They were inside a dark room underneath the City of the Dead. The musty scent of sand and 3000 years of stone untouched and crumbling with age made Fallon sneeze. Only the early afternoon sunlight shone through the hole they excavated as an entrance.
"Can you imagine that we're standing in a room that no one has been in for more than 3000 years?" Evy asked, her voice echoing in the large room.
"Well, yeah, I can imagine it. 'Cuz guess what we're doing?" Kelly said, rolling her eyes. She could make out only shapes in the darkness. There was no real knowing of which room they were in exactly.
Evy was holding a small rolled up tool kit that Kelly recognized Rick holding earlier when she was talking to him.
"I'd bet everything we're in the mummification room!'' Fallon said excitedly. "It's certainly big enough by what I can tell."
Evy went over to where a large round mirror sat and caught the reflection of the sun from above, which transferred it to the other mirrors in the room. The room lit up immediately and low and behold they were standing in the mummification room.
"Nice find, Evy," Adam said, patting her on the back.
"So what all went on in here?" Rick asked.
"Oh no," Kelly and Adam moaned.
"Well, they would take the body-" Fallon and Evy began, then they would go off into rants about mummification describing different things at different times, making Rick and the Warden confused.
"What about you guys answer that later," Rick interrupted them loudly. "Let's look for that book."
"And look for bugs. I hate bugs!" The Warden declared.
"Well, wait! We can spend some time here in the mummification room! I'm sure there's plenty of things that we can find here," Fallon exclaimed.
"I'm sure there's some wonderful things in here, Fal, but-" Adam began to reason with his sister.
"We should get going to find the base of Anubis if we're going to find the book before those Americans find it before us and decide to claim it for themselves," Rick finished, lighting an ancient torch he took from the wall with a lighter.
Fallon turned red. Though the book was a priority to the group right now, it wasn't her top one. What if her parents had studied this room? There could be clues that they left behind. "Well, I'll stay here and excavate. You all go on ahead. I'll be fine."
"Well...suit yourself," Jonathon nodded and began to head off to a darkened path.
Kelly stepped forward and caught Jonathon's shoulder. "We shouldn't break up, anything could be down here." Rick and Kelly locked eyes with each other. "I don't feel comfortable leaving you here alone. Besides...if the Americans come across this room you'll be all by yourself. Let's just go find what we need to find, and we'll come back and excavate this room on our way back."
Fallon clenched her teeth and nodded. They lit a couple more torches and headed out into the nearest darkened pathway. Kelly put an arm across Fallon's shoulders to comfort her.
They ventured out of the mummification room and into some dark passages to Fallon's quiet protestations. . They kept going until they heard a loud scuttling that rang through the entire passageway. They looked around hastily and could see nothing that could make that sound.
"What was that sound?" Fallon asked.
"Sounds like…bugs," Rick said.
"He said bugs!" Evy hissed back at everyone. The Warden jumped, looking for any sign of them and gasping utterances of detestation for bugs. Fallon shivered.
"Ew," Kelly murmured to herself. She had caught up to Adam and held tightly onto his arm as they continued through the passage.
They came to an opening where they found a long and large pair of black legs standing before them on a square podium. The legs of Anubis.
"These are the legs of Anubis. There has to be a secret compartment in here somewhere," Evy said. They heard muffled voices all of a sudden, echoing through the room.
They all huddled together quietly around the legs of Anubis, Rick handed Adam and Kelly a gun and they inched towards the corner of the podium, sure that was where the voices were coming from. They waited until they popped around the other side only to find Beni, the Americans, their Egyptologist fellow, and many of their workers pointing guns at them and holding up pick-axes.
Henderson sighed in relief, not lowering his gun. "You scared the bejeezes out of us, O'Connell."
"Likewise." Rick didn't lower his gun either.
"Well, it was nice to see you all again but we really should get to work. So if you'll be on your way then," Fallon said finally with a voice of authority.
