It was late into the night when the sickening sound of raspy cackling began to emerge from the office of Rafik Mrad, an unassuming professor of antiquities who had recently joined the museum's staff. Inside the office, the shriveled and emaciated form of Jarha the Mad was sitting placidly in front of a bronze scrying bowl filled with water and serpent's blood and an incense burner packed with the smoldering remains of vulture feathers. A maw full of pointed teeth stood as flat as a brick, while an unearthly crimson glow seeped out of the creature's otherwise empty eye sockets. The creature's bony hands clutched the skull of a jackal bearing ancient heka written in the blood of a man.
Secure in the mystical wards the mummy had cast around himself, he cast his senses across the void of space. The sensations of the office blurred away, giving way to a rushing out, away from the darkened city of Cairo, past ancient spires and domes, past the dens of vice the wealthy were wasting their nights in, past the ragged tenements of the city's poor, into the desert of the nomadic tribes, his senses flying across the dunes until he found what he was looking for. Soon enough, the creature finally sensed what it was searching for.Nestled amid the ever shifting dunes, Jarha's projected senses were inflamed by the stench of dead flesh and dried bile. Far off into the distance, he could hear horses and those accursed devices called guns.
The ancient immortal's detached consciousness banished distractions for a moment, and concentrated on the scent of dead flesh. Dead lips miles away spoke the tainted heka, projecting a dark magic across the length of space. Soon the mummy's animating life force, an abomidable form of energy that mocked the natural order simply by existing, was being siphoned into the physical world, fed to something that lay just beneath the sands, something not unlike Jarha himself. Had anyone been watching that particular dune, they would have seen a light draining black fog manifesting. The last thing Jarha's senses picked up before he returned his senses to his body was the rumbling of many starving predatory stomaches snarling. When the undying mummy returned to consciousness, it could not help but crack a barbed smile.
Confidant that his key would be protected for the night, Jarha the Mad put his ritual tools away, well out of sight of any overly curious "colleagues" from the museum. He rose to his feet and grabbed his leopard claw talisman to become Rafik Mrad. In the fiend's mind, the persona of Rafik Mrad seemed to be neccesary annoyance. But soon enough, the mummy thought to himself, there would be no need for Rafik Mrad, no need for deceptions, no need for anything save for the truth about creation itself. That there might be dire consquences to his quest for the ultimate truth was the last thing on the lunatic's mind. He did after all have a key to acquire before anything could be unearthed. In the back of his mind, the creature using the alias of Rafik Mrad knew that were he to fail, his masters would punish his poor judgment with nothing short of total oblivion.
As Professor Mrad left the museum in high spirits, he was completely oblivious to a set of European eyes that followed him out of the museum. It was only through deliberate effort that the European could stay hidden in the streets of Cairo, but the man would not be so easily defeated. Never straying far from the crowds that assembled even by night in the street, Renfield still managed to keep sight of his quarry. Renfield followed this man Rafik Mrad like a trained hunting hound at the behest of his master, knowing that the price of failure was destruction at the hands of his own master.