The first man shouted again, pointing at the stone in obvious fear.
Then he turned and ran from the chamber.
His desertion was like a floodgate opening, and the other workers sprinted furiously after him. Lois could see their flashlights receding through the second and first chambers.
She looked up at Clark again, wondering what could have caused that reaction. “What did he say?!”
Clark looked at her worriedly.
“I– I think he said it’s the curse of the mummy.”*****
“What do you mean there hasn’t been a crime?” Lois exclaimed.
The police had come within the hour after Dr. Weeks sent Zaid to summon them. But they didn’t seem to think much of what they found at the tomb.
Bashir translated her words to the two officers that stood in chamber three with them.
One officer shrugged, gesturing to the statue.
Bashir nodded to him and translated, “He says that there is no crime for leaving a statue in the tomb. There is only a crime for removing one.”
“But this man is missing!” she argued, gesturing at the statue. Captivated by the realistic features of the face, she knelt down to examine it more closely. “How do we know he’s not…
in there?”
She heard Bashir translating over her shoulder.
“In there?” Clark echoed.
“Well, this is pretty life-like,” she said, examining the individual hairs on the eyebrows. “And it’s the size of a man. How do we know he wasn’t dipped in cement or something?”
Clark didn’t reply, his eyes moving over the statue.
“Well?” she asked, looking back at him. “What do you think?”
Her partner toyed with his glasses, finally sliding them all the way down his nose to clean them, but still squinting at the statue over them, then looking through them again. “I don’t know. I can’t see inside it.”
She snorted and rolled her eyes. “Well, yeah, that’s the problem, isn’t it?”
Meanwhile the two officers were exchanging words with Dr. Weeks as they made their way toward the exit of the tomb.
“Hey! Where are you going?” she called after them.
Bashir turned to her. “They made out a report for the missing petrol,” he explained. “That’s all they can do.”
“But that’s ridiculous!”
“It seems they are not superstitious,” Bashir shrugged, sounding almost disappointed.
“Well, neither am I, but even I can see that something odd is going on around—”
“We need to locate the men,” Dr. Weeks said over her, returning to the small group that was left.
“I will go,” Zaid volunteered.
“I should go as well,” Bashir said next.
“No,” Dr.Weeks disagreed. “I’ll go. I need you here to continue in chamber nine.”
“It will take much longer on my own,” Bashir replied, shaking his head slowly.
“That’s still better than not getting any further at all,” Dr. Weeks replied.
“We offered to help last night,” piped up Clark with a smile. “The offer’s still good.”
Lois immediately shot him a look that told him to pipe
right down again, which he deliberately ignored. Stifling her outrage, she crossed her arms over her chest. She wasn’t here to join the excavation team; she was here to
investigate them.
“You aren’t trained,” Dr. Weeks replied practically.
She breathed a sigh of relief.
“There’s chamber eight,” suggested Bashir.
Dr. Weeks looked at him consideringly, and her hopes sank.
“Chamber eight?” Clark echoed.
“When we began work on chamber nine, we transferred some of the rock that we knew was worthless to chamber eight.”
Lois jumped in, seeing where this was going. “So now you need to transfer the rock to…?”
Bashir grinned, pointing upward.
She looked at Clark, plainly asking if he was serious about making them haul rock all day.
He gave her a look back that suggested he had more empathy for the archeologists’ schedule than for the aching back she knew she’d have by the time they were done.
“Most of the rock in the front of eight has already been sifted and classified,” Bashir went on. “And if I’m in nine, then I can supervise.”
“Fine,” Dr. Weeks ruled. “You three head into the corridor to keep clearing eight and cataloguing nine and I’ll go with Zaid to see if we can find enough help to keep working tomorrow.”
“What are we going to do with him?” Lois asked, gesturing to the stone figure.
They all considered the ghastly figure at the center of the room.
“I mean, it
could be a body,” she said.
Bashir walked up to it, examining with a critical eye.
