The Mummy Read online

  Washed in the golden glow, as if the book in his hands were aflame, Imhotep, his voice a rumbling emotionless baritone, continued the fearsome incantation.

  And now the golden lightning was accompanied by an impossible wind which whipped at the clothing of those gathered around the mummified mistress, and soldiers who had fought in ferocious battles now cringed like frightened children, hiding behind their shields as their skirts fluttered in a wind that caused not a grain of sand to shift.

  Imhotep, unaffected by the lightning and the wind, read on, uttering the ghastly malediction as his faithful priests—holding their white cats in front of them ceremonially—remained as calm and unaffected by the lightning flashes of gold and the lashing wind as their high priest himself seemingly was.

  As Imhotep neared the final words of the incantation, the linen-wrapped mummy began to tremble, as if coming back to life. As gold lightning intermittently flashed, a whirlpool of wind seemed to find the woman’s body and, at first slowly, then with dramatic quickness, raised her into the air. The eyes of the terrified slaves, the frightened soldiers, the calm priests, followed her ascent, watching mesmerized as the mummified woman floated there, eerily, Imhotep’s deep voice rumbling through the concluding passage.

  Then, in one last all-pervasive golden flash, and a blast of wind that should have (but did not) created a sandstorm, the mummy fell back to earth, where Anck-su-namun’s remains suddenly revealed themselves as no longer shapely, but shriveled, twisted, and grotesque, as if even the final few vestiges of beauty had been siphoned from her.

  Silence draped the desert like a suffocating cloak. No wind. No one spoke as the priests of Osiris gathered up the gnarled mummy and deposited it in the wooden coffin; the canopic jars were placed within the box as well before the lid was shut. The Nubians carted the coffin to the grave and dropped it in, then began shoveling sand in on top of it with their hands. On the surrounding dunes, many of the Med-jai turned and drifted away into the night, satisfied, apparently, that their late master had been avenged. Anck-su-namun would soon be in the underworld, her soul devoured.

  When the sand had been smoothed over, the grave disappearing into the desert floor, the Nubian slaves looked toward Imhotep for their next order. But the next order Imhotep issued was not for the slaves . . .

  The high priest nodded to the soldiers, who raised their spears and hurled them at the Nubians, whose cries of pain and surprise broke the unearthly silence. Within seconds the area was littered with the dead, sand stained dark with blood.

  The soldiers, now unarmed, looked toward Imhotep for permission to retrieve their spears. Instead, Imhotep nodded again, and the priests of Osiris—their cats deposited on the ground, where they looked on with bland indifference—descended upon the soldiers with daggers, hacking at the startled men in a darkness relieved only by the flickering of torchlight and, shortly, the blood of dead men was again seeping into the sand.

  A few Med-jai remained, watching from the dunes; they knew they were in no danger, for they—like the priests of Osiris—were holy men. Only common people—slaves, soldiers—had to be killed; no unholy person could ever know the exact location of the burial site.

  And the handful of Med-jai who had stayed to watch the inevitable slaughter now slipped away into the night as well. The priests of Osiris rose from the corpses they’d created, their holy knives dripping rubies, and—at Imhotep’s nod—climbed the dunes to watch the Med-jai depart.

  When his priests reported back to him that the final Med-jai had vanished over a distant dune, Imhotep nodded one last time.

  Then he and his priests raced to the grave of Anck-su-namun and began digging at the sand with their hands, urgently, furiously, as if the most valuable buried treasure in the world awaited them.

  Which, in Imhotep’s eyes, it did.

  2

  City of the Dead

  The starry sky conspired with the scimitar-slice moon to turn the desert a blue-tinged ivory, its dunes undulating sinuously, sensuously, like reclining concubines beckoning their lovers; no more peaceful landscape could be imagined, no silence more still, more complete . . . only to dissolve under the sand-stirring hooves of the whinnying horses bearing chariots whose mighty wheels carved grooves in the desert floor.

  Whip cracks split the night, horses straining forward, men straining forward, as the priests of Osiris followed their highest, most holy master on the lowest, most unholy of missions.

