Eternal Unrest: A Novel of Mummy Terror
Page 27
And then, with a final word, he ended it all.
Drained, she hung from his hand like a wet towel. She felt nothing, not even her own presence, not even the heat of her living body.
He tossed her aside.
She stared at him from the floor. He glanced at her with impassive eyes, no longer regarding her as anything of worth in his world. She’d been disposable all along.
He placed one hand on the dead Pharaoh’s chest and closed his eyes. Priscilla could tell he was praying, but now there was only silence in her head. Whatever connection they had shared was gone. He’d pulled it out of her. Reclaimed it.
She struggled for the strength to move, to pull herself off the floor, but her body refused to obey. The paralysis was complete. She felt like a ghost, no longer a physical being but still aware, unable touch a world still surrounding her.
Pharaoh Hekamaatresetepenamun’s eyelids opened, revealing a set of icy blue eyes. His body repaired itself, the flesh gaining color and filling out, his twisted arms straightening, his face recomposing.
Recognizing Petosiris, he screamed.
But only for a moment.
Before the transformation could even finish, Petosiris pulled his hand back, wound up, and thrust it deep into the Pharaoh’s chest, tearing through surging skin and weaving muscle, breaking through hardening bone, then pulled back. He extracted his hand from the gaping hole and opened his fist. In his palm he held a tiny bloodstained bundle of folded papyrus leaves.
He held it up and let the leaves unfurl in front of the Pharoah’s dying eyes. Just before the life left him for a second time, Petosiris showed the royal leader the ring he’d given Chione.
The Pharaoh collapsed inside the sarcophagus, his body reverting back to a desiccated mummy and crumbling into a pile of gray ash. His teeth skittered across the floor like jacks. A molar and canine, fused together and distorted by age, came to rest by Priscilla’s cheek.
Petosiris closed his fist around Chione’s ring and closed his eyes. His lips moved, but if any words came out they were too subtle to hear. Perhaps he was praying again, but Priscilla doubted it. Remembering the image of the beautiful young girl in her mind—and the sense of loss that accompanied it—she understood these words were meant for her.
She felt a tingle in her fingertips, the steady throb of blood pressure returning, and then her toes, too, curling and uncurling, motion returning to her hands and feet and arms and legs.
Petosiris turned to her. “It is complete.”
She pushed off the floor, muscles sore and protesting, and managed to stand. Her equilibrium was still off-kilter, but with effort she stayed upright, swaying as gravity pulled her this way and then that.
Petosiris went to a wall and removed a large ceremonial sword from its carved bone cradle. Swinging the weapon, he approached her in wide, confident strides. “There is no need for two of us anymore. One of us has no future here.”
Trembling, her eyes flickered around the tomb. She saw no other weapons. The thought of defending herself against him brought a deranged smile to her face. There was no way, she knew. She was no more threat to him than a sacrificial lamb to its butcher. But this lamb would not offer her throat to his blade.
She stepped back, wobbling, arms jutting out to balance herself, as he stepped effortlessly forward, leading with the sword. She needed to stay out of the weapon’s reach, she knew, or else he’d plunge the blade through her before she could ever dodge the strike. Another step backward and her foot twisted; she skidded, losing control, falling, catching herself with the butts of her palms against the floor and her feet flat, then crawled away as he came at her, the curved blade hovering over her head.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
Despair raced through her and tears flooded her face. She wanted to live, to return to Mason and live a life at his side, to visit her sister in her schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, to place a fresh bouquet of flowers on her mother’s hilltop grave, to—
Petosiris lowered the sword and held out the handle.
Bending down as she took the weapon, he said, “End this now. Chione waits.”
Climbing up, she wiped the tears from her face as he dropped onto his hands and knees and extended his neck under the blade. Her hands shook. Petosiris had always been with her it seemed, an invisible hand rearranging her life, emboldening her when she was weak and giving her the strength to avenge her mother. She wondered what life would be like without him, without even the smallest shadow of him within her to guide her through the dark times. Was it better to live with a monster than face life alone?
