“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.*****
“Ms. Lane! Mr. Kent!”
She didn’t miss the fact that Clark put his body subtly in front of her as the unidentified voice came through the darkness, distorted by its own echo.
“Who’s there?” she called out.
“Oh, Ms. Lane, I’m so very glad that you’re alright.” Carnahan popped out from behind the pile of rubble in the middle of chamber three.
“Dr. Carnahan!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing here?!”
The older man limped lightly toward them. “Dr. Weeks sent me into the tomb after you, as he insists that you’re
my responsibility. You look to be reasonably alive,” he said glibly. “He’ll be glad to hear that.”
“We’re both fine,” Clark confirmed, his hand tightening around hers.
“It sounds like you’ve had an exciting morning,” Carnahan said.
“Seems like
you missed the whole thing,” Lois said, making little effort to hide what she thought of that. She shot a look toward Clark, and she saw him make the same judgement in a look toward her. They weren’t going to give Carnahan any more information than he already had, not when he’d been missing all morning, and now out of sight for
two of the mummy’s appearances, in spite of being close by immediately after.
“Yes, we’ve all had a busy morning, in one way or another,” Carnahan agreed, nervously toying with his beard.
“Where were you?” she followed up. “Did you leave camp?”
“Yes, I had some business in Luxor,” he said brusquely before turning back the way he’d come. “Anyhow, shall we head out?”
They didn’t have much choice but to follow.
“What happened after we ran in here?”
“Ah, well, I’m not entirely sure. It seems I returned after the hullabaloo had died down,” he said as they passed through chamber two.
She felt her eyes narrow and tugged lightly on Clark’s hand, which was
still holding onto hers. He squeezed it back, and even though she knew that meant he was only responding to a request, her heart still tripped over it.
“Is the excavation crew still here?” Clark asked, correctly interpreting her hand signal.
“Bashir mentioned that the team had broken for lunch early today.”
They were passing through chamber one, and it occurred to Lois that Carnahan wasn’t giving them any more information than they were giving him.
“Do you have any idea what Dr. Weeks plans to do next?” she asked, frustrated.
“Continue onward, of course,” he said, and then lent action to speech and moved through the doorway of the tomb to dunes outside.
They were alone and in the dark again.
“Do you get the idea that he–”
“Yeah,” agreed Clark. “But let’s not talk about it here.”
She watched as he eyed the walls around them, remembering their earlier conversation about the possibility of secret passages in the tomb.
“Right,” she said, and moved to follow Carnahan out.
His hand finally dropped away from hers as they navigated the narrower doorway, and she couldn’t help but feel that neither things with Carnahan or things with Clark were going exactly the way she wanted them.
***
When they emerged from the tomb, no one else was there, and Canahan was making his way on a steady path toward the tents. Exchanging a look with Clark, with a grim expression on her face, they trailed behind him. The tent area looked equally deserted, though it was impossible to tell if everyone was inside or if they were actually empty.
So they made their way down to the campfires and found the excavation crew.
Lunch had been a tense shared meal at the campfires. Even Abo, who had been all but jolly when he’d heaped their plates with kebabs the night before, was sedate as he handed them pita sandwiches today.
Not seeing Zaid or Gamal, they joined another group that they hadn’t met yet. But whether it was the limited shared vocabulary or the fear still pervasive throughout the group, the conversation was short and lackluster, and the reporters didn’t get anything relevant to their investigation.
Afterwards, the workers all shuffled reluctantly back toward the tombs.
Lois and Clark followed, stopping near the entrance with the rest of the men. Lois couldn’t help but notice that they were several yards away from where they usually waited.
A few moments later, Dr. Weeks appeared from the tents with Zaid in tow. Zaid had his clipboard with him.
“That’s a relief,” she muttered to Clark.
“What is?” he asked, sotto voce.
“The clipboard. Lights should make things a whole lot easier.”
Before he could reply, Dr. Weeks was getting their attention. “Thanks for coming back. I know a number of you are still skeptical. We’re going to send most of you over to the western side again to keep removing debris from above the tomb. But a few of us will go inside and turn the rest of the lights on,” he said gesturing toward the tomb.
A few of the men shuffled their feet at this.
Dr. Weeks went on in Arabic, seemingly repeating the same thing, gesturing first out toward where the men had been removing debris since they’d arrived, and then once more toward the tomb.
