The mummy's curse!

“Of course, there’s no such thing as curses,” Amelia Featherstone said brightly. It was about two hours later. “And that’s why I feel perfectly comfortable opening up this ancient sarcophagus in front of you all, here in the ballroom of Shepheard’s Hotel.”

The other lady archaeologists, around fifty in all, nodded their agreement. Of course, they weren’t the only people present at the annual conference of the International Lady Archaeologists’ Association. The event was open at all, and so hundreds of other guests at Shepheard’s Hotel had wandered in to raid the buffet and see what was going on. And, naturally, every major newspaper in the world had its photographers there.

But the lady archaeologists, who ranged from English blondes like Amelia to dark-eyed Persian beauties like Fatima Firouzi, Amelia’s arch-nemesis, were certainly the star of the show. All were brilliantly intelligent, with many advanced degrees and remarkable discoveries between them, and stunningly physically attractive, though of course as professional scholars they paid no heed to such trivial and frivolous things. They stood around the ballroom in extremely sensible and modest Victorian travelling dresses, paying no attention whatsoever to the rakish young fops who tried to flirt with them, listening attentively to Amelia’s speech.

“A lot of guff has been talked about Pharaoh Sukhontiti. They say he had incredible dark powers, that he could make women do whatever he liked and so forth. Nonsense. Close attention to the historical evidence demonstrates beyond a doubt that he was nothing more than a cheap, pathetic charlatan. All that stuff about his thousands of shamefaced slavegirls, kidnapped by his evil sorcery from all across time and space, and how he made the most beautiful queens and priestesses of the ancient world grovel naked before him, is just pure balderdash and poppycock. And now,” said Amelia, “if you’ll all prepare your cameras, I intend to open his coffin.”

Cameras were duly prepared. The ropes were untied, and the lid of the sarcophagus, now standing on its end so the interior could be more easily presented to the public, was swung open. Inside stood Fiona Fairweather, stark naked, her blue eyes wide and her red lips parted in surprise as the light flooded in.

There was a stunned silence. It lasted perhaps three seconds before all the photographers started shooting for all they were worth, while the rakish young fops cheered and raised glasses of champagne in Fiona’s honour. Fiona, who had just been put through two solid hours of excruciating and relentless tickle ****, was in no mood to be ambushed naked by an entire ballroom’s worth of sensible lady archaeologists and their somewhat less sensible guests. But there was very little she could do to alter the situation.

She settled for covering herself with her arms, squealing a lot, and sprinting for the nearest exit, which happened to lead into the very busy street out the front of Shepheard’s Hotel. Several hundred eyes watched her pink bottom depart.

“Well,” said Amelia Featherstone, primly. “That certainly was not what I expected. But I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable scientific explanation for it.”

“Nope,” said Sukhontiti, stepping out of the coffin, having now fully manifested himself in the real world. He was a tall, bald, dark-skinned man in a simple white cotton robe. He yawned, stretched and cracked his knuckles. “Magic all the way.”

“Who the devil are you?”

“Sukhontiti.”

“But he’s been dead for three thousand years!”

“Yes, I needed the rest. But now I’m back, to take my rightful place as ruler of Egypt. And I see you’ve brought me presents.”

“No I haven’t!”

“Sure you have,” said Sukhontiti, and spoke a few words in Ancient Egyptian. Instantly, the modest travelling dresses of the beautiful lady archaeologists shimmered like mirages, and became complex lattices of purple silk and golden chain that enveloped the womens’ bodies, framing their breasts and pussies in a most enticing manner while concealing absolutely no portion of the horrified ladies’ luscious figures. “Yes, that’s better.”

“No it isn’t!” squealed Amelia, hands flying to cover her exposed intimate regions as her face turned bright red. The ballroom echoed with the laughter of fops, the click of cameras and the mortified squeals of lady archaeologists, clad in nothing but absurd ****-girl confections that were somehow even more embarrassing to wear than mere nudity.

South Indian bosoms as dark and round as coconuts, fashionably small and perky pink-nippled French tits, creamy Irish breasts with freckles scattering their slopes, delicate soft round Chinese boobies like the rising full moon, were displayed to all the curious guests in the Shepheard’s Hotel ballroom, encircled by glittering golden bands. Bushes in ginger, chestnut, pale blonde and midnight black were framed by gleaming chain triangles, attracting every eye. Bare bottoms in every shade from deepest brown to palest pink wiggled enticingly as the yelping, distraught girls spun around and tried to hide behind each other.

