“Aaarrruggggh!!” It was a contest as to who screeched the loudest; either way, both her and the rotting mummy that lifted itself up out of the coffin made much the same noise, Chloe falling backwards as the earth tumbled out from under her, her heart seared away with fear. And yet something else rose up out of the coffin behind the old, age-eaten corpse...
“Ha ha ha ha!” it laughed, very un-mummy like in its chuckle and form.
“Alex! You…you…!” Chloe growled, anger replacing the fear. She couldn’t believe this! She stepped forward and slapped him on the back-side of the head. “How can you do this? Have you no respect for a dead man? For me?”
“I only meant to join them,” Alex replied, his mouth cocked in a twisted grin, the same kind a drunken man gets when he’s trying to be cavalier. Chloe shoved at his shoulder, which made him laugh even more. Alex was better than Terry at this point, but it still wasn’t Cort.
“Well, you should do it sooner rather than later before you ruin what chance I have of getting out of this place,” she replied.
“My dear, sweet, baby sister,” Alex crooned, wobbling out of the sarcophagus and onto even more wobbly feet. “I’ll have you know that at this moment, my career is on a high note.” With that, he belched. Right in her face.
Grossed out, Chloe fell back to sit on the dais of a very large statue, the entire frustration of the situation overcoming her.
“Oh Alex, don’t…don’t make this difficult. I haven’t the faintest clue what I’m doing here or why and Terry thinks I’m a total idiot and…Alex, whats going on?”
“Sorry, kid. I thought you might like to know I found something,” Alex weaved his way to sit next to her, and fished in the pockets of his loose jacket, grinning triumphantly at her.
“Oh no, not another trinket!” Chloe groaned, thinking how Alex had developed a penchant for visiting the town and picking out items for her to verify, especially after all the exclamation she had made over his Nagasaki bowl. It was endearing, really, and she did her best, but at the moment, the last thing she wanted to deal with was an antiquities appraisal. “If I have to look at one more flea-market reject, I’ll…”
Alex’s long fingers flourished an odd shaped brass box in front of her, shutting her up immediately. It was six-sided with familiar glyphs molded on each side. She looked up at him and he waggled his eyebrows to encourage her.
“Where did you find this?” Chloe breathed, her own fingers wrapping around its edges, as if she were handling a fragile pot.
“On a dig, in Thebes,” he answered. “Now, sister, tell me I found something.”
She couldn’t help herself, really. Little boxes like this were a fetish, and she had decorated her suite at the Point with the kinds of boxes her own hunts in the flea market had garnered, not to mention one or two more precious ones Cort had given her. Her fingers felt little points along the rims, like some Braille code hinting at a secret key, pressing and pushing until the top snapped open like a cracker. A folded up parchment was stuffed inside.
“Alex…” she whispered.
“Yes?” He was leaning over it, too.
“I think you found something.”
~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~
At first she’d been afraid to open it, her hands shaking so that she was sure that she would tear the parchment, but Alex had no qualms and was soon laying it out on top of a stack of books in the library, revealing a map. Chloe was rather disappointed. She’d been hoping it was a map out of this place, a guidance back to the atrium, back to Cort, back to the point where they had been before, but Alex had swept it up and marched it into the curator’s office…and then Chloe was really afraid, because she did not feel like facing Terry’s withering wrath again.
Instead, Terry humored them both and Chloe got the first impression he was vastly curious about the map…but, of course, he ruffled up his feathers and acted all haughty about it.
“The cartouche…there? That’s of Seti the First,” she ventured, pride still piqued. “I’m sure of it.”
“Perhaps,” Terry replied, unyielding.
“Two questions,” Alex broke in, much too eager to notice the curator’s reserve. “Who is Seti and was he rich?”
Well, at least Alex was interested. “He was the last Pharaoh of the Old Kingdom, said to be the wealthiest of them all,” Chloe provided, glancing at Terry again, for proof, for approval.
“That’s good, that’s very good!” Alex declared, rubbing his hands together. “I’m liking this joe very much.”