“If it is, the surface is cement.” He pressed his finger into it. “It has been drying, but it is not fully set.”
“How can you tell?” she asked. “Your finger didn’t even make an imprint.”
“The color,” Dr. Weeks replied, also looking at the cement statue with an analytic gaze. “It’s not light enough to be fully dry all the way through, but not dark enough to still be wet on the outer layer.”
“Can you tell how long it’s been drying?” she pressed.
“Anywhere from a couple hours to twenty or so?” he guessed.
“Can’t you narrow it down any more than that?” she asked.
“From that color, at least eight hours, not more than sixteen. Wouldn’t you say Bashir?”
“Eight to twelve,” Bashir replied without ceasing his examination of the stone.
She exchanged a heavy glance with Clark. It was within the exact window that Wahid went missing. She took a step away from the statue, unconsciously moving closer to Clark.
“How do you know that?” Clark asked.
“Because I’m betting it’s quick-dry cement,” Dr. Weeks said. “We’ve been using it for years. We see quite a lot of it as we impatiently wait for it to cure.”
“So you’re saying anyone on the dig site would know how to work with it?” Lois asked slowly, wheels turning in her head.
Dr. Weeks nodded.
It seemed like there was no way to whittle down their suspect list.
“I don’t think there is a body inside,” Bashir spoke up, still examining the nose of the stone man very closely.
“What makes you say that?” asked Clark.
“Artifacts that are dipped have all the detail on the inside, like a mold. This has all the detail on the
outside. If a body had been dipped, it would not look like the person. And also—” He put his hands on the stone man’s shoulder and pushed. It barely moved. “If it was a body, this would be much lighter.” He rapped his knuckle against it. “This is cement all the way through.”
“So you’re saying that Wahid went missing, and then someone carved a statue of him and left it here? Why would someone do that?”
“Maybe that’s why they needed the lights out,” Clark interjected.
“Yes,” she agreed, warming to his theme. “They knew Dr. Weeks wouldn’t let anyone into the tomb if the lights were out. I bet they used the mummy last night to scare everyone away so that they could get this in here! But why a statue?”
“Maybe they thought it would scare anyone away that hadn’t been run off by the mummy last night?” Clark guessed.
Looking at it, she repressed a shiver. “It
is pretty creepy.”
“You make it sound like there is a conspiracy,” Bashir said, his brows drawn.
“None of the men would do this,” said Zaid with concern in his voice. “Many have been here for
years.”
“I didn’t want to worry anyone, but…” Dr. Weeks sighed, taking off his bucket hat and running his hand through his hair. “You must have noticed all the things that have gone wrong in the last couple of months. Yesterday, the generator. The missing fuel. The ladder that fell last week–it nearly hit Rupert. New debris getting set in our way. The buckets that went missing a few weeks back. Things disappearing.”
“Thieves will always take what they see if—” Bashir started.
But Dr. Weeks was shaking his head. “It’s coordinated. And it’s meant to slow us down.”
“What can we do?” asked Zaid.
“We can keep going,” Dr. Weeks said emphatically.
Bashir nodded, taking in his fortifying words. “We keep going.”
“So let’s go and see if we can bring any of our excavators back,” Dr. Weeks said bracingly.
Zaid nodded and moved toward the exit.
“Do you need any help with the lights?” Dr. Weeks asked Bashir.
“No. We will only use them in eight and nine,” Bashir said. “I will check them.”
“Hopefully we’ll be back in a few hours with more help,” Dr. Weeks said, following Zaid out.
Bashir watched him go, the worried look on his face again.
“I wonder what will happen to his family,” Clark said somberly.
“What?” she asked, her mind rolling over Bashir’s insistence that this all must be caused by thieves.
“Wahid’s family. Last night Zaid told us that his sister was sick, that his mother couldn’t walk well. If Wahid is really gone, who will support them now?”
