The Mammoth Book of the Mummy

by Paula Guran

  Meaning his Blazer, it was still right there, parked the other way from the dually but right beside it.

  Garrett sat back on the bed and buried his face in his hands.

  Still shaking his head no, he made himself stand again, stand in the cold rushing air.

  How was he supposed to carry Lady out, when dark skin in the back of a dusty truck was exactly what Border Patrol was trained to see? He could do it any minute, he knew. But which one? Which minute was going to be the one the officer wasn’t going to be through with his business in the hotel?

  It was impossible.

  Garrett skipped lunch, kept his vigil.

  Instead of leaving, the federal vehicle multiplied.

  All the feds Bats had pulled in with his big wreck? They were bivouacking here, it looked like.

  From the wheeled, dragging sounds in the hall, they were right here.

  Garrett heard himself laughing. He didn’t like the way it sounded.

  Instead of walking out to his truck for his tools, or to better hide the coolers packed with foam and history, Garrett stiff-legged it through the lobby, his sunglasses already on.

  It was two miles down to the hardware store. And two miles back.

  There was a new plan.

  Garrett had thought it up at the exact instant the phone on the nightstand rang.

  He’d clamped his hand down on it like to keep it still, to hide it from the Feds all around.

  He lifted the phone to the side of his face.

  “I know where you are, you son of a bitch,” the voice said. The female voice.

  Garrett looked up to Lady hesitantly, like a plea. For her to be quiet, please. To not be saying this. To just be dead.

  But then his rational mind kicked in.

  “Penny,” he said.

  She chuckled, hung up.

  Garrett tilted his head back, his eyes closed against all of this.

  If she knew to call back, it was just a matter of time until she called management. Or the police.

  His heart was slapping the inside walls of his chest.

  He could get in the dually and leave, just keep driving, but his plates were on that index card.

  “Because you wanted them there,” he said down to the top of Lady’s head.

  That he couldn’t see her face told him she was smiling.

  He wanted to kick her, except he was suddenly sure her right arm would stab out, catch him by the shin.

  And then she’d look up to him.

  “Bats,” Garrett said to her, instead.

  Bats had brought the Feds here, but, to make up for it, he’d also given Garrett a way to slither out.

  Mummies.

  At the hardware store—it was local, expensive—Garrett bought a sheetrock knife, some mud, a putty knife, a roll of clear tape, and a disposable plastic drop cloth.

  The boxed-in space under the hotel’s king bed would have been the place to bury Lady, except that’s where the kids hid their beer and drugs, Garrett knew. Lady had told him, showed him the six-pack rings, the wadded-up balls of foil, the rubber bands.

  And hotels updated the furniture every decade or so anyway.

  But they didn’t update the dead space between the walls. Not unless there was a smell. The drop cloth would take care of that, if he sealed it up right.

  Garrett made it back just as night was falling.

  The Feds and the locals and La Migra were all at the bar, having a good old legal time.

  Garrett felt like crying.

  Using the skills he’d hated his dad for making him learn, sitting on the floor with his back to Lady, Garrett razored through the thick wallpaper, careful not to go too fast and rip it.

  What he was cutting was a door. One-time use. A door to a tomb to be sealed up for ten thousand years.

  It was as tall as just over his knee, as wide as his shoulders. Lady wasn’t as big as him, but her length now, from her lower back to her toes, was about that. She was probably going to have to sit sideways along the wall, Garrett figured. But that was better than the other option—what he’d be having to do if they weren’t in a room by the elevator: sawing her into pieces, the more gruely bits slipping down the drain of the bathtub, the rest double-bagged in those flimsy trash bags from the cleaning cart.

  This was better.

  Until he heard something behind him.

  A breath?

  Garrett turned, brandishing the sheetrock knife, but Lady was as she had been. Still, he planted a heel in the carpet, pushed himself away from her, closer to the bed.

  “Quit goddamn smiling,” he said to her.

  She either did or she didn’t.

  And, her hair now, her long black hair—was it all outside her arms? Was there none between the skin of her arms and the legs of her pants? That would be most comfortable, he figured. Would allow her head to move.

  It made sense, except that she was dead.

  Standing, Garrett edged up to her, used the knife to flick her hair to the side. It was like unburying her, uncovering the Indian artifact she was slowly becoming.

  Her hair kept falling back into place, though.

  Finally, to show her he could, he pressed the business edge of the sheetrock knife into the meat of her shoulder and pulled down, away from himself.

  Her flesh opened like flan. A foul blackness slid down to her elbow, held on for a moment before dripping to the carpet and mixing with all the previous occupants’ stains

  “There,” Garrett said, and swallowed the stupid lump in his throat.

  When he went back to the wallpaper he kept himself facing her now, even though it meant coming at the cuts wrong-sided, like he was left-handed.

  He didn’t peel the wallpaper back. Instead he clicked the knife’s razor out farther, prayed for no studs, and traced along the wallpaper cuts, slicing deeper now, into the sheetrock. And, it wasn’t sheetrock after all, like he’d been taught on, but some sort of fiberboard.

  When had this started happening?

  “While you were in a cave,” he said to himself.