This time, it got a bigger reaction.
Two of the men were speaking rapidly in Arabic. She recognized them both as men that were in the tombs when the statue of Wahid had been found.
“We have to have the lights on inside!” Dr. Weeks argued back. “We cannot avoid going into the tombs for the rest of this dig. We have talked about this thoroughly already!”
But the men argued back again, and this time two more jumped in.
Clark called out over the din. “Lois and I have already been inside since the mummy impersonator last appeared.”
The men quieted, looking at him.
Clark looked to Dr. Weeks and Zaid, “Um, would you mind…”
Zaid dipped his head and immediately started translating, gesturing toward Clark.
“We were inside, and we went through a bunch of the chambers. We couldn’t find anyone,” he said in a reassuring voice.
“We were alone,” she spoke up. “There would have been plenty of time for something to happen if it was going to. But we were perfectly safe.”
The men were looking at each other as Zaid translated.
“Actually,” she pointed out, “none of us has ever seen the mummy
inside the tomb. If the curse was real, we don’t even know if it could exist in there. The only place it’s ever been seen at all is right out here.”
The men looked startled as Zaid finished translating.
“So we had better get a move on, then,” Dr. Weeks said, taking advantage of their new discomfiture and heading toward the tomb entrance. “Let’s go.”
Zaid said something else in Arabic and most of the men headed up the dune with their buckets. Six of them lagged behind and trudged slowly after Dr. Weeks.
One of the men looked back toward her and Clark, and said something she couldn’t understand to Zaid. But it was Dr. Weeks who answered, “Of course they are.” Turning back, he called over his shoulder, “Ms. Lane, Mr. Kent, you’ll be joining us again, won’t you?”
“Yes, we’d like to,” said Clark, joining the slow procession of workers.
She moved a little faster than the men as they crossed the packed sand toward the entrance. It was true that the mummy hadn’t been there when they’d entered last time. But perhaps it had known that it was being pursued. Maybe this time there was a chance of catching it unawares.
Clark seemed to realize what she had in mind about halfway there and caught up to her just before she walked into the tomb right after Dr. Weeks.
She threw him a cocky grin, and he responded with a knowing smile and raised eyebrows, walking along at her side.
The other men followed them in and cautiously spread out around the room, checking the lights that were already on. Zaid checked things off on his clipboard, and they all proceeded into chamber two, where they did much the same thing, checking the lights they’d turned on this morning.
When they went to enter chamber three, where the statue of Wahid had been found, there was a brief pause.
Lois rolled her eyes and confidently stepped through.
But chamber three wasn’t as they’d left it.
The lights had all been extinguished.
“Clark!” she hissed.
“I’m right here,” he said, suddenly beside her.
“We should take a look around,” she said. “Before anyone else comes in.”
“What’s the hold-up, you two?” Dr. Weeks said from behind them. They were still standing in the doorway.
“I think you might want to let us check it out first,” Clark suggested.
“What’s happening?” Dr. Weeks asked warily.
“Did you have all the lights in here turned out during lunch?” she asked.
“No,” Dr. Weeks said, shaking his head.
“Well, someone did,” she told him.
“I’m going with you.”
“It might be better if you stayed here. Just to make sure no one else gets out when we go in,” Clark suggested.
It looked like Dr. Weeks was going to argue, but instead he nodded. “Here,” he said, and handed Clark his flashlight. Then he took a step back, so that he was positioned directly in the center of the doorway and started speaking to the men.
“Do you think whoever it was is still in here?” she wondered out loud.
“No,” Clark said with certainty. She tilted her head in question over the surety of his tone and he adjusted his glasses, continuing on, “I think they’ve probably gone by now. They always seem to know the schedule of when people are coming and going here.”
That much was true.
“Alright, let’s head for where we found the last statue. If our mummy friend left us anything, he’s probably repeating his pattern,” she said, taking a step forward.
A thin light chased away the darkness just in front of her, and she looked back at Clark, who had Dr. Weeks’ flashlight pointed in front of her feet, instead of his own.
“Thanks,” she said softly. He came up beside her, and they moved forward together.
She squinted, but couldn’t see anything in front of them, yet.
“So do you think the lighting was just to give themselves some cover?” she asked.
