Chapter 14
"They've got reinforcements!" cried Bob. He fumbled with the crossbow and ducked. A quarrel bounced off the stone behind him.
The world dissolved into slow motion. Elizabeth saw an elf take aim at her. She slowly raised the skillet up to shield her face. It shook in her hand as the quarrel shattered against it. Bounding over the snow like a man on the moon, Thomas ran at a closing elf and its stone knife shattered on the blade of his sword. He struck it down and made for Titania.
Elizabeth heard a whoosh and a thud at her ear. She spun around and saw Trip flicking blood from the poker. An elf lay, knife drawn, at his feet with a nasty dent in its temple.
The elves closed in. Elizabeth raised her poker. She and Bob stood back to back and laid about them with their pokers. The elves shied away from the iron and she began to hope. They edged towards the gate, not more than ten yards away now, with Joe and Trip beside them. Though unsteady on his feet, Joe was pistol-whipping everything that came within arm's reach. Titania shrieked something in that high fluting language and the elves reluctantly pressed in.
An elf leapt up at Elizabeth's feet as if he'd sprung from the ground. He raised his stone knife and brought it down. She parried with her skillet a moment too late and the knife glanced across her arm, opening a long gash at her wrist. "Ow! Damn it!" She bashed the skillet across the elf's face. "How much longer can we—"
The gate roared and a blinding light streamed out horizontally across them, the elves, and the heaving backs of the horses. The elves shrieked and clapped their hands over their ears. The humans took this opportunity for more elf bashing and a run for the gate.
The roar grew deafening and the light blinded them. Joe tripped on a fallen elf and Elizabeth fell over them both.
"Maybe we should be running the other way." Bob tried to help untangle them, but between Joe and Elizabeth's frantic struggling and the elf's miserable keening and slithering around in the snow, he didn't get very far.
The roar resolved into the growl of an engine and the pale Cadillac of Death burst out from between the standing stones. Streaming wails of terror and clouds of burning oil, the car bore down on them. Elves scattered crying as they hurled themselves away from the huge mass of iron. The car swerved around a standing stone and plunged into the horses. As it zoomed past Thomas, he threw himself across the hood.
"We can't see," cried Kevin who was sitting in the front seat and fighting with the mummy for the steering wheel. "Get off!"
"No!"
Bob hauled Elizabeth to her feet and flung her into the backseat as the car slowed to avoid another stone. He boosted Joe in after her. They landed on Dirk who was sprawled across the seat.
"The trip through the gate looks a lot more dramatic on this end. I thought you were more elves or demons," said Elizabeth, trying to climb off Dirk without putting her knee through his chest. Dirk shoved her into the foot well and tried to rearrange his bathrobe. Trip and Bob leapt into the backseat as the car picked up speed and turned back towards the gate.
"Alice!" shouted Elizabeth, scrambling to look out over the door. "We can't leave without Alice."
"Where is she?" cried Kevin who was currently winning the battle of the steering wheel. He also wore a bathrobe.
"Here!" The sudden arrival of an unseen weight knocked Elizabeth back onto the floor. "Damn, y'all, did you bring towels too?"
When the car had made a complete U-turn and was pointed back at the gate, Kevin let go of the steering wheel to help Thomas crawl over the windscreen. Thomas ended up in his lap and they both grabbed for the steering wheel when the mummy diverged from the desired course.
"I'll get you yet!" screamed Titania. She hurled a ball of ethereal fire at the Cadillac. It splattered across the trunk with minimal effect, but Elizabeth felt something like an electric shock. She felt her hair rise from her head and saw the faces of her companions framed by haloes of yellow, brown, and black. Bob's hair was already high and didn't look any different from usual. The end of a bandage rose from the head of the mummy.
The Cadillac leapt onward through the gate and the park reappeared around them. The car caught enough air to clear the low walls around the fountain. Grass, gaslights, cars parked along the street, relieving to see except for the speed at which they whipped by.
"Make it stop," cried Dirk.
