A/N: Hey all you guys! Sorry, this is a long chapter...I keep trying to
tell them how to get home, but they just keep going off the other way and
getting into more trouble! Silly buggers...
Imhotep's Lover: You star! I cant believe you are always the first to review! You have a very special place in the little chambered muscle straining away in my thoracic cavity. [Get away from her you BITCH! She's my reviewer!] I have no idea what you mean about talking to myself though...
nefertirioc: Glad my poor attempts at humour continue to tickle you in places other toothbrushes find it hard to reach. I might well go and read that fic you recommended- if I can ever find it based on your vague description...!
Marybug6otnile: words just don't cut it when it comes to describing my appreciation towards you...all your sound advice, such ancient wisdom from such a tender youth... *blinks back threat of tears* and Viscount Carmen Vermicelli di Angelo, aka Sid the Sicilian Cameleon, has finally been located and is now safely installed in my sock drawer (cheers for the tip- but my house is a bloody mess!!) He is currently a dingy greyish colour with little fluffy bobbles on, having skilfully camouflaged himself against my tennis socks.
EvelynC.O: don't worry about the review that didn't come up- its there now, and that's what counts. Yay! I got my target number of reviews! Ta very much.
*************************************
Chapter 7
*************************************
Jonathan, lying face down on the dusty floor of the underground cellar with his poor, punctured white bottom sticking up in the air in a most undignified manner, had started to snore.
Stephen prodded him gently with his brown leather brogue.
"Hey, sleepy head-" there was no response so he kicked him a little harder. "Oi! Get your sorry arse up or we're gonna make an interesting spectacle at a double hanging!"
Jonathan snorted, mumbled something about fish finger sandwiches, and went back to snoring. A little silken thread of drool glistened in the early morning sunlight filtering through the broken cellar cover.
Stephen looked around for something to throw over him, and his eye landed on a large barrel standing in the corner. He went over to it, ripped the lid off, and the strong, pungently acrid aroma that immediately rushed up into his nostrils made him reel back in shock.
"Cor blimey!" he muttered, wiping tears from the corners of his eyes. Waving his hand over the mouth of the barrel in a vain attempt to disperse the fumes, he looked down at its contents; some sort of fermenting, fruity pulp. The solid organic matter had sunk to the bottom, leaving a clear, dark liquid on the top.
Stephen wrapped his huge muscled arms around the barrel in a bear hug, rocked it up onto its edge and hefted it across the floor. He rested it next to Jonathan's unconscious form, placing it just the right distance away to lower the rim down above his head.
"Heh heh heh, you always did love a drink Johnny," he cackled as he let the weight of the barrel tip itself over, spilling a torrent of gleaming red fig wine onto Jonathan's gently snoring head.
The effect was instantaneous, and not good.
"AAAAAaaaaaargh! Ack!" Jonathan screeched, waking with a violent start, spluttering and gargling on the potently alcoholic juice.
"It burns! It burns!" he wailed, getting to his knees and mashing his fists into his eye sockets, trying to rid them of the stinging fluid streaming down his hair and onto his face.
"Don't be daft, its only-"
"Aaaaargh! It feels like acid! Get it off me! Get it of meeeeeeee!!!" jumping to his feet and waving his arms out beside him, as if suddenly under some sort of delusion that he possessed the ability to fly. Trying to shake the liquid from his drenched head and shoulders he started shuffling and pirouetting about, not particularly gracefully at that. He was only able to take tiny waddling steps, his feet being fettered by the trousers still lying around his ankles. He seemed to have forgotten that fact for the moment.
Suddenly, with a Laurel-and-Hardy-like comical clumsiness, his feet became tangled, his knees gave way and his upper body pitched forward, arms pin wheeling uselessly. Then his screwed shut eyes flew open in an overly exaggerated look of shock as he landed face down on the floor- again.
Thankfully there were no bottles or broken glass directly beneath him.
"Ow," he said faintly with the little breath left in his lungs.
