By Kim Newman
“This tomb’s leaking sand,” said Fred Regent. “And beetles.”
Fine white stuff, hourglass quality not bucket and spade material, seeped from a vertical crack, fanning out around and between clumps of lush, long green grass. Black bugs glittered in morning sunlight, hornlike protrusions rooting through the overgrowth, sand-specks stuck to their carapaces. Fred looked up at the face of the tomb, which was framed by faux-Egyptian columns. The name bunning was cut deep into the stone, hemmed around by weather-beaten hieroglyphs.
It was the summer of 197—. Fred Regent, late of the Metropolitan Constabulary, was again adventuring with the supernatural. As before, his guide off life’s beaten track was Richard Jeperson, the most resourceful agent of the Diogenes Club, which remained the least-known branch of Britain’s intelligence and police services. All the anomalies came down to Jeperson. Last month, it had been glam rock ghouls gutting groupies at the Glastonbury Festival and an obeah curse on Prime Minister Edward Heath hatched somewhere inside his own cabinet; this morning, it was ghosts in Kingstead Cemetery.
Jeperson, something of an anomaly himself, scooped up a handful of sand and looked down his hawk nose at a couple of fat bugs.
“Were we on the banks of the great river Nile rather than on a pleasant hill overlooking the greater city of London,” said Jeperson, “I shouldn’t be surprised to come across these little fellows. As it is, I’m flummoxed. These, Fred, are scarabus beetles.”
“I saw Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb at the Rialto, Richard. I know what a scarab is.”
Jeperson laughed, deepening creases in his tanned forehead and cheeks. His smile lifted black moustaches and showed sharp teeth-points. The Man from the Diogenes Club sounded as English as James Mason, but when suntanned he looked more like an Arab, or a Romany disguised as Charles II. His mass of black ringlets was not a wig, though. And no gypsy would dress as gaudily as Richard Jeperson.
“Of course you do, Fred. I elucidate for the benefit of exposition. Thinking out loud. That is Sahara sand, and these are North African beasties.”
“Absolutely, guv’nor. And that bloody big dead one there is a scorpion.”
Jeperson looked down with amused distaste. The scorpion twitched, scuttled and was squashed under Jeperson’s foot.
“Not so dead, Fred.”
“Is now.”
“Let us hope so.”
Jeperson considered his sole, then scraped the evil crushed thing off on a chunk of old headstone.
For this expedition to darkest N6, he wore a generously bloused, leopard-pattern safari jacket and tight white, high-waisted britches tucked into sturdy fell-walker’s boots. His ensemble included a turquoise Sam Browne belt (with pouches full of useful implements and substances), a tiger’s-fang amulet that was supposed to protect against evil, and an Australian bush hat with three corks dangling from the rim. Champagne corks, each marked with a date in felt-tip pen.
“The term for a thing so out of place is, as we all know, an ‘apport,’“ said Jeperson. “Unless some peculiar person has for reasons unknown placed sand, scarabs and scorps in our path for the purpose of puzzlement, we must conclude that they have materialised for some supernatural reason. Mr. Lillywhite, this is your belief, is it not? This is yet another manifestation of the spookery you have reported?”
Lillywhite nodded. He was a milk-skinned, fair-haired middle-aged man with burning red cheeks and a peacocktail-pattern smock. His complaint had been passed from the police to the Diogenes Club, and then fielded to Jeperson.
“What is all this doing here?” asked Vanessa, Jeperson’s other assistant—the one everyone noticed before realising Fred was in the room. The tall, model-beautiful redhead wore huge sunglasses with swirly mint-and-yellow patterns on the lenses and frames, a sari-like arrangement of silk scarves that exposed a ruby winking in her navel, and stack-heeled cream leather go-go boots. Beside the other two, Fred felt a bit underdressed in his Fred Perry and Doc Martens.
“Appearing supernaturally, I should say, Vanessa,” said Jeperson. “That’s generally what apports do.”
“Not just the apports,” she went on. “All the obelisks and sphinxes. Oughtn’t this to be in the Valley of the Kings, not buried under greenery in London North Six?”
Jeperson dropped the sand and let the scarabs scuttle where they might. He brushed his palms together.
