like your tone, Edmund. This is not my doing.”
“You know about these things – make it stop!”
“Calm yourself, Eddie. Once you’ve recovered, I think you’ll agree this is an unprecedented opportunity to speak with a distinguished personage of over three thousand years in age; a man whom Cleopatra would have considered one of the ancient ones and he is now our guest."
“I don’t know that I want to speak to him and how would he know what I’m saying to him? Or do you think he’s picked up English during his long entombment?”
"Eddie, please," Madeleine intervened as she took my arm in hers and led me away from the group. She brought me out into the parlour at the front of the house and we sat down facing one another and our fear.
"It's not Roderick's doing per se. These things happen despite our own wishes, despite all our entreaties."
"But Roderick wanted this. I didn't want them to take it. I pleaded with him not to do it. He was hurting me."
"He is a bully, sometimes, Edmund. Did he hit you?" Something in her eyes made me wonder…
"No, he didn't touch me but Madeleine, has he ever hit you?"
"No, he's never touched me." She darkened as she said this and continued after a pause, "He's never hit me, ever."
"He stared at me so intently, as though he penetrated my skull and I felt acute pain in a very particular area of my brain – deep inside."
"I see," she said as she looked from my eyes to the floor.
"What is that power he has? I'm not imagining it. Where does it come from?"
"Honestly, Eddie, I don't know where our powers come from. We've never understood it, either one of us. I mean, we've never understood it beyond the curse. Clearly, the act that brought forth the curse is the original sin. He is shadowed by something. In his moods we see the shadows wash over and away from him like the tides. He is claimed and must be redeemed, frequently redeemed. That is why I stay close to him."
"Claimed?"
"I don't know any more than you do, Edmund, really, I don't. That is all I was told – by the spirit of a drunkard. Claimed by a Tinker, he said, one of the Tinkers. All my questions have never been answered. What does that signify? What is a Tinker in that sense? I thought it might be nonsense but one nod of a demon's head when I'd asked did he know of such a thing convinced me that it is real enough in some other existence, elsewhere. It is hard to think of Roddy as a pitiful creature, he has such animal vitality but there are many things to pity him for. He needs kindness – and not to be crossed. One must surrender to him in such a way that he feels sated, purged of exigencies and then one can recover lost ground," she said with a flush of crimson in her cheeks. Some ground, I thought, can never be regained.
"How could I cross him with that stiletto of pain he drove through my skull? I was helpless. But I'll be damned if I'll be kind to him after subjecting me to that."
"No more mention of being damned, Eddie, I couldn't bear it if you were and it does happen, as quickly as drawing a breath." She then teased me with a theatrical suck of air through her mouth and gave me a coquettish smile. Damnation had never seemed so alluring.
We rejoined the others who had still not regrouped around the mummy. Cautiously we re-formed our circle around him; he was now mumbling softly without cease.
"He appears to be talking but what on earth could he be saying?"
"He seems a bit feeble-minded to me."
"Well! – That is harsh. What sort of a presentation do you suppose you would give three thousand years after your prime? And what would you have to say after sleeping several millennia?"
"I think I'd be a bit groggy and soft in the head after waking from such a sound sleep. I'm sure that's what's ailing our friend here."
"The ancient Egyptians were unaware of the brain's importance; during the embalming process they removed it with long hooks that they worked up the nose, then they threw it away. Ipso Facto, we are faced with the distinct possibility that our mummy has been rendered imbecilic. We are entertaining a moron."
"Let's not be so hasty, Archie."
"Well, if he has no tongue but can speak; if he has no lung but can breathe, don't you think it possible he might think like a philosopher even without a brain?" I asked.
It was odd to be communing with the supernatural yet for comprehension to be quashed by the thrum of this ancient tongue, incomprehensible for it’s befuddled mumbling – due to centuries of disuse, or the continued ramblings of a feeble-minded bore? It would be just our luck to have stumbled upon a mummy with a living soul and re-animated (though tattered and dusty,) flesh who had not much to say – eternally.
