And then she thought she saw a flicker of the heat from when they were interrupted start to smolder behind his eyes. Or maybe her overactive mind was just imagining it.
Still, his voice was low when he said, “Should we talk about—?”
Alarm bells went off in her head as his more intimate tone went right to her core, and she cut him off before he could finish. “We can talk about a game plan tomorrow. Right now I just want to find a pair of clean pajamas and go to sleep.”
She moved toward her suitcase without waiting for a reply and without looking back.
A moment later, she heard Clark unzip his own suitcase, and she tried to bury that traitorous little sliver of disappointment that stubbornly ran through her relief at evading whatever he’d wanted to say.***
Lois covered a wide yawn as she trekked from the tents toward the tombs.
She had been up at first light, slipping out of the tent that had felt increasingly suffocating—and not just because of the early morning heat that was already building. Well, not because of the
climate, at any rate.
After she and Clark had navigated living together again, this time without the benefit of a wall between them for privacy, she’d batted her way through the mosquito netting, chosen the mat nearest the wall, laid down, turned her back, and hoped for morning.
A few moments later, Clark had sought the sanctuary of the netting, fussing with it to close it and tuck it under his mat and then under her mat near her feet. She’d felt her mat shift a little as he’d laid down on his, and then he’d said a soft ‘goodnight, Lois’ before she felt him roll away from her. She had remained still and silent, hoping he’d think that she’d fallen asleep instantly.
In truth, she’d tossed and turned, only managing to sleep by eventually counting Clark’s slow, steady breaths and matching her own to his. She’d woken in the middle of the night, startled to find herself on the far side of her mat from where she’d started, nearly hugging Clark. She’d painstakingly moved slowly back to the opposite side of her own mat, lying on her back, and had resorted to aligning her breathing to his once more to fall asleep.
But she’d woken what felt like minutes later to find herself yet again at the edge of her mat and at Clark’s side. Irritated by the silence of the desert, the buzzing of the bugs, the proximity of her partner, and the chasm that had grown between them, she firmly moved her traitorous body toward the wall again and wrapped her coverlet around her leg, making it more difficult for her to move. Unable to shake her irritation enough to calm down, she watched the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest to finally soothe her back to sleep.
Finally, she’d hazily blinked her eyes open to find that it was still dark outside, and stifled a groan. Despite her best efforts, she had migrated back toward Clark in the seconds it felt like she had slept. But this time, he had rolled toward her, too. His face was tucked down, her hair nearly brushing his cheek. One of her arms was pillowed under her head, but the other was reaching toward her partner in the scant space between them, her hand bent back toward herself. His arm mirrored hers, and the backs of their hands were touching lightly. She fought the urge to hook her hand just slightly, so that it was clasped in his.
Exhausted, she didn’t have the will to move herself away again.
Instead, she had settled in, imagining Clark’s comforting embrace surrounding her, exhaling deeply and inhaling his familiar scent.
This time, she was asleep in seconds.
And she had slept soundly, deeply, and peacefully until daybreak, when she’d woken and realized she ought to move away from Clark before he woke up and decided to question her too vulnerable heart about what it thought it was doing. She had awkwardly and regretfully dragged herself away from her still slumbering partner and out of the tent to locate whatever makeshift facility passed as a bathroom.
And now she was walking alongside him after a morning of dodging small talk, only partly feigning sleepiness and a corresponding crankiness as she sorted out what in the world had gotten into her. Last evening she’d almost kissed him, and in the middle of the night she’d practically thrown herself at his unconscious body. The hot, arid climate must be affecting her ability to think straight. She needed to get a grip.
But still.
After so many weeks with a wall between them…the closeness had been nice.
“Looks like they’re making some progress with the generator,” Clark dared to comment as they approached the tomb, pointing up the hill to where some of the workmen were gathered around the ancient, rusting generator they’d examined with Dr. Weeks the day before.
“Let’s hope nothing else goes wrong with it,” she groused.
“Did you sleep alright?” Clark asked cautiously, looking at her askance.
“Once I was out,” she replied, trying to brush him off.
Clark’s expression turned guilty, but it was laced with something sad.
“Lois, if you’re that uncomfortable with me there, we can go back to the hotel, or I can sleep somewhere else—"
“No,” she said firmly.
It wasn’t that she was uncomfortable. It was that he made her feel too comfortable. And, just on the other side of her awful betrayal of an engagement, she didn’t want to investigate too deeply why Clark was suddenly such a source of comfort. Because by the time she’d woken up on that third round of insomnia, all she’d wanted was to wrap herself around him. It wasn’t lost on her that she’d only finally fallen asleep once she’d given in to her urge to stay near him and practically cuddled up.
The only thing making her uncomfortable, well, besides the oppressive heat, was her own fractured heart. Because Clark had been true to his word last night—she’d been perfectly safe with him. But her worry was quickly becoming that if her little crush, or whatever it was, continued to develop, that
he wouldn’t be safe with
her. Her track record with relationships was rocky, at best, but they seemed to be increasingly catastrophic.