Bashir tuned back into their conversation. “Wahid has been doing odd jobs to help support them for a while now. He even runs errands for us that are not associated with the project. He makes trips into Luxor when we are too busy to go. The post office, the pharmacy, things like that. I am sure they have something saved. And,” he said, “I am
sure Wahid will turn up.”
“How do you know?” asked Lois, trying not to let suspicion creep into her voice.
“Egyptians are resilient," Bashir said with some pride. “As Dr. Weeks’ says, we must keep going. Are we ready?”
In hindsight, she regretted saying that yesterday afternoon’s Egyptology lesson was interminable.
Because apparently today was shaping up to be even worse.
***
She grunted as she dropped the little boulder onto the wagon Bashir had produced for them. It was only the size of her head, but it weighed a ton! Wiping her forehead with her sleeve, she cast a withering look at Clark as he joined her at the wagon, maneuvering his rock with what looked like a
lot less difficulty.
Catching her stare, he grinned and asked, “Winded?”
“That thing had to be fifty pounds!” she complained.
Clark glanced at the rock she’d brought over. “That’s probably pretty close! It’s solid limestone.”
“Oh, good, well, at least I can find a second career as a human scale if the whole investigative reporter thing doesn’t work out,” she griped, putting a hand to her lower back.
Clark’s eyes followed her hand. “It’s not worth hurting yourself. You can stick to the smaller ones if it’s easier.”
She felt her anger find a new target. “I can lift just as much as you,” she said, hearing it come out like a threat and not regretting it.
“If you say so…” He put up his hands in mock surrender.
“You don’t even work out!” she protested.
He laughed. “Lois, I was a farm kid! All I did was haul stuff around.”
“It’s fine,” she said and marched back to the far side of the chamber to find herself another rock.
“You really don’t like this assignment, do you?” he asked. He crossed toward her and started pulling up another rock of his own.
“No,” she said definitively, half waddling as she lugged her miniature boulder across the room away from him.
“Didn’t you ever have an Egypt phase as a kid, Lois?”
“Egypt was a childhood phase?”
“Sure! Cleopatra, the pyramids, King Tut’s tomb, the sphinx, Nefertiti, the curse of the mummy?”
“I must have missed that one,” she said dryly.
“This stuff is cool!” he said exuberantly, like a happy kid reciting the best part of his day. “You don’t think this is fun at all?”
“I
think this is a bunch of junk. Old, decaying, dusty, sand-covered junk that everyone forgot about in the first place.” She dropped her boulder into the wagon and leaned back against it. “But I’ll tell you what it isn’t: cursed. There’s no awakened mummy, no phantom pharaoh, and no ancient curse.”
He rolled his eyes, but, like the good sport he was, asked, “So what
were you into as a kid?”
“Taking care of the baby,” she said, so tired and frustrated from the hours of rocks she’d reluctantly lugged that she accidentally gave a real, undefended answer.
“Like playing house?” Clark asked.
“No,” she said moodily, pushing off the cart as he approached it, rock in tow, and heading back to the pile of rubble with her head down.
“So, dolls?” he guessed. “I can’t quite picture you with a doll. Maybe a hobby horse and a water pistol…” he chuckled.
“I can’t remember if I had a doll,” she said offhandedly, still catching her breath but pushing herself to put distance between them, and hopefully this topic, too. “I must have.”
“So if you weren’t playing house, and weren’t playing with dolls, how did you–”
“Lucy,” she cut off his speculation in a huff, and knelt down to find a rock the size she could heft.
“You played with her a lot as a kid?” he asked.
“I did
everything with her a lot as a kid.”
“What do you mean?” he asked. His tone had shifted in a somber direction. Feeling him kneel down beside her, she grabbed the closest rock to her before standing and twisting away.
“Dad was always at work. Mom ended up…
sleeping a lot. Lucy was there. Someone had to feed her.”
“How old were you?”
She could hear the surprise in his voice, which was part of the reason she didn’t talk about this much. She’d been seven, and already precocious and self-sufficient for her age.
