The Curse of Neferiset: Prologue

***As promised, it's time to start up our Halloween extravaganza! Here's a seasonal shrinking and growth dark adventure featuring a classic man-eating Egyptian mummy. Well, kind of classic... I'll run this one every Friday, so it's finished in time for Halloween.***

“This is a bad idea,” Dr Ana Forcet warned. Probably the twentieth time now. But her father had never much listened to her, and didn’t look like he was going to now. He was the great Professor Rupert Forcet, after all, foremost Egyptologist in the world. At least, he intended to be after this latest find. The excitement was making him reckless.

No one had expected them to uncover this tomb. Most people weren’t even convinced of the existence of the pharaoh Neferiset, a violent usurper queen who had rested power for a brief but ferocious period almost four thousand years ago. But the trail of her legends had occupied much of the Forcet family’s careers, fascinated as they were by rumours of Neferiset’s occult powers. Records of her were scant, but the few that remained were vivid: she was variously referenced as some kind of titan, a devourer of worlds. A being too powerful to live.

Only together had Ana and her father finally unravelled the clues to this chamber fifty feet beneath the sands, twenty kilometres from Farafra and close to absolutely nothing else. Far from the great pyramids and elaborate chambers of the better-known pharaohs, they now stood in a dusty room barely five metres wide with only a couple of empty alcoves for decoration, none of the riches left to accompany this queen into the afterlife. No surprise there: Rupert had tracked various of Neferiset’s belongings over the years, with bracelets and jewellery scattered to far abroad places, including the crucial so-called blood amulet that had pinpointed this location. The pharaoh’s possessions had apparently been stripped from her before she died.

But what the tomb lacked in decoration, it made up for in its eerie air of importance – and danger. Ana had a sense of foreboding the second she set foot in here, their electric lanterns illuminating the ominous sarcophagus at the back. Neferiset’s final resting place was standing upright, a tall, chiselled coffin of stone with faint hieroglyphs etched on the surface mostly worn by age. The simplicity of the place warned against its nature: this was not a queen who had been left celebrated. She had been entombed somewhere to be ignored and forgotten – somewhere secure.

While it had been hard to find, and lacked adornments, this was still a formidable tomb: buried deep, with great stone walls, no small feat of engineering. And the sarcophagus was grand in its size and weight if not its decoration. Ana couldn’t help thinking that whoever had put this queen here had deliberately built something sturdy enough to contain the ruthless ruler’s power, even after death.

But they couldn’t let such concerns get in the way. Fairy tales, really, her father quipped. And even if not, who were they to let ancient threats get in the way of important discoveries . . .

Rupert eagerly ran his hands around the edges of her coffin lid, searching for a way in. He was a wiry man, sprightly at sixty-two, and especially lively now. It was a monumental finding, after all, and one that was the private pleasure of just he, Ana and their aide, Vincent. Vincent, a tall, broad-shouldered man whose dark suit was somehow much less dusty than Rupert’s shabby brown one, stood alongside Ana’s father, calmly sorting through a bag of tools.

“We should set up a perimeter, get some extra equipment from the university,” Ana suggested, but Rupert flapped an impatient hand at her.

“Let them take half the credit?” he said. “You know how they’d frame it. They’d want an official photographer, contracts over how exactly we describe the find. Credit given to Professor Briggins. No. When we reveal this discovery to the world, they will know it was the Forcets alone who rediscovered Neferiset.” He clicked his fingers at Vincent, and the lumbering aide presented a crowbar.

“Father –” Ana attempted one more time, but without giving it a moment Rupert jammed the tool into the crack in the sarcophagus. He pushed hard, straining, but no chance he was letting Vincent take over now. The stone creaked, and for a moment Ana thought it would merely crack apart, a historic monument destroyed – then the large stone slab shifted with a croaking shudder. The sudden movement threw Rupert off balance and he dropped the crowbar with a gasp, staggering to keep upright. Then they were all motionless, staring in.

It was open.

Neferiset’s great stone coffin stood with an angled gap barely a foot wide, the lid having pivoted on a corner. It was unnaturally dark inside, as if the chamber sucked away all light, and Ana couldn’t make out any hint of its occupant. Rupert apparently couldn’t either, as he crept closer, pushing his head right up to the gap. Vincent bent in, too.

“Oh sweet marigolds,” Rupert muttered, “we’ve done it. Look. There she is.”

Ana took the slightest step closer, emotions duelling between elation and an unnamed fear that there was something very wrong about the sheer darkness of the sarcophagus interior.

