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scuttled off behind a curtain. Logan had thoroughly checked the floor and walls for any sign of a hidden entrance, and had found none. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Just solid, immoveable concrete block walls and a poured cement floor.  

    Fact: A man had appeared in the very same closed, locked room, as naked as the mummy had been, and bearing a startling resemblance to the effigy sculpted on the lid of the sarcophagus.

    Conclusion A: Seti was a member of a subversive, futuristic nudist society and had been beamed inside the room at the same time the mummy had been beamed out by way of some top-secret, highly questionable, utterly improbable transporting device.  

    Conclusion B: The man who called himself Seti was the mummy, just as he purported himself to be. He looked like the golden effigy because he had been the model the artist had used to render it.

    Occam’s Razor, Logan thought. “Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem,” which translated stated, “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.” In other words, all things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the correct one.

    Seti, the naked man who had a face and body that could make the angels weep at its beauty and who was sitting not twenty feet away from Logan, was…  

    “…a five thousand year old dead guy,” Logan whispered in awe.

    Logan felt himself begin to shake as he stepped outside of the Vault and stared hard at Seti, not certain at all how to handle the subject of his newly formed hypothesis. On one hand, if it was true then Seti possessed a wealth of first-hand knowledge that would be invaluable to the scientific community. Simply put, he was a history-geek’s wet dream. On the other hand, he was a walking corpse who had last seen the light of day before the birth of the pyramids.

    He didn’t look like a corpse. In fact, he looked like one of the men who graced the covers of the skin magazines that were stacked in Logan’s bottom dresser drawer at home. The kind that had inspired one-handed orgasms over the years – tall, handsome, with a hard, sculpted body.

    Seti was still slumped in the Queen Anne chair where Logan had left him, looking drained and worn-out. No wonder. Rejuvenating from a state that was only one step up from dust must have been exhausting.

    “Now do you believe?” Seti’s voice sounded as weary as he looked.

    “Maybe,” Logan hedged. Saying out it out loud was a step Logan wasn’t yet prepared to take. “You need to understand how impossible this all seems.”

    “Impossible?” Seti sniffed. “Nothing is impossible where the gods are concerned.”

    “God did this to you?”

    “No, your Jehovah had nothing to do with this. At the time I was cursed he had not yet made his presence known in the pantheon of the Immortals. It was Setekh,” Seti said, venomously. “Demon bastard of a mongrel’s whore.” There was obviously no love lost between Seti and the god whose name he bore.

    “Setekh cursed you? That’s why the canopic jar bore the head of a crocodile! I was right. It was meant to represent Setekh!” Logan couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice as his deduction was validated. He’d thought that the jar symbolized Set, although he hadn’t known why. “But you were mummified. What happened to the other canopic jars?”

    “Must we have this conversation now?” Seti growled. “I am hungry, thirsty, and grow impatient with your questions.”

    “Look, Boris Karloff, I think I’m entitled to a few answers,” Logan said, sarcastically. “I was living in a nice, safe, rational world up until a few minutes ago. If you’re going to expect me to believe that you are who you say you are, then I think I deserve a few details.”

    “I will tell you all you wish to know after we leave this place.”

    “Leave? Where do you think you’re going to go? You can’t run around New York in nothing but your skin. People don’t do that anymore. We’re civilized