"I can't reach the brakes." Kevin wriggled out from beneath Thomas and wrenched the steering wheel to the right in time to avoid an oak tree. The car bounced across the lane which wound through the park. Kevin pulled the wheel the other way and the car swerved away from the edge of a steep incline. The mummy stepped on the accelerator and the car surged forward onto Franklin, made a sharp left, and barreled down the hill. Elizabeth felt a flicker in her head and a map of the neighborhood appeared in her mind's eye.
The occupants of the back seat sorted themselves out between attacks of panic and screaming. Elizabeth crawled onto Bob's lap, Alice onto Joe's, and Dirk onto Trip's.
Kevin and the mummy began to kick each other over the pedals.
"She seems to be guided by screams of terror," said Thomas. "The louder you scream, the more she swerves."
"Yeah, but she doesn't stop." Kevin got a foot on the brake and the car abruptly decelerated, flinging them all forward. The mummy grabbed Kevin by the throat and shoved him away. She stepped on the gas and the car lurched forward again.
"Why are you all in bathrobes?" asked Alice.
"We were staying up all night for the solstice," said Dirk. "Then we got tired and decided to go to bed. Then we heard this crashing sound out back and the mummy had driven the car right through the carriage house doors. We ran after it, she wasn't moving really fast and we thought we could stop her. Where the hell were we just now?"
"But it's not even seven yet—"
"No, it's like five something in the morning—"
"But—"
"In ballads, time passes more slowly in the Fair Country," said Thomas. "Don't you have those stories about the person who spends a year there and when he returns, fifty years have passed here. Augh!"
They all screamed when the mummy ran a stop sign and they were nearly T-boned by a van. The car screeched to a halt at the far side of the intersection, then proceeded at a more demure pace, the wrong way on the one-way streets, through Shockoe Bottom.
"So that was elf land?" Dirk put an arm around Trip's shoulders and made himself comfortable. "I like this look," he said, with a wiggle of the saucepan which was still on Trip's head.
"Thanks. I'm thinking of getting one for every day of the week."
Elizabeth and Alice exchanged a glance, eyebrows raised. That's new, Elizabeth mouthed. Alice shrugged and yelped when the car ran up on the curb in front of a brick house half hidden behind a massive magnolia.
Kevin took the car out of gear and reached across the mummy to set the parking brake. The others piled out of the car.
Elizabeth caught sight of the brass numbers screwed onto the porch. "This is Alastair Price's house."
"Hey, Trip!" A car full of girls pulled up beside the Cadillac.
Trip crawled out of the Cadillac and stood nonchalantly in front of the mummy. "Hi, Amy. What's up?"
"Oh, Sarah wanted to do this Solstice-Old Time Religion thing," Amy yawned. "So when is it sunrise already? Hey, why do you have a pan on your head?"
"We were caroling and we used the pan for collecting wassail," he said, stumbling forward slightly as the mummy shoved him from behind.
"Huh?"
One of the girls leaned over Amy. "Let's go. We can get a paper and look up sunrise in there. We're going over to my place for breakfast, want to come?"
"No, some other time maybe." The mummy hit him again and he tried to elbow it, but it ducked.
"Okay. Bye, Trip." The girls zoomed off towards the gas station.
The mummy shoved Trip completely out of her way and climbed out of the Cadillac. She stood in the street, head swiveling back and forth as if she were listening.
"You're sure Miss Price is here?" Dirk and Kevin straightened their robes and groped around in the car for their slippers. "How can we get in?"
"Bang on the door and wake up Alastair Price. He'll let us in," Elizabeth declared.
"Break a window?"
Joe slouched further into the backseat. "I'll just stay here with the stolen car. Y'all go on ahead."
"Okay." Alice straightened out her horned helmet. "So we're breaking in? We got all these big strong guys here, y'all can break down the door."
As they stood dithering on the sidewalk in front of the gate, the mummy shoved straight through them. She burst through the iron gate and marched directly up the front path. At the front door, she paused.
Elizabeth felt an odd page-turning sensation in her mind and found herself picturing a door and doorknob. "It's the strangest thing—" she began.
The mummy wrenched the knob off the door and kicked the door open.
"So, problem solved," said Bob.
They ran into the house after the mummy, who stopped again in the foyer to listen for … something.
"Miss Price? Are you here?" they called as they spread through the house, flipping on the lights as they went.
