by Paula Guran
“Can anyone?” Jennifer asked. “I mean, how many big mummy novels have there been? It’s not like the vampire: for a while there, it seemed like every other book, movie, and TV show was about vampires, for crying out loud.”
“And frequently from the vampire’s point of view,” Bob added.
“I know, really, like I’m going to identify with this walking corpse that spends his nights sucking people’s blood out of little holes in their necks. Hello! Whose brainstorm was this? Anyway, regardless of what I may have thought, they were very popular. And you’ve had God only knows how many of those zombie movies, those Dead movies, Night of the Living Evil Dead from Hell Part III or whatever, not to mention movies about the devil and possession and witches and toxic monsters—but we were talking about books, weren’t we? Well, I’m sure you’ve had books about all those things, too, haven’t you?” She looked at me.
“More or less,” I said.
“And werewolves: this one—” she gestured at me with her wine glass “—is working on a werewolf thing. It’s very good. Are you done with it yet?”
“Not yet,” I said.
“He’s been very busy with the semester,” Fiona said.
“We’ve got the great werewolf novel—sorry, I know I’m not supposed to call it that—we’ve got the great werewolf story coming, too, but what about the mummy?”
“The mummy is different,” I replied. “It’s a relic from a different time, the imperial age, from when the sun never set on the British Empire. Has anyone read any of the original mummy stories, the ones Arthur Conan Doyle wrote?” Only Bob nodded. “I shouldn’t call them the original stories; I don’t know for sure whether they are or not. I assume they were among the first. Anyway, Conan Doyle’s mummy is very different from what we’re accustomed to when we hear that name; at least, from what I think of. His mummy is a weapon. There’s an obnoxious student of obscure foreign languages at Oxford who buys one that he keeps in his apartment for use against his enemies. He can read the spell that animates the mummy and sends it to do your bidding, which in his case usually involves disposing of the latest person who’s annoyed him.”
“Talk about Revenge of the Nerds,” Jennifer said.
“What happens to him?” Fiona asked.
“Fortunately, a fellow student figures out what’s going on and forces him to destroy the mummy, cut it up with dissecting knives and burn it together with the papers that brought it to life.”
“How does he manage that?” Jennifer asked. “You would think the guy would just sick the mummy on him.”
“He goes armed, with a gun.”
“Oh. I guess that would do the trick.”
“Indeed. I haven’t made any kind of exhaustive survey, but that seems to be how the mummy first enters English literature. I wonder if it doesn’t express some kind of anxiety, or even guilt, about the whole imperial enterprise, particularly with regard to the museums. The mummy seems so much a creature of the museum, doesn’t it? You imagine it shuffling through the museum after dark, one loose bandage trailing along the floor behind it. Where does that image come from? It must be a scene in a film, I suppose. But it’s as if the mummy embodies a kind of doubt the British had about removing all those antiquities from their rightful locations and shipping them to London for display, as if they suspected the morality of their actions—”
“Or as if they were afraid of contamination,” Fiona said.
“Mmm,” Bob said. “Who knows what you’re going to bring into the country?”
“Right, you have to be careful,” I said. “That could be it, too, like Dracula. Watch out what you unload from the boats.”
“Dracula?” Jennifer asked.
“There are those who see Dracula as sublimating a fear of rabies,” Bob answered, “a fear of England becoming diseased through its contact with other, particularly very distant and very foreign, places.”
“I see,” Jennifer said. “Thank you, Bob. You’re right about the mummy: we don’t think about it in terms of the story you described. We think of it as a love story, am I right? It starts in ancient Egypt, with a priest who’s in love with the wrong person: the pharaoh’s wife, or his sister—or weren’t their sisters their wives? Anyway, he’s in love with someone he’s not supposed to be, so as a punishment for his hubris—see, I do remember something from Bob’s class—he’s mummified. Could you say he’s mummified alive?”
“Well, technically mummification was something that was done to you after you were dead,” Bob said. “But hey—why not?”
