Rick and Dragovitch attempted to clamber up the rocks and rubble to the shaft opening, but the vaulted ceiling made it all but impossible to reach the hole. They couldn't even make it close.
"Son of a bitch."
"Well, this is fun." Hallet drawled. "Should we draw straws now to see who we eat first or should we just wait and see who runs the slowest?"
"Not the time." Jonathan said shortly.
"Yes, Mother." The kid said. "Are you going to cut off my pocket money?"
Jonathan ignored him, knowing by now that a lot of his sarcasm was to cover up anxiety, and he tried not to see himself in that.
In the light cast by the torches, he saw the expression on his nephew's face. Alex looked shocked. All the situations he and the family had been caught in during his life, supernatural or not, there had always been a way out. An escape. There was more of a possibility to escape when people were shooting at you then being entombed alive.
His insides twisted. Entombed alive. Unbidden, visions of Imhotep intruded in his brain.
"This is bad." Alex whispered.
"C'mon, partner." Jonathan nudged his nephew's arm. "Remember Rule 1?"
After a moment of thought, Alex's expression eased a little.
"The hell's Rule 1?" Hallet groused.
"There's always a hidden door." Alex said.
"There's always a hidden door." Jonathan agreed, looking around. Finally his gaze settled on Hallet, and the kid actually started to look a little nervous as his gaze didn't waver. An edge of an idea crept through his mind as Andy glanced at Alex, wordlessly appealing for help against his uncle that had clearly finally gone insane.
The idea finally crystalised, and Jonathan reached out to pluck the pack of cigarettes from Hallet's jacket. Smoke hanging from his lips, Jonathan struck a match and lit up, puffing.
"Oi!"
Jonathan walked back to the back wall and after a moment of confusion, Sigrun's eyes cleared with sudden understanding.
Mouth full of smoke, he slowly breathed out a thin stream at the wall, eyeing it up carefully to see where the smoke was curling off to. He casually strolled from one end of the wall to the other, puffing and exhaling.
"Uncle Jon-"
There was a grunt as Rick jumped down from the rock he was perched on, before going to paw through the supplies they had. "Shh."
"But-"
Jonathan coughed, but drew in another lungful of smoke. This time as he breathed out, the white smoke swirled around the section of wall-
-before it was sucked through to the other side.
"Here!" He shouted, fingers searching for some sort of ledge or seam in the stonework. "We've got a door!"
"Move." Jonathan stepped out of the way moments before his brother-in-law slammed one of their folding shovels into the gap in the stone, wiggling it furiously.
"Hold on, that wall has been in place since 400BC." Kurt sounded horrified.
"Yeah, well, I've made it this far without being buried alive, I'd like to keep up that streak." Rick grumbled, forcing open the panel in the wall. From the other side, Dragovitch jammed his jimmy bar into the wall and the two men slowly levered the block from the wall. Jonathan stepped out of the way just as the stone fell forward, sending a flurry of dirt into the air.
"Rule 1." Alex said triumphantly.
Sigrun shone her flashlight through the hole, and Jonathan saw a narrow staircase arching away into darkness.
"It's a priest hole."
"What?" Rick asked, and Jonathan rolled his eyes. Surely there was no way he hadn't heard of those before, the man lived with Evy, for heaven's sake.
"Secret rooms so a holy man can disappear if they need to." Alex said. "At home, they're normally rooms or secret chapels, but some are connected to passages so they could get around the reformers and sneak about unseen."
"Oh, fantastic. I always wanted a priest to be able to able to sneak about unseen." Rick murmured sarcastically. Jonathan swallowed an inappropriate giggle.
He waved his hand in a sweeping motion grinning sheepishly at Sigrun.
"Ladies first?"
Out of everything he had done over the course of his life for the first time Jonathan was genuinely worried that with each step it was entirely possible he would break his neck as he attempted to navigate the steep, narrow and crumbling stairs in semi-darkness. Boots slapped down into a decent amount of water and Jonathan looked up nervously, hoping that the Red Sea wasn't about to come down on top of their heads.
