by S. A. Sidor
On the table was a crate filled with tubes like the one in Hakim’s pocket. The print on the side of the box read: GIANT POWDER COMPANY. Beneath that was an address in San Francisco.
Dynamite sticks.
Hakim had stolen one. This final act proved to me that he was driven by forces beyond himself to do unspeakable deeds, but the real Hakim had not completely evaporated in death. He’d rebelled. From the looks of things, he had planned an honorable, if catastrophic, act of resistance. Interrupted – he’d paid for his rebellion. But I can’t imagine death is any worse than being the puppet of a mad sorcerer. I took two more sticks from the box, making a bundle of three, and I added a length of fuse. Put the sticks and fuse into my coat. I bent down and closed Hakim’s eyes. He had deserved better than what he got in the end.
A lot of people do.
“Hardy! Look out in the bunkhouse!”
I ran to the door in time to spy McTroy kneeling in the high rocks. I waved. Glad to see he was alive. He was pointing off to my left. I turned and saw the mine portal. Heavy beams framed it. Twin rails led into darkness. But my attention quickly diverted.
Two missiles (like the ones I’d witnessed earlier) zipped through the air.
I heard a dull clatter hitting the rocks. Then I saw the second projectile come to an abrupt stop right at McTroy. From this vantage point I could make out what they were – not birds, but arrows. McTroy rolled over. An arrow stuck out of his upper body. He dropped his rifle and grabbed at the arrow’s shaft. His rifle slid off the slick rocks, down into the ravine, disappearing between boulders with a dreadful clack. He ran for better cover. A barrage of arrows followed him, coming from two directions.
An arrow hit his leg. He fell, tumbling head over heels into the canyon.
“McTroy!”
No reply.
Then a cry came.
“Hardy!”
But it wasn’t McTroy’s voice. It was Evangeline’s, shouting from the opposite side of the notch. Two mummies scurried up the steepness like gray spiders. Evangeline moved out onto the narrow ledge. There was nowhere she could go to get away from them. It was only a matter of time. Another mummy, this one with a broad-bladed and brutal short sword, picked his path carefully, but speedily, to the spot where McTroy had terminated his fall.
I gripped my ape-headed stick. I was prepared to attack as a wild beast would if his family group were threatened. However, a terrible decision faced me. Where to go first? McTroy appeared incapacitated and his assassin stalked on, yards away from finishing him with a throat slashing or beheading. Sweet Evangeline crawled out to the tip of her ledge. She had her Army pistol in hand, true, but I knew what little effect bullets had on the mummies. She could at best delay but never defeat her assailants. Yong Wu was either hidden or…
I dared not think we had lost him. It would be too devastating…
Indecision had been my undoing in the past, but I was determined not to let that happen here. The stakes were too great. I made my call. Yes, I would go where my heart ordered me. I had not taken but a single step when Evangeline shouted again.
“Hardy, be on your guard!”
Her tone seemed less panicky than a warning. As it happened, indecision did not undo me, but striding into open terrain without proper caution or heeding the repeated shouts of warning from my companions was another matter entirely. I cleared the doorway. Over my left shoulder, the fourth servant of Odji-Kek had sidled his insidious way along the bunkhouse, pressing his back to the outer wall. His gray bindings blended with the bunkhouse stones, and my temporary color blindness made matters worse.
It was too late.
I turned. He punched me squarely between the eyes.
The bandages felt hot. Dry. The hand inside was very cold. Like a frozen club it hammered upon my head. Again. And again. He bashed my face. Crack! One of my teeth popped out onto my tongue. I tried raising my arms, but my brain had disconnected from the rest of me. I was untethered. Another hard blow, another enamel crack. Did my neck just break? I thought it might have. But it was darkness for me either way; that was certain. Darkness and an instant sleep.
Was this a dream?
