May 2014 Short Story of the Month

CURSED OBJECTS

It should go without saying that nobody believed the curse. Even in 2014, the discovery a new Egyptian mummy came with a degree of excitement. And a slight mysticism, Joe had to admit. The sarcophagus was remarkably intact. So much that it looked as if it was already in a museum; polished, restored and ready for display. Had he not spent the last eight hours excavating it, Joe would not have believed anything else. But here it was. The mummy. Who it was, they could not quite say. It was a mystery, a John Doe. Everything about it was a mystery and he was sure there would be speculation for some time to come. Carl Broderick, who was the head of this expedition, had spent the last hour trying to think up a name. After all, they had found it, hadn’t they? Wasn’t it their right to name it? But so far, John Doe was the best they had.
They didn’t even know if it was male or female. At this point, they didn’t know anything. Only that they had it, and from what they had seen already, it was in remarkable shape. Truth be told, this was always Joe’s favorite part: the not knowing. The imagining of the story before everything began to come to light. They had exhumed the mummy, then they would look it over, and then they would begin to put together the facts. Even though Joe was in the business of facts, he liked the imagining better. The not knowing. Science, he thought, was the pursuit of the discovery more than the discovery itself. The discovery by itself was just a punch line. Without build-up, it didn’t matter.
On the side of the sarcophagus, they found hieroglyphs. Remarkably intact. First a short epitath, but still without a name. It said nothing of who this person had been. Below that, they found the curse. It was nothing they felt threatened by or even concerned themselves with. It was perfectly commonplace for the Ancient Egyptians to write some sort of warning on the tomb. Curses like these were the “NO TRESPASSING” signs of their era. Sure, movies had given them some negative stigma, but these were modern times and all of that had faded away into history. Just another forgotten superstition.
Nobody thought about the curse that night, or the next morning, or when they flew the mummy back to the museum in London. Not so much as a thought. They didn’t think about it during the lecture tour or the television interviews. They didn’t think about it when the power shut down for twelve hours after the mummy was finally brought into its new exhibit.
And they didn’t even think about it when Brandon Park died in his sleep of unknown causes some two months after they had excavated the mummy.
The first time that any of them—or Joe, at the very least—thought about the curse that had been carved into the side of the sarcophagus was not until the second death. It wasn’t that another member of the crew had died that had struck Joe as odd. It was odd, to be sure, but these things happened. Life had a funny way of working out, and he knew that. He had known it ever since Lila Crockett told him at the prom that she wasn’t ready for any serious commitment, and then wound up married three months later. He knew it when, on occasion, he would find his mind drifting to Lila (still happily married) while making love to his wife. Oh yes, he knew. Life had a funny way of working out.
It was the way that Peter Hamlin had died that stuck out to Joe when he had first heard the news: they didn’t know. There was no official cause, just like there had not been with Brandon Park, and so Joe began to wonder. To imagine. But imagine what, exactly? The mummy creeping out of its tomb like Boris Karloff in the old movie? Walking out of a museum in which it was currently the star attraction without being noticed? Traveling 3,000 miles either way just to get its hands on two men that had helped lift it out of the earth? What exactly was Joe trying to imagine?
He didn’t know. But he knew trying was the operative word, because when he actually thought about what could have happened, his mind came up with nothing.
Such a thing had happened historically, he didn’t discount that. There was the infamous curse of King Tut. Where the men who had dug up the pharaoh Tutankhamen had died mysteriously, one by one. But that had been an error of procedure, of science. They didn’t know in the 20’s what they knew now, especially when it came to handling the dead. The men who had exhumed Tutankhamen had not foreseen what coming into contact with something that old and that dead might do to their body, and so they had suffered the consequences. All those who had come in contact with the mummy had suffered. A very ancient bug passed around from one to the other until none remained.
Was that what had happened here? Joe thought it couldn’t possibly be. Science had come a long way since then. A staggeringly long way, when he thought about it. Procedure was entirely different and no one in the scientific field was so irresponsible as to handle a corpse in 2014 the way they had in 1924. So it wasn’t an oversight or a stupid mistake that had gotten two men killed.
What, then, was it?