In that vicious way human beings have, we had already dismissed the poor fellow before he’d had a chance to explain himself and his shabby appearance and we were already wondering how we might shut him up!
Having watched what was left of his lips moving for twenty minutes, we left Hatotep to his mumbling and re-located to the front parlour. We looked at each other with astonished faces.
"Whatever are we going to do?" Lucretia wondered. Roderick and Madeleine both had been notably quiet during this adventure; re-animation of the dead being a good deal less novel for them. Roderick looked upon us with some amusement and not a word spoken.
"Well, Roddy, you look pleased with yourself," Benjamin noted.
"That's my usual state, Ben. I'm merely a bit more pleased with myself at initiating what has turned out to be more of an adventure than I'd bargained for. I think we should maintain our calm and allow it to play itself out. I for one am going back to check on our friend and see if I can't communicate with him."
We agreed that this was a reasonable course of action and once more rather comically we moved en masse back to the billiard room to open dialogue with the ancient one.
"Hatotep," Roderick said loudly in the same manner one speaks to the elderly and infirm. To our further amazement, at the sound of his name, Hatotep stopped mumbling and craned his neck to look at Roddy.
"Well, old boy, you can hear me. Let me introduce myself. You are Hatotep," he said pointing to our friend, "and I am Roderick," he added pointing to his own chest. He then began pointing to each of us in turn while calling out our names in a voice that the deafest of simpleton's could have understood.
"Hattie my friend," he repeated, "I am Roderick. Raw-der-ick." The mummy then tried to form this exotic name on his lips with some success. This was then repeated with all. It was to be the limit of what he could comprehend but it was astonishing! He cogitated and talked, not necessarily in that order. His speech became louder and more animated and we began to perceive the being within; of note was his dry sense of humor, or so we gathered from the timeless and universal gestures of the professional wit – the arched brow, the simpering pout, a tight, economical smile, a retraction and enlargement of the ears and dilation of the auditory canal that indicated a heightened attentiveness to “news”.
We were all overjoyed and somewhat horrified at this turn of events and I immediately thought of M. Seullinard as the only person who could help us truly communicate with Hatotep and wrote to him that very evening. We decided that he must have a companion at all times so as not leave him lonely. In the weeks before our translator arrived we by turns would listen and laugh with our friend though we couldn't understand a syllable of what he was saying. He prattled on in the face of our incomprehension and we listened, nodding our heads and smiling like imbecile's ourselves.
It was all remarkable enough but we couldn't help wondering; after millennia of dormancy, what had caused the re-animation of Hatotep?
And now once again, enter the French, as represented by one M. Seullinard, linguist and Egyptologist extraordinaire.
So many slanders are committed in the Anglophone world against the French that I feel I must champion the good sense, warmth and humor of our French friends. Perhaps in the days of the ancien regime a cold, crystalline wit predominated but I have found as much commonality with the French as
with any English I’ve known, or for that matter, any of my own countrymen, though the Parisians may be considered a separate entity from the “French” and not necessarily in possession of those aforesaid qualities.
In addition to those French friends and business associates secured by the family’s connections to New Orleans and Europe, an older, deeper bond remained fast – the affection of my grandfather for the Marquis de Lafayette and other members of the French contingent whose gallantry helped secure victory in our revolt against English tyranny. I well remember assembling with my family as a young boy to greet the Marquis on his triumphant return to America in ’24. How proud and grateful we all were for the privilege.
It was a mere four weeks and some days after I posted the letter that M. Seullinard arrived on our shores; he had been sunk in a bout of ennui, otherwise known as old-age, and was revivified by our promise of a fantastic mystery that only he could help unlock. I had employed all the literary devices in order to seduce Seullinard to our project without tugging too hard at the shroud of enticing mystery I had laid delicately upon the words of my perfectly correct French sentences.
I'd told him that the mummy he had shipped all those years ago to my father and the still-born Boston Museum he had hoped to establish, had now, under closer inspection, revealed ancient mysteries so profound and disturbing as to