"Push off, this is our dig site," the Egyptologist said rudely.
"I beg to differ," Adam fought back.
"Our dig site!" Everyone yelled at the same time, holding their guns more tightly in their hands. Beni held his gun up to Fallon, and her mouth dropped open. Burns and Kelly turned their guns to Beni. Henderson moved Burns' arm towards Kelly and Kelly swiped another gun from it's holder around Rick's waist and pointed it at Burns.
"Well, O'Connell, there's only seven of you and fifteen of me. Those odds don't look so good for you," Beni said.
Rick and Kelly clicked their guns. Kelly said, "We've had worse."
"Yeah, me too," Jonathon said. Everyone in their group glared at him.
"Now, now, children, if we're going to be playing with each other we must learn to share," Evy said, lowering Rick's arm. "There are other places to dig."
They managed to find stairways leading underneath the level where the legs of Anubis rested. Evy was clever enough to maneuver the group to a room right underneath the statue. "According to these hieroglyphics, we should be right underneath the statue. We'll come up right between his legs," Evy said. They had made their way down deeper into the city until Evy could find the right hieroglyphs on the ceiling telling her if they were underneath the statue of Anubis.
They were standing on ancient podiums that held broken jackals as they tore at the ceiling with crow barbs, streams of sand falling onto them.
"And when those Yankees go to sleep we'll dig our way up and take it right out from under them," Jonathon said. He turned to Rick and Kelly. "No offense."
"None taken," they both said at the same time.
Fallon chuckled as she stood by. There wasn't enough room for her to stand on the podiums to help dig.
"If those beastly Americans haven't beaten us to it. No offense," Evy added.
"None taken," Kelly and Rick repeated.
"Speaking of beastly, where's our stinky little friend, the Warden?" Jonathon asked.
He had wandered off somewhere. Nobody really cared. He was a nuisance and they didn't really want him around anyway.
Fallon turned her head to make a notion for looking for him, but really she was examining the room they were in. It was vast with walls covered in hieroglyphs that led to other passageways and dark corners. She wondered what this room technically was, if it was even a room. She strolled over to one of the walls and examined some of the ancient etchings. They covered nearly the entirety of the wall, all of them facing left. That meant they were read from right to left.
'Un-na aa en pet sesu-na seb erpat neteru artit-f era (Be opened to me the doors of heaven, may unbolt for me Sab the chief of the gods his two jaws for me...)' (reference 1). It was a blessing to pass on after death. Fallon moved to continue reading the message, straying just a little further from the torchlight, but it was still light enough for her to read. 'Un-f maa-a setentet tunu-f ret-a qerfi serut en Anpu masti-a thesu er-a (May he open my two eyes blinded, may he make to stretch out my feet which are fastened together, may make strong Anubis my legs to rise up for myself)' (reference 2). Fallon had grabbed out a lighter that Rick had thrown to her to make more torches in order to continue reading the hieroglyphs. She looked to where the others were, but realized she had strayed a little too far from their excavation, she could only here the sound of crowbars against sand and stone and their murmurings. She should get back before they realized that she wasn't there, but she wanted to finish reading the inscription on the wall.
Fallon knelt down to finish reading the last bits of hieroglyphs at the bottom of the wall. She touched the chiseled engravings, wiping away some sandy dust, but noticed something was off. Her hands fell upon a stain, brown or it could have been a deep red, as her eyes strained in the low light. It was separated into four long, skinny stains that looked like a...
Fallon gasped and collapsed backwards to crawl away from it. It was an old bloody hand stain.
