The Tell-Tale House of Usher
not touching you, Eddie."
"Please stop."
"I don't know what you mean but of course, as you wish, consider me stopped but I want the mummy! We are bringing him back to the house."
And there was the end of it, no less humiliating for being the predicted and only possible conclusion. The mummy was loaded onto the top of the carriage by the intoxicated party and I spent a very anxious, furious ride back to Boston, fearing at any moment to see the coffins above dashed to the ground in a splintery mess.
"Madeleine, look what the black cat brought in," Roddy announced as he slammed open the front door and we all tumbled in with the momentum of the caskets' dead weight.
"Oh, Roderick, let the dead lie. Haven't you learned?" Madeleine's distress was quickly overcome when she focused attention on soothing my obviously wrecked ego as the others carried the mummy up to the second floor.
All was restored to a state of equilibrium only when the caskets were laid atop a billiard table and we were once more lounging on the carpets and couches of the Usher drawing rooms, a spent force for excitations; yawns were frequent between tea sips and biscuit bites. "To bed!" was now the cry. We had all planned an overnight stay at Ushers' and we were shown to our beds gratefully. As we all had our separate engagements the next day, we agreed to reconvene the following night for the unwrapping of Hatotep.
The frequent unearthing of mummified remains in Egypt had rendered them mere commodities, an ingredient in a pigment known as Caput Mortuum – Death's Head – or just simply Mummy Brown, still available today and prized by some artists of the renaissance but avoided by others familiar with its fugitive qualities. So it was not altogether unusual for mummies, though not usually complete in their decorated caskets and ancillary jars of vital organs, to be shipped to France and then for one to be chosen among a baker’s dozen as a token of appreciation for some service done by my father for the benefit of M. Seullinard.
During the Middle-Ages, due to an error in translation from the Arabic, it was thought that mummies contained bitumen, considered a healing agent and they were therefore ground into powder and sold by apothecaries.
Furthermore, it was the rage in England in particular and the Continent in general, for the well-to-do to purchase mummies for a night's entertainment by unwrapping them and observing the nut-meat inside the shell. Education with a frisson of death and the after-world focuses one's attention as well as a demi-tasse of strong Algerian coffee.
Unconcerned by a redundancy of stimulants we had our Algerian coffee preceded by a light but sumptuous meal in which we kept our imbibing within the confines of reason, though unable to completely abstain due to the considerable wait for the stroke of midnight, by unanimous agreement the proper hour for commencement of the mummy's undressing. All the company were in an ecstasy of shivers as we conspired with the night in our ghoulish labors.
I insisted that some scientific rigor be applied to the task and that notes should be taken. Annabel Lee enthusiastically volunteered to keep the record both in script and pictures. Her widely known artistic talents and attention to detail made her more capable of that than anyone present and I gratefully accepted her offer.
We first removed the mummy out of the large box it had been shipped from France in, disposing of a vast quantity of straw and wood shavings. The original outer case was an elegant rectangle of Lebanon Cedar, three times long as it was deep; it's pictograms and hieroglyphics were carved in shallow relief and painted with greens, blues, blacks, whites and reds only somewhat faded. Out of this box we removed another, also of cedar, with its still vibrant colors intact. It conformed to the human anatomy within, being rounded at the head and shoulders and from these tapered down to the feet that protruded out from the plane of the body. The decoration all over its surface was of the highest quality and aesthetic appeal and I chastised my father internally for having locked away treasures such as this that would have given immense pleasure to those with the privilege to see them in a proper setting, if only we'd been allowed to.
Having lifted this casket from the outer case, we were able to see that the rich decoration continued down the sides, all looking as though it had been applied the day before. We opened the casket and were greeted with the bright mask of gilded cartonnage, a material of papyrus and plaster, similar I think, to papier-mâché. There were also several gilded cartouches-like placards resting on top of the mummy's shroud.