Alastair Price had quite a house. Room after room of nice antiques and hand-knotted carpets, Elizabeth noted with the fraction of her attention that wasn't looking for Miss Price or trying not to trip and break anything. She pulled her sleeve down over the cut in her wrist, which was still bleeding slowly, and tried to not drip on the rugs. One room had a tall glass case filled with ceramics, one shelf of which was populated with tiny Egyptians rowing a tiny boat into the afterlife. She stopped to look.
A low banging sound vibrated the floor beneath her feet. She thought she could hear shouting. She cried, "Miss Price?"
The banging redoubled.
"She's in the basement," Elizabeth called. She ran to the back of the house where the kitchen ought to be and started opening doors. The first two doors were a pantry and a broom closet, but the third opened to rough wooden stairs descending into a dark basement floored with earth and brick. Bob was at her back as she descended and Alice crowded behind them.
Miss Price was locked in an iron cage suspended from the ceiling and more than arm's reach from anything in the room, except for the ductwork. Miss Price clung with one hand to the bars across the top, with her feet on the crossbars. She had gotten herself up high enough to bang on the ductwork with a shoe.
"Elizabeth? Is that you?" She dropped to the floor of the cage and began pulling her shoe back on. "I'm so glad you all are here. I can't do a thing with iron."
Alice examined the padlock. "Is the key around here?"
"No. Alastair took it with him."
"I could get Joe's gun and shoot it off."
"Oh," Miss Price said faintly, "I hope that won't be necessary."
"It won't." Bob pulled a multi-tool from his pocket and attacked the bolts that held the hinge plates. "So, 'can't do a thing with iron?' Are you an elf too?" he asked.
"Certainly not! Anyone with half a brain can see that." Miss Price eyed him frostily.
"Be nice to the guy with the multi-tool. What are you then?" One hinge plate fell to the floor. Elizabeth dragged a bench over for him to stand on so he could reach the other.
"Never mind that. We've got to catch up with Alastair. What time is it?"
"Early, like six?"
"More like seven," said Dirk. He hurried down the stairs, followed by the sound of breaking glass. "That mummy is tearing the place apart. Kevin managed to save the drapes, but she hasn't figured out how to open doors by turning the knobs yet."
"What? The mummy?" Miss Price reached through the cage to grab the front of Alice's jacket. "What did you do?"
Alice squirmed. "Nothing. We gave the mummy some tea. She's, like, way dehydrated."
"Very funny. That's big magic. You have no idea what you've released into the world."
"Thomas said we could let her go," Elizabeth said. "Although I was asleep at the time, so I don't know if that counts."
"We may have to," said Miss Price. "We've got to get to the Egyptian Building! Alastair has some stupid notion that our uncle hid treasure there when he directed the remodeling. That's why he wanted all those papers; he was looking for clues. And he's taken my crystal pyramid too. That was in my office. You girls didn't let him in, did you?"
"No, ma'am." Elizabeth explained about the kidnapping as Bob detached the second hinge plate and swung the door open on its latch. They helped Miss Price down and she bolted for the stairs. "Come on," she cried.
"But—"
"No buts! We must stop Alastair. He's going to make a complete mess of things!"
They followed her up the steps and through the house, picking up Kevin, Trip, and Thomas on the way.
"The mummy smashed that curio cabinet and grabbed a scroll," said Kevin. "She's run back out to the car."
"A scroll? Or the scroll?" asked Miss Price.
"Alastair took the scroll from your office," Alice told her.
"Then she's headed for the Egyptian Building too," said Miss Price.
Outside, Joe hunched down in the backseat of the Cadillac as the mummy marched down the sidewalk towards him. He called, "I'm glad to see y'all. Can't you turn her off?"
The mummy walked over the seats and sat back in the driver's seat. The others all piled in after her as the car pulled away.
"Wait for us!" Kevin cried. Dirk lost a slipper on the porch steps and they stopped to retrieve it.
"Catch up!" Miss Price called back to them. "The Egyptian Building is only a few blocks from here."
The Cadillac swerved around the corner and zoomed up Broad Street. The sky was starting to look vaguely light off to the southeast. They passed Trip's friends who were standing by their car at the gas station flipping through a newspaper.
