Chapter 41

[seymoure]

Chapter 41
“The First”

The winds of the Sahara were as stinging and hot as Ethel Muntz remembered them. She had been in this desert so many times that she had lost track.

She even recognized the location. She was about a quarter mile from the Valley of the Kings and the Pyramids.

She wondered why the thing that had been known as Damien Kane had sent her here. This was a place she knew well, from personal experience as well as mounds of research. She had sent her fictional sleuth to these arid spaces a dozen times in the last few years.

She knew that this was some kind of mystery. She would have to figure out what she needed to do and then do it. But at least she didn’t feel lost.

She didn’t feel lost until she reached the top of a dune and saw what should not be there.

What should have been the Valley of the Kings was a huge body of water. It was at least a lake, it could have been more. The water stretched out to the horizon.

She was glad that whatever had been done to return her to a healthy body had been done. She was breathing heavily, but the woman who had stood in the hotel room couldn’t have made it up the hill.

But what she saw at the top of the dune was enough to have knocked her off her feet.

There was nothing to do but go to the water and find out what, besides the fact that this wasn’t the world she knew, she was going to have to do.

The stinging wind was replaced by an ocean breeze. She could smell the salt water as she had back in Cape Cod as a child.

She noticed that there was no life on the beach around her. Her eyes fell to the sand beneath her feet and saw no sea shells or kelp or any other proof of the kind of beach she knew.

She looked up and noticed that there were no gulls of any kind. She had always known the sound of waves, which there were, mixed inseparably with the call of the gulls.

Ethel Muntz was nothing if not curious. So she decided to test the water.

Then came a, well, unusual thing, even for this place. As she stepped on the water, it receded from her foot. Where ever she stepped the water wasn’t there to touch her.

She walked out to a spot that should have found her waist deep in the water. Instead she was in the middle of an air pocket, surrounded by water.

She wondered if Moses felt something like this.

She reached out her hand, and the water did not back away from her arm. Her fingers felt the cool water for a good moment.

Then, something strong grabbed Ethel Muntz by the hand and began to drag her into the dark water.

© 2005 by C. Wayne Owens