Author's Note: Okay - couldn't sleep last night, so decided to put the finishing touches on the chapters I had been working on. Hopefully, this instalment will pacify those of you who think I am cruel and sadistic.
There is still quite a way to go in the tale, but after this update, I am definitely doing some work on my thesis, so these three chapters will have to suffice for a couple of weeks. Unless I get through my work very quickly...
Anyhow, read, enjoy, review!

Chapter Seven: Last Year's Bitter Loving

When consciousness returned, it was slow and painful.

Evelyn prised one eye open and then shut it again. Her head pounded, as though someone had taken a hammer to her brain itself and then replaced the skull. One side of her face felt swollen and bruised and her stomach heaved ominously. She lay quite still, vaguely aware of her predicament and equally vaguely grateful that she was not tied up. That in itself was a moot point: she was barely capable of movement as it was. She rolled onto her side, drawing her knees towards her chest and groaned piteously. Fragments of what had happened starting to surface from the confused fog of thoughts.

Evelyn forced herself to open her eyes again, but in the gloom she could make out very little. What she was aware of most was the smell - a noxious combination of motor-oil, kerosene and dirt. Another wave of nausea hit her and she gulped down lungfuls of the fetid air in an effort to maintain control.

There was a sound, something familiar that she couldn't quite place at first. Creaking. Like rope against wood and then beyond that the call of voices in the distance. It reminded of...
A barge. She was on a barge. Moored along one of the less salubrious parts of the river, she surmised. Evelyn felt rather pleased with her deductions, but her sense of triumph was short lived.

The nausea and the pounding in her head had receded to bearable levels, so she ventured to sit up. Her cabin was small and one look at the heavy wooden door told her that it was locked. The single window was covered with a heavy grille - rendering the cabin both sombre and virtually airless.

There was, she realised, no way out.

Time, we like to tell ourselves, is a fixed, understandable component of our universe. Under extreme conditions, however, it becomes fluid and incalculable. Said conditions accurately describe Evelyn's predicament, and time had become an unknown quantity. If it was day or night, if she had been there for days or only hours, she did not know.
There was time enough for her drug-induced stupor to have worn off, so that she was hungry, thirsty and exceedingly irritable by the time the door to her cabin finally opened.

The man who entered was carrying a tray - she stared at him, not truly believing what she was seeing.

David Barton smiled shyly in return.
Evelyn watched him warily, unconsciously drawing herself into a ball.

'I thought you might be hungry,' he remarked.

'Well, that was considerate of you.' Her mouth and throat were painfully dry, giving her words a rasping edge.

'I don't want to fight with you, Evelyn.'

'Oh no, of course not. That would be terribly uncivilised. Almost as bad as sending some huge goon after a girl and knocking her unconscious.'

'Yes, I'm sorry about that,' he said, placing the tray on a low table near the bed. 'Some of these fellows get a little carried away, I'm afraid. Here.'
He poured water out of a pitcher and the glass out to her. Evelyn eyed it suspiciously.

'Do you really expect to me to just drink that?'

'It's water, that's all. It will make you feel better.'

What would make her feel better, she was certain, was emptying the pitcher over his head - possibly even hitting him with it - and yelling at him very loudly. The more rational side of her warned her that this course of action was fruitless. And Evelyn prided herself on being a rational person. She accepted the glass and drank down the contents, barely able to suppress a sigh of satisfaction as the liquid cooled her parched throat. Once she was feeling slightly more human, Evelyn placed the glass on the table and sat forward, her feet firmly on the floor, her hands clasped primly in her lap.

'Now, David, listen to me.' It was her most calming, reasonable tone of voice. The one Jonathan called her most annoying, schoolteacher voice. 'I don't pretend to know what it is you think you are doing, but you should really let me go. No good can come of this.'

'Do remember when we were at Oxford, Evelyn?'

She blinked.

'Do you remember all the plans we had, all of the discoveries we were going to make?'

'That was a long time ago, David. You-'

'It wasn't that long ago.' His green eyes glittered menacingly. 'I remember all of it. I had tried to forget, and it almost worked. But then I heard that you were in Egypt and I realised that it was fate. The time was right, you see.'
He wasn't really talking to her, she thought. He was talking at her: his eyes were fixed intently on her face, but he wasn't really seeing her. She remembered the earnest young undergraduate she had known and compared that memory with this man. The difference made her feel sick. Or had that madness always been there and she hadn't noticed at the time?
But mad or not, just who did he think he was?

'David, if you had wanted to talk to me, all you had to do was say to me "I want to talk to you." Simple. There is no need for any of this.'

'Would you have come, if I had asked? I don't think so. Besides, I doubt very much that your,' he sneered over the word, 'fiancé would have allowed it. Anyway, there was no time to start coaxing you.' He waved his hand dismissively, as though this matter had now been dealt with beyond what was absolutely necessary. 'I've made some amazing discoveries, Evelyn. Really it's...' He gazed up at the ceiling, searching for the words. 'It's immense. World-changing. You have no idea of the power... And I want you to share it with me. You'll be a part of it - I knew that it was meant to be like that when I saw you again. I had planned it a little - before then, but when we were on the balcony...' he was close to her now, his hand stretching out to caress her cheek. Evelyn recoiled, slapping his hand away.

'David, I have no idea what you're talking about,' she snapped irritably.

'Oh, you will.'

She could feel the anger starting to bubble up. Her head was still aching miserably and she was in no mood for playing games or humouring a madman's evasiveness.

'This is ridiculous. I am not going tolerate this for another second.' Evelyn stood up, brushing past him to get to the door. He caught hold of her arm, wrenching it painfully behind her back and threw her across the room. She tried vainly to catch the bedpost but missed and landed on the floor. The breath was knocked out of her and she lay quite still for a moment, struggling for air.

'Don't do that, Evelyn. You're not going to get off this barge. I'll come back when you're in a more civilised frame of mind.' He started towards the door and then looked back over his shoulder, watching as she pulled herself on to the bed.

'If you ever touch me like that again, I swear to God-'

'Don't be stupid, Evelyn. There isn't anything you can do to me, so I'd try to behave it I were you. I don't particularly want to drug you or hurt you, but I will if I have to.'

'Your threats don't mean much. I've been kidnapped by-' she stopped herself hastily. 'Well, by people a lot more powerful and frightening than you.' It didn't have quite the same dramatic effect as 'an immortal mummy', but Evelyn felt that her point was made. She had helped put Imhotep back into his grave; David Barton held no fear for her. Besides, there was always Rick.
She shook the hair out of her eyes defiantly. 'Rick will find me. And I really wouldn't like to see what he'll do to you when he does. You should just let me go while you're actually still breathing.' She had a brief, satisfying vision of Rick bursting into the cabin and beating Barton to a pulp.

He gave her a tight, sinister little smile, his eyes glittering. 'Oh,' he said softly, 'I don't think that Mr O'Connell will be giving us much trouble. Or your brother, for that matter.'

'What does that mean?'

'They met with an accident.'

It was the strangest sensation. As though all of her muscles had simply stopped working and the oxygen had suddenly left her lungs. She tried to speak, but her face felt numb - it seemed an age before she could finally form the words.

'What sort of accident?'

'A fatal one. My condolences on your loss.'