“Around eight or nine.”
“Eight?!”
“It didn’t take a genius to make peanut butter and jelly,” she said. In her haste, she had picked a rock even bigger than the last one that had winded her, and this time it was taking her longer to cross the room.
“That had to be pretty hard on a kid,” Clark said.
“It was time-consuming, that’s for sure,” she replied, finally reaching the wagon and dropping her rock into it. She leaned over the wagon’s side to catch her breath. “So, no, I never had time for an Egypt phase.”
He was quiet for a moment.
Thankfully.
Then he appeared beside her, dropping his own rock beside hers. He turned and leaned against the wagon, too, looking at the chamber walls.
“It’s never too late.”
She guffawed at the idea, and it turned into a derisive, self-deprecating laugh.
“I don’t think it’s going to be on this trip,” she lightly retorted.
“You’ll never find a more eager set of teachers,” he said with a widening grin.
In response, she scrunched up her nose in distaste. “Ugh, academics! Don’t even put that idea into their heads.”
She pushed off the cart and set across the room on her hunt for another rock.
“I don’t think I’ve ever met Lucy,” Clark said, as if searching his memory.
“I don’t think you have,” she concurred, walking the length of the wall to examine the rocks in front of her. “She moved to California right after you started at the
Planet.”
“She didn’t come back for the wedding?” he asked.
Lois froze, her least favorite topic arresting her where she stood.
Clark seemed to realize it immediately.
“Gosh, Lois, I’m sorry,” he apologized earnestly.
She forced enough oxygen back into her lungs to answer him. “It’s fine,” she said tersely.
“It doesn’t have to be,” he said. It sounded like an offer.
“Really?” she asked, rounding on him. “Because when Ariana Carlin suggested I wasn’t ‘fine,’ you and Perry practically wanted to have me committed!”
His shoulders dropped. “That’s because we thought you were blacking out and having episodes where you acted so erratically that you might be a danger to yourself.”
“Well, I wasn’t,” she snapped, crossing her arms defensively.
“No,” he agreed heartily. “You weren’t. In fact, you’ve probably held it together better than most people would have in the same situation.”
“Who else has been in
this situation?” she asked, agog.
He shrugged lightly, nodding in acknowledgement. “Lots of people have been betrayed by someone they love.”
Her eyes welled up at once.
“But you don’t have to talk about it if you really don’t want to,” he followed up quickly.
“No, I don’t,” she rejoined, angry at the tears she hadn’t been able to repress. She dashed them away. Even when so many others had pried into her personal life, vying for gossip and dirty details, Clark hadn’t asked
ever. Instead, he’d been so careful with her, avoiding adjacent topics and adjusting related language and awkwardly jumping into conversations to help erect a wall between her and the memories. She figured he was due his pound of flesh and felt herself relent.
“But I will now, if you want to.”
“Are you sure?” he asked, eyebrows in his hairline. Then they dropped down again, and the space between them furrowed. “I would never want to–”
“The clock is ticking,” she said, irritation seeping through in spite of his kindness in offering her an out.
He nodded and inhaled, and she recognized that he was buying time, the way he did when he was choosing his words carefully. “It all just seemed kind of…fast. Especially at the end. One week you were going to the opera together for the first time and the next you were engaged. How did that happen?”
“He proposed,” she said shortly.
He looked at her as if trying to read her. “I meant it when I said that you didn’t have to talk about it.”
She exhaled, forcing her breath to remain steady until she ran out of air. Then she said more evenly, “I’ve always taken risks at work. I figured I should try it in my personal life for once.”
He looked surprised.
“You don’t think you take risks in your personal life?” he asked.
“You know I don’t,” she said grumpily.
He shook his head. “You go running in Centennial Park at night. You
fight as a hobby. You take Jimmy out for coffee and listen to
all of his latest girlfriend problems. You even read ‘Go Ask Alice’ on a recommendation.”
