Fury From the Tomb Read online

  “Don’t you find most things you’ll never forget are those you wished never happened?”

  “Not always,” I said. I was going to add something, but Evangeline had scooted off to converse with McTroy. Inching forward, I could not help but feel that I was crossing an invisible threshold from one realm to another, and the passage ahead seemed closer to something found than something manmade. What created it? I cannot say. Someone had clearly cut these agates and rubbed them smooth, but the corridor itself gave the impression of being formed by the earth – volcanic? – and not by human intelligence. This was no comfort. Moving slowly, creeping, shaking my singed fingers now that my match had smoked out, I was seized by the sensation that I was being swallowed, alive and whole, down the gullet of a gigantic snake. Or a worm. I shivered at the thought. Never having seen El Gusano in his worm-state, I assessed him to be a much bigger specimen of maggot stock, and having witnessed his handiwork in digging out that tiger pit for the train and presuming he had lumbered for miles underground with a sarcophagus balanced on his gelatinous back, it was no leap to think he might fill both this tunnel passage and the recently vacated well with his bulk in a smothering instant. No lantern scorch would deter him and no volley of gunshots either. I reversed. I lingered with my face turned back toward the diminishing sight of the lighted well shaft. It looked better to me than it had minutes ago. The sky had cleared. Several planks shading the well mouth had ripped away in the storm. A golden drill bit of sunlight bore down. Wu was up there, and I hoped he was safe. I tried to keep that last vision of the sun inside me, soaking up the rays for my journey. I would have made a terrible mole.

  “I’ll go first. Doc, you take the rear,” McTroy said. He vanished into the hole.

  Evangeline followed him.

  I took three deep breaths, closed my eyes, and crawled in – and when I opened my eyes it was to find Evangeline’s bottom before me. I would follow it like a beacon. We went in on our knees, like supplicants do when approaching a god. As I had that very thought, I wondered if Odji-Kek planted it, if he were in my head with me even as we crept closer to him. Did he watch us through me? Was he mocking our feeble efforts? This line of thinking was a short trip to madness, and I wondered if inducing madness were the greatest talent a sorcerer could hope for. I sought to block Kek’s black magic where and when I could, so I forced myself to banish such theorizing on the spot. The gallery we had entered was as straight as it was narrow, the blackness becoming so complete that I observed hallucinatory flashes of hues vibrant and otherworldly, from strings of goblin greens that ran along the low ceiling to pink puddles and dancing globular blue orbs. They appeared solid, utterly real, and dimensional. I reached out to touch them.

  “Hardy!”

  Evangeline kicked her foot back at me.

  “Sorry, I can’t make heads or tails of where I’m at–”

  Evangeline covered my lips with a warm, damp hand.

  “Something,” she whispered.

  “I see lights,” McTroy said, his voice low. “Orangey, flickering…”

  “Do be careful,” I said. “Perhaps we should wait until the candles go out?”

  Past Evangeline’s shoulder, McTroy’s head twisted forth, crossed with shadow bars. “There’s a grate.” He reached, grasping, and the shadow bars shivered. “It moves.”

  “Can you see people?” I asked.

  “This here’s a room stacked up with bottles. Some barrels. Might be they’re filled with blood. The grate’s got a big sucker of a padlock I couldn’t break with a hammer.”

  “Let me see,” Evangeline said, too excited to keep whispering. She pressed in.

  “Be my guest, miss.”

  She squirmed in one direction, and McTroy reversed to join me.

  The lady’s amusement was plain.

  “It’s a wine cellar. I dare say your ‘blood’ is claret.” She lowered her chin, and began poking at the back of her head with her slender, nimble fingers.

  “My blood’s hellfire red, thank you. It ain’t time for you to be fixing your tresses.”

  Her eyes opened wide to glare at McTroy, the disdain in them visible despite the irregular lighting. “I’m picking the lock. For that I need a hairpin. Quiet thoughts of encouragement would be desirable while I work the mechanism.” Her request brought up an important fact: the screams had stopped. She leaned into the wall to concentrate, her hand fiddling at the pick and lock out of sight. McTroy nudged me.

