The Mammoth Book of the Mummy

by Paula Guran

  But it wasn’t the drugs (or possibility of same) that kept the story pot bubbling. No. The mummy mythos did that job. Of course, there weren’t too many people around here who knew much about Kharis and his eternal search for a reincarnated princess, but that changed PDQ. The local all-night TV station took a clue and started running those old movies on the Late Late Show, and a lot of folks stayed up watching, looking for answers. Not long after that, we had a town full of experts. You’d hear people sitting around in coffee shops discussing reincarnation, black magic, and all the rest of it. A couple of tabloids picked up the story, too. One of them ran a piece called “The Terror of Butcher Lake.” That’s where the name came from, and it stuck.

  Sheriff Cross and Deputy Myers became mummy experts, too. Just like everyone else, they coffee’d up and watched those Universal movies on the Late Late Show. After the mummy marathon aired, Cross even borrowed the prints from the TV station and ran them on the big screen at the local Bijou for some of the guys from the D.A.’s office, the state shrinks, and a few other invitees. God knows what that crowd made of them. I’ve always wondered if they just sat there stunned, or if they ate popcorn and had themselves a ball. I especially wonder about Sheriff Cross—after all, he’d gunned down the thing. It must have been something to see its twin take loads of buckshot and keep on coming, even if it was just a Hollywood shadow show up on the big screen.

  Of course, the Hollywood part of the equation was just the sizzle for the story, not the steak. The inventory of Charlie’s temple didn’t stop there, because there was more locked up in his personal madhouse besides the movie stuff. There were books about black magic, too. A stack of them. And there were notebooks Charlie had written with lots of missing pages, and other books with whole chapters cut out.

  But by then, it really didn’t matter.

  After all, Charlie Steiner was dead.

  For the next few weeks, I told the story over and over. My parents didn’t let me talk to any reporters, of course. It’s hard to believe with the way things are now. These days people spill their guts anywhere and everywhere, but that didn’t happen back then. You kept your business to yourself unless the cops told you otherwise, and that’s the way we played it. I talked to a couple of doctors, and I talked to someone from the district attorney’s office. Of course, I talked to Sheriff Cross, too.

  I told all of them the same story. How Roger and me and the preacher’s kid had come across the mummy—or Charlie Steiner. How he seemed to be working some kind of magic spell, and how he’d tossed a bound girl into the water after saying something about dreams, and wishes, and sacrifice.

  It really was a simple story, and it didn’t change. But every time I told it, the whole thing always came back to one question that punched a hole in the whole deal: Where was the little girl? They never did find her body in the lake. And, sure, there had been a couple young girls reported missing in neighboring towns during the preceding months, but that didn’t mean anything. After all, if Charlie had tossed a missing girl into Butcher’s Lake, they should have found her body. Drowned girls didn’t just disappear into thin air.

  Pretty soon, that girl in the princess mask was all the doctors wanted to talk about. I can’t really blame them. After all, I’d been busted up pretty good that night. I had a concussion. I was still having headaches several weeks after the fact. My sentences would run off to nowhere, and my thoughts would run to places I didn’t like. I wasn’t sleeping too well and I admit I had problems putting things together after a while.

  Not the story, but other things.

  The story was always there in my head. The story was always the same.

  I knew what I saw and heard that night, and I was sure it happened just the way I remembered it.

  But, in the end, it didn’t matter what I thought. The doctors brought in a headshrinker from upstate, and he put the word out that I was having trouble separating reality from fantasy. Something about disassociation, or disassociation, or something like that. All this, because I stuck to my story about a little girl who no one could find. That, and the fact that sometimes I talked about a mummy, and didn’t talk about Charlie Steiner at all.

  Like it mattered.

  Like that thing hadn’t been real for me on Halloween night.

  For most people, that delivered the entire episode to the closing gate. Sure, something had happened out there in the darkness, and my brother was dead. But as far as the state shrinks and the DA were concerned, they already had the culprit responsible for my brother’s murder. That kid’s name was Charlie Steiner, and Charlie wasn’t talking to anyone. He’d died in his very own boogeyman suit. The undertaker didn’t have to do much work on him—Charlie’s belly had been hollowed out by the sheriff ’s shotgun, and there weren’t enough guts left in his carcass to fill a whore’s nylon. So they sluiced the blood off Charlie and scraped off his make-up and dressed him up in a suit that had already been a couple sizes too small on him a few years before. Didn’t matter, because there was less of Charlie now. His family (such as it was) didn’t even hold a funeral. They wanted Charlie in the ground double-quick, and they didn’t have any money anyway. So the county took care of things, and they did a first-class, bang-up job.

  I’ve heard that some of Charlie’s wounds leaked so bad you could hear the formaldehyde sloshing around in his plywood coffin when they hauled him off to the local Potter’s Field. They dropped him in a hole and covered him over. They didn’t even put a tombstone on Charlie’s grave, though it didn’t take long for most of the kids in town to figure out where it was.