Vanessa was right. Everything in this section of Kingstead Cemetery was tricked out with Ancient Egyptian statuary and design features. The Burning tomb was guarded by two human-headed stone lions in pharaonic headdresses. Their faces had weathered as badly in a century as the original sphinx in millennia. All around were miniature sandstone pyramids and temples, animal-headed deities, faded blue and gold hieroglyphs and ankh-shaped gravestones.
“I can explain that, Miss ... ah?” said Lillywhite.
“Vanessa. Just Vanessa.”
“Vanessa, fine,” said the scholarly caretaker, segueing into a tour guide speech. “The motif dates back to the establishment of the cemetery in 1839. Stephen Geary, the original architect, had a passion for Egyptiana which was shared by the general public of his day. From the first, the cemetery was planned not just as a place for burying the dead but as a species of morbid tourist attraction. Victorians were rather more given to visiting dead relatives than we are. It was expected that whole families would come to picnic by grandmama’s grave.”
“If my gran were dead, we’d certainly have a picnic,” said Fred. Lillywhite looked a little shocked. “Well, you don’t know my gran,” Fred explained.
“They held black-crepe birthday parties for the many children who died in infancy,” the caretaker continued, “with solemn games and floral presents. Siblings annually gathered around marble babies well into their own old age. It’s not easy to start a graveyard from scratch, especially at what you might call the top end of the market. Cemeteries are supposed to be old. For a Victorian to be laid to rest in a new one would be like you or me being bundled into a plastic bag and ploughed under a motorway extension.”
“That’s more or less what Fred has planned,” said Jeperson.
“I can’t say I’m surprised. To circumvent the prejudice, Geary decided to trade on associations with ancient civilisations. If his cemetery couldn’t be instantly old, then at least it would look old. This area is Egyptian Avenue. Geary himself is buried here. Originally, there were three such sections, with a Roman Avenue and a Grecian Avenue completing the set. But the fashionable had a craze for Egypt. The Roman and Grecian Avenues were abandoned and overtaken. It was no real scholarly interest in Egyptology, by the way, just an enthusiasm for the styles. Some of the gods you see represented aren’t even real, just made up to fit in with the pantheon. A historian might draw a parallel between Ancient Egyptian obsession with funerary rites and the Victorian fascination with the aesthetics of death.”
Fred thought anyone who chose to spend his life looking after a disused cemetery must nurture some of that obsession himself. Lillywhite was an unsalaried amateur, a local resident who was a booster for this forgotten corner of the capital.
“It’s certainly ancient now,” said Fred. “Falling to pieces.”
“Regrettably so. Victorian craftsmen were good on surface, but skimped everything else. Artisans knew the customers would all be too dead to complain and cut a lot of corners. Impressive stone fronts, but crumbling at the back. Statues that dissolve to lumps after fifty years in the rain. Tombs with strong corners but weak roofs. By the 1920s, when the original site was full and children and grandchildren of the first tenants were in their own grave-plots, everything had fallen into disrepair. When the United Cemetery Company went bust in the early 1960s, Kingstead was more or less abandoned. Our historical society has been trying to raise money for restoration and repair work. With not much luck, as yet.”
“Put me down for fifty quid,” said Jeperson.
Fred wasn’t sure if restoration and repair would improve the place. The tombs had been laid out to a classical plan like miniature pyramids or cathedrals, and serpentine pathways wound between them. Uncontrolled shrubbery and ivy swarmed everywhere, clogging the paths, practically burying the stonework. A broken-winged angel soared from a nearby rhododendron, face scraped eyeless. It was the dead city of a lost civilisation, like something from Rider Haggard. Nature had crept back, green tendrils undermining thrones and palaces, and was slowly taking the impertinent erections of a passing humanity back into her leafy bosom.
“This is the source of your haunting?” asked Jeperson, nodding at the Bunning tomb.
Fred had forgotten for a moment why they were here.
“It seems to be.”
There had been a great deal of ghostly activity. Yesterday, Fred had gone to the newspaper library in Colindale and looked over a hundred and twenty years of wails in the night and alarmed courting couples. As burial grounds went, Kingstead Cemetery was rather sporadically haunted. Until the last three months, when spooks had been running riot with bells and whistles on. A newsagent’s across the road had been pelted with a rain of lightning-charged pebbles. A physical culture enthusiast had been knocked off his bicycle by ectoplasmic tentacles. And there had been a lot of sightings.
