The Doomsday Key

Time stretched to a razor's edge.

Pain tore through her.

She felt the spear tip on her tongue.

Still, she turned.

"Stop!" Gray finally called out.

She let go. She slumped, sliding off the impaling spear and onto the floor. Distantly, a third gong sounded.

Three spirals, three gongs.

Her vision darkened at the edges, but she saw the spikes pull back, retracting slowly toward the roof. With her skull on the floor, she heard huge gears turning below, like listening to God's pocket watch.

Closer at hand, the cross straightened and righted itself.

Gray was suddenly at her side. He scooped her up and dragged her onto his lap. She curled around him, hugging him. He held her tight.

"You did it. Look."

He lifted her higher in his arms. She stared out across the room.

As the gears wound below, each of the three spirals began to flip, revealing false floors. The sections rotated full around. The spiral sides vanished, turning upside down to reveal what had been hidden for all these centuries.

Bolted to the underside of each floor was a glass cradle.

As the three floors settled to a stop, the three cradles swung in their stanchions.

Even from here, Seichan knew they weren't babies in those oversized cradles, but bodies.

The cradles were actually caskets.

"It's the tombs," Gray said.

Across the chamber, the door unsealed, and the slab pulled back up. The others rushed into the chamber.

Wallace's eyes were huge. "You did it!"

"Gray...?" Rachel called out.

Tears streamed down her face. She must have thought he was dead. Relief and horror mixed in her expression at finding him alive but covered in blood.

Seichan tried to stand but was too weak.

Gray lifted her to her feet. He supported her with one arm. Blood still flowed from her stabbed cheek, but not as heavily. Wallace offered his handkerchief. She balled it up and pressed it to her face.

Gray stared at her, his eyes questioning. She nodded and took a stumbling step out of his arms. It was the hardest thing she'd ever done. But she didn't belong there.

Rachel rushed to him and helped bind Gray's hand.

Wallace came with Kowalski. "They're glass coffins..."

"Of course they are," Kowalski said.

Gray gave his bandage a final cinch. Blood still dripped from his fingertips as he pointed toward the tombs. "We need to find that key."

4:08 P.M.

Gray knew where to look first.

He led the others to the one casket that was unlike the other two. Fine dust covered the glass, but the motif was clear. Flashlights focused on it, their glows igniting its brilliance.

The sides and top of the coffin were forged out of intricately designed panels of stained glass. The colors were as bright as jewels, and the images all too familiar. Sculpted out of shards of glass and slivers of gems were rows of tiny hawks, jackals, winged lions, beetles, hands, eyes, feathers, along with angular stylized symbols.

"They're Egyptian hieroglyphs," Wallace noted with a gasp.

"Formed out of stained glass." Rachel sounded equally awed.

Wallace leaned closer. "The glyphs, though, are very old. Early Egyptian. Old Kingdom, I imagine. The Church must have copied them from some original funeral stele. Perhaps they were once carved on that sarcophagus in Bardsey. Before scrubbing them off, some monk must have kept a record, then re-created them here in stained glass."

"Can you read it?" Gray asked, hoping it held some clue to the key.

Wallace ran a finger through the dust. "'Here lies Meritaten, daughter of King Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti. She who crossed the seas and brought the sun god Ra to these cold lands.'"

By the time the professor was done, his hands trembled as much as his voice. "The dark queen." He turned, his eyes wide with shock. "She's an Egyptian princess."

"Could that be possible?" Rachel asked.

Gray stared through the stained glass. He remembered Father Rye's tale of Bardsey Island, of the claim that the wizard Merlin was buried there in a glass coffin. Was this the true source of that myth? Had word whispered out of the entombment here, confusing the name Meritaten with Merlin?

Gray ran the mythic history of the British Isles through his head. He remembered the priest's description of the war of the Celts against a tribe of black-skinned monsters, the Fomorians. To the Celts, a tribe of displaced Egyptians would have seemed foreign and strange. And according to those same stories, the Fomorians shared their abundant knowledge of agriculture, a skill well honed by the Egyptians along the Nile.

Wallace straightened, deep in thought. "Some historians claim the ancient stone builders of England might have been Egyptian. At a Neolithic burial site at Tara in Ireland, they found a body decorated with ceramic faience beads, a skill not known to such people-but the beads were almost identical to those found in the tomb of Tutankhamen. And in England, near the city of Hull, massive boats were discovered preserved in a peat marsh. They were distinctly Egyptian in design and dated to 1400 B.C., well before Vikings or any other seafaring people came to our shores. I myself viewed an ancient stone at the British Museum, unearthed by a farmer in Wales. It shows a figure in Egyptian garb with pyramids in the background."

Wallace shook his head, as if still struggling to believe it himself. "But here...here's true proof."

"And the key?" Seichan reminded them, coughing hoarsely, still holding a bloody cloth to her cheek.

Beyond the glass, a figure lay in the coffin. A bronze clasp closed the hinged lid. Gray knew they had to disturb the rest of this Egyptian princess. He reached and undid the clasp. He pulled the lid up and leaned it back.

A sweetly sick scent wafted out.

"My God!" Rachel exclaimed.

Though withered and desiccated, the body was still strangely preserved. Long black hair draped the reclining figure. Her dark skin was stretched smooth. Even her eyelashes were intact. Fine cloth wrapped her body from toe to neck. A gold crown topped her head, clearly Egyptian in design from the decorations in lapis lazuli.

The only other exposed parts of her body were her hands. They were folded over her chest, clutching a stone jug carved with more hieroglyphs. The jar was sealed on top with a gold lid in the shape of a hawk's head.

"Look at her right hand," Rachel said.

Gray noted the missing index finger.

Wallace's attention fixed on the stone-and-gold jug. "The design looks like a canopic jar. Used to hold the embalmed organs of a king or queen."

Gray knew they had to look inside. The Doomsday key had always been connected to the body of the dark queen. He reached into the casket and slipped the heavy container from the queen's withered fingers.

"I wouldn't do that," Kowalski mumbled and backed up a step. "No way, no how. Thing's got to be cursed."