"Jon, you should do kid's birthday parties!" Stephen croaked out between fits of raucous laughter, completely forgetting his earlier warning about the need to avoid noise.
"Shut up or sod off," Jonathan said sternly, getting his breath, and his sense of pride, back with a sobering effort.
"Fine, I'll just leave you to sort your own mess out, shall I?"
"Anything would be better than this humiliation..." Jonathan muttered into the dusty floor, bracing his palms against it to push himself up. With a long, painstaking effort- push-ups were Stephen's forte, not his- he managed to get himself into some sort of unseemly squat, careful not to hurt his bare, mutilated backside.
With a look of forced composure he grabbed his trousers by the belt loops and yanked them back up into place. He even managed not to wince- too much.
Evidently the wine in his eyes wasn't causing him as much irritation as he had made out. He licked his lips, which were stained bright fuscia like a strumpet's rouge, and looked presently surprised at the taste of the partially fermented juice on them.
"Hmmm," he mused with the self important air of a connoisseur, "the bouquet leaves a little to be desired, but it will be a full bodied little number when it's matured."
"Yes, you like 'em full bodied, don't you Johnny boy?" Stephen replied with a saucy wink, thinking of the lovely Zeelah with her generously proportioned assets, who Jonathan had earlier claimed his undying love for.
Jonathan flashed him a mischievously debonair look that said 'you're not wrong there my friend!' before clapping his hands and rubbing them together with renewed purpose.
"Right, let's get out of here." He said briskly.
"By the stairs?" Stephen enquired, pointing to the more conventional way back up to the street.
"And end up right back were we started? I think not!"
"Ok smarty pants, what exactly do you suggest we do?" Stephen asked in a patronising tone, as if he were talking to a particularly bossy five year old.
"I say we see what's behind door number two." Jonathan hoiked a thumb in the direction of the inner door, leading to god knew what on the other side.
Stephen closed his eyes and slowly brought a palm up to cover them in a look of despair and disbelief.
"Johnny, that's called breaking and entering!"
"No, technically we've already broken the door, now we're just entering," Jonathan said with a smug grin.
"I knew you'd have some clever dick answer. You're such a-"
"Alright, you'll have all the time in the world to insult my good name later," Jonathan interrupted, "how about we just concentrate on saving our hides first, huh?" He had another one of those annoyingly prim expressions on his face, that in his present state he really didn't have the dignity to carry off.
"Look," Stephen tried to reason, "it's past dawn now, everyone will be waking up soon. I don't know about you, but I don't fancy bumping in to any more of the locals," he emphasised this last word, making a stabbing gesture with his fist clenched around an imaginary machete.
"Well we'd better get our skates on then, before the whole bloody city realises what we're up to."
"Whatever. Just remember that I was the voice of reason here." Stephen said self righteously.
"Just like my dear baby sister. You two would make a lovely couple, if you didn't nag each other to death!" Jonathan teased, aiming a playful thump at Stephen's arm.
His cheeks coloured a little at the mention of Evelyn, who Jonathan knew perfectly well he had a bit of a crush on. If he hadn't felt slightly sorry for all the pain Jonathan had endured that night, Stephen would have decked him then and there. Instead he just rolled his eyes in a 'here we go again' expression, and followed Jonathan towards the door, like an obedient Labrador following his master into a minefield.
Jonathan tiptoed over to the high, crumbling step, stealthily crept up onto it, and tried the door handle.
"Well bugger me........." he whispered.
"What? What's wrong now?!" Stephen hissed back.
"It's open." Jonathan chuckled at his friend's rapidly fraying nerves as he gently creaked the door open, and peeked out.
The darkness on the other side was complete. Not even the glow of a gas lamp or the wan light of day spilling in through a shuttered window. All they could make out from the meagre illumination afforded by the beam of sun falling through the hole into the cellar behind them, were walls. Two cracked and rough plastered walls framing a narrow corridor.
"Come on Stevie," Jonathan enjoined, just before he slipped past the threshold and into the unknown interior of the building.