He squeezed past a partly collapsed doorframe, and shone his flashlight into the room beyond-
-and almost jumped back to collide against Rick as the rows of skulls grinned at him from their nooks in the walls. Even his brother-in-law gave a sharp inhale as he saw what was beyond. He felt himself tense as he walked past grinning skulls, intimately aware of how easily those skeletons could leap into life and commit mass homicide.
"We're in a crypt," There was entirely way too much of Evy's ghoulish fascination in Alex's voice. "We must be surrounded by the royalty and knights of Aksum." He bent down to examine the inscriptions. "This is brilliant."
"Be better if we could find a damn door." Rick murmured.
"Well, logically they had to get them in here from somewhere." Jonathan said.
Kurt walked cautiously into the centre of the room. There was a stone table in the centre of the room, a withered skeleton laid out like the priests had been disturbed in the middle of preparing someone for burial and had simply… never come back. His friend hadn't spoken a word, and Jonathan approached, hoping Kurt wasn't about to fall back into his darkness.
"Old boy?"
The big fellow was bent over the skeleton, before reeling back slightly.
"Kurt?"
"Behold Hermes Trismegistus, Last Wanderer of the Land of the Gods." His voice was vaguely shocked as he read the inscription in the stone. A surprising smile crept across his face. "We're here."
"We're where?"
"Punt. We're in the Port of Punt. Queen Hatshepsut sailed here. Egyptian traders have been sailing here since 25BC. We are walking through the pages of history." He gripped Sigrun's arm, his eyes bright, and she smiled back at her friend's enthusiasm.
Jonathan really needed to get his friend together with his sister. The two of them could nerd out together.
"Looks real impressive." Rick grumbled. Jonathan elbowed him in the ribs.
"I'm here." After the initial burst of excitement, Kurt's voice took on a note of melancholy wonder. "I made it."
Jonathan gripped his shoulder, and Kurt shot him a small smile. He turned back to the corpse, running a finger idly over the stone. "'What you are, so once were we. What we are, so you shall be'." He quoted.
"You're in a melancholy mood." Sigrun said.
"I have been dragged clear across the world, madam. My sanity is hanging by a mere thread."
She blinked. "Is that supposed to be different than how you usually are?"
"Ha." Jonathan said. "Wait, Hermes Trismegistus? Hasn't he, well, already been found? Found dead, that is."
Though he had seen so many things come back from the dead over the course of his life he didn't know why he was surprised anymore.
"Also, if Hermes here was the last traveller of Punt, well, why's he here in a church dating to the Aksum Kingdom? There's a bit of a gap between the dates."
The three of them stared back down at the corpse. If this fellow was he last survivor of Punt, according to the accepted dating, he was hundreds of years old when he died and Punt transitioned into the Aksumite Kingdom. If Jonathan had a quid for every time he'd run into some immortal bastard, he'd have three pounds. All right, it was the same chap the first two times, but it was still odd that it had happened three times.
"If this is the Hermes guy, isn't he supposed to have the Tablet?" Hallet asked into the darkness, breaking them out of their reverie. Jonathan looked at Kurt and shrugged. The dead fellow did indeed look like he was gripping a book under his shroud, and after a deep sigh Kurt touched it, the material crumbling away. He mumbled something that sounded vaguely like I'm never going to work again.
Jonathan swallowed down the mounting excitement as Sigrun directed the beam of her torch at the corpse. He was gripping something book-shaped.
But it wasn't a book.
Jonathan, Sigrun and Kurt lent forward, staring at the stone tablet the skeletal fingers were gripping.
"Well, that was anticlimactic." He would be lying if he said he wasn't vaguely disappointed. He supposed he had been conditioned to find the fabulous treasure at the end of the insane adventure, and felt vaguely ripped-off as a result.
"Shush." Sigrun said.
Kurt's eyebrows were knotted. "It's not here."
Sigrun's face didn't flicker. "There's something wrong here."
Jonathan scoffed. "There's a dead man in a church. I'd say this is the most normal we've been for a while."
She shot him a dirty look. "No, Jonathan, look at his hands."
He frowned. "What?"
"Just look."
And he did, looking for whatever tiny detail that the doctor had noticed. He could have just asked her what it was, of course, but that would have just ruined the game. Jonathan's eyes narrowed and after a moment he grinned.
