‘Let’s hope so.’
‘Ishmael!’ Penny looked at me, shocked. ‘That’s an awful thing to say.’
‘If she isn’t,’ I said steadily, ‘then the odds are she’s dead. Because she should have heard us by now and she hasn’t called out for help.’
I opened the door and strode into George’s study, with Penny all but treading on my heels. Marjorie was sitting behind George’s desk. There wasn’t a mark on her, and her eyes were closed. She could almost have been sleeping. I closed the door, to make sure we wouldn’t be interrupted, and then moved behind the desk to check Marjorie’s vital signs. Just in case. I looked back at Penny and shook my head.
‘Damn!’ said Penny. ‘I was just starting to like her. Did she die the same way as Nicholas and Caroline?’
‘Looks like it,’ I said. ‘But don’t ask me how.’
‘So she wasn’t the killer,’ said Penny. ‘Maybe what she said about George was true, after all.’
‘Probably,’ I said kindly.
‘But why bring her here to kill her? It’s not much of a hiding place.’
‘The killer doesn’t seem to care where we find his kills,’ I said. I took a quick look around the study. ‘Nothing has been moved since I was last here. So presumably the killer wasn’t interested in George’s work, nor the security aspects. This was just the first room the killer came to where he could kill Marjorie without being heard by the others.’
‘So he had no interest in interrogating her?’ said Penny. ‘He only ever wanted to kill her?’
‘Bait in a trap,’ I said. ‘To lure us here.’
‘Whoever it is, they must be really strong,’ said Penny. ‘Marjorie wouldn’t have gone quietly. She’d have fought like hell.’
I suddenly looked round at the closed door. ‘The footsteps are coming down the corridor towards us.’
Penny moved beside me and we stood together facing the door. The alarm in my head shrieked desperately, like a wounded animal trying to warn the rest of its pack. Something bad was coming. And something deep inside me told me I knew what it was, if I would only remember …
The footsteps grew steadily louder as they approached the door, and Penny’s head came up as she heard them too. They sounded soft and oddly muffled, and something in the way the killer walked jarred painfully against my sensibilities. People weren’t supposed to walk like that. The footsteps finally came to a halt on the other side of the door. I waited, but nothing happened. My muscles ached with the strain of standing so still. Penny clutched at my arm.
‘What’s he doing out there?’ she murmured.
‘Standing still,’ I said quietly. ‘I can hear him breathing. I think … he’s listening to us listening to him.’
I was tempted to yank open the door and strike down whoever was out there with all my strength. Kill the killer, so we could all be safe. And so I’d never have to feel this way again. Because he scared me, for reasons I couldn’t understand … But I couldn’t kill him while I still had questions only he could answer.
Penny must have seen something in my face. ‘What’s wrong, Ishmael? You can take him.’
‘Can I?’ I said, not looking away from the closed door. ‘How can I be sure when I don’t know what’s out there? I have no idea what it is, or what it wants.’
‘It?’ said Penny.
‘It doesn’t walk like a man,’ I said.
‘At least we can be sure it’s not the mummy,’ said Penny.
I managed a small smile. ‘There is that, yes. Go stand by the far wall, Penny. I think I’m going to need room to manoeuvre in order to handle this.’
I waited till Penny had retreated the whole distance of the room, then took a deep breath and hauled open the door. I grabbed the arm of the man waiting outside and jerked him inside. It was Professor Rose. I threw him to the floor and slammed the door shut. Rose hit the floor hard, but in a moment was up on his feet again facing me. He didn’t stand like a man: he crouched like an animal at bay, or a predator poised to strike. His balance was wrong, as though something inside him had broken or shifted. I was between him and the only exit, but he didn’t even glance at the door. Or at Penny, or the dead woman sitting behind the desk. He didn’t care about them. He only had eyes for me.
