Aaaiiieee

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Betty Ann’s hands did not touch him, her fists coiled around the bars of her metal headboard. Christmas music crooned half-heard from the radio, crackling as if the falling snow interfered with its reception. And Walt thought he heard one soft, whispery sob…but when he lifted his slippery, hungry face to look, Betty Ann’s face was turned to the gloomy shadows of her little apartment.

  * * *

  On Christmas eve, Walt arrived at the Five-In-One with bundles in his arms, snow on his fedora’s brim. He even had presents for the fat lady, the dwarf, the sword swallower and Ed/Edna (a bottle of women’s perfume and a bottle of men’s cologne lashed together with a thick rubber band).

  But when he got there, the police had arrived ahead of him. Real police, not private dicks like himself.

  Leaving his bundles in the hall, Walt charged up the stairs. Her door was open. He shoved half way in past a cop before the man got a hold of him and stopped him. But he could see enough from where he stood.

  Betty Ann’s body lay on the worn carpet, in front of the sofa where he had first made love to her. He didn’t know where she had acquired the shotgun that lay beside her like a spent lover. Betty Ann’s body was unmarked. Soft. Lovely. But the thing that had been Sally was burst like a strange fruit from the blast, rent horribly down the middle and its limbs even more askew.

  Betty Ann’s eyes and mouth were half open. Her surgery had been unsuccessful. And she had bled. Bled so badly…her lustrous chestnut skin now grayish.

  Walt sagged against the cop, no longer fought him. A sob was wrenched painfully up from his chest.

  “I’m sorry,” he croaked. “I’m sorry…”

  And a window rattled with a sharp, harsh gust of winter wind, like an agonized ghost aching to break through the pane—but trapped outside of it.

  Hapi Birthday

  Vultures wheeled in the sky, high and distant, an unsettling sight for an Easterner like myself. I don’t know why it should have bothered me, though. I’d been to many stranger places on the globe than Southern California…had just returned from such a place, in fact. But there was nevertheless an alien feeling to this day. The seemingly endless orange groves we had navigated to reach my friend’s remote house had seemed a great bleak expanse to me, despite their fecundity. And the house, when at last we arrived, was modern and odd-angled.

  It had been built to the tastes of my friend, Ronald Montgomery, who had the wealth to indulge in all his tastes, and the imagination for those tastes to be unique. Perhaps it was the availability of everything money could buy that had turned his tastes more…unorthodox…over the years. That money makes us jaded, makes us lose our perspectives, is no new observation.

  We had gone to school together; it was there, in fact, that I came under the thrall of his undeniable charisma. When I married, my wife gradually helped me break that hold. She had never liked Monty. I felt glad actually, relieved, when I began to assert my independence from him. He had moved to the west coast. But then came his visit, a brief stay. Now here I was…returning from a long trip to the Egypt I had always ached to visit. A trip sponsored by my friend, Ronald Montgomery.

  Four strong men lowered the crate down from the truck and struggled it inside as Monty came out to embrace me. His arm around my shoulders, he gestured at the sweaty workers. “Like slaves moving one of the blocks at Giza, huh? Your timing couldn’t be better, Tim…did you remember that tomorrow is my birthday?”

  Monty walked behind the men, craning his neck to observe their passage. He turned to me again and grinned. “Who would have thought the Valley of the Kings had any surprises left, huh, Tim?”

  I nodded. “Who’d have thought that there was a tunnel so deep under Thebes? The deepest chamber recorded in the valley…”

  “No one would have thought to look for it before, in the monkey cemetery of all places. But you see, Tim? You got me my treasure and I got you in the history books. Hey, I think you still owe me.”

  I must confess I winced inside. I wanted to meet my obligation and escape back to my own life. “Well, they weren’t that happy to have the mummy taken. And National Geographic wanted to be there when it was unwrapped.”

  “The authorities weren’t too unhappy to take my money, and I have more of that than National Geographic does! They know it’s in good hands here in my esteemed collection. And I did sponsor the excavation, after all. If people are nice I’ll let them borrow it for study. Besides, there were other baboon mummies in the chamber.”