  Pretty soon guys were daring each other to climb the wrought-iron fence and take a piss on old Charlie, the trick being to do the job without the terror of Butcher’s Lake reaching up and pulling them down to hell by the short hairs. And not too long after that . . . well, people have short memories, don’t they?

  They forget.

  They forgot the Terror of Butcher’s Lake.

  They forgot Charlie Steiner.

  They forgot my brother Roger.

  And life moved on.

  For most people, anyway.

  For most people, that’s the way they like it.

  The story ends, and they turn the page.

  So life moved on, the way it does. I finished junior high and started high school. But everything I did, I figured Roger would have done better. It made me feel kind of like a shadow, two steps behind a guy who wasn’t even there to cast it any more.

  Fresh out of high school, I got drafted. Uncle Sam sent me to Vietnam, and I stayed there four years. That was the first thing I felt I did on my own, so it didn’t seem like such a bad deal to me. Of course, I couldn’t leave everything behind. I took Roger’s Louisville Slugger with me. Sometimes I used it on scruffy baseball fields . . . most of the larger bases had ball fields. Sometimes I took it into the jungle, but I never used it there. It was just something to help me keep away the bad dreams.

  Funny to be in a jungle and dream about a desert, or a mummy, but it happened.

  Over and over, night after night.

  But after a couple years, I stopped dreaming about the mummy. I dreamed about the jungle instead, and the war. I was crazy enough to think that marked some kind of progress, but looking back on it maybe all I did was trade one bad dream for another.

  Then I came home and slipped back into the world. I borrowed a car, drove around. Started doing some of the same things I’d done before I left. And then the dreams started to change again.

  I dreamed about my brother, and Butcher’s Lake.

  And the girl in the princess mask. And the mummy.

  I’d wake up sweating, with my head feeling like it was ready to crack. Finally one morning I didn’t go for a drive. I started looking at the newspaper classifieds instead. Figured it was time to find work, something new that would put the past behind me. For a while I even thought about college, because I could have used my GI Bill benefits.

  But that whole plan chan
ged one morning with a couple of knocks on the front door. It was Sheriff Cross. Older and grayer, but still built like a guy who could hold his own with just about anyone.

  “Hey, Sergeant. Welcome home.”

  “Thanks.” I knew I should have said more, since I was practically a kid the last time I’d seen him, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “Got a minute?” he asked. “I’ve got something here I’d like to show you.”

  “Sure.”

  Sheriff Cross had a new leather wallet. He flipped it open. There was a deputy sheriff ’s badge inside. He flipped the wallet closed and handed it to me. I took it from him.

  “I think you’re the guy I’m looking for,” he said. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t need to think. I’m in.”

  “That’s what I like to hear. We’ve got some paperwork to fill out. An application . . . some other stuff. You’ll have six weeks up north in the training academy. You’ll have to pass a physical, some other tests. You can talk to the other guys about that. They can let you know what’s coming.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “I thought it would. Now let’s go down to the cop shop and I’ll introduce you around. This is going to work out fine.”

  The town had changed while I was gone.

  Actually, that’s an understatement.

  What had really changed was the whole damn country.

  It seemed like a century had passed since the lockstep America of the fifties. The sixties had definitely made their mark. And even though it was 1973, the sixties were holding on, the same way the fifties had right up until the time that JFK took that bullet down in Dallas. Even in our little corner of the world, it might as well have been the Summer of Love. Grass and acid and downers had come to town. Hair got longer; guitars got fuzzy. No one remembered Elvis or Mickey Spillane. Truth be told, most of my contemporaries didn’t remember Jack Kerouac, either.

  But in the heart of the town, and the heart of America, not much was different. Same stores, same people, same crew cuts on the older guy who held the keys to the store. Every now and then some kid got hired, and there were a few twenty-somethings checking groceries at the market or selling TVs over at Sears or working down at the bank in the teller’s cage. But they came and went. They didn’t stick around long enough to wear out the linoleum or pocket the keys to the store, like the old guard had. For them, it didn’t seem like ringing up corn flakes was a lifelong ambition, or moving a weekly quota of Magnavox consoles, or stamping deposits in the Christmas Club accounts. No. The twenty-somethings would catch a whiff of sweeter possibilities and move on, and the old guys would stub out their cigs and put up a HELP WANTED sign, and some fresh face would take the bait and give the forty-hour grind a test-drive while the old guard grumbled about training another kid who wasn’t going to stay the course.

  So, in that way, things were pretty much the same, it was just that the faces changed more often. Tote things in those terms, and you’d say that all that had really changed were the clothes and the haircuts and the vices. But around the corners, the town had gotten a little frayed.

  Take Charlie Steiner’s house. Charlie’s mother had passed away when I was in high school. Then one day his father packed up his pickup and left the place behind. The house sat vacant the whole time I was in ’Nam, and it was the “20” for one of the first calls I rolled on after Ben Cross pinned a badge on my chest.

