Lost Tomb of the Damned - A Horror Short Story

 

In the time of the Pharaoh Shoshenq II, shortly after the end of the grandeur of Egypt’s New Kingdom, a time when the ordinary were ignored and their activities long since forgotten, lived a resourceful, scribal young man named Anseb; resourceful because the early death of his father, which had left the family poor, had forced the development of such traits and scribal because his still young, well-meaning mother, attractive though talentless, had managed to pay for her son’s education by way of a very loose and distant connection to royalty which afforded her the company of wealthy men, one of whom, taking a passing interest in the son though overwhelmingly in the mother, had agreed to fund his education to the top scribal school in Memphis as a present to her for a short lived affair.   An intelligent, though some said, overly imaginative teenager of 18 years, Anseb thrived in his studies, learning to decipher the hieroglyphs of various texts; his morbid curiosity, fueled in part by a somewhat darker view of life which the children of parents who die young often develop, tilted towards the funeral texts, his young, imaginative and, frankly, bored need for titillation greatly satiated by the depictions of gods and goddesses aiding powerful figures in their battles against the monsters of the Underworld in texts like the Amduat and the later Book of the Dead.  He knew both ancient texts thoroughly and, hopefully, would one day translate such hieroglyphs to artists for painting and chiseling onto not only the walls of tombs but onto those of temples, monuments, statues and any number of other surfaces.  Such was the much sought after power of the scribe in an overwhelmingly uneducated world.  That future, however, hung in the balance, for his benefactor, a high ranking official in the Memphis city government, had recently grown tired of his aging mother and permanently left the scene on a moment’s notice, not even bothering to talk with Anseb or show the least concern for the final leg of his education.  The young scribe in training needed money desperately as his final term at school approached and the situation had become critical. 

          Wracking his excellent though financially inexperienced brain for ideas, he remembered what appeared to be an old tomb he’d come across after getting lost while hiking outside Memphis alone a few years before.  Lonely after first leaving home to live at school, he’d wandered into a virtually never travelled area and gotten lost in one of a large series of cliffs, a huge, rocky section of supposedly nothing.  There, in a winding series of passageways, he’d observed the outline of what was clearly a large cut space covered over by rubble.  In his anxious need to find his way back home, he hadn’t entertained any thought of entering at the time but now it blazoned across the landscape of his brain. 

Why build a tomb there?  Ostensibly to keep it hidden but why in such a forbidden place, far away from the main cemeteries on the Nile’s West Bank and even the main necropolises of Memphis?  His intellectual curiosity faded, replaced by normal human nature, when he considered the possible wealth contained inside.  Wealth.  Money just lying there in the middle of nowhere in a forgotten place, probably from a forgotten era.  He didn’t need it all.  Just enough.  All he wanted out of life was enough.  He’d do the rest; his drive and his work would do the rest.  Determined like never before, he committed himself to finding that tomb again and taking what he needed from it.  He didn’t consider it grave robbing.  He considered it surviving.  His father was dead and his mother was no help if she couldn’t find the right man for support at the right time and that time had gone.  He was a man now and he’d do what needed to be done.  All great men who came before would do the same. 

          He spent the next several days searching without success.  A week later, just on the verge of quitting, he found what he was looking for, once again essentially by accident, after walking up a path in one of the dozens of high cliffs in the target area then winding through the labyrinthine set of passageways which opened into a small clearing around a hundred feet above ground level.  A large overhang covered the clearing like a stone awning some fifty feet long; at its end, the cliff opened out into the countryside, providing the clearing’s only light.  The burial opening was cut into a deep recess in one of the walls of rock, still covered over by the same pile of rubble.  He noticed footprints, the only footprints, undisturbed in the thin layer of sand on the flat stone floor and deduced them as his own, left two years previously.   Though the large stone awning eventually reached out to the open air, because of the footprints he felt sure the area was insulated completely from the effects of the elements; he also felt confident that no one had entered the area since and, thanking his good fortune for both hiking in obscure places and easily getting lost, delighted that only he and the dead knew the place now.  He still didn’t think himself a tomb robber but he couldn’t shake off a slight sense of superstitious foreboding.  His education and imaginative nature made him wonder.  So many stories of gods and goddesses and monsters.  So many people believed it.  Checking himself, he was startled to realize he’d never even given it much thought, despite the heavy religious education Egyptian children received.  Gods.  Goddesses.  Monsters.  Protectors of tombs.  Destroyers of corrupters.  He shook his head.  Just stories. 

          Anseb returned with a hammer, chisel, two oil lamps and a flint and went to work over the next few days.  After some hard labor with the two former objects, he knew he was at the last layer of rubble blocking the entranceway.   The last layer contained hieroglyphic writing, a series of symbols at the top like the header on a roll of papyrus.  The symbols included a series of waves, a lion, an owl, several feathers, two vultures, two hands and two eyes.  A wave of fear surged into his heart when he translated, 

“Only the damned are here.”