  “Where do you suppose she practiced a skill like that?”

  “I learned it from my father. He learned from the Brothers Davenport who were more into ropes and knots, but they had other skills – here you go, boys.”

  She passed the sprung padlock to McTroy.

  “You’d be popular in the jailhouse,” he said.

  “But not for long. Why bother with a key when I am one?”

  Cautiously, we dropped from our hole in the wall into the monastery’s wine cellar. The gate was hinged at the top and it lifted to a dangling hook. McTroy latched it.

  “Maybe Rojo wasn’t lying about a secret entrance,” McTroy said. “This is an escape tunnel. Those cloaked devils could hide out in the well if lawmen or angels ever came a calling.”

  “Clever monks,” I said. “We best remember that. Should we leave the gate so obviously open? If they see it, we are finished.”

  “I don’t want to fuss with it when I’m looking for a way out.”

  “But it’s not a way out, is it? Only a way back to another dead end.”

  “What’s this here on the floor?” Evangeline interrupted.

  A heap of personal items was piled against the far end of the long, narrow cellar, spilling outward into a kind of lost-and-found talus. I saw wiry spectacles, clothing fit for both sexes, an assortment of shoes, boots, and head-wear. All manner of jewelry and timepieces littered the miniature mountain. Evangeline picked through the under layers and came up with a stout, ebony walking stick topped with a silver grip in the shape of an ape’s head, pitted, but not unattractively so, and coated with a lovely warm patina.

  “I’ll take that if you don’t mind,” I said.

  She gave it to me without comment.

  I swung the cane to and fro, testing the weight and battle effectiveness.

  “This will do nicely in a tussle, I imagine.”

  McTroy had gone around the rows of wine racks, scouting our next move. Evangeline crouched at the edge of the pile and was holding up a small item for close inspection. She brought it nearer to one of the sconces set at eye level for further study.

  “I know this,” she said, more to herself than to me.

  “What’s that you have there?”

  “I’ve seen it before. Recently. On the train. There can’t be many like it, so the odds of coincidence are too great. It must be the same one I saw. But why is it here?”

  I approached the candlelight and the object she cupped in her palm.

  A mother of pearl ring with a bell pendant attached, the ring’s circumference was far too large for a finger and yet too small to wear as a bracelet. The chestnut-sized bell was embossed with an image of the man in the moon. Smiling, jolly, winking.

  “It’s a baby’s rattle,” she said. “I remember the child. His mother sat…”

  She cleared her throat. She did not say any more about the boy and his mother.

  I wandered to the pile again, with new eyes. “These must be the things they’ve taken from their victims over the years. No use for them in the cloister.”

  Those screams we’d heard – the ones that fell silent – came from survivors of the train wreck, conveyed by monsters on horseback through the desert for hideous occult purposes, tumbled from one nightmare to the next, a descent into Hell. Their fate must have been incomprehensible. More than bad luck hounded them: cursed lives – lambs who’d simply boarded a train for Los Angeles never knowing hell-bound wolves waited for them in a church in the desert. It was as preposterous as it was sad. />
  “How unjust,” Evangeline said. She laid the rattle back on top of the pile.

  “We will put a stop to it.”

  She nodded. “People know right from wrong. But sometimes they don’t know how wrong they are, the degree of their misdeeds. Selfishness blinds them. Horribly.”

  “The monks and necrófagos are beyond morality,” I said.

  “I’m not talking about them.” Her voice rose. “I’m talking about my own–”

  “Keep it down,” McTroy slipped from between two columns of barrels. “There’s a parade coming and we don’t want to be a part of it. Snuff those candles.”

  I blew at the sconces, and we were back in the dark.

  “Get under them clothes and boots. Do it,” McTroy said.

  We buried ourselves in the leavings of ghosts.