Alone.
Dara’s voice returned to her. “He say … that you die all alone in dark,with smile.”
She closed her eyes and saw them all: Owney Baxlerdean and Eli Towns; Captain Hilliard and Bennie Leland; Dara and Tamir and Keena Krayzel; the Germans and Italians; Buddy Martin and Mason—
Mason.
She opened her eyes and brought the sword down with every quivering ounce of strength she had in her. The moment the blade struck his neck his body changed, withering back into the shape of the decayed mummy she’d first seen in the storage crate.
The head came off clean.
Petosiris’s body fell to the tomb floor.
Priscilla dropped the sword.
The tomb doors cracked open.
afterward
Maurice Teasdale continued his duties as Curator of Special Exhibits at the British Museum until his retirement in 1959. Moving to Edinburgh, he spent his remaining days restoring his personal collection of rustic Scottish antiques. He died of respiratory failure at the Royal Victoria Hospital.
Hanley Brigstocke, the young soldier in charge of the refueling station in Basildon, fulfilled his military duty in 1945 and joined the Samuel Braener Company, a munitions manufacturer that transformed into a humanitarian relief organization. As an engineer, Brigstocke helped rebuild London’s war-damaged tenement communities. Never completely retiring, he died behind a forklift’s controls in 1982.
Maire Mason, mother of Brian Mason, battled chronic asthma in her two-room cottage in Sligeach, Ireland, until her passing in 1952. Her greatest wish was for grandchildren.
Director Gil Kelvins retired from the dock at the end of the war. Although plagued with illnesses stemming from his war wounds, he successfully ran for parliament where he served two terms as a leading voice for veteran affairs, free trade, and the preservation of artistic and historic antiquities.
Old Scratch wandered the Egyptian coastline for several days before finding a home with a fisherman’s family in Alexandria.
Katherine Stuyvesant continued to teach elementary school in Burks County, Pennsylvania. Only occasionally in touch with her older sister, Katie married and had three children before succumbing to pancreatic cancer in 1976.
Boris Sammons never returned to dock work after the accident that severed his fingers. He found employment instead wherever he could: art figure model, custodian, night guard. In late 1978, already in his late seventies, Boris invented a popular pastry item and sold the patent to an international fast food corporation. Finding himself suddenly wealthy, he moved to America.
William Abrams married twice more after leaving Priscilla Stuyvesant and fathered four children. After the collapse of his third marriage, William moved to New Mexico. His current whereabouts, if alive, are unknown.
Doctor Gottfried Oelrich’s body was found floating in the shallows off the Egyptian coast by an Egyptian fisherman. Selling the remains to the Italian army, he was able to move his family—and cat—to the countryside, avoiding the impact of the war.
Khaemweset was accused of conspiracy to murder the Pharoah Ramesses IV in 1147 BC. Although innocent of the charges, the High Priest convicted him. Before his execution could be performed, however, the Pharaoh died. It was determined that Khaemweset would be mummified alive and interred in the Valley of Kings in the Pharaoh’s place to thwart the rampant grave robbers exhuming the Kingd
om’s graves. His living skin was dried and sewn, but his organs were only removed after his death. His punishment was considered one of the most painful and extreme in Egyptian history.
On his journey from the devastated Italian camp at Dikheila, Brian Mason stepped on a Schrapnellmine “Bouncing Betty” landmine and was killed instantly. His body was buried by the locals in an unmarked grave.
٥
1989 A.D.
The bedsheets were cold. The yellowing window on the wall, flanked by a rocking chair, had a crack in its wooden frame, mostly hidden by a sloppy paint job, but nevertheless the source of the draft. Priscilla curled the lip of the comforter under her chin, but it did little to warm her. At seventy-eight pounds, she just couldn’t produce enough body heat to warm the bed.
Maybe by midnight, she thought, and then her thoughts turned away from the cold as Danny came through her door with his cart.
