The Third Grave

by David Case

  “How can it be?” I asked him—and myself, as well—shaking my head. The motion served only to jostle my thoughts about within my mind. “The brain cannot exist without the body. It demands the body, it requires glandular secretions, nutrients, oxygen, blood—the brain is not the soul, Mallory, it cannot rise from the corpse.” He was frowning at me. “Why, one-­fourth of all the blood pumped from the heart goes to service the brain.”

  “Yes. A huge percentage, considering the relatively small mass. That disproves nothing. On the contrary, it attests to the overwhelming power of the brain—the subservience of the body. And the mind—is that not the soul?—what does the mind need with a pump to push its blood when it can suck up the very substance of thought? What does it want with the cumbersome process of digestion, excretion, circulation? They are useless appendages to man, vestigial traits from the dawn of time when we came crawling and dripping from the primordial slime. The brain is a tyrant ruling imbecilic cells and yet unable to renounce its corporal kingdom. Yet it lives royally. Do you know that the human brain receives the same amount of blood every moment through its existence? That cerebral vessels are not affected by heat or cold or physical exertion but take their due unaltered, no matter how the muscles labor? Are you not convinced?”

  I did not wish to be convinced.

  If this were truth, I would deny truth. I turned away from him, I stared sightless about the room, all perceptions turned inward, my thoughts horrendous. I pictured a man, any man, myself perhaps, the body dead and the mind aware, waiting, waiting—patiently waiting for corruption. The thoughts, my God, the thoughts, untempered by sensation, that would exist without that mind! Would he pray the maggots speed, would he will them first to his eyes so that, blinded, he need not witness his own decay? Would he silently scream for the skulking scavenger whose dripping jaws could crush the skull? I wanted to vomit. It could not be. Mallory had sought proof, and now I sought proof to disprove. My eyes, wandering, suddenly focused.

  I was looking at the mummy case.

  Mallory intercepted my gaze.

  “Yes,” he nodded. “I will show you my mummy.”

  I followed Mallory across the room, holding tight rein on my emotions, telling myself this was merely another mummy like many another I had seen. Mallory put his hand on the edge of the case, then paused dramatically, like a magician about to produce a rabbit from a hat. He was facing me; peering at me, not at the case. Then he threw it open.

  The mummy moved.

  I screamed silently within my head and leaped back.

  Mallory, still watching me, chuckled.

  My inflamed imagination was roaring like a forest fire, and I had to struggle with myself to keep from bolting. The mummy had made a solitary motion; now it was still. I saw that it had been placed so that the arms, folded over the chest, had been held in position by the lid of the case; that, when Mallory threw the lid back suddenly, the arms had dropped down to the sides. One clawlike hand came to rest on the edge of the case. It had been—or so it seemed in my fevered state—a remarkably lifelike motion. Thank God my scream had been silent, I thought, seeing Mallory’s amusement. My startled leap had been embarrassing enough.

  Looking as nonchalant as I could, I stepped forward.

  “A pretty fellow, eh?” Mallory said.

  I grimaced.

  “I call him Encephalon.”

  I inspected the mummy. Someone—Mallory, presumably—had unwound the wrappings from head and torso, leaving only the flanks and lower limbs bound in yellowed linen. The mummy was blackened and withered and loathsome. The mottled skin was drawn tautly over a gaunt rib cage and sunken belly, and crouching upright on spindly thighs it seemed possessed of a terrible vitality; the mummy seemed frozen at an instant of energy.

  I looked at the face.

  The features were perfectly preserved, although age had blotched the skin. Two dull grey eyes, without pupils, congealed like drops of lead in the eye sockets. The thin lips had shriveled back from irregular yellow fangs.

  Mallory was watching me with interest.

  “Hideous,” I said.

  Mallory carefully tucked the errant claw back inside the case. My initial impression satisfied, I regarded the mummy with more professional interest. The torso had been neatly slit below the breastbone but not in the manner of the ancient embalmers. The cut looked surgical and recent.

  “You’ve opened it?” I asked.

  “Of course. This is my cut.” He pointed to the belly. “You will notice there are no others—the corpse was embalmed without being gutted.”

  “Unusual.”

  “Yes. But see here—and here—” He was thrusting his fore­finger from place to place on chest and flank. His finger touched the marcescent skin. I saw the slight indentations where he pointed and leaned closer. They appeared to be puncture wounds which had drawn closed as the flesh tightened. “It was through these openings that the chemicals were passed into the body cavity—poured, injected, dripped, however it was done.” He shrugged. “I know nothing of their methods, other than that they succeeded—but succeed, they did, for look—”

  Mallory tenderly spread open the incision below the breastbone, stretching the parchment-like flesh. I looked. There within the dark body cavity, hardened and dried but positioned as in life, were the mummy’s internal organs.

  “Remarkable,” I said, almost forgetting Mallory’s previous revelations as my interest was arrested by this astonishing discovery. But it was not a simple variation in the embalming process that he was showing me, and letting the belly close up again, he reached to the bony head.

  He cupped the cheeks in both hands and turned the head to the side.