Joe hadn’t the slightest idea. The thoughts were fleeting at best, and before too long, he let them float away into the ether; that place where seemingly important thoughts and memories went to die.
The third body seemed to be an accident. Daniel Carnarvon had died in a car crash. He was driving in Boston, on his way home from a lecture at BU, when he began to drift into the other lane. He was hit by an oncoming car and ended up veering right off of a bridge. The body was mostly intact when they pulled it from the water. No reason had been given for why he had started to drift, that was the mystery. They had checked for brain damage, a tumor or something, anything during the autopsy. But nothing was found.
Joe didn’t hear about this death until weeks later, and it bothered him. Unlike Brandon or Peter, who he had barely ever talked to even when they had been digging up bodies together, Joe had known Daniel. They had gone to college together and had always maintained a healthy rivalry. It was Joe, in fact, who had insisted Daniel be given a place on the Egypt trip. They had always wanted to make a discovery together, and they believed this mummy was it. They believed that completely.
Now Daniel was dead.
The mummy they had found, the one lying in the center of the Museum of Science (press had grown around it enough that Joe had heard it was scheduled to be transferred to the Museum of Natural History in New York, and that didn’t surprise him one bit) was the only lasting legacy of their friendship. Joe took no comfort in this. Instead, at the thought of it, he felt an unmistakable sense of dread.
Within a month the only people that remained of the crew that had dug that mummy up were Joe, Carl Broderick, and an intern named Colbie Brent. She was sweet, Joe had liked her much in the way a respected archaeologist often likes their bubbly young interns and he had done his best to keep that to himself. He loved his wife very much. And he hadn’t liked Colbie enough to think about her after they had returned home, he had simply liked her, and that was all. After reading about the latest death, he found himself thinking of both her and Carl more and more.
Joe weighed the decision for a long time before he made the call. He kept telling himself that she would think he was crazy, kept telling himself that maybe he was crazy, but now that there were only three of them left, he knew he didn’t believe that. And now that they were three, he was pretty sure she didn’t believe that either.
He could hear the nervousness on the other end before she even spoke. “Hello?” he said. “Colbie? It’s Joe Proctor. You remember, from…”
“Yes, of course I remember you, Joe,” she said quickly. Then she asked a question that she put more weight into than any question Joe had ever heard. “How are you?” she said slowly. He wasn’t sure if that was grief talk, as if she had seen him at a funeral and asked “How are you holding up?” He wasn’t sure if she meant it to sound like he was the victim of an accident, and now in some sort of recovery. It sounded like neither of those things. After they spoke, when he thought about it, it sounded to Joe as if she was grieving for him.
“Listen,” Joe said, gently, “can we talk sometime? I’d really like to get together if you’re in the neighborhood. Talk about, I don’t know, how you’re doing. You know. Everything that’s happened since the dig.”
A nervous jitter on the other end like a bug tittering across the phone. “No, I’m afraid I can’t do that, Joe. I’m sorry I just… I can’t see anyone right now. I’m very busy, you see. I’m afraid I won’t be getting out for awhile.”
“Well, suppose I come see you?”
A pause. She weighed the offer.
Joe waited.
“Yes,” she said finally. “I suppose that would be okay.”
He went to visit her at her apartment the next morning. There was, at first, no sound from within. He knocked a few times, and thought he could hear someone moving inside, but there was no answer. Eventually he began to walk away. When he had nearly reached the end of the hall, the door to her apartment opened. Just a crack.
He turned and walked back, gently opening the door. “Colbie? Are you here?”
The place was an absolute mess. Trash upon trash. Clutter upon clutter. He wondered how anyone could live like this.
One look at her as she stepped out of the kitchen and he had his answer. She was just as filthy as the rest of the apartment. Hair a mess, skin caked with dirt and grease. And she stank. Not in the simple way of body odor, this was much more than that. It was heavier, thicker, like it had been built up as a wall around her. For defense as much as anything else. The poor, frightened woman. She hadn’t left the house in weeks, at least. Probably months.
“Close the door!” She said quickly.
Joe did. He kept a hand to the door after he had done it, to reassure her that it was in fact shut. He hoped that would calm her, but it didn’t. At least not outwardly, not that he could tell.