Nothing else.  No other markings, no incantations, blessings or curses.  Just an epitaph, a single, cryptic line perhaps meant to dissuade anyone from entering or, perhaps, just a final condemnation for those within.  Anseb stared at the symbols for several seconds, blinked hard twice then began angrily hacking away with his hammer and chisel, ashamed of his fear and unwilling to let anything stop him, least of all just words painted on rock.  Still, he waited until his bit of work to cut into the hieroglyphs, cracking several segments though not breaking clearly through.  Something seemed to be holding him off, preventing him from that last step.  The open air past the stone awning revealed the setting sun.  It was late and he suddenly wasn’t interested in staying.  Combined with the exhaustion of a long day of labor, the young man decided not to fully break through the final level until tomorrow.  Then he would have plenty of time to enter and explore.  Confidently leaving his objects there, he left for home, sliding through a crack in the rock wall into the first passageway, greatly excited for his return, when he expected to explore and hopefully find the wealth of dreams.  Then he heard it. 

“Awwwwwww.” 

A low though undeniable moan.  He froze as the haunting noise seemed to creep across the stone around him in a layer of cold, Nile slime, slime that then creeped up his back and shrouded him like a cloaked corpse.  He felt his ears stiffen defensively, stretching for any further sound, but only heard silence.  Looking in all directions, as people do when trying to locate a sound from nowhere, he eyed the crack in the wall leading back to the tomb and couldn’t resist a shudder.  With trepidation and a slight delay, he squeezed back into the clearing and noticed a small chunk of rock he’d chiseled had given way and fallen out, creating a small hole into the tomb’s main corridor.  Inching towards it, Anseb saw it was from a section of the painted hieroglyphs.  He picked up the fallen chunk and read it.  A hand, a vulture, an owl and a wave.  He dropped it like it had just fallen from the sun, fast walked then jogged then ran back into the passageway, not stopping his quickened pace until he’d exited the cliffs.  Painted on the chunk of rock he’d picked up was one word:   

“Damned.” 

 

He failed to return the next night nor over the next several days as the thought of being greeted with that moan again made a quick attempt to enter the tomb impossible.  All week, he tried to use his reason to explain the sound.  Had to be the wind.  The wind came and whistled in the crevice created by the fallen stone he’d chiseled.  That’s what happened.  Yet that area, completely isolated from the elements, seemingly had no wind.  His footprints from two years ago hadn’t been disturbed in any way.  No, it had to be…some kind of creaking in the rock when the stone gave way?  Some sort of phenomenon he didn’t understand which caused a moaning.  Yet how could it?  Maybe his ears had played tricks on him.  He was tired and he knew he was impressionable to an extent.  Maybe it was something else.  Yes, he’d heard wrong.  He wondered if he should plug the hole but, overcome by that odd sensation of suddenly not being alone, realized the last thing he wanted in the world was to approach that opening.    All those stories of gods and goddesses…and monsters.  No.  Couldn’t be true.   And the chunk of rock that had fallen out with that word painted on it?  Coincidence.  Yet, his reason couldn’t overcome his emotions, most specifically his sense of dread.  No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t force himself to go back to that spot. 

          As the date for payment for what would be his final school term approached, he took to conducting long walks in the area of the cliff, trying to work up enough courage to continue on, knowing he’d need time to both inspect the tomb and work to extract any treasures inside but time was almost out.   Finally, with only a few days left before he’d have to have the money, he stiffened his backbone while on one of his walks, swallowed his apprehension and chose to enter and scout around.  His walk had begun in the early afternoon and, by the time he’d made his choice, the sun had begun to sink.  He cursed himself a fool.  The fear of a sound which probably came from the wind or something natural had kept him away until the very end and now here he stood, in an isolated place possibly only he, as a living person, knew the location of in a landscape soon to be consumed by night.  Whatever fear he’d felt before felt half what he felt now but he knew he’d never have the nerve to enter again if he left so he continued.  He was educated.  He didn’t believe in what he couldn’t see.  Moans couldn’t come out of nowhere.  He hadn’t felt or heard a wind but there must have been one and that’s all there is to it.  Given the circumstances, it had to be. 

He walked up the trail and accessed the passageways with the caution of one expecting a hail of arrows at any moment from an enemy army.  He entered the clearing and eyed the hole in the final layer blocking the burial chamber.  It seemed to widen as he stared, an imagined silent hiss from the visible mouth of a black viper which pulled him in, ready to consume and digest him.  He inched towards it as if to sneak up on it, taking it by surprise, fearing any further sound would shatter his will and send him fleeing back home, never to return.  Not willing to take his eyes from the opening, suspicious of something, nothing or everything, he crouched down to pick it up one of his oil lamps and inadvertently knocked it over, spilling large amounts of oil.  With an exclamation, he hurriedly groped for it and set it upright, some of the ooze getting on his hand, more than half its oil now staining the stone floor. 