  Imhotep led the charge, racing against time, against discovery, against the gods themselves. He was the general of a small army of black chariots steered by bald muscular men with desert-withered flesh who served their smooth-skinned master unquestioningly, willing to follow him even into hell. Which, on this lovely desert night, they were.

  The chariot just behind Imhotep served as the hearse of the twisted, shriveled mummy that had been Anck-su-namun. The curse Imhotep had leveled upon his beloved must be cast out, must be reversed, and in this land there was only one way, one place, one book that could dispense such a forbidden mercy.

  Just as The Book of Amun Ra had sucked the soul from Imhotep’s lover, so could that other book, that volume of which even to speak was blasphemy, restore Anck-su-namun’s spiritual essence. Moreover, this book, which in the rites of his religion must never be opened, this blackest of books . . .

  . . . The Book of the Dead . . .

  . . . this book alone held the incantations that could bring his beloved back to life, and in her perfect earthly state.

  To do such an unholy thing was to defy the gods; as high priest of Osiris—god of the underworld—Imhotep understood this as few living men could. And yet had not Osiris himself risen from the dead, due to the love of Isis, his own beloved? As the loyal high priest of Osiris, should Imhotep be denied any less for the woman he loved? No matter—for the return of Anck-su-namun, Imhotep would willingly risk not just his life, but his soul.

  So that no sacrilege might ever disgrace their kingdom, The Book of the Dead lay in the care of the god Anubis, at Hamanaptra, that unspeakable place known in whispers as the City of the Dead. Not a city in the sense of the City of the Living, Thebes, Hamanaptra was the temple of the god Anubis, and like many temples in the kingdom, it was not a single structure, rather a walled complex of buildings and courtyards with the honored statue of Anubis—who “lived” in the temple—in its midst.

  No one lived at Hamanaptra but the warrior priests of Anubis, and the real “City of the Dead” lay below ground, carved into the rock under the dunes—rock-cut tombs having replaced those impractical, pyramidal monstrosities of the early pharaohs—an underground maze of tunnels, staircases, corridors, mausoleums, and elegant underground rooms, booby-trapped with false doors and blocked passages to bedevil grave robbers.

  The small army of chariots raced up the sloping sand and rumbled onto the stone ramp rising to the massive wooden gates of the temple complex, where a company of warrior priests, their shields bearing the skull-like design of Hamanaptra, stood guard. But these fierce soldiers of Anubis did not question the entry of such holy men, particularly with Imhotep himself at their head. This place was guarded from thieves and heretics, not the high priest of Osiris.

  Soon Imhotep—on the pretext of paying a visit to the god who lived in this place—was alone in the grandly pillared chamber of the central open temple that looked out on the sandy courtyard of the complex. Kneeling at the feet of the enormous jackal-headed statue of Anubis, the high priest of Osiris might have been praying before the great god; but in fact Imhotep was finding the small trip lever that would open the hidden compartment at the base of the statue.

  The small heavy stone door swung open with an accusing creak and Imhotep removed an ornately carved and painted chest. He opened it, lifting out a big heavy brass-hinged book which in size and shape and, to some degree, form and ornamentation mirrored that of The Book of Amun Ra; however, this intimidating volume was not fashioned of gold, but carved from pure obsidian.
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  Imhotep stared upon the black face of The Book of the Dead, and in the smooth stone surface, his own face looked back at him. For a frozen moment, his tortured expression questioned what it was he was about to do.

  Then he returned the chest, now empty, to the base of the jackal-headed statue, closed the compartment, and went swiftly—massive stone volume held in one hand, slipped under his flowing black robe, hidden away from the eyes of any stray warrior priest—to gather his followers for the ceremony.

