He spoke up, his voice squeakier than he expected. “I –– I need somebody to check something for me back there, in the back room.”
M. Sabin flipped up a thumb. “Take a hike, kid. Nothing here for you but offices and storage.”
“I know, I need someone to check on some… some stock. The shelves are empty.”
“What the hell’re you babbling about? I’m losing patience here. Go home.” The burly security guard was slowly edging Danny aside from the door, knowing he couldn’t use his hands or fists on a kid, but still using his size and weight.
Danny noticed some grease stains on the blue cop shirt, right above the name tag.
“I was looking for someone…”
“You just said you wanted some stock or somethin’. Now it’s somebody?” Sabin had almost displaced Danny’s feet by now. “I’ve about had it with you, wise guy. Your folks around?” His wide head swiveled around, but it was more to see what he could get away with than to rat Danny out to his parents, Danny was sure of it.
Suddenly Danny was afraid.
Afraid of what this guy Sabin might do to him just for being curious.
Afraid, also because his head was ringing as if somebody was bashing a bell in there, and as he stared back at Sabin’s jowly face he suddenly thought of him as the Bad One.
Which was weird, because he knew Sabin was a world-class jerk, but how could he assume he was bad? Wasn’t he just doing his job, even if not very well?
The Bad One?
Danny also looked around. His folks weren’t to be seen down his limited-view aisles, and there were no sales people. Or other shoppers. Maybe the snow storm was emptying out the place after all. Danny wasn’t going to get any help. He let the jerk’s weight move him an inch or two more, weakening against the full-court press the security guard’s body was putting on him.
“Hey, watch it!” he said, as he finally started to lose his balance, almost tipping over sideways because he wouldn’t move his feet and the guy wouldn’t stop pushing. Danny smelled fried potatoes on the shirt; he was that close.
Finally Sabin’s weight won, and Danny had to step aside or tip over, and then Sabin grabbed the knob and powered the door open wide enough and was through it, muttering curses as he slammed it behind him.
“Damn it!” The mild curse felt swell on Danny’s tongue. So he’d lost to the impolite big ape, sure, but on top of that he’d also failed in his mission: to see if Mego action figures were stored by the dozen in the back room.
Suddenly he staggered a little and bumped one of the nearby shelves. A Crissy, the less popular Barbie knock-off doll, fell off and bounced on his shoe. The ringing in his ears was so loud he thought he was going deaf. Behind the ringing were those muttered words again, and Sabin’s image popped into his head. The Bad One.
There were other images, too, sudden and wave-like, flowing unbidden into his mind as if someone were pouring them in. He blinked and the harshly-lit store and its battered shelves flickered and then what he saw couldn’t be, because it was a wide vista of sand dunes dotted with lush green dots with low huts around them… and then the image flickered again and now it was snow, flying in stinging sheets against his face. But instead of cold he felt heat…
Help. Me.
They weren’t even words. They were a sensation. But they made him shiver, because he saw Sabin the security guard doing something awful, something terrible which he couldn’t describe, but which made him practically sob with fear and a great, crushing sadness.
Danny wondered if he’d picked up a brain tumor on the way over here.
He closed his eyes hard, reopened them, and at least he was seeing what he was supposed to –– that same depressing Mego-less store. But still something didn’t feel right.
Help. Me.
The tortured scream could only be in his head, Danny was sure of it. But it meant something.
With barely a pause, he slowly regained his balance, shook his head to try and clear it of whatever was happening, and reached out for the doorknob once again. All he knew was that he had to get back there.
Someone was in trouble.
* *
He is so desperately alone…
The Bad One is nearby again. The Other has been thwarted.
He cries tears of sand and dust.
* *
Danny took one quick glance around, in case his father were to be suddenly chugging up the aisle with fury in his eyes, or his mother with her weepy, pleading look –– Daniele, please don’t make things worse than they are! –– then he turned the rattly knob carefully and ducked inside.
He wasn’t sure anymore what he had expected. A cavernous space, surely, with endless rows of shelving and boxes piled sky-high on pallets, but what it was in actuality was a dingy and ill-lit warren of dead-end rows of junk piled in almost no conceivable order. He stood for a half-minute, surveying the disappointing truth… there would be no miracle stock of Mego stuff he could hold up in triumph. And even if there were, he rather doubted his father would care considering the trouble he was about to get into…
The lighting was made up of bare bulbs coated with dust, causing the light they threw to be hazy and patchy.
Still, something drove Danny onward. It wasn’t Mego figures any longer. He’d given up on that mission. He was a realist, and hoping to drive his father’s shopping had been a vague goal at best. He knew now that he had wanted to see them, and maybe just use his saved-up lunch money to buy one and get it out of system. His wise Gram sometimes said that.