Now aware that one of his lamps would provide him with little light if needed, anger at his clumsiness once again replaced fear as he picked up his hammer and chisel with disgust and began finishing his work on the rubble, taking care to hammer off each word of painted hieroglyph left in an act of defiance. He’d soon broken enough away to create enough space to wedge through, his anxiety to explore dissuading any further labor.  He carefully lit his full oil lamp with his flint, hovered it over the now large hole and recoiled when the flame snuffed out, as if the invisible black viper had flicked it with its tongue.  Clearly there was a breeze of some sort from within, which also explained the moan he’d heard several days before.   What did it matter if he’d felt none?  Wind was wind, whether he felt it or not.  He lit the lamp again, the light breaking through the weight of the heaviest darkness he’d ever put his arm through, illuminating a space a few feet in front of what appeared to be a hallway with a set of steps chiseled into the concrete, the top few still buried in rubble.  As he made his first move to enter, his eyes couldn’t help scanning for the chunk of rock marked with the hand, vulture, owl and hand.  He exhaled with relief when he couldn’t see it among the many chips and hunks he’d hacked through and thrown aside.  Picking up his second lamp, he set it just outside the entrance as he squeezed feet first inside, taking care to protect his light, his right then his left foot finding one of the bottom steps.  Dust soiled his tunic as he entered but, otherwise, he went in without a scratch.  He reached back for his second oil lamp as he tepidly tip toed down the bottom steps inside, pausing with each footfall before continuing.  Once fully inside, he set the unlit oil lamp down by the final step.  The arid place, devoid of water, smelled of nothing.  He manipulated his oil lamp high and low.  The hallway, seemingly carved into the rock haphazardly, had a short ceiling, only about six feet high, just enough to walk through but no more.  The immediate walls were bare but over the steps on the ceiling was painted a large representation of the god Geb, portrayed traditionally as a man holding a staff in one hand and an ankh in the other but also with a cobra looped around his throat like a necklace, its tail clasped in its mouth.  Geb, father of snakes and the one who caused earthquakes by his laughter.  His appearance puzzled Anseb for Geb had only scant influence on the dead and none on their final journey to the afterlife.  Why was he portrayed thusly at the tomb’s entrance?  Surely Anubis would be better…  Trying to keep his focus, Anseb shook his head and continued his search. 

He walked forward nearly thirty feet with more representations of Geb on the ceiling every five feet or so, giving the impression of a trail lain with bits of food.  He reached the end of the hall, only about another twenty feet down, with Geb’s painted eyes watching him each step.  The ceiling progressively tapered lower than his height, forcing him to stoop slightly, as he reached the end of the hall and into the burial chamber.  No rooms were cut to the sides, as was usually the case in the tombs of the most powerful and, by extension, the wealthiest.  Was there only one room here?  It was an older tomb, possibly a thousand years old or more.  His spirits began to sink.  Hastily carved with no consideration for proper measurements, possibly only one room and, as he noticed before crossing the threshold, no steps to descend going in.  Perhaps no treasure existed at all here.  Maybe they just dumped a body there and left.  Then again, he hadn’t explored anything yet.  Perhaps there were multiple rooms attached to this main room.  He entered the burial chamber like in a slow-motion trance, making sure to keep to the near wall to his left for safety, unwilling to wander into the middle for now.  He raised his lamp to get an idea of the surroundings.  His arm fully extended, the light barely shined on the ceiling so he estimated it to be around nine feet high, around the height of a regular Egyptian room.  The first thing he saw on the wall, which gave him a start, was an enormous representation of a snarling baboon, painted dark brown, perhaps twice as large as life size.  The baboon represented the “opener of the gates” for departed souls in texts like the Amduat, the Book of the Hidden Chamber, popular in older tombs, more recently surpassed in importance by the Book of the Dead.  The baboon began the process of allowing the spirit to advance through the waters of the Netherworld on the way to immortality.  Painted next to it where a set of hieroglyphs which, once translated, proved the opposite to be true. 

‘Baboon,’ it read.  ‘You who makes music for those who begin their journey across the waters, instead of opening your mouth in harmony, close your mouth, withhold the secret language from the cowards buried here.  May they not learn the words to gain access to that which provides immortality.  May they be damned forever for their treachery.’