“I believe it is,” said Sukhontiti, calmly. “You ladies called me a charlatan, as I recall. You disturbed my rest with your infernal digging. You think you can mock the dead, uncover our secrets and expose what we had thought long buried. How do you like having your secrets exposed?”

“I don’t like it,” wailed Amelia, writhing in disgrace, twisting and turning this way and that as a pair of merciless photographers snapped endless juicy images of her plump strawberries-and-cream tits, her jiggly pink bottom and her butter-yellow bush. “Stop laughing! It’s not funny at all!”

The whole crowd was laughing now, obviously delighting in the girls’ comic nude embarrassment. Even Colonel Straightman, widely considered to be the single most sensible and conservative fellow in the entire British army, watching from the sidelines, had to concede that there was something a touch amusing about the spectacle of fifty or so arrogant lady scholars, all professional and strait-laced to the highest degree, suddenly deprived of all their clothing and left standing naked in a crowded ballroom for the whole world to see. Only the denuded lady scholars failed to see the funny side.

“Now,” ordered Sukhontiti. “Dance.”

Strains of ancient music filled the air, notes wailed from pipes and plucked from stringed instruments that nobody had played for a thousand years, a lively and hauntingly beautiful melody. Amelia, to her even greater horror, found her feet beginning to shift in time to the rhythm.

“Slavegirls must dance to please their master,” Sukhontiti explained as hips began to sway and arms began to twine in complex, sinuous motions. “The Dance of No Veils. A punishment dance. It symbolises total defeat and humiliating submission. Typically, it is only performed by those who have ****. I remember when I made the Queen of Babylon do it on the steps of her own ziggurat.”

He watched in satisfaction as the blushing lady scholars writhed and shimmied in something very like a belly-dance, though far more erotic and sensual. Amelia glided across the ballroom floor in tandem with Fatima, their expressions aghast, their bodies entirely beyond their control as they first leaned in so close their breasts touched, kissing the air around each other’s faces, then twirled around in unison and thrust their hips lewdly at the curious onlookers.

Of course, the dance did not permit the adoption of the pose of modest Venus. So the outraged, infuriated ladies had **** but to expose themselves unclad from top to toe, breasts and bottoms and pussies lewdly presented to the giggling spectators by their indecently skimpy ****-girl outfits, while a small army of photographers documenting every tiny detail of their naked shame for the front covers of major newspapers and the historical record. Headlines like “TABLES TURNED ON GIRL DIGGERS” and “LADY EXCAVATORS PUT TO BLUSH” would soon be gracing shelves in every newsagents from Paris to Tokyo.

There was a lot more shimmying and twirling and cavorting to be done, as Sukhontiti’s newest acquisitions saw the Dance of No Veils out to its conclusion. It ended with the girls grovelling on the floor, on hands and knees, kissing the carpet, bare bottoms raised invitingly in the air, in a posture of abject submission to their new lord and master. Sukhontiti smiled, letting the moment linger.

Then he spoke a single word in Ancient Egyptian, and the ****-girls howled in unison as they felt the lash of invisible whips kissing their backsides. Sukhontiti spoke the word again, this time drawing it out, and the girls shrieked in horror as red stripes began to materialise across their nude posteriors.

Yes, thought the pharaoh, pouring himself a glass of something that appeared to be called “champagne”, as the hotel guests laughed at the spectacle of a mob of squealing red-faced ****-girls grovelling on all fours as they had their bare bottoms whipped. Pretty much every single person in Shepheard’s Hotel - maybe every single European in Cairo - had managed to make it here by now. He was going to like this thing called the nineteenth century.

But something was missing.

Around half of the rapidly growing ballroom crowd was women, not counting the ****-girls. Some of them were hotel guests, some diplomats or artists or merchants who happened to be passing by and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Pretty much all of them wore sensible Victorian travelling gowns.

Sukhontiti spoke a word. Immediately, all the skirts of all the women’s gowns were whipped up over their heads and knotted into bags. Their bloomers were pulled down around their ankles, exposing bare bottoms and pussies. They blundered around blindly, astonished, bumping into each other, muffled squeals of outrage issuing from inside the bags.

Sukhontiti spoke another word, and invisible whips started whipping all the freshly bared female bottoms, eliciting more red stripes and squeals. That was better. When you were an evil immortal magician, thoroughness always paid off.