Lex hadn’t even made it out alive.
She swallowed, pushing away the confusion and unexpected longing at the mere hint of a deeper relationship with Clark.
She needed to remember that the curse in this desert wasn’t some charlatan dressed as a mummy.
The only curse in this desert was
her.
“It was the heat, the hard mat, the sand, the jet lag…” she trailed off.
Clark looked unconvinced, so she stopped in her tracks. Wherever her emotions were right now, she didn’t want them leaking out and upsetting the growing camaraderie she and Clark had been renewing since they’d landed in Luxor.
When he stopped beside her, she put a hand on his arm. “It wasn’t you,” she emphasized.
Some kind of weight lifted from his shoulders at her earnest reassurance, and he nodded.
And then they were standing there together in the early morning sun, with an intense emotion seeping into his expression, and she was a heartbeat away from leaning into him again and indulging in the comfort and caress she’d begun to crave so badly.
“Good morning, friends!”
She dropped her hand away from Clark and turned to see Bashir approaching them with a wave.
“Good morning!” Clark called back to him.
Was his voice a little tighter than usual?
The heat and her imagination were playing tricks on her. Clark had been standoffish with her for months. It was clear he wasn’t even sure about their friendship going back to what it had been. Last night, he had been trying to make her crazy just for sport, pretending a reanimated mummy was a suspect. He certainly wasn’t going to kiss her. She must be losing her mind to the desert and this must be one of the symptoms of heat stroke.
“Are they going to be able to fix the generator?” she asked Bashir, fighting to sway her interest from her partner to her job.
“Yes, yes,” Bashir said happily. “They are just filling the petrol now. Let us walk down together. We can see them turn on the lights!”
Together, they started the walk toward the tomb. A couple of the workers, along with Dr. Weeks in his signature white bucket hat, had converged around the generator. A number of the other excavators were milling around the still-darkened entrance.
“Did all the men return this morning?” Lois asked, trying to do a quick mental headcount.
“All but one,” Bashir replied. She and Clark exchanged a quick look as Bashir went on. “We will be able to keep up our schedule with only one man resigned. We are lucky that the others chose to return.”
“That
is lucky,” Clark agreed.
“Who didn’t come back?” Lois followed up.
“Wahid,” Bashir said, shaking his head.
Lois’ eyes shot straight to Clark’s, and his answering raised eyebrows confirmed that he, too, was remembering their joint suspicion of Wahid from the previous night.
“Why do you think he didn’t come back?” Clark asked in a carefully casual way.
“It is a shame, but sometimes men leave the Project. And some of the men from the villages nearby are superstitious. Wahid has a sick sister. Maybe he did not want to work at a place that seemed to tempt fate,” Bashir said empathetically.
“You can’t really be telling me that a grown man is afraid of a
mummy?” she spit out incredulously.
“I understand why you might think that. It may be a different experience when your culture is rooted in a religion where the point of a mummy was that it would walk again,” Bashir replied.
“What?” she asked, surprise overruling her incredulity.
Bashir was clearly thrilled to shift into teaching mode, and she nearly groaned out loud at having fallen into this trap. “The god of the dead, Osiris, was the first being to be mummified: and, simply, Osiris rose from the dead. In his example, our ancestors began preserving their dead just as Osiris was preserved, in the hopes that the spirit would be able to return to life in immortality.”
“Maybe that would work for a god, but it probably wouldn’t work for a human,” she scoffed.
“But the ancients believed that the pharaohs were
divine,” Bashir told her. “They were the gods’ representations on earth, practically gods themselves.”
“That’s pretty convenient,” she said. “Wouldn’t being a god make them unquestionable? You couldn’t ever accuse a corrupt pharaoh of something without annoying a god and risking entry into the afterlife?”
“Not all pharaohs were corrupt,” Bashir conversed happily, in spite of Lois’ pessimism. “Remember, Cleopatra was the last pharaoh, and it is widely thought that the people loved her.”
“Well, of course, that example would be a woman,” she said haughtily.
She saw Clark smirk in her peripheral vision.
“Don’t you agree?” she asked him challengingly.
“Of course, Lois,” he said, just a degree away from sounding placating.
She narrowed her eyes at him and he smiled innocently back at her. Sometimes she swore he was just trying to get under her skin.
And that was hardly the behavior of someone who wanted to kiss her. She must have misread the moment in the tent last night. His low tones must have been one of concern, not…anything else. With something perilously close to disappointment, she decided that it had probably been one-sided—which would be totally humiliating if
he’d read
her intent. Thank goodness she’d cut off whatever he’d wanted to talk about last night!
Her thoughts were interrupted as they came to a stop just outside the tomb, and one of the men at the generator shouted something down in Arabic. Another workman on the ground replied to him, and Bashir’s enthusiasm grew.
“It shouldn’t be long now!” Bashir told them excitedly.
The man at the generator shouted again, and the man on the ground repeated his words, this time shouting into the tomb like a game of telephone. A third person shouted back to the man on the ground, and a moment later, an amber light spilled out of the tomb, mixing with the already blinding morning sunlight.