The word “damned” made him think of his recent pitfalls and the meaning of what he read.  He’d never studied any text with this message.  It seemed to be unique, perhaps created specifically for this tomb, but it was a good sign.  The tomb may have been carved abruptly and without care but the body or bodies there at least warranted a type of funeral text and those were not just for anybody.   But what of this magic invocation for the baboon?  Who was entombed here and why were their souls damned?   The soul could not attain eternal life with the gates closed.  Whoever lied there, they were certainly condemned. 

A few feet down from the baboon and its writing was the picture of twelve coiled uraeus serpents in three rows of four, one on top of the other.  In classic funeral texts, the uraeus serpent lit the way for the souls of the dead through the early stages of the Netherworld’s dark waters with their fiery breath, serving as living torches.  The magic command for these creatures in their subsequent hieroglyphs kept in the same line as that of the baboon. 

‘Serpents, who light the way of deserving souls, withhold your fiery breath as a beacon from these traitors.  Keep their Bas in darkness but use your flames to sear their bodies.  Keep them from peace as they burn in agony.’

Traitors?  So whoever lay there had incurred the wrath of powerful people and been condemned for their supposed treachery.  What did they do to deserve the punishment of spiritual non-existence, the worst punishment imaginable?

As he moved along to the next wall, his foot kicked what felt like a large chunk of rock in the corner, prompting an unavoidable curse from his lips.  A quick scan with his lamp showed what looked more like brick than stone.  Careful not to stub his toe again, he began looking over the next wall, his lamp lighting a complex set of hieroglyphs in pictures and characters painted from end to end which told a story of treason and betrayal, of a plot concocted by the vizier and queen of an unnamed pharaoh to seize power some eight hundred years earlier, prior even to the creation of the Theban Necropolis.  The painted pictures showed the two conspirators, lovers behind the king’s back, in bed, with the words,

‘They met and made love in his own bed chamber and conspired to take both his throne and his life.’ 

The next set of pictures showed the Queen addressing a woman, painted in the slightly smaller manner denoting lower status, who then addresses a man her size in the dress of a palace guard.

‘They poisoned the mind of the favorite concubine of Pharaoh against him and she in turn poisoned the mind of one of his trusted guardsmen.’ 

The next set showed the concubine and the guardsman again but with another man in guard’s clothes hiding behind a pillar.   It read,

‘But the traitors were overheard by another guard, who told their Captain, who informed Pharaoh.  Their plan to kill him on his own bed failed and they were arrested.’ 

 The corresponding set showed the results of the trap that was set; a man in royal garb, ostensibly the King, in the royal bed with the concubine.  The guard brought into the conspiracy stood behind another pillar, waiting for his best chance to attack and kill.  The set after that showed two new guards taking their treasonous comrade by each arm and another tying the concubine’s hands behind her back.  Pharoah stands at an elevated position to the side, his hieroglyph towering over the events, holding a Was scepter, the symbol emphasizing the power he still held. 

The next set of pictures chronicled in gory detail the gruesome torture and deaths of the conspirators, including a palace scribe outed by the torture of the others, who had been tasked to create a false record of what was to be the assassination to cover for those involved and fool the public.    The concubine had her ears and nose cut off before being smothered.  The palace guardsman was disemboweled and his guts, that part of the body seen as the center of the strength of soldiers to fight for Pharaoh, were ripped out while he was still alive.  The scribe’s hands, which were to pen the false narrative saying the King had died by drowning in the Nile, were cut off, leading to his rapid death from blood loss.  The Queen, befitting her status, received the quickest death, a swift one stroke beheading by ax; the Vizier, whose words were seen as the start of it all, received the worst.  Both sides of his mouth were slashed and his jaw yanked down until it ripped apart; his chest was then cut open and his heart gouged out.  For good measure, he had also been castrated while alive. 

‘Such is the punishment of the betrayers of Pharaoh, the Sungod on Earth,’ the funeral text laid out as the final punctuation on all the gruesomeness. 

Anseb closed his eyes at the horror of it all.  What vicious retribution.  The heinous plot deserved punishment, of course, but to that extent?  Such was his naivete of the power politics of his era, when the evil faced horrible punishments and, sometimes, the good faced even worse. 

Laid out in hieroglyphs on the next wall, the one opposite the entrance, were the condemnations and final judgments for the conspirators.  The scribe, guard and concubine, considered small fish doing what they were either told or manipulated to do, escaped damnation, their separate, brutal mutilations punishment enough.  The Vizier and Queen weren’t so lucky.  The hieroglyphs for their fates contained the following chilling proclamation:

          ‘For the former Queen and disgraced Grand Vizier, whose names do not deserve mention, eternal limbo, stuck in their bodies between Heaven and Hell, bathed in eternal darkness, always close to the light but unable to reach it.  Their bodies will be covered with broken lapis to prevent their souls from reaching freedom.  For them, the gates will be forever closed.  If either escapes their body, may Apophis, dreaded snake of the dark, deadly serpent of chaos, take each in the unbreakable strength of his muscular coils and burn them in the pitiless Lake of Fire as Sekhmet, that lion headed goddess and eye of Ra, bites their face and rips their head to pieces.’ 

