The Curse.

It has been 3 years since we opened the tomb of Anochmodon, the Golden Pharoah.

Of the ten of us who went in, Only I, Amelia Skinner, am alive.

I must start from the beginning.

We went into Cairo on 10th of May, 1919. By this time most of the tombs had been discovered or well and truly lost to mankind. My husband, Patrick, was certain he knew of the location of Anoch-Ka, the pyramid of the deceased Pharoah. He came of the tomb's location in one of two ways, I have now decided, since he was a secretive man by nature, keeping many from even I, his own wife. In december of 1918, he awoke from a dream, covered in sweat, drenching the sheets we had slept in. I remember it vividly as he began to remble about the "City in the sands". The doctors gave him a clean bill of health, but I was never so sure. He became obsessive, often taking long trips to the Africas. I feel it was most likely on one of those trips where he gained some nugget of information.

In Cairo, returning to the point, we stayed as a guest to a wealth landowner whom my husband had become aquainted, a Mr. Shier. Shier had moved into the city some years ago, saying that the climate agreed with him. He and my Husband had, apparently, gotten very drunk one night and Shier agreed to fund the whole venture.

Along with them came two of Shier's servants - Hamon and Duvais. Duvais, a frenchman, was a chubby and personable man, often singing old folk songs whenever bored. I came to know him well in our journey. Hamon was a gaunt man, the opposite to Duvais - often sticking close to Shier, keeping their whispering secret. I saw why Patrick and Shier became friends.

From Dublin, came Doctor Austin. A heavy smoker, always with a pipe hanging from his lips.

From Essex, one Professor Bixby and his wife, Emily. The professor always had a childlike quality to him, always astounded by history and science, odd from a man of his qualifications. Emily was a chatterbox, but nice enough.

The other 3 in our party were out guides. I never made any attempt to know them by name.

The professor, Shier and my husband all said the same thing in terms of location. So we soon set off from the city.

The caravan we travelled in was that of a trader called Hassan. He agreed to help us in exchange for a cut of the "treasure". Shier said there would be more than enough for everyone, not that I was interested you understand.

I was just happy seeing my Patrick happy. He had, prior to his epiphany in bed, been a stoic man. Gentle, kind, but very, very quiet. He always seemed to have a dark shadow following him, even when I had met him. I was more than glad to see him energised by the adventure, and to go along with him.

I would have followed him to the ends of the earth. And I guess I really did.

Eventually, we reached the location - a huge rocky plateau in the middle of nowhere. We wondered wether there was anything there at all, but, sure enough - A narrow stair was found under a huge rock to the side of the impass. Patrick said this was just the tip of the iceburg and ran, literally, down the stairs.

Like lambs to the slaughter we followed.

Our first casualty was one of the guides. At the bottom of the stairs was a huge drop into a deep abyss. The poor man fell down the stairs and... Well, we didn't hear him hit the bottom.

Cautiously now, we passed over the small path down to the hidden city, now visible to us in our position. The city was titanic - houses, statues and a huge temple towards the back of it, seemingly built into the rock face itself.

On the wall we held ourselves against, there were glyphic pictures, seemingly documenting the construction of the city and the life of the Pharoah.

We should have noticed the corpses piling up as we went along. But we often miss the most obvious things in front of our eyes.

We did however notice the warning. The huge visage of the Pharoah himself, both great and terrible, killing those around it with it's pure magnificence. The professor interpreted it as the possibilty of a curse, but we disregarded it in the heat of the moment.

On level footing, we entered the city, passing over the threshold, onto the hewn stone streets. The buildings were simple, for the workers.

Inside each building were the life possessions of the workers who lived there. Including their bodies. Mummified, laid in the beds they slept in. We had split up at this point, into 2 groups. I remember the other group finding a single, unmummified skeleton, in what seemed to be a guardhouse. Shier joked that the man was damned by occupation, but frankly no-one laughed. It was sad. The lengths people go to in service of a king or royal. It must have been that he was the last man to mummify as worker, as he was the only one not to be done in such a manner. It was as I said, sad, at least from our modernistic perspective.

We reached the temple. It was finely detailed, more so than the worker houses. It seemed to take hours to get up the stairs, though that may have been from the heat.