Jeperson considered the Bunning tomb. Fred saw he was letting down his guard, trying to sense what was disturbed in the vicinity. Jeperson was a sensitive.
“According to your report, Lillywhite, our spectral visitors have run the whole gamut. Disembodied sounds ...”
“Like jackals,” said Lillywhite. “I was in Suez in ‘56. I know what a jackal sounds like.”
“... phantom figures ...”
“Mummies, with bandages. Hawk-headed humans. Ghostly barges. Crawling severed hands.”
“... and now, physical presences. To whit: the scarabs and other nasties. Even the sand. It’s still warm, by the way. Does anyone else detect a theme here?”
“Spirits of Ancient Egypt,” suggested Vanessa.
Jeperson shot her a finger-gun. “You have it.”
Fred would have shivered, only ...
“Richard, isn’t there something funny here?” he said. “A themed haunting? It’s a bit Hammer Horror, isn’t it? I mean, this place may be done up with Egyptian tat but it’s still North London. You can see the Post Office Tower from here. Whoever is buried in this tomb ...”
“Members of the Bunning Family,” put in Lillywhite. “The publishing house. Bunning and Company, Pyramid Press. You can see their offices from here. That black building, the one that looks like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s called the Horus Tower.”
Fred knew the skyscraper, but had never realised who owned it.
“Yes, them. The Bunnings. They were just Victorians who liked the idea of a few hierogylphs and cat-headed birds in the way they might have liked striped wallpaper or a particular cut of waistcoat. You said it was a fashion, a craze. So why have we got authentic Egyptian ghosts, just as if there were some evil high priest or mad pharaoh in there?”
“George Oldrid Bunning was supposedly buried in a proper Egyptian sarcophagus,” said Lillywhite. “It was even said that he went through the mummification process.”
“Brains through the nose, liver and lights in canoptic jars?”
“Yes, Mr. Jeperson. Indeed.”
“That would have been irregular?”
“In 1897? Yes.”
“I withdraw my objection,” said Fred. “Old Bunning was clearly a loon. You might expect loon ghosts.”
Jeperson was on his knees, looking at the sand. The scarabs were gone now, scuttling across London in advance of a nasty surprise come the first frost.
“I’ve been trying to get in touch with the descendants for a while,” said Lillywhite. “Even before all this fuss. I was hoping they might sponsor restoration of the Bunning tomb. The current head of the family is George Rameses Bunning. He must maintain the family interest in Egypt, or at least his parents did. It appears George Rameses has his own troubles.”
“So I’d heard,” said Jeperson. “All dynasties must fail, I suppose.”
Fred had vaguely heard of the Bunnings but couldn’t remember where.
“Pyramid Press are magazine publishers,” said Jeperson, answering the unspoken query. “You’ve heard of Stunna.”
Vanessa made a face.
Stunna was supposedly a blokes‘ answer to Cosmopolitan, with features about fast cars and sport and (especially) sex. It ran glossy pictures of girls not naked enough to get into Playboy but nevertheless unclad enough for you not to want your mum knowing you looked at them. The magazine had launched last year with a lot of publicity, then been attacked with a couple of libel suits from a rival publisher they had made nasty jokes about, Derek
Leech of the Daily Comet. Stunna had just ceased publication, probably taking the company down with it. Fred realised he had heard of George Rameses Bunning after all. He was doomed to be dragged into bankruptcy and ruin, throwing a lot of people out of work. The scraps of his company would probably be gobbled up by the litigious Leech, which may well have been the point.
“Bunning and Company once put out British Pluck and The Halfpenny Marvel,” said Jeperson. “Boy’s papers. At their height of popularity between the wars. And dozens of other titles over the years. Mostly sensation stuff. Generations of lads were raised on the adventures of Jack Dauntless, RN, and the scientific vigilante, Dr. Shade. I think the masthead of Stunna bears the sad legend ‘incorporating British Pluck.”‘
“You think there’s a tie-in,” said Fred. “With all the pluck business. It’s a penny dreadful curse.”