  Between a silk top hat and a fiddle case I had enough of a gap to see the procession pass the archway where the cellar met the corridor. We heard the chanting first. Words I could not comprehend, though I know Greek and Latin and smatterings of dead languages from the ancient east. The closest match might be Akkadian or even Sumerian, though who can say what that tongue sounds like? What I heard I did not understand intellectually, but I knew it in my viscera, the words landing like punches into my gut, and my innards told me to remain still and hope I never heard such articulations again.

  The monks were naked.

  Initially, and improbably, I guessed they were peeled, fleshless, like Gaspar Becerra’s famous etching of a flayed man holding his own skin, but in truth it was only the blood they wore on their skins that made them shine so redly in the candle flickers. Their bodily hairs, all of them head to toe, were painted and matted down with clots of gore, a crimson mud, if you will. Only the bottoms of their feet remained dry. The ones who didn’t carry elaborate and grotesquely wide candlesticks bore knives and sickles and ceremonial daggers that curved and recurved like metallic snakes. A cloud floated over their heads. They burned some stomach-churning mix of herbal shamanistic insanity in their censors. My eyes watered, and I felt my brain loosen in my skull and slosh like so much murky water in a bucket. Dream-state inducement. They drugged themselves into a borderland that I desperately wanted to avoid, so I held my breath and hoped Evangeline and McTroy were doing the same. The inhalant had other physical effects I noticed, for each man walked like Priapus in the garden. I conjectured that the drug caused changes both neurological and circulatory – the men’s veins crawled over them like centipedes, and the tautness of their sinews seemed utterly unnatural, and yet they moved with salamandrine smoothness, a glossy, silky coordination that spread from the individuals to the group. They were as one entity, an animated Blakeian vision, a dragon proceeding down the corridor.

  I saw no victims. No rattle-less baby boy, thankfully.

  Whatever bloodletting they had been engaged in had reached its intermission.

  After the monks came the ghouls who wore their stolen suits and dresses. Coffins were their closets, mausoleums, their armoire, and it showed. I will say they appeared bored with the ritual. I suspected they’d done this before. The mummies were last in line. They did not walk under their own power. Perhaps their legs were still too stiff and their joints locked. They rode in high-backed chairs. More naked monks carried them aloft. These former corpses had served as Odji-Kek’s acolytes, and here now they presented themselves not delicate as most mummies are, emptied of organs, hollowed out; no, not these, because the monks shouldering them strained with the effort. Apparently evil had returned their bodies with leaden certainty, and extra weight. The mummies stared ahead. Nobler in resurrection than they had been before or after the tomb, their bandages dripped from them like trimmings from the robes of kings. But where was Kek?

  I did not see Kek.

  Anxiety, or maybe the hallucinatory smoke, seized upon Evangeline. She found my hand in the pile and squeezed it. I hoped she was not feeling what I was feeling and doing my best to resist: a strong, persistent desire to rise and follow the procession.

  I squeezed back.

  The chanting changed in volume and quality. The voices diminished. They were mounting a staircase. Soon they would be above ground, heading for the chapel.

  My attention shifted abruptly from my ears to my eyes.

  Kek.

  He stood in the wine cellar archway. He turned his head.

  This was not the Kek I saw in my dreams. He had changed. He was without a doubt alive. Fully alive, transformed. I tried to avoid his eyes. His mouth, his lips – he smiled. He entered the cellar, and as he moved through the darkness toward us I knew that he knew exactly where I was hiding, where we all were. I believed he saw me – I was so convinced of this fact I could hardly hold my tongue. But I could bite it, and I did, grabbing the firm flesh between my teeth, clamping down tightly until I tasted the iron in my blood. After the jolt of pain came a swift clearing of my thoughts, like a scudding cloud passing from the brightest full moon, and in those seconds of clarity I speculated if Kek might be searching for me with his probing intellect, if he had called out, so to speak, to my inner ear with that big, vibrating voice of his, and if he had asked me to reveal myself, and my friends to him. I will not answer you! I WILL NOT ANSWER!

  He stopped in front of the pile.

  Inches away.

  He breathed, in and out. His breath was sweet, wine-scented.

  His long arm swept over the sad heap of belongings. It paused and dipped, and I feared for Evangeline. Had he discovered her? A lock of loose hair, a glimpse of her enflamed cheek?

