The desert air in Professor Alistair Finch’s study was thick with the smell of dust and old secrets. For thirty years, the eminent Egyptologist had chased a myth: the tomb of Khaemwaset, a high priest rumored to have mastered arts far darker than simple mummification. His peers called it a folktale, but now, the prize stood before him, dominating the room—a sarcophagus of obsidian, veined with gold that seemed to pulse in the low light.
It was unlike any found before. No benevolent gods adorned its surface; instead, it was carved with writhing, amorphous shapes and hieroglyphs that spoke of silence, not an afterlife. The translation was fragmentary, chilling: “He who silences the heart, whose breath is the stillness of the deep tomb. Disturb his rest, and know the weight of eternal quiet.” Alistair’s assistant, a young, ambitious woman named Lena, ran a hand over the cool stone. “The curse is… different. It doesn’t promise boils or plagues. It promises… nothing.”
“Superstition,” Alistair chuckled, though the sound was hollow. His own heart thumped a frantic rhythm against his ribs. Greed and academic glory had long since drowned out caution. With painstaking care, they broke the seal. The sound was not a crack, but a sigh, as if the tomb itself had been holding its breath for millennia. Inside, the mummy was a shock. It wasn’t wrapped in neat linen bandages. It was encased in a shell of what looked like solidified, black tar, streaked through with the same vile gold. A single, perfect scarab of lapis lazuli was set where its heart would be.
That night, as a sandstorm raged outside, Alistair began his examination. The air grew cold. The lights flickered. He attributed it to the storm until he heard it—a whisper, not in his ears, but inside his mind. It was the sound of shifting sand, of a dry wind blowing through an empty canyon for centuries. It was a whisper of profound, unbearable loneliness.
He spun around. The sarcophagus was open. The black-shelled mummy was gone.
Panic seized him. “Lena!” he cried, but his voice was muffled, swallowed by the oppressive silence that had filled the house. The storm outside was now a silent, ghostly dance beyond the windows. Then he saw it, standing in the doorway to the hall. Khaemwaset. It didn’t move like a reanimated corpse; it glided, an effigy of jet and gold. The air around it died. The frantic ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall ceased abruptly as it passed. The scarab on its chest began to glow with a faint, cold light. Alistair stumbled back, his scientific mind shattering. This was no curse of physical death. This was an erasure.
Lena came running down the stairs, her mouth open in a scream that made no sound. As the mummy turned its featureless face toward her, the scream was cut short. Not silenced—unmade. The very sound waves seemed to be absorbed into its dark form. She clutched her throat, her eyes wide with a terror beyond description, and then… she began to fade. Not into invisibility, but into a profound lack of existence. Within seconds, there was no trace she had ever been there. The memory of her face blurred in Alistair’s mind, stolen away.
The mummy turned back to him. The whispering in his mind grew louder, a desperate, hungry sound. It was coming for the noise of his life. He felt a pulling sensation, starting with the pounding of his heart. The rhythm faltered, growing sluggish and quiet. The blood in his veins seemed to slow, its rush becoming a whisper, then nothing. He tried to pray, to beg, but the words died on his tongue, the thoughts dissolving before they could fully form. The world lost its color, its texture, its sound. He was being unmade, not with violence, but with an infinite, crushing silence.
The last thing Professor Alistair Finch saw was the glint of the lapis scarab before his eyes ceased to transmit any signal at all. When the sandstorm cleared, the Cairo authorities found a perfectly preserved study. The obsidian sarcophagus stood open and empty. There was no body, no struggle, no sign of the professor or his assistant. Just a profound, unnerving silence, and the lingering feeling that something ancient and hungry had, at long last, been fed.
