The Mammoth Book of the Mummy

by Paula Guran

  There was a bit the embalmer had read in one of his books, about a crocodile god, or maybe only part crocodile, because there were other parts too, part hippopotamus, part lion, all of those animals which were known to be man-eaters. And it was this god who would eat the hearts of the dead if they weren’t good enough, if they weren’t skinny enough, if they weren’t cool enough, if they carried black dogs with them, if their brothers died, if they were good with wire cutters, if they needed stepladders to kiss—and the people in the hallway were like that now, they had become the Great Devourer.

  The embalmer wanted to stop it all but he didn’t know how. He didn’t know what to do when things went a little bit wrong, only when things went very wrong like if your pet rabbit accidentally drank weed killer or you forgot to feed it for a while. Death was fixable. Hurt was much harder.

  But Dahlia bore it all patiently. She reminded the embalmer of pictures he had seen, pictures of St Thecla and all the little virgin martyrs his mother prayed to every night. Even when the yammerers cut her hair into a jagged line she had this look in her eyes that was peaceful and serene. She looked like she could reach out and touch them and then they would all be blessed, their zits would clear, their periods would dry up, their unwanted erections would wither, their wanted erections would swell to the size of cucumbers. They were making her powerful and they didn’t even know it.

  I think you know where this story is going now. I think if you knew what happened to Diesel in the yard with the circular saw then you think you know where this story is going, you think you know what’s going to happen to Dahlia because maybe she’ll drink the weed killer, maybe that’s what she got in the mail the next day from All Juiced Up, maybe she’ll die and then the embalmer will come for her the way he came for Diesel, the way he came for all the other animals.

  But that’s not this story.

  The kitty was found. Miss Kitagawa organized an urgent postering campaign and pretty soon the street was covered with pictures of the missing cat. It was the Smiths who finally found her. She was scratching at their backdoor, demanding to be let in. The littlest Smith wanted to keep her so they kept her for a while even though she had a collar, even though there were all those signs taped to poles and tacked to bulletin boards. But the Smiths had to keep her in the basement. They were worried about someone spotting her in the window. She was a celebrity now, the kitty was, sure to be recognized. But then the littlest Smith had a change of heart when she saw Miss Persimmons crying in the girls’ bathroom, all of her adult self curled up on one of those tiny toilets that barely reached her knees.

  But by then Dahlia had been pulled out of school. Her parents were moving to Florida, some place where it was warm and sunny and where they wouldn’t have to see that awful stretch of road outside their house. Dahlia buried the Labra-Dane in the backyard garden. She planted an acorn over the top. Maybe in a thousand years, she thought, there’ll be squirrels. God that dog was bananas for squirrels.

  In Florida Dahlia was mysteriously cool. Maybe it was the jagged punk hair she wore. Maybe it was the mole above her lip. Maybe it was the fact that the new cleanse was working, she’d lost twenty-four inches even if she never dropped a pound. All of her felt heavier after that and her sandals always made deeper footprints in the sand than anyone else’s did.

  When the other kids whispered that something had happened where she came from and that she used to have a brother this all had a kind of magic to them. Like they didn’t have Death in Florida. Which maybe, Dahlia thought, they didn’t. Everyone she saw had brownish-orange skin, everyone’s face had withered, everyone looked like they’d been around since the pyramids.

  But she felt better. It wasn’t the weight thing, though that’s what her parents thought. It wasn’t the kids either. They didn’t matter to her so much now. They were just kids. Maybe it was just the move, being somewhere new. The ocean. The sunlight. Maybe they were good for her. Maybe that was enough for her to let go a little and be happy.

  It was soon after Dahlia moved that Henry’s mother discovered the wire cutters in his bedroom. She couldn’t understand why he was sad all the time and her magazines said it was probably drugs and that they’d probably be in his closet or in his mattress. She checked all those places but she didn’t find the drugs, she found the wire cutters instead. And because she was a mother and she had a mother’s instinct and she remembered the way the police officer had been looking up the stairs it all came together in one awful, glorious moment of realization.

  So they left too. They weren’t hiding out exactly, it was never anything as obvious as that. Henry hadn’t broken any laws. He probably wasn’t an infant psychopath. But they loaded up the car and they drove away. Just in case.