"You're crazy."
And then Stephen stepped into the hallway behind him.
************************************
Blackness... less like a shade of night than an entity. A breathing thing like a blackened lung, oppressive with it's weight and thickness, saturating, clogging and malignant. It binds, holds and squeezes like a vice upon the heart... the breath begins to rasp in the throat, the blood rushing in the ears...
Aisha began to thrash more wildly in her narrow, rickety bed, the thread bare sheets twisting between her frantically kicking legs. She let a tiny moan escape her as she looked on the nightmare unfolding before her sleeping eyes...
...at the edge of the dark, out of the shroud of creeping fog, angular and alien things lurking in the gloom at the limits of consciousness... their spikey limbs assembling into the skeletons of huge mechanical spiders, a tangled mass of brightly painted spokes and wheels... bristling cogs like row upon row of serrated teeth gleaming malevolently in the dark. The darkness teems with demonic eyes that grow bigger and bigger until everything is filled with them, held within them, and the night is nothing more than a glistening black forest of eyes... unblinking, unpitying...closer, closer... jagged maws gaping wide...
"Ab! An najada!" she cried out, jolting awake to the peaceful, early morning silence of her own room. She blinked at the light, a painful contrast to the all pervading darkness of her nightmare, which was already beginning to recede at the insistence of another awareness. The pressure of her bladder.
Aisha slowly swung her feet around to the side of the bed, lowered them to the floor where her slippers awaited her, and unsteadily levered herself up. Her long white nightgown fell in loose folds to the floor, here and there the translucency of the material interrupted by a patched tear. She went to the chair and retrieved her shawl, throwing it around her slim shoulders, and clasped the ends tightly to her breast.
Then she tiptoed to the door and slowly pulled it open, not wanting to wake her father with the rude screech of rusty hinges.
***********************************
Jonathan and Stephen had come to a short staircase at the end of the hall, leading up to another door. Light filtered to them from the crack beneath it, but having listened with his ear pressed against it for a good few minutes, Jonathan had decided it was safe to proceed.
Now they were standing in a small, well equipped kitchen. Jonathan's eyes lit up at the sight of a bowl filled with dates, figs and pomegranates standing in the middle of the counter.
"Jeez, I'm famished, aren't you Stevie?" he said hungrily, reaching out towards them and trying to keep his tongue in his head.
"Don't even think about it."
"But couldn't we just.....?" he persisted.
"NO!"
"Alright EVY, don't have an aneurysm." Jonathan huffed, smiling slightly at having carried out his threat.
Stephen made a rude hand gesture.
"Shut up and let's just get outta here!" he hissed through clenched teeth. Stephen was on absolute tenterhooks, at any minute expecting to be caught sneaking around and face yet more Arabic wrath.
"Fine. Maybe Evy will cook me breakfast when I get home."
"If she doesn't kill you, you mean?"
"Oh, I'm sure I can find some way of smoothing her over. After all, I am her favourite older brother!" Jonathan said cheerfully, confident in his ability to appeal to his sister's soft nature.
"Thank god she's only got the one." Stephen said in a tone dripping with sarcasm.
Leaving the kitchen undisturbed, they made their way out into another hallway. At the end of it they could see a heavy wooden door, leading to the outside world.
"See Stephen- our salvation is within sight."
**************************************
Aisha came to the top of the stairs, grasped the rail and lowered one foot to descend. She halted it in mid air at the sound of voices coming from the kitchen.
"Maaza qult?" she gasped, not recognising their speech. As she stood frozen at the top of the stairs, the door to the kitchen opened, and two strange men walked out into the hallway.
**************************************
A/N: I know this is a really mean way to end the chapter, but if I go into the next bit now then it will be far too long! Don't kill me, I can make it up to you!
Translation of Arabic;
Ab! An najada!- Father! Help me!
Maaza qult?- What was that?
And something I forgot to explain in a previous chapter;
Man hunaak?- Who's there?