  “But this one was so…big. For a baboon. And its coffin.” I wagged my head.

  “I don’t suppose any amount of money could have made them part with that, hm? Solid gold, like Tut-ankh-Amen’s inner coffin…”

  “For a baboon! I know they were sacred, and high-ranking baboons received better burials than lower grade baboons, but Christ, you’ve seen the pictures! All they can say is that this monkey must have been a symbolic representation of the god Hapi.”

  “Selected, no doubt, for its unusual size, as you’ve pointed out. Hey, gentlemen, easy there!”

  * * *

  Monty had been walking fine when I arrived, but by the time we had the mummy unpacked and on the table he had prepared for it, he was using his cane to support himself. When he was excited or upset, I knew, his equilibrium seemed to falter. It was his worsening MS that had kept him from joining me at the excavation; in the past, we had been a team on some of his expeditions, his adventures. And on many he had gone without me. The relics—no, the trophies—of these adventures decorated the lab around us, and abounded even more in the study just beyond.

  “Hey,” I said half-jokingly, “I’m a little jet-lagged, Monty. You’re not really going to start unwrapping your birthday present now, are you?”

  “You can go nap or freshen up if you’d like, Tim, but I’ve been waiting months for this, and everything’s set to begin. I don’t need your help, but…”

  I sighed, shrugged. I didn’t contest him…just like the old me.

  And so we began undoing the careful and reverent work that had been done atop another laboratory table, fifteen-hundred years before the birth of Christ. That was not only the time when conspicuous pyramids were passed up in favor of the hidden tombs in the Valley of the Kings (to protect the interred from grave robbers such as ourselves), but it was when the Egyptians further perfected the art of preservation. These advances were increasingly reflected in the body we now labored over. The remains were fully swathed in linen, this covered in a glassy-black, hardened gum. The resin was so hard in places that Monty had to chisel at it, but he had anticipated this. In other places he was able to simply unwind the wrappings as I gently elevated the dry form.

  While I held the baboon up in gloved hands, I glanced around at the lab. On a shelf there were several human infants pickled in a yellowish solution, perhaps formaldehyde. The infants were pathetically deformed, but their deformities were well preserved…

  Monty was impatient but he wasn’t sloppy; we worked slowly and carefully, and recorded our progress with frequent photographs. Two video cameras were mounted on tripods. By the time we took our first break it had become dark, and while Monty pored over the photos I had mailed him of the baboon’s sarcophagus and the inner gold coffin, I wandered into the adjacent study to pour myself a little scotch.

  Some of Monty’s trophies I was familiar with, others were a surprising revelation. Earlier, he had briefly pointed out some of his newer acquisitions, like a proud kid showing off a collection of baseball cards. The only difference between men and boys is the perversity of their obsessions.

  Whether it had anything to do with being born in the early hours of All Saints’ Day, I don’t know, but Monty’s obsession was death. Rather—Death. Our desperate fear of it, which inspires us to rebel against its domination.

  Monty was very afraid to die. He had never told me—it was self-evident. Wasn’t it this fear of obliteration that had driven others to manufacture mummies in the first place, that kep
t the practice of embalming alive in our time? Monty’s acute fear had made his spirit as twisted and shriveled as the flesh of the bizarre audience now ringing me.

  An Egyptian mummy had long been his desire, and he had had to settle for that of an animal, but he had done well in other lands with less restrictions. In a lighted case on one wall were several shrunken heads of the Jivaro Indians, long laces dangling from their sewn lips. There was a larger smoked head, of a Maori, its face covered in elaborate engraved tattoos. A full Maori mummy resided in a large cabinet, in the customary seated position, its face hideously contorted. A kneeling Peruvian mummy, with her hair thick and intact but her face like a loose human mask of dried clay, mostly broken apart. A skeletal body, barely crusted in skin, from the Aleutian Islands. Bodies like gnarled root things dug out from under huge trees, bodies like papier-mache. An international congress of the dead.

