SHORT STORY: DIVING ADVENTURE WAS CURSED - I AWAIT MY TURN TO DROWN

 The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb

The evil that befell us after diving the Salem Express annoying the guardian of the Egyptian pyramid

(Creative Writing assignment - fiction based on True Diving expedition to the Red Sea)

FARSIDE CARTOON

BY STEPHEN WEIR © The thing about worn-out tropes and stale-dated figures of speech, is that life doesn't get any better when you drop one of these oft repeated yawn bombs. Might even make life worse.

Yeah, there are always a few exceptions. I’ll give you that if you are ambling through an orchard, it is useful to remember that the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree. Heed the word or you may soon be wearing a Granny Smith crown on your head.
"The only old-fashioned meme that I pay any attention to these days is the Mummy’s Curse," I whispered to the young secret agent who was lying beside me under my wobbly desk. "You know, the curse is that death or misfortune will fall upon those who disturb a pharaoh’s tomb.”
I sighed and then rolled over on my side, putting my chin in my hand. I looked over at the secret agent I liked to call the CSIS Kid. We’d been on the floor of my attic office for four hours now, and it just became obvious that my spouting of private trippy tropes wasn’t going to bore him back to his squad car parked on the street outside. No, he wasn’t budging until he heard and recorded the mystical voice that often spoke to me from the hole in the floor. Canada’s Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) takes reports of UFO sightings, zombie attacks, and talking houses like mine seriously!
“What about it, Gramps?” he sneered at me.
“What about, what about it, Kid?” I sneered back at the CSIS Kid.

“What about you get your Goober in the woodwork to chime in? Or did you put him to sleep with all this cliché bullshit?” said the CSIS Kid.
“No. I am here. What do you want?” shouted a voice from down the round hole in the floor between Junior and me.

Wide-eyed, mouth open, the CSIS Kid and I stared at each other. The floor had spoken, a wavering senior citizen warble. He and I had talked many times before, but I never expected it would happen in front of company, especially when the short arm of the law carried a very big gun. (Did I mention the CSIS Kid was very short, which is why he liked to wear high heeled Mountie boots with spurs?)

“Who are you?” asked the CSIS Kid in his Big Boy police voice.
“A.Y. Who did you think? The hole in the floor barked back.
"He says he is A.Y. Jackson. Ya know, one of Canada’s most revered painters," I stage-whispered to the prone secret agent man.
"This attic was where the Group of Seven used to come to frame their paintings. Emily Carr too, until her pet monkey defecated on the floor next to your hand." I pointed to a brown spot on the floor. "A.Y. and the other nine painters tossed her. The National Art Gallery won’t let me paint over the spot, so watch yourself there."
"I want you to take Mr. Policeman to Cairo; the curse must be dealt with, or you will soon be victim number five," he yelled at me. Damn, he must have heard me repeat the Mummy’s Curse to the CSIS Kid! A.Y.’s voice loudly rolled out of the hole like smoke out of my 100-year-old chimney.
Wish I had an all-day sucker for The Kid. He sputtered, squirmed, acting half his age. I pulled him out from under the desk.
Bonus points. Both my computer and that cold/old cuppa Starbucks stayed in place, and I didn’t drag him over the brown spot. The adventure started accident-free, but could I get him out the front door alive? If only he would stop hollering that the head of his Security division was no “Mummy Dummy” and would probably give his 'sphinxter' a kick for asking for two free tickets to Cairo.
I didn’t laugh. Neither did the House.
Here's hoping that the office spirit wasn't taking his diatribe to heart. I know A.Y.’s trick all too well. The staircase pulling away from the wall when you take that first step at the top of the stairs. Or the radiator shooting hot steam in the face as you sit down to put on your shoes. And the biggest annoyance: the flower box over the front door having an early fall, literally.
My armed friend finally caught my evil eye and my hand swipes across my throat, signalling him to be silent. Thank Christ, he went out peacefully like every ghost fearing human should.
It was a hot June 24th, the longest day of the year. We set up camp - a picnic table in the outer regions of our large neighbourhood park. We sat near a wading pool that had more yapping dogs than kids cooling themselves off. Silence is indeed golden, but we needed to be as far away as possible from the century-old brick washroom and storage shed next to the soccer pitch. Believe me, when it comes to A.Y., all the neighbourhood walls have ears. For what I was about to say, we had to be out of range from any old structure that might be part of my House’s brick brigade.
"If we go to Cairo today, I’ll probably be dead before the sun sets behind the Great Pyramid of Giza. And I wouldn’t put much stock in you making it home alive either.”
Great. I made him gulp. “Grab a seat, and I’ll unpack this mystery for you.”
The Kid put his gun back on his hip, took a slightly soiled handkerchief out of his briefcase, and laid it on the seat of the shaky wooden picnic table, then gracefully sat down. He looked me in the eye and said, "This better be good and please make it troupe-free.”
“Mummy’s the word, friend.” I said to the Kid. “Sit down, and I’ll unpack this mystery for you.”
I gave him the short version. “I carry a Mummy’s Curse. The Grim Reaper is on his way. The fat lady is almost finished singing.”

