2.11 Into The Tomb Part Two: Jon

Jon enters the Hungry Tomb in search of Elizabeth. Will they all be devoured?

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Transcript

THIS HOUSE WILL DEVOUR YOU: THE HUNGRY TOMB  Season Two

A Podcast concerning love, madness, mystery, murder and dead gods in 1920's Ireland, England and Egypt.

 THWDY Episode 2.11 Part 2
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'Into The Tomb: Jon'
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El Kharga

Egypt

March 9th

1926

Dear Lily,

I hope you got my other letter, that I posted from El Kharga a few days ago. At the time I was in quite a state, having missed Elizabeth by days, and wanted a record of sorts to survive. I feel I owe it to you to let you know what happened to us in the desert. I am sure you will understand what a devilish setting we found ourselves in. 

Youssef and I had beat Clarke and the Brotherhood to the tomb. Indeed, we helped drive the Brotherhood off when they attacked the army expedition. We arrived to find Elizabeth’s camp empty save for the camels, a grotesque figure we could not be sure was not some occultist murder, and a burnt-out tent with an unknown victim inside. Elizabeth had left an alarming letter for me which threw some light on these discoveries. In essence this revenant priestess who would bring herself back to life had killed a Qufti and one of the American expedition members, apparently drawing their life force into her and making herself stronger. I took some faint hope from the fact that the priestess had not killed everyone, but it was becoming clear to me that the Hungry Tomb’s alleged inscription, ‘Do not enter lest you be devoured’, was not so much a warning as a promise.  Were we already too late?

It was still early morning and the sun was riding high in the sky, bleaching out the cliff face but unable to penetrate that large black square cut entrance to the tomb, which seemed to absorb all light. Away from the camp, there were no animals or insects. Nothing living moved in the landscape apart from us. The sun beat down like a hammer  on us in this desolate place and heat seemed to pulse off the rock face. 

Apart from the wind and the sound of our footsteps, the one constant in that otherwise silent place was the hiss of sand. This close to the foot of the cliff, I could not see the gigantic sand ridge above us, but I could feel it, a deadly wave that threatened to ride over the edge and drown us. A fine screen of sand was endlessly flowing out into space over the top of the cliff as well as trickling out through the disturbing number of cracks in the cliff face.  The sand was pooling at the foot of the cliff in small fans and I was half convinced that  in the little time we had been there, the flow had increased. I knew that sand dunes were constantly moving, but could they move that fast? Maybe the whole thing was at tipping point, just needing that one final grain to fall before the whole thing failed and slumped down on us like a killing avalanche. 

Youssef was brave, I can tell you. He was risking his life for people he had never met, sure only that it was the right thing to do. We both had a pistol and knife as well as a pressure lamp each. A path had been cleared through the rubble at the base of the cliff but it, the broken ladders and the scaffolding were slowly disappearing under the ceaseless sand.  I gave the rope ladder that snaked up the cliff face and disappeared inside the forbidding tomb entrance a tug. It held firm. I had a sudden image of being halfway up the cliff and the  horror of feeling the ladder go slack.

Then there was the crunch of gravel and a figure stepped out from behind an outcrop. He was a slim, well dressed Egyptian in his thirties, and he was pointing a gun at me.

“Who are you?” he asked in perfect English.

Youssef beside me, said something back in rapid Arabic. 

The man lowered his gun. I realised he was exhausted.

He said, “You must be Captain Ross! Miss Sanderson was very convinced that you find your way here. I am Mr Ali Ashraf, factotum to Sir Malcom and a fool for having ever followed him into the desert.”

He said he had persuaded the Quftis to ride for El Kharga with a message to warn some of Sir Malcolm’s contacts of what was happening. When we had arrived here, Mr Ashraf had been steeling himself to enter the tomb alone, to mount a one man rescue mission, likely knowing it was a death sentence. 

I went up the ladder first, as fast as possible and keeping an eye out for hand holds I could grab, if someone above cut it loose. My hands were slick with sweat from the baking heat and eventually I had to slow down for fear of slipping off. After what seemed an age, constantly glancing up and expecting to see some strange figure peering back, I scrambled over the lip and into a crouching position, drawing my gun as I did so. I was shaking from the exertion and, I’m not ashamed to admit, fear. 