Jeperson’s brow furrowed. He was having one of his “feelings,” which usually meant bad news for anyone within hailing distance.
“More than that, Fred. I sense something very nasty here. An old cruelty that lingers. Also, this is one of those ‘hey, look at me’ hauntings. It’s as if our phantoms are trying to tell us something, to issue a warning.”
“Then why start making a fuss in the last month? Any ghosts around here must have been planted ...”
“Discorporated, Fred.”
“Yes, that... they must have been dead for eighty years. Why sit quietly all that time but kick up a row this summer?”
“Maybe they object to something topical,” suggested Vanessa. “Like what’s Top of the Pops?”
“It’s not dreadful enough to be after the Bay City Rollers, luv,” said Fred.
“Good point.”
Jeperson considered the Bunning tomb, and stroked his ‘tache.
Fred looked around. The cemetery afforded a pleasant green dappling of shadow, and swathes of sun-struck grass. But Jeperson was right. Something very nasty was here.
“Vanessa,” said Jeperson. “Pass the crowbar. I think we should unseal this tomb.”
“But...,” put in the startled Lillywhite.
Jeperson tapped his tiger fang. “Have no fear of curses, man. This will shield us all.”
“It’s not that... this is private property.”
“I won’t tell if you don’t. Besides, you’ve already established that George Rameses Bunning has less than no interest in the last resting place of his ancestors. Who else could possibly object?”
“I’m supposed to be a guardian of this place.”
“Come on. Haven’t you ever wanted to open one of these tombs up and poke around inside?”
“The original Mr. Bunning is supposed to have had an authentic Egyptian funeral. He might be surrounded by his treasures.”
“A bicycle to pedal into the afterlife? Golden cigar cuspidors? Ornamental funerary gaslamps?”
“Very likely.”
“Then we shall be Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon.”
Fred thought that wasn’t a happy parallel. Hadn’t there been an effective curse on the tomb of King Tutankhamen?
Vanessa produced a crowbar from her BOAC hold-all. She was always prepared for any eventualities.
Fred thought he should volunteer, but Jeperson took the tool and slipped it into a crack. He strained and the stone didn’t shift.
“Superior workmanship, Lillywhite. No skimping here.”
Jeperson heaved again. The stone advanced an inch, and more sand cascaded. Something chittered inside.
Vanessa had a trowel. She cleared some of the sand and picked out dried-up mortar.
“Good girl,” said Jeperson.
He heaved again. The bottom half of the stone cracked through completely, then fell out of the doorway. The top half slid down in grooves and broke in two pieces. A lot more sand avalanched.
Fred tugged Lillywhite out of the way. Jeperson and Vanessa had already stepped aside.
A scarecrow-thin human figure stood in the shifting sands, hands raised as if to thump, teeth bared in a gruesome grin. It pitched forward on its face and broke apart like a poorly made dummy. If it were a Guy, it would not earn a penny from the most intimidated or kindly passerby.
“That’s not George Oldrid Bunning,” gasped Lillywhite.
“No,” said Jeperson. “I rather fear that it’s his butler.”
* * * *
There were five of them, strewn around the stone sarcophagus, bundles of bones in browned wrappings.
“A butler, a footman, a cook, a housekeeper and a maid,” said Jeperson. Under his tan, he was pale. He held himself rigidly, so that he wouldn’t shake with rage and despair. He understood this sort of horror all too well—having lost the memory of a boyhood torn away in a Nazi camp—but never got used to it.
The servant bodies wore the remains of uniforms.
Lillywhite was upset. He was sitting on the grass, with his head between his knees.
Vanessa, less sensitive than Jeperson, was looking about the tomb with a torch.
“It’s a good size,” she called out. “Extensive foundations.”
“They were alive,” bleated Lillywhite.
“For a while,” said Jeperson.
“What a bastard,” said Fred. “Old George Oldrid Bunning. He got his pharaoh’s funeral all right, with all his servants buried alive to shine his boots and tug their forelocks through all eternity. How did he do it?”
“Careful planning,” said Jeperson. “And a total lack of scruple.”
Lillywhite looked up. He concentrated, falling back on expertise to damp down the shock.