  “See them?”

  I saw. At the temple and below the ear and at the base of the skull were further punctures.

  “The same process?”

  “Yes. The same method, although the fluids employed were different. More effective, apparently.”

  “How so?”

  He smiled meaningfully.

  He turned the head to the other direction.

  I gasped.

  Mallory had opened an oblong hole in the skull, removing a segment of bone and exposing the brainpan. And in that hollow was the brain. I stared at it, my mouth gaping open. The brain was not hardened and dried like the organs—it was soft and pulpy, it seemed almost to pulsate with life. This was no embalming process known to man—no process I had ever conceived of. Whatever methods had been used, this brain was preserved as it had been in life.

  I turned to stare at Mallory.

  “And now,” he said. “Now do you believe?”

  “I don’t know what to believe.”

  “Come now. Skepticism is all well and good, but you can’t deny what you’ve seen. Or do you suppose I’m playing a hoax? That I’ve stuffed this skull with some plastic simulation?”

  “No, not that.”

  “Well then?”

  “It’s—it’s inconceivable. But—it’s there, I can’t deny that. As to the other—do you really believe that brain still lives?”

  Mallory frowned slightly and, before he replied, turned the head back to the front.

  “That, I don’t know,” he said. “Nothing registers on the encephalograph. Too long entombed, perhaps? Or faultily prepared? What is life? We cannot define it. This is living matter, no doubt. But as to whether it can still think—that is the question again, Ashley. Perhaps through the ages the brain, without external stimuli, sinks into a state of mental inertia. Several times I’ve been tempted to take pity on him—to destroy his brain. But it is too precious. He’s lived inside that skull for five thousand years; a few more years wouldn’t hurt him, if a sense of duration still exists. Or, without the senses, can the passage of time exist at all?” Mallory peered at me bemusedly. “Ah, Ashley, there are so many things I do not yet und
erstand. But I know the most important, I know how this brain was preserved. I took a small section of tissue—not enough to damage it—and the chemical analysis was simple enough. It was by duplicating that process that I kept—kept the dog alive.”

  “And the organs?”

  “That is where I have failed. You saw how hardened they were. Analysis proves nothing. That is why I’m so desperately hoping you’ll be able to discover the process in your translations.”

  “But—if it didn’t work for this man—”

  “That means nothing. Men die on the operating table every day. It could have been a mistake, a blunder, the wrong combination of chemicals. Or perhaps it did not fail. Perhaps Encephalon lived for a thousand years, two thousand—perhaps there was some scale by which the ancients judged a man’s worth and granted him a specific duration of life after death. Perhaps they did not have true immortality with their primitive chemistry—but today, with all the benefits of science, if once we make a beginning we shall surely be able to extend the span into eternity.”

  “Does the end justify the means?”

  “Certainly,” said Mallory.

  He proceeded to close the mummy case, then paused and patted the mummy fraternally on the shoulder before drawing shut the lid. He turned to me, smiling, as though I were presumed an accomplice and collaborator. And was I? Did I see him as he saw himself, the would-­be benefactor of mankind? Or as some dark angel with flaming sword, barring man from whatever paradisiacal domain Heaven affords?

  “I’ll leave you to your work now,” he said.

  He started for the door.

  “Mallory!”

  He turned back.

  “All this that you’ve told me—”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you—tell Amos Snow?”

  He regarded me thoughtfully.

  Then he shrugged.

  “What does it matter?” he said. “The man is dead.”

  He left. The door closed very solidly behind him. The room was silent. I stood there, alone. No, not alone. I stood there with Encephalon.

  8

  I do not pretend to remember the sequence of my thoughts, for my mind dashed madly from point to point, as if describing the geometries of deduction. I sat at the desk, the papyrus before me, but I could not concentrate on it. My eyes kept edging toward the mummy case, toward my eerie companion. I hadn’t the slightest doubt Mallory had killed Snow; that he had revealed his knowledge to Snow, and the doctor had refused to cooperate, perhaps had threatened to expose him and his intentions. Just as he’d revealed it to me—the similarities were too obvious. We had both been summoned here for our specific abilities—had both been told the reasons—had rejected Mallory’s design.

  I was afraid.

  I did not fear Mallory; my fear arose from a deeper source, welling up from basic instincts too primitive to countenance the rational mind.

  I did not admit it to myself.

  Not at first.

  It was nonsense.

  Yet my eyes returned to the mummy case.

  No, I told myself. Mallory killed Snow, not—

  Not something else.

  But Snow’s body had been horribly mangled, almost dismembered by inhuman force. Mallory did not look powerful, he was tall and gaunt. Mallory did not seem the type to fly into an uncontrollable rage, even if he possessed the strength. Mallory was not the sort to commit his own crimes, but to summon another to the task.

  Once again my eyes turned to the mummy case.

  I could no longer deny my thoughts.

  To summon another—

  It was not possible—

  Or was it?

  Could that gruesome thing live?

  Had that long-­dead corpse been used to commit murder?