The dark emptiness of the tomb stared back at me. It was as if light itself failed a foot into that hole into hell. Youssef and then Mr Ashraf appeared beside me. It should have been comical how we three men instinctively crowded close on the narrow sunny strip at the edge of the darkness, except there was nothing remotely funny about the void that dared us enter, and be devoured. 

Mr Ashraf broke the spell by turning on his torch. The light penetrated the darkness though not as strongly as it ought to have. It picked out a low ceilinged, wide passageway with pale plastered walls, riven with cracks from earthquakes and covered in coloured and elaborate hieroglyphs. The floor was smooth and dusty. A mess of footprints seemed to go in and out and, jarringly,  modern litter was scattered about, bits of packaging and even tools. It gave the impression of a very hurried, unprofessional excavation which seemed at odds with what I knew of Sir Malcolm’s diary. We pumped and primed our lamps, their hiss not as comforting in the dead silence as it usually was. 

I went first, lamp held high and the Mauser pistol in my other hand. The light from my lamp didn’t want to travel far from its source  as if the inky darkness was viscous and pushing back. There was always an abrupt wall of Stygian pitch black ahead of me, that my imagination populated with all sorts of terror. At every moment I expected some strange horror to lurch out of that darkness at me. I kept an eye on the lamp’s pressure as the thought of it going out and this strange murk congealing around me, touching me, filled me with dread. 

It was disorientating creeping through the tomb. The hieroglyphs were painted on, but sometimes also cut into the plaster  and those latter appeared to move and twist in the reluctant light. I was the wrong man to interpret these images but it seemed to me that there was a lot of smiting and prostrating. Anubis I recognised but there were a bizarre variety of animal headed gods on display. The formality and the strangeness of them, the sense of deep time,  just added to the alienation, that the living were not meant to be in here. We pushed on. It was cool and getting colder, the further we moved from the entrance. We came to a junction and chose right as it showed the most evidence of use, including a discarded empty box of nails. 

We went on and on into that dark silence, none of us speaking because there didn’t seem to be anything worth saying. We passed more junctions, always choosing the one with the most activity. I felt like I had been wandering forever in a labyrinth that only existed a few feet in front and behind me. I noticed Youssef increasingly looking back the way we can come. I began straining my ears. Was that the scuff of a foot behind us? A harsh breath? I wasn’t sure if I was imagining them, spooked by Youssef’s concern or my own fancies. I knew what beast had hunted of old in the labyrinth.

We abruptly stumbled into a cramped chamber, likely the one that Sir Malcolm mentioned in his diary. If it had been full of scrolls as he said, then it had been cleared out, scattered dry fragments on the floor all that was left. A dead floor lamp loomed skeletally alongside a wall and strewn about was more evidence of what looked to my inexpert eye like a very unprofessional packing station. And still there was no sign of anyone. Where was Elizabeth? Where was the expedition?

Mr Ashraf hissed, “Here!” and we hustled over to where he crouched just past the lamp. Somebody had smashed a crude hole in the wall about three feet high and the same wide. Sir Malcolm had written that he suspected there was a hidden chamber. The damage looked fresh but not ‘this morning’ fresh.  A faint smell of tar and spices hung in the air.

A story began to form in my head, based on what Elizabeth had discovered combined with what Fatima told me. 

Sir Malcom returns from the desert, convinced the ritual he is about to perform will return his beloved Mabel to him but instead he half resurrects the priestess, the Hekat who would be pharaoh. Perhaps the ritual was a trap all along waiting for someone foolish and arrogant enough to speak it. If he had performed it here rather than in Cairo, would she have come fully back to life, an ancient priestess with who knows what macabre powers,  instead of the  half-formed thing she is now, forced to wear Mabel’s face and able to convince anyone she comes into contact with of her identity, but really trapped between two bodies, two states, two times? 

The Brotherhood of the Veil and Clarke both get wind of Sir Malcolm’s discovery and react in their own ways, but neither knows exactly what it is he has found. Each sees it according to their biases,  that it is either an ancient evil, or a powerful weapon that could tip the balance of power in Egypt.  

The Brotherhood, newly invigorated, plays to its strengths and sends a killing curse after everyone one on Sir M’s expedition, something I too encountered. When that fails and perhaps realising that the priestess intends to resurrect herself fully, for that must surely be her goal in coming back here to where her body, her mummy, is, the Brotherhood sets out for the Hungry Tomb on a mission it is ill suited for. 