  Wherever they ended up they didn’t stay very long. She never let him into pet shops and she was suspicious when he went out by himself or he didn’t come home on time. But he was getting older and she didn’t want to suffocate him. He had a girlfriend, the girlfriend did drugs but she was pretty and his mother figured they’d both grow out of it eventually, what was she supposed to do, just ground him forever? Of course not. He had a life to live. She couldn’t freeze him in place, she couldn’t stop bad things from happening. All she could do was watch and wait and pray that he was okay, pray that her love was enough to keep him safe forever.

  Adam Roberts offers a brilliant alternative history take on the assumed superiority of imperial “civilization” and its views of subordinate colonial lands filled with interesting archaeological relics and remnants, inhabited by “degenerate” races mired in the past and incapable of prevailing as their ancestors had. In our world, “Tollund Man” is much like the mummy described. Probably the most well-preserved body we have from pre-historic times, the mummy was discovered in 1950 in a peat bog near a small village—Tollund—on the Jutland Peninsula of Denmark. Now estimated to have died between 375 and 210 BCE, it has been determined that the cause of his death was hanging.

  Tollund

  Adam Roberts

  1

  1330 AH

  As he stepped from the boat, Gamal el-Kafir el-Sheikh’s impressions were of warm air and a bright sky. That vivid, alien green so characteristic of the northlands. It was, altogether, a pleasant surprise. There weren’t many passengers; for few people had any reason to come to this far-flung land, and el-Kafir el-Sheikh’s servant—assigned him for the duration of the excavation—found him easily enough. “I am Bille, minherr,” he said in passable Masri. “I may take you the hotel?” He was a tall man, but he stared at his own shoes as he spoke, which in turn prompted el-Kafir el-Sheikh to look down. The fellow had huge feet, big as boats, wrapped in two ill-cobbled shoes of scuffed leather. “Bille what?” el-Kafir el-Sheikh asked him. “Or is it, what-Bille?

  This seemed to confuse the big Jutlander. “I’m sorry, minherr?” “I’m asking your full name.”

  “Bille Jensen, minherr.”

  “Come along, man, don’t quail! I’m a historian, an archaeologist, not a Grendl! I won’t eat you.” The fellow didn’t respond to this, but el-Kafir el-Sheikh clapped him on the back. “My first time here, you know. Though I’ve spent years in libraries learning about it. What a charming-looking country!”

  “Yes, minherr.”

  They rode a horse and cart, the nag a proper north-European beast, rust-colored, barrel-flanked, its legs tasseled with dirty trailing strands of hair. The road was rutted and progress was slow. El-Kafir el-Sheikh didn’t care. The air was full of xylophonic birdsong and the breeze had the authentic tang of occidental exoticism. It was all so green! The trees positively foamed with leaves. “Are my colleagues all at the hotel?”

  “Minherr?”

  “Professor Suyuti? Professor el-Akkad? Or are they at the dig?”

  “At the hotel, minherr.”

  “You have seen the dig?”

  The fellow angled his long-boned face in his master’s direction. Was that fear in the old man’s eyes? “Yes, minherr.”r />
  “Oh it’s a marvelous thing. You know, I have nothing but respect for your people and your culture,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh told him, a touch over-earnestly (but he was prone to over-earnestness). “You should know that these archaeological digs are a way of uncovering the rich history of your folk.”

  “Yes, minherr,” the fellow said, sulkily, turning his big head back in the direction of travel.

  “I sense your disaffection. You don’t like us rootling around amongst your old kings and dukes.” When this failed to produce a reply, el-Kafir el-Sheikh added: “Are you a superstitious fellow, Bille? Is it the business with the mummies?”

  The servant put a brief sine wave into the reins he was holding and barked a barbaric Jutlandese command at the horse. But he did not answer el-Kafir el-Sheikh’s question.

  “It’s all nonsense, you know, my dear fellow,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh told him, pulling out his pipe and lighting it. “We are men of science. Of course I heard those stories about murders and strange deaths. Which is to say, I read about them in the papers. Back in Cairo there’s a deal of excitement about your mummies, you know. Oh we have mummies back home, you know, but they’re clean. The fact is, there’s a certain type of Egyptian who likes nothing better than grisly stories of the bog-mummies, coming alive and turning human victims to sludge. But that it’s a good story doesn’t mean it’s true, now does it!”