“Or to scare people,” Clark suggested.
That could very well be, she acknowledged to herself. She fought off the chill that was threatening to run down her back, ludicrous as it was in this heat. But her reporter’s instincts were on alert, and in this dark, ancient grave site, it was giving her the creeps. She was glad that Clark was at her side.
Behind them, Dr. Weeks’ voice faded out as he stopped speaking, and she did her best not to glance back over her shoulder.
Instead, she scanned the darkness around her trying to identify movement in the blackness. But she couldn’t see anything beyond a couple of feet. If there was someone in the dark, she’d never know until they were just about on top of her. While she could certainly take care of herself, it really helped if she saw where to aim her kick.
“Do you hear something?” Clark asked quietly.
“No,” she replied. Then it occurred to her that over the past year and a half, Clark’s hearing had proven to be better than her own. “Why, do you?”
“No,” he assured. “You just looked like you were looking for something.”
“Just looking for
anything,” she said, squinting again to see ahead of her.
And it looked like she’d found it.
Standing just past the beam of their light was a figure.
She came to a stop, and Clark stalled right beside her, shifting the beam up toward the person in front of them. She could scarcely see, and the flashlight barely cut through the darkness, but it didn’t look like the carving of Wahid crouching that they’d found earlier. This person was standing still, directly in their path.
“Who’s there?” she called out sternly.
“Lois…” Clark said, shaking his head.
He took a few steps forward, light directly on the unmoving figure. As he got closer, she could see that it had an uncanny valley look to it, like it wasn’t exactly a person.
She followed him, not content for Clark to reach the figure without her, especially if it
did turn out to be a man and that mysterious man chose to attack. Of the two of them, she was definitely the better trained fighter.
A few feet ahead of her, Clark rounded the other side of the figure and his face fell, not in fear but in sadness.
Probably not an attack, then, she assessed, coming up toward him.
“It’s just like the other one,” Clark warned. “It’s a little unsettling.”
“I’m not afraid,” she replied.
But in spite of her protestation, as she rounded the figure to see what Clark was seeing, it unsettled her anyway.
The statue of Wahid had been removed.
Another man stood in his place, cowering to make himself smaller, his face a mask of fear, both arms out in front of him, hands up as if he could stop something that was threatening him. Even with his face warped in terror, she could just recognize him.
“Is that…?”
“Gamal,” Clark confirmed. “The artist from dinner last night.”
Now she felt badly about thinking he was sensitive and gullible while he was pointing at the ominously timed crow. He’d been terrified by the omen and, even if it was a coincidence, for him it had been proven right. Because poor Gamal had surely been terrified all over again when he’d been taken.
They both jumped to the conclusion that he must be missing now, too, the same as Wahid.
“But he was with us this morning, before we chased the mummy back into the tomb,” she said, examining the grotesque lines of his terrified face.
“He wasn’t at lunch,” Clark pointed out.
“So it must have happened before that. How was he taken while we were in the tomb, if we were
inside the tomb the whole time?” she asked in frustration.
“You guessed before that there was more than one entrance to this place. Maybe you were right.”
“There
has to be another entrance, if they’re getting these statues in here,” she said with another glance at it. It was ghastly-looking and so lifelike that she felt another shiver threatening to run up her spine. “But it still doesn’t make any sense. How are they grabbing people in broad daylight, with no one seeing them, and getting them back in here?”
“So you think they’re being held in the tomb somewhere?” Clark asked.
“Well, where else would they be?”
“The tents?” Clark suggested. “Or taken off-site?”
“My instincts say that this is an inside job, and that everything revolves around the tomb or something in it. I think Wahid and Gamal are still close by.”
Barely audible, there was a soft thud behind her.
They both whipped around, Clark shining his light exactly where she’d thought she’d heard something. The light shone against one of the crumbling pillars.
“Mr. Kent? Ms. Lane?” Dr. Weeks called out from the doorway behind them. “Have you found anything?”
She looked to Clark, who was fiddling with his glasses, but stopped to nod at her intense expression. Without responding to Dr. Weeks, she charged around the pillar, Clark following and practically beside her.
There was nothing there.
“Ms. Lane! Mr. Kent!”
