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darkness, invaded by beetles, of course did not see the Med-jai leader step from the darkness to lock the coffin lid tight, with eight gold keys connected as one. The embalmers lilted the heavy sarcophagus lid and set it into place, sealing it airtight with a whoosh; the Med-jai leader again used the strange eight-sided key, locking the sarcophagus lid.
    “Here you will remain,” the Med-jai leader said softly, (and yet Imhotep, within the sealed coffin heard these words, echoing within his small world). “Sealed within, undead for all of eternity.”
    The deed complete, the Med-jai leader folded the many-sided key into a small, octagonal, golden puzzle box.
    As his followers gathered about him, the Med-jai leader said quietly, “We must take all precautions that He Who Shall Not Be Named never be released from his imprisonment, for he would be a walking disease, a plague upon mankind, an unholy eater of flesh with the strength of ages, power over even the sands themselves, with the glory of invincibility.”
    Around him, the Med-jai priests nodded gravely; they knew— even as Imhotep himself, trapped with his beetle friends within the slime-sealed sarcophagus knew —that such was the price of that most horrible of curses, the hom-dai. That was why, never before, no matter how severe the infamy, had any villain ever been so punished.
    Using many ropes, into a pit where the black slime boiled and roiled, the embalmers lowered the heavy sarcophagus, the muck splashing up over it, then streaming down its sides like melting candle wax, only to be sucked into the seams of the granite casement, until—as when the black liquid had vanished into Anck-su-namun’s mummy—the sarcophagus had drunk the pit dry of the viscous fluid, its sides clean, all of it clean and dry, not a bead of dampness remaining.
    The embalmers, pulling upon the many ropes, withdrew the sarcophagus from the now parched pit and, at the Med-jai leader’s bidding, carted the granite casement to its chosen burial site.
    Within his cold hell, the skittering beetles upon him and within him, Imhotep knew the ramifications of the portentous curse his burial carried with it, the hom-dai. If he were to raise himself, and his beloved Anck-su-namun, from their respective places in the underworld, they would together be unconquerable; they would unleash upon the world an infection so vile, so indomitable, that a cataclysmic ending would come to all living things . . . all but Imhotep and Anck-su-namun.
    Perhaps, like his priests before him, Imhotep had been driven insane by the torture of living mummification.
    And yet the muffled, tongueless screams that emerged from the living mummy in the coffin within the granite sarcophagus, onto which sand and dirt were rudely being shoveled, seemed to threaten revenge and were tinged with a chilling promise of inevitable triumph.
    They buried him in the temple courtyard, near the base of the looming statue of Anubis ( The Book of the Dead returned to its hiding place), where the jackal-headed death god could look sternly down on He Who Shall Not Be Named. For many hundreds of years Anubis, and armed generations of Med-jai, watched the grave of Imhotep, until the sands of time and the Sahara had all but hidden the ruins of Hamanaptra, the decayed head of Anubis barely visible above the shifting desert’s dry tides.
    And yet, as civilizations lived and died, came and went, sealed within his coffin, with his scarab companions . . .
    . . . Imhotep lived!

  PART TWO  
    The Mummy’s Return
    The Sahara—1925

  3  
    Legion of Lost Men
    U ncovered by the unintentional excavation efforts of a recent sandstorm, the ruins of the temple complex at Hamanaptra poked from the sand like the sun-bleached bones of some unfortunate desert wanderer who had died of thirst. Once grand, now partly crumbled pylons proudly bore the hieroglyphic record of gods and kings; a scattering of wind-worn stone columns and partial walls remained