Clarke sends a secret expedition under the fake auspices of the  Egyptological Exploratory Society, led by that rogue Roland Osbourne who is probably looking for an opportunity to ingratiate himself back into polite society. I had not yet met that fellow but he has been a constant thorn in our sides.  

Roland must have robbed everything he could find here and shipped it back to Cairo as fast as he could. In the meantime Clarke also starts putting together an armed expedition and waits to hear from Roland that he has located the tomb before setting off. What is the purpose of the army expedition? To secure the Hungry Tomb for the Residency or to make sure that no one from the Whitton expedition returns alive? Both?

Of course, the Brotherhood, the army and indeed us, were all following the same trail, hence the battle in the desert. I wondered which of them would arrive here first. 

Youssef sighed, then ducked through the hole and disappeared in the blackness. We followed, dropping down a foot into a new passageway. It was tall enough to stand in but barely wider than a person. Its ancient plastered walls and ceiling were covered in large sparse hieroglyphs that definitely seemed to move as we passed them, reaching out for us. I was bringing up the rear when Youssef stopped and said – Listen!

Somewhere ahead of us was shouting, a harsh woman’s voice riding over it all. Then there was a bloodcurdling scream and a cracking noise that seemed to go on forever before abruptly curtailing. In the shocked silence that followed, I distinctly heard something sneaking quietly up on  me. 

I spun around and held up my lamp. It reflected off the nearby hieroglyphs that twisted unpleasantly but the thick darkness swallowed its light. I could hear them now – soft creeping footsteps. What was in here with us, hunting us? The way the darkness ate the light, it would be on top of us as soon as we could see it. I whispered to the other two that something was behind us, then I put my lamp on the ground, braced myself, and aimed my pistol  into the black void of the passageway. I tried to ignore the way my hand was shaking.

A pale figure suddenly lurched out of the darkness straight at me, shockingly close. At the last second I didn’t pull the trigger, though it nearly cost me dearly as she, for it was a woman,  slashed at me with a vicious little knife. I barely avoided it and managed to grab her hand. Whoever this was, it wasn’t Mabel, whom Elizabeth had described as small and dull. This was a tall striking woman though her clothes were scuffed and dirty. I realised also that she had had her eyes shut the whole time. She opened them now and glared at me as if I had been the one who’d attacked her. 

“Whoever you are,” she said haughtily, “take your damn hands off of me.”

From that accent she could only be Irina. It wasn’t a knife she held but a slim chisel, viciously sharp nonetheless. I released her and introduced myself. She was of the opinion that it was about time I showed up and gratefully accepted some water from a canteen. She told us that Sir Malcom and this Jeremy fellow were completely in thrall to the priestess and and had forced everyone left at gun point into the tomb. Dr Rookfield had at one point taken advantage of the priestess’ distraction at the evidence of looting, to shove Irina down a side passage, hissing ‘save yourself.’

“The man is an idiot,” she said at this point, though somewhat affectionately.

She added, “Then I wandered through this terrible maze. I am not sure space or time have proper meaning down here! And the dark”–- she shivered at this–- “the dark is alive, it resents us warm things. Its touch is a corruption; I think stay here too long and we will become living ghosts trapped forever. So I tell myself, Irina, you are a survivor, you will be okay, but you need to go help Elizabeth and Hugh. Then I closed my eyes so the dark could not see me, and came this way.”

She noted the bemusement in my gaze at this last bit and said sharply, “The eyes are the windows to the soul, everyone knows this.”

She pushed impatiently past us to look down the passageway from which an eerie chanting had started up. 

I said, “Well, there is no need to be afraid now. We can get you out of here.”

Irina looked at me in astonishment, “I am not afraid, Elizabeth’s Jon. I am very, very angry.”

And with that she closed her eyes and turned and strode off into the darkness towards the chanting.

We were non-plussed at first and then raced to catch up with her. The passageway ahead turned a corner into a short wide corridor. At its far end, it looked like there was another chamber. Light flowed out from it in a hesitant way as if afraid to go too far. We were in time to see Irina enter the room. I could hear a female and male voice chanting in counterpoint, in competition it seemed. I pushed past the other two, desperate to see if Elizabeth was there, but too cautious to go striding in like Irina. 