They exchanged a look of defeat and both turned back at the same time. Coming back around the pillar, she could see Dr. Weeks’ silhouette in the doorway to the previous chamber, illuminated by the floodlights behind him.
“We’ll be right there!” she called out, managing to only sound a little irritated.
Clark fell right into step with her.
“I heard something back there,” she said.
“It might have been an echo. Sound bounces around down here. Or a rat. Or just something that shifted; it
is pretty old down here.”
“I heard something, and so did you, and we both know it,” she insisted.
He shrugged. “I thought I did, too, but we looked. There wasn’t anything there.”
“If there was a sound, then something made it,” she said. “And I want to know what it was.”
They’d made it back to Dr. Weeks who looked at them with an anxious expression.
“Did you find anything?”
“There’s a new statue,” Clark said.
“Of one of us?” Dr. Weeks asked.
“Gamal,” she answered. “We haven’t seen him since we chased the mummy inside before lunch. Have you seen him since then?”
Dr. Weeks’ brow furrowed in concentration. “No, I don’t think so.”
“The police didn’t listen to us about Wahid, but maybe they will now that Gamal is gone, too.”
Clark looked to Dr. Weeks. “Is that the kind of thing that might shut the project down?”
“It won’t have to. At the rate we’re losing workers, it will shut down anyway. None of this mischief was hurting people before. It was just a nuisance. I can’t understand what changed,” Dr. Weeks said, taking his bucket hat off to wring in his hands.
“People that do this sort of thing start small,” she replied. “Then they escalate things. It’s a pretty common pattern.”
“I need to tell the men if someone else has gone missing.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. “That will probably send them running again.”
Dr. Weeks nodded. “They have the right to know.”
He turned and they watched as he called the men together in a circle at the far end of the chamber. She could hear him speaking quietly. The men were attentive around him. And then all of sudden, they all spoke at once. She cringed; this wasn't going to go well for Dr. Weeks, but she admired that he was doing the right thing in not hiding it from them.
Glancing over her shoulder, she sidled closer toward the doorway at the back of the chamber until she heard Clark’s voice.
“And where do you think
you’re going?”
She looked back at her partner, who had one eyebrow raised, and said innocently. “It doesn’t seem like Dr. Weeks needs us for this. Aren’t you curious where that noise came from?”
“Lo-
is,” he said chastisingly. “I don’t think Dr. Weeks would want us wandering through the tombs without anyone from the team.”
“Well, I think that Dr. Weeks would want us to find out who’s picking off his crew and shutting down his project.” She stomped over to him and snatched the flashlight out of his hand. Crossing back to the door, she looked back over her shoulder. “Hurry up before he’s not distracted anymore." She waited just long enough to see Clark’s eyes roll heavenward, and then stepped into chamber three.
It was dark, and she was grateful to hear Clark’s steady footsteps just behind her as she moved back toward the center of the room. She was alert, feeling the hair on the back of her neck rise as her reporter’s instinct came online—a sure sign they were headed in the right direction.
“Do you think we should try to turn the lights on?” Clark asked quietly.
“Let’s not give them more warning than they already have,” she whispered back.
“You think they’re still here?”
They passed the statue of Gamal, and she purposely didn’t look at its face or into its lifelike eyes.
“I think we didn’t see them leave. So we’re either going to find whoever’s doing this, or we’re going to find out how they’re getting in and out.”
She arrived at the pillar that they’d heard something behind earlier, and she slowed down in anticipation of the corner. Creeping forward, she swung the light swiftly around the pillar.
“No one there,” said Clark from a step behind her.
“No,” she said, scanning down the pillar. “But there was someone here. Look!”
She pointed to the sand, where there were visible footsteps leading right up to the pillar they’d been standing on the other side of.
Lois walked over and stood right behind the footsteps on the ground. Examining the pillar, she could see that a little chunk had cracked off and fallen away. The pile of rubble was built up on that same side of it, but there was a little hollow space just where the broken piece was missing. Careful not to disturb the footprints they’d found, she bent over to take a closer look. Staring at it, she realized that the missing piece itself wasn’t the clue…but the empty space itself was.
“Clark, look at this,” she hissed, waving him over. He came up next to her, and she tugged on his sleeve to pull him down. “There’s a peephole!” Using his shoulder to balance, she leaned in even closer, shining the light through the crack. “And it looks out on the statue. I bet they were watching us the whole time!”