“That’s not what I mean and you know it,” she said sternly, reining in the grin that wanted to escape. “My intuition was telling me to pursue Lex, so I did. I just didn’t realize it was telling me to investigate him instead of telling me to marry him.”
“That was an
awfully big risk.”
“I didn’t know how big a risk it was when I said ‘yes.’ I figured we could go our separate ways in a few years if it didn’t work out.” She shrugged.
Clark shook his head at that.
“What?” she asked.
“I guess I think that’s just a pretty cynical viewpoint about marriage,” he answered.
“People get divorced all the time,” she said as a matter of fact, picking up a smaller rock this time and stumbling sideways toward the wagon.
“I just can’t imagine it.”
“Oh, what are you saying? You’ll never get divorced?” she challenged, dropping her mini-boulder off in relief.
“I hope not,” he said.
There was a wistfulness in his voice that made her turn and look at him. He was staring at her with a sort of a sad expression on his face. Her heart skipped at seeing it.
“Clark?”
“I just can’t imagine it,” he said again. “You finally find the one person you want to spend your life with. You’re lucky enough that they agree to marry you. You plan the wedding. You celebrate your marriage. You dream about a whole future together. You expect to share their whole lifetime. And then a few years later, you just give up on them?”
She blinked. From that perspective, it did seem like a rather cruel twist of fate. She’d only ever really considered her parents’ marriage as an example. But clearly, Clark had done the same. Privately, she thought that he was working off a skewed sample; most people’s parents weren’t as crazy about each other as Jonathan and Martha were. Then again, it occurred to her, maybe so was she. It was equally rare that she met a couple as committed to vitriol and punitive pettiness as her parents were. She’d always assumed that as a product of divorce, she’d end up divorced, too. But wasn’t it just as likely that a kid that came from a warm and stable home like Clark’s would similarly end up in a warm, stable marriage?
“Well, maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones,” she conceded.
“I really hope so,” he said, that wistful note doubling down in his voice.
She tilted her head, trying to gauge his meaning. But the moment, like desert sand below their feet, shifted quickly.
Thinking of Clark’s parents reminded her of his ultimate plan to head back to the farm once he was done playing reporter, and it felt like a slap to the face all over again.
Without replying, she moved past him to find another rock.
“Lois?” His voice was probing.
“It must be nice to have that plan,” she said tersely. “To go back home to take care of your parents, marry some other farmer, and live out your days without ever considering a divorce. That’s happily ever after in Kansas, right?”
He followed her over to the rock pile. “Lois, I know I caught you off-guard last night…”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She picked up yet another stupid boulder.
“Do you really think that if something happened to my parents, I shouldn’t try to help them?”
She blew the hair out of her eyes in frustration. “No, of course not,” she partly conceded. “But that doesn’t mean that you should give up your entire life.”
He stood in her path. “It wouldn’t be my
entire life.”
“No?” she asked, dropping her boulder where she stood and rounding on him. “Just your entire life in Metropolis! Jimmy looks up to you like an older brother. Perry thinks of you like one of his own kids. And your job isn’t exactly an easy one to get! Every reporter worth anything would
kill for a shot to work at the
Planet. To be on such a successful team, in such a successful
partnership! And I—” She cut herself off. “You’re already one of the lucky ones, Clark. Or doesn’t any of that matter to you?”
He took a tentative step closer to her, his eyes soft. “I
am lucky. I think of Perry and Jimmy as family, too. And that’s how I know that wherever I am in the world, I’ll always be a part of their lives. Even if it’s not the exact partnership we have now.”
Even though Clark was talking about Jimmy and Perry, she knew that he meant her, too. His voice had sounded like he was going to explain why his life in Metropolis meant so much to him. But his meaning, in spite of his sappy tone, was loud and clear: he would leave them all in a minute if asked, as if they didn’t matter at all. He would still leave.