“All right then: Bob has given me permission to use the phrase ‘mummified alive.’ So the priest is buried in the desert, where he’s forgotten about for the next four to five thousand years, until a bunch of clueless archaeologists, or I guess they’d be Egyptologists, find him, bring him to the museum, and turn him loose.”
“Which usually involves his trying to find the reincarnation of his lost love,” I added.
“Yes, who just happens to be the woman the hero’s in love with, too. Convenient, that. The mummy kidnaps her and carries her to the Egypt room at the museum, which he has set up for the ceremony that will return his lost love’s soul to the heroine’s body. Luckily, the hero has figured all this out, and he shows up at the museum just in time to foil the mummy’s plans. And get the girl. The mummy winds up incinerated.”
“That’s Hollywood,” Fiona said, shaking her head, “everything becomes a romance.”
“What’s wrong with romance?” I asked, receiving in reply a sour expression. “Well,” I said, “certainly the film versions of the mummy story tend to rob it of the deeper implications you find in the earlier written stories. The mummy becomes another monster, his Egyptian origins so much window-dressing.”
Bob said, “The Egyptian associations had no resonance for Americans.”
“Not the same resonance,” Fiona said. “For America, Egypt was just another exotic location.”
“So that’s it?” Jennifer asked. “The mummy is dead? There’s nothing anyone can do with it? Him? It?”
“This is all very nice,” Kappa said, “and very educational, I can assure you. But isn’t it a bit off track? We were talking about things that actually had happened to people, not movies and books.”
Bob nodded, and Jennifer said, “You’re absolutely right, Kappa, we were talking about actual events.”
“So,” I said, glancing round the company gathered there in the living room, my eyebrows raised for effect, “does anyone have a mummy story they’d care to share?”
There was a pause during which the wind fell off, and then a voice said, “I do.”
We looked about to see who had spoken, and our eyes settled on Nicholas, who had been introduced at the start of our stay at the Cape house as an old friend of Bob’s from Harvard and who had maintained an almost unbroken silence in the five days since, departing the house for hours at a time on walks whose destination he shared with no one, but which appeared to take him inland, away from the beach and the winter-angry ocean. His face was buried under twin avalanches of white hair, one descending from the tangled mass crowning his head, the other rising from the tangled mass hugging his jaw, but his hooded eyes were a pale bright blue that I should have described as arctic. For dress, he favored a pair of worn jeans and a yellowed cable-knit sweater, which he supplemented with a long grey wool coat and boots that laced up just short of his knees for his jaunts outside. In reply to a question Jennifer had posed our first morning there, while Nicholas was out, Kappa had informed us that Nicholas was an archaeologist whose particular interest was the study of the Vikings, which was the basis upon which his friendship with Bob had been founded when they met at Harvard. Although they had maintained contact over the years, it was not uncommon for Nicholas to disappear on some expedition or another for months at a time, and occasionally longer, which was part of the reason Kappa assumed he never had married. He did not speak much: this we had witnessed ourselves as Jennifer, who pri
des herself on being able to have a conversation with any living human being, availed herself of every opportunity to ask Nicholas questions, about himself, his career, what he was engaged in currently, that he answered in monosyllables when possible, clipped phrases when not, his voice when he spoke the sandpapery rasp of one unaccustomed to frequent speech. Now he was sitting on a dining-room chair he had positioned at the group’s perimeter, between the dining room and the living room, a long-necked bottle of beer cradled in his hands. We shifted in our respective seats to face him, and he repeated, “I do; I have a mummy story.”
“You do?” Bob asked.
“Well,” Jennifer said, “I’m sure we’d all love to hear your story, Nicholas.”
“Why don’t you come a bit closer?” Kappa offered, but Nicholas made no effort to move.
“You have a mummy story?” Fiona asked, to which Nicholas nodded vigorously in reply. “Yes,” he said, “yes, I think you’d have to call it that.”
