Crocodile on the Sandbank - Elizabeth Peters [91]
I stopped struggling. Evelyn and I stood with our arms wrapped around one another, frozen with horror. The Mummy’s hideous laughter resounded through the quiet night. It turned to face our window.
Then, at long last, from the deck to the left came the sound of voices. The crewmen were awake. The Mummy heard. It raised one bandaged arm and shook a paw menacingly in the direction of the approaching men. I could not see them, but I knew they had seen the Mummy; they had probably seen the entire incredible performance, which had been played out on the open deck.
With a series of acrobatic bounds, the bandaged figure left. Evelyn was limp in my grasp. I shook her, none too gently.
“Lie down,” I ordered. “You are safe, Evelyn; I must go to Lucas.”
She slumped down onto the floor, and I scrambled through the window—no easy task in my voluminous night garments. I am afraid I displayed some part of my limbs as I crawled out onto the deck, but I was past worrying about that, and the crewmen were in no condition to notice my lack of dignity. I saw them as I got to my feet; they were clustered in a dark mass at the end of the deck, huddling together like silly sheep afraid of a wolf.
Lucas was still motionless.
I turned him over, not without difficulty; he was a heavy man, and would one day be fat if he continued to indulge himself. He did not appear to be injured; his pulse was strong, if a little too quick, and his color was good. But his breath came and went in the oddest whistling gasps and from time to time his whole body quivered in a kind of muscular spasm.
At first the men would not approach, and when they finally crept forward they refused to touch Lucas, even to carry him to a cabin. Reis Hassan finally came; his whiplash voice roused the men. I fancied they were almost as afraid of him as they were of the supernatural—but not quite. As soon as they had placed Lucas on his bed, they fled.
Hassan remained, standing just within the doorway, with his arms folded across his broad chest.
Never had I so regretted that I had not learned Arabic instead of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Hassan was not anxious to explain himself, and my incoherent questions were probably as unintelligible to him as his answers were to me. I thought he was rather ashamed of himself, but the cause of his shame was not easy to ascertain. He had slept too soundly, that much I was able to understand. All the crew had slept. It was not a natural sleep. It was like a spell—like magic. Otherwise they would, of course, have rushed to answer my call for help.
That much I grasped, or thought I grasped. It did not reassure me. I dismissed Hassan, after ordering him, as well as I could, to keep a man on watch for the remainder of the night. Lucas demanded my attention; and I was uneasily aware of the fact that I could no longer rely on my crew, not even my captain. If they had not already been frightened by tales of the Mummy, the night’s adventure would have done the job.
Lucas was still unconscious. I did not dare consider the nature of the force that had struck him down so mysteriously; after examining him for a wound, and finding none, I decided to treat his condition as I would an ordinary faint. But none of my measures succeeded. His eyes remained closed; his broad chest rose and fell in the strange, stentorious breathing.
I began to be frightened. If this was a faint, it was an unnatural one. I rubbed his hands, slapped cold cloths on face and breast, elevated his feet—to no avail. Finally I turned to Evelyn, who was standing in the open doorway watching me.
“He is not…” She could not finish the sentence.
“No, nor in any danger of dying,” I replied quickly. “I don’t understand what is wrong with him.”
“I can’t bear it,” Evelyn whispered; and then, as I started to speak,