Tunnels 06 - Terminal

finished saying, gazing down at the dried skin and cracked flesh of the mummy’s face, its brown teeth showing through its ruptured cheek.
    ‘It’s in here,’ Elliott said quietly.
    ‘What?’ Will replied, hurrying over towards the corner. She was by a huge stone sarcophagus, its surface covered in glyphs.
    ‘What do you mean, it’s in there?’ Will asked. ‘It can’t be. That won’t have anything left in it.’
    Having removed her Bergen and put it together with her rifle on the floor, Elliott was running her hands over the lid of the sarcophagus. ‘No, it’s right here,’ she repeated. ‘I can feel it.’
    ‘Oh, brilliant,’ Will exhaled wearily. ‘Trust you to choose the most humongous sarcophagus in the whole place.’
    Elliott’s hands had come to a stop on a panel showing two entwined snakes along the middle of the chunky lid. ‘Right here,’ she whispered, moving her fingers over the snakes. She seemed to be in a desperate panic as she began to try to hook her fingers under the lid and lift it. It was futile; Will knew that she didn’t have a chance because of the sheer weight.
    ‘Okay, just hold on,’ he said, dumping his Bergen and Stenon the floor beside Elliott’s kit. ‘We need to find a lever of some kind. A piece of metal will do.’
    Elliott refused to budge from beside the sarcophagus so Will began to search around. He eventually discovered a fire point out in the corridor where there were some buckets and a hose coiled on a roll. Next to this was an axe in a Perspex-fronted case, which he broke open with a kick. He came back with the axe, and even though he could just get the tip underneath the eroded stone of the lid, it was going to be of no use in lifting it.
    ‘This is hopeless,’ he muttered, as his eyes fell on the large stone idol – a massive pharaoh’s head carved in stone and some ten feet in height – beside the sarcophagus. He walked around the head to examine it from different angles, then checked very carefully how far it was from the sarcophagus. Last of all, he went behind the head to find out how much clearance there was between it and the wall.
    ‘I wonder …’ he said under his breath, as he flicked the lens up from his eye to look at the head in the moonlight that poured in through a window higher up on the wall.
    Then he nodded to himself. ‘Elliott, I need you over here. If we can tip this over, I reckon it should fall on your sarcophagus and maybe break it open.’
    It took him a while to persuade her to leave the sarcophagus and come with him to the rear of the pharaoh’s head. Then she seemed to understand what he was proposing. As he tried to tell Elliott where he wanted her to be, she suddenly clutched her hand to the nape of her neck.
    ‘What’s wrong?’ Will asked.
    ‘I don’t know – just had a really bad pain here,’ she answered. ‘It’s gone now.’
    As she seemed to be all right, Will explained his idea again and then, with their backs to the wall and their feet braced against the pharaoh, they both eased themselves up until they were five or six feet above the floor.
    ‘Three … two … one,’ he counted down and they pushed with all their might. The pharaoh’s head rocked slightly. ‘There! We moved it!’ Will exclaimed enthusiastically. ‘Elliott, this could really work!’
    For a moment he turned his head to glance through the window, his eyes lingering on the moon. ‘Howard Carter, if you’re up there and watching this, I just want you to know I’m sorry,’ he muttered. ‘Right,’ he said, addressing Elliott. ‘We get into a rhythm until this bust goes over. And I just hope it goes the right way, or we’ll be squashed like … very squashed things.’
    Will repeated, ‘Push … push … push …’ again and again as the pharaoh rocked backwards and forwards, and then with a last ‘PUSH!’ it overbalanced and was tipping forward. Will and Elliott jumped to the side as it toppled straight on top of the sarcophagus with a floor-shaking thud.
    They had both skipped around to the front to watch as the sarcophagus, in what felt like slow motion, also went over. Its huge lid slid onto the ground, smashing the glass display case before it finally came to rest.
    ‘What have I done?’ Will said, as he saw the damage to the pharaoh’s head, the sarcophagus lid, which was broken in half, and to the mummy in the glass case.
    But Elliott wasn’t the least bit concerned about any of these. She squatted down