He stepped deeper into the confusion of shelves and stacks and piles of materials that seemed completely unrelated to retail. The farther he went, navigating through the clutter, the darker the air seemed to get. It was stuffy, too, and smelled almost musty. Like a museum.
He felt driven. The voice in his head had subsided, but images came faster now, images that went from the weird sand dune vistas to something else, something like a strange hospital except it was primitive. Comfortable with supple skin blankets, but still unlike anything Danny had ever seen. The dunes reminded him of Lawrence of Arabia, the re-release of which his father had taken him to see recently.
Danny saw people now, people who were sick and dying, all of them lying on low beds and wracked with fever and chills even in the desert heat, and he saw three people coming into focus suddenly like a photograph steadied under a magnifying glass. It was a family, a mother and father, proud-looking and regal, but now rendered weak and withered… and a child, a male about Danny’s age, thrashing under a blanket, his skin on fire.
Help. Me.
Danny was working on instinct now, just letting it take over, and he reached the back wall of the room without finding anything. Or seeing Sabin, the security guard. The Bad One.
Where…?
Then he spotted yet another poorly-balanced door in a dark corner. It wasn’t quite closed, and he saw light in the crack.
Danny approached the door and pulled it just far enough to take a glance. Behind it was a narrow staircase with one light throwing weird shadows, descending into some sort of basement. He heard voices below –– at least one voice. Gravelly, irritated. Loud.
Angry.
The Bad One.
Sighing, Danny opened the door and snuck through as narrow a crack as he could.
The stairs led into darkness.
* *
He hears the Other now, the one who can set things right. The one from this confusing world who can return him to the immortal arms of his loving family.
His consciousness casts out warnings to go with the images he has already formed for the Other to see. He does not know if it will help the Other, but he feels a surge of strength flow into his wrapped limbs, and slowly, tentatively, he begins to edge toward the lid that keeps him in the blessed darkness. Perhaps the time has come to rise.
To help the Other help him.
* *
Wary of squeaks, Danny stayed close to one side of the stairs
and heard a creak only once. He froze, but the voice from below never stopped to listen. Now he could hear the one-way conversation, maybe on the phone.
It was Sabin.
“Look, I know about the weather,” he was saying, irate but trying to sound reasonable. “But I can’t keep it here. Too many people running in and out of here, and we’re gonna be open extra hours for Christmas, so I have got to get you to take delivery.”
There was a pause as Sabin listened to the other voice on the phone.
“I know!” he said loudly. “I’m not stupid, and I’m not an idiot. Ever since that King Tut exhibit closed up in London in September every podunk museum in every backwater wants one, and some of’em ain’t too scrupulous as to how and where. I get it, and that’s what I did, I got one for your client. Now you gotta fulfill your part of the deal and get it off my hands before I get caught, you dig?”
Pause.
“Anything I say not get through to you? Wyatt, I don’t care what your transportation needs are. The deal was I get one, you pick it up and pay me. I’ve gotten good stuff for you before, right? This one’s right up there. Just like the Boy King, you know?”
Pause.
“Damn it, man, listen to me! I’ve been sitting on it two days, but by now the heist’s been detected and it’s only a matter of time until they start checking the security services. Now I made sure things look mysterious and all, but still I gotta get the goods out of my warehouse.”
Another irritated pause. Danny’s eyes were wide in the dark, putting the pieces together, suddenly frightened and not at all happy he had decided to come down here in the half-dark.
“All right,” Sabin said more quietly. “I can wait until then. I can probably––”
The step under Danny’s right foot seemed to wobble, or maybe it was actually his foot giving way because he’d been perched on tip-toes with half a mind to pivot and scurry back up the stairs, but next thing he knew he’d stumbled and bumped his way loudly down the last few steps, ending up on the dusty concrete floor under a cone of dingy lighting.
Sabin’s furious face stuck out of a doorway only a couple yards away, a phone receiver glued to his ear. He smiled wickedly and it was not a pretty sight.
“Let me call you back,” he growled into the phone. “I gotta a curious mouse problem here.”
He tossed the phone back into the room and loomed over Danny, who was sprawled on the floor, his ankle just starting to throb.
“Well, well, well,” said Sabin, chuckling. “Find what you were lookin’ for, ya little twerp?” His hand went to the nightstick on his belt.
A sob caught in Danny’s throat.
* *
He has found his way out of the wooden cocoon and staggered forward, toward the light and the angry sounds. His legs are mere matchsticks, and tightly-wrapped in the Old Way, but somehow he has found strength to maneuver toward where the Other is now in danger. The Other faces danger on his behalf, and this cannot stand. It is as if the Universe has found its conscience and has decided to help.
He stumbles into the light, his eyes forever closed but his inner eyes open and receptive, and his bandaged arms reach out for the Bad One, who is threatening the Other with an upraised club.
