The Book of the Dead (17 page)

Menzies let his hand fall away from hers, and as he did so, she saw—with a thrill of horror—that his other hand had been concealed beneath. It held a tiny syringe, which was injecting a colorless liquid into the IV tube at her wrist. Even as she watched, he withdrew the syringe, palmed it, then replaced it in his suit jacket.

“My dear Margo,” he said, sitting back, his voice so very different now. “Did you really think you’d seen the last of me?”

Panic, and a desperate desire to survive, surged within her—yet she felt utterly powerless against the drug that was spreading through her veins, silencing her voice and paralyzing her limbs. Menzies swept to his feet, placed a finger against his lips, and whispered, “Time to sleep, Margo…”

The hated darkness surged in, blotting out sight and thought. Panic, shock, and disbelief fell aside as the mere act of drawing breath became a struggle. As she lay paralyzed, Margo saw Menzies turn and hasten from the room, heard his faint yelling for a nurse. But then his voice, too, was subsumed into the hollow roar that filled her head, and darkness gathered in her eyes until the roar dwindled into blackness and eternal night, and she knew no more.

F
our days after their meeting with Menzies, the sound-and-light show was finally installed and ready for debugging, and that night they were pulling the final cables, hooking everything up. Jay Lipper crouched by the dusty hole near the floor of the Hall of the Chariots, listening to various sounds emerging from the hole: grunts, heavy breathing, muttered curses. It was the third night in a row they’d worked on the install into the wee hours of the morning, and he was dog-tired. He couldn’t take much more of this. The exhibition had basically taken over his life. All his guildmates in
Land of Darkmord
had given up on him and continued with the online game. By now, they’d leveled up once, maybe twice, and he was hopelessly behind.

“Got it?” came DeMeo’s muffled voice from the hole. Lipper looked down to see the end of a fiber-optic cable poking out of the blackness.

Lipper seized the end. “Got it.”

He pulled it through, then waited for DeMeo to come around from the other side. Soon DeMeo’s blocky figure, backlit and faint in the dim light of the tomb, came huffing down the passageway, cables coiled about his massive shoulders. Lipper handed him the cable end and DeMeo plugged it into the back of a PowerBook sitting on a nearby worktable. Later, when the artifacts were all in place, the laptop would be artfully hidden behind a gilded and painted chest. But for now, it was out in the open, where they could access it.

DeMeo slapped the dust off his thighs with a grin, then held up his hand. “High five, bro. We did it.”

Lipper ignored the hand, unable to disguise his irritation. He had had just about enough of DeMeo. The museum’s two electricians had insisted on going home at midnight, and as a result he’d found himself on his hands and knees, acting as DeMeo’s damn assistant.

“We’ve got a long way to go,” he said in a sulky voice.

DeMeo’s hand dropped. “Yeah, but at least, the cabling’s been pulled, the software’s loaded, and we’re on schedule. You can’t ask for better than that, right, Jayce?”

Lipper reached over and turned on the computer, initiating the boot sequence. He hoped to hell the computer would see the network and the remote devices, but he knew it wouldn’t. It was never that easy—and besides, DeMeo was the one who set up the frigging network. Anything could happen.

The computer finished booting and, with a sinking heart, Lipper began sending pings over the network, checking to see how many of the two dozen remote devices were missing and would require time-consuming troubleshooting to locate. He’d be lucky if the computer saw half of the peripherals on first boot-up: it was the nature of the business.

But as he moused his way from one network address to another, a sense of disbelief stole over him. Everything seemed to be there.

He ran over his checklist. It was impossible, but true: the entire network was there, visible and operational. All the remote devices, the sound-and-light apparatus, were responding and seemed to be perfectly synchronized. It was as if someone had already worked out the kinks.

Lipper rechecked his list, but with the same result. Disbelief gave way to a kind of guarded jubilation: he could not recall a single job where such a complicated network was up and running on the first try. And it wasn’t just the network: the entire project had been like that, everything coming together like a charm. It had taken days of seemingly endless work, but in the real world it would have taken even longer. Probably a lot longer. He fetched a deep breath.

“How’s it look?” DeMeo asked, crowding up behind him to peer at the small screen. Lipper could smell his oniony breath.

“Looks good.” Lipper edged away.