Choosing fury over the wilder swirling emotions, she picked up her rock and hauled it over to the wagon, dropping it in.
Then she turned and stalked back to the pile for another.
“Lois–”
“I can’t talk and move these at the same time,” she bit out, turning on him accusingly. “Or do you want to break our promise to Bashir?”
He shook his head like he’d been chastised, and she went to pick out another rock to torture herself with.
The only sound either of them heard for the rest of the morning was the fall of discarded boulders.
***
When Bashir came to check on them a couple of hours later, he brought the news of an impending team meeting. Eager to find a way out of the enclosed space with Clark, she gladly dropped the rock she’d been carrying and practically hurled herself toward the corridor to head up to the meeting.
Emerging from the tomb, it took her eyes a moment to adjust to the piercing light of the sun again. But once they did, she saw most of the excavation team standing in a clumped circle nearby. Bashir headed in that direction and she followed, realizing that, of course, Clark had come along, too.
Joining the group, she found herself standing next to Gamal, the introverted little artist that had brought their luggage to them. He offered a polite head nod in recognition. She smiled back at him before she turned her attention to Dr. Weeks, who stood at the front of the group.
“Thank you all for meeting. On any given day, we do a good job cobbling together Arabic and English and French and even hand gestures and hieratic to communicate, but I want this to be as clear as possible, so I’m asking Dr. Bashir to translate for us.”
Bashir stepped forward to stand next to Dr. Weeks and nodded his head.
“I want to address the things that have been going on around here,” he began. Bashir spoke right over him in Arabic, just a bit louder, as Dr. Weeks went on, and the men around them tuned into the solemn sound of the normally convivial man.
“There have been several incidents over the past few weeks where things have gone missing or where the work has been sabotaged. I no longer believe that these are accidents. Someone is intentionally doing these things to slow and ultimately endanger our work here. It must stop. If you know anything, please talk to myself, Dr. Bashir, Dr. Carnahan, or Zaid.”
Bashir pressed his hands across his heart and Zaid inclined his head as they heard their respective names.
Lois looked around her, casting her eyes over the group. Where was Carnahan? She couldn’t find him in the small crowd now, and she didn’t remember seeing him this morning when they’d turned on the lights, either.
For the moment, work was going to have to take priority over how she felt about Clark and his selfish decisions about his future. Right now, she needed her partner.
Luckily, even when she was angry at him, he was never far away.
Sidling over a couple feet toward him, she nudged him and whispered, “Where’s Carnahan?”
Clark’s head immediately snapped up, looking around the circle of men.
“He’s not here,” he replied into her ear.
“Do you remember seeing him after last night?” she asked quietly.
Clark shook his head, his expression shifting to worry. “Do you think something happened to him?”
“Or
because of him,” she murmured.
Meanwhile, one of the men had asked a question that Bashir was quietly translating to Dr. Weeks.
“No,” Dr. Weeks said emphatically. “These people were embalmed during the New Kingdom. That means they believed they were preserving bodies via mummification so that the souls who traveled during the day had a resting place to come home to at night. The mummy from chamber five was
stolen and thus is no longer providing this service to its soul. Instead, a real, modern man, like you or I, is walking around in a costume trying to scare us all away.”
Another man asked something in Arabic, and she looked from him toward Dr. Weeks.
“He may be dangerous, but only as dangerous as any other man. We are not asking you to catch him. Your safety should be the priority. But point him out if you see him. If you see anything amiss, call out for myself or one of the other directors.”
“Dr. Weeks!” yelled one of the men almost instantly.
Most heads swiveled to the far side of the circle to see one of the men looking panicked and shaking.
Bashir spoke to him in Arabic and the man raised his hand, pointing back toward the tombs.
As if they were watching a tennis match, everyone turned again.
Standing in the doorway to the tomb, once again, was the mummy.
He pointed directly at them as he had before, and some of the men took several steps back.