A cheer went up from the other men.
The generator was working again.
“Come along,” invited Bashir. “We’ll go with them as they turn the lights on.”
Lois followed after him, with Clark at her heels. “I thought the lights
were on.”
“The test light is on,” corrected Bashir. “Once the generator goes down, we manually disconnect each light for safety. We will go room by room to turn them all on now.”
Most of the workmen dispersed with their buckets but four held back, waiting at the entrance to the tomb. A moment later, the team that had been working on the generator—Dr. Weeks, Zaid, and two other men—made it down the dune to join them.
“Everyone ready?” Dr. Weeks asked.
A chorus of confirmations rose from the group, and Dr. Weeks led them into the sparsely-lit first chamber.
One of the lights was already on, and there was a man kneeling beside it. Zaid walked over to him and asked a question. The man replied in the affirmative, and Zaid marked something off on his clipboard. Meanwhile, the other workers had dispersed in pairs to the other three lights scattered around the room. They turned them on one at a time, Zaid checking his list off as they went. It was obvious that they had been through this process before. When they finished, Zaid turned to Dr. Weeks and nodded.
“On to chamber two!” Dr. Weeks instructed, leading the way.
As they entered the next chamber, the workers turned on their flashlights in the fully dark room and spread out along the walls, locating the four lights in that room. Again, they turned them on one after another, checking in after each, and Zaid marked them down one by one.
Lois’ impatience snapped to the forefront. Turning these lights on individually was going to take forever!
“Dr. Bashir?” She got the man’s attention. “How many chambers are there?”
“That is what we are mapping,” he said excitedly, and she saw the academic monologue taking hold. “The initial excavation team counted more than seventy chambers along the main corridors but there’s no telling—”
“
Seventy chambers!” she exclaimed, interrupting before he could really get into it. “Are all of them lit?”
“No,” Bashir assured her. “Only some are lit: less than a dozen through the outer rooms and two of the main passages.”
She sighed in evident relief. A dozen was still a lot at the rate they were going, but it was better than seventy!
“On to chamber three!” Dr. Weeks called out, and they all summarily shuffled into the next dark room.
Chamber three was the large room that was held up by the enormously tall columns, where she and Clark had run into Dr. Weeks and Wahid after the lights had gone out. She glanced around as the men scattered toward separate points along the walls. It looked like there were six lights in this chamber, but she could only see four of them since a huge, nearly ceiling-high pile of rubble in the center was obscuring a huge section of the room.
The first light flickered on, and the worker called out his confirmation to Zaid.
She glanced around, but the light was barely emitting enough brightness to reach the floor she stood on near the entrance. The room remained bathed in darkness.
The second light sparked into existence, granting her marginally better vision, and the second worker called out his confirmation.
The third light came on and she saw its slight twinkle across the chamber. It should have illuminated the path in front of her. Her brow wrinkled as she tried to make out what was obstructing it.
She took a step toward it, wondering if she was misremembering this chamber or whether there had been some sort of minor cave-in since she’d been inside last.
The fourth light illuminated then, and her eye caught on what looked like a thick boulder in front of her. She was sure now that it hadn’t been there when they’d crossed through this chamber yesterday, because she’d tripped right there, over the small jutting rock she could still dimly see sticking up from the sand, not two feet from the new boulder. If it had been there yesterday, she would have crashed right into it, instead of staggering off-balance toward her partner. It would have sat between her and Clark, instead of just the wall of regrets that usually sat between them these days.
She took another step toward whatever it was in the dim light.
And another.
“Lois?” Clark called out from near the entryway.
“That wasn’t here before,” she said aloud, eyes still focused on the mass in front of her, trying to make it out.
“What wasn’t?” His voice sounded a little sharper, and nearer, too, as if he was following her into the darkness.
The fifth light came to life, but she couldn’t see it at all since it was blocked behind the rubble. But the light’s caretaker called out the same reply she’d gotten used to hearing, so it must have come on.
She squinted her eyes, moving more purposefully toward the new rock.
“Lois!” Clark called again.
“Ms. Lane?” Bashir’s voice joined Clark’s to caution her, but she wasn’t about to stop. The mummy had been the last person in the tomb, and now something had changed. It
couldn’t be a coincidence. But it could be a
clue.
She was just two or three paces from the rock when the last lamp bloomed.
And she gasped when its light reached her eyes.
It was
not a boulder in front of her.
It was the figure of a man, shrinking backward. One arm was thrown up to shield his eyes, as if he could protect himself from whatever was terrifying him. The other arm was held up in a defensive posture, his hand out to halt whatever was approaching him. His eyes were closed, his expression a rictus of horror.
The face was Wahid’s.
And it was stone.
It was so realistic that she took a frightened step back, gasping again when she ran into someone.
She looked up to see Clark, solidly behind her, examining the statue over her head. His hands had come up to frame her arms, but she wasn’t sure if it was to steady her or to protect her.
One of the workers shouted something that she couldn’t understand, and his companions responded in panicked shouts, all backing away from them and the petrified form.
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.”