We lifted off these lovely gilded items and finally removed the mummy himself from the last casket
We had hoped to unravel the linen bandages wrapped around the body without cutting or tearing them but the intricacy of the wrapping and the incredible volume of linen used to accomplish it made us less fastidious in this regard after some several minutes of searching for the true end (from the embalmer's viewpoint, but the beginning from ours), of the linen strips. We thus began cutting the trusses that bound the forearms together over the hips, forcing the hands, which were holding a small papyrus roll, together over the pubic area.
Though the outer-most bandages were dis-colored, those below surface were clean, remarkably supple, though a little crisp from the resin they'd been coated with and of a very fine weave. In between them we found slips of papyrus at various intervals, little prayers for the soul's immortality and small figurine deities of blue-green faience, some five in number, as we got closer to the corpus itself.
Roddy was being uncharacteristically patient and good through the entire process and was obviously as transfixed as we all were at the many little discoveries. Each object and method of removal was noted in Annabel's sketch-book, which would soon be violently tossed to the ground by her sheer horror at what was to come.
Finally we reached the human skin and cut away the remainder of linen covering him, leaving the body itself in place atop the remaining material he rested on. The skin was quite black, gaining tones of brown with repeated viewing. The skin glimmered softly as though burnished; where bones pushed against the skin, highlights of a pewter tinge could be seen. Over the incision in the left abdomen, from which the internal organs were removed, was a solid gold disc bearing the horus eye.
We gazed in silence at the corroded flesh, contemplating our own like futures. Roderick spoke first.
"Imagine, this was once a man who made love, who revered his gods," he said as he stroked the forehead tenderly.
"What kind of lover do you suppose he was? Did he make the ladies cry?" Lucretia wondered. "I shall kiss him and see." Before our protests could be registered - they were in any case nearly drowned out by the fervent and voluble encouragement of Roderick – she had done so. Almost immediately, a strange look came upon her face.
"I felt something," she said.
"LOVE!" we all exclaimed in unison.
"Ah, the hot son of Egypt melts the Wenham iceberg," Benjamin melodramatically opined.
Lucretia, heiress to a fortune built on the mercurial backs of ice cubes cut from New English lakes and shipped across the globe as far as Calcutta, was notoriously finicky and stubborn when it came to the male sex.
"I always said it would take you thousands of years to marry and now you've covered that ground in mere minutes," he finished.
"The fickle Lucretia, who has spurned all my advances, finds a mate," said Archibald.
"Well, you should feel better Archie, clearly she prefers the company of older gentlemen," Roderick added.
Then the most extraordinary thing happened – a single muffled cough escaped the mouth of Hatotep. Gasps filled the stale air close around the mummy. Astounded and speechless we looked at him and each other with eyes and mouths agape.
"What was that?"
“Is this your parlor trick, Eddie?" Ben demanded to know. "A brilliant one if it is but you’ve scared the hell out of me and now we’re primed for the debunking – before I go out of my head."
"Surely there is some natural explanation," Annabel said.
Then, in what must have been less than a minute, a
great inhalation followed by an even greater exhalation passed through the mummy's mouth. His right arm moved; he brought hand to skull and then scratched it as though he was quite puzzled!
Utter pandemonium struck the room. We clutched our hair, rubbed our eyes, bit into our digits till they drew blood but not even the most severe of corporeal self-inflictions we could mete-out would change the circumstance of a thirty-five hundred year old man with simple but still evolving needs who was quite capable of attending to them himself. And then he began mumbling. We were now the agonists of a play in which the skull soliloquized to Hamlet.
I had a sick feeling in the vicinity of my solar plexus, as though my internal organs were re-arranging themselves. In my head I felt a burning tingle that convinced me I was experiencing the onset of insanity. That my colleagues confirmed all that I was seeing and hearing gave me no comfort, as two of them I considered already a bit around the bend and one, Roderick, I now feared suddenly as though he had a black hand in this business, that perhaps he had contrived these things for the purpose of driving me mad. All the strange instances and frights I’d experienced with him as a child now were recalled to me and I was nauseated at the recollection.
“Roderick, make it stop,” I said, the accusation burning my throat.
“I don’t