Professor Rose smiled slowly. A vicious, dangerous strangely triumphant smile. I gave him my best cold stare, and he met my gaze unflinchingly with unblinking eyes. The smile stretched his mouth unnaturally, till I was surprised it didn’t split his cheeks. It must have been painful, but he didn’t seem to care. I looked him over carefully. I’d given him up for dead so many times it was almost a shock to see him alive. All those theories I’d come up with, and now it was him! It didn’t make sense … Except Rose knew all there was to know about the story of Cleopatra’s gem, so who better to find and take it? He didn’t look like a thief or a killer. He just looked … wrong. Not the quiet unassuming historian who’d jousted with me over our respective scholarly reputations. The figure before me was like something out of a nightmare. Spiritually twisted and distorted, trembling with barely suppressed energies …
Ready to fight or run, or do something awful. Just because he could.
‘You’re not wearing any shoes,’ I said. With so much strangeness in the room, it was a relief to concentrate on something I did understand. Something that finally made sense. ‘You’ve been walking around in your socks. That’s why your footsteps sounded so soft and muffled! Especially on the carpeted floor upstairs. All to make us think the mummy was up and about. But even so, how did you freak those people out so completely?’
Rose didn’t answer. He just crouched before me, staring at me, smiling his inhuman smile.
‘It was the way you walked,’ I said. ‘The stance was wrong and the rhythms, and the way you carried your weight … Enough to affect everyone on a subconscious level, even if they didn’t know why. How much of this was planned, Professor? Wanting to sound like a mummy to confuse the issue … yes, I get that but how much was down to the fact that you just couldn’t walk like a man any more? What have you done to yourself?’
‘Don’t you know?’ said Rose. His voice was harsh and the inflections were all wrong. He didn’t sound like Rose at all.
‘I know you’re the killer,’ I said. ‘I know you took something out of the mummy. But why? What’s this all about?’
‘It’s a matter of death and life,’ said Rose. ‘You should know that.’
‘I really don’t,’ I said. ‘None of this makes any sense.’
Rose cocked his head slightly to one side, as if to see me more clearly. ‘Then let me make things clear to you.’
He went for me, surging forward impossibly fast. His outstretched hands reached for my throat, the fingers curved into claws. I grabbed hold of his wrists with both hands and brought him to a sudden halt. His wrists felt hard as iron, hot as coals, as though he was burning up from the inside. I held him off, but only just. He threw all his strength against me, and it took all my more than human strength to stop him. No wonder the others died so easily; they wouldn’t have stood a chance against something like this. No one would. Rose pressed forward inch by inch, straining so hard his whole body trembled.
I fell back, trying to catch him off balance and throw him to one side, but he matched my every move. We staggered back and forth across the study, crashing against the furniture and trampling over the wreckage. We surged this way and that, our eyes locked on each other. Rose’s smile never wavered. He fought to get to me, and I fought to hold him off. And nothing else mattered.
Penny had the good sense to stay out of the way, pressed up against the far wall. She knew there was nothing she could do to help.
Rose pushed forward despite everything I could do. I didn’t dare let go of his wrists to hit him. And I wasn’t sure I could hurt him, anyway. His whole body shuddered with the effort of what he was doing, and his wrists were so hot they almost burned my hands. Rose was calling on all his resources, burning h
imself up just to get to me. As though it didn’t matter to him whether he lived or died.
The alarm screamed in my head like a dying thing.
And then Rose’s hands leapt forward, and I didn’t have enough strength left to stop him. But he didn’t go for my throat. Instead, his hands fastened on to both sides of my head. I cried in pain at the terrible pressure, as his hands closed like a vice. Rose stared unblinkingly into my eyes, his smile so wide now it was a wonder the skin didn’t split open to reveal the teeth beneath. We stood face to face, both of us flushed and panting from our exertions. I tightened my grip on his wrists and felt the bones crack and break, but Rose didn’t flinch and his grip on my head didn’t weaken.