“Light,” Rupert commanded, holding a hand up to Vincent. When a torch wasn’t instantly delivered, he clicked his fingers angrily. “Light, come on man!” The loud sound in this private chamber made Ana flinch – and a rumbling groan responded. The tomb shuddered, momentarily, then was still again.

“What on earth?” Rupert whispered, looking at the ceiling. He put on a smile for Ana, and was about to make some flippant, dismissive remark, when a shape shot out of the sarcophagus and latched onto him. Rupert shrieked and tried to pull away, only to be jerked towards the opening. Vincent shoved his hands past to try and help, as Ana went rigid. She couldn’t see what it was, but Rupert cried, “Get her off me! Get her off!”

The gnarled hand of a corpse thousands of years old had reached out from its grave and snatched hold of his shirt, pulled him in. Its grip was unbreakable, neither Rupert nor Vincent able to claw it off, and it was pressing Rupert into the stone as if to squeeze him through the too-small gap.

Vincent let go and stepped back to regroup, searching for the crowbar. He paused with shock as Rupert screamed and a great gust of air burst out past him, a cloud of sand spraying from the sarcophagus. Ana jumped back, into the wall, as it rolled over Rupert and Vincent and dispersed. The men coughed and spluttered to clear their lungs, Vincent with his hands on his knees but Rupert held up even now by the dead claw.

Then, before Ana’s eyes, they both appeared to deflate, sinking down like punctured balloons.

No, it wasn’t deflating. Her father was getting smaller, drawn in on himself. Towards the point of his chest where he was being held up. Vincent, too, was losing height, limbs shrinking. Ana steadied herself, blinking as she watched the two tall men rapidly receding towards childlike size. Further – Vincent was now below knee height, her father hanging like a doll in the air. Rupert’s cries doubled and he spidered his arms and legs against the sarcophagus, trying to lever himself away. He rapidly lost strength and distance as his body got smaller. Smaller.

By the time Ana had numbly paced into the centre of the room, each man was a mere four inches tall, and she could make out, clearly, the hand that held her father up. Rupert dangled by the chest of his shirt from twisted, sharp fingers, a withered and dark hand partly wrapped in bandages. He thrashed like a fish on a hook and cried out for help in a rodent’s squeak. It was too unreal, too shocking for Ana to do anything.

Then, in a flash, the fingers shot open, before wrapping entirely around her miniaturised father. The hand clamped shut and carried him helplessly back into the darkness. Rupert screamed pitifully, triggering Ana into finally rushing towards the sarcophagus. She raised her hand to reach inside and take him back, not thinking of the consequences, but stopped only when she heard a horrific CRUNCH, an unmistakable sound of something biting through flesh into bone. A noise that ended Rupert’s screams.

Ana gagged on her shock, and in the shadow of the coffin saw the slightest edge of movement. A jawline, chewing, with more awful crunches. The red glow of an unreal eye.

Ana shot into action, not to reach into the sarcophagus this time, but to clamp both her hands on the lid and wrench with all her might. She heard a sloppy gulp, with more chewing, and the shift of the monster inside, readying to move again. She heaved harder, with more force than she’d ever moved before, and let out an involuntary shout of effort.

Something hissed near her shoulder, and she felt a brush of air – but the sarcophagus lid shifted. It thumped back into place with a bang and another puff of dust, just as the thing inside made a snarling lunge. Ana jumped back as it clawed against the inside of the coffin, nails on stone. Then it was still again.

Ana stared at the bare stone for the longest time, breathing deeply, scarcely believing all she had just seen. The room was again still, vacant and untouched – as it had been for millennia. Except now her father was gone. And Vincent was down on the ground next to the sarcophagus, terrified and confused. He was the size of a small action figure. It was impossible, but he was right there, and from his vantage point she had to appear like an equally unreal giant. She imagined her expression wasn’t much more confident than his.

But she was Dr Ana Forcet, and damned if she was going to sleep on whatever the hell had just happened. They had achieved her father’s dream in finding this place. He had just given his life for it. Success was still in their grasp. The horror was contained, and there wasn’t necessarily any evidence that it had ever occurred. None, that is, except for the miniature man worriedly watching Ana.

She crouched down, holding up a cautious hand to show she meant no harm. Vincent had been their family’s aide for decades, of course she would take care of him. It was just that he couldn’t be allowed to compromise all they’d achieved. He shook his head at her, seeming to read something more clearly in her face, and turned to run.

Fast as a snake, she snatched down and caught him.