The Mammoth Book of the Mummy

by Paula Guran

  For he was, quite simply, tetched. Had he gone to war, been shattered at Gettysburg, they might have understood. But he had only gone into the desert and come home with mummies and sphinxes and pyramids and other such truck, but most remarkably the shards of stone, which—once reassembled by skilled stonemasons—took the form of a gigantic serpent, coiled to strike.

  It was, they all agreed, quite a remarkable thing he had found in the sand, nearly as remarkable as the bodiless Sphinx. It was so unnecessary (and in fact so sad) that he should feel compelled to embroider a tale—and a tall tale at that—around it. And insist on its truth, no matter how the experts scoffed and ridiculed his greatest discovery. But children, anyway, adored the story he told as he haunted his museum’s halls. And if they were very good children and listened attentively, he might even open his vest and show them the golden amulet he kept there on a chain around his neck, bearing the image of the barque of the sun. For this, he told them, was the only thing that had saved him on the day that the great Serpent swallowed whole the famous Otis shovel and its boiler, which, stoked to the bursting point with mummies saturated in combustible resins and pitch, had just built up such a very great head of steam.

  Norman Partridge loves old movies and scary stories. In a way, this sensational novella is a paean to mummy movies—especially those from 1932 through the 1950s. It’s also an outright scary story. The mummy may not really be a mummy, but he is also not playing a role—he is embodying an iconic, if monstrous, mummy. As for death, the afterlife, nightmares, and love . . . there’s a lot to think about here.

  The Mummy’s Heart

  Norman Partridge

  Who knows how dreams get started.

  But they gear up in all of us, maybe more than anything else. Waking . . . sleeping . . . sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. Sometimes dreams are sweet little ghosts, dancing in our heads like St Nick’s visions of sugarplums. Other times they’re a hidden nest of scorpions penned up in a bone cage they can never escape, digging stingers into soft brain-meat hour after hour and day after day.

  Sugarplums and scorpions. Take your pick. Or maybe grab yourself a full scoop of both. Because we all do that, don’t we? Hey, I plead guilty. I’ve had my share of dreams. Most of them have been bad, but even a guy like me has had a few sweet ones. And every time I’ve bedded one of those and snuggled up close, a monster movie scorpion came crawling from beneath the sheets and jack-hammered his king-sized stinger straight into my brain.

  That’s why I don’t trust dreams.

  That’s why I’d rather have nightmares.

  Nightmares are straight up. They’re honest—what you see is what you get. Dreams are another story. They don’t play straight. They take your nights, and they take your days, too. Sometimes they make it hard to tell one from the other. They make you want things and want them bad, and every one of those things comes with a price.

  Of course, no one thinks about the price of dreams on the front end of the deal. We all figure we’d pay up, but that’s because the price is never self-evident going in. So we spend more time dreaming, as if the act itself will turn the trick. A few of us work hard, building a staircase toward a dream—but people like that come few and far between. Most of us look for a short cut. We toss coins in a fountain or go down on our knees and say a prayer. We look for a quick fix from some mystic force, or one god or another.

  After all, that’s the dreamer’s playbook. Dreamers don’t take the hard road. We look for instant gratification. We make a wish, or two, or a dozen . . . as if something as simple as a wish could be a vehicle for a dream. But you never know. The universe is deep, and odds are that someone has to get lucky taking the short road sometime. And wishing only takes a second. Like the man said: Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

  Nothing. It turns out that’s a key word, because the thing most dreamers end up with is a fistful of nothing. And for most of us, that’s when the whole idea of dreams becoming reality disappears in the rearview mirror. For others, that’s when the longer road comes in. It’s not a road taken by realists, or workers, or builders. No. It’s a madman’s road. It’s built on books of mystic lore, most of them written by other madmen. It’s built on half-truths and faulty suppositions and twisted logic that (by rights) should be nailed through with a stake, boxed up, and buried in a narrow grave. It requires a certain brand of blind faith codified in stories and legends, and it demands a high level of trust in things that are beyond fantastic. Wizards and witches, monsters and myths. The power of an eye of newt, a jackal’s hide, or even a child sacrifice.

