by Paula Guran
In 2004, Return from the Dead: A Collection of Classic Mummy Stories (Wordsworth Editions), edited by David Stuart Davies, again reprinted older stories as did Chad Arment in Out of the Sand: Mummies, Pyramids, and Egyptology in Classic Science Fiction and Fantasy (Coachwhip Publications, 2008). The latter is a print-on-demand publication.
Jurassic London published a companion volume to the aforementioned The Book of the Dead. Unearthed, co-edited by Jared Shurin and John J. Johnston, compiled eleven classic stories—one virtually unknown—for an excellent compilation of (essentially, if not exactly) nineteenth-century (1840–1906) short fiction. Both books were published in partnership with the Egypt Exploration Society and have introductions by John J. Johnston, Vice-Chair of the Egypt Exploration Society, that are the epitome of what I wish this introduction was.
Although there may be some anthologies among the many mummy-related fiction titles published for children and young adults in the last three decades, I haven’t found them. Similarly, in the relatively new area of digital publication, The Mummy Megapack: 20 Modern and Classic Tales (Wildside Press, 2011), appears to be the single ebook-only anthology widely available. Despite its title, it consists of only three modern stories (two of which are by Nina Kiriki Hoffman) and seventeen public domain stories published before 1913.
Although some of the stories in The Mammoth Book of the Mummy use earlier tropes, it’s often with a modern twist. We offer three brand-new stories. Five tales employ non-Egyptian mummies: one Mesopotamian, two Northern European bog mummies, two American. Admittedly, the mummies may not all turn out to be mummies, exactly, but I think you’ll agree the stories fit the theme very well.
You will find the slightly supernatural (or maybe not actually supernatural at all), science fictional (that sometimes could be fantasy), noir, the frankly scary and the somewhat eerie, elements of the mystery, alternative history, steampunk, a tall tale, historical fiction tinged with the preternatural, fictionalized mythology, the literary, the weird, the poignant, and the comic. Some stories sip from several genres.
I hope you will find these tales are a breath of fresh air in the mummy subgenre that, too often, is as stifling as a long-sealed sarcophagus—if written in at all.
Some final notes . . .
A great deal of the above would, in a scholarly article, be footnoted. I’m not being scholarly.
For instance, there should be a footnote explaining the title of this introduction. It is part of Spell 22 in the Book of the Dead concerned with the Opening of the Mouth ritual. The ritual was needed so the deceased could breathe, speak, eat, and drink in the afterlife.
I’ve retained the spelling of ancient Egyptian words and names as each author wrote them. Preferred spellings have changed over the years; stories set in an earlier era may well be employing what was “proper” then. English transliterations of hieroglyphs are dicey business to begin with, so we shall leave well enough alone.
Similarly, any historical inaccuracies the authors may have used—intentionally or inadvertently—have been left. After all, this is fiction. Any mistakes made by me are unintentional, but I have no excuse.
I use the term “steampunk” in a couple of story introductions. It occurs to me that there may be readers unaware of its meaning. In general, it is science fiction and fantasy that incorporates technology and aesthetic designs inspired by nineteenth-century industrial steam-powered machinery.
Any historic dates in my story introductions come from Ancient Egyptian Chronology, edited by Erik Hornung, Rolf Krauss, and David A. Warburton (Brill, 2006).
Ankh, wedja, seneb!
(Life, prosperity, health!)
Paula Guran
When seeking stories for this anthology, I recalled “Private Grave 9” as one of the finest “mummy” stories I had ever read. Others mentioned it as their “favorite mummy story,” too. When I reread Karen Joy Fowler’s story, I realized Tu-api is not exactly mummified—but, even excluding the subtext of Howard Carter’s famous discovery, this hauntingly powerful story is more than “close enough” to include here.
Private Grave 9
Karen Joy Fowler
Every week Ferhid takes our trash out and buries it. Last week’s included chicken bones, orange peels, a tin that cherries had come in and another for peas, an empty silver-bromide bottle, my used razorblade, a Bakelite comb someone sat on and broke, and several early drafts of Mallick’s letter to Lord Wallis about our progress. Meanwhile, at G4 and G5, two bone hairpins and seven clay shards were unearthed, one of which was painted with some sort of dog, or so Davis says, though I’d have guessed lion. There’s more to be found in other sectors, but all of it too recent—anything Roman or later is still trash to us. G4 and G5 are along the deep cut, and we’re finding our oldest stuff there.