Possessed by a sudden impulse, I asked, “Would you tell us your story, Nicholas?” which appeared to be the cue for which he had been waiting: he began to speak, his voice scraping like a machine that had been but seldom used for an exceedingly long time. It strengthened, his voice, as he continued speaking; at the end of the hour and a half, or perhaps it was two hours, his story took, it sounded almost pleasant, the kind of voice that would have been at home delivering lectures to large groups of students at a university. The story he told would not have found a home at a university, however: it was the kind of story that is suited to a February night in an old house with a strong storm howling off the ocean. When his tale was completed, we retired to bed without much comment. I do not think any of us slept soundly that night; I know I did not. In the dark, I lay beside my fiancée listening to the wind moaning at our window, to the ocean smashing itself on to the beach, and when at last I slept I dreamed of a dark island, and gnarled hands reaching up, out of the water, to choke me.
II
This happened twenty-five years ago (Nicholas said). Immediately after, and for years, I thought the memory of it would never fade. I was sure the memory would never fade: it was burned into my brain. But the surface on to which it was burned has worn away over the last quarter-century, and now the memory doesn’t seem as deeply engraved.
I was at the University of Aberdeen on a faculty exchange program. I was supposed to be delivering weekly lectures and meeting with students for tutorial sessions, but I was able to pass the bulk of those duties off on a bright young assistant someone at the university, probably the department chair, had decided to assign me. His name was Bruce; as I recall, he was from Greenock, a town on the west coast. Bruce delivered my lectures, which was to say he gave lectures he had researched and written and I told him I had read and approved, and Bruce took care of my tutorials. He was very eager. I was, too: I was using the free time Bruce allowed me to make trips all over the country to do research for a book I was writing on the Viking presence in Scotland, a subject I considered, and still do, vastly understudied. I would leave the university for anywhere from a day to a week at a time—well, I was away for a week only once, and that was to take part in a dig on Skye that an old friend of mine from undergrad was running. Nothing disastrous ever happened while I was gone, and I thought Bruce would benefit from all the experience.
When I returned from a trip, I spent a day organizing my notes, then another couple of days writing. I wrote from eight in the morning till four in the afternoon, stopping for a half-hour lunch some time between eleven and one, depending on how the writing was proceeding. At four, I pushed my chair away from the typewriter and left my cold flat for a warm pub, usually one just down the street called The Tappit Hen. Most days, Bruce would join me to fill me in on how the latest lecture or tutorial had gone. I would nod at whatever he told me, not really listening to him, and say, “Sounds like you’re doing fine.” This pleased him what seemed to me an inordinate amount. I was flattered, yes, but I was also annoyed, maybe more annoyed than flattered. A number of significant discoveries concerning the Viking role in British history had broken in the last couple of years, and I had not been involved, not even remotely, in any of them. I had only been aware one of them was in progress. The picture of myself I saw in Bruce’s broad freckled face reminded me acutely how far my reality was from his ideal.
Bruce was with me when the man from MI-5 pulled up a stool at the table. I assume he was from MI-5; I didn’t ask and he didn’t volunteer the information. He was affiliated with some type of intelligence operation, of that much I was sure. His skin was bad, his teeth were bad, and he wore his hair in a crew cut. He was carrying an old briefcase that he swung up onto the table and unsnapped, but did not open. He verified my identity, did not bother with Bruce’s, and gave his name as Green. There were no handshakes. He had sought me out, Green said, because he thought I might be able to help him. He propped open his briefcase and withdrew from it a large envelope which he slid across the table to me, asking me to have a look at its contents and tell him what I thought.
The envelope held a dozen or so large black-and-white photographs. The first few were of an island, not a very large one from the look of it, a rocky beach and a couple of hills. There was a shape on top of one of the hills, the one to the right in the picture: what looked like a stone column. My guess was correct: the next photos showed a tall, narrow column that was covered from top to bottom in runes. A couple of the pictures were clear and close enough for me to have a good look at some of the runes, and when I did my heart started to knock in my chest. I had not seen runes like these before: there were certain family resemblances to runes I knew from parts of Eastern Norway, enough for me to be able to read a couple of words and phrases here and there, but there were also striking variations, and more than a few characters that were completely new, unprecedented. You may be surprised to hear that not once did I doubt these pictures’ authenticity, but that was the case. I looked at Green and asked him where this was.
