The Pharaoh Of Hauntown, Pt.II

     Instead, I yanked the lamp hard away from the wall and knocked off its shade. I stepped warily into the silent hallway, the lamp held upside down, its heavy metal base poised against my shoulder like a midevil mace to put out someone's lights.

     I stalked towards al-Jariri's door until a floorboard snapped and creaked loudly under my foot. I lunged through the bedroom door to behold the incredible visage of a man-sized baboon crouched snarling among shards of shattered glass on the window sill, drool and blood glinting in the dull amber light shining from the upturned lamp on the bed. The thing bared its massive bloodied canines at me; it clenched a golden object in its fist while its tail jerked warily from side to side.

     Someone groaned on the floor and the second I glanced away from the animal, it disappeared through the window.

     Dr. al Jariri lay in a crumpled bloody heap at my feet, deep scratches ripped through his face. A monstrous hole bled plentifully just below his left shoulder; the jagged white edge of his snapped collar bone gleamed inside. Blood soaked everything. Fighting nausea, I tore a handful of cloth from the bed sheet and pack it into the gaping wound. The professor howled in pain. An instant later, Arnold and Bob appeared.

     Seeing al Jariri wounded, Bob rushed off to call an ambulance. Arnold meanwhile, looked at me dully in a confused state of shock and sat on the bed.

     "Rex is dead," he said softly.

     I shivered from a cold February breeze blowing through the broken window. I asked Arnold to hand me the blankets off the bed to put over al Jariri. As he did so, his steady stare demanded more answers than he knew he had questions for.

     "I've got a story for you and the professor---neither of you is going to like."

     I told them what I had read in the History of Hauntown written by Arnold's father, Archibald Thornson:

     In 1861, a 36 year old Ezra Russell Thornson and a young Amos Dués were partners in a Davenport, Iowa, speculation business. At the onset of the Civil War, Colonel Nero Bates, of the newly formed 4th Iowa Mounted Rifles, contracted Thornson and Dués as his agents to invest the funds of a grim tontine agreement among his regimental staff officers (see: The Curse Of The 4th Iowa Mounted Rifles, April, 1997, vol. 4, Issue #4).

     Thornson's and Dués' investments paid handsomely. By war's end in 1865, Thornson had married a younger woman named Penelope Odell who bore him a son named Russell. He also foreclosed on a large farm belonging to the parents of Capt. Ellsworth Bernhardt, 4th Iowa Mounted Rifles, who died at Missionary Ridge. Thornson retired to this new Clinton County farm while Dués struck out to for infamy in Kossuth County (see: Amos Dues' Home For Wayward Girls, July, 1996, vol. 3, Issue #7). In 1866, Thornson hired architect Thaddeus Haun from the Georg von Podebrad College of Engineering in Zoar, Iowa, to build an entire town on his new estate. Impressed by the plans, Thornson named the hamlet "Haun Town". By advertising a shrewd combination of truth and balderdash in eastern newspapers as well as abroad, Thornson enlisted more than two thousand eager people, many war-ravaged Southerners, to abide in what was his private domain---for he kept title to all the land in Haun Town and charged rent for it.

     Being absolute ruler of Haun Town soon bored him. At only 44 years old and decadently wealthy, Thornson began spending exorbitant sums on ancient Egyptian treasures of illicit provenience. Given his wealth, though, such extravagances were taken as those of an eccentric. In 1870, he traveled to Egypt and returned the following year with the carefully dismantled sanctuary of Hapi, Guardian of the Dead. The squat, stocky mud brick edifice with its odd, stall-like niches and the ancient pagan friezes of freakish human bodies supporting animal heads at first awed his townsfolk. Yet, soon, they shunned and feared the place. Stories spread. The entire village soon got known as "Hauntown". The name stuck.

