Since the first classical ghost story was written, and since the unexplainable caught the imaginations of men, the mysteries of ancient Egypt have captivated the reading public in both fact and fiction. Non one who walks through the Egyptian exhibits of a museum can fail to be impressed by the immense number and complexity of the exhibits. What meanings lie hidden in that ageless heiroglyphic writing? What forbidden knowledge lurks behind the inscrutable eyes of Nephthys, Guardian of the Dead? What dreadful secrets are revealed when the seals around the lid of a sarcophagus are broken? Do the falcon-headed gods Horus and Set still walk the earth? Do the carnivorous fangs of the weird Anubis still seek the human blood. Does Mont, the macabre bull-headed god still hold sinister sway in forgotten corners of the Delta? The explorers who raided the timeless tomb at Luxor discovered to their cost, that an Egyptian curse was independent of time and space...
Release date:
April 30, 2015
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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BELLENGER was dead when they found him. That Bellenger was dead was probably the understatement of the year. Bellenger was horribly, violently dead!
If there can be various degrees of anything so terrible and so final as death, then it could be said that Bellenger was as dead as it was possible to be. There is the restful, peaceful death of the very old, who with the quiet mind have slipped away from one world to the next. They have crossed the twilight bridge on tiptoe. There is the death from “natural causes” where the victim—no matter what his age—looks naturally dead… But there is also the kind of death that Harold Bellenger died.
It wasn’t that anything violent had happened to Bellenger. It was the look on his face. There was an expression in Bellenger’s eyes that was completely beyond description. The eyes looked as if they had been trying to escape from his face when whatever it was that had got him had approached. Men who are strangled; men who are hung; men who are suffocated, or asphyxiated, take on that awful bulge-eyed, rabbit look, but none of them had it as bad as Bellenger had it. It was as though his eyes were two planets that had suddenly broken free from gravity and got whirled off—victims of centrifugal force.
There was another thing about his body, too. It wasn’t only the fact that his eyes were standing out from the rest of the corpse, there was the awful twisting of the features. Doc Morgan was a pretty tough character. A man has to be tough to be a police pathologist, but when he stooped and began examining Bellenger’s body for other damage, he suddenly straightened and swallowed hard. It was the supreme effort of a strong man bringing his nerves under the control of his will …
“Well?” asked Kinston. Inspector Kinston—tall, slim, dark, looked almost like a matinee idol of a bygone day. He was sleek and well groomed, yet it was obvious that the aristocratic exterior hid a core of the toughest physical steel that a human personality can be made of. Kinston had been to an awful lot of trouble one way and another. He had fought his way through a brace of world wars. He had got into the first by adding half a dozen years to his age when recruiting was not strictly controlled. He had wangled his way into the second when a lot of other people were busy wangling their way out … by taking that same half a dozen years off.
Now, looking far younger than the fifty-odd years that he carried, he seemed to combine the strength and stamina of a man in his prime with the wisdom and maturity of middle age. He was a pretty formidable opponent. There were many men on the other side of prison bars—particularly several tough cases down on the Moor and over on the Island—who had good reason to wish that Claud Kinston had never come back from those raids on No-man’s Land that had won him an extremely distinguished Service Medal and two bars.
Despite their ill wishing, however, Kinston still moved and had his being and enjoyed his regular pastime of breathing and eating and sleeping, and generally, despite the nefarious world in which he lived and moved, he managed to enjoy life.
He was not enjoying it at this moment.
The charwoman who had found Harold Bellenger was still being pacified by a matronly policewoman.
So far he and the doctor were the only two men to see the corpse. He decided if that select company could be kept as select as possible, it would be a very good thing! This was not the sort of thing that could be termed an attractive sight, even by the most hardened connoisseur of the macabre.
“What’s the matter, Doc?” Kinston’s voice was deep, and surprisingly rugged for so smooth looking a man.
Morgan pursed his lips for a moment without speaking.
“Just feel that man’s ribs,” he said very softly, “and then you tell me!”
Claud knelt beside the body and touched Harold Bellenger’s side.
He, too, straightened up with a slight grimace.
“What did that?”
“I should like to know,” replied Morgan. “I should like to know very much indeed.”
He could understand something of the message of terror in those eyes now. Those dead eyes that were trying to escape.
“I have seen two men who have been crushed as this man has been crushed. One of them was hit by a train,” went on Morgan very quietly. “The other was caught by a hydraulic press! One was an accident. The other was murder. You see, the difficulty here. Inspector, is that there’s no hydraulic press and there’s no train. There’s nothing but a perfectly ordinary bachelor flat. A flat of contemporary furnishing, modern design, quietly tasteful, respectable. Very much ‘anywhere in the suburbs.’ Could have been your living-room, Inspector—could have been mine. We find a body which looks as if it had been squeezed by a savagely angry grizzly bear.”