He was a good kid, in spite of his long, curly hair and his hunched posture. Most kids were like that now. He pulled a pair of cheap headphones off his ears. She could hear the buzz of electric guitars and the rumble of drums even across the room. It was a wonder the music hadn’t turned him stone deaf. “Hey, Miss Stuyvesant, how’ya doin’ tonight?”
She smiled at him.
On his black T-shirt—he never wore anything else, it seemed, as if they had stopped making them in other colors—there was an illustration of a mummy holding a British flag. She recognized the band name above the design—he had several of these—but this shirt was new. At the mummy’s feet were the words tour ’84.
“Good concert last night?” she asked him.
Now he smiled. “Oh yeah. Not something you’d like, I bet, though.”
“Never know,” she said with a wink. “Maybe you could spring me out of here some night and we’ll go rock and roll together.”
He laughed and held up a short paper cup. “Funny, I come here and you want to rock out. I go to a show and everyone there asks if I can get them some of these.”
He set her medication on the bedside table and followed it with a plastic cup of water. He glanced down at her hands. She darted them under the comforter. “You sure you’re okay? You look like you’re white knucklin’ it again tonight. I can get a nurse in here in no time.”
“I’m fine, Danny,” she lied. The pain was atrocious.
Mesothelioma is what they called the growth in her lungs. A form of cancer, Doctor Fleisburg explained, and then asked a lot of questions: Had she ever worked in a mine? A shipping yard? On an older cargo boat? She shook her head, ignoring the images of the fire aboard the Limpkin that danced in her head. How much smoke had she inhaled? The doctor told her there was no cure. So what did any of it matter?
Recently, though, the pain medications stopped bringing relief and that led to more and more nights without sleep. She was growing weaker. She could eat very little without getting sick and vomiting.
Did she have anyone they should call in case of an emergency, one nurse had asked? She knew the emergency that she meant. No, there was no one. No family left. No husband. No children. She was alone.
Danny, leaving, asked, “You want anything before I go? If you change your mind, you buzz a nurse, okay? You want this light on?”
“No, you can turn it off,” she whispered.
He flicked the switch and closed the door.
She had already decided that she wouldn’t take any more pills. Tonight was the night. She took a last glance around her dark room and said goodbye to the spider plant in the corner.
It wouldn’t be long now.
She was so close.
The door creaked, startling her, and a silhouette moved into the opening doorway. At that distance, especially in the low light, her old eyes couldn’t begin to define the shape of the visitor. Her voice cracking, she asked, “Who’s that?”
A hand moved to the light switch. The lamp next to the spider plant came on, bathing the room in warm yellow. The tall woman came inside and closed the door behind her. “An old friend.”
“Who are you,” Priscilla asked, squinting.
“A very good swimmer,” she said, coming to her bedside and reaching for her hand. Priscilla sat up, her body creaking and popping, and embraced her.
Tears came. “What took you so long?”
They sat on the bed and cried. And talked. And cried some more. Dara told her how she’d washed up on the Egyptian shore barely alive and clinging to a flimpsy beam of driftwood. She crawled across a rocky beach until she found a road. Hours later an English convoy came by and picked her up. She’d finished out her childhood on a military base in the English countryside with an adopted family.
Priscilla didn’t tell her side of the story. Dara didn’t seem to mind and offered more of her own story: moving to America, meeting a man, raising a family. Hours later, they’d run out of words. Dara stayed a while longer, just holding her hand and smiling.
“You should go now,” Priscilla told her as she settled back into bed. She could feel the end coming now, rushing at her. Her feet had already lost feeling.
Dara seemed to understand. “I could stay a little while longer.”
“But I can’t.”
Dara nodded, got up, and went to the door. Without asking, she shut off the light. “I’ll visit you soon.”
“Don’t you dare.” A weak smile turned up the corners of Priscilla’s lips.
The door closed.
Alone again, truly alone now, in the dark, she waited for the end to come.
