The silence Khaemwaset left behind was not empty. It was fertile. For three days, the Cairo authorities treated Professor Finch’s estate as a crime scene, though no crime was evident. The lead inspector, a pragmatic man named Hassan, noted the bizarre, tomb-like chill and the way sound died within the study’s walls. His report mentioned "acute mass hysteria" as the likely cause for the disappearances. He was wrong. On the fourth day, Inspector Hassan returned alone to retrieve a forgotten evidence bag. He found the study warmer, the air thick and heavy, like the moment before a thunderstorm. And the silence had changed. It was no longer an absence. It was a presence—a patient, breathing stillness. In the center of the room, the obsidian sarcophagus seemed to pulse, its vile gold veins glowing with a faint, sickly light.
From within the open tomb, a soft, scraping sound began. It was the sound of something dry and brittle being dragged across stone. Hassan drew his service revolver, his training warring with a primal dread that turned his bones to ice.
It was not Khaemwaset that emerged.
It was Lena. Or a thing wearing Lena’s skin, perfect in every detail except for its eyes. They were pools of the same absolute black as the mummy’s shell, and the lapis lazuli scarab was now embedded in her palm, pulsing like a second heart. She smiled, and the expression was a flawless, horrifying mockery of life.
“He is… generous,” the thing that was Lena said, its voice a perfect replica, yet devoid of any soul, a sound generated purely to communicate. “The silence is not an end. It is a beginning. A purity.”
Hassan fired. The gunshot was shockingly loud, a violent profanity in the quiet room. The bullet struck Lena’s shoulder. There was no blood. Instead, a spiderweb of black, resinous cracks spread from the wound. The thing looked down, curious, then back at Hassan. The scarab in its palm glowed brighter.
“Noise,” it whispered, and the word was a vacuum.
Hassan’s ears popped. The echo of the gunshot, the sound waves still traveling through the room, were sucked into the scarab’s light. The silence that rushed back in was deeper, heavier than before. He tried to fire again, but the trigger made no click. The gun itself had been muted, its mechanical promise of violence stripped away.
The thing glided toward him. He stumbled back, but the silence was a physical weight, pressing on his lungs, slowing his thoughts. He tried to shout, but his voice was a voiceless puff of air. He was being pre-digested, his capacity for sound systematically erased.
He saw then the true horror. Khaemwaset was not a mere predator. It was a seed. Its curse was a contagion of quiet, and its victims became its vectors. The thing that had been Lena was its first apostle, created to spread the silence, to find new symphonies of life to consume and convert.
The Lena-thing reached out and touched his chest. It was not a violent gesture, but an intimate one, like a lover’s hand. A coldness, deeper than any freeze, spread from its fingers. Hassan felt the pounding of his heart—the drum he had lived by since birth—begin to slow, to soften, to quiet. The panic in his mind became a distant, muffled hum, then nothing at all.
His last sight was the Lena-thing leaning close, its black eyes reflecting his own fading existence. “You will help us make the world… still,” it whispered, its breath the chill of a tomb that has never known a single sound.
When they found Inspector Hassan’s body the next day, it was a paradox. Medically, he was dead. But there were no marks, no cause. His face was placid, empty. The strangest thing, the coroner would later swear in a trembling voice, was that when he moved the body, it made no sound. No rustle of clothing, no scrape of shoe on the floor. It was as if the man had been fundamentally muted, his very physicality stripped of vibration, and in the dead inspector’s tightly clutched hand was a single, perfect scarab of lapis lazuli, cold and waiting. The silence had begun to breed.