  And, fiberboard was better, as it turned out. It cut cleaner, didn’t crumble like sheetrock. He wasn’t sure the mud would stick to it right, since it wasn’t coated in paper. But maybe.

  Everything else was working out, right?

  This would too, he told himself.

  Though it had to be sub-zero in the room, he was sweating by the time the door was ready, two hours later.

  Inside the wall there’d just been lint and dust and insulation over-spray. No wires, no pipes, no junctions, and, most importantly, no studs. He didn’t have a plan B if there’d been a stud.

  To be sure she was going to fit, Garrett breathed all his air out, crawled in himself.

  It was tight for sure, but, first, she wasn’t his size, and second, she was only going to be getting smaller and drier over the years, right?

  In case her drop cloth filled with fluids that might leach out, stain the wall, call for an investigation, Garrett commandeered the no-slip mat from the bathtub. Folding the corners up and crimping them with bent staples and paper clips, he was able to make a tray of sorts for Lady to sit in. A pan to keep her from staining the wall behind the industrial baseboard.

  It was almost midnight by the time he realized he was stalling with the last step, then.

  “I’m sorry, girl,” he said, and wrapped Lady as gently as he could in the drop cloth. When it was done he kissed her on the cloudy top of her head, closed his eyes in farewell.

  They’d had a good run, all told.

  It was too bad it had to end like this.

  There was no blue cornmeal to sift down over her, no sage to smudge the air with. No songs.

  She hadn’t been that kind of Indian, though. She was more the beer-can-splintering-campfire-light-out-into-the-darkness kind.

  Garrett dropped to his knees, cradled her to his chest, and maneuvered her through the opening in the wall, tipping her head down so as not to catch, then pr
opping her back up.

  When he turned around to get the “door”—it was leaned against the dresser far away from him, so he wouldn’t accidentally bump into it, snap it in half—he thought he heard it again. Not a breath, but . . . like a sigh?

  “Gases escaping,” he said out loud, to make it true.

  And the sound didn’t repeat.

  Now that there was just a half-inch of fiberboard and a scrim of wallpaper between him and his neighbor, it could even be the sound of someone turning over in bed.

  Garrett nodded because that was definitely it.

  It meant he had to be extra quiet, too.

  He turned the television on to mask what sounds he had to make, and then he set the door back into place.

  It fit so perfect he closed his eyes in thanks.

  Then he let it lean back, dabbed all around the three raw edges of the fiberboard with the pale mud. The door still closed like it was supposed to. Just, it made more of a seal now. Once the mud dried, the wall would be hermetic again.

  To be sure, he wet the pad of his index finger with the mud, ran a ghost of it down along the crack in the fiberboard that was hardly even there any more.

  This was going to work.

  Instead of using the clear tape like he’d thought he was going to have to, for the wallpaper, he simply pressed the cut wallpaper into the ghost of mud smeared over the crack. It was like the wallpaper had adhesive backing.

  Ten careful, tedious minutes later, the deed was done.

  Garrett pushed back from the wall, looked away then came back to it like just seeing it for the first time.

  The outline of the door was still there, but it was so, so slight. If anything, it looked like a plumber or electrician had had to open the wall a year or two ago, make a service call, then do his best to cover his tracks.

  “Yes yes yes,” Garrett said, and stood, cased the room.

  He packed Lady’s clothes and bathroom junk into her own suitcase, his stuff in his duffel, and was saying goodbye to this chapter of his life when the top right corner of the door was casting a triangular shadow he had to look at twice to be sure he was really seeing.

  A corner of the wallpaper had curled back. It was where he’d cut maybe a sixteenth of an inch higher than he needed to.

  He dropped the bags, got the mud out but finally decided against it this time. There was no way to get any in behind a curl of paper that small.

  The tape it was, then.

  It was clean, was as “invisible” as the packaging claimed.

  Now there was no shadow, no curl of paper.

  No Lady.

  “Well then,” Garrett said, and hiked the bags back up, took the stairs down to the parking lot instead of the elevator to the lobby. No need to announce his exit, right?

  He threw the bags over the tailgate, into the camper, and counted the coolers. They were all there. And even if they weren’t, he was still gone. Especially if they weren’t, right?

  He looked up to the window of his room for one last goodbye, and, through the gauzy curtains, there was a form. A figure. A shape.

  Garrett fell back, had to stab a hand out to the dually’s fender flare to keep standing.

  The curtains had been moving with the air conditioner, so he hadn’t been able to tell male from female.

  But—even if it was female, that didn’t mean it was Lady, right?

  There was the cleaning staff. There were the female federal agents.

  Already in his room, though? Had they been watching? Listening? Had they had a cadaver dog or methane-sniffing equipment next door, and figured out what he was doing?

  “No way,” Garrett said out loud.

  Because the door from the stairs had locked behind him, he had to come back through the lobby.

  He pretended to be lost in his phone.

  The bar was empty.

  He took the elevator.

  A Fed stepped in with him at the last moment. A guy about Garrett’s height, his tie two-fingers loose.

