R. LaFevers - Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos

It was a small room, no bigger than a large closet really, with heavy curtains covering the east wall. Wigmere went over to the curtains and pulled them aside.

There was a door behind the curtains! A flat shiny metal door with no handles, only a seam running down the middle.

Wigmere pushed a button on the wall and they opened. I gasped. It was a lift. Right here in Somerset House. Amazing!

I followed him into the small compartment. He nodded at the fellow manning the control panel on the wall. “Level Six, please.” The man pushed a button, then the whole world dropped out from under my feet and my stomach nearly came out my nose.

I reached out and placed a hand against the wall to steady myself.

“All right?” Wigmere asked.

I nodded.

“Takes a bit of getting used to.”

I’ll say.

With a grind of gears and a lurch we reached Level Six. I followed Wigmere off the lift, none too sorry to have solid floor beneath my feet.

The excitement of the lift was quickly forgotten as I stared at the hustle and bustle all around me. Dozens and dozens of desks were set up in tidy rows. But that was the only neat thing about the place. Everything else was a jumbled mess. Men sat at desks stacked with old parchment, papyrus scrolls, and clay tablets. Telegraph machines tapped out messages in quick staccato bursts. Men scurried back and forth, carrying files and books. It was like a library gone mad.

A thoroughly modern library, I might add. There wasn’t a single gas lamp in sight. It was all electric lights!

“Welcome to Level Six, the heart of our operations,” Wigmere said, with no small amount of pride in his voice.

I estimated there were somewhere between twenty and thirty men (it was hard to tell because they all kept moving around). There were worktables and workstations and artifacts spilling about like so much forgotten rubbish. Everything was a tangled, disorderly mess, and it was absolutely lovely to behold! Well, except for the faint smell of curses that clung to the corners of the room.

Wigmere limped along at a rather furious clip. I had a hard time keeping up because I was so busy trying to take everything in.

We passed several large basins of quartzite and a huge sarcophagus made out of alabaster. Very curious. I’d never seen anything that big made out of alabaster before. A few feet away from that was a tub, a regular clawfooted bathtub like we had at home. Only this tub was full of thick reddish mud.

“Mud?” I asked.

“Yes. Nile River mud. We find it can sometimes absorb the curses and nullify them. What do you do when a curse escapes an artifact and works its way into a person?” he asked.

A vision of poor Isis flashed in my mind. “Oh, that’s never happened,” I said, eyeing the mud thoughtfully. It wasn’t strictly a lie. Isis isn’t a person.

We resumed walking and passed a wall of offices with large glass windows. In one of them, two men leaned forward, examining something on a table. An artifact of some sort. One of the men reached out and lifted it up.

I could see the air swirl around the artifact and the man’s arm, like heat waves rising up from the pavement in the dog days of summer. Suddenly, the man screamed and clutched his hand. His partner leaped up from the table and ran over to a switch on the wall and flipped it.

Immediately a buzzer sounded and the entire room erupted into frenzied activity. “Stay here,” Wigmere barked, then limped as fast as he could toward the commotion.

Needless to say, I followed.

A crew of operatives burst into the small office and dragged the man out into the main room, toward the large mud-filled tub.

As I drew closer, I could see the skin on the injured man’s hand hiss and bubble and blister all the way up to his wrist. There was the foul stink of sulfur in the air.

They shoved his arm into the tub, covering it completely in the Nile River mud.

A few seconds later they removed his arm from the tub and rinsed it off. We all watched the man’s arm closely. Slowly, like a serpent waking, the bubbling resumed and began working up toward his elbow. The poor fellow was close to panicking. The medic treating him looked to Wigmere for direction. “Now what, sir?”

“What kind of curse was it, Danver?” Wigmere asked the injured man.

“I d-don’t know, sir. We hadn’t gotten that far yet.” Poor Danver couldn’t take his eyes off his arm as the blisters and boils covered his elbow and continued upward.

Wigmere exploded. “You mean to tell me you touched a cursed object without knowing the nature or power of the curse?”

“Excuse me,” I said, worming my way forward. “Perhaps this might slow it down.” I reached up and lifted another of my amulets off my neck. Without touching Danver’s skin directly, I wrapped the leather cord with the amulet around his upper arm, like a tourniquet.

The bubbling boil of the curse lapped up against the tourniquet, then pulled back, like a wave at the seashore. Again it surged forward, and again the amulet repelled it. In the background I heard voices murmuring, “I say, jolly good,” and, “Clever, that.”

“This won’t hold all day.” My mind was scrambling, sorting through all the curse antidotes I knew. “Wax! We need wax. Do you have any?”

“Wax?” Wigmere said.

“Yes. Now, hurry. Please! ”

“How much?” one of the medics called out even as he began moving away.

“Enough to cover his whole arm up to his shoulder,” I called back.

People finally got the message and propelled themselves to action. I gave Danver my most confident look. “Don’t worry. This amulet should hold the curse off long enough for us to remove it.” I so hoped I was right about that.

I turned to Wigmere. “We’ll need to melt the wax. Do you have an electric coil or a chafing dish or something?”

He studied me closely, then nodded and barked out an order.

Before long there were men scurrying everywhere, finding the wax, breaking it into bits so that it would melt quickly, setting it up to melt. As they made the preparations, I checked Danver’s arm to see how it was doing.

A small sliver of the curse, like a fine thread, had just found its way under the tourniquet and was working its way to his shoulder. “We really need to hurry up with that wax!” I called out.

“Ready in two minutes,” the medic called back.

Danver’s eyes were practically rolling back in his head. “Don’t panic, please don’t panic,” I said. “Everything will be all right.” I think. I hope. I’d only done this twice, and only on artifacts, never on humans. But according to Hassam Fahkir in his ancient scroll on remedies for Egyptian magic, it should work.

Finally they brought a basin full of melted wax. “Take off his shirt,” I told the medic.

There was a general gasp at the thought of a man removing his shirt in front of a girl.

“Oh, stuff and nonsense! Do you want to remove this wretched curse or not?”

With a glance at Wigmere, the medic removed Danver’s shirt.

“The wax will be hot, but, um, it shouldn’t be any worse than the curse,” I warned.

Danver nodded. “Just get on with it,” he replied between clenched teeth.

“Right.”

I pulled the shallow dish closer. “Shove your arm in that, as far as it will go.”

Danver took a deep breath and did as I instructed. (I do so love a grownup who can follow instructions!)

He sucked in a breath, then the whole room fell silent as his arm sat bathed in the wax.

Keeping my hands clear of the curse-infected arm, I pushed on his shoulder to help get as much of his arm down in the wax as I could. Glancing around, I spotted a letter opener on the desk. I picked this up and used it to spread the wax so that it completely covered the skin.