  Most of the time, it’s a twisted trail that leads nowhere, except maybe to a cozy rubber room or not-so-cozy prison cell, or (if we’re going gothic) a locked attic in the home of some rich relation. But that doesn’t happen all the time . . . and it doesn’t happen for all madmen.

  I say that because I know it’s true.

  I’ve seen where those roads can lead.

  The night I first walked a madman’s trail I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, no more than a passer-by in the darkness. It wasn’t my own dream or my own trail, but it was one I took.

  Walk any trail and you’re bound to soak up the scenery. Might be there’s only one way to go, so you follow it. And you put one foot in front of the other, the same way as those who have gone before you, and sometimes the darkness takes hold of you as it did them. Sometimes it draws you in.

  You might stay on that trail a long time, always looking for a way off. sure you’ll find one eventually.

  But walk anywhere long enough, and that place becomes yours.

  Especially if you walk alone.

  The trail I’m talking about was cut by a mummy.

  He did the job on Halloween night in 1963. He was mad as a hatter, and he came out of a plywood pyramid that was (mostly) his own making. And no, he wasn’t really a mummy. But that night, he was definitely living the part. Even in the autopsy photos, that shambler from the dark side was a sight to behold.

  His name was Charlie Steiner and he was nearly twenty-three years old—too old to be trick-or-treating. And Charlie was big . . . football-lineman big. If you know your old Universal Studios creepers, he was definitely more a product of the Lon Chaney, Jr engine of destruction school of mummidom than the Boris Karloff wicked esthete branch. But either camp you put him in, he was a long way from the cut-rate dime-store variety when it came to living-dead Egyptians.

  Because this mummy wasn’t playing a role. He was embodying one.

  Which is another way of saying: He was living a dream.

  Charlie’s bandages were ripped Egyptian cotton, dredged in Nile river-bottom he’d ordered from some Rosicrucian mail-order outfit. He was wound and bound and wrapped tight for the ages, and he wasn’t wearing a Don Post mask he’d bought from the back pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland. No. Charlie had gone full-on Jack Pierce with the make-up. Furrows and wrinkles cut deep trenches across his face like windblown Saharan dunes, and the patch of mortician’s wax that covered one eye was as smooth as a jackal’s footprint . . . add it all up and drop it in your treat sack, and just the sight of Charlie would have made Boris Karloff shiver.

  And you can round that off to the lowest common denominator and say that Charlie Steiner would have scared just about anyone. Sure, you’d know he was a guy in a costume if you got a look at him. But even on first glance, you might believe this kid was twenty-three going on four thousand.

  Look a little closer, you’d see the important part: Charlie Steiner was twenty-three going on insane. There was no dodging that if you got close enough to spot the mad gleam in his eye—the one he hadn’t covered with mortician’s wax. Or maybe if you spotted his right hand, the one dripping blood . . . the one he’d shorn of a couple fingers with a butcher’s cleaver. And then there was his tongue, half of it cut out of his mouth with a switchblade, its purple root bubbling blood.

  Charlie wrapped those things up in a jackal’s hide he’d bought fro
m the back pages of a big-game hunting magazine with Ernest Hemingway on the cover. Who knew if that hide was real but Charlie believed in it, same way he believed in the little statue of a cat-headed goddess he added to the stash, along with a dozen withered red roses, his own fingers and tongue, and a Hallmark Valentine’s Day card.

  The same way he believed in the dream those things would deliver to him.

  The same way he believed in the madman’s trail he was about to travel.

  Charlie tossed all those things in the back of the family station wagon (along with one other important ingredient), and he drove down to the local lovers’ lane, which wasn’t far from his house. At that time of year, the place was deserted. By the time Charlie had things set up to his satisfaction, he had swallowed so much of his own blood that he might as well have eaten three raw steaks. But he kept on moving—readying his incantation mummy-slow . . . sure but steady. Just the way you’d expect a mummy to do business, moving like the sands of time.