I’d spent the morning in the darkroom, ostensibly to work but really because I was tired of the constant gabble of the expedition house. When I grew up, it was just my mother and me. I had the whole third floor to myself, and she wasn’t allowed to come up unless I asked her. I’ve got no gripe against anyone here. It’s just a question of what you’re used to.
The photographs I was printing were all of infant skeletons. There’s an entire level of these, laid out identically on their sides with their legs pulled into their stomachs. Davis had cleared each tiny skull and ribcage with his breath because they were so delicate, and it took a week because there were so many. That seemed very intimate to me, and I wondered if he’d felt any attachment to one more than another. I thought it would probably be rude to ask. My pictures were of all different babies, but all my pictures looked the same.
At lunch, I shared some philosophical thoughts—all about how much sadder finding a single child would have been and how odd that was, you feeling less with each addition.
Mallick, our director, said when I’d put in a few more seasons I’d find I didn’t think of them as dead people at all, but as the bead necklace or the copper bowl or whatever else might be found with the body. Mallick’s eyes are all rimmed in red like a basset hound’s. This gives him a tragic demeanor, when he’s really quite cheerful. The whole time he was speaking, Miss Jackson, his secretary, was seated just past him with her head down, attending to her food. Miss Jackson lost her husband in the trenches and her son to the flu after.
Remembering that, and remembering how each of her losses was merely one among so many they might as well have been stars in the sky, made me wish I’d kept my thoughts to myself. Women take death harder than we men. Or that’s been my experience.
“No signs of illness or malformation.” Davis has a face round as a moon and that pale skin that takes color easily; he’s always either blanching or blushing. I watched him clean his fork on his napkin with the same surgical precision, the same careful attention, he brought to every task. Sunlight flashed off the square lenses of his spectacles whenever he looked up at me. Flash, flash, flash. “Best guess?” he said. “Infanticide.”
Ferhid had carved us a cold lamb for lunch and had the mail lying under our forks. Ferhid has the profile of a film star, but a mouth full of rotted teeth. His mouth is a painful thing to see, and I wish he didn’t smile so often.
We each had a letter or two, which was fair and friendly, though most of them mentioned Howard Carter’s dig, which was not. Mine, of course, was from my mother, pretending not to miss me as unpersuasively as she possibly could. I missed the war as her sole support, but since that ended it’s been more of a burden. Last month I wrote to her that a man must have a vocation and if nothing comes to him, then he must go looking. Today she responded by wondering if it was necessary to travel half a globe and forty-five hundred years away. She said that Mesopotamia must be about as far from Michigan as it’s possible to get. How wonderful, she said, to be so unattached that you can pick up and go anywhere and never mind the people you’ve left behind. And then she promised me that she wasn’t complaining.
Patwin read bits of The Times aloud while we
had our coffee. Apparently reporters are still camped at the Tut-ankh-Amen tomb, cataloguing gold masks and lapis-lazuli scarabs and ebony effigies as fast as Carter can haul them out. These Times accounts have Lord Wallis and everyone else in a spin, as if we’re playing some sort of tennis match against Carter and losing badly. Our potsherds, never mind how old they are, have become an embarrassing return on Wallis’ investment, though they were good enough before. Our skeletons are too numerous to be tasteful. I’m betting Wallis won’t be whimsical about paintings of dogs, nor will anyone else at his club.
As he read, Patwin’s tone conveyed his disapproval. He has the darting eyes of an anarchist (and a beard like Freud’s), but he’s actually a stolid Marxist. So he’ll tell you slavery was a necessary historical phase, but it’s clear that shards of good clay working-class pots suit him better than golden bowls put by for the afterlife.