As her hands fell onto the sand, she heard a crinkling and some clanking. Eyeing the bloody hand stain on the wall warily, she brushed some sand away from where her hand had landed and felt the softness of leather and the crinkled texture of paper. Tearing her eyes away from the wall she saw a brown leather roll with a buckle and a piece of yellowed paper with ink scrawled on it. Her breath caught in her throat. Gently taking the piece of paper from the sand, she only read the first few words "Dear Father and Mother, Adam and I will miss you while you are gone..." for her fears to be true. Her hands shook as she read the rest of the letter, and when she finished she grabbed at the rolled leather sack. If the letter wasn't proof enough, the initials ERC in cursive sewn onto the leather was enough to make her know for sure. Elliott Randall Carnahan was her father's name. He used to share the toolkit with Mother. Unbuckling the toolkit she found that all of the tools were still inside. She slowly rolled it back up and clutched it to her chest as a tear rolled down her cheek. She still shook and her heartbeat was pounding in her chest. Her mind was racing.
"Fallon?! Thank God we found you!" A voice came from a light in the darkness.
Fallon screamed and jumped where she sat, but was relieved when she saw Kelly and Adam behind the light of the torch.
"Jesus, what is it?!" Adam exclaimed. When he saw what she was clutching, he raised an inquiring, but worried, eyebrow. Fallon only lifted a finger to the bottom of the wall. Fallon could see the blood drain from Adam's face. Kelly only looked at it, her face straight. She tried not to let it phase her even though she knew that this was something that she would never be able to unsee, and Fallon would never forget or drop when they had time to talk tonight. Rational, Kelly kept thinking to herself, just remain calm and rational. She held out a hand to Fallon who reluctantly took it, her eyes still on the wall.
"Give all of that to Adam, he'll put it in his jacket. We need to show you something," Kelly said calmly to Fallon.
In the room where Fallon had strayed from a sarcophagus rested on the ground with Rick, Evy, and Jonathon surrounding it and examining it. Fallon stopped in her tracks. Where had it come from. She looked up and saw a giant rectangular shaped hole in the ceiling above the sarcophagus.
"Why...?" Fallon muttered. Her thoughts were racing a million miles a minute. She couldn't concentrate on a single thing with the discovery she had made of her parents' toolkit, the hand print on the wall, the letter, and now this. "At the base of Anubis," was all she could say.
"He must have been someone of great importance…or he did something very naughty," Evy explained. They took Evy's toolkit that Rick gave to her and dusted off the sand off the lid, coming across some hieroglyphs. "'He that must not be named.'"
"That's not common to find something like that," Fallon speculated, her voice barely a whisper. There was a feeling in her gut that just didn't feel right. "We shouldn't have found this."
Rick blew some more sand off of an odd shaped ridge in the lid. A scarab was carved into the middle of it. "This looks like some sort of lock."
"Yeah, well, whoever was in there sure wasn't getting out anytime soon," Adam said, trying to lighten the mood.
"Yeah, it'll take a month to crack this thing open without a key," Rick speculated.
"A key," Evy said suddenly.
"What?" Jonathon asked. Evy ran straight over to her bag.
"A key, a key, that's what the man on the boat, the one with the hook was talking about, a key," Evy rambled on. She held the puzzle box opened and she stuck it into the oddly shaped hole in the sarcophagus.
As soon as Fallon saw it fit perfectly, something in her snapped, and she bolted forward. It's mustn't be turned!
They heard mangled screaming coming from a man down a separate passageway. They all abandoned their spots and ran to the passage way only to see the Warden holding his head and running past them, not noticing them at all and running into the wall at the end of the hall, dead.
"What happened?" Fallon asked, frightened.
Thank you all for reading! This chapter required a lot of revisions and additions and a little bit of research. The Ancient Egyptian in this chapter was pulled from the actual Egyptian Book of the Dead, the transliteration and translation by E.A. Wallis Budge. I thought it was appropriate considering it talks about Anubis. My references are at the end of this little note. Please favorite, follow, and review, let me know what you think. There aren't any reviews so far and I would love to know if there's anything that I can improve on :) Thank you!
Reference 1: Budge, E. A. Wallis. The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Papyus of Ani. New York: Dover, 1967. Print. Page 88
Reference 2: Budge, E. A. Wallis. The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Papyus of Ani. New York: Dover, 1967. Print. Page 89