“Yes—going back to your remarks on the train and the hydraulic press,” said Kinston. “Surely those bodies were——”
“Yes, they were! They were horrible! They were mangled. Badly mangled. This one is hardly touched, there’s no external bleeding. Whatever got him and gave him one fatal, crushing squeeze was relatively soft on the outside. There was no sharp surface, no hard surface. More like the work of a bear or a gorilla than anything else … Yet you know without me telling you that human bone is twice as strong as oak, size for size, volume for volume. Its tensile strength is greater than that of any wood known to man. It doesn’t rank beside metal, but it’s one of the strongest substances nature produces. No ordinary human being could do that to another. It wasn’t done by any mechanical device because nothing is here now. A press big enough to do that would take quite a lot of lugging about.”
“Which means,” said Claud thoughtfully, “that: (a) the body was brought here after it was crushed, or (b) we are up against something that’s horribly out of the normal. It completely rules our suicide or accident or ‘natural causes,’ doesn’t it?”
“It most certainly does,” said the doctor. “That,” he pointed to the corpse, “was very definitely murdered.”
He examined the position of the body in relationship to the floor very carefully. “It’s only a hunch,” he said, “one of those things you get a ‘feeling’ about, after you’ve seen enough of it. But he wasn’t dragged, there’s no mark on the carpet.”
“You’re crossing over into my department, you know,” commented Claud, “but carry on.”
“He wasn’t dragged and I don’t think he was carried in. You get the ‘feel’ of these things. You know when a body has been killed and dropped, or whether it’s been carried in and left. There’s something about the way they fall—one’s natural, and one isn’t. This is natural—even though at the same time it’s horribly unnatural—supernatural, abnormal, weird”—he paused, at a loss for words. “There’s something grim, frightening … horrible about this. Something that doesn’t smack of human crime at all … Could be the work of an immensely powerful maniac, or a beast … or ———” He left the sentence unfinished.
“I know what you mean,” said Kinston, “and I don’t like it any more than you do.”
They threw a sheet over the recumbent form.
“The photographers and fingerprint boys will be here in a moment,” said the Inspector. “I think we can leave this to them now. I’ve got to do an awful lot of thinking about this. I want to do some checking up. I specially want to know if anything has escaped. I want to know if any person has escaped from any of the criminal lunatic-asylums.”
“I don’t think even a lunatic with superhuman strength could have done it. It’s a greater strength than that. You see, I’ve been examining those marks on the body”—he was speaking in short, jerky phrases, a sign of the strain and stress to which his mind was being subjected—“you see, Inspector, an ordinary man, such as you or I, would crush quite slowly, no matter how hard we tried to speed up our movements. We’d have to be a world weight-lifting champion to do anything like that, and even then we couldn’t do it quickly. It would take time for the muscular co-ordination to reach its peak. This wasn’t done like that at all. This was done by something immensely strong, something that could squeeze a man’s body as easily as you or I would squash a grape.”
“It’s as bad as that, is it?” queried the Inspector.
“Yes, it is,” said Morgan. “If I believed in mythology and folk lore I’d say that man had been picked up by a Titan, by a Frost Giant. I’d say he’d fallen foul of an evil Hercules. That Thor had smashed him with his hammer, or that Zeus had struck him with an invisible thunderbolt. It’s one of the most straightforward, and yet, at the same time, most baffling deaths I’ve ever come across …”
“I’m going back to the station,” said Kinston. “Do you want to hang on?”
“No, thanks,” said Morgan. “I’ve got a pretty strong stomach but it’s not that strong. I don’t want to stay here any longer with that. I’m a civilised man, and not normally afraid; I get blasé in this job, too. I could eat my dinner in a laboratory full of objects that would turn an ordinary man’s stomach inside out. But I’m not so blasé that deep down in my sub-conscious mind there lurks the fear that whatever did that may come back! I want company. I want to get away from this!”
“I’ll do some checking … I don’t like the thought of that thing loose.” The doctor and the pathologist left together. As an extra precaution Claud Kinston posted two constables on the door instead of one …
He made his way back to his office very deep in thought, as he drove through the stillness of the London night. “1960,” he told himself “I’m a civilised man living in a civilised community; there’s lights and laughter and music and song; television, radio, buses, advertisements, newspapers, everything that goes to make life modern and understandable. Everything, in fact, that goes to make life ordinary and prosaic … Then suddenly this happens, and it isn’t ordinary and prosaic any more. In the middle of the ordinary there comes the extraordinary. In the middle of the everyday comes the once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence. It’s as though the veil that we call contemporary life, with which we try to disguise from our poor little finite minds the great eternal mysteries of time and space. These things are thrust in upon us. Our veil is torn and we stand naked in soul and stripped bare in our minds, exposed to thoughts that are so penetrating, exposed to elemental forces so old and so vast that they’re too big for us. They crush us by their very immenseness. By their very size; by their very magnitude.” He drew a deep breath. “I wonder … I wonder what it was could kill a man in that way, and leave no other trace. What could walk into a man’s flat and crush him as a spider crushes a tiny fly. What could pick up a human being and frighten him to death and then squeeze the life from him as easily as a man squeezes water from a sponge? Anything natural! Anything human?”
The police car pulled up, he mounted the steps, passed quickly through the charge room, and so into his office.
His first call was to Records.
“I want th. . .
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