  He nodded to Garrett and, because there was only a second-floor button, Garrett pushed it. The Fed walked behind Garrett the whole way down the hall, until Garrett had to stop. He pretended to be confused about his key situation until the Fed had stepped past.

  The reason he didn’t want to open the door with the Fed right there was because he didn’t know what was going to be on the other side of the door.

  Who.

  No one was in the room. The secret half-door—quarter-door—was still in place.

  Garrett closed his eyes to heighten the sensitivity of the pad of his index finger, traced the cut-line to be sure.

  According to the clock he’d plugged back in, figured out how to set, there was still four hours until the hotel rolled breakfast out. Nine hours until next check-out.

  Garrett nodded to himself, reminded himself about the omelettes, the folded eggs, whatever the hell they were.

  This was all because of them. It would be foolish to leave without at least getting a plateful. It would be even more foolish to leave before the mud had dried all the way. He could wait. If Penny had called the cops, they would’ve been here by now. He didn’t want to get this close and screw it all up when the maid saw a corner of loose wallpaper where it shouldn’t have been, and wrote it up for Maintenance.

  “Good, good,” Garrett said about this decision to stay, and used the remote to turn the television on. Whatever channel, just something for sound. He stripped down, stood in the curtainless shower, the steam from his water making cyclones in the doorway with the air conditioner.

  That’s what he liked about hotels: unlimited hot water, unlimited refrigerated air.

  This was better than driving a hole in the night, wasn’t it?

  The towel he used to dry off still smelled like Lady. And, because he’d always used her brush, there wasn’t one. It was in the dually. Along with forensic proof that he’d been running with her, he figured. The brush was always matted black with her Indian hair.

  Until the first roadside trashcan.

  Garrett told himself to remember that. To remember it hard. It would be stupid to get busted for something like that. Penny was still out there, after all. Still might do something.

  Before lying down to soak in the news or the movies or the basketball highlights, Garrett slid the nightstand over in front of Lady. Now if that little door fell open, the lamp would tip over, the bulb would flash blue and fizzle out.

  It was in case he went to sleep.

  How long had it been? Just one day? It felt like longer. It felt like forever.

  Garrett settled back on to the bed, watched the kung fu movie until that thing happened that meant he was sleeping: he started hearing different voices from the screen. His own voice.

  He changed to where the news had been but it was just a dead picture, a holding pattern, the current time and temperature. It matched the clock. Garrett smiled about that.

  He ended up on a kids’ sit-com that made so little sense to him that when he started hearing his own voice talking to him from the characters’ mouths, the show actually started to track.

  He chuckled, felt his chest rising and falling with it.

  And then he looked over, he wasn’t sure why—oh, it was because of the shadow, right.

  Was that on the show, or was it from the show?

  No. It was from the lady crawling out of the wall, her hair dragging the ground under her it was so long.

  And then the show went off with no warning, no prelude, the picture sucked down to a point of light, which the set then swallowed.

  Next was a flash of blue.

  It was just enough for Garrett to see a woman standing at the foot of the bed, her chin hanging low and crooked because the bones in there were gravel now, her mouth a twisted oval opening on to endless black.

  Garrett’s fingers knew to grab into the damp sheets he was lying on when that blue flash fizzled, but the rest of him didn’t even flinch.

  Garre
tt came to. A wall of thunder was falling down over him.

  The door, knocking.

  Sunlight cutting in through the window.

  Morning.

  Somebody at the door.

  He fumbled out, tangled in the sheets, still blinking, and stabbed his hand out for the nightstand for support but it wasn’t there.

  And then he remembered. All of it.

  He looked to where the nightstand still was.

  The lamp had fallen in the night.

  Garrett’s chest went cold until he tracked back from it, down along its cord to the throw pillow he’d had his head propped on.

  It had fallen right on the cord, which had been stretched tight to accommodate the lamp’s new position.

  And the knocking would not stop.

  “Hold on!” Garrett said, his voice still congested with sleep.

  It wasn’t the cleaning staff. Their knocks were timid, apologetic.

  According to the digital clock, he still had fifteen minutes to make breakfast.

  “This better be good,” he said, and stepped across the room in his underwear and button-down shirt, the top sheet dragging behind until he shook it off.

  Garrett hauled the door open.

  It was the cops.

  Two of them, anyway.

  Guns holstered. Khaki uniform shirts, brown pocket flaps.

  Deputies, then.

  Not the Feds all up and down the hall.

  “Um,” Garrett said, trying to rub the blear from his eyes, mentally casing the room behind him.

  It was empty, though. He knew. It had to be. Because he’d meant to be gone already.

  And then Penny stepped in front of the deputy on the right. It wasn’t who he figured had to be Penny, it was definitely Penny. He could tell by the way something in his chest collapsed—he could tell by the way he nearly said Lady’s name, to ask her how she was here when she was already dead in the wall.

  He’d never thought to ask Lady if she had a twin.

  Her eyes cut right through Garrett.

  “What’s this about, officers?” he said.

  “Deputy,” the deputy on the left said.

  “You know what it’s about,” Penny said.

  Garrett focused in on her, said, “Do I know you?”

  “I know you,” Penny said back, and pushed past him, the deputy on her side reaching out to catch her by the shoulder.