“Stay where you are!” shouted Dr. Weeks, Bashir still translating. “That is nothing but a troublemaker in a costume!”
The mummy shook its fist at the sky.
At that moment, a crow that had been cresting over the dunes nearby alighted on the rough-hewn doorway of the tomb, just above the mummy.
It caused an immediate uproar amongst the group, who took another collective step back, and with raised voices, began arguing outright with Dr. Weeks and Bashir.
Lois turned to Gamal beside her. “What is it? What happened?”
But he just pointed, the same as the other man. If he was able to paint and whittle as expressively as Zaid had said, apparently that articulation didn’t translate into speech.
“Gamal!” she said sharply, getting his attention. “What is
wrong?”
“The bird!” Gamal replied, his voice loud, as if near hysteria. “The black bird means death.”
“But it's just a crow!” she argued.
“The mummy brought the death bird,” he told her.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” she cursed, practically hearing Clark’s voice in her head telling her that artists were
sensitive and it didn’t mean that this man in particular was overly gullible. Then she shouted toward Dr. Weeks, “Isn’t anyone going to go after it?”
But Dr. Weeks and Bashir were both distracted, speaking rapidly in Arabic to the men, pointing toward the mummy and clearly trying to prove their point. Even Zaid looked like he was trying to control the panicked crowd.
Knowing she was out of English speakers that could understand her suggestion, she made the only logical decision.
“Lois…”
She heard Clark’s warning tone just as she turned on her heel and took off at a sprint toward the tomb.
“Here we go again,” she heard Clark say from a few feet behind her before she blocked him out and concentrated on her speed.
This time, she was much closer to the entrance. And the ground beneath her feet was
packed sand, not just sand that had been capriciously dumped in her path by the wind, nearly ready to take flight again. This packed ground was much easier to run across, and a moment later she was off the sand completely and on the stone path that led into the tomb.
“Lois, wait up!” she heard Clark call.
She immediately poured on all the speed she could, remembering that last time he’d caught up to her, he had forced her to miss out on confronting whoever this was.
That wasn’t going to be the case this time!
Running as fast as she could, she angled herself toward the sunken doorway to the tomb. When she was three paces away, she flung herself inside, diving through the door and evading Clark’s grasp just in case he was reaching for her this time. She rolled, not to her feet, yet, but into a runner’s starting position.
She felt the light temperature drop as she did every time she came into the tomb, but this time she swore she could feel a chill creep over her skin.
She looked around.
She was inside chamber one.
And she was
alone.
The mummy was gone.
Hearing movement behind her, she dashed into the second chamber, which Zaid’s team had lit earlier that morning.
Glancing around quickly, she saw that there was no one in here, either.
“Lois!”
Hearing Clark loudly whisper her name, she vaulted across the second chamber and into the third. She wasn’t going to let him stop her this time—not when she could put an end to this whole thing right now!
The third chamber was held up by the lines of columns which were now partially obstructed by great piles of broken rock. It was also the chamber with multiple doors, she now realized, looking around. And multiple doors meant multiple exits for whomever she was chasing—if they hadn’t already high-tailed it down some secret passage, that is.
Looking to buy time before Clark found her and dragged her back into the daylight, she turned off the straight path that they’d previously taken in this room and raced around to the other side of the main pile of rubble, using it for cover. There was a door here that she hadn’t seen before, and she crept toward it.
But there were no footprints going through this doorway.
She could see trails leading to the floodlight that was sitting just a few steps away from the door, but none that went through the door itself.
Just then, she heard a rock clatter to her left.
Her head immediately swiveled to track it but she couldn’t see anyone there.
Someone must be on the other side of the rubble pile!
On alert, she crept further around the precariously stacked rock, hoping to catch and uncover their mystery mummy.
As she made her way around, she realized that she should have come upon another light by now. Her eyes traced the wall until she found it. This floodlight was out, and she was guessing that it was no accident. Because it, too, was just next to a doorway. She was just leaning forward to see if she could find any footprints in the sand leading to that doorway when she heard another sound.