“We had a lovely morning in PG 9,” Mallick said stoutly. PG stands for private grave, and PG 9 is the largest tomb we’ve found so far, four chambers in all, and never plundered—naturally, that’s the part that has us most excited. A woman is laid out in the second of these chambers—a priestess or a queen in a coffin of clay. There’s a necklace of gold leaves and a gold ring. Several of the colored beads she once wore in her hair have fallen into her skull. The skeletons of seven other women, presumably her servants, are kneeling in the third and fourth chambers, along with two groomsmen, two oxen, and a musician with what I imagine, when Davis reconstructs it, will be a lyre. Once upon a time Wallis would have been entirely content with this. A royal tomb. A sleeping priestess. But that was before Carter began to swim in golden sarcophagi.
Another American, a girl from Rapid City, has come to visit us in the mud-brick expedition house. Her name is Emily Whitfield, and she’s a cousin of Mallick’s wife or a second cousin or some such thing, some relative Mallick found impossible to send away. She’s twenty-nine, just a couple years shy of me, flapper haircut, eyes of a washed-out blue, but a good figure. Already there’d been some teasing. “High time you met the right girl,” Mallick had said, but the minute I’d seen Miss Whitfield I’d known she wasn’t that. I’ve never believed in love at first sight, but I’ve had a fair amount of experience with the opposite.
Patwin had claimed to dread Miss Whitfield’s visit, in spite of the obvious appeal of a new face. “She’ll need to be taken everywhere, and someone will always be hurting her feelings,” Patwin had predicted, fingers scratching through his beard. Patwin prided himself on knowing women, although when that would have happened I really couldn’t say. “She’ll find it all very dirty and our facilities insupportable. She’ll never have stood before.” And then Patwin had a coughing fit; it was such a rude thing to have said in Miss Jackson’s presence.
But Miss Whitfield was proving entirely game. Davis took her to see the baby skeletons, and he said she made no comment, lit an unmoved cigarette. Apparently she’s an authoress and quite successful, according to Mallick who’d learned it from his wife. Four books so far, books in which people are killed in clever and unusual ways, murderers unmasked by people even cleverer. She was about to set a book at a dig such as ours; it’s why she’d come. Mallick told me to take her along and show her the new tomb, so she was there when I took my picture. I’d been pointing out an arresting detail or two—the way the workmen chant as they haul the rubble out of the chamber, the rags they tie around their heads, their seeping eyes—but she didn’t seem interested.
We brought the smell of sweat and flesh with us into the tomb. Most people would have instinctively lowered their voices. Not Miss Whitfield. “I thought it would be grander,” she said when we were inside the second chamber. Patwin had rigged an electrical installation so there was plenty of light for our work here. “I didn’t picture mud.” She lifted a hand to her hair, and when she lowered it again there was a streak of dust running from the hairline down her temple. It gave her a friendlier, franker look, but like Mallick’s sad eyes, this proved deceiving. What she really wanted to know was whether there were tensions in the expedition house. “You all live in each other’s pockets. It must drive you crazy sometimes. There must be little, annoying habits that send you right around the bend.”
“Actually things go very smoothly,” I told her. “Sorry to disappoint.” I was taking my first photographs of the bones in the coffin, adjusting the lighting, dragging a stool about and standing on it to get the best angle. Miss Whitfield was beneath my elbow. Davis was in a corner of the chamber on his knees, pouring hot wax and pressing a cloth down on it. When the wax dried, he would lift out bits of shell and stone without disturbing their placement.
Miss Whitfield finally softened her voice. She was so close I could smell the cigarette smoke in her hair. “But if you did murder someone,” she whispered, “would it more likely be Mr Patwin or Mr Davis?” She might have been asking this at the exact moment I took my first picture.
With her free hand, she reached into the coffin, straight into my second shot, ruining it. I watched through the rangefinder as she rolled the skull slightly away. I was too surprised to stop her. “Please don’t touch!” Davis called in alarm from his corner, and she removed her hand.
“I heard Tut-ankh-Amen’s head was bashed in at the back with a blunt instrument,” she explained. Her smoke-filled disappointment wafted through the tomb. I came off my stool, tried to set the skull back the way it had been, but I couldn’t be sure I’d done it right. I’d need to check my first photograph for that.
