Brimstone Kiss

 

When Lorre/Ugarte stepped through an opening, sweeping the torch aside with a dramatic flare and whoosh of its flame, I was stunned by the huge space revealed.

A right royal mess I've gotten myself into, I thought as I was led into the inner sanctum of a royal tomb.

This was no stone burial chamber, richly appointed but relatively small. This was the Mall of America-Cecil B. DeMille and Donald Trump style-redone in Egyptian Baroque.

I gasped to take in the vast glittering, gilded chamber, the rows of animal-headed figures, more than life-sized statues, alabaster urns, inlaid chests-all guarded by coils of gigantic venomous snakes. The lavish low furniture on carved wooden animal hooves and paws poised as if about to come alive and hunt me down. Almost every inch of space on the towering walls was incised with painted figures and colorful hieroglyphs.

A many-stepped dais at the space's far end was surmounted by leopard-upholstered ebony thrones virtually tattooed with solid gold and lapis lazuli inlay. A pair of huge albino cobras occupied the positions of honor, and anyone could guess who they reminded me of, swaying with their hoods flared. White. Deadly. Christophe. Cocaine. Snow.

Vegas verged on being magical at duplicating world landmarks, but mere reproductions of these treasures would be too priceless even for Vegas. A modern billionaire with close to Pharaonic wealth must have either bought or recreated the priceless past. The real thing, though, wouldn't have survived in such glorious and perfect condition, so I was back to Daddy Gargantuabucks. Of course, being escorted into a nameless billionaire's secret treasure vault didn't augur well for making a return trip out.

Whoever was behind the Karnak had heard enough about me to set the court hyenas on me. When that failed, I'd obliged them by coming to this mountain of basalt and, if I didn't devise an escape plan, probably would soon slip into a sarcophagus as an unsuspected tribute to the royal mummy, like a pre-dynastic servant killed to accompany the ruler-god to the afterlife. But why? What had I done to tick off the Karnak mob? I'd surely find out soon enough.

The floor was wall-to-wall Mediterranean-blue tiles, lapis lazuli with gold flecks.

I felt like I was walking on water. I couldn't help but move farther into this incredible vision. I knew I'd never see its like again, if I lived to see anything again.

Oddly, the lavish setting cheered me up. People who needed such pomp needed witnesses... impressed, awed, cowering witnesses. Disciples.

I sensed the Ugarte CinSim shuffling silently by my side. Our footsteps were muted by the sound of flute and drum, not an American Revolutionary marching band, but a quintet of musicians against one wall, looking as if they'd just stepped off its painted surface.

Their dress was tomb-painting typical: wigs and diaphanous, pleated linen kilts for the bronze-skinned men; high-waisted, long pleated linen gowns with mere bands covering only the nipples of the breasts for the women.

The music was oddly atonal, both jumbled and flat. I recognized harps decorated with semiprecious stones. There were also lyres, drums, rattles, and tambourines.

I could believe that this was an area reserved for elite guests, and then I reconsidered. This area was not for any hotel guests at all, no matter how many millions they gambled.

This fiercely luxuriant death-themed palace was for unwanted guests, like me.

Still I couldn't keep myself from gaping at the riches beyond belief as I moved forward to the processional music, not fretting about retreating or an escape route. Perhaps the swaying white cobras had mesmerized me.

Maybe I thought such civilized surroundings wouldn't be the scene of bloody murder, mine.

Maybe I figured the CinSim was obviously allowed to come and go.

Maybe I just was going to worry about it after I found out what was going on.

Maybe I would take two Darvon and wake up in the morning in my cozy Enchanted Cottage bedroom.

Wait! Maybe I wasn't worrying because my subconscious had noticed that I was surrounded by burnished reflective surfaces, if not outright mirrors, and that my silver familiar had split and morphed into pair of cobra-shaped twining bracelets on my upper arms.

I'd bet my developing silver medium ways against this flood of high-karat gold any day. I'd come within twenty feet of the thrones and paused when the music silenced. So I stopped.

The cobras slunk over the chair backs to guard an inlaid screen that made a wall behind them. Figures stepped out from each side of the screen, bizarre doubles of the ancient Egyptians painted on the walls.

Their beauty amazed me. Both had the profiles of the famed bust of Nefertiti, the queen as sleek as an Egyptian hound in her proud carriage and long, lyrical neck. Both wore the high and wide, flat-topped headdress her statue did. Both had skins the color of terra cotta and eyes edged in thick sweeps of kohl.