For an unconscious moment I entertained the possibility that I had simply drifted off into a slumber, napping on my desk, my heavy tome-filled head tucked into a pair of folded, tweedy arms, snug in my cubby carrel in Chicago. Safe in the musty, old library. No Egypt for Hardy, no sir. The Sahara so studded with puzzles and curses, the Gila, here in the Americas, equally chockful of dangers… mummies, banditos, Chinese vampires… a smart, cat-eyed, occultist librarian whom I fancied – how preposterous was that! – and a steely bounty hunter with a name like Rex McTroy. Please…
This was dream stuff, surely.
Pure fancy. I mean… it had to be. Didn’t it?
Bloated, slickened worms the size of toppled silos… asps… killer train wrecks and horseback-riding grave eaters – one who played flamenco guitar! – these materials lived in dreamland, not the borderland. There was peace in knowing it was all a dream.
I smiled and my smile hurt.
I awoke. Jarringly. My mouth filled with penny-flavored froth.
I spit blood. I tried to open my eyes.
Managed the right eye, just a crack. Dizzy-making. Desert scene. Sparsely illuminated or was that me dipping into blackness again…
Waking–
All the colors were bone.
There were two mummies with me now. Servants of Kek, neither one the Slayer from the South, Lord of Demons, et cetera. Two minions dragging me, arm in arm. Three jolly stumbling drunkards were we. My legs had gone the way of boiled noodles (limp). My feet raked sand. They bumped along crossties set between twin rails. We were headed into the mineshaft. Where smoky lanterns were spiked to chiseled walls–
Smother me now – oh, I hate being closed in. Shadow-trove. An eggy smell gassing up from somewhere below. Stinkdamp? Damned dust everywhere in here too. Coolness emanated. I was blind in my left eye. I had to swing my head around to see what was what. So the neck’s not broken, I thought. But it turned stiffly with an audible grind. My face swelled lumpy as a fruit pie. Couldn’t feel it much and was glad for that. I spit out a tooth and tried to snatch it as it dropped in the dirt in the dark.
“Aaarggaahhh,” I said.
I’d bitten the inside of my mouth. Bloody specks flew out with my attempt at speech. I’d only wanted to swear at my captors.
We climbed into a mine cart.
They high-stepped; I was shoved and dumped. They mashed me in between them, undead fore and aft. Their bodies: pokey as tree limbs bound by burlap. Jabby knobs of elbows and sharp, crooked fingers prodded my ribs. At least they let go of my arms. I was tingling. I touched my blind eye, hoping not to find a gooey hole. Tender and bulging – my eye was still there. I pried the thick lids apart. It bothered me to look out, but I could see things – a sliver of passing, glowing streaks (the lanterns), and the back of the mummy who sat in front of me, his dull gray head like a bulbous hornet’s nest, papery, whorled, pointed at the top, and drilled straight through with a hole. One of McTroy’s bullets did that, I was sure. I felt happy about it. He didn’t seem to care. The cart went down. Down. Could the mine be this deep? Fast, jostling us side to side. My jaw throbbed. I knew where the missing tooth had come from, below the battered eye. I tongued the gap and an electric pain jolted into the center of my head. I yowled. The motion of the cart was too much. We kept going, and going… the wheels shrieked madly. My head was a spinning top. The view tilted, warped, and suddenly I was sick, bent over, emptying my stomach along the rail margins. The tunnel above us carved low and tight, but the air caressed and felt as clean as cool spring water on my skin. I rested my chin on the edge of the cart, breathing through my nose, until the mummy behind me grabbed a handful of my hair and hauled me into my seat.
“Bassstaarrr,” I growled, as I pawed at my lips to wipe the slime away.
The cart braked with a jerk – slowe
d – jerked again. Stopped.
We had arrived.
41
A Sarcophagus for Pythagoras
“Doctor Hardy, I am so very pleased you are here with us.”
Montague Pythagoras Waterston finally stood before me. He was not as I had imagined him when I first received his letter. No, the Monty speaking to me was a man of matchstick arms and broomstick legs. He teetered on his feet. His shock of white hair must have been a source of great pride… once. But a tinge of unhealthy tarnish had seeped in. Limp strands fell over his eyes. He combed them back with a jaunty flip of his fingers, but they would not stay in place. His hands were nervous yellow crabs. He’d made a mess of his last shave, leaving bits of beard and cuts on his face where he’d nicked himself. Dried blood and soap stained his collar.