  I still remember that night. Wind rustling through overgrown trees around the place as I pulled up the drive, no lights inside but a fire in the fireplace that cast flickering ribbons against windows dull with grime. I killed my lights as I cut off the dirt road that went out toward Butcher’s Lake, and I killed the patrol cruiser’s engine ten feet after that. We’d had reports of stoners using the place as a crash pad, and I didn’t want to leave them a way out if they had wheels.

  The walk to the house was a long one. Not because I was worried about what I’d find inside. For the first time since the jungle I felt edgy. I mean, really edgy. I had a .38 strapped to my leg, but what I wanted in my hand was an M-16, or even Roger’s Louisville Slugger. Something familiar, something I could trust. It was a weird feeling, as if yesterday’s baggage were ready to bury me as deep as Charlie Steiner, right along with the new future I was building. I felt like I was on Charlie’s turf, and even though I knew he was six feet under in Potter’s Field, that night he cast a long shadow.

  Lucky for me, Charlie’s shadow got shorter once I took charge of the situation. I banged through the front door and hit the occupants with my flashlight beam. A couple of the stoners rabbited through a back window, and two girls spread out on a mattress in front of the fireplace were so toasted on downers they didn’t even wake up. It was almost comical. Right away I forgot all about Charlie. I nudged those girls and shook them, and after about ten minutes I even got them up walking, but it was tough to manage the both of them. Before I could do anything about it one would wander off and find her way back to the mattress, and when I went to grab her, the other stumbled out the door and fell asleep in the weeds in front of the place.

  I called it in to Jack Morrison, who was on duty back at the cop shop. He said he’d roll out and give me a hand with the girls. In the meantime, he told me to check out the rest of the place. Right away I knew what he meant.

  He didn’t mean the house.

  He meant Charlie Steiner’s pyramid.

  By that time I’d cooled out. Still, you never know what you’ll find, and I’d tangled enough with Charlie in my dreams that I wasn’t looking forward to a walk up his own personal madman’s trail. But it was my job. So I checked behind the main house and found the little deer-run path that led up to the A-frame. No lights out there except my flashlight, and the wind had died. If there had been a noise, I certainly would have heard it. A mouse skittering across the porch. A mummy’s padded footfall. Anything. I would have heard it.

  But I didn’t hear anything that night.

  I walked up to the A-frame.

  I swung open the door.

  I didn’t know what to expect.

  My flashlight beam skittered across the floor and over the walls. But it was just an empty room. There was nothing there at all. And that taught me something . . . at least for a while. Even though it was a lesson that didn’t stick, I held on to it—and that moment—for a few months.

  For a while, it convinced me everything would be okay.

  For a while, I actually believed that dreams were ephemeral.

  About a month later, the sheriff called me up on a Sunday morning and asked me to go to breakfast down at the diner. Ben told me he’d bought the old Steiner place, and was thinking he’d fix it up and turn it into a rental. Maybe even look into moving into the place himself when he hit retirement age and was ready to get a little farther out of town. He said it seemed like a good investment, and that he’d make some money if nothing else.

  “Sounds like a sweet deal,” I said. “I’m going to bank as much of my check as I can this year. Maybe one of these days I’ll have enough to start looking around for a place myself.”

  “That’s a good plan,” Ben said. “Can’t be easy being under your parents’ roof again.”

  “Well, I’m probably going to grab a studio apartment after I get a few more checks, but paying rent will definitely cut down on the savings. Can’t have it both ways, though.”

  “Maybe I can help you out with that.”

  “How do you figure?”

  Ben took a sip of coffee. “The Steiner place needs a lot of work. I’m looking for someone to help me out with it. Way I see it, you could live there rent-free. Clear the brush around the place. Do some carpentry. Some painting. I’d come in on the weekends and help out. How’s that sound?”

  I didn’t know what to say, but I knew I had to say something. “Well . . . hey, it’s hard to turn down free rent.”

  Ben nodded and set down his coffee cup. “Look, I know you have a h
istory with Charlie Steiner, and this was his house. Maybe this isn’t the best move for you. If you have any second thoughts—”

  “I know what you’re saying, Ben . . . but I’ll probably always have second thoughts. But I can’t bury the past, and maybe I shouldn’t try. Maybe what I need to do is confront it. You know, come to terms with it. And maybe working on that house will help me do that.”

  “Okay . . . but if it doesn’t work out—”

  “Then we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  We shook on the deal, and that was that. I moved into the Steiner house, and fortunately the night with the crash-pad girls was still fresh in my mind. I told myself everything would be okay, just as it had been that night, and if it wasn’t . . . well, I’d find a way to tell Ben that it wasn’t going to work, even if that was the last thing I wanted to do after the conversation we’d had.

  The first week, I lay awake at night listening to every creak and moan the old house made, and it seemed like those old fears had moved in with me. But eventually, spending so much time in that old house made the worries I’d had about moving into the place seem as out-of-style as a teenager with a crew cut. And it got easier once I started to work on the place. I took one thing at a time, and focused in on each project. A few weeks went by, and I’d cleared all the brush around the house, even chopped a wider path up to Charlie’s pyramid so I could get up there with a wheelbarrow and some tools. I figured I’d use that pyra.mid as practice before I started on the main house.