Author's Note: Sorry it seems to always take so long to update this - I haven't written it in ages (I had the first eleven chapters saved on my computer from last November, when I went on a bit of a writing frenzy) and therefore often forget it exists. Which, really, is a shame, as I do have a lot of fun with it and I absolutely adore writing Evy. I've also been inspired to start writing again by Buffelyn's fabulous new story, The Professor and the Madwoman, which is just great on a million different levels.
So . . . yes. Hopefully, you'll be seeing more of this more frequently.
I thought that I had been scared before.
One certainly couldn't blame me - I'd just come across a man whose eyes appeared to have been gouged out, and somehow I doubted that he had done the handiwork himself in some twisted reenactment of Oedipus the King.
But as I studied Mr. Burns in horror, a slight movement seemed to occur from behind me. Shaking in terror, I turned.
Oh. My. God.
"Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!"
There, not three feet away from me, stood our dear friend the mummy.
Only, despite his three-thousand year demise, he appeared to be very much alive.
Without Jonathan's help.
But with, I noticed, a new pair of eyes.
"Ohhhh," I mumbled, horrified, as I inched against the wall. The mummy took a few steps toward me, and I shivered in disgust.
He was completely rotted, colored a sickening shade of brown - a crude and grotesque parody of what a man was supposed to look like.
"Ohhhh," I muttered again. My tone high with horrorstricken desperation, I weakly asked Mr. Burns, "Please....help me."
"My tongue," responded Mr. Burns miserably in slurred speech completely devoid of enunciation, "He took my tongue..."
The destroyed man began to crawl backwards slowly, and I immediately regretted every less-than-glowing thought I'd ever had about the poor Americans. That petty rivalry seemed so utterly foolish now that we were in danger.
To put it lightly.
"Please don't leave me," I requested desperately as Burns continued to crawl down the passageway.
The mummy was so close to me now that I'd gone faint from his putrid stench, that I could feel evil radiating from his decomposed form.
Rotten lips contorting repulsively, he uttered one word.
"Anck-su-namun."
O'Connell, I thought desperately, If you save me now, I will never be the slightest bit annoyed by you again...I will love you until the day I die...just HELP!
The foul creature continued to speak, and I translated his words in my chaos-ridden mind.
"Come with me my princess Anck-su-namun."
Oh dear...oh dear...who for the love of God was Anck-su-namun, and why did he think I was her?
Well, one thing was for certain, I wasn't going anywhere with him.
O'Connell!! I wailed mentally.
And suddenly there he was, suddenly beside me. My eyes drank in the sight of him hungrily, and I wanted nothing more than to throw my arms around him and profess my undying gratitude.
However, I sensed that this was not the time or place.
"There you are!" he cried, looking both relieved and annoyed. "There's no time to play hide and seek! Come on! Let's get outta here-"
His eyes fell upon the mummy, and he fell silent for a millisecond before a surprised shout escaped his lips.
"Whoa!!"
I heard Jonathan's voice yelling out my name faintly, and hoped that he wouldn't come over here. If there was one thing my dear older brother couldn't handle, it was a resurrected mummy.
The mummy seemed to size us up for a moment before letting out a loud, furious roar. It rang through the air, numbing my eardrums and causing me to shudder involuntarily as his repugnant breath blasted at us.
O'Connell was ready with a retort at once.
"Aaaaahhhhh!!!!!!!" he mimicked before firing the elephant gun and causing bits of the creature to go flying through the air.
"MOVE!" O'Connell ordered, grabbing my hand and dragging me through the tunnels with a speed so rapid that it could only be caused by sheer panic.
I could hear the mummy roaring furiously from where we'd left him, and I resisted the urge to either let out a scream of frustration or burst into tears. Both were equally appealing, and I had to put them out of my mind in order not to perform them.
Relief immediately washed through me as we flew out of the temple and outside. I took a few deep, hungry breaths of fresh air before realizing that the black-clad warriors that had invaded the camp had returned.
One of the men, a rather attractive one with long black hair and dark eyes that sparkled angrily, began to speak.
"I told you to leave this place or die! You refused," he proclaimed, then added morbidly, "Now you may have killed us all."
He let his words sink in for a moment, and they lingered in the air with merciless resolve.
