Nightside 10 - The Good the Bad and the Uncanny

gold, not to mention an armed guard. We can always come back for it later, after we’ve found the wand. The gold is safe and secure here, but I can’t say the same for the Lady of the Lake. That is still our main objective, isn’t it?”
    “Well, yes,” I said reluctantly. “You can always find more gold, but there’s only one Lady of the Lake.”
    “Exactly! Who’s a clever boy.”
    “Any idea of where we should look for the wand?” I said. “I don’t see it anywhere.”
    “Of course not,” said Polly. “Far too valuable to be left lying around. The Pharaoh took it with him, inside his sarcophagus.”
    I considered the casket thoughtfully. Eight feet long, covered in jewels and gold leaf, the whole of the lid taken up with one big stylised portrait of the inhabitant. Very impressive, and very solid. Polly pretended to read some of the markings.
    “Not dead, only sleeping.”
    “He’s not kidding anyone but himself,” I said. “Don’t suppose you’ve got a crow-bar about you?”
    “Hold back on the brute force, just for a moment,” said Polly. She walked slowly around the sarcophagus, studying every inch of it through her Looking Glass while careful to maintain a respectful distance at all times. “There are supposed to be extra-special booby-traps,” she said, after a while. “Mechanical and magical protections, all set to activate if anyone even touches the lid. But as far as I can see ... they’re all silent. Deactivated. I can only assume my protections are working overtime.”
    “Just as well,” I said. “We don’t want Sleeping Beauty to wake up. I’ve seen those movies.”
    “We can handle him,” said Polly, dismissively.
    “Don’t get overconfident,” I said. “After all these years on the Street of the Gods, soaking up worshippers’ belief, who knows what the mummy might have become?”
    “As long as my protections are still working, he’s only another stiff in bandages,” Polly said firmly. “If he should sit up, just slap him down again. Larry? Are you listening to me?”
    I was listening to something else. I could hear the sound of soft, shuffling feet. I could hear great wings beating. I could hear my own heart hammering in my chest. The sense of some third presence in the burial chamber was almost overwhelming, close and threatening. I kept thinking the statues on the edge of my vision were slowly turning their heads to look at me. They were only feelings. I wasn’t fooled by them. But I was becoming more and more convinced that someone or something knew we were there, in a place we shouldn’t be. That inside the sarcophagus, under the lid, the Pharaoh’s eyes were open and looking up at us.
    Polly moved in close beside me, squeezing my arm hard.
    “Larry, please calm down. We’re perfectly safe. If I’d known you got spooked this easily, I’d have chosen someone else.”
    “I’m fine,” I said. “Fine. Let’s get the lid off, get what we came for, and then get the hell out of here.”
    “Suits me, sweetie. The mummy’s holding the wand in his left hand. All we have to do is slide the lid far enough to one side for us to reach in.”
    Even with both of us pushing and shoving, the sarcophagus lid didn’t want to move. It ground grudgingly sideways, a few inches at a time. Loud scraping noises echoed on the still air, interspersed with muffled curses from Polly and me. We threw all our strength against the lid, and slowly, slowly, a space opened up, revealing the interior of the sarcophagus and its occupant. The mummified head and shoulders looked shrivelled and distorted, the eyes and mouth just shadows in a face like baked clay. The wrappings were brown and grey, decayed, sunken down into the dead flesh. The body looked brittle, as though rough handling would break it into pieces.
    The elven wand was held tightly in one clawlike hand, laid across the sunken chest.
    “Well, go on!” said Polly. “Take it!”
    “You take it!”
    “What?”
    “Let’s think about this for a moment,” I said, leaning on the lid. “I have seen pretty much every mummy movie ever made, including that Abbott and Costello abomination, and it’s always the idiot who takes the sacred object from the mummy’s hand who ends up getting it in the neck. In fact, it’s usually at this point in the film that the warning music starts getting really loud.”
    “God, you’re a wimp!” said Polly. She grabbed the elven wand, wrestled it out of the mummy’s hand, and