They were startlingly small and delicate, almost fairylike. Neither, minus crown, could be over five feet tall. Elegant, slim, rich miniatures of their civilization's oldest genes boiled down to perfection. As I took them in from headdress to sandaled toe, I confirmed that they were man and woman. And blushed.

Yup. I guess it still shows that I'm from Kansas. Here I am in a monstrous, magnificent necropolis, probably a candidate for embalming myself, and my face feels as hot as a country yokel's at a State Fair hoochie-koochie show.

The man's diaphanous kilt, the linen sides crossing on a curve at the front, still showed his genitals through the double-layer gauze. And the woman... well, not only did the central bands that went over her shoulders barely cover her tattooed nipples, but the empire-waist skirt parted at the bottom of her breast bone, breaking totally away to reveal the rest of her nude torso and legs in front.

Both of their pubic areas were shaved and liberally decorated with tattooed hieroglyphs. Similar funky tats appeared elsewhere on their bodies as well.

Hmm, Irma said. Wouldn't mind having one of these, way more artistic than modern ones.

I ignored her and turned, shocked, to see how Ugarte was taking all this.

He stood like a bashful penguin behind me, toes out, hands in jacket pockets, head down. Had we some ancient sand beneath our feet, I would have expected him to stub a toe in it.

And he was probably used to this duo!

At least the full frontal view vanished when they took their seats in tandem. They moved in eerie harmony, like paired Dobermans I'd seen, littermates trained together.

Their sandaled feet rested on small stools and their hands on the elaborate chair arms. Their profiles turned to each other in imitation of a tomb wall painting.

"This is the one?" the man asked.

"Yes. Her lion hound is a remarkable warrior. Our hyena-kas were forced to return to their bodies here."

"She could be comely, although she is large and cumbersome."

The woman's delicate features made a moue of distaste. "I prefer the sources we find in the lands of the morning sun, Kephron. They are quite trim and portable."

"And she has disinterred and is seeking to withhold He Who Is Born Again and Dies Again, the dead one we wish to dwell in our house and memory?" he asked.

"She is an asker of questions and that is always annoying, especially now," she answered.

"She is quiet at the moment, Kepherati."

The man turned his face forward to fully inspect me. He was as beautiful as the woman in the same exotic, almost precious way.

Either they were fabulously wealthy delusionists, or I was regarding actual Egyptians who spoke English. Who would the ancient Egyptians' true descendants be? Two thousand years of invasion would dilute any race. The modern-day Copts were Christians who had converted in the early days of the disciples. They claim that when the Arabs invaded Egypt in the seventh century, they kept themselves apart and never intermarried. This could be some sect that revived the ancient ways and resembled their long-ago forebears the way you saw ancient Mayan temple faces on living descendants in Mexico and Central America even today.

Kepherati had turned with him to eye me also. I got a cold chill icy enough to make my vertebrae chatter. Their speaking so freely in front of me implied the assumption of utter power or the assurance that if they didn't like how much I heard, I could be easily offed.

"Those arm cuffs are lovely in design," the woman said. "Give them to me." She stretched out a slender brown arm, tattooed at the wrist and inner elbow. I saw tattoos ringing her neck and had glimpsed designs on her inner thighs and even peeking out from around the backs of her knees.

He was tattooed in all the same places, including the elaborate ones circling his nipples.

As Kepherati lifted her arm a heavy wave of exquisite scent, spicy and musky and sweet, swirled around my face. It was so overpowering I almost raised my forearm in turn, preparing to take off the armlets. Of course I couldn't.

"I can't," I said.

"You can and will do anything we ask," she said in a soft husky voice.

"I cannot. This...silver design is as permanently attached to me as your tattoos."

Their profiles consulted each other in silence.

Kephron turned back first. "Skin is removable."

Another icy chill up my spine. "This design is mobile. It moves to avoid its own destruction."

"Ah." Kepherati clapped her tiny hands together. I noticed that her fingertips were stained red, as well as her nails. "Such a clever accessory. I want it more than ever now."

The twin arm cuffs became living serpents and circled down my forearms to fill my palms with thick silver hafts. My fists held a pair of intricately scalloped and edged battle axes. That startled even me, who was used to playing canvas for the silver familiar's shape-shifting ways, but I liked being so seriously armed.

The pair lifted their outer hands.

A wave of shuffling and rattling echoed like thunder and lightning in the massive hall. Behind me, Ugarte swallowed a cocker spaniel whimper of despair.

I watched the walls, as if suddenly papered by a mob, sprout brown and black bodies glittering with metal weapons. The painted figures had come to life, and then some. Perhaps they'd always been three-dimensional figures, only standing so still that I mistook them for bas-relief sculptures.