The chamber was bigger than the first one and it was crowded. Lamps on the floor uplit the room, creating ghastly reaching shadows whenever anyone moved. A massive stone sarcophagus dominated the chamber. Its huge lid had been pulled off and dropped carelessly on the floor to the right of it, cracking in two. Like the rest of the tomb, the room was otherwise devoid of artefacts, presumably ransacked by Roland. 

To the left of the sarcophagus, was the remainder of the expedition. A body was on the ground rendered in that gruesome fashion we had seen outside the tomb. Two slack faced men who could only be Sir Malcom and Jeremy held a small group of men and one woman at gun point. These I would later learn were the Frenchmen, Artie and Mrs Valentino.  In front of them was the priestess and opposing her was Rookfield. Behind him was a rotund Egyptian man brandishing a crow bar and my Elizabeth, looking terrified and dishevelled but resolute, an oil lamp clutched in her hand. Oh how my heart leaped to see her unharmed but also in such great danger.

Irina had stopped, unsure of what to do. Rookfield had some kind of purple flare in his left outstretched hand, while he chanted in a language unknown to me. The Priestess had her right hand palm out pointing at him and was reciting something guttural and ugly. The flare in Rookfield’s hand burned unsteadily, sometimes blooming bright, sometimes guttering. Sweat was dripping down his strained face. I suddenly understood that this was an esoteric duel and that Dr Rookfield was losing. 

The priestess was smiling. She knew it too. It was very hard to look at her as there were two images superimposed. One a small, soaking wet dead-eyed Englishwoman, the other a taller skeletal figure dressed in tattered robes and ornate headdress. The priestess closed her fist, there was a flash of green light, and Rookfield collapsed to his knees with a cry. The purple light faded to a dim ember clutched in his hand. 

“How far have magicians fallen since my day,” she sneered, “This land is ripe for the plucking.”

Her voice in the chamber was a rasping ragged whisper but in my head I heard the same words as spoken by an upperclass Englishwoman. With the purple flare gone, I could see that maybe Irina was right about the darkness for it writhed around the priestess like grasping branches or reaching tentacles of shadow. 

That Polish lady stepped between the priestess and Rookfield and said, brandishing her little chisel,

“Get away from him you -”

The priestess stepped closer, letting her palm sink onto the sharp edge of the chisel. 

“Or you’ll do what, my so sad artist?”

Elizabeth stepped forward and pulled Irina roughly back.

“Why don’t you burn?” she shouted, smashing her oil lamp at the priestess’ feet.

That creature lit up like a torch as flames ran up her ancient dry robes and she crackled and burned. Her wizened skin blackened and charred like paper while the superimposed Mabel’s flesh swelled and split, spitting sparks of burning fat.  

Elizabeth had done it! 

But no, no my hope died as I saw  this thing seemed amused rather than anything else. The twisting shadows behind her arched down to touch two of the men held at gunpoint. At their contact, the men began screaming and shrivelling, the skin turning leathery and pulling tight even as the bones underneath fractured and broke under the pulling strain. They looked alive throughout the whole ordeal even as they finally fell as dry husks to the ground. The priestess laughed and absorbed the flames into her as well. The ancient part of her looked somehow more solid and real.

“You, strange little girl,” she rasped, pointing at Elizabeth, “Show me your mind. I can see you know who has taken my body.”

The Egyptian fellow with Elizabeth moved in front of her and Irina and waved the crowbar at the priestess.  He looked terrified. 

The priestess growled, “Kill everyone else.”

Well that was my cue. Even as Sir Malcom and Jeremy, their faces disturbingly blank, stepped forward raising their guns, I strode into the chamber, Youssef and Mr Ashraf behind me. Sir Malcolm pointed this gun at me. I couldn’t miss at that range and the burst from the Mauser hit him straight in the chest. I half expected him to ignore the bullets but he collapsed to the ground, dead. I turned to the other man but he was already falling, hit by my companions. I emptied the rest of the clip into the priestess but it had as little effect as I thought it would.

I heard Elizabeth shout ‘Jon’ in joy and concern but I had eyes only for the tentacle of shadow that arched over the Priestess and dropped down towards me. I shut my eyes.

I opened them again. The tentacle had stopped an inch from my face. It’s hard to describe it, like black congealing blood, and it poised unwavering in front of me.

The priestess said, “Open your mind to me, girl, or I will kill him slowly. I can see you care for him.”

