realized. He glanced around at the people in the audience. They leaned forward, their eyes hungry, mouths slightly open as though to feast on the strange spectacle.
“Many different lengths and widths of bandages were used in wrapping the mummy,” Dr. Pettigrew said. He held up a bandage he had just removed from the chest. “This one has fringes, and is hemmed in a different color. Look here.” He showed them a central part of the bandage, where faded ink scrawled indecipherable outlines. “This may be a prayer, or the name of the deceased. I’ll give these materials to the scholars.”
Abraham raised his hand. “For what was the writing, doctor?”
“A spell, a protection, or just to commemorate the person. It may be the person’s name. Names were important to them; they left their names everywhere. These Egyptians were a superstitious lot. They had spells for everything. Perhaps the writings were supposed to protect them from tomb robbers.”
Manifestly, the spell hadn’t worked in this case.
What was he thinking? Heathen magic flew in the face of logic and science. Not only that, but it blasphemed against the true faith. This was just an exercise in observation and information collecting, a study of the quaint customs of a vanished people whose belief systems had been fatally flawed.
The doctor unrolled more bandages, lecturing as he went. Abraham leaned forward like everyone else, anxious, now, ready to have the bandages gone. He had seen mummies in the British Museum that afternoon, but they were still swaddled in linen. Did a perfectly preserved body lie inside the wrappings? When the bandages parted over the face, would it look as fresh as the day it was prepared, three or four thousand years earlier?
Was there a chance of resurrection? Of life after death, even after a sleep of a thousand years?
“Ah,” said the doctor, “here’s the heart scarab.” He held up a green lump the size of a child’s fist, and there came a collective gasp from the room again. “A particularly fine specimen. The Egyptians believed that the heart was the source of knowledge and intelligence. To them, it was the most important organ in the body. The inscription on the bottom of the heart scarab instructs the gods of the afterlife not to weigh the mummy’s heart too heavily in the scales of justice. As we do in our faith, the Egyptians believed that evil deeds could condemn them. Good deeds and the right intercessions by the gods could elevate them to a land of eternal bliss. Bad deeds made their hearts weigh heavier than the Feather of Truth, and the Devourer of the Dead waited beside the scales during the weighing. If judgment went against the deceased, the Devourer ate the heart, and the dead person’s self was lost forever.”
Abraham shivered. In his darkest hours, he had reached for hope that he would someday meet his mother in the realms of the blessed, restored to her true self, and happy. What if she had done something wrong in her life? What if she had gone to the other place?
What if he used his life badly, and never reached that reunion?
The doctor went back to work, meticulously unrolling, speaking all the while. Then he gasped. Everyone in the room drew in a breath and leaned forward. The doctor had not been surprised by his previous finds, only pleased. What had he discovered now?
The wings glinted in the gas flames. The part of the soul that wanders, Abraham thought, and remembered thin fingertips brushing lightly over images of winged beings. Mother: does a part of your blessed soul wander? Does it linger here on Earth? Are you waiting for me to discover how to see and speak with you? He rose and walked toward the doctor and the amulet.
“Abraham!” cried his father.
“Son?” said the doctor. He glanced around. Men who had been standing in shadow against the back wall converged.
Abraham’s hand lifted, hovered near the winged image. Do you wander still, ancient one? Can you speak to others like yourself?
Can you be a conduit between one who yet lives and one who has gone beyond?
Oh, but this was foolish. It defied rationality, and it was one of the temptations away from the true faith.
The boy thought, I believe in the remission of sins, the resurrection of the flesh, the life everlasting. This poor soul, or part of a soul, is not saved —
“Please. Return to your seat. You may examine the finds after the lecture is concluded,” said the doctor, taking a step back.
Abraham touched the silver amulet with his fingertips. At first, it was cool and smooth to the touch. Then fierce heat gathered. A glow surrounded the amulet. Light flowed from the amulet to envelope his hand, stinging like nettles. Shock radiated through him, and he stumbled back. Heat raced like rivers of molten metal through his body. He cried out.
Something was present. Something had survived.
“Abraham!” Papa leaned over him, a shadow against the light. He lifted his head and faced Dr. Pettigrew. “Doctor, I am so sorry! He is in general the best-behaved boy in the world. I don’t know what possessed him. Please forgive us.”
Papa knelt, lifted him, carried him out of the hall.
The evening air was cool and damp and filthy. His father carried him toward the corner. Gas lamps made glowing halos in the mist. The clopping of horses’ hooves, the ring of wheels against the cobbles, echoed between buildings.
“Son, you have disgraced me,” Papa said. He quickened his stride, hailed a passing cab. Abraham felt a twinge of shame, then an overwhelming weariness.
The driver pulled his horse to a stop and released the door. “Where to?”
“Morley’s Hotel on Trafalgar Square.” Papa set Abraham on the seat and settled beside him in the darkness of the cab’s interior. The door closed, and the cab swayed as it set off.
“What into you has gotten?” Papa asked.
Abraham could not answer. He didn’t yet know what this was, this molten spill that had burned into his bones and etched itself onto his organs.
Abraham’s breath was hot as it rushed out over his tongue, cool as he drew it in. His breathing was so loud he couldn’t hear anything else.
“Abraham!” said Papa.
“Son? Are you weeping?” Papa touched the tears on his cheek.
Abraham could not explain: not any of it. The amulet had called to him — how? Why? What had wakened after a sleep of thousands of years? Who was now resident inside him, remembering the scent of spices and unguents from ancient times, the taste of honey on the tongue, the heat of a blazing, dusty midday and the fretted shadows of palm fronds across pale stone?
What remnant of personality was it that, defying science, had lasted millennia to live again, even in such a tattered form?
Death was not final. If one soul could survive death, might not another? Suppose his mother had left a piece of herself in something at home, something he had not touched since her death —
He lay back against the seat, his gaze fixed on the roof of the cab as though he could see through it, past the mists and smokes of the London sky to the stars above, and beyond.
The sky cracked open and the possibility of wonders rained down.
THE MUMMY’S FOOT, by Jessie Adelaide Middleton
Nothing would induce me to write the full story of the mummy at the British Museum, though an Egyptian friend has given me some information which throws a little further light on the matter. I think the subject is one to be left severely alone, and I only wish the late Mr. Fletcher Robinson, whom I knew, had thought so too, and consequently avoided it.
In the beginning of this year, however, I was involved in a strange episode concerning a mummy’s foot, the scene of which was the house at Hampstead in which I am now writing, which is quite modern, and, to say the least of it, the most “unghostly” place I have ever met with.
Last New Year’s Eve, Miss Westwood, a girl friend who was staying with us, went