Inside, we were astonished. It was gold - the whole thing. In the centre was a huge sarcophagus - larger than any that had been discovered before. Most were inside of a large stone coffin, for want of a different word., and then inside another, and another, until the final golden death robe of the ancient king. As this was all gold, we had to assume that the rest of it was as well.

There was no way we could get out with it - even if Emily and myself were to help. Shier decided we should take back proof to Cairo and enlist help from there. Close by were several golden plates and jeweled ingots, and we were each given some to carry back. Patrick, Hamon, the professor and Shier each took a canopic jar - the storage of the organs of the deceased king - to take as consise proof of the discovery.

Then is when the troubles truly began.

As we went to leave the temple, a huge state in the centre of the city cracked. We heard it from where we were, just in time to see the hand of the god-king fall. Needless to say, we quickened our pace.

Eyes, followed us through the city. Incorporial eyes burning into our bodies. I felt quite... Odd. Emily later siad to me that she was a tad "turned on" by the experience at the time, despite our later experiences. An odd one she was.

As we reached the centre of the city, our path was blocked. The one we had previously taken was blocked by the arm of the statue. A cruel irony.

We went by a different route. At one point we came across a house in the worker district. It's inhabitants - 3 members of the family - were all in the doorway, lying as they were before, but moved. A haunting sight. We quickly passed, though as we did, both Duvais and I swear to have heard a shuffling from behind us.

At the gates of the city, we turned to look back at the temple.

There, at the top of the stairs, in all of his gruesome magnificence - the God-king himself stood. Just watching us. He was in all gold and red, I distinctly remember - a white cape attatched to him draped dead across the floor. His mask was... Deathly still. His beautiful face frozen, just staring.

None of us could say a thing. After a while of just staring... We walked out of the city.

A scream came from the city. A moan of sheer power and authority. The king spoke and his subjects answered in kind. We ran, as carefully as we could, back along the causeway.

Behind us, we saw, the skeletal figure of the last guard stumbled out of the gates after us, sword in hand.

We reached the stairs. Emily, poor girl, looked back again. She screamed and lost her footing, joining the guide in the darkness. The professor didn't notice until we had gotten far away.

I too looked back, but stifled my own yell. I saw the Pharoah, walking down the stairs of the temple.

As we managed to reach the exit, Doctor Austin and Shier pushed the stone across the entrance once more, blocking any of the walking dead from following us.

The professor, shaken as he was, and Doctor Austin both said we had shared some mass hallucination. Impossible. Ludicrous. Utterly insane.

We never enlisted any help in Cairo - choosing to just go our seperate ways once more, never to speak of this incident again.

2 months passed. Shier, we heard, fell ill. A sickness of the heart. It failed soon after the report we recieved.

Hamon went insane and walked into the desert. He loved his master, in the way of the somomites, I mean. Poor man. Duvais came and stayed with us as our guest.

The professor was lost without his wife. He lost his innocent demeanor, becoming a mean drunk and a worse person. He threw himself into the Thames. He joined his love. I don't pity him anymore.

The doctor passed to a malignant disease of the lungs. He had showed no signs of it before.

Our other guide was murdered. We recieved a telegram from his next of kin. He had left something to us in his will.

It was Shier's jar. One of the stomach.

The professor had the intestines.

Patrick's was of the lungs.

We can only assume Hamon's was the liver - it was never found.

The 3 of us in the house grew close, the survivors of some grand scheme of misfortune. Duvais often confided in me and I too him since Patrick wasn't the type to do so. We often saw Patrick in the house watching us in the garden. He was beginning to scare me.

One night, after I had retired to bed, there was an arguement. Patrick accused Duvais of trying to seduce me - tempting me away from him. Duvais was innocent, I knew it, what we talked of was nothing of that manner.

There was a gun shot. I ran down and saw waht remained of my poor Duvais, sprawled across the room. A revolver in my husband's hand. He was crying. He ran out of the house crying for mercy from God. I heard the next shot a minute later.

I am alone now. But I feel the fingers of death at my door.

I am unsteady on my feet. For no reason, I'm wasting away. IS this my punishment? To slowly fade and die? I didn't do anything more than the others! Why is my curse so much more... vile?!

I feel like I need to sleep.

I must... Sleep.