“Sweet!” DeMeo gave a whoop that echoed through the tomb, just about blowing out Lipper’s eardrum. “I am the
man!
I’m a freaking network
monster!
” He danced around the room, doing an ungainly buck-and-wing, pumping his fist into the air. Then he glanced over at Lipper. “Let’s do a test run.”

“I have a better idea. Why don’t you go out and get us a couple of pizzas?”

DeMeo looked at him in surprise. “What—now? You don’t want to do an alpha?”

Lipper certainly did want to do a test run. But not with DeMeo breathing down his neck, whooping in his ear, and acting like an ass. Lipper wanted to admire his handiwork quietly, in a focused way. He needed a break from DeMeo, and he needed one bad.

“We’ll do a run
after
the pizzas. On me.”

He watched as DeMeo considered this.

“All right,” DeMeo said. “What do you want?”

“The Neapolitan. With a large iced tea.”

“I’m going for the Hawaiian double pineapple with honey-glazed ham, extra garlic, and two Dr Peppers.”

It was typical of DeMeo to assume Lipper gave a shit what kind of pizza he wanted. Lipper pulled out two twenties, passed them over.

“Thanks, bro.”

He watched DeMeo’s form labor up the stone staircase and vanish in the gloom. The footsteps echoed slowly away.

Lipper breathed in the blessed silence. Maybe DeMeo would be run over by a bus on the way back.

With that pleasant thought in mind, he turned his attention back to the computer’s control panel. He moused over each peripheral device in turn, checking to see that it was alive and functional, surprised again that each one responded perfectly, on cue, as if somebody had already debugged the network for them. DeMeo, for all his wisecracks and shenanigans, had actually done his job—and done it perfectly.

Suddenly he paused, frowning. A software icon was jumping frantically in the dock. Somehow the main routines for the sound-and-light show had loaded automatically, when, in fact, he had specifically programmed them to load manually, at least during the alpha testing, so he could step through the code and check each module.

So there was a glitch, after all. He’d need to fix it, of course: but not right now. The software was loaded, the controllers were online and ready, the screens in place, the fog machine filled.

He might as well run it.

He drew in another breath, savoring the peace and quiet, his finger over the return key, ready to execute the program. Then he paused. A sound had drifted toward him from the deeper part of the tomb: the Hall of Truth, or maybe even the burial chamber itself. Couldn’t be DeMeo, since he’d be coming from the opposite direction. And the pizzas would take at least half an hour; if he were lucky, maybe even forty minutes.

Perhaps it was a guard or something.

The sound came again: a strange, dry, scurrying sound. No guard made a noise like that.

Mice, maybe?

He rose indecisively. It was probably nothing. Christ, he was letting himself get spooked by all this curse crap the guards had started to whisper about. It was probably just a mouse. After all, there’d been plenty of mice in the old Egyptian galleries, enough so the Maintenance Department had needed to place glue traps. Still, if some had gotten into the tomb itself—maybe through one of the cable holes DeMeo had opened up—all it would take was a pair of rodent teeth sunk into one cable to crash the whole system and cause a delay of hours, maybe even days, while they examined each cable. Inch by frigging inch.

Another scurry, like wind rustling dead leaves. Leaving the lights dimmed, he picked up DeMeo’s coat—ready to throw it over a mouse if he found one—then rose and made his way stealthily into the deepest recesses of the tomb.

    Teddy DeMeo fumbled for his key card, swiping it through the newly installed lock to the Egyptian gallery while trying not to drop the pizzas at the same time. The damn pies were cold—the guards at the security entrance had taken their sweet time clearing him through, when the same idiots had checked him out just twenty-five minutes earlier. Security? More like moronity.

The door to the Egyptian gallery whispered shut and he strode down the length of the hall, turned into the annex—and was surprised to find the doors to the tomb shut before him.

A suspicion took root in his mind: had Lipper gone and done the first run without him? But he quickly dismissed it. Lipper, though a fussy artiste type and cranky as hell, was basically a cool guy.

He fumbled out his key card and swiped it, hearing the locks disengage. Still balancing the pizzas and drinks, he got an elbow into the door and shoved it open, then slipped through, the door clicking shut behind him.

The lights had dimmed to level 1—the level they would be at after a run—and once again, DeMeo felt a stab of suspicion.

“Hey, Jayce!” he called out. “Pizza delivery!”