The occupants of the Cadillac sorted themselves out again. Thomas dived into the front seat and struggled with the mummy for control of the car. By now the mummy had more driving experience than he did. He still didn't know which pedal was which. The car swung drunkenly back and forth across the double yellow lines.
"Let go! Switch with me," Bob shouted to him as he leaned over the mummy from the back seat and grabbed for the steering wheel.
"Somebody—anybody with a license," called Joe.
"Augh!" They all screamed as the Cadillac smashed into and over the cyclone fence that blocked College Street. The mummy scraped by a backhoe and swerved to avoid a dump truck. Now they were right beside the Egyptian Building. An image of the front entrance and the plaza before it sprang into Elizabeth's mind. The mummy turned up Marshall and jumped the curb into the plaza. The Cadillac smashed into a concrete barrier and came to an abrupt halt, flinging them all forward. Dark oily smoke spilled out from the exhaust and from around the edges of the hood.
The mummy picked up her scroll and climbed out of the car. The others examined themselves for damage and followed more slowly.
Joe tried to move but couldn't pull himself out of the seat. His skin was pale and perspiration beaded his forehead even though it was really cold, not that they'd noticed. "I think y'all will have to go on ahead. I don't think that scissors band-aid is doing the trick anymore … "
"You're going to the emergency room," said Bob, helping him out of the car. "It's right over there. Alice, go with him. Take this." He handed Alice the quiver of elfin arrows, still miraculously hanging from his shoulder though the crossbow and all the pokers had been dropped on their flight from the Fair Country. "Tell them he got scratched with one of these. There's a Dr. Vasquez who should be on duty right now. He's into poisons. Make sure he gets the arrows and make sure no one else gets scratched with them."
Alice nodded, her face drawn with sudden worry and guilt, even as her eyes followed the mummy marching up to the papyrus crowned columns. She took Joe by the arm and they started across the street, but Joe stumbled and nearly knocked her to her knees.
"Help her." Bob shoved Trip after them. Trip went, with a regretful look back at the Egyptian Building where the mummy was now standing perplexed in front of the knobless doors. He put Joe's other arm across his shoulders and half carried him across the street.
"Now, what happened to you?" Bob took Elizabeth's hand in his and turned it over. His fingers gently probed the gash made by an elf's stone knife.
"It's okay, it's not hardly even bleeding anymore. The knives must not be poisoned. I forgot I had it," she said, almost truthfully. She'd been thinking about it when she was bleeding all over the Cadillac and everyone in it. The wound ached. She pulled her wrist away.
"You could use a couple stitches. Or a bandage. Some soap and water. Maybe some sleep?"
"Later. Soon," she promised. "Come on." She followed Thomas and Miss Price over to the entrance of the Egyptian Building.
Bob put the Cadillac in park and would have cut the engine except that there were no keys in the ignition. If he'd looked closer, he would have seen that there was no gas in the tank either.
Miss Price watched the mummy look at the doors for a second, then said, "Wait a second. Are these even locked? Alastair's got a key." She tried a door, but the bolt was shot. The mummy, a fast learner, tried the next door which swung open.
The mummy entered the hallway and the others streamed in past her.
"He'll be—I don't know, not in his lab—in the central hall," said Miss Price. She charged up the stairs. Elizabeth, Bob, and Thomas were right behind her.
The mummy stood motionless, twisting her head from side to side as if she were trying to catch a scent. Elizabeth felt the floor plan of the Egyptian Building unfold in her mind. The route to Price's lab, where the other mummy slept, was highlighted in gold.
"What about the mummy?" Elizabeth asked Miss Price.
"Oh, she'll just try to reanimate her boyfriend. She can't do it on her own, even with the scroll. It has to be read aloud and she can't speak," Miss Price said.
"She can make sounds though. She was yodeling before," Elizabeth said.
"Zaghreet."
"What?"
"Zaghreet, not yodel. Even so, that's a far cry from reciting the Scroll of Life." Miss Price dashed through the door at the top of the stairs and ran out into the atrium.