Anyway, if anyone wants to pick me up on my Arabic, please do. I only got it from a phrase book, and I don't object to corrections, if they are sensible.
Imhotep's Lover: You star! I cant believe you are always the first to review! You have a very special place in the little chambered muscle straining away in my thoracic cavity. [Get away from her you BITCH! She's my reviewer!] I have no idea what you mean about talking to myself though...
nefertirioc: Glad my poor attempts at humour continue to tickle you in places other toothbrushes find it hard to reach. I might well go and read that fic you recommended- if I can ever find it based on your vague description...!
Marybug6otnile: words just don't cut it when it comes to describing my appreciation towards you...all your sound advice, such ancient wisdom from such a tender youth... *blinks back threat of tears* and Viscount Carmen Vermicelli di Angelo, aka Sid the Sicilian Cameleon, has finally been located and is now safely installed in my sock drawer (cheers for the tip- but my house is a bloody mess!!) He is currently a dingy greyish colour with little fluffy bobbles on, having skilfully camouflaged himself against my tennis socks.
EvelynC.O: don't worry about the review that didn't come up- its there now, and that's what counts. Yay! I got my target number of reviews! Ta very much.
*************************************
Chapter 7
*************************************
Jonathan, lying face down on the dusty floor of the underground cellar with his poor, punctured white bottom sticking up in the air in a most undignified manner, had started to snore.
Stephen prodded him gently with his brown leather brogue.
"Hey, sleepy head-" there was no response so he kicked him a little harder. "Oi! Get your sorry arse up or we're gonna make an interesting spectacle at a double hanging!"
Jonathan snorted, mumbled something about fish finger sandwiches, and went back to snoring. A little silken thread of drool glistened in the early morning sunlight filtering through the broken cellar cover.
Stephen looked around for something to throw over him, and his eye landed on a large barrel standing in the corner. He went over to it, ripped the lid off, and the strong, pungently acrid aroma that immediately rushed up into his nostrils made him reel back in shock.
"Cor blimey!" he muttered, wiping tears from the corners of his eyes. Waving his hand over the mouth of the barrel in a vain attempt to disperse the fumes, he looked down at its contents; some sort of fermenting, fruity pulp. The solid organic matter had sunk to the bottom, leaving a clear, dark liquid on the top.
Stephen wrapped his huge muscled arms around the barrel in a bear hug, rocked it up onto its edge and hefted it across the floor. He rested it next to Jonathan's unconscious form, placing it just the right distance away to lower the rim down above his head.
"Heh heh heh, you always did love a drink Johnny," he cackled as he let the weight of the barrel tip itself over, spilling a torrent of gleaming red fig wine onto Jonathan's gently snoring head.
The effect was instantaneous, and not good.
"AAAAAaaaaaargh! Ack!" Jonathan screeched, waking with a violent start, spluttering and gargling on the potently alcoholic juice.
"It burns! It burns!" he wailed, getting to his knees and mashing his fists into his eye sockets, trying to rid them of the stinging fluid streaming down his hair and onto his face.
"Don't be daft, its only-"
"Aaaaargh! It feels like acid! Get it off me! Get it of meeeeeeee!!!" jumping to his feet and waving his arms out beside him, as if suddenly under some sort of delusion that he possessed the ability to fly. Trying to shake the liquid from his drenched head and shoulders he started shuffling and pirouetting about, not particularly gracefully at that. He was only able to take tiny waddling steps, his feet being fettered by the trousers still lying around his ankles. He seemed to have forgotten that fact for the moment.
Suddenly, with a Laurel-and-Hardy-like comical clumsiness, his feet became tangled, his knees gave way and his upper body pitched forward, arms pin wheeling uselessly. Then his screwed shut eyes flew open in an overly exaggerated look of shock as he landed face down on the floor- again.
Thankfully there were no bottles or broken glass directly beneath him.
"Ow," he said faintly with the little breath left in his lungs.
"Jon, you should do kid's birthday parties!" Stephen croaked out between fits of raucous laughter, completely forgetting his earlier warning about the need to avoid noise.
