finger of black smoke wormed down the hallway, invading the white clouds, hanging like a spiderweb around the Germans.
Eli, panting, said, “The fuel store’s on fire.”
“How long for the engine?” Priscilla whispered.
Biting his bottom lip to fight the pain, from between his clenched jaws, he grumbled, “Minutes.”
New noise came from both stairwells, loud, thunderous eruptions of sound. At first, Priscilla thought it was the death rattles of the ship’s engine succumbing to the fire—but then she saw them. Two massive shapes ascended the stairwell behind the Germans, dark figures coming forward through a haze of dark smoke, heads strangely still on broad shoulders.
The Germans spun, facing the new arrivals, took aim, and back-stepped down the hall.
Brigham dropped the useless revolver and ran to the center of the hallway. Shooting her eyes to the stairwell beyond him, she saw that another, even larger figure was descending, blocking off the only other escape route.
Shambling into the hallway, the figure came into view. Priscilla recognized it immediately. The horrible face from the crate stared down the hallway at her, now animate, and grinned through a maze of ancient wrinkles on its decayed face. There was fresh blood smeared across its chin.
Mason backed her against the wall, keeping her body blocked by his, and stretched out both arms, as if he could keep the Germans and mummies at arm’s length by gesture alone.
Motion caught her eye and her head swung back around. The pair of mummies entering the aft stairwell came into light, both wearing identical ferocious sneers on their warped faces. But unlike the creature on the hallway’s other extreme, these carried weapons. Though she had never seen either of these particular weapons before, she knew them by sight. One carried an ancient Greek Kopis, a thin, arm’s length sacrificial sword. The other held an elm Holmegaard bow, a restrung relic, restored to its Mesolithic condition. They were exhibits from the hold, she realized.
Dropping his arms, Mason took Priscilla’s hand and squeezed. She couldn’t see the freedom fighter in his eyes anymore.
Gripping Dara, Brigham joined their huddle over Eli.
The Germans continued to retreat, until they, too, were within arm’s reach. The mummies lurched forward, cutting off both stairwells and closing in.
Dara wept. Eli screamed.
The black smoke engulfed them.
Chapter 29
They moved through the smoke like stone idols that had come to life, monolithic exaggerations of the human form, weathered and ancient but resilient and unbroken. The spreading plumes of smoke and ash raced down the hallway, overtaking the Germans in a dark, rolling wave of vapor, then, coming in like the tide, closed around Mason, Priscilla, Eli, Brigham and Dara.
Priscilla breathed in. Her lungs burned.
The wave of smoke cleared and Priscilla’s eyes caught a glint of refracted light from the far side of the hallway. Squinting, she saw the straight edge of a fire ax peeking over t
he rolling bales of smoke. Mason’s eyes followed hers. Without hesitation, the Irishman sprinted toward the weapon, passing Brigham and Dara before being swallowed by the cloud.
Yanking Eli’s collar, Priscilla groaned, her muscles straining. His body slid, not much, but enough to elicit a fresh scream from his throat. Leaning over his ear, she screamed, “YOU’VE GOT TO HELP ME—”
“Can’t,” he whimpered, large pearly tears flowing down his face. “Hurts … too much … gotta … leave me …”
A fresh black cloud enveloped the Germans, wisps of smoke reaching around their bodies like a million tiny fingers closing into a fist. They began to scream. The hall filled with echoes, loud and soft, distorted and plain, like a choir of ghosts. Then the gunshots, quick blasts, a volley of suppression fire.
Brigham stormed across the hallway, kicked open a cabin door, and hurried inside. He left the door open behind him.
“HELP ME WITH HIM,” Priscilla screamed.
“—gotta … go … now … gotta go—”
“No,” she snarled into Eli’s face. “I’m not leaving you here to die.”
Mason returned, heels first, stepping backward out of the black haze. He held the fire ax like a baseball bat, hands gripped tight to the hilt’s end. Then the other figure came through the smoke, face first, the wickerwork puzzle of its gnarled features emerging like a shark’s fin on a dark ocean. It reached for Mason with a thin, tubular arm and spider-leg fingers.
Mason swung the ax, the force of his swing spinning him off his feet and missing his mark. The mummy, now fully out of the murk, hissed in disapproval.
Priscilla jerked on Eli’s collar with every bit of strength in her. Unable to withstand the pressure, the shirt tore at the seams and she lost her grip on the fabric. She fell, back to the wall.
The Germans stopped screaming.
The largest mummy advanced, thrusting out with one open hand, punching into Mason’s chest, the impact resonating like a thunderclap. He flew back as if struck by a sledgehammer swung by a bodybuilder, feet leaving the ground, body folding over as it collided with the wall. The ax freed itself from his hand a moment before he fell, hands too late to brace himself for impact.
Eternal Unrest: A Novel of Mummy Terror Page 19