“So you’re interested?” he asked. I said I was, and he told me that the island in these photographs was located north-northwest of the Shetlands, an hour and a half’s boat ride from the nearest human habitation. The place was called Skua Island, and if I thought that artifact of any archaeological significance, he and his employers—his term—were prepared to send me there to study it within two weeks, as soon as school let out for Christmas holiday.
Of course I was suspicious. People don’t just approach you in a pub and offer to pay your way to unearthing a potentially historic find. Did I say unearthing? Yes: that was what one of the segments of writing I could read said, that there was something buried underneath this column, something I immediately thought might be the remains of a nobleman or hero. Even if what lay below the column wasn’t that exciting, the column itself was: among the runes were characters that I thought I recognized as ancient Greek, and a couple that resembled pictographs I had seen on scrolls on display at the Met, in New York, in the Egyptian wing. I saw myself invited to lecture at Oxford, at the Sorbonne, on my earth-shaking discovery. And if that discovery had been arranged and financed by an intelligence organization, what difference did that make? I had heard of such partnerships in the past; it was impossible to go very far in the field in any direction without encountering them: a team was provided generous funding to go to Peru, or Morocco, or Indonesia, and in exchange all they had to do was answer a few questions on their return, plot out the route they had taken through the mountains on a map, share their photographs of the capital, the airport. It’s been the way of the archaeological world since at least the Victorians, probably longer. Undoubtedly, I was needed on the island as a cover, a front for whatever operation required its use. Perhaps they wanted to monitor the movements of Soviet submarines in the North Atlantic. If we could help each other, I saw no harm in it.
So I agreed, and even engaged to have Bruce accompany me as a reward for his slave labor. The morning after the last day of
classes, the two of us were flown in a small plane from Aberdeen to the Shetlands, where we were introduced to the rest of our crew, eleven men whose posture and crew cuts bespoke their military associations as well as any uniform would have. I don’t remember most of their names, only the leader’s, Collins, whom I later heard the men address as “Major,” and another, Joseph—I’m not sure if that was his first or last name—and a third, Ryan. Collins was older, by ten years at least, than his men, in his early- to mid-thirties. He was short and stocky, and his eyes were green and sharp. All the gear I had requested he had procured and had stored on board the fishing ship that had been hired to ferry us to the island. One thing I will say for the military: they are efficient. We ate lunch on the ship as it rode out of port.
By then it was three o’clock, and already the sky was darkening. I don’t know if any of you have been that far north in the winter (Bob, I know you’ve been to Iceland, but wasn’t that in the summer?), but the sun only puts in an appearance for a few hours a day, the fewer the closer to the Arctic Circle you venture. It goes without saying that the sea was rough. Rough! It was a heap of grey slabs heaving around us. Despite the pills we had swallowed with our lunches, Bruce and I were soon hanging over the ship’s side, our lunches offerings to the sea. None of our companions seemed much affected. I remember that trip as a succession of flights and drops, the deck see-sawing beneath our feet, the ship’s engine throbbing as it scaled one grey hill then slid down another, the waves striking the bow with a great hollow boom. We made better time than the season should have allowed, and it was just over an hour after we left port that Skua Island rose to our left. Ryan pointed it out to me, but my eyes already had found it. It wasn’t more than a couple of hills that seemed barely taller than the waves swelling around us. Even given the hour and the failing light, the place seemed unusually dark. I searched the hill crests and located the column on the hill to the left, which meant that the photograph Green had shown me had been shot from the other side of the island. It was to there that we made our way. Seen from above, the island resembled a horseshoe, the opening facing north and forming a bay that was only a little less choppy than the sea. The ship dropped anchor in the bay, and Bruce and I and the eleven soldiers packed our gear into bright yellow inflatable rafts that we rowed to shore. As we approached the beach, a great cloud of black-backed gulls, really, a surprising number for so small an island, rose into the wind, shrieking furiously. It’s an enormous bird, the black-backed gull; as we pulled up on the beach, the flock hung there overhead screaming at us for what seemed a long time, before veering away.