          On the wall next to this final judgment, as a kind of frightening postscript, Anseb’s lamp lit the face of an enormous snake, presumably Apophis, normally the soul’s enemy in need of vanquishing in funeral texts, now invoked as an instrument of retribution should the souls of the Vizier and Queen escape their earthly remains.  Apophis’ likeness, coils upon coils stacking him high until his face reached the eye level of a regular human, glared out into the room with open mouth and forked tongue, looking ready to strike at an invisible victim.  Anseb thought of his impression while staring at the hole in the tomb’s opening earlier, giving him the impression of a deadly snake.  Now, here Apophis of the Amduat sat on layer upon layer of his coils, fangs bared as if looking for souls to eat.  He noted the absence of Sekhmet on the wall, which struck him as strange.  He then slowly shook his head in disbelief.  Surely what was thus chronicled could not have been acted upon. 

A few feet down on the next wall proved him wrong as his light shined on something leathery, something shriveled.  A sharp jolt of nausea hit his stomach as he examined closer.  Hanging on the wall by a rope at its waist like some slaughtered animal was the withered, long dead body of a woman, completely naked, perhaps as a form of debasement or insult, the arms angled slightly forward, rigid from where they’d hardened.  Anseb’s face pursed with revulsion when he saw she had no nose, ears or eyes, both former features hacked off and the latter rotted out with time.  No doubt the concubine of the story.  The weathered, dark brown skin clung to the skeleton like tight clothing and the mouth hung open in a final shriek of pain.  He’d never seen anything so terrible, never wanted to believe anything that terrible could exist.  A few feet down, his next discovery rivaled his first for shock for there hung a second body, this one a man, probably the guard by the looks of him, in a loin cloth.  A huge hole yawned in his stomach with bits of dried skin stiff around the edges and the remnants of snapped bones within, as if he’d been slit by a large knife and his ribs ripped apart by powerful hands.  An examination of the horribly contorted face made it obvious this man had died that way, cut open and disemboweled alive, just as the text said.  A few more few feet down hung the next and last of the trio, the scribe with no hands and a blank, empty facial expression like his soul had been sucked from his body by spiders draining him of blood.  A woman hacked to pieces and two men butchered like hogs.  Three people killed with savage brutality left to hang there in timeless shame.  Far from being among the sacred, Anseb had stepped into what was truly a chamber of horrors, of manmade monstrosities whose reality should only run amok in the imaginations of the most depraved. 

“They are dead,” he reasoned to himself, over and over.  “They are dead.  They have been dead many years and cannot hurt anyone.  Whatever they did once, it is unimportant now.  Unimportant because they are dead.  They are dead.  They are dead.”

He breathed a sigh of relief at the lack of writing or images on the last bit of wall next to the entrance as he finished his circuit.  The worst of this terrible place could only be over now.  Hopefully only treasure and the continuance of what was a bright future for him remained.  He turned towards the middle of the room to get a look at what he assumed would be the location of two caskets…and stared straight into the bug eyed, blood spattered, nightmarish face of a freshly dead man.  Anseb shouted loudly enough to wake the dead there.  His lamp flew out of his hands as he reflexively threw up his arms.  Terrified out of his reason, he ran towards the entrance in the now dark room, managed to find and get through it then sprinted towards the tomb opening as fast as he could.   One nightmare too many had revealed itself and he was finished.  He could choose another career.  Anything.  But he had to get out of there.  Moving with blind, thoughtless panic and unable to see anything in the dark hallway, he lost his sense of awareness and tripped over the tomb entrance’s first step.  His head slammed into the rubble burying the stop steps at the top and he crumbled to the floor, instantly unconscious. 

 

He awoke a half hour later, his opening right eyelid moving a thin bit of dust from where his head had lain on the stone floor, forcing him back to attention in order to rub it.  His forced sleep and current headache brought on a sense of reset to his situation, a sense of renewed sobriety that had been shattered by the terror of seeing…a dead body?  Had he truly seen a dead man, not one of the cadavers hanging on the wall, but a man like himself, a contemporary peer?  It still scared him to the point of fleeing but now his reason had returned due to the unplanned rest.  The matter of his schooling and the funding it desperately needed loomed larger and larger in his mind and the pressure wouldn’t allow him to leave.  He also felt a sense of connection to the place now, as if the death stored in the tomb walls had penetrated his body and possessed his spirit as he slept.  Rising gingerly, he felt the pain above his right eye, which forced him to concentrate; he realized he must find the second lamp and the flint he’d brought in to make further search possible.  Taking special care of his footfalls, he reached into the general area by the steps where he’d left it, near where he’d fallen unconscious, groping for it in the dark.  Spilled earlier, the lamp now had little oil left and one more mishap would finish it and him.  The darkness began to feel heavy, as it had when he first entered.  Exasperated, he timidly reached out and nearly burst into tears as his fingernails finally scraped against the clay object.  He managed to pick up both the lamp and flint and, moments later, had light again, albeit dim and sparse but he could see, if only barely. 