  One of Monty’s more recent finds filled a large glass case in a corner, dimly and reverently lit: a bearded female midget that might have been a Neanderthal but that she was attired in a cute red dress which showed off her furry upper chest and complemented her uneasily attractive curves. This was “The Ugliest Woman in the World,” Julia Pastrana, made famous as a sideshow attraction before and after death. And still. When does a museum become a sideshow?

  Superbly preserved as she was, her simian face seemed to glare at me.

  With her on a pedestal was her tiny infant son, similarly hirsute. Monty had acquired the mummy Madonna and child from a collector in Norway. They were the most touching and pitiful exhibit in the whole depressing mini-museum. I felt ashamed for even looking.

  In the dark living room beyond the study entrance, a jack-o’-lantern glowed. Monty’s boyish sense of fun, but it was an irreverent thing to look at, surrounded as I was by these kidnaped ancient beings. I remembered Monty once telling me how the Celts had started the custom by placing glowing coals inside hollow turnips, in order to ward off the spirits of the dead on Halloween night, when they were given to roaming.

  A hand from the murk of the study lightly settled on my shoulder and I flinched. Monty smiled as if this had been his intention. “Let’s get back to it, Tim.”

  * * *

  So far we had removed over a hundred pieces of jewelry and protective amulets from within the wrappings of the monkey, each one delicately set aside. This had been one regal cynocephalus (sacred baboon). I had told Monty that all the other baboon mummies in the chamber had been positioned as though seated, representing the baboon god Thoth, a lunar divinity and also scribe to the gods.

  Again reflecting on this creature’s remarkable burial, Monty reiterated, “This one was so large and important to them, they did it up like a king. From the looks of it, they even cut his tail off to further the effect. Definitely more Hapi than Thoth.”

  Where Thoth was an actual baboon god, Hapi was more a baboon-headed god, as Horus had the head of a falcon, Anubis that of a jackal. Hapi was one of the four genii whose heads appear atop the canopic urns into which the internal organs of mummies were removed, these four protecting the soul of the departed when it was called before the judgment of the great god Osiris. Defense counsels for the dead, I thought. What would Hapi and his three comrades think of the great plunder of Egypt’s tombs through the ages, all the body-snatching in the name of curiosity?

  “Here’s our boy,” Monty breathed through his surgical mask, as we unveiled the face of the mummy at last…

  It was the canine face of a hamadryas baboon. Leathery, blackish, but very well preserved. The lips were twisted back grotesquely from the dark stained teeth, as though the baboon was exposing its fearsome tusks in a snarl.

  We took pictures, then went on. As I was gently handling yet another protective amulet, Monty gasped my name. I looked up and he gestured me around the table to his side.

  “My God!” I hissed.

  “Am I losing my mind, Tim, or…”

  “No,” I said. I examined the right hand and forearm Monty had just unwrapped. The hand was well enough preserved, though skeletal, to show that it bore no hair. Shaved perhaps. But there was no mistaking that this hand was, in size and proportion, more human than simian…

  “Easy!” I warned Monty, but he had moved excitedly to the feet.

  I shifted to help him. Within several minutes we had one foot exposed, and we were both speechless.

  It was not the prehensile foot of a monkey, but the long and splendidly preserved foot of a man.

  “Jesus, Monty, we can’t do this anymore! We have to get this X-rayed!”

  “It’s almost finished, Tim, and it’s mine. We’re doing fine…”

  “Monty, this is unheard of! To make a representation of Hapi, they sewed the head of a baboon onto the body of a man. Like those mermaids they used to exhibit in sideshows; a mummified monkey torso stitched to the tail of a fish.”

  “Yes…incredible!”

  “And like I say, unheard of! What we have here is a startling new find! Never before has there been any indication of such a thing in our studies of ancient Egypt. Never! This is a priceless mummy, not just another monkey mummy. To go on with this now would be arrogant and irresponsible!”

  “But we’ve nearly finished, Tim, and as I say…it belongs to me. Their government let me take it. Now, I’ll allow people to come see it. I’ll let them copy my tapes. But we’re almost finished, and we’re going to finish. Okay?”

