by S. A. Sidor
The mummy teetered. The mummy fell in a jumble.
She put a heel to him as if he had crawled out of her cupboard.
“Oh, my dear girl, please do stop,” Monty Waterston said, warmly chiding her. He hung his head in mock shame. “Such high spirits! You are your father’s daughter. Come to me, Evie.”
Evangeline reached under her skirts and retrieved her Army pistol. She pointed the gun at Waterston. His expression registered a mixture of shock and social outrage. Then she lowered the barrel to aim at the mummy on the ground, who was inching himself away from her. She pulled the trigger. But the hammer fell on empty chambers. Still she kept pulling it until Kek walked over and took the weapon away. He tossed it into a corner where it broke into pieces.
“Please join us,” he said. The sorcerer offered her his hand.
She did not take it, but she walked with him. She saw me hanging from the beam, the tips of my boots scraping the dirt, but she did not react. Monty went to her. He grasped her forearm, the way the elderly often do, and he guided her to the pair of gold sarcophagi. She did not resist. He was talking to her quietly. Encouraging, chastising, correcting her in the manner fathers have employed for centuries. He led her to sit on the lip of the open sarcophagus he had ordered for her. He brushed back her hair from her face. He kissed her lightly on the forehead. She looked into his eyes and smiled, but tears ran down her cheeks and her mouth trembled, as Monty went on talking, pointing at the coffins, the Ka door, and Kek.
The sorcerer approached me. On his way, he stepped on the head of the mummy still crawling in the dirt. The head burst like a dry husk. Kek never glanced down. He stood in front of me. His ribcage was at my eye level. His deep voice thrummed strings in my nerves, bristled my hairs. Honey-smooth. I knew why men followed him.
“She is bold,” he said.
I nodded. He removed the rags from my mouth.
“She’ll never have you,” I said.
He gave my cheek a gentle, playful slap. His fingers slid along my jaw.
Monty called out, “Let’s begin now. I don’t want to wait any longer.”
“I am ready. Put your wrists together.” He turned and gestured to his pair of servants. “They will bind you.”
“Bind me?” Waterston’s voice climbed. “Is that necessary? I’m not running away.”
“The ritual is not a matter of choice. Do you want it to work?”
“Absolutely,” Waterston said.
“They bind you. Wrists and ankles. You will lie on your back.”
“I see.”
“Do you have my dagger?”
“It is my most treasured artifact. The dagger led me to you. I bought it on the black market in London. The seller had no idea whose it was. He lacked knowledge.”
“Present the dagger to me.”
Waterston reached into his coat and withdrew the dagger. He turned the handle so it faced the evil priest. The flint blade was wide and very, very old. I did not recognize the monster carved into the ivory handle. It bore no writing of any kind.
Kek took the blade from him.
Waterston raised his arms. Purple veins creeped like centipedes over his bulging, arthritic knuckles. The mummies bound him. He winced when they tied his feet together. They lifted him and put him carefully in his coffin.
“Father, don’t do this,” Evangeline said.
His features softened. “My precious girl, have no fear. This business is only a formality. Join me. We can journey together to the Land of the Dead and back again. We will see wonders.”
She looked at him tied up in the gold box. She shook her head.
Waterston nodded. “Let’s talk again when I return.” He pointed with his bound hands. “I’m coming through that door in a matter of minutes. You can decide then what you really want.” He turned from his daughter to Odji-Kek. “I am ready for the rite to continue.”
Kek moved the dagger from hand to hand.
“You are prepared to leave this realm?” he asked.
“I am.”
“Kek’s lying to you!” I shouted. “You aren’t going anywhere.”
“You ought to listen to Hardy, Monty. He is smarter than you are.”
“What?” Waterston attempted to sit up in his sarcophagus. But Kek easily pinned him in place with one hand. He held the dagger up.
“Is this part of the ritual? But I read all the books. You strike quickly at my heart. I shall die instantly. Then… then I travel to the Duat to meet the gods. But you will intervene! The Lord of Demons will deny the gods and return me to this world.”
