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    The Great Belzoni and the Gait of Anubis
    The Great Belzoni and the Gait of Anubis
    The Great Belzoni and the Gait of Anubis
    Ebook39 pages41 minutes

    The Great Belzoni and the Gait of Anubis

    By W.D. Gagliani

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    About this ebook

    Giovanni Battista Belzoni was an Italian circus strongman and one of the earliest European antiquities procurers. Also one of the first Europeans inside the Great Pyramid. I gave him a "chronicler" in the Sherlock Holmes vein and a new set of supernatural adventures fit for an explorer of his caliber. Followed by short-short "The Great Belzoni and the Monster of Goa," this novella is 9800 words.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherW.D. Gagliani
    Release dateJul 10, 2010
    ISBN9781452416557
    The Great Belzoni and the Gait of Anubis
    Author

    W.D. Gagliani

    W. D. Gagliani’s Wolf’s Trap was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award in 2004. His novels Wolf's Gambit, Wolf's Bluff, Wolf's Edge, Wolf's Cut, and Wolf's Blind also feature Homicide Detective Nick Lupo, as does the novella Wolf's Deal. He is also the author of the supernatural thriller The Judas Hit and the hard-noir thriller Savage Nights and numerous short stories published in anthologies such as Robert Bloch’s Psychos, Dark Passions: Hot Blood 13 (with David Benton), Wicked Karnival Halloween Horror, Small Bites, The Midnighters Club, and More Monsters From Memphis, among many others. "The Great Belzoni and the Gait of Anubis," also a werewolf tale of sorts, is available through Amazon.com. His stories have appeared in e-zines such as Dead Lines, Wicked Karnival, Horrorfind, and The Grimoire. His book reviews are published regularly in Cemetery Dance, the Bram Stoker Award–winning Web site Chiaroscuro (www.chizine.com), the Web site HorrorWorld, and others, and his nonfiction has been in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, BookPage, BookLovers, The Scream Factory, Horror Magazine, Science Fiction Chronicle, and various others. When not writing, reading, or reviewing books, he listens to old and new progressive rock, plays with vintage synthesizers and his Theremin, and collects interesting weaponry. He is a member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA), the International Thriller Writers (ITW), and the Authors Guild. MYSTERIES & MAYHEM is a collection of stories, published and new, written with David Benton. MOOD ELEVATOR is one of those, previously published in HOT BLOOD 13.

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      Book preview

      The Great Belzoni and the Gait of Anubis - W.D. Gagliani

      Prologue

      Cambridge 1960

      It had been long and terrifying, watching our father die his torturously slow death, but on a quiet Wednesday morning in spring he waved us closer and gestured for our attention. With Nurse seated nearby, wiping the dark bloody discharge dribbling steadily from his nose, we huddled over his bedside, my siblings and I. His hoarse whisper barely reached us.

      "Sarcophagus."

      Fatigue from the effort to speak the syllables beaded his flaccid face. His eyes seemed to liquefy before us, no longer really his eyes at all. Then he stiffened, expiring with the quiet dignity of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, for whom he was named.

      John Balfour Hudson.

      Sarcophagus. That deathbed utterance, like the deathbed itself, haunted me many a day. I wondered to what crypt he had referred. What could be so important as to occupy his mind even as the final curtain fell before his eyes? Yes, my father's father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had indeed spent years in and around Egypt during their speckled military careers. These tales had been in our family as long as I could remember, though they seemed hazy and somehow mythical in nature, as if they'd never truly happened. I was not to understand the significance of his final word until the disposition of my father's considerable estate was well underway.

      Toward the end of the long process of divesting ourselves of the many possessions accumulated by so many adventurer ancestors (not the least of which was a library packed with thousands of volumes on hundreds of topics), we undertook to inventory the contents of the attic. The family manse had undergone renovations on at least three occasions, but the attic had remained largely untouched. Indeed, it had been locked years before at my father's instructions, and so a locksmith was hired to secure our entrance to the chamber, in which lay stacked an endless series of crates. Surely it can be of no surprise that one of the crates, a long and solidly-built affair, contained a sarcophagus brilliant with gold and blue highlights which shone brightly under our lamps. After our local workmen had lugged the piece down to the now bare study, my siblings and I stood around it, awed, until my brother Jonathan finally dared take hold of the worn cover. I hastened to take the other end, while our sister Hannah awaited the riches we would find within. To our surprise, when we swung the elaborately carved cover out of the way, what captured our attention was a large number of numbered Canopic jars standing in close ranks, their godheads staring at us with tiny ruby eyes.

      This was the legacy of which our father breathed his last to warn us? It cannot seem unduly disrespectful of us to have displayed our disappointment, and so we did -- until I consented to break the seal on the carved jar marked with the crude number one. Inside reposed a tightly-rolled scroll secured with

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