  Into the catacombs that were the underground necropolis of the City of the Dead, the high priest—now bearing The Book of the Dead before him like an offering—led his black-robed followers, again with torches in hand. The procession—which included two priests solemnly conveying the mummy of Anck-su-namun—descended a stairway carved from the rock into a cavernous chamber; black hairy rats the size of small dogs scurried as sandaled footsteps echoed through the ampitheaterlike area, its cavelike walls painted orange with torchlight. At the periphery burbled moats of black muck that might have been tar, but was instead the decayed residue of human remains mingling with what had once been water, a soup of despair in which skulls bobbed like onions.

  In the center of the open area was a strange, twisted altar of heavy dark stone adorned with golden decorative touches—winged scarabs, cobra heads, rams’ horns—and onto its smooth surface the priests carefully placed Imhotep’s mummified beloved.

  Then Imhotep’s followers gathered in a circle around the mummy on the altar, and began to chant, eyes hooded, faces lifeless, bald heads rocking, bodies swaying. The eerie hum of their chanting filled the chamber as, one by one, Imhotep received from five of his priests the five precious canopic jars, placing them around the altar, around his loved one, in the precise position the incantation required. Had more time passed than a mere forty days, the concubine’s vital organs would not have remained fresh enough for this unholy procedure, and a human sacrifice would have been needed to replace the contents of the canopic jars.

  Imhotep opened the immense pages of the obsidian book and began to read. The withered, gnarled mummy shuddered, and then shimmied and shimmered and blurred, as it magically resumed the shapely form of Anck-su-namun. The high priest’s eyes were wide and his teeth were bare in something like a smile as he began to unwrap the linen bandages, pleased to find young, vibrant flesh beneath, the naked form of the woman he loved, her physical state restored.

  The first stage of his sorcery, this reversal of the spells he’d previously cast, was successful. What must come next would make every other incantation he had made on this horrendous night seem like the rhyming of a child at play.

  Imhotep began to read from The Book of the Dead, as the monotonous chanters circled around him and the beautiful dead woman on the altar, droning on. The foul black pools at the edges of the chamber began to roil, like a pot brought to a boil; bubbles popped, globules spattered, and the concentration of the priests, a few of them at least, was broken by the bizarre simmering around them. The priests, pale from fright, closed their eyes and resumed chanting, even as the bog at their periphery began to brew and gurgle and seethe, boiling bubbles bursting, snapping, until the pools began to overflow their rocky banks.

  Like a living thing, a black slime slid over the cavern floor; from every dark corner it came, crawling, slithering, inexorably seeping, a thin layer of ooze that closed in on the chanters, finding its way to, and around, their sandaled feet, rising just high enough to touch their flesh, hot but not burning, a shallow fetid nasty coating that soon was all around them, even creeping to the squat sculpted ox-head statues that were the legs holding up the altar.

  Imhotep, lost in the incantation, his deep voice rumbling through the cavern, seemed not to notice the black ooze gleaming at his feet. One of his priests, the youngest of them, looked down into the shining black liquid mirror that touched his toes and the reflection that looked back was that of his own mummified corpse.

  The priest’s scream of unearthly terror, shrill at first, then an echoing wail in the cavernous chamber, followed him as he broke from the circle and ran, splashing through the thin layer of hot black liquid, running for the stairs but losing his balance and sliding, shrieking, skidding, stumbling into the steaming mire, which swallowed him, filling his screaming mouth with slime, pulling him down into its festering stew.

  This barely registered to Imhotep, who continued his incantation, though he did watch as the black slippery slime seeped around the canopic jars, slithering up them, coating them, covering them, finally invading them . . .

  The black-coated jars shuddered. Shook. A steady drumlike throb began to emanate from one of them.

  Anck-su-namun’s heart, beating again!

  Imhotep spoke the forbidden words, the whites of his eyes exposed all around, teeth bared like a grinning animal, watching aghast, yet elated, as the black fingers of ooze crawled up the legs of the altar, trickling up over the decorative icons, painting the scarabs and cobras and rams’ heads a glistening obsidian, like The Book of the Dead itself, until it had risen to glide up and over the naked body of the beautiful dead concubine, covering her, encasing her in slippery shining black liquid, heightening and highlighting the exquisite dunes and valleys of her body, making a gleaming black statue of her . . .