"Oh, but can't she—" Elizabeth stopped, one hand on the door pull. Bob and Thomas hurtled past her. With half her conscious self, she took in the scene before her. The other half fought to clear her mind of the mummy—who else would be rummaging around in there, picking out bits of memory and tossing them aside if they did not serve? How a kind of door latch works, light switches, the door which Kharis lay behind. Her lips moved, her lungs forced a puff of air into her throat, and the strange music of another language filled her mouth. The sense of it sprang into her mind. Kharis. I shall gather together thy bones, thou shall be raised up, thy word is truth …
Alastair Price stood in the center of the atrium in the gray light that spun down from the skylight high above. He held a pyramid-shaped crystal in one hand and in the other a piece of chalk which he was handing to Charlotte. She didn't look any better for the early hour than the rest of them, though obviously she hadn't been engaged in hand-to-hand combat in the recent past and had managed to get a cup of coffee. Elizabeth could smell it before she spotted the Starbucks cup in Charlotte's hand.
"Grab him," cried Miss Price.
The last thing Elizabeth saw was Thomas reaching for Price's arm. The curse roared up within her, shoving her into a tiny corner of her own skull. But my skull doesn't have corners, she protested mutely, as her body stepped back into the stairwell and turned. Her body walked down the stairs, across the landing, down another flight to the basement level. It walked with a gait that was not hers, as if her limbs were being moved along by someone accustomed to shorter legs, smaller feet. Elizabeth fought for a fraction of her visual cortex so she could see where she was being taken. Down the hall, past the break room, past the other labs. She turned the corner and walked through the door of Alastair Price's lab, where the mummy of Ananka stood motionless before the mummy case. The mummy was looking a little hagridden too. Her bandages were unraveling and trailed from her head down her back. She'd lost a finger somewhere and had picked up a lot of grime in the carriage house.
The mummy case was open. The lid had been wrenched off and tossed aside. It lay on the floor, face up and cracked in half down the center. The museum people will be so mad, Elizabeth thought. The dusty mummy of Kharis reclined in the mummy case, much as he had back in the mummy pit at the museum, except that someone had restored his mask, which portrayed the face of a man with a long, knife-blade of a nose and full, sensuous lips. Wide ebony eyes gazed toward the ceiling. He looks kind of bored. Elizabeth wondered if the mask was taken from life.
Her hands reached out to the scroll lying on the workbench. Slowly, she unrolled it. Her index finger traced along the rows of hieroglyphics and her lips formed the words. She and the mummy fought for control over her breathing. I've done this more recently than you have, she thought fiercely, feeling her body going lightheaded until the mummy finally backed off and stuck to the vocalizations. While the mummy's voice issued from her throat, Elizabeth stealthily expanded her dominion over her own body.
When he saw who was bearing down on him, Alastair Price threw up his hands and ran for the stairs at the far end of the hall. He slowed only to smash a glass case and grab a Civil War saber.
"Stop this instant," cried Miss Price. "And don't drop my pyramid!"
"No, you can't stop me now," Price shouted. "You can have the pyramid back when I'm done with it."
Thomas caught him up as he started up the stairs. Price brandished the saber. Thomas drew his own sword and, with a bemused expression, easily parried Price, advanced a step inside his guard, and elbowed him in the jaw. Price fell backwards, dropping the saber and the pyramid. Miss Price appeared at his left hand to catch the crystal pyramid as it fell.
"Hi, Charlotte. What's going on?" Bob approached Charlotte as the tableau on the staircase unfolded.
"I'm helping Alastair look for buried treasure. X marks the spot." She brandished the piece of chalk and took a sip of her coffee. "Supposedly if you put the pyramid at the apex of the glass roof, the first light of dawn on the day of the winter solstice will shine through it and light up the spot where his uncle buried some treasure back when they were redoing the building. Personally, I don't think it's going to work, but there's a gold bar in it for me if it does, so, whatever. But I think Miss Price has pretty much brought the operation to a screeching halt, so I guess I'll just—"
"Stay right there, Charlotte, I'll have a word with you in a minute."
"Ma'am."
"Aunt Glinda, don't stop me now. There's only a small window of time when it will work." Price cringed away as Miss Price reached for him. She pinched the skin beneath his chin and shook his head around.