"You see it?"
"I see it."
Because on closer inspection the skeleton's fingers weren't actually gripping the tablet. They were curled up and had definitely been gripping something at some stage. Now he was looking for it Jonathan could see that the clawed hands were resting on the top of the stone and there were a couple of snapped fingers from where someone had broken rigor mortis to take whatever the chap had originally been placed in the crypt with.
"Who would have thought it." He murmured.
A shout went up from the far end of the room, and the three of them looked over to see that the team muscle had broken through another wall. Alex turned to them. "We've got more stairs." He said, eyes alight. "And these ones go up."
The field was empty bar for his flock. The goatherd sat under a nearby tree, watching his flock amble about and eat as he chewed idly on a mouthful of gum. There were worse jobs in the world, the goatherd mused, scratching his back on the tree bark before settling back down.
The next moment some kids that had been grouped around an especially-green looking circle of grass immediately jumped back and scattered in all directions. Surprised, the goatherd jumped to his feet. The circle of grass seemed to balloon. Once. Twice.
And then the ground broke open.
The goatherd jumped back, scrabbling backwards for the old rifle that still lay under the tree. With shaking hands he raised it to his shoulder as he saw a hand emerge from the ground.
"Who's there?" He demanded in a shaking voice. "I am armed!"
Though if this was the same as the old stories, would it matter if he was armed?
There was a muffled sound from underground. Voices? More of the ground broke away, leaving a hole in the middle of the field. The goatherd crept closer.
"Don't shoot!" Two hands emerged from the hole, raised in an exaggerated kindly don't kill me way.
"Who are you?" The goatherd demanded.
"Ah, that's a funny story, old boy." The voice said. "How much time do you have?"
"Dear God, this day. I swear, this last bloody month has been the longest century of my life."
"The longest of your life so far." Alex corrected primly.
Jonathan shot his nephew two fingers and the kid grinned. Rick plopped a glass of something almost black on the table, and Jonathan's nose wrinkled.
"Is that sump oil?"
"What's it matter? It'll knock you on your ass either way."
Jonathan didn't doubt that in the slightest. He liked to think that he knew his alcohols, but Rick O'Connell had spent his childhood knocking around the back streets of Cairo before joining the Foreign Legion. The bloke probably knew how to squeeze booze out of a stone. Still squinting at the glass doubtfully, he picked up the drink. Hell, you only lived once. He hoped. Jonathan raised his glass in a toast.
"Here's to friends and family that know us well, but like us just the same!"
"To those that've seen us at our best and our worst and can't tell the difference." Rick replied, and the two of them clinked glasses before throwing their heads back.
It was like a smack in the face. Jonathan screwed his nose up, grimacing at the taste. "Talk about poison all around. Christ, did you just mix all Dragovitch's dregs together in a bucket?"
"I'm not giving up my secrets."
"What a waste of time." Kurt was staring moodily down at the tabletop. "What an absolute monumental fucking waste of time." The chap's massive hands were gripped hard together in front of him. "It wasn't there. We were in Punt's port. It should have been there."
Sigrun sat down heavily at the table, her rubbings and notebook in front of her. "We'll find it."
"Dear Doctor Magnusson, I thought you didn't believe in magic." Jonathan teased.
"I don't." She said shortly. "But something was taken from the body. The Mossad is after something. Something tangible. Something real."
Rick just looked at Jonathan. "Why do we even let you out of the house anymore?"
"Because I'll chew up the furniture otherwise?"
Sigrun tapped her fountain pen against the notepad. The poor pen looked more well-travelled than Jonathan was and probably needed to be put out of its misery. "Where would someone go to fence a stolen artefact that could potentially hold legendary wisdom?" She said it with the guise of someone who already knew the answer. Rick kicked Jonathan under the table.
"I think that one's for you."
"Well, you could always pop down to the local pub to drum up interest. Publicans are generally the best for knowing what's about around town." He spun his glass around. "But especially if it looked like a book of some kind, you'd go to a museum or a university or-"
Jonathan swore.
Oh, bugger me.
"A library." Sigrun finished.