Footsteps were heading in her direction from the other side of the rubble pile, the sand shifting under their feet as they moved.
And they were closing in quickly.
She slid silently across the floor, stopping just at the edge of a buried column.
The footsteps were nearly on top of her.
She took a deep breath—and when she was sure that the mummy was just about to turn the corner—she leapt out from the pile and kicked out into the darkness.
But the mummy sidestepped her easily, and she fell, her momentum carrying her forward.
The mummy reached out to grab her, and she raised a fist to get away.
“Lois, it’s me.”
She paused, and he let her catch her balance before releasing her.
“Clark?! Where’s the mummy?” she hissed.
“I haven’t seen it,” he replied quietly.
She rolled her eyes, then narrowed them.
“How did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“You stepped aside when I tried to kick you. You should have been on the floor from that kick, but you just stepped away, like you could see it coming.”
He adjusted his glasses. “Luck, I guess?”
“That just figures,” she said irritably. “Anyway, I think he went through this door. Let’s take a better look.”
Clark followed her to the doorway and stopped. “This light was on this morning, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said excitedly. “And look: footprints.”
“Bashir said that an initial excavation team came through here.”
“So?” she asked, searching for his point.
“So how do you know Dr. Weeks didn’t make those himself?”
“I’m going to find out,” she said, and walked through the doorway.
“Be careful,” Clark warned, right behind her.
“Be quiet,” she shot back.
Having left the lights behind, she put one hand on the wall and kept moving down the corridor they were in.
And it seemed to get darker with every step she took.
When the wall fell away unexpectedly, she paused, sliding her foot around the corner.
Standing only an inch away from it, she couldn’t even see that the wall was missing.
Clark bumped into her lightly, and even through her annoyance, she was glad that he was there.
“What’s wrong?” he asked quietly.
“The wall ends. I can’t tell if this is a new room or just a corner,” she said, feeling disgruntled. “This place could be a maze down here and we’d never know it.”
“Maybe we should go back,” he suggested.
“No,” she argued immediately. “Here.”
Turning to him, she fumbled around in the dark until she found his arm and slid her hand down to meet his.
Ignoring the flicker of electricity across her palm, she placed his hand on the edge of the wall.
“Keep that there, and give me your other hand,” she instructed.
Feeling his other hand come up to meet hers, she clasped it firmly and, ignoring the little spark that had shocked her palm, took a step off the wall and into the emptiness. Then she took another step and then another. She felt Clark shift nearer to her, extending his arm out. She took another step, tugging lightly on Clark’s hand.
“I can’t take another step without letting go of the wall,” he cautioned.
She reached her arm out all the way in front of her and into the darkness.
Her fingertips grazed stone.
“I found it!” she enthused. “It’s either a door or another corridor.”
“Which way do you want to go?”
Either would have suited her fine, but totally blind, there was no way to even guess at the difference.
Kneeling down, she pressed her hand down over the sand in multiple places toward what she guessed was the center of their corridor. It all felt the same to her.
“What are you doing?” Clark asked.
“Feeling for footprints,” she said. “Let me concentrate.”
He gave her the silence she requested, and she took a breath, listening for the reporter’s instinct that always seemed to kick in at the right moment for her.
But there was nothing.
Sometimes that meant that she’d veered onto the wrong path.
“This is useless,” she said darkly. Even if the mummy was hiding in here, how would she know? Unless she blindly stumbled into him…and her luck hadn’t been that good on this trip. “Maybe you’re right. I don’t know how we’re going to find anybody down here.”
“Let’s head back up to the group. Maybe our showing up can at least prove to the men that the mummy didn’t lure us in and turn us to stone.”
“And maybe we can talk Dr. Weeks into extending those floodlights down here,” she said despondently.
She let him lead her back to chamber three and the light of the flood lamps.
He didn’t seem to notice that they held hands all the way there.