“It was a special design. When he was dying, George Oldrid contracted a master mason to create his tomb. It’s the only one here that’s survived substantially intact. The mason died before Bunning. Suspiciously.”
“Pharaohs had their architects killed, to preserve the secrets of their tombs from grave robbers. There were all kind of traps in the pyramids, to discourage looters.”
A loud noise came from inside the tomb. Something snapping shut with a clang.
Jeperson’s cool vanished.
“Vanessa?” he shouted.
Vanessa came out of the tomb, hair awry and pinned back by her raised sunglasses. She had a nasty graze on her knee.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Nothing a tot won’t cure.”
She found a silver flask in her hold-all and took a swallow, then passed it round. Fred took a jolting shot of brandy.
“Who’d leave a man-trap in a tomb? Coiled steel, with enough tensile strength after a century to bisect a poor girl, or at least take her leg off, if she didn’t have a dancer’s reflexes.”
“George Oldrid Bunning,” said Jeperson.
“Bastard General,” clarified Fred.
“Just so. He must have been the bastardo di tutti bastardi. It would have been in the will that he be laid personally to rest by his servants, with no other witnesses, at dead of night. They were probably expecting healthy bequests. The sad, greedy lot. When closed, the sarcophagus lid triggered a mechanism and the stone door slammed down. Forever, or at least until Vanessa and her crowbar. The tomb is soundproof. Weatherproof. Escape-proof.”
“There’s treasure,” said Vanessa. “Gold and silver. Some Egyptian things. Genuine, I think. Ushabti figures, a death-mask. A lot of it is broken. The downstairs mob must have tried to improvise tools. Not that it did them any good.”
The now-shattered stone door showed signs of ancient scratching. But the breaks were new, and clean.
“How long did they ...?”
“Best not to think of it, Lillywhite,” said Jeperson.
“In death, they got strong,” said Vanessa. “They finally cracked the door, or we’d never have been able to shift it.”
The little maid, tiny skull in a mob-cap, was especially disturbing. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen.
“No wonder the ghosts have been making a racket,” said Fred. “If someone did that to me, I’d give nobody any rest until it was made right.”
Jeperson tapped his front tooth, thinking.
“But why wait until now? As you said, they’ve had a hundred years in which to manifest their understandable ire. And why the Egyptian thing? Shouldn’t they be Victorian servant ghosts? I should think an experience like being buried alive by a crackpot with a King Tut complex would sour one on ancient cultures in general and Egypt in particular.”
“They’re trying to tell us something,” said Vanessa.
“Sharp girl. Indeed they are.”
Fred looked away from the tomb. Across the city.
The Horus Tower caught the light. It was a black glass block, surmounted by a gold pyramid.
“George Rameses Bunning is dying,” said Lillywhite. “A recurrence of some tropical disease. News got out just after Derek Leech Incorporated started suing Pyramid Press. It’s had a disastrous effect on the company stock. He’s liable to die broke.”
“If he’s anything like his great-great, then he deserves it,” said Vanessa.
Jeperson snapped his fingers.
“I think he’s a lot like his great-great. And I know what the ghosts have been trying to tell us. Quick, Fred, get the Rolls. Vanessa, ring Inspector Price at New Scotland Yard, and have him meet us at the Horus Tower immediately. He might want to bring a lot of hearty fellows with him. Some with guns. This is going to make a big noise.”
* * * *
Fred didn’t care to set foot inside the Horus Tower. Just thinking about what had been done in the building made him sick to his stomach. He was on the forecourt as the coughing, shrunken, handcuffed George Rameses Bunning was led out by Inspector Euan Price. Jeperson had accompanied the police up to the pyramid on top of the tower, to be there at the arrest.
Employees gathered at their windows, looking down as the boss was hauled off to pokey. Rumours of what he had intended for them—for two hundred and thirty-eight men and women, from senior editors to junior copy-boys—would already be circulating already, though Fred guessed many wouldn’t believe them. Derek Leech’s paper would carry the story, but few people put any credence in those loony crime stories in the Comet.
“He’ll be dead before he comes to trial,” said Jeperson. “Unless they find a cure.”
“I hope they do, Richard,” said Fred. “And he spends a good few years buried alive himself, in a concrete cell.”