A sudden glow blazed in Rose’s eyes, and strange energies leapt out to hit me full in the face. It was like staring into the sun, a force so terrible it was capable of burning me up in a moment. But I wouldn’t look away. And then it was like standing before a black hole, a weird inhuman vortex sucking everything into itself. And suddenly I understood, Rose wanted my life energies so he could feast on them … Except I wouldn’t let them go. I clamped down hard, clinging on to my life with everything I had. Rose cried out in frustration, the terrible light in his eyes snapped off, and all the strength went out of him. He collapsed bonelessly, falling to his knees, only held up by my grip on his wrists.
There was another presence in the room now. Something wild and powerful, invisible and utterly inhuman. Like a ghost gone bad, or a god brought low. It hung on the air, seething and crackling, and then shot off through the doorway and was gone. I could feel it howling down the corridor in search of new prey. I slowly opened my hands, letting go of Professor Rose’s wrists. He fell to the floor, and didn’t move.
I was trembling all over. I had looked death in the eye and defied it. And felt tired, so tired. Penny came forward tentatively, and then stopped as she saw the look on my face.
‘Did you see that?’ I asked harshly.
‘See what, Ishmael?’
‘Didn’t you feel it?’
‘Feel what? I don’t understand, Ishmael. What just happened here? And what’s wrong with Professor Rose?’
She really didn’t know what I was talking about. She hadn’t been able to see or sense the terrible thing that had hidden inside Rose, like the gem in the mummy. I reached out to Penny, still trembling, and she took me in her arms and held me tightly. After a while I let go of her, and she immediately let go of me. She knew I could only bear to be weak for so long. I looked down at Rose, curled up in a ball on the floor, barely breathing. I knelt down beside him and checked his pulse. It was weak and thready, growing fainter by the moment. Penny knelt down, looking worriedly at me rather than the professor.
‘What’s wrong with him, Ishmael?’
‘He’s dying,’ I said. ‘He’s all used up.’
‘Isn’t there anything you can do to help him?’
‘No. He’s been emptied out, from inside.’
Rose slowly opened his eyes to look at me. And when he spoke, forcing the words out with one last effort, he sounded like himself again.
‘It wasn’t me. None of it was me.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘Something got inside me. The ka …’
He stopped breathing. His whole body fell in upon itself, shaking and shuddering, withering away until he resembled nothing so much as the mummy he’d studied for so long. The thing inside him had used up all his energies to fuel its fight with me. I started to get to my feet, and almost collapsed. I was trembling again, from the narrowness of my escape. Penny had to help me up.
‘Why did the professor want to kill you?’ she asked quietly.
‘It was more than that.’ I fought to keep my voice calm. ‘Something inside him tried to suck the life out of me.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Like a vampire?’
‘Something like that, I suppose.’ I had to be careful what I said. Penny had good reason to be terrified of vampires. ‘Whatever it was, it couldn’t take my life the way it did with Nicholas, Caroline and Marjorie. Because they were human, while I … have other resources. If I hadn’t beaten this thing, it would have left Rose and got inside me. Walked around the house in my body, doing awful things with my strength.’
‘So Rose was the killer all along?’ said Penny.
‘People died because of him,’ I said carefully. ‘He sucked the life out of Nicholas and Caroline and Marjorie – that’s why there wasn’t a mark on them to show how they died. He got to them because they never saw the professor as a threat. But George … I still don’t understand what happened to George. That was a completely different kind of death. Whatever had got inside Rose was strong enough to have beaten George that badly, but why would it want to?’
‘Because George stole the mummy and had it brought here?’
‘No. I think it wanted to come here. Remember the dreams that led the locals to uncover Cleopatra’s tomb? Something dreamed those dreams for them.’
‘Rose said there was something inside him,’ said Penny. ‘That something got in …’
‘It’s not here any more,’ I said. ‘I felt it leave.’
‘But what is it? What’s going on, Ishmael? Talk to me!’
I looked round the office, found two chairs and stood them up, and gestured for Penny to sit down facing me. She did so, reluctantly, and I did my best to sound calm and reasonable while I talked of impossible things.
‘It all goes back to Ancient Egypt,’ I said. ‘The story Professor Rose told us of an amazing magical gem that fell from the heavens.’