He is struck by how much the Other reminds him… of himself.
And then he is upon the Bad One, his dessicated hands like talons grabbing the cloth of the fat man’s strange clothing and shaking him like a rag puppet.
* *
Sabin screamed in a high pitch as the thing lurched up and over Danny’s body, snagging his shirt with sharp-clawed hands trailing loose bandages and shaking him with desperate intensity.
Danny realized the thing had just saved him from getting clubbed down by Sabin’s nightstick, which was now rattling harmlessly down the corridor.
The big man’s eyes were wide with irrational fear, his mouth a frightening grimace of one who has glimpsed hell.
The thing made gargling noises from down in its throat, though they were muffled by the decaying bandages that wrapped most of its short, Danny-like body. Danny saw that closed eye-sockets were visible between wrappings, but somehow he knew the thing’s vision was supernatural.
And then Sabin clutched at his own shirt front, grabbing the cloth and trying to rip it apart even as the thing’s hands pushed him back into the room from which he had come, and they both went crashing down, but Sabin’s tortured scream was cut off as his hands stopped grasping his chest and he made one long, shuddering sigh and lay still under the bandaged creature.
Danny was no expert, but it seemed to him that Sabin had had a massive heart attack, brought on by the shock and fear of having a dead creature attacking him.
Danny’s brain processed all of it, then, and helpful images came from the mind of the wrapped boy, who was probably Danny’s age. Or he had been, when he and his parents had taken ill and died so many thousands of years before.
The wrapped boy slowly crawled away from Sabin, whose eyes stared into their own eternity now. He came to his knees and then to his feet unsteadily, hampered by the wrappings and by the thinness of the limbs themselves.
Danny was no longer afraid. His ankle hurt terribly now, lancing through his thigh and into his torso. He vaguely remembered the snap he had heard upon landing on the concrete. He crawled toward Sabin and grasped the walkie-talkie from the security guard’s belt.
The wrapped boy held out a hand, and Danny took it and with some help he managed to stand, keeping his weight off the broken ankle by leaning against the nearby doorframe.
The words Thank You seemed to form in Danny’s mind and he nodded, understanding them even though they were not a language he understood.
Danny pressed the button on the black unit. “Hello, can anyone hear me?” he said into it after extending the antenna. “My name is Danny…”
He turned slightly to see that the wrapped boy was struggling to shamble toward a long crate that stood propped up in the corner of the other room.
Sabin’s corpse lay quietly as Danny told someone at the other end his story in short bursts. Well, part of the story…
Boy, was his father gonna be pissed.
* *
He lays himself to rest, knowing somehow that the Other will take care of him from now on, as if they were brothers.
And soon he will be reunited with his parents in the place the three of them had called home for many decades, a place called the Field Museum, a place from which they had been moved recently for some kind of scientific examination –– perhaps the thing called x-ray had awakened his consciousness –– and now he knows that whatever it was, his perception is fading. He can no longer cast out his mind, and he is grateful he was able to thank the Other before he…
He sleeps again. Eternity has claimed him once again.
He does not know that nearby, the Other cries as he looks inside the crate.
But his last thought was a happy one.
* * The End * *
☮
AUTHOR’S NOTE
“The Christmas Mummy” is dedicated to Charles Spain Verral, whose six Brains Benton kid detective stories made my young mind lust for the world of mystery writing, long before I discovered horror and thrillers. But even so the Benton books contained a touch of humorous horror, and thus was born (in part) my love of blending genres. In this story there is one overt reference to the second Benton novel, one written by George Wyatt, which was a pseudonym for Verral, but I won’t identify it here… have fun looking for it! And I have kept this tale intentionally PG, unlike the other “Christmas Monsters,” as part of my tribute to this often overlooked writer who nevertheless made a huge impact on me.
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!
☣
Other works by W.D. Gagliani:
Wolf’s Trap – Nick Lupo Series, 1 (Samhain Publishing reissue)
Wolf’s Gambit – Nick Lupo Series, 2 (47North)
Wolf’s Bluff – Nick Lupo Series, 3 (47North)
Wolf’s Edge – Nick Lupo Series, 4 (Samhain Publishing)
Wolf’s Cut – Nick Lupo Series, 5 (Samhain Publishing, 2014)
Savage Nights (Hard-noir Thriller)
Shadowplays (Fiction Collection)
The Great Belzoni and the Gait of Anubis (Novella)
Mysteries & Mayhem (with David Benton, Fiction Collection)
Mood Elevator (with David Benton, Short Story)
Love at First Sting – A Splatterpunk Story (with David Benton, Short Story)
www.wdgagliani.com
www.williamdgagliani.com
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@WDGagliani
Copyright © 2013 W.D. Gagliani
The Christmas Mummy Page 2