His voice echoed and died away.

“Jayce!”

He descended the staircase, walked down the corridor, and went as far as the bridge over the well before pausing again.

“Jayce! Pizza time!”

He listened while the echoes died away. Lipper wouldn’t have done an initial test run without him: not after all the time they’d put in on the project together. He wasn’t that much of an asshole. He probably had his earphones on, checking the sound track or something. Or maybe he was listening to his iPod—sometimes he did that while working. DeMeo ventured across the bridge and entered their main work area in the Hall of the Chariots.

As he did so, he heard a distant footstep. At least he thought it was a footstep. But it had made an odd thumping sound. It came from deeper within the tomb, probably the burial chamber.

“That you, Jayce?” For the first time, DeMeo felt a creeping sense of alarm. He put the pizzas down on the worktable and took a few steps toward the Hall of Truth and the burial chamber beyond. He could see that it was quite dark—still at level 1 lighting, like the rest of the tomb. He couldn’t see a damn thing, to tell the truth.

He went back to the worktable, looked at the computer. It was fully booted, the software loaded and waiting in standby mode. He moused over to the lighting icon, trying to remember how to raise the light levels. Lipper had done it a hundred times, but he’d never paid much attention. There were some software sliders visible in an open window and he clicked the one labeled Hall of the Chariots.

Christ! The lights
dimmed
, sending the disquieting Egyptian carvings and stone statuary even further into gloom. He quickly moused the slider in the other direction, and the lights intensified. Then he began brightening the lights in the rest of the tomb.

He heard a thump and turned with a jerk. “Jayce?”

It had definitely come from the burial chamber.

DeMeo laughed. “Hey, Jayce, c’mere. I got the pizzas.”

There was that strange noise again: Draaaag-thump. Draaaag-thump. As if somebody, or some thing, was dragging one limb.

“It sounds just like
The Mummy’s Curse
. Ha, ha, Jayce—good one!”

No answer.

DeMeo, still chuckling, turned from the computer and strode through the Hall of Truth. He turned his eyes away from the squatting form of Ammut—something about the Egyptian god, the eater of hearts with a crocodile head and lion’s mane, creeped him out even worse than the rest of the tomb.

He paused beyond the door to the burial chamber. “You’re a funny guy, Jayce.”

He waited for Lipper’s laugh, for the sight of his skinny form emerging from behind a pilaster. But there was nothing. The silence was absolute. With a nervous swallow, he ducked inside, peered about the tomb.

Nothing. The other doors leading away from the burial chamber were dark—they weren’t part of the computer lighting scheme. Lipper must be hiding in one of those rooms, preparing to jump out and scare him half to death.

“Hey, Jayce, come on. The pizzas are cold and getting colder.”

The lights suddenly went out.

“Hey!”

DeMeo spun around, but the tomb doglegged at the Hall of Truth and he could not see back into the Hall of the Chariots—nor could he see the comforting blue glow of the LCD screen.

He spun again, hearing the strange, dragging footfalls behind him, moving closer now.

“This isn’t funny, Jay.”

He felt for his flashlight—but of course he wasn’t carrying it; it was back in the chariots hall, on the table. Why couldn’t he see the indirect glow of the LCD? Had the power been cut as well? The darkness was total.

“Look, Jay, cut the crap. I’m serious.”

He shuffled backward in the dark, came up against one of the pillars, began feeling his way around it. The steps drew still closer.

Draaaag-
thump
. Draaaag-
thump
.

“Jay, come on. Cut the bullshit.”

Suddenly, from closer than he ever expected, he heard the raspy sound of air escaping from a dry throat. A rattle that was almost a hiss, full of something like hatred.

“Jesus!” DeMeo took a step forward and swiped his heavy fist through the air, striking something that shuffled back with another snakelike hiss.

“Stop it! Stop it!”

He both heard and felt the thing rush at him with a high keening sound. He tried to twist aside but felt, with astonishment, a terrible blow. Searing heat knifed through his chest. With a shriek, he fell backward, clawing at the darkness, and as he hit the ground, he felt something heavy and cold stamp on his throat and bear down with shocking weight. He lashed about with his hands as he heard the bones crackling in his neck and a sudden, dazzling explosion of urine-colored light flashed in his eyes—and then nothing.