“I wonder how many of these passages have hidden peepholes like this,” Clark wondered.
Meanwhile, she swept the light onto the ground again. The footsteps made a trail leading away from the pillar and into the open space behind the pile of rubble.
She pointed at them, her flashlight still targeting the path. “Come on.”
“If we’re going to follow someone’s path, maybe we should go back and get more help.”
“We
are the help,” she retorted before walking alongside the footprints.
They led her back around the ceiling-high pile of rubble to the two doorways they’d been examining when they went after the mummy. But several feet from both of them, the footprints stopped entirely.
“They just
stop,” he said, sounding perplexed.
“Well, there’s got to be an explanation for that. He’s not Superman; he can’t just fly off.”
“Maybe he disappeared,” Clark said in a spooky voice before chuckling.
“He’s not a
ghost either,” she said with petulant certainty, not enjoying his teasing while she was trying to think.
She walked over to the doorway next to the floodlight that they’d gone through earlier. Examining the prints in the sand, she could clearly see her own, easily recognizable because they were smaller than most of the men’s here. And she could see a larger set next to hers that she assumed were Clark’s. She could tell that they went into the passage and then came out again, criss-crossing their earlier tracks. But she couldn’t tell whether they looked different than they would have a few hours ago.
Heading over to the other doorway that she’d discounted before, she made a closer examination. Even though she had a flashlight now, she still couldn't see any footprints. In fact, it looked almost like no one had passed through there ever, which couldn’t be true.
It looked
wrong, without her understanding why, and her nerves tingled. She took a step toward the door that felt like it was lying to her.
“Why that one?” Clark asked, following her.
“Because none of this has made any sense so far and this door looks like the one that doesn’t make any sense.”
She crept up to the wall beside the doorway and took a deep breath, wondering if there would be a man half-dressed in a mummy costume just around the corner. Turning to catch Clark’s eye, she held her finger up to her mouth to tell him to be silent. He nodded once and she turned back toward the door.
Aiming to catch anyone off guard, she crouched down low so that she wasn’t at eye level and peeked around the corner, whipping her flashlight around to shine in front of her.
It was an empty passage.
Well,
nearly empty. There was a bundle of sticks leaning against the wall. She stood and walked a few feet into the tunnel to examine it. The bundle was tied together at the top and about a third of the way to the bottom. The top was held tightly with the sticks creating the smallest possible cylinder. But at the bottom, the sticks were tied much more loosely so that they were splayed out widely. It wasn’t until she picked it up that she realized what it was.
“A broom!?”
Why on earth would someone try to sweep up in here, unless…
She immediately stepped backwards, sweeping at her own footprints as she moved.
They disappeared completely into the sand.
“They’ve been covering their tracks,” Clark said.
She hurriedly dropped the broom back where she found it and swung her flashlight low again. Next to the broom were her own footprints. And a foot beyond that were dozens and dozens more, so many that they’d worn a trail into the sand at the center of the passage.
She could barely contain her glee. This was the first break they’d had!
“Looks like you picked the right door,” Clark observed quietly, and she detected just a note of pride slipping through in his voice.
“Let’s go!” she said back, energized now that they were on an actual trail, and not just on a wild goose–well, a wild
mummy chase.
As they moved along the passage, she swept the flashlight around, keeping her eye out for any other signs of the mummy-man. But her gaze kept returning to the floor, her mind quibbling about what she was seeing.
“Clark?” she whispered without looking back.
“Yeah?”
“Do you notice anything weird about the footprint tracks?”
There was a pause.
“Just that there's an awful lot of them.”
“Right, that’s what I thought at first, too,” she said, stopping and crouching down. “But look at this. The track here in the middle is so deep. How long would it have taken to wear this down like this?”
“I’m not sure about sand, but on the farm, it would have taken months, at least, maybe years.”
“Well, what if it’s not just people walking through here? What if they were carrying something? Or dragging something? Something heavy?”
“Heavy like a statue?” he asked.
She’d been moving her light methodically back and forth across the floor as they spoke, and she finally found what she’d been looking for. “There!” she said, pointing. “That’s not a footprint.”
It was a deep indent, like the corner of something really heavy had sunken in and then been pulled back toward the center of the path.