“Seti,” Chloe corrected him and went on, “I can even tell you how old this map is – almost four thousand years. See the heiratics…?” Terry looked as if he had just taken a whiff of smoke and was deciding whether to breathe it in or not. “It says ‘Hamunaptra.’”
Ah-ha, finally! A reaction. Terry froze and his eyes looked a bit wild for a moment, and then his shoulders relaxed. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said in a patronizing tone. “We’re scholars, not treasure hunters. Hamunaptra was a myth.”
Almost talking over him, Alex was vibrating as if he had been electrified. “Are you talking about the Hamunaptra?” he asked of her.
“Yes,” Chloe confirmed. “The City of the Dead, where the early Pharaohs were said to have hidden the wealth of Egypt.”
“Yeah, right! In a big underground treasure chamber. Everyone knows this story,” Alex encouraged her. “The entire place was rigged to sink into the sand and on the Pharaoh’s command, the whole place could disappear!”
“They think it vanished around 2, 134 B. C.,” Chloe added, delighting in Alex’s excitement. But she reached out to take the map herself; she hadn’t had a really good look at it because Alex had hogged it and she still wanted to look for some clue, some trace of a path back to the statue of Diana…only to find that Terry was holding it rather loosely, as if he couldn’t wait to let it drop…
“Hey! Hey!” She shrieked as Terry let it fall to the floor, a large corner of it burning vividly from the flame of the candle that had been touched to it.
“As the Americans would say,” Terry intoned, bored. “It’s all fairy tales and hokum.”
“You burned it!” Alex growled, stamping on the little flames still fuming away at the maps remaining edges.
“It’s for the best, I’m sure,” Terry told them both. When he saw that Chloe was ready to let fly with a few well-chosen words of her own, he frowned harder and said, “Many men have wasted their lives in the foolish pursuit of Hamunaptra. No one has ever found it. Most have not returned.”
“You killed my map!” Alex moaned, holding the singed parchment in his hands.
“It was a fake,” Terry said and turned to have the last word with Chloe yet again. “Really, Miss Carnarvon, I’m surprised at you. I didn’t think you’d be fooled.”
She saw him reach for the trinket box but was quick enough to snatch it before Terry put his fingers around it.
“Alex gave it to me,” Chloe said with as much of her own haughtiness as she could muster and, grabbing Alex by the sleeve of his jacket, pulled him out of Terry’s office.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~
“You told me you found it in a dig in Thebes!”
They were in a prison. She couldn’t remember how they got there. She had pulled Alex along, he gnashing his teeth as he went, into the open courtyard of the museum and then a side street and then…well, they were at a prison. And a filthy one too, filled to the brim with scabeous, leering men who called out to her in various forms of Arabic and languages she didn’t want to know, and suddenly she saw the trinket box for what it was…or at least had some idea of how Alex came by it.
“I was mistaken.”
“And now you tell me you stole it from a drunk at the local Casbah?” Chloe was ready to thwap him upside the back of the head again. How many times had she told Alex she objected to vague provenance on the items he brought her, especially if they were Native American dart points? And this item was stolen!
“Picked his pocket, actually,” Alex supplied, looking more nervous than embarrassed.
Chloe gave in to the urge to thwap his head. The warden of the jail walked up before Alex could come up with a suitable retort and waved her on. Apparently, Alex had brought her here to find the person he took it from. The warden himself was a roly-poly ball of garlicky, sweaty, Arabic shortness who scowled and growled at various prisoners as they walked to the holding pens. Alex had his arm threaded through hers, almost leaning on her in a bid to stay as close to her as possible. When the warden stopped and motioned to the turnkey to bring in the prisoner in question, she tapped him on the shoulder.
“What is the man in prison for?” Chloe asked the warden, trying to use conversation to take her mind off the smell of the place and distract the warden’s wandering eye.
“This I did not know,” the warden said, black eyes gleaming. “So when I heard you were coming, I asked him myself.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said…he was just looking for a good time.”
At that moment, the doors to the barred holding pen burst open and a figure was literally rolled across the ground to slam against the bars. The others cheered and laughed. The prisoner recovered to rise to his knees and lift his head to look around. His long hair was hanging in his eyes, but Chloe knew him instantly.