"Shut up or sod off," Jonathan said sternly, getting his breath, and his sense of pride, back with a sobering effort.
"Fine, I'll just leave you to sort your own mess out, shall I?"
"Anything would be better than this humiliation..." Jonathan muttered into the dusty floor, bracing his palms against it to push himself up. With a long, painstaking effort- push-ups were Stephen's forte, not his- he managed to get himself into some sort of unseemly squat, careful not to hurt his bare, mutilated backside.
With a look of forced composure he grabbed his trousers by the belt loops and yanked them back up into place. He even managed not to wince- too much.
Evidently the wine in his eyes wasn't causing him as much irritation as he had made out. He licked his lips, which were stained bright fuscia like a strumpet's rouge, and looked presently surprised at the taste of the partially fermented juice on them.
"Hmmm," he mused with the self important air of a connoisseur, "the bouquet leaves a little to be desired, but it will be a full bodied little number when it's matured."
"Yes, you like 'em full bodied, don't you Johnny boy?" Stephen replied with a saucy wink, thinking of the lovely Zeelah with her generously proportioned assets, who Jonathan had earlier claimed his undying love for.
Jonathan flashed him a mischievously debonair look that said 'you're not wrong there my friend!' before clapping his hands and rubbing them together with renewed purpose.
"Right, let's get out of here." He said briskly.
"By the stairs?" Stephen enquired, pointing to the more conventional way back up to the street.
"And end up right back were we started? I think not!"
"Ok smarty pants, what exactly do you suggest we do?" Stephen asked in a patronising tone, as if he were talking to a particularly bossy five year old.
"I say we see what's behind door number two." Jonathan hoiked a thumb in the direction of the inner door, leading to god knew what on the other side.
Stephen closed his eyes and slowly brought a palm up to cover them in a look of despair and disbelief.
"Johnny, that's called breaking and entering!"
"No, technically we've already broken the door, now we're just entering," Jonathan said with a smug grin.
"I knew you'd have some clever dick answer. You're such a-"
"Alright, you'll have all the time in the world to insult my good name later," Jonathan interrupted, "how about we just concentrate on saving our hides first, huh?" He had another one of those annoyingly prim expressions on his face, that in his present state he really didn't have the dignity to carry off.
"Look," Stephen tried to reason, "it's past dawn now, everyone will be waking up soon. I don't know about you, but I don't fancy bumping in to any more of the locals," he emphasised this last word, making a stabbing gesture with his fist clenched around an imaginary machete.
"Well we'd better get our skates on then, before the whole bloody city realises what we're up to."
"Whatever. Just remember that I was the voice of reason here." Stephen said self righteously.
"Just like my dear baby sister. You two would make a lovely couple, if you didn't nag each other to death!" Jonathan teased, aiming a playful thump at Stephen's arm.
His cheeks coloured a little at the mention of Evelyn, who Jonathan knew perfectly well he had a bit of a crush on. If he hadn't felt slightly sorry for all the pain Jonathan had endured that night, Stephen would have decked him then and there. Instead he just rolled his eyes in a 'here we go again' expression, and followed Jonathan towards the door, like an obedient Labrador following his master into a minefield.
Jonathan tiptoed over to the high, crumbling step, stealthily crept up onto it, and tried the door handle.
"Well bugger me........." he whispered.
"What? What's wrong now?!" Stephen hissed back.
"It's open." Jonathan chuckled at his friend's rapidly fraying nerves as he gently creaked the door open, and peeked out.
The darkness on the other side was complete. Not even the glow of a gas lamp or the wan light of day spilling in through a shuttered window. All they could make out from the meagre illumination afforded by the beam of sun falling through the hole into the cellar behind them, were walls. Two cracked and rough plastered walls framing a narrow corridor.
"Come on Stevie," Jonathan enjoined, just before he slipped past the threshold and into the unknown interior of the building.
"You're crazy."
And then Stephen stepped into the hallway behind him.