The mummies shoved me toward the wall and chained me to a beam overhead.
“This is a most special day,” Waterston said to me. “You are privileged. People would pay a fortune to see what you’re going to see. I will be made immortal. This is an historic moment in American magic… by way of Egypt, of course.” His smile was ghastly; the teeth grossly prominent as if the skin around his mouth had shrunk away. I might have believed he was the resurrected corpse among us and not Kek. It seemed only fitting to meet him underground.
“You’re insane. Kek’s going to kill you and take your money,” I said.
“Tut, tut… Show respect for your superiors, young man.”
“I thought you were smarter than this, Waterston. You don’t know what I brought back. He Who Disturbs the Balance. Plague Bringer. Corrupter of the Land. Do you think the ancients gave out those titles lightly?”
Waterston looked at me the way one looks at a dog that has eaten the Christmas goose. “Gag him,” he told the mummies. But they remained still, as if they hadn’t heard.
A low chuckle from an obscure corner – Kek emerged. His standing next to Waterston exaggerated the differences between the two men. Waterston, white, thin, and fragile as a fishbone: a fossil of earlier life. The sorcerer grew larger every time I met him. He was like a bonfire that raged out of control and consumed the town. The air around him popped and crackled with combustion. “Silence the doctor. When his friends join us, we can talk. Their sounds will be a song to my ears. The tomb is a quiet place, Monty.”
“I shan’t be there for long,” Waterston said.
“Don’t be too sure–” I started to say.
One of the mummies tore a bandage from his leg and stuffed it into my mouth. Pain throbbed from the holes where I had lost my teeth. Saliva ran copiously down my chin. The burial cloth tasted of salt and onions. I felt my gorge rise. Acid bathed my inner throat. I breathed through my nose, and swallowed my own blood in a rush of panic and revulsion. Calm yourself, Hardy. Don’t end up choking to death on your vomit. It was my voice in my head, not Kek’s.
They were leaving me alone, busying themselves with the ritual at hand. I had an opportunity to look around, as I concentrated on slowing my breathing and calming my nerves. I have learned that coldly observing facts can sometimes steady me and keep my mind from galloping off the first available cliff. The mine cart I’d ridden in with the two mummies lay off to my right, and to my left was a dome of unbroken rock. The vein of gold within the rock had crusted over scabby red like an old, dark wound. My chemical background taught me gold and iron ores often mixed; blood red and yellow gold accompanying each other in geology, as in life. This specimen stood out boldly in the lamplight, as wide as my hand in most places; it forked across the expanse of the dome like lightning during a hellish thunderstorm. But gold imprisoned in the raw earth isn’t nearly as impressive as gold extracted, molded, and polished to please the human eye. Here before me I had examples of both, and there was no comparison.
Monty Waterston, Odji-Kek, and the duo of mummy-guards gathered around a pair of newly-made, but historically accurate, golden sarcophagi; the sarcophagi were open, and their lids waited, propped against the far wall. My attempt at slow breathing failed miserably. Bookended between the lids stood a Ka door like the one from the Temple Underneath. The profile of the first lid resembled a much younger, healthier, and robust Montague P. Waterston.
The second lid was a dead ringer for his daughter, Evangeline.
I must have made a noise showing my alarm, because Waterston lifted his head from inspecting the confines of his soon-to-be coffin to grin at me.
“It’s a beautiful Ka door, is it not?”
I shook my head.
“No doubt, Dr Hardy, you have noticed the sarcophagi. Fine craftsmanship. We mined the gold for them right here. Off the books, mind you. I don’t need any record of my private digging on the company ledgers. I employed men like the pharaohs did. They will be buried in the mine with me and Evangeline. We’re very old-fashioned that way.”
I struggled and pulled at my chains. Dust showered me. The beam held solid.