He quaked. The flesh of his face rippled in disbelief, incredulous.
“Why would I?” Kek asked. “What is my interest in you?”
“I saved your damned soul from the skull rock. You owe me.”
Kek sneered. Pride and haughtiness dropped over him like an ugly, gaudy mask. But looking again, it was not a change overcoming him, but his true self, the inner Kek surfacing. “I owe you nothing. It was I who made you search for me. From realms distant and beyond your imagination, I directed you to find me. Hardy dug me up. You, Monty, were but a blind servant. Like these two.” He pointed at the silent mummies.
“You will never have my money,” Waterston said. “The banks won’t give it to you. Not one penny. My lawyers will see to that.” He talked like a petulant child on the verge of crying, clasping his favorite, shiniest toy to his bosom.
“Your heir will give it to me.”
Waterston stared with pleading eyes at Evangeline. She, in turn, appeared as a statue of marble, immune from comprehending what was happening right before her eyes.
Waterston looked back at Kek.
“Why can’t you grant me this favor? It costs you nothing. Let me live as I once did.”
“Enjoy the shit smell of the underworld.”
The veins in the old man’s neck swelled as he struggled to free himself.
“Do something, Evie! You must help me. He will kill us both.”
“I think she is going to stay with me. Every god needs his goddess, or at least a good concubine.” Kek lowered the dagger. “I’m not going to kill you, Monty. Time will.”
Kek stepped back. His mummies lowered the sarcophagus lid over the screaming body of Montague P. Waterston. The muffled cries grew increasingly hysterical. Then they stopped completely. I honestly believed that Waterston had shouted himself to death; that his fear of dying had torn the channels of his heart or perhaps drowned his brain in blood.
The sorcerer ignored the sounds from the coffin, turning his attention elsewhere.
He summoned Evangeline. Without breaking eye contact, she drifted to him.
He inclined his head to her perfectly-shaped seashell ear and whispered in it. She drew a deep breath. Her face flushed. Both of them were smiling. Evangeline’s eyes were glazed and wet as if they’d been painted with a clear, syrupy varnish. Her fists clenched.
I was the only one who heard something coming from inside Waterston’s coffin.
Barely discernable, rhythmic. Like singing, but not exactly.
I did not understand a word of it.
Chanting.
The mad, decrepit millionaire had begun chanting.
42
Gods of Gold, Lords of Lead
A rumbling soon covered up the monotonous intonations of Monty Waterston. Another cart was riding the rails into the depths of the mine. Kek straightened from his conversation with Evangeline, his spell temporarily interrupted. My suspicion that he held hypnotic sway over her consciousness was confirmed by her expression of befuddlement – like a sleepwalker who has awakened mid-stroll at the edge of a precipice. The two mummies’ alertness peaked simultaneously with Kek’s shifting focus, and they watched with an intense interest directed at the mouth of the tunnel, as floury dust sprinkled down, triggered by the vibrations of the speeding cart.
The blood had drained from my shackled arms. They were as numb as if they had been made of ice. I used the tip
of my boot to scoop together a small pile of rubble. I had to swing out like a pendulum and, with my feet acting as a pair of pincers, I collected a few of the larger, rounder lumps of hard rock scattered around. But I quickly succeeded in building a sizable mound under me. I stepped up onto it and thrusted my hanging limbs toward the ceiling. I expected relief, and relief did eventually come, but what I got first was pain, as my circulation returned and my tender nerves signaled to my brain that all was not right with the corpus Hardy. I would have sworn an invisible devil was plunging red-hot pins into my shoulders. My hands, I was quite certain, were squeezing live bees.
The imminent arrival of the third cart distracted us all. My pain diminished, or I got better at ignoring it. I was actively attempting to test my ten digits and keep them moving in hopes that, whatever fate awaited me, I would at a future point be unchained.
The braking cart shrieked to a stop. The last mummy of Kek’s crew was driving the cart, but he was not my concern. Yong Wu slumped across the mummy’s lap. He appeared unconscious. A lurid smear of blood painted his cheeks. The mummy exited the cart and tossed Wu’s limp body over his shoulder like a feed sack. The boy never cried out, never fluttered his eyes. Now I knew this mummy was the one who had been hunting McTroy in the rocks, because I saw the same brutal short sword tucked between the loops of soiled bandages knotted around his waist.