     In 1874, he imperiously demolished Haun Town's church and built his tottering 5-storied Victorian mansion in its place. There, he delved into a sinister study of sacred papyri dealing with magic, death, and resurrection. Books and bundles of rare, ancient papyrus streamed into the house. On August 11, 1876, Thornson had workmen seal the temple and hired a local boy to tend the contents of 12 heavy crates. Day after day, Thornson toted stacks of paper to and from the temple. The boy Thornson hired remained steadfastly discreet about activities inside no matter what was offered him. One morning, weird screeching and howling erupted from the building. Townsfolk who rushed in to help saw the place strewn with straw and tattered pieces of paper covered with crude scribblings. Thornson found the boy scratched and bleeding on the smooth stone floor. When the villagers demanded an explanation of the animals kept there, Thornson ignored them; and carried the injured boy to his home to recover.

     When Thornson died in 1886, he had a public funeral, but there was no body in the casket. The boy, who had become Thornson's acolyte and surrogate son---jealously resented by Thornson's biological son, Russell---stole the body and secretly prepared it using the ancient mummification techniques used by Egyptian priests. He sealed it into the chamber he and his master had prepared in the mansion's basement so that Ezra would live forever.

     "Dad never said a thing about Great Grandpa being in the basement," Arnold scratched his nose in surprise. "Nor nothin' about all that Egyptian stuff. He only printed ten copies of that book and burned the manuscript. Never said why."

     "I think he knew what the baboons..." I started but the professor interrupted.

     "Hapi protects the ka before it goes to the west. Ezra's ka is adrift and vulnerable." al Jariri gasped, trying to raise himself up. "Hapi took the mummy's ankh from me to protect it."

     "It was just a burglar in a Halloween mask," Arnold soothed.

     "I saw what attacked me! I know what it means!" the professor gasped. "You know nothing of these gods and their power. The ka needs its sanctuary."

     "He's delirious," Arnold observed.

     "The ka can't find its material form," al Jariri ranted, breathlessly. "Workmen destroyed his funerary statue. We need his mummy from my lab."

     "Pah!" Arnold commented, rolling his eyes at me. He left, muttering he would finding out about the ambulance.

     "The holy of holies must be somewhere..." The professor went on, his eyes closed. "An enclosed space...symbolizes grain."

     "The grain elevator!" I blurted.

     He gestured for his overnight bag near the door. I dug out the cell phone and handed it to him. The curt ferocity with which he ordered his poor grad assistant over the phone showede that he knew more about the dire events of that night than he let on.

     "Alan will meet us there," he winced, dropping the phone. Suddenly his eyes rolled back. "The...the appropriate rituals..."

     The professor swooned. Bob burst in, trailing the paramedics close behind. They leapt into action, immobilizing his left shoulder by securing his left arm in a sling across his chest and then gently binding him on a gurney.

     "Invocation," al Jariri moaned, waking suddenly for an instant.

     "He's lost a lot of blood," one the medics said as they took al Jariri away.

     Bob gave me a worried look, "Got a call about something weird happening at the grain elevator. Sounds like those baboons again."

     I nodded, "It'll get weirder. We're going there to meet a mummy."

     Bob gaped for a second, "Tell me in the car."

     We drove over in Bob's patrol car to the abandoned elevator. At first glance as we pulled in front of it, the gray elevator looked just as foreboding and dismal as I remembered it (see: Hauntown's Grain Elevator Of Death, August, 1996, vol. 3, Issue #8). I made out shadowy figures creeping on all fours along the catwalk just below the very top of the elevator. Suddenly, the windshield crunched and buckled as a chunk of concrete rubble hit it. I shrieked and threw up my hands in front of my face, startled out of my wits. Bob slammed the gear in reverse just as a torrent of rocks and debris pelted the car. When we got out of range, he turned on the spotlight and shone it up at the catwalk.