  The cart trundled round the corner, under an archway formed by two lusciously foliaged trees, and the hotel appeared before them. And sauntering out through the main entrance was Professor Tawfiq el-Akkad. “Gamal, you old rogue!” he cried. “Finally you have come!”

  2

  The whole team took tea in the conservatory: el-Kafir el-Sheikh, Suyuti, el-Akkad, and Hussein. Everyone called Hussein Gurbati because he was Dom rather than misriyūn; but he didn’t seem to mind. “It’s too late to go out to the site today,” el-Akkad announced. “And tomorrow is Sabbath. But first thing al-Ahad we’ll go straight there. We have a car, you know. I do believe it is the only internal combustion engine in the whole of Jutland!”

  “I really can’t wait,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh gushed. “I brought all my books.”

  “Oh, it’s your noggin we really need,” said Suyuti.

  “Don’t tell me there aren’t any runes,” said el-Kafir el-Sheikh. “I was promised runes.”

  “Runes,” said Gurbati, in a bored-sounding voice. “We’ve dozens of tablets, linden-wood mostly, absolutely covered in runes. But it’s not that.”

  “People are chatting,” Suyuti said. “In Danish.”

  “You mean—Old Danish?”

  “I certainly don’t mean new Danish!”

  “Which people?”

  “Natives; whitters. People who cannot read or write. As to how they could acquire the complex grammar and vocabulary of a dead language . . . well, some say their god of language, Jut, has put a spell upon them. Cast a spell across time, from a thousand years ago.”

  “Good gracious!” el-Kafir el-Sheikh sucked lustily on his pipe stem. “It took me seven years’ careful study to acquire it. Are you sure they’re speaking Old Danish?”

  Suyuti’s laugh was like a thunderclap. “That’s what you’re here to determine, my old friend!” he boomed. He took a drink, and when he lowered the cup the hairs of his moustache were dewed with droplets of tea. “That—and the runes.”

  “Of course you’ve heard the stories of strange goings-on,” Gurbati observed, gloomily.

  “Well,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh laughed. “I’ve read some silly stories. People exploding and so on. People turning to . . . well, manure. I can’t say I believed it.”

  “He believes it,” Suyuti chortled, clapping Gurbati on the shoulder.

  “Really? I didn’t realize you were a superstitious type, Gurbati! And you think it’s connected to your digging up these old mummies? It hardly seems credible.”

  “It looks unlikely in the sunlight, I grant you,” said Gurbati. “But you wait. The weather will revert to type tomorrow, and everything will look different. As to the mummies, well, I don’t know. But I do know that there have been strange deaths. The police have opened official investigations on three of them. Talk to Bille. He saw one of the victims die. Actually watched the woman . . . deliquesce!”

  But nothing could dampen el-Kafir el-Sheikh’s spirits. He was actually here, in Jutland, with his university friends, about to take part in the most exciting discovery in the history of archaeology! “Come, come,” he said. “It’s 1333! It’s not the dark ages. We are men of science.

  I’ll keep an open mind,” he added, “of course. But I’m itching to see these mummies, and I don’t believe they’re cursed.”

  Later that evening, after a splendid supper, they all sat in the conservatory of the hotel. The weather had changed, and el-Kafir el-Sheikh listened to the rain percussing the roof with a continual, rather soothing rush of noise over their heads. They all smoked. Mohammed Suyuti gave them the benefit of his theory as to why the northerners had failed to rise to the level of the Ummah. “It’s not racial, whatever some people say. I do not hold with those despicable racist views. There’s nothing intrinsically inferior about the northerners. It’s an accident of geography.”

  “You mean,” said el-Akkad. “The climate.”