He creeped back to the chamber with a sense of awe, still skeptical his discovery of the recently dead body actually happened.  He stepped directly into the middle of the room, rigidly holding his lamp, afraid the slightest movement might make it go out again, more and more afraid for its precious supply of oil with each step.  Once, the light flickered and Anseb held his breath.  The light dimmed, dimmed, then returned to the previous level.  He must find another light source and fast.  Nearly the moment he thought it, the type of cauldron used to light large rooms appeared before him as if Renenet, goddess of good fortune, had sent it herself.  He very carefully tilted the lamp into what looked like charcoal with no luck on the first two tries then came up with an idea.  Taking a leap of faith in his own creativity, he blew out the light, poured the remaining oil on the charcoal and tried to light it with his flint.  After a few flicks of sparks, the charcoal ignited, the chamber finally illuminated well enough to see most of the room, save for a few shadowy spots here and there. 

 His eyes immediately bored into the sight of what was, indeed, a recently dead man near the cauldron, the flickering fire producing the eerie dance of light and shadows on the body, which stood upright next to one of two sarcophagi in the room’s center.  A large section of rock from the ceiling had showered down on the poor man, both trapping his right leg and opening up a huge gash on his forehead, which poured blood all over his face and down his chest.  It smelt only faintly like decomposing flesh, apparently the process of bodily decay having mostly taken place.  A quick look at the upper right leg made Anseb shiver and take a step back.  A gaping slash nearly five inches long and an inch wide was ripped to the bone.  The hideous wound, now crusted with mounds of scar tissue, had drenched the rest of the leg and the rocks burying it in red.  Trapped and desperate, unable to move inside a remote section of cliff in the desert, the dead man must have taken up a piece of rock from the pile and tried to cut his own leg off to escape, death probably occurring from blood loss.  As he bled out, his standing body just kind of leaned on some of the rocks which had buried him.  He couldn’t have been there longer than two weeks, the corpse still emanating a kind of life as if it would move, taking up the stone again, to continue frenziedly slicing at its own leg, the end goal being a one legged man hemorrhaging buckets of blood, each second crawling with his last strength for the entrance, not noticing or caring he’d still be too far away from civilization to make it back alive.  Anseb tried to close the man’s eyelids, both out of compassion and to end their hideous glare but couldn’t, the lids unmoving as if the eyes were fated to bore a hole into his every activity until he left that horrible place.    

As he moved over to the corner where he’d earlier kicked the chunk of what appeared to be brick, he noticed and counted seven large hieroglyphic representations of Geb covering every section of ceiling except for two areas; the one where the dead man had been trapped, which he assumed had also been adorned with the gods’ likeness before it caved in, the other in the corner he now moved to.  He observed an opening in the ceiling right above him, about three feet by three feet, two distant stars in the now night sky visible as tiny specks.  On the floor appeared to be broken clumps of mud mixed with straw, which could only be bricks.  He reasoned the tomb, possibly built on short notice, had been built too high to the top of the cliff in that section.  The builders had broken through the top and chose to cover up their masonry mistake with brick.  At some point, the bricks obviously had given way and collapsed, falling and breaking to pieces.  He also now observed a moderately long cord of rope on the floor.  He guessed the dead man, a rare soul like himself in that area of desert, had hiked to the top of the cliff and unwittingly stepped onto the bricked-up section, breaking part or all of it open.  The man, perhaps like he, realizing he’d found a lost tomb, had come back later to see if he could find anything of value, lowering himself down by the rope, which had given way.  Anseb again looked up over the dead man at the ceiling.  That section must have a large crag above, providing more than enough rock to bury the man.  The rocks had fallen but only from the underside.  How could this happen?  He couldn’t repress the idea of the supernatural once again.  Perplexed, his eyes danced around the hollowed-out section of ceiling.  Could the gods…somehow make rocks fall on people?