  Just the fact that Charlie could do that was a little slice of a miracle all by itself. Whittling himself down like that, how’d he even keep walking? Chalk it up to drugs he stole from the VA hospital. All through high school, Charlie worked in an after-school program up there, pushing guys around in wheelchairs. He learned about pain management during that time, and he’d continued working as a part-time attendant after he graduated. In other words, Charlie knew what he was doing with the needle and the knife.

  So Charlie Steiner was walking on a cloud that night. Or an imaginary dune overlooking an Egyptian oasis, with jackals howling in his head and a mad priest’s plan in his heart. On this single night, at long last, he’d finally become the sum of his dreams . . . or maybe a dream personified. And what wasn’t locked up in his own skin was wrapped in that mojo hide . . . or waiting, bound, beneath a blanket in the back of the station wagon.

  Put it all together and it was an offering, a single wish boiled up, and Charlie had a place for it.

  Not in the plywood temple he’d abandoned. No. His place was out in the night and under the Halloween moon . . . just a stone’s throw from lovers’ lane.

  Beneath the same stars that shone down on Egypt.

  If you’ve seen those old mummy movies, you know something about mummies and their dreams. And Charlie knew that, too. He knew those movies backwards and forwards, and he knew that mummy was always after the same dream. Kharis was looking for a reincarnated princess, Ananka, who died on the altar of a dark Egyptian god and left Kharis alone to pay the price for their twin blasphemies. Which, when you strip the Hollywood mysticism and curses and high priests of Karnak window-dressing off the tale, means one thing: Kharis died for love, and he came back from the dead looking for a second eternal helping of the very same thing.

  Pure love. Eternal love. Love that didn’t backslide.

  That’s what Kharis was after, and almost every knock-off mummy who came in his wake wanted the same thing. That’s what Charlie Steiner was after, too, and his madness started on the day he wrapped his needs in the bandages of the most accessible mythos he could find. And while that’s a ticket that buys us an ingress to Charlie’s story, it’s a long way from the whole deal, because there was a lot of other mumbo jumbo that Charlie Steiner believed. But eternal love was the final destination Charlie had in mind, and the path that led to it traveled through Egypt and Hollywood. As crazy as he was, that’s all Charlie really wanted. The quest for same lay beneath the insanity, and the magic, and the bad things he’d done and was about to do.

  Who knows.

  Maybe the whole thing came to him in a dream.

  Of course, I didn’t understand any of that back then. That’s because I was just a kid, out on the prowl on Halloween night in 1963, looking for candy and ready (or so I thought) for whatever came my way.

  We were out trick-or-treating for the very last time before our teenage years closed the door on the holiday. My brother Roger and me and Roger’s best friend. On the loose without the parents, or any adult supervision at all. I was twelve, Roger was thirteen. We were a pair of Irish twins, as they used to say back in the day, brothers born just eleven months apart.

  Me, I was dressed up like a soldier—mostly courtesy of the local army surplus store, but with a coat my dad had worn in Korea. Roger was a baseball player. Yankee pinstripes just like Roger Maris, and a Louisville Slugger, too. The preacher’s kid who lived next door to us was a vampire. Hair slicked back with Brylcreem, he looked like the greaser son of Bela Lugosi himself.

  Of course, our parents had given us ground rules for the night. Stay on the streets. Don’t go anywhere the street lights don’t shine. But we had our own agenda, and we got down to business with it once our treat sacks were full. And that put us on the edge of town, where the blacktop ended at a rust-flecked twenty-foot stretch of guard rail capped with a NO TRESPASSING sign.

  Beyond that was a dirt trail that twisted through a eucalyptus grove. And beyond the grove was a cattail-choked hollow, a place called Butcher’s Lake. Maybe that was the only place for us to go that night, because by then we wanted to find out if there was something more to Halloween than knocking on doors and getting candy. We were looking for something a little more exciting.