************************************
Blackness... less like a shade of night than an entity. A breathing thing like a blackened lung, oppressive with it's weight and thickness, saturating, clogging and malignant. It binds, holds and squeezes like a vice upon the heart... the breath begins to rasp in the throat, the blood rushing in the ears...
Aisha began to thrash more wildly in her narrow, rickety bed, the thread bare sheets twisting between her frantically kicking legs. She let a tiny moan escape her as she looked on the nightmare unfolding before her sleeping eyes...
...at the edge of the dark, out of the shroud of creeping fog, angular and alien things lurking in the gloom at the limits of consciousness... their spikey limbs assembling into the skeletons of huge mechanical spiders, a tangled mass of brightly painted spokes and wheels... bristling cogs like row upon row of serrated teeth gleaming malevolently in the dark. The darkness teems with demonic eyes that grow bigger and bigger until everything is filled with them, held within them, and the night is nothing more than a glistening black forest of eyes... unblinking, unpitying...closer, closer... jagged maws gaping wide...
"Ab! An najada!" she cried out, jolting awake to the peaceful, early morning silence of her own room. She blinked at the light, a painful contrast to the all pervading darkness of her nightmare, which was already beginning to recede at the insistence of another awareness. The pressure of her bladder.
Aisha slowly swung her feet around to the side of the bed, lowered them to the floor where her slippers awaited her, and unsteadily levered herself up. Her long white nightgown fell in loose folds to the floor, here and there the translucency of the material interrupted by a patched tear. She went to the chair and retrieved her shawl, throwing it around her slim shoulders, and clasped the ends tightly to her breast.
Then she tiptoed to the door and slowly pulled it open, not wanting to wake her father with the rude screech of rusty hinges.
***********************************
Jonathan and Stephen had come to a short staircase at the end of the hall, leading up to another door. Light filtered to them from the crack beneath it, but having listened with his ear pressed against it for a good few minutes, Jonathan had decided it was safe to proceed.
Now they were standing in a small, well equipped kitchen. Jonathan's eyes lit up at the sight of a bowl filled with dates, figs and pomegranates standing in the middle of the counter.
"Jeez, I'm famished, aren't you Stevie?" he said hungrily, reaching out towards them and trying to keep his tongue in his head.
"Don't even think about it."
"But couldn't we just.....?" he persisted.
"NO!"
"Alright EVY, don't have an aneurysm." Jonathan huffed, smiling slightly at having carried out his threat.
Stephen made a rude hand gesture.
"Shut up and let's just get outta here!" he hissed through clenched teeth. Stephen was on absolute tenterhooks, at any minute expecting to be caught sneaking around and face yet more Arabic wrath.
"Fine. Maybe Evy will cook me breakfast when I get home."
"If she doesn't kill you, you mean?"
"Oh, I'm sure I can find some way of smoothing her over. After all, I am her favourite older brother!" Jonathan said cheerfully, confident in his ability to appeal to his sister's soft nature.
"Thank god she's only got the one." Stephen said in a tone dripping with sarcasm.
Leaving the kitchen undisturbed, they made their way out into another hallway. At the end of it they could see a heavy wooden door, leading to the outside world.
"See Stephen- our salvation is within sight."
**************************************
Aisha came to the top of the stairs, grasped the rail and lowered one foot to descend. She halted it in mid air at the sound of voices coming from the kitchen.
"Maaza qult?" she gasped, not recognising their speech. As she stood frozen at the top of the stairs, the door to the kitchen opened, and two strange men walked out into the hallway.
**************************************
A/N: I know this is a really mean way to end the chapter, but if I go into the next bit now then it will be far too long! Don't kill me, I can make it up to you!
Translation of Arabic;
Ab! An najada!- Father! Help me!
Maaza qult?- What was that?
And something I forgot to explain in a previous chapter;
Man hunaak?- Who's there?
Anyway, if anyone wants to pick me up on my Arabic, please do. I only got it from a phrase book, and I don't object to corrections, if they are sensible.