“Are you here to kill me?” Colbie asked.
“No,” Joe said. “No, not at all. I’m here because… well, I should think you should know why I’m here. Of all the people who went on that dig, there are only three of us left and nobody knows anything as to why. Do you?”
Colbie shook her head, but he could see it in her eyes that she was lying.
“I think you do,” Joe said. “But I don’t think you want to believe it. I know you don’t, because I don’t want to believe it either. I haven’t even brought myself to say it out loud, but I think I can say it now. Now that I’m with you.” A long, deep breath. “I think it’s the curse. The one we found on the side of that sarcophagus. The curse of the mummy.”
He had said it a thousand times in his mind, over and over. And every one of those times, he either cursed himself or laughed at himself because of how absolutely ridiculous it sounded. But not now. Now it simply sounded right.
She nodded and sat down. “Yes,” she said absently. “Yes, I think it is.”
“What should we do about it?” Joe asked, and some deep part of him asked himself, is this a conversation I’m really having?
“We don’t do anything. There’s nothing you can do, except nothing. This isn’t science, Joe. This is a lot older and, I think, a lot stronger. We were never prepared to deal with anything like it. So we can’t. I’ve been here ever since I figured it out, starting to figure it out, at least. I knew something was happening before I knew what it was, but I suppose that’s the way it always goes, isn’t it? I was here and I figured I’d be safe if I didn’t leave. That maybe it couldn’t find me here if I hid, if I didn’t want to be found. But of course now you’ve come along and bastardized that too.”
Joe felt a sudden rush of irrational anger. “You can’t possibly blame me for what’s been happening.”
“Of course I do,” she said. “I blame you and I blame me and I blame all of us. We all did the deed. That’s what we’re dying for, isn’t it? We didn’t heed the warnings. We didn’t respect our elders and now we’re being punished.”
“So you… you don’t think we can survive this?”
She laughed. It was an insane laugh that sounded more like a baboon than a human, and Joe realized then that the woman he’d grown attracted to on the Egypt dig was already dead and had been for some time. Her laughter softened and faded away. “No, you naïve bastard, I don’t think we can survive it. Not you or me or Carl, wherever he may be. None of us is getting out of us alive. It’s fate, you see. We didn’t believe in fate, so now fate’s giving us a proper scolding.”
Colbie began to fumble at the button of her pants as if she had forgotten how it worked. After some trying, she got it and began to slide them down. “Do you want to fuck me?” she asked in a hoarse, dry voice. It was broken and cancerous, not attractive and not trying to be. “A fuck, Joe? We’re going to die anyway, right? Might as well get off one last pop.”
Joe had no response.
“Suit yourself,” she said, and began to masturbate before he had even turned to open the door. She did not say a word to him as he left, devoting her attention entirely to herself. Although somehow he doubted that too.
Joe was already across the street and halfway to his car when her apartment blew up. They ruled it as a gas leak, but in the apartment moments before it had blown he had smelled no gas. He supposed she could have done it while he was leaving, but somehow he doubted that too.
Only a night later he was awakened by a phone call. Carl Broderick had had a heart attack and died. It was no surprise, they said. The man was old and he didn’t take good care of himself or his eating habits. Something like this would have happened eventually. Joe agreed with them on one point: it was no surprise. Yet at the same time it was.
Just like that, without even a moment to think about it, Joe was the only one left. He had known for some time what was happening. He knew even longer than that that everyone who had lifted up that mummy was dying in rapid succession. Naturally, he had often wondered what he was going to do when it was his turn. He’d thought about it, but he’d never really thought about it as a reality, and he was kicking himself for that now. Because now it was just him.
Joe was alone against whatever was coming to get him. He had thought a lot about that too. The mummy sneaking into his apartment like some midnight movie monster. Or an ancient spirit hovering over him in the night. Or nothing at all, and one moment he would simply find himself dying and not be able to do a damn thing about it. That, he suspected, was closest to the truth. But at the same time, he thought maybe that was only what he wanted to believe.