  Butcher’s Lake seemed like the best place to find it. Though there were a few ghost stories about the place, it wasn’t named for a murder spree or anything quite that exciting. No. The far side of the lake just happened to mark the border of a couple of neighboring cattle ranches, and that’s how it got its name. The only other thing about Butcher’s Lake was that it was the local lovers’ lane, but by the time Halloween rolled around that action had pretty much shut down for the season.

  That night, it was ghosts we were after.

  So Butcher’s Lake was where we went.

  That’s where we found Charlie Steiner.

  Or the thing he’d become on Halloween night.

  Or the thing he most wanted to be.

  As soon as we climbed over that rusty guard rail, Roger’s friend, the preacher’s kid, said, “I don’t know, Rodge.” He said that practically right away, before we took a single step on that trail that led through the eucalyptus grove, as if he was already primed to turn tail and head for home. But my brother gave him a look. “We’ve been planning this for weeks,” Roger said. “We’re not turning chicken now.”

  Rodge meant it. Every word. Like I said, he was only thirteen, but he’d grown up on John Wayne movies and TV cowboys and that was how he operated. If you didn’t grow up back then, it seems impossibly archaic now. But in those days, they built us to do what we set out to do, and finish the job. Or, as our old man always said, “If you talk the talk, you walk the walk.”

  So we set out, putting one foot in front of the other. Roger took the lead on that snaking path through the eucalyptus grove. He had a flashlight, but he didn’t turn it on—we were counting on the moon that night, and we didn’t want to spook anyone who might be down by the lake. Anyway, the trees grew close in the grove. Straight. Thick-bodied. Tall. And the moon was full, but you wouldn’t have known it. Those eucalyptus trees blocked out the light and made everything you heard seem twice as loud.

  The castanet rattle of dry leaves.

  The soughing wind tearing snakeskin flaps of bark from straight, smooth trunks.

  The short whispering breaths of three kids on the prowl.

  Ahead, near the lake, the sounds were moist and alive. Crickets cut their music in the night. Frogs croaked a hundred yards away, where the trees gave ground to a muddy little patch of beach that rimmed the first wall of cattails.

  And there was another sound just ahead . . . one that hung over the night like a shroud. It was enough to make us slow our pace as we approached the last stand of eucalyptus trees, and I remember telling myself that it was probably just the sound of the wind cutting through the cattails.

  It might have been . . . but it wasn’t.

  Chanting. That was the sound waiting for us down
by the water.

  Bright moonlight shone over that muddy little beach. It washed in waves, as if buffeted by the winds and the clouds—silver light lapping over the dark water and the sandy banks of the lake, each little glimmer of moonlight washing in rhythm to the sound that I’d mistaken for a soughing wind.

  Because now I knew what that sound was. Someone was down there, ahead of us in the night. He stood before the lake and the swaying cattails, silhouetted by the glow of the moon, watching the water. We didn’t know it then, but he was watching for a sign.

  Of course, there were a lot of things we didn’t know then. All we knew was what we saw, and we couldn’t believe it as the moonlight spilled over the figure and turned that silhouette into something we could recognize.

  A big thing, pacing back and forth along that shore. Wrapped in bandages.

  Gray and silent as a mountain of cobwebs.

  A mummy. At Butcher’s Lake. On Halloween night.

  The preacher’s kid said something, and Roger cut him off with a sharp whisper. The monster didn’t see us. We stood frozen at the edge of the grove. Every once in a while he’d stop and stare at the water, but there was nothing waiting for him except the sound of his own chanting rolling over the surface. The moon washed over it and spilled a reflection on the murky waves like a spotlight that could open a hole into a black brimming pit. And that mummy would stare at that white hole in that black sky, and the white hole in the water, and the emptiness of both seemed to drive him mad. He stared up at the heavens, and he swung his free arm like a crane, and the wrinkled fist on the end of it was like a wrecking ball ready to tear down the universe.