She slowly moved her light a couple of feet further down the path. There was another mark exactly the same as the first one.
“They
are dragging something,” Clark confirmed.
“They’re dragging the statues,” she said confidently. “This must be where the statues are coming from! This is why no one has ever seen them bringing something in through the front!”
She stood eagerly and made her way further down the dark passage.
It opened up into a larger, empty chamber. She couldn’t help but feel disappointed that the path had led them nowhere. Stepping further into the room, she threw her light around, looking for any details that might help them. There were four reliefs cut into the two walls on either side of her, and while they looked like little alcoves, they were only cut about a foot or two into the walls, not nearly deep enough to hide in. She shone her light into all four corners of the room, ran it over the ceiling, and back at the doorway they’d just passed through.
Nothing.
Then she looked back to the floor.
The little trail of footprints was still there.
“Do you think they just hid the statues here until they needed them? Like a staging area?”
“Maybe,” she said doubtfully.
Moving further into the room, she stayed on her little footprint-trod, statue-dragged path. It led her to the back of the room, and then turned. She turned when it did and found herself facing the last of the little alcoves.
Only it wasn’t an alcove.
It was another path.
“Clark! Come look at this!” she squealed.
“Lois? What did you–oh!” His mouth dropped as he got close enough to see the pathway opening up in front of him. He took two steps back, then came forward again, examining the effect. “I’ve seen this before! It’s a perspective trick with the bricks.”
“Well, don’t just stand there,” she said, darting into the newly found tunnel.
“Right behind you,” he said, sounding like he was close enough to mean that literally.
The new passage was only four or five feet wide, but as it ended, another room opened up on the left side of the wall.
This room was
not empty.
But it
was enormous, the darkness clawing at them from all sides.
There were bags of quick-dry cement stacked in a pile near the door. There were also a handful of buckets like those from the dig site, all filled with water. Two wooden horses stood near one another, supporting a horizontal plank to create a make-shift table. She moved toward the table first. When she was close enough that the light reached it, she could see well-worn tools lying across the top in a neat row.
“Chisels. I bet this is what they’re using to carve the statues,” Clark said from just over her shoulder, his voice still low.
“If the tools are still here, maybe they’re making more,” she hypothesized.
Turning toward the rest of the open room, she peered out into the darkness, her flashlight not even cutting across the whole room.
She looked at Clark and they exchanged a tense glance, knowing they were close to unravelling this, but also that the danger grew the more they discovered. Someone had been going to a lot of trouble to scare people away at the Project. They’d even abducted two of the workers, neither of whom had been seen since.
And as she stepped forward into the obsidian unknown, she was again glad that Clark was beside her. She’d never had that surge of gratitude for any other partner or anyone she’d ever worked with. She hadn’t even felt it with Clark at the beginning. But somewhere during that first year, she’d gotten used to him. She’d even started to enjoy working with him. After the
Planet had been destroyed, she’d all but begged him to stay with her, anywhere, as her partner. And when Lex had basically given her carte blanche to hire Clark, she’d thrown herself into convincing him to take the offer. When they’d finally gotten to go home to the rebuilt newspaper offices, she was so happy to be working with him that the gratitude had come swiftly.
But there always seemed to be some new obstacle in the way. First there was Arianna impersonating her in an attempt to discredit her and take out Superman. Then she’d nearly lost her job and her partnership, too, over her disappearing source when she’d broken the Viologic scandal. When Kyle Griffin had come out of her past to taunt her, she’d been more grateful than ever for Clark’s steadying presence and his easygoing nature that let her fall asleep watching movies before crashing on his couch.
Had that only been a
week ago?
Time felt like it moved so differently here.
In some ways, it seemed to be standing still.
Or maybe it was just her and Clark that were standing still.
She wasn’t sure how she felt about that anymore.
“Look,” came his voice in her ear. “Over to the left.”
She obligingly swung her flashlight in that direction and immediately saw what he was talking about.
Three figures huddled in the sand.
Keeping her light trained on them, she moved cautiously forward towards the figures near the center of the room. They didn’t cry out at the approaching brightness or move in any way, and she started to feel more certain that they were statues—or at least, she hoped they were unmoving because they were stone, and not for another nefarious reason.