“His Board of Directors were wondering why, with the company on the verge of liquidation, Bunning had authorised such extensive remodelling of his corporate HQ. It was done, you know. He could have thrown the switch tomorrow, or next week. Whenever all was lost.”
Now Fred shivered. Cemeteries didn’t bother him, but places like this—concrete, glass and steel traps for the enslavement and destruction of living human beings—did.
“What did he tell what’s-his-name, the architect? Drache?”
“It was supposed to be about security, locking down the tower against armed insurrection. Rioting investors wanting their dividends, perhaps. The spray nozzles that were to flood the building with nerve gas were a new kind of fire-prevention system.”
“And Drache believed him?”
“He believed the money.”
“Another bastard, then.”
“Culpable, but not indictable.”
The Horus Tower was equipped with shutters that would seal every window, door and ventilation duct. When the master switch was thrown, they would all come down and lock tight. Then deadly gas would fill every office space, instantly preserving in death the entire workforce. Had George Rameses Bunning intended to keep publishing magazines in the afterlife? Did he really think his personal tomb would be left inviolate in perpetuity with all the corpses at their desks, a monument to himself for all eternity? Of course, George Oldrid Bunning had got away with it for a century.
“George Rameses knew?”
“About George Oldrid’s funerary arrangements? Yes.”
“Bastard bastard.”
“Quite.”
People began to file out of the skyscraper. The workday was over early.
There was a commotion.
A policeman was on the concrete, writhing around his kneed groin. Still handcuffed, George Rameses sprinted back towards his tower, shouldering through his employees.
Jeperson shouted to Price. “Get everyone out, now!”
Fred’s old boss understood at once. He got a bullhorn and ordered everyone away from the building.
“He’ll take the stairs,” said Jeperson. “He won’t chance us stopping the lifts. That’ll give everyone time to make it out.”
Alarm bells sounded. The flood of people leaving the Horus Tower grew to exodus proportions.
“Should I send someone in to catch him?” asked Price. “It should be easy to snag him on the stairs. He’ll be out of puff by the fifth floor, let alone the thirtieth.”
Jeperson shook his head.
“Too much of a risk, Inspector. Just make sure everyone else is out. This should be interesting.”
“Interesting?” spat Fred.
“Come on. Don’t you want to see if it works? The big clockwork trap. The plans I saw were ingenious. A real economy of construction. No electricals. Just levers, sand and water. Drache kept to Egyptian technology. Modern materials, though.”
“And nerve gas?” said Fred.
“Yes, there is that.”
“You’d better hope Drache’s shutters are damn good, or half London is going to drop dead.”
“It won’t come to that.”
Vanessa crossed the forecourt. She was with the still-bewildered Lillywhite.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“George Rameses is back inside, racing towards his master switch.”
“Good grief.”
“Never fear, Vanessa. Inspector, it might be an idea to find some managerial bods in the crowd. Read the class register, as it were. Just make sure everyone’s out of the tower.”
“Good idea, Jeperson.”
The policeman hurried off.
Jeperson looked up at the building. The afternoon sun was reflected in black.
Then the reflection was gone.
Matte shutters closed like eyelids over every window. Black grilles came down behind the glass walls of the lobby, jaws meshing around floor-holes. The pyramid atop the tower twisted on a stem and lowered, locking into place. It was all done before the noise registered, a great mechanical wheezing and clanking. Torrents of water gushed from drains around the building, squirting up fifty feet in the air from the ornamental fountain.
“He’s escaped,” said Fred. “A quick, easy death from the gas and it’ll take twenty years to break through all that engineering.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Jeperson. “Fifteen at the most. Modern methods, you know.”
“The ghosts won’t rest,” said Lillywhite. “Not without revenge or restitution.”
“I think they might,” said Jeperson. “You see, George Rameses is still alive in his tomb. Alone, ill and, after his struggle up all those stairs, severely out of breath. Though I left the bulk of his self-burial mechanism alone, I took the precaution of disabling the nerve gas.”
“Is that a scream I hear?” said Vanessa.
“I doubt it,” said Jeperson. “If nothing else, George Rameses has just soundproofed his tomb.”