"Smith, Guy N - Accursed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Guy N)
'We are all entitled to our own beliefs, Reverend, however mistaken they may be.' Suma yawned, stretched himself, a touch of arrogance this time. 'Now I am going to turn in for I must leave early in the morning.'
'Before we break through into the tomb, eh?' Mason leaned forward. 'You're up to something, my friend. You've broken into a dozen or more tombs before this one and rumour has it that you have a collection of relics that would grace the finest museum.'
There are many rumours along the Nile.' Suma stood up, his ill-fitting khaki shorts falling well below his knees, laughable in any other place except this ancient burial ground. 'I should not take too much notice of what you hear, Reverend.'
'But you expect me to take note of your insinuations.'
'Yes,' the guide's eyes narrowed, his voice dropped to a whisper. 'Because I know. But as I told you, the decision is yours. Now I'll bid you goodnight, Reverend. Sleep well.'
Mason watched the other walk away, a kind of glide on those short legs until the darkness swallowed him up.
Mason began unrolling his blankets on the soft sandy ground, found himself glancing again into the shadows. He shivered. These desert nights were cold; the wilderness burned you by day and froze you by night. But tonight seemed exceptionally cold. Maybe he should keep the fire going; a stirring of primitive man's instincts, flames to keep the wild beasts at bay. Something scuttled across the cave, hidden by the darkness, and he started. A rat probably, these excavations were crawling with them. But they were harmless, not like scorpions and snakes. He shuddered, tried to throw off an indeterminable creeping fear. There was nothing here that his own faith would not protect him from. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death....
His bedroll ready, he dropped to his knees, tried to shut everything else out of his mind while he prayed. It wasn't easy. That rat was running to and fro again, scavenging for scraps of food; a sudden gust of cold desert wind whipped up the sand, drove it at him as though some venomous being out there was echoing Suma's warning in its own inexplicable way. You're a thief, Reverend, a grave robber!
When he opened his eyes again the embers had died down to a dull glow allowing the shadows to move in on him, black shapes that were alive and seemed to touch him with icy fingers. There was a shotgun and some ammunition in the truck; he thought about going and fetching it but that would only have been pandering to his own childish fears. Like the time when his parents had first demanded that he slept in a room of his own. The sheer terror of those first few nights, he would never forget them. Voices that whispered as he trembled beneath the bedclothes, fingers stroking the blankets and when he jumped, prodding him, taunting him. Infantile fears that eventually evaporated. Until now. He pulled the blankets right up over his head.
Listening. That rat had gone away, probably tired of its constant search for food, returning to its hole to sleep. Mason wished he could sleep. Suddenly he wasn't tired anymore. Perhaps he should go and fetch a torch and try to read. But that meant going out there into the night....
Voices! Like those in his infant years, an indecipherable whispering as though demons hid in the shadows and were mocking him; closing his eyes tightly, trembling violently.
Something made him open his eyes, an awareness of light like when his mother used to check on him on her way up to bed. He saw it through the blankets, a penetrating golden radiance, its brightness making him squint. Fear, groping for a logical explanation. The dying embers had blazed up. He had to be sure. Breathlessly, almost afraid to look, he eased himself up and peered out of his bedroll.
The scene which greeted the vicar brought a grunt of amazement from his bearded lips, dying away to a moan of terror. It was impossible, it could not be! A waking nightmare in the midst of some desert fever, an hallucination brought about by his mind dwelling on Suma's superstitions, the fact that the natives would not come near this place after nightfall. He stared, again tried to reassure himself that what he saw was a figment of the imagination, the mental meanderings of an old man.
The cave had magnified many times, or perhaps it had always been this size but hidden by the shadows. But it was no longer a cave, more of a huge chamber with plain walls, a tomb such as the one which might lie behind that heavy door in the adjacent excavations. The whole scene was lit by some radiating golden light as though the rays of a setting sun penetrated this gloomy place. The Reverend Mason continued to stare, saw that in the centre of the floor stood a small plain sarcophagus. A child's coffin, a thing of sadness that misted his eyes and blurred his vision, held his gaze as though it had some kind of hypnotic power.
The temperature had dropped several degrees and the light seemed to die, bringing back the surrounding shadows. And even as he watched the tiny coffin lid began to raise as though the infant occupant had suddenly come to life or else had not been dead in the first place.
The Reverend Mason wanted to tear his gaze away, to scream, to rush headlong from this place of inexplicable death into the world outside. But it seemed that all bodily functions were denied him; that some unknown power commanded that he must be a spectator to the happenings in this place, the horrors of some unearthly resurrection.
The sarcophagus lid was flung aside, a white robed figure sitting up, disrobing itself so that its features and its nakedness were revealed in its full beauty. It was no child but a woman of exquisite beauty, so petite in every feature, her full red lips moving as she uttered mute words which the watcher did not hear yet understood. A plea, looking about her fearfully even as she spoke. 'Take me from this place, O stranger, and the one who loves me and is entombed back there. Take us back to your land and free us from the curse which has been put upon us. I beseech you!'
Mason thought that he could make out another sarcophagus some distance away, a larger one from which there was no movement, but it could just have been a trick of the shadows. Like this one!
'It is no trick, stranger.' She seemed to read his confused thoughts which were still searching for a logical explanation. 'For I am Dalukah, an enslaved high priestess of one whose name even now I dare not utter. And there lies my lover, Aba-aner the soldier, and our crime is that we love each other. Free us, I beseech you, take us away from this tomb to another land while there is still time and before we are yet again put to the sword and entombed for eternity.'
Her voice was fading away, the light failing and the darkness coming back again; leaving Mason lying there in the black solitude of the cave, knowing that it was neither dream nor hallucination. It had all happened, there was no doubt about that.
Suma was gone when the clergyman emerged from the cave next morning, tyre-tracks leading off into the desert and when the drifting sands obliterated them it would be as though Suma had never been. Just another legend that might or might not be true.
Mason felt tired as though he had not slept the previous night, a niggling ache behind his eyes which in all probability would increase as the day progressed. Again he saw that scene in the chamber, the woman of unparalleled beauty pleading with him to take her away, to release her from some ancient curse. But how could he when she didn't exist anymore? The cave had no recesses, there were no coffins concealed in the shadows.
His troubled thoughts were disturbed by the appearance of the natives; there should have been five but doubtless the others had left, having conceded to their superstitions and cowardice. An old man and a boy, they might have been father and son but the clergyman did not consider it worth bothering to find out. Already the sun was up and the coolness of the underground would have been appealing to him had it not been for the memory of that vision.
| © 2025 Библиотека RealLib.org (support [a t] reallib.org) |