     Baboons chattered and howled back at us angrily before they scampered out of the light. As Bob shone its beam along the airy walk way, I saw crude symbols splashed onto the wall of the elevator with black paint resembling hieroglyphs. And suddenly I put it together. The grain elevator didn't just symbolize the temple, it was the temple. Thornson's son, Rusty, used the temple's rubble to build his grain elevator but still the damn thing remained a sanctuary to an Egyptian baboon god! For 70 years, it stored up cosmic spiritual energy to protect Ezra Thornson's ka from oblivion and eternal death.

     Bob switched off the light. We watched in stunned silence for a long time as the baboons scrambling high above in the dim glare of the street lamp. Suddenly, the burly pick up truck bounced over the curb and pulled up behind us. Alan the grad assistant, hopped out, and ran up to us. "I got the coffin...Oh my God!"

     Looking up, I saw a spinning pool of light about the size of a full moon hanging in the sky above us. From it, an oily black gelatinous ooze trickled down forming into a giant jackal-headed phantom. The stench of carrion filled the air as the hideous thing lumbered towards the elevator, waves rippling along its body with every step. The howling and shrieking baboons the catwalk deafened us. Yet as the great beast drew closer, they scribbled on the elevator walls all the more frantically.

     At just that moment, the giant beast shuddered, reeling as if from a blow then fell crashing towards us. We ran from the cruiser just as the rippling giant smacked against the car sending it bouncing backwards several feet; its entire front end smashed flat.

     Alan promptly lost his nerve. Getting back into his truck, he gunned the engine and skittered off. The rippling giant grabbed one of the baboon scribes and hurled it helpless through the air. With a sickening squeal, it smashed into the pickup truck's windshield, spattering glass and primate parts everywhere. The truck careened straight into the little office shack attached to the elevator, plowing through it into the elevator's sturdy concrete wall. Steam gysered from the truck's buckled radiator.

     I ran to the pickup's cab to find Alan grotesquely folded up over the steering wheel. He had no pulse. Skittering to the back, I frantically hauled the delicately carved wooden coffin of Hauntown's not so ancient pharaoh out of the truck's bed.

     "What the hell is that thing?" Bob demanded as he drew near.

     We removed the coffin's lid. Jasmine and sweet spices perfumed the dusty air.

     A deep snarl resonated from above and suddenly a great baboon jumped down, landing lightly at the head of the open casket. Hapi, Guardian of the Dead growled with indignant expectation. I suddenly recalled the professor mentioning something about a ritual. Terrified, I looked at Bob.

     But Bob's face was the pallor of ash, his eyes rolled back into his head and his mouth slack and hanging open. I screamed his name; the baboon god barked for silence. The building rumbled and shook violently, dust and rubble clattered down on us. Suddenly, Bob spoke in an inscrutable middle eastern tongue, smoothly intoning each word of a forgotten incantation yet with native fluency and subtlety.

     The god shoved a golden ankh through the wrappings into the mummy's mouth then faded away into mist. The mummy convulsed with grotesque violence inside its perfumed wrappings. Still entranced, Bob, dutifully replaced the coffin lid over the wriggling form. As soon as the it slammed shut, the wriggling inside ceased. Bob sagged to the floor. Not waiting further, I caught up his arm and helped him out the door.

     Terrible bellowing greeted us outside; the air stank with sulfur and decayed flesh. The horrible beast staggered before us. Bellowing in frustration and pain, parts of him dripped steaming onto the ground. A moment later, there was nothing left save the long daggers of rose-colored sunlight stretching across the morning sky.

     It's been several weeks since that night in Hauntown. I visited Dr. al Jariri in the hospital and recounted our adventure. He shivered when I mentioned the jackal-headed phantom and said we had acted just in time. He didn't understand why Bob went into the trance, though and that's good because I didn't want him to know that jackal-headed phantom might return. Old Ezra's ka wasn't the only restless spirit loose that night...

     Last week, Doreen called to say the Sheriff had arrested Bob after he had a nervous breakdown and went berserk in town with his gun. I think I know why...

     The boy that Ezra Thornson took under his arm as his acolyte was Bob Mallory's Great Grandfather, Chester Mallory.