"Pharaoh's armies will use your decoration's blades for toothpicks," Kephron warned.

The paired battle axes melted onto my hands and again became cuff bracelets. Even my defensive talisman knew when to back down.

"Which pharaoh do you speak of?" I slipped a finger into my jeans pocket to turn on my cell phone voice recorder, thinking I could look up a historical reference to identify these creatures when I got away. If I got away.

"We are Pharaoh," they said in unison, their heads tilting together. "Kephron and Kepherati, Lord and Lady of the Two Lands, son and daughter of the God Sethmose and God's Wife Sethset, may they live forever."

And then I got it. The dainty couple before me was not only a product of royal Egyptian breeding, but of inbreeding. I'd heard of dynastic marriages between siblings, between progeny and parents even. As I stood there wondering if the silver familiar was only fastened to me until death did us part, I realized that Keph and Keph were more than siblings, they were twins. And married lovers.

The mind boggled. If I got out of here with my skin and silver familiar intact, I'd be doing a ton of Groggling the Web on ancient Egyptian customs and artifacts... artifacts like the twin pair of golden sculptures bracketing the incestuous royal couple.

I eased my cell phone from my pocket enough to shoot a few photos, hoping I captured the throne scene. The sculptures were odder than any ancient Egyptian items I'd ever seen. They stood about five feet tall, like the pharaonic pair, and resembled flower pots impaled with a long, leafless stick from which what looked like a headless animal was tied by its tail.

Dead dog dangling. More likely a cat. Here I'd thought the culture revered felines.

But maybe this was an ersatz Egyptian cult. Much more likely. And who was this person of theirs I was trying to disinter? I wasn't trying to disinter anyone. That was Ric's job, Cadaver Kid territory.

I had nothing to do with the disinterment of anything, not even a zombie.

And then I got it. Sunset Park. Ric had joined with me to dowse for water, and he'd unearthed the two dead bodies. One was He Who Is Born Again and Dies Again.

"The dead bone boy," I said aloud. My normal tones seemed almost shouting in that echoing chamber.

Kepherati forgot my bracelets.

"He is not dead, just sleeping," she said.

"He is only bones," I said.

Kephron nodded. "Yes, but we can raise the dead from ancient bones, even if they are no longer in their wrappings."

"But, his bones aren't ancient. He's only been dead six hundred years"

"Yes, Krzysztof is a mere boy compared to us." Kepherati stroked Kephron's smooth brown cheek. "Yet he is a prince, and descended from the founder of a royal line that lasted for almost three centuries. Of course, that is nothing compared to our descent of many millennia. Prince Krzysztof is a mere newcomer, really, but better than modern stock. He is an ideal beginning for our purposes." Kepherati ran her ruddy fingertip over her consort's lips.

"Good," Ugarte hissed in a low whisper. "If they make the beast with two backs their conjoined Eye of Horus will be upon themselves, not me."

I recognized his reference to a sacred protective symbol that was also a hieroglyph of the eye. Some said today's "private eye" expression came from that ancient icon of godly oversight and protection.

I agreed with Ugarte, miserable weasel that he was. This creepy couple needed to get it on with each other and forget about us.

Their profiles were sipping from each other's lips, a passionless yet sick sort of symbiosis. Kepherati turned her face toward me again.

"Why did you disturb the boy's sleep before we had time to reclaim him?"

"I... I didn't know you existed, or how important he was. Besides, I thought he was slain for eternity."

"This is a modern age," Kephron lectured me in the same cold tone. "We also have refined our methods of interring and... disinterring. Even long-dead bones may rise-in the proper hands."

It was hard to believe the Egyptians were still after zombies, even skeletal zombies.

"Speaking of proper hands," Kephron added, leaning toward me with almost more lust than he'd shown his consort, "I've heard of bodies recently rising to the surface at Caesar Cicereau's Starlight Lodge."

"You're surprised that bodies were buried out there?"

"Nothing surprises us," they replied as one, like twins.

If Lilith was indeed my twin, and I found her, and we showed any tendency to speak in unison, I'd skip out forever and ever, amen.

If she showed any incestuous tendencies, I'd... I didn't know what I'd do, besides not doing it.

"How did these bodies rise?" Kepherati inquired rather politely.

Sure, like you'd say, "How'd you do that hairstyle? How do you dial 911?"

I'd tried to dial out on my cell phone again, surreptitiously, and it wasn't cooperating. Of course, if I were a cell phone I wouldn't wake up and work in this temple of blocked signals and dedicated necrophilia.

I answered with a question. "How would I know how these bodies rose?"