But now came the time to conduct his business.  He approached the two sarcophagi in the center, side by side and perpendicular to the room’s entrance, one open and one closed, the former with what appeared to be an undisturbed mummy lying inside.  The removed casket lid lay to its side; he’d narrowly avoided stepping on it during his first circuit.  Just past their feet in between the caskets and the second stretch of wall, as if reading his mind from earlier, stood a full-sized statue of Sekhmet, with the body of a woman and the head of a lion.  Sekhmet, the violent warrior goddess, avenger against all that is dark and disorderly.  A heroine of justice.  The circle seemed to be complete, with all interpretations of all the characters of the unique funeral text represented in some way in the chamber.  He passed over the closed casket, the one closest to the entrance, for the moment so he could focus on the open one.  The smaller body size made it likely to be the Queen.  The only thing visible on the outside of the body was a necklace of a thin, clearly worthless metal with empty sockets where possibly stones used to be, presumably the lapis lazuli mentioned in the text.  Anseb cursed as he looked over the open casket.  Nothing visible.  Why were the sockets in the necklace empty?  Where had the jewels gone?  The thought they could be hidden in the recently dead man’s loin cloth, which they in fact were, flashed across his mind but he hurriedly rejected such a search.  He wanted no part of that corpse.  Maybe after he looked over the body of the Vizier.  Maybe.   He lifted the mummy’s left hand to see if any rings adorned the fingers when the entire thing, every bit of wrapping and what could be inside, collapsed into dust.  Quick swipes of his hands proved there to be nothing in the wrappings, either.  Both agitated yet strangely tired, Anseb tried to think it through.

“How is there no body?” he thought.  “Surely a corpse cannot just turn to dust with no skin or bones?” 

The sense of the supernatural tugged stronger on his tunic than ever and he resolved to give the body of the Vizier a quick going over before getting out of there.  Whether he left with any prize or not, he couldn’t wait to put this whole night of fright behind him.  The Vizier’s casket lid was surprisingly light, made of something like balsa wood, completely free of any protective markings or representations.  It made only a tiny thump as he pushed it onto the floor, revealing a sloppily wrapped mummy inside.   He couldn’t contain a squeal of delight when he saw a similar necklace to the Queen’s, only this one with the lapis lazuli jewels intact; though still in the sockets, the gems were streaked with cleavages, probably done by a hammer.  Broken lapis covering the body, meant to block the transference of the soul to spiritual immortality.  Anseb felt both the burden and freedom of education, the burden being the knowledge of such things and the reservations of action they induced, the freedom being the instilled logical thought that led to those reservations being overcome.  Lapis lazuli, being highly valuable, in this amount would be more than enough to carry him through the end of his final semester.  He reached around the neck and felt a small clasp.  With this find, he chose not to search the recently dead man’s loin cloth.  He would be out of that place with his booty in mere seconds, none of it to be spoken of again.   He undid the clasp and took off the necklace, planning on taking the whole thing as the lapis nearly came apart in his hands as he cradled it.  With a smile, he took a step towards the exit. 

“AWWWWW!”

The sound erupted from the mummy, the exact same agonized moan Anseb had heard the night he first chiseled into the tomb, only several levels higher.  The shock made him drop the necklace, the compromised lapis breaking into tiny bits on the stone floor.  He backed up until he made contact with the Queen’s casket and sank to the floor as what can only be called a ghost, a filmy though distinguishable white, rose from out the mummy’s body, the first thing noticeable being the jaw ripped free from the upper skull, hanging all the way down against the neck like loose flab, the wounds of the slashed mouth visible from where it had been cut, just as the funeral text said the Vizier’s punishment had been.  The eyes showed the kind of fear experienced at the moment of violent death, as if the visage rising now existed exactly as he’d died, revealing the experience of his tortures.  The center of the ghostly white chest showed a hole where the heart had been ripped out.  The naked body also revealed its castration as it rose and floated above its mummy then looked down at the terrified Anseb as if noting his presence but not understanding it, the disconnected jaw hanging in a silent, eternal scream. 

The mutilated ghost then turned and slowly floated towards the entrance then made a slight adjustment towards what could only be the start of the funeral text, as if ready to merge with it on a journey into the Netherworld.  As it approached, the enormous baboon painted near the front of the text came alive as if its soul had resided in its painted representation all these years, its filmy white form blocking the only exit with a vicious, deep throated howl while repeatedly clapping its hands.  The twelve uraeus serpents followed suit in identical fashion, coming off the wall in murky white, each of the twelve spewing ethereal flames from their now open mouths.  They advanced on the Vizier’s ghost, forcing him back towards the room’s opposite wall, floating on a higher plane above the ground.  Anseb began shaking as he watched, unable to move his limbs in any other way.  The Vizier reached its translucent hands out several times, only to snap them back as they touched the fiery flames apparently only creatures of the spirit world could feel, emitting brief, pathetic yelps of pain. 