Cort!
His befuddled expression changed when he spotted her, his eyes widening in recognition, but the turnkey had come up behind him and shoved him further forward. Chloe was trying to think fast enough to figure out a way to get him out without having to explain to the warden that she knew this man, but Cort seemed to get the measure much faster.
“Who’s the doll?”
“Doll!” Chloe gasped. Cort knew she hated that word!
“My sister,” Alex volunteered, pulling her forward.
Cort’s green eyes raked over her, despite the fact that she was glaring at him, sending daggers of thought that he should not persist in pretending ignorance.
“Yeah? Well, she’s not a total loss,” he said, offhandedly.
This, from the man who whispered wicked sweet nothings to her when she really needed to concentrate on mundane matters!
Speechless, Chloe stood in silence as the warden caught sight of something offensive to him and went trundling off to investigate. Alex took that opportunity to pull her towards the prisoner. Cort’s more modern clothing of jeans and shirt had been replaced with trousers, shirt and braces more in keeping with his original time period. It was torn in several places and bruises were evident everywhere…just as if he had been pulled from his movie.
“We…um…found your puzzle box,” Chloe managed to choke out. If he was going to play this game, then fine. “And we’ve come to ask you about it.”
“No,” Cort replied.
He remembers! Chloe’s heart thudded. He’s going to say he knows what’s going on and he can get us out…
“No?”
“No,” Cort repeated patiently. “You came to ask me about Hamunaptra.” The eyebrows lifted slightly, as if he wanted to transmit a message of his own.
“How do you know the box pertains to Hamunaptra?” Chloe was getting a slightly sick feeling in her stomach. What if he didn’t remember her?
“Because that’s where I found it. I was there.”
Chloe’s mind reeled. That’s where he had been! He must be as confused as she was. She opened her mouth to tell him was okay, that she’d get him out…it distressed her to see that he had been knocked about…but then, Alex interfered.
“How do we know that’s not a load of pig swallow?” He leaned into the conversation, feigning skepticism.
Cort’s eyes narrowed.
“Don’t I know you?”
Yes! Chloe wanted to shout. You know him, and Terry, and Maximus, and Tina, and John and all the others at the Point! But before she could say anything, Cort’s fist flew between the bars and smacked Alex square on the jaw. Out cold.
On reflex the guard behind Cort clubbed him, causing him to bounce his head on the bars. Wincing, he only returned his gaze to Chloe as she stepped over Alex and bent down.
“You were at Hamunaptra?” Chloe asked, lowering her voice, but the guard was still too close. Should she call his real name?
“Yeah, I was there,” he said, a smile quirking his lips.
Okay, now he was playing with her, Chloe was sure. He’s going to make me pay for messing with that statue and force me to agonize over his memory. Either that or he’s been knocked on his head one too many times.
“Do you swear?” she asked, eyes narrowed.
“Every damn day,” he quipped.
“Cut it out! I mean…”
“I know what you meant,” he interrupted her, a bit more serious this time. “I was there alright. Seti’s place. The City of the Dead.”
Hands quivering, she grasped the bars as she leaned down further.
“What did you find? What did you see?” she asked, bringing her face level with his. Please say you found a way out of here.
“I found sand. I saw death,” was all Cort would give her.
“Could you at least tell me how to get there?” she persisted, head even lower now.
“You want to know?” Cort asked, his eyes fixed on her mouth.
“Yes.”
“Really want to know?”
“Yes!” Dammit, Cort, stop playing! Their faces were now inches apart, close enough for her to whisper additional information, if she just had a chance…
Long fingers shot between the bars and grabbed her by the chin as he thrust his face forward and kissed her full on the lips.
“Then get me the hell outta here,” he growled. Any other chance of remarks were beaten out of him as the guard pulled him back and practically drop-kicked him into the antechamber beyond.
Chloe bumped into the warden as he watched the guards drag a struggling Cort out of sight.
“Where are they taking him?” she demanded.
“Too be hanged,” the warden gloated, his black eyes snapping. “Apparently, he had a very good time!”