‘You don’t believe in magical gems,’ said Penny.
‘No, I don’t. But I have good reason to believe that strange and powerful things sometimes fall from the skies.’
‘You think the gem was something alien?’
‘Some kind of misunderstood alien tech,’ I said. ‘Or possibly something alive … Cleopatra used it to suck the life out of her enemies to make herself strong. That’s why the people around her took it away from her. Because they knew what a danger it was to all of them. Without the gem to keep her going, Cleopatra died. And they hid the thing inside her mummified body and sealed them both in the tomb forever. They even wiped the first Cleopatra’s name from history, so no one would look for her or the thing inside her. And there the gem stayed for more than two thousand years. Dreaming in the dark, waiting for a chance to live again …
‘Rose must have found a more complete version of the story, that told him where to look. Or perhaps the gem called to him. Either way, he opened up the mummy and took the thing for himself. Perhaps because he just couldn’t stand the thought of someone like George having it. And then the gem took him … Rose’s last word was “ka”. We talked about that earlier. The Ancient Egyptian idea of a soul that could exist separately from its body. Which was sometimes so strong it could overpower a weaker soul and force it out. Rose found the gem, and it woke up. And it woke up hungry.’
‘The gem, or something in it, possessed Rose?’ said Penny.
‘It took control of him, and then ate him up from the inside. Sent him creeping round the house to make itself stronger by stealing the life energies from others. That’s why Rose disappeared. So he could prey on his victims one at a time, because he wasn’t strong enough to take on the whole group.’
‘When do you think all this started?’ said Penny. ‘When was Rose first possessed? How long has something else been living in his body, watching us through his eyes and getting ready to make its first move?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s possible we never met the real Professor Rose until just now.’
‘So everything that’s happened in this house is the result of an ancient curse, after all?’ said Penny.
‘It’s starting to look that way,’ I said. ‘But why does this thing need to take so many lives? Why not just hide inside someone until it can figure out a way to get home again?’
‘It’s planning somethi
ng,’ said Penny.
‘Seems likely,’ I said. I rose to my feet and Penny got up to face me. ‘Come on. We need to get back to the others. Because this isn’t over yet.’
EIGHT
Questions and Answers
I started for the door and then stopped, as I realized Penny was making no move to follow me. She stood beside the desk, looking at Marjorie sitting slumped in her chair. I could see Penny was troubled, but I didn’t understand why. She’d seen worse, in cases we’d handled before. In our line of work, bad situations come with the territory. Penny suddenly turned to look at me. And just like that, I wanted to look away. Because I knew what questions she was going to ask, and the only answers I had weren’t going to make her feel any better.
‘She looks so peaceful,’ said Penny. ‘But Marjorie wasn’t just killed, she had the life torn out of her to feed something alien. Talk to me, Ishmael. I need to understand this.’
‘Ask me anything,’ I said. Because she was my partner, and I could only protect her from the things she allowed me to.
‘The alien hiding inside Professor Rose sucked out Marjorie’s life energies,’ said Penny. ‘But did it also eat her soul?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘It feeds on the energies, that’s all. It takes control of a body by pushing that body’s ka to one side, but the original person is still in there. Remember how Professor Rose spoke to us at the end? Once the possessor left Rose’s body, he was himself again.’
Penny nodded slowly, accepting what I had to say; for the moment. For which I was grateful. I wasn’t lying, as far as I knew. My explanation made sense, it fitted all the facts … But did I believe it because I wanted it to be true? Because the alternative was simply too horrifying to bear? Not just an energy vampire, but an eater of souls …
Who seemed to know me. Who hated me, because of someone I didn’t even remember being.
‘Do we have to leave Marjorie’s body here?’ Penny said finally. ‘And the professor’s?’
‘We’ve already been through this,’ I said patiently. ‘With Nicholas and Caroline. What good would it do to move them? They’re beyond our help. The bodies will be safe and secure here, and that’s all we can do for them right now.’