Swallowing, she looked around reflexively, making sure that they were still alone. Her little flashlight wasn’t doing much in this wide chamber, though, and she realized she couldn’t even see the walls or the door that they’d just come from within this thick, starless night that surrounded her. She reminded herself that the dark was nothing to fear. Rather, for their mummy-impersonator,
she was the thing to fear.
Together, they cautiously approached the first figure. Like Wahid’s statue, this one was crouching, both hands up as if protecting its face against whatever nightmare was looking down on it. As she moved her light upward, she saw that the figure didn’t have any features on its face.
A terror-stricken, anonymous statue.
It was somehow even more eerie than the others, and she felt her skin prickle.
She looked to Clark to see his reaction, and saw an expression she nearly didn’t recognize on him: something stern and disapproving. When he clocked her looking at him, he put on a more neutral face.
“Do you think that they don’t know who their next victim is? Or did they just not get that far?”
She swept her light along the carved cement. “Look at the hands. They’re so detailed. I think that this is definitely ready for a face when they pick one.”
Shining her light on the next statue, she moved toward it. “This one is more developed,” she said. The face was much more detailed, though the features were still smooth, as if it had only been roughed out. But the hands and other details on the fabric weren’t quite so defined, either. “Well, sort of,” she amended.
Clark made his way over and looked at it, too. “I see what you mean.”
“Can you tell who it is?” she asked.
He stared at it hard for a moment before saying, “That could match almost half of the men here.”
“Maybe that’s the point,” she suggested as Clark moved off to look at the last statue. She squinted at the half-formed features, thinking that they looked familiar. “Maybe they’re drafting this one to fit a lot of different people so that they can just add the last details and be able to put this out in a hurry once they’ve kidnapped their next victim.”
Suddenly Clark was beside her again, taking her elbow in his hand and practically guiding her back the way they’d come.
“What are you doing?” she asked, digging her feet in.
“I think we should go,” he said seriously, tugging on her arm again, trying to turn her toward the door.
“I think we should keep looking around.”
“Let’s get Dr. Weeks and Bashir and some better lights and come back,” he said, tugging at her again.
“What? No! What if the imposter mummy comes back before we do? We’re leaving footprints. If they know we’ve been here, they’ll hide things.”
“That’s exactly why I want to get out of here—in case they come back!”
“Why are you so panicked?” she asked, swinging her light closer to his face.
“I just think this is dangerous,” he said quickly, looking right at her even though her flashlight was in his eyes.
“You didn’t think it was so dangerous a minute ago when you pointed me in this direction. Or when we found their workroom. Or when you followed me down the secret passage. Why do you think it’s dangerous now?”
“I just do.”
“What changed?” she asked, swinging her light back toward the statues. She realized what must have happened. “Does the third statue have a face?”
However disapproving Clark’ face had looked earlier, he looked absolutely dire now. “Lois–”
“It does, doesn’t it?” she asked, knowing she was on the right track. She took a step backward, trying to pull him back to it.
“Lois, stop. I’ll tell you–”
“So tell me.”
“Not here. Let’s get back outside and we can–”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” Fed up, she twisted her arm adroitly, forcing his arm down, too, which made it possible to slide out of his grasp. Whirling away, she darted back toward the statues that he’d practically dragged her away from.
“Lois!”
She passed the first and then the second and realized that the third was sitting on a diagonal, facing even further away from her.
“Lois, let’s just leave!” Clark pleaded one more time, and she could now hear him coming after her.
But she didn’t listen.
She rounded the statue and raised her light up—
And looked into her own face, in a grim suspension of fear.
It was so lifelike that she gasped.
“Oh my god,” she said aloud.
She could hear Clark heading toward her across the sand, but when she looked up he was still standing exactly where she’d left him, staring down at the ground, his fingertips pinching the bridge of his nose.
Then his head snapped up to look right at her, and just by the look on her face she knew she was in trouble.
His focus had been just above her, so, following his cue, she ducked and felt something whoosh past her just above her head, only a second after she’d dodged.
Standing up again, she whirled around to see what had nearly knocked her block off.
And she looked up into a face with dark wide eyes and a mouth open in a silent, hissing scream, covered in gritty, decaying white bandages. He was nearly a foot taller than her with shoulders almost as broad as Clark’s.
For one heart-stopping moment, she was frozen in the sudden, clenching fear that mummies were real.
She couldn’t help but scream.