“You disapprove? Even after you’ve seen the abundance of evidence? Amun Odji-Kek, May He Live Forever in the Endless Night, will bring us back good as new. Better than new. Bodies die. I have outlasted mine. That must be obvious. Some people are born to live and die. Others are destined to be eternal… like me. The Sorcerer Kek has defeated the gods who sit in judgment. I am not so fond of judgment. Better to make your own luck. What would be the point of all my wealth if someday I had to walk away from it?”
I kicked gravel at him.
“If you like having legs, I would suggest you stop doing that,” he said. “Now, where was I? Ah, yes. You have likely noticed I only have the innermost coffins. No outer boxes of wood and stone. Why hide such luxury? You see, I have no fear of grave robbers. We will seal the mine, of course. That’s only prudent. The Sorcerer Kek will apply a nasty curse to the portal. I own Resurrección Mine and will continue to do so ad infinitum. There will be no more mining. I can post guards if I so choose. The sarcophagi are quite safe, believe me. And no one will be looking for my tomb, because as far as the world will know, I will be alive and healthy. As will my lovely daughter, once she sees this is her best path going forward. She is impetuous. Being young, she does not think things through. She will have her time. We both will. All the time in the world…”
There was a rumbling in the mine – a burring vibration I felt through my feet.
“Speak of the devil and she doth appear,” her father said.
Another cart was riding along the rails. McTroy had dispatched one of Kek’s servant mummies at the sand whirlpool, leaving four to contend with; two of those remaining had guarded me, and were presently preparing for the death-entombment ritual, meaning that the other two mummies remained on the surface. Before being knocked unconscious, I had witnessed a bandaged automaton, armed with a short sword, lumbering in the direction of McTroy’s inert form lying on the rocks.
I swiveled around as far as my bonds allowed. I wanted to see who was in the cart when it arrived, but nearly every combination of passengers that I could imagine made my heart sink. I sawed my chain back and forth over the beam. It would take me hours, even days, to cut through the equivalent of a tree trunk from which I hung suspended.
The cart wheels screeched. They were getting closer.
Kek gestured to his servants, and they, in turn, lurched their brainless way to the empty cart we had used previously on our downhill journey. I wondered for the first time if Kek spoke to them mainly in their thoughts the way he did to me. I had not heard any of them talk to Kek or to each other. Were they thoughtless creatures? A quartet of detached torsos and limbs that merely acted out Kek’s commands, according to coded transmissions they received like electromagnetic telegraph machines? The second cart was braking now. Shrieks rang from the tunnel. Then it appeared: a boxy blur of shaking, rattling rust. It slowed. The horrid grinding made my (remaining) teeth ache.
A hairless, gray form sat stiffly with its hand clutching the brake lever. The bandages that once wrapped around its head were missing, stripped aw
ay, and a tattered scarf of formerly intact bindings dragged behind the cart. The mummy was male. They all were, I had assumed, but Kek was the only one I had seen uncovered. This fellow was far less handsome. He had been in a close struggle – that was apparent – and he had paid a price. His exposed skull looked like a tree after children peel the bark away and weather and insects have had a go at it. Two bulging, inflamed eyes were the only parts that seemed the least bit vital. They rolled in flaky, tobacco-brown sockets. He had no nose. It was a juiceless affair, all told.
He released the brake. As he rose in the cart, puffs of dust wheezed from his armpits and leg joints.
Evangeline was with him.
I hadn’t seen her before, but now I could. The mummy had his arm clamped under her chin. She was tight in the crook of his elbow. Her skin had changed from peaches and cream to maroon. Her eyes were shut. I dreaded the worst: that she was dead, or near death. Her father wouldn’t care, would he? He’d simply ask Kek to summon her from the Duat, and in whatever state she might be. Would she be herself? Or would she, like Hakim, find annihilation preferable to infinite undead limbo?
The mummy hauled her around, swinging her body up and out of the cart.
As she came over the edge, she planted a foot on solid ground and kicked out her other leg into the side of the mummy’s knee. His leg snapped with a loud crack! Like dry kindling it sounded, before one throws the little pieces in the fire. Standing on one leg and holding onto Evangeline proved impossible.