"Okay, let’s hear the full-length cut," said The Kid as he put his government spy phone on the table and started recording.
I didn’t know how old the agent was or how much he knew about shipwrecks, so I told him my sailor’s tale right from the beginning. It all started in Egypt in the late 20th century. Ramadan had just ended, and pilgrims came to the shores of the Red Sea by the hundreds of thousands. All carried 30 days' worth of gear and supplies wrapped in bed sheets. Prayers were written on the white cloth in bright red paint.
The Salem Express was a large roll-on-roll-off car ferry boat. Trucks and cars drove onboard at the stern and drove off a ramp at the bow when it reached port. During the Ramadan crush, the Salem Express stopped taking vehicles. Pilgrim families, around 1,000 souls per trip, clambered onboard to cross the Red Sea. They squatted on board with their huge packs, camping out where the cars normally would park.

"Yeah, I remember the story. It was 1991. She left Saudi Arabia for Egypt just as the sun set on a calm Red Sea. It was evening prayers, and everyone, including the pilot, kneeled in prayer," recalled the CSIS Kid. “The captain wasn’t looking. They hit a reef, knocking out the bow drive-on ramp. The sea roared into the hold of the Salem, and she was a goner in five."

“A couple of hundred made it out, but the sharks took half of them before help arrived. Eight hundred passengers and crew went down with the ship.”
The Kid started choking. He looked at me in horror. “Wait, were you on the Salem Express? Is that why you are cursed, and what does that have to do with A.Y. Jackson? Is it not that he can see the Red Sea from your chimney?” asked The Kid.
"No, I wasn’t on her when she went down, although I did swim through her remains a couple of decades later, and that is what started my Mummy’s curse,” I answered. “North American media outlets pressed the Egyptian and Jordanian Governments to let their reporters in to see the remains of the Salem Express almost before she settled into the Red Sea’s sandy bottom, 100 feet down."
It was seventeen years later when Egypt came to its senses. They have been making seriously big tourism coin for hundreds of years getting visitors to tour their tombs. And now in the 21st century, why not a sunken tomb? Bring on the scuba gear and the underwater cameras!
“I was recruited by the Globe and Mail and a Scuba Diving TV show to make up the first media crew to bring our cave diving kits and swim through the hard to reach body-filled hold of the Salem. We were given permission to take pictures and shoot underwater movies. And the Egyptian and Jordanian Governments kicked in the airfare!”

“And that’s why the curse?” asked the CSIS agent. “Some sort of spirit didn’t like you disturbing the dead?”
“No, I don’t need a spirit’s curse,” I confessed. “My midnight memories of skulls, bones sticking out from under cloth-covered luggage, and empty kids' shoes will never leave me. It was a dive I pray I could give back. No go, so far.”

The cop started gagging again. I gave him a ten count before I continued my story. “After climbing through the rubble and the bodies that filled the Salem’s parking hold, we exited through a hole in the hull and had an underwater group vomit on the sea floor beside the wreck.