She didn’t have long to wait.
Five thousand, six hundred miles away, an ancient body stirred.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lorne Dixon lives and writes off an exit of I-78 in residential New Jersey. He grew up on a diet of yellow-spined paperbacks, black-and-white monster movies, and the thunder lizard backbeat of rock-and-roll.
He is the author of the werewolf novella, Snarl, the zombie novel, The Lifeless, and the classic book mash-up, Hound: Curse of the Baskervilles, co-authored with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, all published by Coscom Entertainment.
The Coscom Entertainment Zombie, Monster, Mash Up and Superhero Books
Please go to www.coscomentertainment.com for a plot synopsis and more information on the books. All are available in eBook and paperback at your favorite online retailer. Thanks.
Monster Novella Series
The Weaponer by Eric S. Brown
The Black Cat and the Ghoul by Edgar Allan Poe and Keith Gouveia
Zombie Books:
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim by Mark Twain and W. Bill Czolgosz
Alice in Zombieland by Lewis Carroll and Nickolas Cook
Axiom-man: The Dead Land by A.P. Fuchs
Bits of the Dead edited by Keith Gouveia and illustrated by Sean Simmans
Blood of the Dead by A.P. Fuchs
Dead Science edited by A.P. Fuchs
Don of the Dead by Nick Cato
Possession of the Dead by A.P. Fuchs
Praise the Dead by Gina Ranalli
Revolt of the Dead by Keith Gouveia
R.I.P. by Harrison Howe
Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers by Paul A. Freeman
The Black Cat and the Ghoul by Edgar Allan Poe and Keith Gouveia
The Lifeless by Lorne Dixon
The Undead World of Oz by L. Frank Baum and Ryan C. Thomas
The War of the Worlds Plus Blood, Guts and Zombies by H.G. Wells and Eric S. Brown
The Weaponer by Eric S. Brown
World War of the Dead by Eric S. Brown
Vicious Verses and Reanimated Rhymes: Zany Zombie Poetry for the Undead Head edited by A.P. Fuchs
Zombie Fight Night: Battles of the Dead by A.P. Fuchs
Zombifrieze by W. Bill Czolgosz and Sean Simmans
Other Monster and Horror Books:
Animal Behavior and Other Tales of Lycanthropy by Keith Gouveia
Anna Karnivora: A Vampire Novel by W. Bill Czolgosz
Bigfoot War 2: Dead in the Woods by Eric S. Brown
Born to Bleed by Ryan C. Thomas
Discovery of Death (Blood of my World, Book One) by A.P. Fuchs
Dracula by Bram Stoker, Illustrated by Sean Simmans with an Introduction by Nancy Kilpatrick
Emma and the Werewolves by Jane Austen and Adam Rann
Eternal Unrest by Lorne Dixon
Hound: The Curse of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Lorne Dixon
Life of Death (Blood of my World, Book Three) by A.P. Fuchs
Magic Man Plus 15 Tales of Terror by A.P. Fuchs
Memories of Death (Blood of my World, Book Two) by A.P. Fuchs
Snarl by Lorne Dixon
The Summer I Died by Ryan C. Thomas
Superhero Books:
Axiom-man (The Axiom-man Saga, Book 1) by A.P. Fuchs
First Night Out (The Axiom-man Saga, Episode No. 0) by A.P. Fuchs
Doorway of Darkness (The Axiom-man Saga, Book 2) by A.P. Fuchs
The Dead Land (The Axiom-man Saga, Episode No. 1) by A.P. Fuchs
The Wraith by Frank Dirscherl
Valley of Evil (The Wraith Series, Book 2) by Frank Dirscherl
Cult of the Damned (The Wraith Series, Book 3) by Frank Dirscherl
Bookazines:
Dry Ice Dreams (Bumper Sticker Shine No. 1) by A.P. Fuchs
The Macro Mechanic’s Manifesto (Bumper Sticker Shine No. 2) by A.P. Fuchs