But while she was caught off guard, she definitely wasn’t defenseless. Dead or undead, the mummy was still tangible, which meant there was something to hit. Pulling her arm back, she swung her flashlight in an arc that would have punched the mummy square in the jaw.
Only it turned out that he had a shovel in his hands, which must have been what nearly hit her when Clark looked so afraid.
Reacting mid-motion, she quickly dropped her swing low to counter the shovel that was headed toward her again.
Lois had always had fast reflexes, and she was especially grateful for that right now, since her flashlight clanged against the metal end of the shovel which had been heading toward her ribs.
But the flashlight that saved her also betrayed her, as it somehow twisted out of her hands with the force of the shovel’s hit, flying upward.
Without a weapon, she dove to the side, rolling to get some distance between her and her attacker.
But somehow, hands were on her immediately.
She threw one arm out to protect herself, and heard her partner’s voice in the same moment she recognized his touch, even through her adrenaline spike.
“Lois, it’s me,” he said gently, lightly catching the hand she’d thrown out.
No longer immediately in danger, she looked up to see where the mummy-impersonator had gone.
He’d vanished into the dark!
But closing her eyes, she could hear feet quickly padding away from them, the swish and scatter of misplaced sand giving him away.
He hadn’t vanished—he was running away!
Launching herself away from Clark, she headed right for her flashlight, bending to grab it as she continued to run. Picking up speed, she kept her footfalls light, listening for her prey.
There!
Ahead of her and just to the right!
She adjusted her course, trying to steady her arm so that she could catch the mummy in her flashlight’s beam.
“Lois! Stop!”
“Keep up!” she shouted without turning back, knowing that he’d be chasing after her. He’d already sounded closer than she’d expected.
Her flashlight caught a flash of white, and she zeroed in on it just as it disappeared.
There must be another passage there.
“Lois!” He sounded afraid. “Please!”
“Come ON!” she yelled back at him, skidding to a near stop when she practically ran into the wall. But then she realized that the passage here was actually a sharp corner, and she picked up speed again, racing inside.
The passage opened up into another room.
Once inside, she paused, not wanting to miss her man in the dark. She dropped the flashlight low to look for footprints.
But she didn’t anticipate Clark charging in immediately behind her.
Naturally, not having expected her to stop, he crashed right into her, already apologizing as he braced her from falling.
“Ow!”
“Sorry, sorry!”
“That really hurt,” she complained, on her feet but smarting over what felt like a full-body tackle.
“I know. I’m so sorry. I didn’t expect you to be right there,” he apologized, sounding really upset by it. “Are you alright?” he asked, running his hands over her arms and down her ribcage.
He was so, so clearly checking to see if he’d broken one of her ribs.
He obviously wasn’t intending anything else.
But her body didn’t realize that, her breath immediately coming short as she involuntarily arched into him.
She could see the surprise lighting behind his eyes, even as she ducked her head and pulled roughly away from him.
“I’m fine,” she snapped.
“You–”
“It’s fine,” she repeated adamantly.
“Okay, sorry,” he apologized again, both his hands up in a pose of surrender.
Her wits well past scattered by now, she turned and started walking through the room beyond the doorway.
Casting her light back and forth, she kept her eyes moving.
Hearing sand shift, she spun around. It was only Clark, of course, following her.
“Stay close,” she said.
Obediently, he stood right beside her as she turned to continue forward.
But then she heard another noise, a hard thud on the sand.
There was a deafening crack that made her wince, her hands coming up to instinctively cover her ears.
Her flashlight hit the floor, rolling sideways away from her, even though she’d thought that the floor had been even in this room.
Then, all of a sudden, she felt like she couldn’t quite keep her balance.
She tried to move forward, but she stepped on a rock and it slid out from under her foot.
The awful cracking sound had stopped but now her ears were ringing with an equally deafening echo that seemed to be drowning out her other senses.
Clark’s arms came around her tightly then, and for the briefest second, she felt like she might be able to catch her balance again.
But even with Clark’s support, she just couldn’t seem to get her feet under her.
A strong breeze suddenly tossed her hair behind her.
Over Clark’s shoulder, she saw the sparse light from the flashlight she’d dropped moving impossibly upward, the space around her growing dimmer.
And that’s when she realized they were falling.