Back on our live-aboard cruiser, we decided to throw in the towel. We sailed to the Egyptian port of Hurghada, where a car was waiting to take us to the city’s airport.
I never found out if CTV swallowed hard and paid for our private charter. We did get some nice airborne footage of the large pyramids on the outskirts of Cairo that we used in our documentary. Landing at Cairo’s private aerodrome, we headed full bore along the desert freeway straight to the nearby Giza Pyramid.
Exploring the interior of the world’s tallest pyramid proves more challenging than wreck diving. There are no steps to navigate the descent and ascent; instead, only a steep stone ramp leads down to the dugout desert floor. The ceiling is low, and the narrow entrance walls are oppressively close. The Egyptian tourist police don’t believe in crowd control, so it is a case of damn the torpedoes, never mind the women and children and every man for himself, or something like that.
Exploring the interior of Egypt’s tallest pyramid proves more challenging than wreck diving. There are no steps to navigate the descent and ascent; instead, only a steep stone ramp leads down to the desert floor. The ceiling is low, and the narrow entrance walls feel oppressively close. Despite the expectation of a downward slope on one side of the passageway and an upward slope on the other, this was not the case.
Most of the tourists, adorned with Tilly Hats and sweating profusely while capturing smartphone videos, hailed from American bus tours. They seemed to assert their entitlement to descend deep into the pyramid en masse, often colliding with others attempting to climb out simultaneously.
Jim, our loudmouth expedition leader, yelled at anyone wearing a Hawaiian shirt and white sneakers. He was pissed at how how much room they were taking (many fatties that day) and how amazingly rude they all were.
“Make way for the press, “was Jim’s high-volume troupe. We held up the heavy film cameras at chest level and pushed our way down. So much yelling, so much pushback. By the time we reached the burial chamber, Michelle, our cameraman, was on the verge of collapse from heat and exhaustion, after lugging the hefty IMAX camera through the underground passages. Spotting an unoccupied sarcophagus in an empty burial chamber, he promptly abandoned the camera and his sweat-soaked laundry, then clambered inside in his malodorous underwear. He was fast asleep before his head even touched the stone pillow.
I didn’t think it was a good idea, and neither did the figure resembling a living skeleton carrying an ornate blunted spear. He wore a white robe that trailed to the stone floor. Did he emerge from the wall? I couldn’t tell.
There was screaming. There was jumping. He jabbed his stick at Michelle and pointed at some hieroglyphs on the wall near the coffin. Jim yelled back. The skeletal figure soon grasped the meaning of "Fuck You. We are the press" and began wildly poking at all of us, as if wielding an out-of-control jackhammer.

“Hu Hum,” a bespeckled woman in a worn travel guide’s uniform yelled. “I believe he has just cursed you all. Might I suggest your friend climb out of the coffin, and you guys start kissing the Egyptian’s ass pronto. He might accept cash donations too.”

She didn’t know Jim. After much shouting, a police squad pushed their way down the ramp and frog-marched us up to the surface. By this time, we were laughing and congratulating ourselves on having a police escort to guide us up to fresh air without having to contend with a new bus tour group pushing their way downhill. Wary of the armed police, the tourists clutched their pearls and their cameras tightly and muttering quietly as they were pushed aside to allow us to reach the surface.
Being the media, the police didn’t charge us and in fact flashed peace signs as they stood ankle deep in sand in front of the pyramid gladly posing for our movie cameras.
"So that's how you got cursed?" sighed The Kid.
"Yuppers. But let me finish the story," I replied, eager to continue now that I was on a roll.
I briefed The Kid on how we flew back to our dive boat and figured that we had gathered enough footage and a compelling storyline for two documentaries. We packed our belongings and arranged for a couple of Navigator limos to help us split town. I adjusted the crew’s complimentary Air Jordan tickets for the return journey to Canada via Hurghada, Athens, Schiphol, Newark, and Gander. I didn’t tell them I booked myself nonstop to New York and onto Toronto.
Media people are cheap bastard; we travel on other people’s expense accounts, even though the routing can sometimes be baffling and uncomfortably long. And we never, ever pay for anything. We'd sooner eat dirt than fork out money for a hot dog.
While waiting for the cars, I was suddenly struck by a twinge of conscience. What about Radar, the fifth member of our team? He was a local key grip whom we had hired to watch our gear on the boat, charge the batteries, and bring us beer as soon as we emerged from the water. I realized none of us had tipped him.
I asked Jim, and he responded with that universal hand gesture that essentially meant “jerk off fella, will ya?.”

Knowing Radar had three kids, I decided to break protocol and return to the boat to give him all our leftover Egyptian currency. I never got the chance to thank him. As I approached the boat, police officers suddenly appeared and began pushing me back down the gangway towards our luggage. Peering over their shoulders, I saw that the water around the stern was stained blood red. A body was being pulled out of the water. It was Radar.