"You were there," Kephron said.

"There were others present, Beloved," she reminded her consort. "Cicereau's wild werewolves and dozens of the walking, unembalmed dead they call 'zombies' now."

"Kin," he agreed, "but not the quality we seek." His liquid, black-lined gaze returned to me. "You are correct. You were not alone." He eyed his mate again, significantly, as if they had just won the lottery, before he questioned me again.

"And you say you do not know how these zombies rose?

"I was busy trying to stay alive," I answered, trying to be as vague as possible. Who knew what these beings were or wanted?

"An overrated activity when being dead is so much more interesting these days." Kepherati smiled. At least her painted lips lifted slightly at the corners.

I understood I was among an unfashionable minority, totting up in my mind who among my circle I knew for sure was alive: Quicksilver. Ric. Hector Nightwine was iffy, and the CinSims were questionable. Caressa Teagarden was semi-alive. Among my enemies, Cicereau and the werewolves were all too alive. Howard Hughes decidedly was not. Sansouci was lively, but not alive. Snow was an enigma. I didn't know if he was good or evil or just self-serving, much less alive or dead.

"She'd mummify well," Kephron told Kepherati. Their lips met again as they spoke. I almost thought they read each other's lips or breath, if they had any, as much as spoke.

"She would be difficult to reanimate and even more difficult to kill. She has too much of a lust for life," his sister-wife replied. "She would destroy outer and inner wrappings in a silly struggle to remain breathing. She would go to the other side flawed, and thus come back flawed."

Yay for flaws! Irma chirped. For such old sickos in the mud these two are really borrring! Let's ditch this dive.

Easy for you to say, I mentally chirped back. But Irma was right. I was seriously disinterested in hearing more about my forthcoming flaws as a mummy.

"There must be a servant of Anubis involved," Kepherati decreed, eyeing me again.

"Is it the dog that runs with her?" They knew about my daily morning runs in Sunset Park with Quicksilver?

"He is not a desert dog," Kephron said, his straight nose barely wrinkling. "He is thick-furred for the northern wastes and large, like her."

I breathed a sigh of relief for Quicksilver. Wolves used to inhabit desert climes but I was glad to hear the Royal Pains disparage his breed. No dog mummification wanted.

"There were wolves at Starlight Lodge," Kephron went on, musing only to his identical twin, like a man addressing himself in a mirror. "Our sybil serpents-" he waved at the hooded cobras swaying like palms behind the royal pair. For a moment I thought he'd said "civil servants." Maybe that's exactly what they were. And vice versa.

"Our royal spies," he went on, "reported that the desert snakes saw wolves. Some were partly disembodied, like our own ka-sendings on four feet. Perhaps they raised these briefly dead people."

I nodded along with Kephron. If he considered corpses as old as seventy years "briefly dead," I wouldn't argue. If "ka" meant soul in the Egyptian old order, the hyenas were undead too. Nor did I want Kephron working his way around to Ric's presence and identifying him as the force able to uproot the dead.

I figured the more of these icy-hearted Egyptians who stayed lost and forgotten and dead, the better. Their society was obviously formal to a fault. Even lust was ritualized, obvious from the flaunted but oddly sexless genitalia and tattoos.

I'd known nothing about lust, except being the unwilling object of it, whether blood lust or sex lust, until I met Ric, but I knew it was impulsive, untidy, and best taken with generous dollops of love.

I didn't feel the love here in the heart of the ex-Egyptian empire at the Karnak Hotel and casino. In fact, I really thought I ought to be going.

"Your ka-sendings," I mimicked their expression. "Those were the killer hyenas I ran into outside the Dead Zone club?"

"You did not 'run into' them," Kepherati said coldly. "They ran into you. They were sent for you. We wished to interrogate you in ka form. Had you been compliant then, you wouldn't be here walking and talking as a living person. Your northern warrior-dog and your vampire servant and you yourself damaged the temporary bodies of our ka-spirits."

So they'd wanted me dead, a spirit to drain of information and toss aside. They'd underestimated human will. And I'd like to see Sansouci called a "vampire servant" to his face, but it chilled me that they'd known what he was when I'd just discovered it last night.

Speaking of faces, theirs were still glued to each other. No wonder their eyes seemed a trifle crossed, like those of some Siamese cats. Such soul-searching postures left them deaf and blind to actions on the fringe.

I eyed the many polished surfaces of the great chamber. Mirrors in their day had not been glass, but buffed metal. I wondered if my silver mediumship was supple enough to slip through metal as well as silver-backed mirror.

If it wasn't, I risked smashing my atoms on hard bronze, not soft silver.