  “The climate dulls their spirits, it is true,” said Suyuti. “In Africa it is so hot that a man must either wilt or rouse himself to great things. There’s nothing like that here; they all stumble about in a daze. It’s too cold to sleep properly, and also so cold that they can’t properly wake up. But, no, I meant something else. Here.” He pulled a notebook from his pocket, opened it and began to read:

  Egypt is not just a piece of land. Egypt is the inventor of civilization . . . The strange thing is that this country of great history and unsurpassed civilization is nothing but a thin strip along the banks of the Nile . . . This thin strip of land created moral values, launched the concept of monotheism, developed arts, invented science, and gave the world a stunning administration. These factors enabled the Egyptians to survive while other cultures and nations withered and died.

  “I copied that from a book I was reading. Doesn’t it strike you as true? In Egypt civilization was focused about the Nile, and that focus, the pressure that applied to human culture, generated civilization—as carbon is compressed into diamond! But throughout northern Europe there’s no such focus. Population spreads itself more or less equally about the inlands, more or less diffuse, and no great civilization can coalesce.”

  “It’s an interesting theory,” said el-Kafir el-Sheikh, gesturing toward Suyuti with the stem of his pipe. “But I would need to see hard evidence. Science! That’s the key, gentlemen!”

  “My father used to tell me,” Gurbati said, in a gloomy voice, “men contend with the living, not with the dead. It was his way of telling me to get on with life, and not waste my energies worrying about the past. But here—in Jutland—well, I tell you, the opposite is true. The opposite is literally true.”

  “Nonsense,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh retorted. “Don’t tell me you’ve become a slave to superstition?”

  “Back home the past is cleaned and tidied away. Here it’s simply left to rot where it falls. It mulches down. These bogs all around us—compacted layers of decaying generations.” He shuddered, visibly. “Magic may not be so difficult to believe as all that, you know. Not here. Not in this land.”

  3

  First sun, then rain, and finally mist. The following morning el-Kafir el-Sheikh pulled the curtains back to be faced with an honest-to-goodness Jutland fog. The homely sun and blue sky had been completely erased, as if dissolved in white solution. Boughs from a couple of the nearer trees loomed blackly toward him, looking disconnected from the world as if levitating in mid-air. Everything else was albumen and opacity. He opened his window. The smell of clouds, wet and faintly vegetative, and a weird muffled silence.

  Breakfast was a muted affair, as if the fog had gotten i
nto everyone’s spirits. Suyuti spoke at an ordinary volume, which for him was akin to whispering. “You’ll need gloves and a scarf,” he advised el-Kafir el-Sheikh. “And I recommend a hat. It’s a long drive to the dig, and we’ll have to take it slowly in this weather. Visibility, you know.”

  “Chilly, chilly,” el-Akkad confirmed.

  The drive was a surreal experience. The road was unsmooth, and the four of them (plus Bille, who was driving) were bounced around, continuously jiggled and agitated; but otherwise el-Kafir el-Sheikh had almost no sensation of motion. Objects might suddenly appear, as if magically transported from nothing into being—the end of a hedgerow, a cow—and lurch toward them, and then vanish into nothingness behind them. And it was cold. Worse, el-Kafir el-Sheikh found that his clothes soaked up moisture and quickly became sopping. The sun was a vagueness of light, high up and to the south. Nothing cast a shadow. “I pride myself on my scientific rationalism,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh confided to Gurbati, “but even I can see that—this is a spooky sort of place.”

  “It’s so ancient,” Gurbati replied, raising his voice over the rattle and hum of the car’s passage. “I mean: Egypt is ancient, obviously. But Egypt has moved on. This land is trapped by the past—as if the past is throttling it, preventing the whole country from going forward.” He shuddered. With the cold, perhaps.

  “It’s like some vast entity has breathed on to the mirror of the sky, and clouded it over,” el-Kafir el-Sheikh said.

  Finally they arrived: two lights like pearl-colored eyes bright in the fog revealed themselves to be oil lamps, struggling to light either side of a gateway in a fence of knitted wire. A Jutlander boy, presumably alerted by the sound of the approaching vehicle, was standing guard. Bille drove past him, and turned the car to a halt, tossing up a little surf of mud. They had parked in front of a long wooden shed, lit from within. El-Kafir el-Sheikh was not sorry to get inside, for there was a stove in the middle around which they all huddled. “So cold!” el-Kafir el-Sheikh gasped. “And yesterday was sunny and warm!”