“Following another media rule—clear out when the police and bodies show up simultaneously—the guys wasted no time in waiting for me, I had to run, jump and slide into one of the now-moving limos,” I told the Kid. “Their haul ass departure angered me, but it also reupped my satisfaction at having cheated them on the return airline tickets.”
The CSIS Kid gave me a quizzical look, clearly wanting more information about Radar.
"Anyway," I continued, "the driver made some calls on the way to the airport." It turned out that the body was indeed his. He had tripped while mopping the wet white stern, falling into the still-moving propellers. He was instantly, as they say, a goner."
"Death Number One," said the Kid as he pulled at his little finger.
"It was a year later," I continued the story. "The team was together, still working on our feature documentary that never ever made it to air—too many bodies for the CBC and the travel channels. We were in Tobermory for a shore dive ('no boat required, we just waded into the ice-cold clear water, I explained). Everyone was using rebreathers and wearing dry suits, except me (I had Nitrox in my tanks).”
“Michelle went in first and quickly swam to deep water. I was the last one in. As I started swimming downwards, I saw Michelle lying on the bottom below me with his regulator hanging out of his mouth. I banged on my tank to get Jim's attention. He brought up the body.

Michelle had not properly turned on his air mix; he had been breathing pure nitrogen until he passed out and drown. It was sorry for your loss time within the Ontario dive community."

"Two fingers up?"
"Correct," I responded.
"And what about Death Number Three?" the CSIS Kid asked me.

"Another year passed," I sighed and said, "This time, our wide angle cameraman bought it. His rebreather malfunctioned at 300 feet while he was filming a deep-water wreck in Lake Superior for another show."

"And Number Four?". He held four fingers up. The CSIS Kid wasn’t giving up.
“Well, that was a strange one. Happened just a few weeks ago. It was Jim, you remember Loudmouth Jim? He ‘Went West,’ Sorta,” I told him. “Jim got a gig filming schooling Hammerheads in the Pacific near Mexico’s Socorro Island.”
“Why do you say sorta?” The Kid said, shaking his smartphone recorder under my nose.
“Jim can be bossy. Sorta like you” I said, while brushing aside his iPhone.

Jim had forgotten to turn on his oxygen. He couldn’t swim back to the boat because of the weight of his gear. He died trying. A diving doctor who Jim had pushed aside to beat him to the sharks found him and brought him up to the side of the boat where the ship’s crew lifted him out of the water and placed him on the deck. The ship’s captain felt his neck and declared him “El morte."

The doctor wasn’t so sure. Good thing. He worked on Jim for an hour before Jim came back to Planet Earth. A helicopter picked Jim off the deck and flew him to Mexico City, and after 3 weeks, he made a full recovery.

The agent gave me a two-eyebrow salute. “True story for sure,” I replied. “Jim gave me all the details while I was under the desk talking to A.Y. I had him on speaker. Shouldn’t have. That is what started this whole Egypt thing with my House ghost."
“Jim told me that the captain had declared him dead. He figured that like marrying a couple on board, the captain’s word is law when at sea. So even if a doctor resurrected the body, Jim said he had been declared another goner, he had indeed been dead.
“So buddy,” I recall him saying, “It was the Mummy’s Curse that killed me. Never mind that I am alive to tell the story; get your shit together, write that will because you are next!”
“So what does that have to do with A.Y.?” I asked The Kid's rhetorical question for him. “He loves that I am a slob. For the past 30 years, I haven’t redone the kitchen, built a bar in the basement, or installed a Toto washlet and a matching bidet. DYI fix ups pains the House. Alive or Dead.”
“And the trip we didn’t take to Cairo?” the Kid asked.
“He wanted you to shoot the pyramid skeleton and bring him the head; he apparently has some ghost spell that he thinks will remove my curse."
I suggested we go back to the House. “House Ghosts have no sense of time. We will tell him we have been and gone and that customs grabbed the skeleton’s skull at the gate. He will believe us. Anyway, here’s your chance to ask him your super snooper questions about haunting the House.”
He looked at me strangely. “You really believe all that stuff you told me about Mummy Curses and the Group of Seven talking out of a century old hole in the floor? Tell me." straight, why do you stay there?” That was the CSIS Kid’s last question.
“Listen friend,” I said. “I didn’t pick the House. The House picked me.

© 2024 STEPHEN WEIR