  I waited for the bark of McTroy’s pistol. But it was suicide to attack now. Suicide!

  Kek backed away and strolled from the room, joining the demonic cavalcade.

  I heard it then as I hear it still, in my sleep, when I dream in the middle of the night here in twentieth century New York, where I live today, and everywhere I’ve ever been since that day.

  I hear it.

  The tinkling of a bell, the size of a chestnut…

  The man in the moon bell.

  And I knew how Amun Odji-Kek got his life back.

  28

  Smoke & Fissures

  I do not know how long we waited before emerging from our hiding spots underneath that small mountain of belongings, that mad, sad memorial to those unfortunate souls who had wandered into the upside-down world of evil monks and marauding robber-ghouls. When we did hatch ourselves and wiggle forth, it was McTroy who went first. The processioners had taken their candles with them and so half the illumination had gone too. But other candles guttered in sconces, and we were not left in a total gloom. McTroy scouted our way forward, slipping into the corridor. Footprints and a wide red smear marked the parade route. He returned winded but sounding excited.

  “They went upstairs but not to the surface. There’s a bridge that cuts over through an old cave. The chapel must be on the other side. Our boys headed that way.”

  “Kek would’ve been the last in line. Did you see him at the bridge?” Evangeline asked.

  “The Rattle Man, that’s him?”

  Evangeline nodded.

  “Then no, miss, I did not.” He pointed with his revolver. “It’s a rabbit warren down here, he could’ve gone any which way. I would love to bag him and go. I count more monks and mummies than I have bullets for.” He scratched at his jaw with the gun barrel.

  “Yes, it is concerning,” she agreed.

  “I thought mummies were generally dead.”

  “That is correct,” she said.

  “He looked mighty robust for a dead man. I’ll kill him if he needs killing. But, damn, I didn’t expect this kind of job from the story you told me at Shirl’s.” He tipped his hat back on his head and leaned into a rack of wine bottles.

  “I’m sorry. We… This is uncharted territory,” I said, but I could not meet the man’s gaze.

  “No kidding. Hey, Hardy, did you know what you signed on for?”

  I did not answer him. I was p
reoccupied with my own observations.

  The ritual had done something to change the light, thickening it, adding fluidity and an unwholesome stain, making the air appear fleshy and corrupt. As I stepped from the wine cellar into the corridor, I felt as though I were gliding through a pudding gone bad, all my movements sluggish and my senses muffled; a cloying odor of putrefaction plugged my nose – me worrying if the obscene light were sticking to my body. I tried to shake it off, twisting like a dog wet from a pond. My thoughts growing fuzzy, confused, the speed of things happening all wrong. It might have been an effect of the hallucinatory incense. Probably it was. But that fact made no difference at the time. I was lost in it.

  The horrible stagnancy.

  Evangeline was talking to me, pulling at my sleeve.

  “Hardy, Hardy, can you hear me?”

  I listened as if from under a great volume of liquid. I grasped the ape head of my walking stick and banged the ferrule into the floor, over and over, checking the solidity of this wavy, murky, subterranean world, attempting to break through, to free my mind from its evil adhesiveness.

  “Trap,” I said. “Trap, trap…”

  My voice sounded odd to me, thrown from across the room, like a magician’s trick.

  “What trap?” Evangeline asked.

  McTroy looked me hard in the eyes, as if judging my sanity.

  “I am not crazy,” I said.

  McTroy’s smile gleamed. He had a gold tooth I hadn’t noticed before. Back on the left.

  Oh, yes you are, Doc, his grin seemed to say. And I am too. Crazy as they come.

  McTroy put his arm around Evangeline’s waist. He turned her and started to lead her away. Wantonness distorted and colored his visage. It would have been easier to accept him if he had suddenly, and without any logical explanation, transformed into a painted circus clown. He leered openly at Evangeline, and winked over his shoulder at me, as if we were in on the same dirty joke.

  She looked shocked, at first, but attempted to conceal it. She was going with him.