Alone with the Mummies
Originally published in Dreich Shorts #2
Hannah had been staring at it for over an hour.
Her nose stood parallel with its canine muzzle. Her eyes met its unflinching stare. Her teeth, long overdue an appointment with the dentist, were rendered pitiful in comparison to two perfect rows of obsidian. They were similar only in one respect: their human torsos, separated by a thin pane of glass.
The glass fogged with breath. Hannah stepped back and squirted it with polish. She wiped away the condensation with her yellow cloth, cleansing the cabinet of dust and fingerprints. The statue of Anubis loomed as she performed this ritual, its jackal head observing her intently. One ear stood erect and purposeful, but the other was missing: a ruinous stump of jagged rubble in its place. The flesh was carved from a single stone. Looking at it, Hannah understood how humans and animals fit together perfectly, creating something new, something better.
With the public locked out, Hannah was alone in the darkened corridors of the museum. It was the oldest artefacts that disturbed her the most; thousands of lives had passed beneath their stony sight, only to be extinguished and forgotten. She was the latest member of a morbid parade. She swept and dusted, while the god of the underworld demanded her attention.
He was calm, almost serene, not at all the snarling monster of her mind. His human arms were regally crossed, but the missing ear made him look vulnerable.
The plaque next to the statue said that Anubis weighed the hearts of the dead against the feather of Ma’at, goddess of truth. If the heart was pure, it would balance the scales, and the deceased soul would continue on their journey through the underworld. But if the heart was heavy, the scales would tip, and Anubis would feed it to the crocodile-headed Ammit. Hannah knew how that felt. Yesterday, her heart had been eaten by a crocodile.
She looked at the mummified remains huddled into small groups around the room. In the past, mummy parts were purchased as souvenirs; people becoming bodies, bodies becoming commodities. The true afterlife. Without the softening bustle of tourists, Hannah saw the display for what it was: not an attraction but a tomb. She imagined desiccated corpses pressing their noses against the transparent pods of the London eye, preserved cadavers posing at Madame Tussauds, Shakespeare’s skull used as a prop on the boards of the Globe. The mummies bared their teeth in rage.
Hannah knelt down to clean the glass case of the one closest to her. It lay near the floor, like it was sleeping on a mattress without a bed. As she cleaned, she noticed a light tapping next to her ear. It was a tiny sound, barely audible, but in the silence of the empty exhibition, it reached her ears like a hammer striking iron. She heard it again, tap, tap, tap, tap. The sound grew more insistent, getting faster, demanding her attention. As she raised her head, she found herself gazing into the eternal eyes of the mummy.
Its face, recognisable even in death, stared piteously at her own. The nose and jaw and brow that had enchanted her before were still there, prominent and brittle in the half-light. A thin, flaking hand reached out to her, fingers touching the glass. They were so close that Hannah could imagine hot, dry breath caressing her cheek.
A voice, withered by the passing of centuries, whispered, ‘Hannah, I think we should see other people.’