But I was alone, with no one else to worry about, besides Irma.

Go for it, chickie-baby. These far-too-friendly he-shes creep me out. They won't even notice we've left the room.

I doubted that, but this was probably the best opportunity to try something.

I checked Peter Lorre as Ugarte. He had tuned out like an abandoned hand puppet and stood inert a few feet away. He had led me here and his usefulness was over.

Mine was too, as far as I was concerned.

I glimpsed my own image, small and wee, in the sun disk headdress between the horns of a magnificent statue of Hathor. The goddess was sometimes portrayed with a cow's head; this headdress wasn't on a bovine head, though, but on the usual attractive head an Egyptian woman.

The statue was maybe eleven feet all, even seated in a throne chair. A Royal Uraeus, the hooded cobra, was centered on her forehead. Her white gown was tight and she wore beaded anklets and armbands. The figure's skin was painted a yellowish hue, her jewelry in red, blue and green with gold accents, but the sun disk was the purest, most polished metal surface in the vast chamber and it wasn't gold, but silver for some reason. Then I got it. No, it wasn't a sun disk, but a moon disk. This was a moon goddess.

Madrigal wasn't here to amplify my mirror-walking abilities. I was about to risk a fatal concussion on a weird do-si-do with a quasi-reflective surface. Risk not. reap not.

I sent my mind leaping up into my own pixie-sized reflected image, tensed my muscles and pantomimed the mental leap with fast, fearless action. First up to her cold sculpted lap. feeling oddly like one of those mini-adult doll-size painted Egyptian children.

Then I dove upward to her elaborate headdress, imagining the two-foot diameter moon disc as a cool silver pool I could dive into. I felt a cold crash of cymbals in my brain, a jolt to every bone and muscle in my body.

As I crouched there, chilled and shaking for what seemed a truly split second of time, I saw the tomb painting of the slim Egyptian pair in profile, their shoulders and chests faced out, frozen in some eternal throne room.

I was not timeless. I had a heart and head that needed to start ticking again. I leaped behind and beyond the tray-sized disc on the figure of an ancient goddess. I passed through another split second, utterly blank and black.

Then it was as if I was speed-dating Mirrorland.

I was shot through a tunnel of shadowed time and space, fast-forwarded past all the eerie places I'd had access to, including the Sinkhole or maybe even deep space.

My body emerged in cold water, upright, and my eyes blinked open through a curtain of liquid to see a crowd of squealing tourists backing away from the spray my appearance here caused. They started clapping.

I stood there dripping silvery strings of water in a Karnak fountain that spit golden discs of gambling chips from a small cow's mouth into a huge pool. Apparently I was taken for a performing acrobat. Tourists stood nine-deep around the fountain, still clapping as I waded out of the water, pulling my dripping hair back from my face.

I paused to bow my head and curtsy, then hopped over the shallow rim of the fountain onto dry marble.

"How do they do it?" a she-tourist asked a he-tourist. "They must have a trap door in the statue someplace. Then she tumbles out, pre-sopping, to look like she came from the fountain."

I looked up at the twelve-foot high statue of the goddess Hathor, seeing my dripping reflection in her mirrored moon-disk headdress. My head ached as if it was holding up that huge symbol. Thank you, ma'am.

All I had to do next was slip through the crowds, past the guards and out of the Karnak's dark shadows into the blazing desert daylight of Las Vegas.

I shuddered from the combination of my wet hair and clothes in the meat-locker air-conditioning and a sense of having communicated with too many of the dead way too closely.

Among the weirdly attired bellmen, security guards and roaming performers, one wet woman in tourist duds was eminently overlookable.

I finally burst back out on the Strip, basking in the blare of sunlight and heat.

Hermie was waiting with Dolly, top cranked down. He'd obviously taken several unauthorized joy rides, but he was back here when I needed him.

"Home, James," I said, hopping into the passenger seat.

I'd never let anyone, even Ric, drive Dolly before, but I was still shaking, fuzzy-brained, and seeing double from my mental-physical leap through solid silver. And my menstrual cramps were killing me, although they proved I was still alive and kicking.

"Where is home, doll?" Hermie asked, obviously hoping for a long journey and a huge tip.

I wasn't about to lead anyone from the Karnak to Hector Nightwine's estate and my small piece of home, sweet heaven on it. I puzzled for a moment.

"The Inferno and make it snappy," I said, pulling out some dough to get him back to the Karnak and grinning at the idea of a demon needing cab fare.

Funny thing. After my brief inspection of the Karnak, darned if the damned Inferno didn't feel like home.