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 head, 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.
I drew father inside before someone could see him on the step. He was uncommunicative then and remains so even now. I washed away the remnants of the obligatory efforts the mortician had made to cap that monstrous orifice. In the lamp light I could see the gray features inside his nearly hollowed head, some crusty dry and some slick. I did my best to pick the pebbles and mop the soil out of there; father had clawed his way up from his grave. I live directly behind the cemetery, in my father’s old house, so fortunately he hadn’t had far to come.
I called immediately to complain to the police that I had been visiting his grave only to find that sick vandals had disinterred my father and removed him for perhaps ungodly uses. I sounded properly distraught and outraged. They never came to investigate the condition of his plot.
When my wife arrived home from work she was dismayed to see that father had come to stay. Oh, but things changed. I had always wondered about them while father was alive; we had all lived under the same roof then, too. One afternoon I came home early to find father squirming atop my wife, he a grotesque hairy bloodless slug with his rump pulsing and she with her legs clamped around his fatty waist. She was running her tongue along the inner rim of his wound, then burying her face entirely within it, so that her moans and licks were muffled. This was why she didn’t see me. But I wasn’t angry, and after that often watched them.
One evening that winter she was bathing father and called me in to look at a tumor growing on his abdomen. In mere days, tadpole-like, rudimentary limbs began to sprout from it. Soon it was as though father had one of those half-formed twins growing out of his side. During this time he also started sneaking out of the house at night. I caught him at this, finally, having chased after him into the graveyard. There he stood over a fresh grave, naked in the night-blue snow, his whole body shaking violently as if in convulsion, a grin of wild rapture on his half-face, and black pus bubbling up over the lip of his wound.
I thought that he might be desiring a return to earth, but when the snow melted and my wife and I strolled in the cemetery as we often did we saw that the ground over that same grave had hollowed a bit—as if something below had been sucked away and the earth had settled into a depression. When spring came the grass was yellow in this spot and, by that time, in a dozen others.
Father’s excursions nourished the birth of my new brothers. They all grew from his lower body, starting out as tumors like the first, two of them forming simultaneously one time. The little figures broke off and reached adulthood in just weeks— though they cried shrilly throughout this growth period, as if it were agonizing for them. It was an exhausting time for us all. Uncles, perhaps they were, rather than brothers, for they were all clones of my father right down to the mole on his chin. Unlike him, they had intact noses and unmarked foreheads but none of them had eyes; there were barely even the cups of sockets there. We let their dark gray hair grow long to hide the absence of eyes and it grew at an amazing rate, as did their nails. My wife trimmed their hair somewhat and tried to keep up with those long nails.
By now my wife had also been producing off-spring, these also sired by my father but in the usual way. They were simply translucent semen-white salamander things, embryonic and again eyeless. She began to pass three or four of them a day, had to heap them into some old rabbit cages in the cellar with bricks to hold the covers down. We did our best to keep them confined but one morning before work I noticed one of them smashed in the road and I rushed to scrape up its remains before a curious driver could pull over to inspect it.
My wife became very attached to the wriggly little creatures. She would lie back and part her legs wide while I fed one into her head-first; the squirming of the thing in that place from which it had originated would amuse her greatly. She found it even more rewarding when one day, experimenting, I cut the head off one of the fetuses with shears and then pushed the remainder of it inside her. Its movements were much more energetic that way.
These tailed fetuses were what we fed to the uncles, which numbered four by spring. Though all alike physically, one of them seemed more intelligent and would sit with my wife and I at the dinner table, smiling at our conversation, turning his head from one to the other of us to listen while he chewed his own slippery meat. Finally I grew a bit daring, and perhaps for his benefit or perhaps to amuse myself I took this uncle out on some errands with me. He wore black glasses as a blind man would and my wife had tied his hair back in a ponytail. He smiled politely at people in the stores, but I saw him quiver his upper lip at a small boy who kept curiously trying to peer around the glasses.
Leaving for home, I could tell by uncle’s fidgety behavior that he had to use the bathroom, so we pulled into a cafe with its small men’s room on the outside—unlocked. We went in and I listened to the lumpy semi-solid