  And then, miraculously, hideously, the liquid, moving like quicksilver with an intelligence, scurried about her body seeking entrance, the ooze finding its way inside her, and it was as if the corpse was drawing the liquid into itself, sucking the slime inside her, through the nostrils, ears, open mouth, every orifice, sucking every drop inside of her until the cavern floor was clear, clean, as if the bizarre black flood had never occurred.

  The beautiful naked body, stretched out upon the altar, into which—impossibly—so much foul liquid had entered, lay still, as well might be expected, of a dead woman. Then the corpse trembled.

  Imhotep’s eyes widened further.

  The body shuddered, and jerked, in a spasm that could only mean the regenerative incantation was working its dark magic.

  “Come back to me, Anck-su-namun,” Imhotep said, and this was not part of the incantation. “Come back to me . . .”

  With a suddenness that made even Imhotep gasp, and his priests choke on their chanting, the eyes of Anck-su-namun snapped open!

  Wide.

  Alive.

  Imhotep touched her cheek; the eyes met his, but she did not speak. She could not speak. Her soul had come back from the dead, but for her full return, her physical return, her organs must be transferred from the canopic jars to their rightful place within her body. And this required one last terrible step.

  “There will be no pain,” he told her tenderly.

  Though her face held no expression, her eyes spoke to him: Do what you must, my love, do what you must . . .

  Imhotep shifted the massive Book of the Dead into his one hand, holding the heavy volume open there, a feat his priests could only marvel at. Then, steeling himself for what he must do, the high priest of Osiris withdrew from under his black robe a sacrificial knife, its long blade wide at the hilt and narrowing to a point so honed that to test it with a touch was to bleed.

  And now Imhotep, face clenched with an intense display of emotion his followers had never suspected him to possess, raised high the gleaming blade, fist white around the knife’s hilt, its serpent’s tooth hovering high above the perfectly restored body of his beautiful beloved, her eyes alive and granting him absolution for the vicious penetration he must perpetrate upon her tender flesh.

  Anck-su-namun would, upon replacement of her vital parts, be again pristinely restored to her natural, magnificent physical state; there would be no scar, no sign of the invasion of Imhotep’s blade, nor for that matter of the blade with which she had ended her life, forty days before. The foul boiling liquid within her would work its strange sorcery, its mystic healing powers . . .

  Around them the droning chant of the priests continued; the beating of
her heart in its canopic jar grew louder, as if the organ were anticipating its own return to the home in her lovely breast, providing a drumbeat to their tuneless song. Imhotep’s eyes fell on the obsidian pages of the open volume in his left hand; knife poised to plunge into his beloved’s breast, he began to read the final incantation, almost shouting to be heard about the rising volume of the chanting and the anxious, beating heart . . .

  Down the stairway, flooding all around the chamber, they came, rushing, two and three and four steps at a time, bolting down, barreling down, storming the ampitheater, screaming as they made their charge, a tattooed horde: the Med-jai!

  Like locusts they descended, and before his hand could come down, Imhotep had been seized, arms clutching him, banding around him, wrist squeezed in a grip, the knife blade frozen in air; his scream echoed through the cavern, and intensified as he saw the leader of the Med-jai raise a foot and bring it down hard, as if stepping on a huge bug: smashing, shattering, crushing the jar with the beating heart.

  Silencing it.

  As the tissue of the vital organ oozed like rotten fruit beneath the sandal of the Med-jai leader, something occurred that was so fantastic, and took place so quickly, that those who were to be alive, after this night, would never be sure it had really happened, would never be positive that their eyes in that dark, dank chamber hadn’t played tricks on them.

  From every orfice of her body, Anck-su-namun expelled the black slimy fluid; it flew from her, and scattered in the air around those gathered about her, touching none of them, as if the flying black lake that had somehow been within her, and now somehow found its way outside of her, was a beast that could maneuver around them and avoid them. The black fluid found its way to the outskirts and corners of the chamber and rejoined the black boiling brew of human detritus from whence it came.