"You have unleashed the creature that we have feared for over three thousand years!"
Oh dear.
I feared that had been my doing.
"Relax," O'Connell instructed casually. "I got 'im."
"No mortal weapon can kill this creature!" the man proclaimed, intensity building in his voice. "He is not of this world!"
As if in a sickening sort of example of the monster's handiwork, Burns was dragged over by two other men in black. A weak, pained whimper escaped his lips.
"You bastards!" Daniels sneered, aghast, as he studied his friend in horror.
"What did you do to him!?!" Henderson demanded violently.
"We saved him!" the man shot back. "Saved him before the creature could finish his work!"
I didn't even want to imagine what 'finishing his work' would be.
"Now leave, all of you," the man instructed, "before he finishes us all!"
The man paused, contemplating. "Now we must go on the hunt and try to find a way to kill him, before he consumes the Earth!"
"I told you," O'Connell growled, annoyed, "I already got him."
The man froze, studying O'Connell in what seemed to be bitter disbelief.
"Know this," he said, his words cutting through the silent air like a knife. "This creature is the bringer of death. He will never eat. He will never sleep. He will never stop."
A moment of silence hung amongst us as we stared in horror at the mysterious man in black.
Finally, breaking the quiet, O'Connell said weakly, "Evelyn, I told you not to mess with the book."
~*~
It really is quite remarkable how quickly humans can accomplish something when driven by fear. Within little more than a quarter of an hour, the entire camp was packed up and being loaded onto the camels.
I slipped past O'Connell, who was calling out orders in an immensely comforting 'I've seen it all before and I've got this under control' sort of manner. Biting my lip in nervousness, I neared Mr. Burns. He'd been left alone temporarily as the Americans hurried to load their luggage on the assorted camels and horses, and a soft, continuous moan escaped his mouth.
I stood before him for a moment, then sunk down onto the dry sand. I waited for a moment for him to acknowledge my presence before realizing that he could no longer see me.
A biting sting seemed to pierce my heart at this.
This was my fault.
All my fault.
"Mr. Burns," I whispered, resting my hand gently upon his own.
An indistinct mumbling that sounded vaguely like 'Who's there?' escaped his lips, and I felt tears collect in my eyes. Determined, I blinked them back. There was no time for crying.
"Mr. Burns, it's Evelyn...Evelyn Carnahan."
His hand trembled under mine, and upon studying the poor man I realized that his whole body was trembling in shock.
"O'Connell's girl?" he asked weakly, words horribly slurred and distorted.
Normally, I would have gone off like a bomb, shrieking out numerous reasons why I was not 'O'Connell's girl' and had no intention of ever being 'owned' by a man.
But everything had changed now, and I knew that I had to as well.
With a gentle smile that he couldn't see, I replied, "Yes. O'Connell's girl."
Mr. Burns let out another unintelligible murmur that I deciphered more quickly than the others. The more I heard him speak, the more I understood him - I'd always been rather quick at such things.
"He's going to kill me," Mr. Burns said weakly. "He's going to kill us all, all of us who opened that chest."
And whose fault is it that he's back in the first place, Evelyn? a wicked voice inside my head sneered.
"He won't kill you," I assured the American, wrapping one arm awkwardly around his broad shoulders and squeezing him in a quick half-hug. "It will be all right, I promise. I'll fix this."
But in all truth, I doubted I would. Even the greatest of heroes probably couldn't defeat such a monster, much less a mousy librarian with a dreadful temper and complete lack of coordination in any way, shape, or form.
I'd done idiotic, disastrous things before. My incident in the library only weeks ago (had it been weeks? It seemed lifetimes) had proved that quite well. But never had I thought myself to be a bringer of purely accidental world destruction.
That had seemed a bit out of my league.
I suppose I'd acted with sheer idiotic frivolousness - something I'd always considered Jonathan to possess and myself to be completely devoid of. I'd been so foolishly confident, so sure that nothing could come of reading a few pages. (But perhaps it would urge the Bembridge scholars to finally accept my application.)
Now the Bembridge scholars seemed galaxies away, and I couldn't bring myself to care about them one bit.
Well, whatever was going to happen, I knew one thing was for certain.
As O'Connell had proclaimed, confidence never failed to turn on you and bite you right in the....
Never mind.