Carole Douglas - Brimstone Kiss

According to one reputable-looking Web source, the spirit went to a Hall of Judgment, which sounded a lot like the two Kephs' reception chamber. After passing seven gates, the wandering corpse had to face the judgment of Osiris, god of the netherworld, in a weighing of the heart ceremony in the presence of Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the dead, and the whole darn Egyptian set of forty-two gods. The heart was the only organ left in the body just to star in this final ceremony. A Weight Watcher's fear of the weekly scale was puny by comparison.

Could Las Vegas be the eternity that lurked beyond the ancient Egyptian river journey of the dead? Were there so many Egyptians here at the Karnak because they'd been crossing over for centuries? The royal twins' reception hall was beneath the surface of the desert. An entire Egyptian necropolis and city could lurk under all this Nevada sand, a secret Area 51 for aliens from Earth's past inner space, rather than outer space.

I kept skimming some of the hundreds of Web sites on Egyptian customs and beliefs, looking for a reason for the Kephs being in the here and now. I played hooky too, taking a detour to museum sites, comparing the loot there to what I'd seen in the netherworld at the Karnak hotel. Even if it was reproduction, the Karnak stuff was worth millions.

A Web page about the tomb of Tutankhamun reminded me of the attack hyena that shared the young pharaoh's cute modern nickname, King Tut. I gazed on color photos of the boy ruler's impressive mummy case, tomb furnishings, the gold and lapis lazuli, the exquisite collars and bangles.

Talk about a vintage treasure trove! Art Deco style was influenced by the art and artifacts Howard Carter discovered in Tut's tomb. I loved that period, but Art Deco furniture would never fit in the cozy late-forties atmosphere of the Enchanted Cottage.

But the gold, piles of it, was beautifully wrought. And the tall gold lily in the pot, maybe five feet high…There, found in King Tut's tomb, was the duplicate of the pair of artifacts flanking Keph and Keph's paired thrones!

I opened my cell phone and took my first gander at the photos I'd managed to take surreptitiously while a guest of the royals. Yup, the same paired artifacts.

I went back to the Web site, eagerly reading the text beside the online photo.

The weird dangling forms I'd seen both online and at the Karnak were Imiut fetishes!

So what were Imiut fetishes? A stuffed or decapitated animal skin tied by its tail to a pole which was, in turn, inserted into a flower-pot-like stand. The skin, usually from a leopard or a bull, was sometimes wrapped in bandages. Its tail often ended in a papyrus flower. In some depictions, the skin dripped blood into the pot. Gruesome!

The ones in Tut's tomb and the Karnak throne room were stylized, gilded versions.

The fetish was originally connected with a god named Imiut-"He Who is in His Wrappings," wrappings as in "mummy." He eventually became an aspect of Anubis, the jackal-headed god who evolved into the gatekeeper of the underworld and who protected the dead as they journeyed there. Anubis wasn't so much a death god as a god of dying and therefore associated with embalming and funerals. He was also the patron of lost souls and therefore…gulp!…orphans.

We have a patron, Irma crowed.

I sat back in Snow's cushy chair, sipped the Albino Vampire Grizelle had sent, and then huffed out a sigh. My shoulders ached, not just from being hunched over a computer screen but from holding up the slippery silk velvet of my vintage gown, which wanted to become an off-the-shoulder style. Who knew sedentary scholarship could be so wearing?

I drank deeper of the Albino Vampire to unchain my brain and relax my shoulders. The alcohol had an immediate effect of loosening my inhibitions and opening my mind. I leaned toward the weird onscreen image again. Something about these ghoulish and oddly undecorative decorative objects had bothered me from the moment I spotted them. It had been suspicion at first sight.

They simply weren't grand and gorgeous enough to flank pharaonic thrones.

Like I'm an expert in Egyptian funerary objects. Still… I studied the dangling beheaded object. It gave me the creeps and seeing a pair of them placed so close to those entwined twins creeped me out even more.

Headless skins were hardly an elegant accessory for a throne room. Keph and Keph had intentionally placed symbols of… embalming…next to their thrones?

Reading further, I found the blue lotus-the lily topping the golden pole-closed nightly only to reopen with the morning sun and was a symbol of rebirth. So a symbol of dead flesh combined with one of renewal…could this odd object embody a ritual by which the dead were returned to life?

I wanted to pound my head to jolt out the fugitive thoughts rattling around the far reaches of my brain.

Were Keph and Keph flanked by evidence that they had been buried but still lived? Did they flaunt the Imiut fetishes that were meant to entomb them for eternity as banners to show what fate they had escaped to enjoy a double undead life hereafter? To show they now lived forever? Immortal undead… vampires?

What if Howard Hughes wasn't the flower of Vegas vampiredom? What if these warped, hidden creatures were the king and queen of the ancient vampire breed and they were gathering armies under the city?

What if they weren't the only ones? That would explain why the Imiut fetishes were found in Tut's tomb and in others going back to the First Dynasty. The fetish is still considered "strange" by Egyptologists despite its link to the bandages used in mummification.

King Tut had died young, about age nineteen. So had Loretta's European vampire prince-except Prince Krzysztof died the vampire's true death six centuries after his fifteen-century birth: beheaded, then buried in Sunset Park. He remained in his grave for sixty years until Ric and I found his skeleton with a coin in the skull's fleshless mouth. Could Tut also have been beheaded, proving him a vampire?

Alas, an article I found online written by modern radiologists said the original 1925 autopsy X-rays showed the skull attached rigidly to the cervical spine, but further research revealed intriguing contradictions. Those same radiologists, examining better X-rays taken in 1968, noted a "bright beaded line" of solidified resin that might have masked a possible severing.

The mummy was stuck fast to its coffin by hardened embalming liquids used to anoint it, so Howard Carter's team cut it into large pieces. (Poor Tut!) They sliced off the arms and legs and halved the trunk. But-and here my instincts quickened-King Tut's head, cemented to its lavish golden mask by the solidified resins, was severed by the archeologists and removed from the mask with hot knives. So he had been beheaded in 1925, millennia past his burial date.

Egyptian antiquities authorities now guard his mummy as closely as Quicksilver guards me, but they did allow a CT scan back in 2005. This examination showed a fracture at "the first cervical (topmost) vertebra and the foramen magnum (large opening at the base of the skull)." There was, according to the scientists, no way to know if this happened during the ancient embalming process or if the rough handling by Carter's crew caused it. The king may have been decapitated back in 1327 BC after all.

One way or another, more than three thousand years ago or less than one hundred, Tutankhamun had lost his royal head.

I also had a huge "Aha!" moment reading this extremely suggestive notation about the Tut skull scans: "He has large front incisors and the overbite characteristic of other kings of from his family (the Tuthmosid line)."

Of course, even in the post-Millennium Revelation world authorities like to hush up finding vampires under every cultural icon. No one would thank an amateur like me for this theory.