Whatever it was that had killed off his colleagues, one thing became abundantly clear as time went on: it was toying with them. Joe lived for another year after everyone else had died. For a few months he lived much like Colbie had spent her last time on Earth, in constant fear. Eventually he saw no more point in that. It was going to happen anyway, one way or the other, whether he tried to hide from it or not. Colbie had proven that at the end.
He had expected the police to come questioning him, but they never did. All the deaths were too random, they had said on TV, for a person to be behind it, and on that they were right. Ironically it was just when Joe was beginning to think—on some deep level—that it might not happen that he finally saw the mummy. It was not at his apartment, but in his office at the university, where he was doing a series of guest lectures. He thought that if nothing had happened, maybe nothing will, and so he tried to return to the work he had always loved doing so that he at least had something to take his mind off of all the fear.
It was only when he returned from the bathroom after everyone had gone home that night that he realized how ridiculous the thought had sounded. He felt the thing in the room before he even saw it. Knowing where it was, he did not want to turn and look at it, but he did.
The mummy looked exactly the way he left it. Except for the fact that it was standing and the fact that white, glassy marble eyes had grown back into its shrunken, shriveled sockets. The whole thing was leathery and discolored, like the pictures he had seen of holocaust victims, only this one looked to be half-digested and wrapped in beef jerky. The eyes, which were not human eyes, followed him as he fell back against the door. It spoke without vocal chords in a language long-dead, which he knew only in pieces. Yet it spoke with another voice, one that went directly into Joe’s brain.
You awakened. You must pay.
Just that simple command and nothing more. Joe had expected something a little more eloquent out of the demon that had come to kill him, but he hid his disappointment well within mind-numbing fear.
“Why?” Joe found himself asking. He wanted to run, but even in a state of panic he knew it would do him no good. He had been running for a year, if not more, and it had been biding its time. Now it had caught up. “Why kill us? Why not just let us go… why can’t you just forget about us?”
The mummy stared at him and Joe suddenly wondered if it could even hear him without ears, or if it could understand English.
You meddle.
The answer at last. So simple and short, yet Joe found he could not argue it. “So how… how is it going to go?” he asked, weakly. “A heart attack? Unknown causes? Are you going to blow the whole office?”
The mummy shook its head. A puff of dust from it as it did so. It raised a thin, shriveled arm to the table behind Joe.
Joe turned. The table, which was used for carrying lab equipment and which had been empty a minute ago, was now full. There were very old, ancient jars on it. And equipment that looked primitive, yet surgical at the same time. Joe knew these things immediately. He had been studying them his whole life. “No…” he found himself saying in a voice that was barely his own. “Christ, please, no.”
The mummy stepped forward. Joe realized dimly that he could see the light move through it, as if the mummy was there and not there at the same time. It looked corporeal, it looked solid. But it was not solid, at least not all the way. Still he had no doubt that when it reached out to touch him, he would feel its bony fingers against his flesh.
And he was right. The mummy pushed Joe down against the table and held him there. Without any remaining muscle, the thing was nonetheless stronger than any man or woman Joe had ever known. He tried to fight, tried to scream, but his body did nothing. It went numb. Joe could not move any longer. He could barely think. And yet he could feel. Still, he could feel everything, even as the picked up the long, barbed hook and drove it up into Joe’s brain.
When Joe’s mummified body was uncovered the next morning, they tried to rule it as a suicide rather than murder to avoid any negative light shedding itself down on the university. But the facts remained that a man could not remove his brains through his nose and then proceed to remove his organs and place them in jars. So murder was what they had to call it, and the story became infamous in no time. It was to bizarre not to spread. Yet to all those who came in contact with the mummified body of Joe Proctor, it was even stranger. From the ancient jars and tools (no university or museum, they found, was missing such items) down to the hieroglyphs on the side of the wrappings, no doubt a message left by the killer.
Joe was the only one qualified enough to read them. They thought about sending someone in, then thought better of it. After all, it was nothing to be worried about, right? Just some sick joke. They didn’t think about that message on the mummified body after the investigation. They didn’t think about it for quite some time afterward. Not even when the first of them died.
Then they thought about the message that had been left on the side of the body.
Then they thought about mummies and curses.
Then they thought: life had a funny way of working out.