"I can't believe how stupid you've been about this whole thing. Attempting to corrupt Charlotte into stealing from me! Stepping on my first edition of a Frances Hodgson Burnett! Kidnapping me! And for what?"
Price yanked his head free and scrabbled backwards up the stairs. "Gold! Great-uncle Simon's gold. He hid it somewhere in the floor. Don't you remember? He told us about the golden artifacts he acquired when he was working with the tomb robbers. He smuggled it out of Egypt, but he can't have sold them off. He lived like a bum and got great-grandmother to finance his expeditions. I found all his account books and the inventory of his collections in the papers I inherited, every penny is accounted for—"
"He kept a second set of books! Probably a third, but I haven't found it yet. Uncle Simon was very … creative." Miss Price shoved her hair back from her forehead. The platinum streak gleamed in the increasing light.
"But in his journals, he said, about the crystal pyramid—it's a photonic crystal! And when it is struck by light from a particular direction, it will refract and pass a coherent beam … And in the plans for the building there's all this space unaccounted for."
"That's what you wanted the crystal for? Alastair, I'm ashamed of you. If you're looking for large quantities of gold (or even small quantities) in a stone floor in a nineteenth century building with no rebar, you use a metal detector! Especially when you've got the plans and you know where the pipes are laid. You do not kidnap your maiden aunt. You do not steal her crystal pyramid. And if you do kidnap your maiden aunt, you most emphatically do not lock her in a cage in your basement where you've got a trapeze, rings set in the wall, and selection of padded handcuffs hanging on a pegboard. I mean, really, Alastair. I've got images in my head now that it's going to take a lot of alcohol to wash out."
The blood drained from Price's face when she mentioned the metal detector. "I never thought of that. I'm not worthy of the Price name."
"Yes, well, except for your mother's sake I wouldn't … Oh, come on. We might as well try it. How do you get up on the roof of this place."
"Aunt Glinda?"
"I know you, Alastair. You're going to run out and get a metal detector as soon as the stores open. You're going to scan the floor and the basement walls like a maniac for a while. And then when you don't find anything, you'll come after the crystal again. So we might as well get it over with." She headed up the stairs.
Price clambered to his feet and followed her, gingerly rubbing the flesh beneath his chin.
"Miss Price, shall I accompany you?" asked Thomas, sheathing his sword and picking up the saber Price had dropped.
"Don't bother. I've got the situation well in hand. You might want to see what's happened to Elizabeth."
"Ah! Where is she?" Bob looked around wildly.
Miss Price and her nephew continued up the stairs. He showed her to the stairwell which zigzagged up through one corner of the building to the roof. As the stairwell did not project beyond the height of the roof, they had to proceed through a trapdoor. Price handed his aunt up carefully.
She held onto the crystal, though he tried to carry it for her, and scampered across the roof. The dawn light painted the world gray and shadows washed their feet. Over the construction site on the east side of the building she could see Church Hill, trees and spires silhouetted against a clear sky. It wouldn't be clouds that kept this experiment from working.
The skylight over the central atrium was made of hundreds of thick squares of plate glass supported in a web of iron. The skylight rose in four sloping triangles, not to a point, but to a small, square iron frame which held a square of etched glass. Miss Price crept up the thick iron ribs and chuckled to herself when she saw the etching. It said "Greetings, Glinda" and around the edges were several glyphs which matched the glyphs carved into the base of her crystal. She aligned the glyphs and placed the crystal in the frame. She turned her face to the dawn and burst out laughing.
"What is so funny?" Price turned his head. "Fucking hell!"
"V-DOT! And the state offices!" Miss Price gasped, wiping tears from her eyes. "They weren't standing when Uncle Simon set up his game."
The sun rose behind an office tower, which cast its long, long shadow across the Egyptian Building.
Price stamped his foot through a glass plate.
As the words of the Scroll of Life rolled off her tongue, Elizabeth crept slowly from the tiny space in her mind where the mummy had trapped her. Relieved to find that she'd only been compressed, not dissolved, she poured herself down her spine and sent strands of blue aura along her bones, gently nudging the aura of the mummy and the curse aside. She suppressed the urge to stretch, as if she'd been stuck in a little box for a long period of time, and continued her slow progress. The mummy didn't seem to be paying attention to any body parts that she wasn't actively making use of.