That night Patwin complained that I was blocking his light while he tried to read. I told him it was interesting that he thought the light belonged to him. I said, that’s an interesting point of view for a Marxist to take, and I saw Miss Whitfield pull out her notebook to write the whole thing down.
Next day, a cylindrical seal was found on the bier, and Davis deciphered a name from it, Tu-api, along with a designation for a highborn woman. A princess, not a priestess, then. We also found a golden amulet, carved in the shape of a goat standing on its hind legs. There’d been a second goat, a matching partner, but that one was crushed beyond mending. Pictures of all the ornaments had to be finished in a rush and sent off to Lord Wallis. The goat is really lovely, and my photograph showed it well; no one will have to apologize for that find.
Even better were the stones and shells that Davis had impressed. Mallick believed they’d once been two sides of a wooden box, which had disintegrated, leaving only the pattern.
One side had shown scenes from ordinary life. There was a banquet with guests and musicians, farmers with wood on their backs, oxen and sheep. The second side was all armies, prisoners of war, chariots, men with weapons. Before and After, Miss Jackson called it, but Mallick called it Peace and War to clarify that it represented two parts of a cycle, and not a sequence, that peace would follow war as well as precede it. The unknown artist must have been remarkable, as the people were so detailed, right down to the sorry look on the prisoners’ faces.
Patwin criticized me for taking more pictures of Tu-api than of the kneeling girls or the groomsmen or the poor musician. He said that I must fight the bourgeois impulse to care more about the princess than about the slave. It would be even harder, he conceded, now that the princess had a name. But Tu-api, he guessed, had the good fortune to die of natural causes. Unlike the others in her tomb.
“Does he always lecture at you like that?” Miss Whitfield asked. “How irritating that must be!”
Because I was busy developing prints of golden goats and verdigris bowls, because we’d already sent Lord Wallis plenty of photographs of skeletons, I left my pictures of Tu-api untouched for a couple of days. It was late at night when I finally put them through the wash and hung them up, and I didn’t look closely until the following morning. In my first shot, Tu-api had a face. This wasn’t part of the picture exactly, but a cloudy, ghostly spot with imploring eyes superimposed over the skull. It made my skin crawl up the back of my neck, and I took it out to
the dig to show the others. It was a hot day and the air so dry it stung to breathe. I found Mallick, Davis, and Miss Jackson all together in the third chamber around the pit where the oxen had been found.
They were not as unnerved as I was. A human face is an easy thing to find, Davis pointed out, in the paint on a ceiling, the grain in a wooden board. “I once saw the face of God in the clouds,” Miss Jackson agreed. “I know how that sounds, but it was as sharp and perfect as a Michelangelo. Sober and very beautiful. Thin Chinese sort of beard. I got down on my knees and watched until it melted and blew away.”
This sudden display of fancy from solid, cylindrical Miss Jackson obviously embarrassed Mallick. He got scholarly in response, with his dry voice and those red-rimmed eyes. “I’ve heard of bodies preserved right down to the facial expression,” he said. “In the Arctic ice, for example. Or at very high altitudes. I’ve always imagined those discoveries to be rather grim.”
“Buried in the bogs,” Patwin said. He’d arrived with Miss Whitfield while Mallick was speaking. He held out his hand for my photograph and looked it over silently. He handed it to Miss Whitfield. “I knew a man who’d met a man who’d found a thousand-year-old woman while digging for peat. He said you can’t look into a thousand-year-old face and not find yourself just a little bit in love. You can’t look into a thousand-year-old face and think, I bet you were an annoying old nag.”
“You’ve just put your thumb here on the print,” Miss Whitfield suggested to me. As if I were six years old and playing with my father’s Brownie.
I imagined myself with my hands around her throat. It came on me all of a sudden and shocked me more than the face had. I took my imaginary hands off her and gave her an imaginary and forgiving handshake instead.
In fact, I was angry with them all for refusing to believe the photograph even as they looked at it. Her face was indistinct, I grant you that. But you could see how beautiful she was. You could see the longing in those eyes. The fear. You could see she hadn’t wanted to die alone, had surrounded herself with other people, but it hadn’t helped her. I thought we all knew something about that, but maybe it was only me.