  I shuddered, my flesh crept over my bones. “I call him Encephalon,” Mallory had said. Had he spoken in the literal sense? Did he mean that he truly called it? Called it up from the dead ages, from the tomb? An image burned itself into my mind. I saw Mallory standing before the opened sarcophagus, heard his voice intone the words, saw the withered creature begin to stir, the leaden eyes commence to glow, the first unsteady footfall as it stepped from the mummy case—as it stepped out from death itself.

  No!

  I would not allow myself such madness.

  I rose from the desk and walked steadily across the room. I didn’t hesitate. I flung open the case. Encephalon crouched within, blackened, dead. I almost laughed at my imagination, at the courage it had taken to open that case, at the absurdity of my fancy. I started to close it again, then paused.

  The room was silent.

  It always happened in silence.

  The silence of the pyramid, the silence of the arch—

  Faintly, faintly, deep inside my head, I heard a sound. It was a ripple, a rustle, a trickle, something so basic that I could not comprehend it. It grew no stronger. It wavered. It was beyond hope, beyond sorrow. Then I knew. I knew that the human mind, in solitude through millenniums, would not evolve. It would devolve. It would not register waves that were discernible to our instruments, any more than we could read the thought patterns of the amoeba. We had been creatures without thumbs, without vocal cords, without spines; such we could be once more.

  Such was Encephalon.

  I closed the case.

  I no longer feared the mummy, for I’d known its weakness, known the helplessness within that withered skull. I no longer feared death itself, for there are far worse things than death. I stood there in the silence, and my living flesh crawled with maggots of horror.

  I could work no more.

  I could bring myself to remain in that chamber no longer. I arranged the papers and the scroll on the desk and, with a final glance at the mummy case, left the workroom. Retracing my steps down the dark corridor, I came to the door of Sam’s cell. It was still barred. Something sparked in my mind, it seemed I should remember something, make some deduction, draw some conclusion, but my thoughts were erratic with the terrible knowledge I had engulfed; concentration was beyond me. Later there would be time to think, I told myself, and I continued on. The corridor opened into the main hallway. There I encountered Mallory.

  “Have you any results?” he asked.

  “Nothing further.”

  “Ah. What did you want?”

  “I’m exhausted, Mallory. I’ll have to rest for a while.”

  He looked perturbed.

  “I suppose so,” he conceded grudgingly.

  “If I continue now, I’ll make mistakes.”

  “No, we can’t allow mistakes,” he agreed. “Forgive me. You can understand my impatience.”

  I nodded.

  “Will you eat now?”

  “I think not.”

  “Shall I have Arabella bring food to your room?”

  I started to protest that I had no appetite, then paused. It occurred to me that there were questions I could well put to Arabella. I nodded.

  “You’ll return to work soon?”

  “Soon, Mallory.”

  Satisfied, he moved down the somber paneled hall. I watched him. I saw how thin he was, how narrow his shoulders. No, he could no more have torn Amos Snow apart than could that bloodless mummy—that mummy at the end of the dark corridor—the corridor with the barred door—the door behind which Sam Cooper was locked. Sam Cooper was a strong man, big, broad. My shoulder twitched with physical recall as I remembered how easily he had struck John aside; how he had lifted me effortlessly from the cobblestones.

  Lifted me toward his face—

  His mouth—

  Inspector Peal’s words rushed at me.

  “The flesh torn—by human teeth—”

  I went to my room.

  I was stretched out on the bed when Arabella knocked at the door. I’
d been thinking. There was much to consider. I jumped up and called for her to enter, and she did so, carrying a tray. She put it down and began to arrange dishes and utensils. Suddenly she laughed, perhaps regarding herself ill-­suited to this menial task and, still laughing, said, “I’m the cook, too.”

  “I’m sure you’re a good one.”

  “I’m terrible. Lucian doesn’t seem much interested in food.”

  “What about Sam?”

  She looked at me.

  “Does Sam have a good appetite? I suppose you have to prepare his meals, too?”

  “That’s a curious thing,” she murmured. “Lucian always attends to that himself. He told me Dr. Snow had made certain dietary suggestions. But it’s strange. I’ve never seen Lucian preparing his meals, and I’ve never noticed any food gone from the larder.” She shrugged. “Well, maybe he has some special stuff—like fat women, you know. Or perhaps you don’t know. All the calories and nutrients in a formula. Or maybe I’ve just not noticed. After all, he has to eat something, doesn’t he?”

  “Did Mallory tell you—before you came here—that you’d be caring for an imbecile?”

  “Sam?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, Sam wasn’t deranged when I first came, you know. He was perfectly normal. A very pleasant man.”

  “What?”

  “Why, what did you think? No, Sam’s accident happened only last week.”

  “He fell down stairs?”

  “Yes.”

  “You—didn’t see the accident?”

  “No. I saw him just afterward.”

  “I was under the impression,” I countered, “that it happened some time ago.”

  “You must have misunderstood.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Of course.” She looked as though my question were foolish, which I suppose it was. She said, “It was fortunate that Dr. Snow was visiting here when it happened. Lucian says Sam would have died, if he hadn’t had expert medical attention immediately.”