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
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—
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 kept 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