  And what do you think I did?

  * * *

  By the time I went to bed it was nearly dawn. Monty stayed on with his prize, his birthday present, and out of a kind of disgust for him I blew out the new candle he had put inside his jack-o’-lantern on my way to my room. My sleep after the long day and night was a deep one, but it was a restless sleep nonetheless. Most of the nightmares were mercifully a dispersing mist when I awoke; just fragments lingered…

  I recalled some kind of a dark door that opened; not so much an actual door, however, as a sort of tear opening up out of the shadows. A group of wispy dark figures slipped from it. In the course of the dream, however, these things apparently became animals, because next there came a distant roaring, growling, as though from a pit of wild dogs. And a horrible wet gurgling, as if someone had been thrown into that pit…and been seized by the throat before he could scream.

  I lay awake, staring at the ceiling, sunlight streaming into the clean guest room. I remembered the remarkable composite mummy as we had left it, fully unveiled. There was no doubt whatsoever, with it completely exposed, that it was a human body. The funny thing was, I could find no stitches, no signs of fastening at the neck where the baboon head joined human shoulders. Of course, in places the wrappings had merged with the skin, so I imagined the stitches had merged with the flesh and that future analysis would reveal them.

  I crept out of bed. Monty’s door was closed; still sleeping. Good. I needed the fresh air of independence. I showered, then dressed. Made myself a coffee, and wandered idly to go look in on the mummy again…

  The door to the lab was open, showing the bright white of that room. And also, a vivid contrast, garish splashes of red…

  I hurried to the door and looked in. I dropped my coffee mug and it shattered. I didn’t feel the burns of the coffee on top of my slippered foot until later.

  The police came. I waited for them outside the house; wouldn’t return to it until they went before me.

  How could I have slept through it while the murderers were at work on Monty? They had been so savage, and there had to have been more than one to have inflicted such terrible damage. But could there be more than one person so maniacal as to tear a man apart like that? To rend him with their teeth like that, all over his body?

  Some strange cult, the police opined. Southern California had had them before. Who else would have left so many expensive material goods, opting instead to steal only Monty’s collection of the dead? For they were all gone. The new mummy from the table. The mummies in the study. The Maori he
ad, the shrunken heads, even the freak babies were gone from their bottles. Julia Pastrana and her hairy infant were also missing from their large glass sarcophagus.

  And who, but some cult of madmen, would have gone through the trouble of breaking off teeth from a few of these mummies—including one tusk from the model of Hapi—to bury them in several of Ronald Montgomery’s wounds?

  How, I wonder, were they able to accomplish that other strange thing? At first, the police said the naked footprints in blood all around the body were those of the killers. But some prints belonged to tiny infants…too tiny to be walking. And the adult prints looked deformed, shriveled. The killers must have dipped the feet of the mummies in his blood, the detectives decided, to create an odd effect.

  But how had the killers avoided making prints of their own feet in the process? I wonder these things still. Perhaps not really wanting to know the true answers…

  Whatever hands were responsible for his death, Ronald Montgomery’s body was so mauled that—despite the provision in his will that it be embalmed—his family had it cremated.

  Family Matter

  I’ll tell you this about my family and me, but please, I must insist that you don’t repeat it to anyone. I think I can trust you…

  Early one evening last autumn my dead father came knocking on my door. For a moment I didn’t recognize him; for one thing, I hadn’t been expecting him…and also, the massive injury which had killed him had left a gaping hole in his head from hairline to mid-nose, as if the top half of his face, eyes and all, had crumpled to fall inside like the cracked rubber head of an old doll. A spiked corona of split and creased flesh surrounded the dark pit like the rim of a blasted lunar crater.

  Indeed, the object that had killed father had fallen from the heavens; his two hunting companions had seen a small bright flare descend from the violet dawn to strike him in the forehead. I had never seen father’s injury, as he had been given a closed casket funeral. Those who did examine him had never found a trace of the object that struck him.