His heart pounded mercilessly against his chest as Simon moved on. The air was becoming thinner, stiffer, dustier the deeper he came. Behind the chamber was another cramped, light-deprived passageway, barely a slit. It looked harmless, if tight. Gritting his teeth, fully aware that there was no other way than through the passage, Simon stepped sideways into the darkness. As he had predicted, it was a tight fit, the walls pressing against either side of him, chest and back, and, although he was thin, he had to draw in his stomach and hold his breath as he squeezed himself through. At one point, he became stuck so deeply that he thought it was permanent, and it took several minutes to fight back the inexorable surge of Claustrophobia before he could move on.

  He was almost on the other side when it happened. Something clicked behind him and this time, stuck between the two walls, he could not evade the thin skewers that shot out of the walls. One of them caught his shoulder.

  Simon howled in agony as the metal pierced right through his shoulder-blade and then retreated back into the wall. His torch slipped from his grip and dropped to the ground with a dull clank, from which he had next to no hope of retrieving it.

  His teeth grit to ward of the pain and careful not to trigger the trap again, Simon tried to feel for the torch with his feet, but it was no use. As he did so, however, there was another faint click, and he braced himself for more pain, but the trap seemed to have exerted itself; instead of a renewed assault from the skewer, a pinch of debris rained down upon the top of his head from the ceiling.

  Painfully, Simon moved on and finally plopped out of the passage on the other side, where he stopped to examine his throbbing shoulder. The injury, a neat, round hole just above his armpit, was small but burned like fire as he dabbed at the edges. He didn't dare contemplate whether the stake had been rusty or not, feeling that (at the very moment) it didn't really matter whether it had contaminated his blood or not. After all, there was no way he was going to be able to go back without having found his way into the chamber first, what with every door he had taken sealed and his reluctance to wind his way back through the evil passage next to him. Even so, he felt as though he was almost ready to give up and wait until the others found him, which was unlikely but much more enticing a prospect than the thought of waiting alone in the darkness for his death by starvation, for instance.

  Telling himself firmly that neither of those scenarios was an option and he wasn't such a coward, Simon steeled his resolve and moved on, his torch still flickering feebly inside the passageway. He would have to do without it from now on, for there was no way he could get at it from the outside, and he wasn't very keen on squeezing back into the gap and risking another skewer to something worse than his shoulder. He'd rather be left in the dark – literally.

  He felt his way along the walls of the corridor until he came to another corner. From what he could tell by listening, this new corridor was rather roomy and wide. A grinding noise came from somewhere ahead, and when he stepped inside, he heard a whooshing noise of something heavy slicing through the air, accompanied by a gentle breeze.

  Carefully, he proceeded further in, and froze at once when several torches, which lined the walls in brackets, flickered to life to reveal two vast, menacingly swinging axes, intent on cutting intruders into half, a short way away. And beyond the axes was an archway at the end of the aisle. Simon's heart gave an excited jolt, hardly able to believe his luck. This was it, he was certain of it. This was the last hurdle he would have to face before he could collect his prize, he had nearly made it...

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  The airy, whispering sound was back again. This time around, it sounded more distinct like voices, a low hiss that carried through the gloom with an eerie, near-human quality. It was to him as though the voices were calling his name, and there was definitely a rush of cold air coming from ahead now.

  He waited until the first of the two axes had passed the corridor in a mighty swing, then skipped through the momentary gap. The second axe swung much faster, and this time he barely made it toward the other side; the weapon tore open his bag, but fortunately missed his head and buttocks, thank God. There was nothing separating him from the secret chamber now except the archway, which was, he found out upon closer examination, made from some silvery metal, and behind which he could see nothing but darkness.

  Simon perused his grandfather's map again. Avrak Walker had marked this exact location with a symbol like a hourglass, two triangles touching at the tip. He checked the metal archway again. Surely enough, in shoulder-height on the right side, underneath a lopsided tile of buttons and switches that looked strangely like a control panel (But the thought was ridiculous, for this was an ancient construction and nothing nearly as modern as the keyboard of a computer.), there was a fist-sized socket, a hollow that appeared to have been moulded to receive an asset in the exact shape of his hourglass pendant.

  The whispering behind him grew louder, more urgent.

  Simon fumbled the hourglass out of his shirt, kissed it with trembling lips, and inserted it into the hollow. It sunk into the cavity easily, flashed blue-hot for a second, then began to spin. A blue-shimmering, foggy, plasmic substance, neither liquid not gas, sprang to life inside the archway, whose frame had begun to crackle and spark with what was unmistakably electricity. For several seconds, the mist shifted and swirled inside the semicircular construction, formed a maelstrom, and then went almost completely still, fluttering and rippling only lightly, like a leaf upon water.

  Simon stared, having, at the alien sight in front of him, momentarily forgotten why he had come here in the first place. Now that his brain was returning to its normal capacities, he could see that a set of steps, winding downward, had lit up in an eerie blueish light behind the archway, where there had been nothing but darkness a moment ago. The staircase flickered dimly, as though he were seeing it through tinted glass.

  He knew he had made it. He took the hourglass out of the hollow and, noticing how warm it suddenly was, turned it in his hands. For a moment he watched the viscous, blue liquid inside alternate between the two halves. Was it just his imagination, or had the half-A pattern come into sharper focus? But surely the faint glow of the thin, carved lines had to be an illusion, a reflection of light on the pendant? He stood gazing at it for several minutes, then, feeling it couldn't possibly be as important as the treasures waiting for him at the bottom of the staircase, tucked the pendant back into his shirt and stepped toward the gate.

  Simon moved quickly through the veil of blue and onto the staircase and, unperturbed by the brief darkness as he passed through, rushed down its torch-lit steps toward the light-flooded doorway at the end. In his hurry to get down to the treasure, all the while retaining a firm grip on his ripped bag, he stumbled over his own feet and nearly lost his glasses, but then he had finally made it to the long-awaited chamber –

  And stopped dead. It was there all right, with the sarcophagus in the middle, marvellous in its glory, surrounded by walls covered in depictions of the sun god Ra and other mythological scenes, everything just as he had imagined it would be... only –

  There was already someone inside.