“Yes.”
He came over to her and drew her into his arms, hugging her tightly. She was touched by the gesture; she had thought that he didn’t want her going because he was so ambitious, and he liked to work together, with her at his beck and call whenever he had an idea.
But he seemed genuinely concerned.
She drew away from him. He was so gorgeous.
“It’s okay. I’ll see to the house and his things. I owe Cutter that much. And I want to have a funeral for him. Then I’ll be back. It will all be fine. Really,” she assured him.
“No. That’s not what will happen. You’ll go home, you’ll see old friends. You won’t want to come back here.”
“I left as a teenager. My life is here,” she said. “I’ll be back.”
He wagged a finger at her. “If you’re not back immediately, I’ll be down there to get you. I’ll take care of you. And if there’s anything bad, well…I’m psychic, you know.”
She laughed. “No, I didn’t know. But by all means. Key West is beautiful. Come on down.”
He sniffed.
At last he left, still offering dire warnings to her.
She needed to pack, but she wandered out to the porch and gazed at the pool she shared with the others who lived in the group of old bungalows. She stared at the water.
Cold water. Even heated, it was still cold, in her mind.
Key West had warm water. Beautiful, warm water.
A sudden scream startled her and brought her back inside. She had a habit of keeping the television on for company. One of the movie channels was running an all-day marathon of classic horror movies.
Someone was running from a werewolf.
She smiled and sat, and then stretched out on her sofa, watching the television. As she did so, her eyes grew heavy. A nap would be great; she had tossed and turned through the night.
As she felt herself nodding off, she thought about fighting sleep.
She knew that she would dream.
It seemed that a scene from a movie was unfolding. The house was distant at first, sitting on its little spit of land. The water around it was aqua and beautiful, as it could only be around Florida and the Caribbean.
But then dark clouds covered the soft blue of the sky, and the ocean became black, as if it were a vast pit of tar.
The camera lens within her dreaming eye came closer and closer, and the old Victorian with its gingerbread fa?ade came clearer to her view. She heard a creaking sound and saw the door was open, that the wind was playing havoc with the hinges.
She was in the house again, and she heard the screams and the wailing, and she saw her father, as she had seen him that day, holding her mother, the sound of his grief terrible. She ran toward him, screaming herself, calling for her mother.
Then Cutter himself came running down the stairs, crying out in horror. He sank down and she felt herself freeze, just standing there as she had on that day.
Then her mother and father and Cutter all faded to mist, and she stood in the empty house, alone. There were boxes and objects, spiderwebs and dust, and there was something else in the house as well, something that seemed like a small black shadow, and then seemed to grow…dark, stygian, filling the house with some kind of evil.
The mummy rose from its sarcophagus and stared at her with rotted and empty eyes. It pointed at the black shadow, and its voice was as dry and brittle as death as it warned, “The house must have you. It’s up to you. Now you—you must come, and you must stop it from growing, from escaping. It’s loose, you see, the evil is on the loose, and it’s growing.”
The mummy wasn’t real. The mummy was dead. Liam had said so.
Terror filled her. She heard her name called. She turned. Liam was there, a tall, lanky teenager, reaching out to her. “Come here, come to me, it isn’t real, the mummy is dead, it’s in your imagination, in all the stories. Don’t believe in it, Kelsey—take my hand.”
There seemed to be a terrible roar. She turned, and the mummy was a swirling pile of darkness, a shadow, and the darkness was threatening to consume her.
Kelsey awoke with a start. She was in her charming living room, in her charming bungalow apartment, and she had fallen asleep with the television on.
And the movie channel she watched was showing Boris Karloff in The Mummy.
She laughed aloud at herself, turned off the TV, and decided that she was going to get things done, batten down the house, pack so she could leave in the morning, and then get a good night’s sleep. She wasn’t a coward; she had spent her childhood with Cutter, and really, she had to have some kind of sense of adventure.
I owe you, Cutter! I’m so sorry. I should have come to see you. I never should have let you die alone like that.
Please forgive me.
She wasn’t afraid.
The house was just a house.
And Cutter’s mummy was just preserved flesh that could now find a good home in a museum. Everything in perspective.
Cutter himself needed to rest at last, in peace.
She would see to it.