As the nightmarish visions floated above him, Anseb finally managed to move, scurrying away from the Queen’s casket until his back hit the side of wall containing the first part of the funeral text.  He continued watching as the representation of Apophis, the monstrous snake enlisted as the punisher of souls, next came off the wall as a giant, smoky white horror, its powerful coils growing larger and larger as if it breathed, moving up behind the oblivious Vizer.  Like lightning, the serpent wrapped itself around the man’s ghost, squeezing the hapless spirit from feet to chest, the Vizier’s head oscillating wildly, the ripped jaw grotesquely flopping loosely from side to side. 

But the worst horror was still to come for the statue of Sekhmet began to take on the same white, translucent quality and, moments later, the goddess of vengeance, goddess of violence, breather of the desert fires, the eyes in her lion head blazing red, her fangs bared, manifested in full, animated, otherworldly life, separating from the stone statue, her razor-sharp claws seeking ethereal blood.  She floated towards the entrapped Vizier’s ghost and, with one giant exhalation, vomited out a torrent of flame, the Lake of Fire punishing the unjust, enveloping the Vizier in fire while unaffected, fireproof Apophis continued his grip, the burning spirit of the Pharaoh’s traitor emitting an ear splitting, high-pitched wail.  The lion goddess then pounced like a giant cat, digging her claws into the Vizier’s ghostly shoulders as her opened mouth crunched down onto his head, fangs cracking into his skull, translucent bones being snapped like twigs.  Anseb screamed uncontrollably as the goddess finally bit off the top of the Vizier’s head, milky white blood and brains pouring down the front of his blazing body.  Apophis slithered his tongue and the baboon at the entrance hopped up and down with pleasure.  Sekhmet let the body loose, which disappeared, supposedly the end of its existence, the worst fate imaginable, and turned towards Anseb, who immediately went silent, now too frightened to even scream, acknowledging his presence for the first time.  Offended by a mortal witnessing this spiritual execution, she snarled then roared at him as he sat petrified, his mouth spasming.  Then each representation of Geb on the ceiling began to laugh, each of their mouths visibly moving, until the laughter united in one haunting, deafening chortle as if in a state of irresistible insanity.  Anseb desperately covered his ears as each representation glowed red as with heat and exploded one by one, the entire ceiling, thick with rock above outside of that one bricked section, soon raining rocks into the room.   The falling rocks and dust shook Anseb from his terror and to his feet as he ran towards the exit, suddenly unconcerned with the ghostly baboon.  He dodged the growing landslide as small bits of rock and dust peppered his head and shoulders as the entire chamber began to fill up, one large rock crushing the Vizier’s mummy to powder, another knocking over the cauldron and putting out its fire.  Sekhmet and Apophis, their duties ended, disappeared, as did the baboon with one last simian squeal.  Anseb dove through the opening just ahead of a series of enormous boulders which covered the chamber entrance forever.  He quickly got back on his feet and ran for the tomb’s main entrance as the laughing Geb hieroglyphs on the hall ceiling glowed red and detonated, Anseb barely ahead of each concussion and the subsequent deluge of debris.  Minding his earlier knockout, he timed a leap as best he could, taking flight just as the last representation of Geb exploded over the tomb entrance, showering him in stone as his hands groped for the exit…

 

When the dust had literally settled and all was quiet, a stunned Anseb checked his situation.  The entire hallway was buried in rock outside his position.  He’d been stopped just outside the hole in which he’d entered the tomb; his left leg and upper body were largely free but his right leg was buried from foot to upper thigh in rock, like the dead man in the burial chamber had been.  Anseb now realized the man must have gone through the same horrors as he, first removing the lapis stones from the Queen’s necklace, whose spirit undoubtedly rose, followed by the attacks of Apophis and Sekhmet.  The dead man no doubt watched the duo work their horrors as he had, after which the hieroglyph of Geb on the ceiling over him exploded, trapping him in that terrible place, that bit of Hell in the home of the dead, which now trapped him.  He tried to push the rubble which held his battered leg like a vice, jagged edges in spots digging into his calf and hamstring, drawing unseen blood, but couldn’t budge any of it save for a few small stones on top.  He could poke his hands and forearms outside the opening and see parts of the roof of the clearing if he shifted his body.  He began yelling loudly and often for help until his voice gave out, night turning to day then back to night in that empty place, for him the emptiest place in the emptiest desert in the world.  Perhaps he would find his voice again soon and someone would come like a miracle and help him.  Perhaps the dead man’s friends, looking for their lost brother, would find this stranger alive.  Perhaps.  Now, his chronic thirst irresistible, he opted for the last act of desperation, which he’d learned from the dead man in the burial chamber.  With tears and a sense of determination, he managed to grope for and seize a sharp rock and, with eyes closed and a prayer to Ra, who is Life, made the first cut into his upper right thigh.