The blade was thoroughly encrimsoned.
In fact, he had gotten McTroy’s blood splashed all over him. To think that McTroy had been cut down by this inarticulate henchman made my blood boil with rage. He lumbered just like his raggedy companions – they were a slow-marching band of clods, I decided, hardly worthy of matching up with the likes of Rex McTroy. But this one swordsman mummy in particular raised my ire. He possessed a physical cockiness that the others lacked. Where they were interchangeable and oafish, he exuded the brash attitude that I associated with gunfighters and duelists. Despite his stiff gait, he carried himself as a man with a reputation would. I wondered who he had been in his previous life. Surely, I’d have been as displeased to make his acquaintance then as now.
He halted a few feet away from Kek and Evangeline.
He dumped poor Wu on the ground.
Evangeline went to the boy. She listened for his breathing and nodded to me that she had, indeed, heard something. His chest did rise and fall. Then, licking the corner of her skirts, she began to clean the blood and grime from his face. But his eyes stayed closed. His lips parted, but not to talk, only to breathe. His color was much improved.
In the meantime, Kek scrutinized his mummified lackey. Again, this caused me to wonder if he communicated with his servants through mental telepathy. After a prolonged interval of staring, during which neither of them blinked, Kek finally pointed to me. “Are you ready to come down, Doctor Hardy?”
“Yes, I am.”
Kek frowned. “You have made a mountain to stand on. How is the view?”
“I have seen better things at the bottom of a hog pen.”
“We will make you comfortable.” He switched his gaze to the swordsman, who gawked dumbly ahead, unmoving. “Sever his bonds. Bring him to me.” Kek clapped his hands, loudly, once.
The swordsman responded by slouching towards me at a quickened pace.
I readied myself to give him a double-heeled kick in the middle. He drew his sword and flicked the stained blade back and forth. I changed my mind.
Kek said, “How do you feel about little boxes?” He tapped the coffin that Waterston had intended for Evangeline. “The air grows scarce. Monty would tell you that. I laid in my box for thousands of years. You think you will go crazy. And you do. But that does not make it stop. You are still trapped. You have no choice. It is the end.”
“Please kill me another way.” I did not want to beg him, but I did. I was awash in ammonia-tinged, icy sweat as if I were a snowman drowning in a self-made puddle.
Waterston’s chanting returned – so he was still alive – his eerie, rhythmic verses rising in volume like nightmare cries coming from under a thick, down-filled pillow.
The swordsman mummy reached up and began chopping at my chain, but the chain was thick and would not break. I feared he might miss and lop off my hand and almost shifted to make it so. Then I would bleed and die from exsanguination. But even in the direst of circumstances it is against our nature to offer ourselves up to the blade or the noose or the volley of bullets. I pulled my hands aside and let him strike at the chain.
Kek grew impatient. Soon another mummy was there with a key. A quick turn and I fell from my shackles to my knees. The swordsman hauled me up. He grunted. I watched as the wet, bloody patch on his shoulder spread its petals like a flower. Good, I thought, I hope it hurts. He stuck his face close to mine.
I saw his gray eyes.
Mummies don’t bleed! He grabbed a handful of my shirt front.
“Hey, Doc,” he whispered.
“In my coat pocket,” I said. “Don’t let them see.”
Mummy McTroy held the sword’s blade under my nose. He touched my pocket, then turned me around and shoved me forward. He hadn’t taken the dynamite. I walked to Kek, and to Evangeline’s yawning coffin.
As I passed, I let my fingers graze Waterston’s sarcophagus. The low hum of his voice was still there, chanting away. Perhaps he is praying, I thought.
But praying to what?
I looked at the Ka door. The ancient hieroglyphs stood out boldly, as if they were slowly being extruded through the wall. Had the paint always been so vivid? Was there a bright greenish piping around the door? Did it radiate ever-so-subtly?