At first her progress was so slow, she didn't think she was making any. The blackness of the curse and the mummy's possessive aura clung like tar and didn't budge when she pushed against them. Then a little bit would give way, she'd fill in the space with blue, and keep pushing against the darkness that filled her.
Elizabeth peeked down at the scroll. It looked like she was going to run out of scroll before she could regain possession of anything outside of her ribcage. She redoubled her efforts as the mummy of Kharis began to stir. What are the odds that Ananka will hop back into her own body when she's got her boyfriend awake? Almost none, she thought. And she'll go looking for a new body for him. As she carefully extended her aura along her humerus, her arm twitched and the mummy Ananka paused. She started to look down at herself, but when Kharis raised his hand and curled his bandaged fingers over the edge of the mummy case, she returned her gaze to the scroll and continued reading in the same even voice that did not sound, to Elizabeth's ears, like her own, foreign language notwithstanding.
Elizabeth stretched and curled a strand of aura around her heart. She drew on strength she didn't know she had and pushed herself downwards into her legs.
The mummy Ananka stopped speaking and the scroll dropped from Elizabeth's hands onto the workbench. Kharis sat up slowly, shedding years of dust, and removed the mask from his face with a grimy and ragged hand. The head of the mummy turned towards her and Ananka leaned Elizabeth's body forward expectantly.
Now! Elizabeth gathered her energy and pushed outward against the mummy's aura with all her mitey might. Her mouth said, "Ah." Thrown from its roost in Elizabeth's body, the aura of Ananka coiled up and twisted around to strike, but Elizabeth had control of her feet now. She ducked behind the motionless form of Ananka's mummy body as the mummy's aura streamed towards her, moving too quickly to change direction, and back into her own body.
A cloud of dust whumped up from the mummy Ananka, who managed to convey surprise without benefit of facial features.
Kharis climbed stiffly out of the mummy case and down from the workbench. He reached for Ananka.
Elizabeth scurried around behind the workbench and tripped over a carton of papers. She sprawled across the floor while the mummies embraced. She groped around in the mess where Alastair Price had overturned boxes of old uncle memorabilia in a frantic search for something. Her fingers closed on the base of a stone statuette. She crouched on the floor and raised the statuette over her head, ready to bash any mummy that tried anything. She heard footsteps in the hall.
"Elizabeth?" Bob ran into the lab. "Are you in here?"
"Elizabeth?" Thomas followed.
She stood up and looked at them across the workbench and the mummy case. "Where are the mummies? Didn't you see them?"
"No," said Bob.
"You're sure? There were two mummies in here a second ago."
"I thought I saw some people down at the end of the corridor," Thomas said slowly.
"And you didn't hack them into pieces? We've got to stop them! They—they get into people's heads." Elizabeth hurried carefully through the strewn papers and picked up speed when she got onto clear floor. Thomas and Bob followed her.
She ran down the hall the way she'd come, following a trail of dusty footprints and scraps of gritty linen. She flung open the stairwell doors and took the steps two at a time. The mummy spoor led her up to the ground floor and out to the plaza. As she ran out of the building, the mummies were climbing into the Cadillac.
"No!" she cried, running towards the car. A picture of the parking brake popped into her head, followed by an image of the streets around the Egyptian Building and the exit onto the interstate. In her mind, I-95 whooshed up and down the eastern seaboard.
Ananka put the Cadillac into gear and backed onto Marshall. She shifted into drive and took off.
"Head them off," called Bob. He pointed to a narrow path that led from the back of the plaza out to Broad Street.
The three of them ran between chest high box hedges, old brick walls, and the Nursing Education Building. They ran out onto the sidewalk, colliding with Dirk and Kevin, who were limping up the hill, holding their bathrobes closed, slippers in shreds. The mummies ran a red light and zoomed across Broad. Ananka took a hard left, tires screaming, and accelerated towards the exit ramp. Loosened bandages streamed out behind them. Ananka raised a hand as the Cadillac swung around the tight curve in the direction of the rising sun, then vanished from view.