I was afraid to move my head, but out of the corner of my eye I could see Elizabeth look worriedly at me, then turn back to the priestess. She stood up straight, brushed some dirt of her outfit and said defiantly,

“You want to see what’s inside my head? You’re welcome to take a look!”

The priestess’ grin was triumphant at this easy capitulation, but it turned to shock as a tall strong feminine form made of golden transparent light  stepped out of Elizabeth’s body. She was dressed in a bare sleeved tunic dress and a gauzy veil hid her face. The shadow tentacle hovering in front of me collapsed into dust.

In a rich voice that my mind heard in English but my ears as another language, this apparition said,

“Ah, Hekat, you still burn with the lust for power after all these millennia. You should have crossed the river long ago.” 

The veiled lady stepped close to the priestess, whose grasping shadows were now reaching out again, questing for all of us to feed her our lives.

“I am all that is, that was, that will be,” this ghost of a goddess whispered, almost as a chant, “No mortal has yet lifted my veil.”

Her hands reached up for that veil and she said harshly, “Let me show you.”

The priestess’ eyes went wide and she shouted ‘No!’ One of her shadow tentacles whipped down to where a dazed Rookfield had just gotten to his feet, stabbing into his hand but no, it was to hit that ember he still held. It blazed blindingly bright, like a miniature purple sun in the chamber creating silhouettes of us all.  Rookfield dropped it in surprise and the thing bloomed with a slow electric light that flared out to touch the chamber sides. 

There was a deafening crack like thunder and the chamber rocked. Fractures zig zagged across the roof and the plaster on the walls shattered. Dust and stones fell from the ceiling.

“You will not have me,” hissed the priestess and then looked up as a slab of rock that weighed tonnes, detached from the ceiling and crushed her where she stood.

The chamber shook again and more stone started falling as bedrock cracked and squealed with stress. The golden apparition of the veiled lady looked around.

“It will have to do,” she said calmly, “Go now.”

Elizabeth grabbed me by the hand and we ran. It was terrifying enough escaping through the collapsing tomb though at least lamp light now seemed to behave properly and we could see where to go even as the air choked with dust and grit. But waiting patiently to take a turn on the rope ladder, that was torture. And all the while the flow of sand from above us increased and strange horrendous straining groans emerged from that giant sand wave that shifted and teetered on the cliff edge.

Some wanted to pause as we collected at the foot of the cliff but I shouted at them to run as if their lives depended on it. We were maybe two hundred feet away before I was prepared to stop and look back. I still held Elizabeth’s hand, warm and real in my own. Great cracks appeared in the cliff face and the entrance to the Hungry Tomb collapsed with a gout of dust and debris. Then slowly, majestically, unstoppably, that great body of golden sand above it began to shift, then to pour, then rush, then it avalanched with a world shattering roar down into the wadi, burying everything. It seemed to go on forever, but at last it was still again and the only sounds were our coughing and sobbing and the distant baying of annoyed camels.

In the end it was the army who got there first. Clarke was with them and I finally met Roland Osbourne. I didn’t take to him, even if his theft of the priestess’ mummy had stopped her completing the ritual to bring her back to life in it. I did find out that everything from the tomb was being shipped straight back to England, where it would be put in storage in the British Museum before the Antiquities Services here ever got wind of it. A win for the Residency, I guess.

I was introduced to Rami the cook who had wielded the crowbar, Hayley Valentino, Artie, and Irina again. Everyone still alive was bruised and scratched but otherwise unharmed apart from Mr Ashraf who had taken a bullet from Jeremy to the leg and had been half carried out by Youssef. The army doctor said he’d live. A lucky man given how many died there. All of those poor half track drivers! Rookfield thanked me for coming to the rescue but truth be told, it seemed to me that Elizabeth and Irina were the ones to be thanked.  And Isis of course, whom Elizabeth had carried within her since Luxor.

Whatever Clarke had intended our fate to be, our intervention in the battle with the brotherhood meant that the army boys were myself and Youssef’s new best friends, and he wisely decided that us agreeing to leave the country at the earliest opportunity was the best course of action. Thankfully the trumped up charges against me have been quietly dropped. 

So here I am in El Kharga again. I am waiting on Elizabeth to finish her bath and then we will take a stroll and finally spend time together alone for the first time in months.  We will be back in England soon enough with a lot of plans to make. 

I hope George continues to recover and that someone is looking out for you also, as I know well enough that not all wounds are physical.

All the best,

Jon