The two real mummies grabbed me roughly and bound my wrists and ankles as they had done for Waterston. They lifted me and deposited me into the narrow confines of the second sarcophagus. Despite McTroy’s presence, my heartbeat pounded and my breathing shallowed. A cold sweat broke from my pores. I fidgeted with my feet. A clammy coolness swept over me as if an oceanic fog blew across seaweed-strewn boulders and icy little pools of brackish water. I tasted salt and a bit of that sea tang.
“You are unwell?” Kek asked. He draped his flipper-sized palm over my eyes. “Imagine the dark. The lid of the coffin is above your face. If you lift your neck, you may knock your forehead against the gold. When it closes, you will never see light again.”
I waited for McTroy to make his move. I followed him out of the corner of my eye. Well, not followed him exactly because he was not moving, had not moved. He stood slackly away from the sarcophagi, arms at his sides, staring off into space as blankly as if he were an actual mummy. Trust can be difficult even under the best of circumstances. When one is about to be entombed it is exponentially more challenging to master.
“I am ready,” I said. “Right now, in this very moment, I am ready.”
I was not talking to Kek. But he did not know that.
He uncovered my face.
“I want the woman to watch as the lid goes down,” he said.
“Her name is Evangeline,” I said.
“Evangeline,” he said, his voice rising. “Come. Join us.”
When she did not respond, he twisted away from me, looking for her where she had been kneeling on the ground, tending to Wu.
They were both gone.
“Where is she? Find her. Kill the boy.” His commands set all three mummies in motion. “Wait.” He raised his hand, the one that still held the flint dagger. He slipped the dagger into his belt and waved to hurry the mummies along. “First seal the coffin.”
I bolted up. McTroy rushed forward and held me down. He nearly slashed me.
“What are you doing?” I was losing control of my fear. My world felt rushed, plunging over a border from which there would be no return. My heart flopped like a dying fish in my chest. I- c- c- could not breathe.
The other two mummies lifted the lid. They aligned it overhead. A shadow fell across me. Logic fled. I was a boy again. A boy trapped in an attic inside a trunk. I felt the sarcophagus shrinki
ng against my sides. The lid dropped down with a thud. No, no, no… this cannot be! What is he doing? My heart will explode. I cannot stand this. The darkness. The absolute, incontrovertible darkness… was not entirely absolute.
A crack of lantern light seeped along an edge of the coffin lid, which lay crookedly over me. I attempted to push it off, but it was too heavy, at least several hundred pounds, and I had no leverage. As I pushed, I noticed with a start that my wrists were no longer bound. McTroy had sliced through the leather thong during our struggle. I sought my pocket and found the dynamite still there. My claustrophobic panic had not subsided, but the wave of terror crested, and I was riding high on a strong current of nervous energy. I investigated the opening where the light entered. I fit my hand through the slot, but what good did it do me? I ran my fingers as far as I could reach along the crack. There, right below my hip, I grasped some cold object very like a carved doorknob: the ape’s head! Surely enough, a few inches of my walking stick blocked the lid from closing, but better still, the stick gave me the leverage I needed to tilt the heavy top askew. I pried it up, and over, creating a space for my knee, and then I worked my body into the breach. Quite a commotion had erupted between the two sarcophagi. When my head fully emerged, I perceived the cause: McTroy was busy fighting off the two mummy servants. They were confused by this sudden betrayal of their partner in eternal mindless servitude; too addled were they to comprehend his disguise. He took advantage of their surprise and with his short sword managed to disarm one opponent (and by disarm I mean he removed the creature’s arms, hacking through the shoulder joints). I bent myself up like an accordion and untied my ankles. The armless mummy butted McTroy with his head. McTroy’s noggin proved the more substantial of the two, and the disoriented mummy staggered sideways before tripping. Tripping over Yong Wu! The boy was not only alive but apparently unharmed. He had been a full participant in McTroy’s dramatic rescue charade – and, no doubt, the hidden supplier of my stick.
No time for fancy reunions. Wu said, “The Ka door, doctor. It is like before.”
