Chapter two
I followed Gwen as she hurriedly walked in front of me, in a few minutes we were standing in front of an open doorway to a small house.
I saw Harry Camp, my chief archeologist and two members of his staff peering inside, there was some sort of bizarre looking creature lying lifeless about twenty feet in front of the door.
"What going on?" I asked.
"Look," Harry said as he moved out of the way.
I grabbed the flashlight out of his hand and looked through the door, I swept the flashlight around the dark room until I saw something unusual.
It was a spinning moving mass of fine loops of silver wire, it was hovering about three feet above the floor, the wires moved in an almost hypnotic way, slowly morphing into different shapes.
I focused on one wire and saw that it stretched and moved to many different lengths and to many different positions, then shrunk to nothingness only to be replaced by another wire.
"Is it art?" I asked Harry.
"Read the stele underneath it."
I looked underneath the writhing mass of wires and saw a small stone column that had hieroglyphs painted onto it.
I read the hieroglyphs.
A puzzle for you Imhotep, you who love numbers and geometry, as you once told me these tools solve all problems.
"There's music too," Gwen blurted out.
I shushed everyone and listened, I heard what sounded like a random string of notes being played mechanically on a flute, the tune paused for a second, then I heard two quick notes that had a musical quality to them then another pause and it started all over again.
"There's more writing on the back of the stele," Harry said.
I walked around to the other side of the stele to read the hieroglyphs.
The trap has been tripped now Imhotep, thirty days should be enough to solve it, of course if you don't there are always consequences.
"What consequences?" I murmured to myself.
"I honestly don't get this puzzle, just that it's looks really complicated," Harry said.
"Does anyone have any ideas?" I asked.
"Um... I know someone who is good at puzzles," Gwen said hesitantly.
"Who?"
"Professor Willow... from the university."
Gwen had been taking courses at one of the universities in Seattle, the city where her mentor Shelley was from.
"How good?"
"He worked at some super secret place during a really awful war, decrypting codes and stuff... Retchley something."
"Bletchley Park?" Harry said.
"Ya, that's it."
Gwen was like me it a way, I had come from a different time, she had come from a different place. The both of us were continually astonished by the marvels and the horrors of the modern world.
"Can he keep a secret?" I asked.
"Oh ya... someone found a picture of him on the internet at this Bletchley place, he said it was his twin brother Raul, we all started laughing but he just got mad and demanded to know where the picture came from."
"Geez... World War two was almost seventy years ago, how old is this guy?" Harry asked.
"He ain't young... but he still has his marbles."
"Send for him, the sooner we solve this the better... I don't want to find out what these consequences are," I said.
Gwen and I headed back towards our quarters leaving Harry and his assistants to do more investigating. I told them to be extra careful and not to disturb anything.
"Imhotep never tripped the trap I guess," Gwen said.
"Yes... very curious... I guess she must have expected him to enter her quarters."
"Why would she set a trap for him?"
"I don't know... hatred... maybe a bizarre sense of humor."
"Her quarters look very old."
"Imhotep lived here forty six hundred years ago, so it's probably from that time... he must have known about the trap somehow... had her quarters sealed."
It was all very puzzling, I had found Imhotep's tomb a few months ago, I knew that he and Semiramis had had some kind of enmity. I also knew that Imhotep had originally been smitten with Semiramis, she had been a breath-taking beauty in her time, and she had used his infatuation in order to manipulate him.
I guess he finally grew up, I thought to myself, stopped believing in a fantasy, beauty was the least important of a woman's charms, something most men eventually figured out.