The town of Boirdeleau, Wisconsin, had a population of three thousand and seventeen, three thousand and sixteen of which were perfectly ordinary folk and precisely one of which was an ancient mummy of questionable provenance.
Boirdeleau, tucked in alongside the Mississippi River just a few miles north of where it met up with the Chippewa, had a nice winery and a few folksy shops on Main Street, but no particular claim to fame other than the mummy, which resided in a glass case in the local library. Miss Faulkman, the librarian these past two years, took responsibility for the mummy's care and upkeep. Right now, she could only hope that her charge would not intervene on his own behalf with the young man from the State Historical Society who had come to examine him.
According to Mr. Brzycki, the mummy was a priceless historical artifact—a point which Miss Faulkman could not argue—and according to him, the State Historical Society in Madison had sent him to evaluate its condition. He flashed paperwork in Miss Faulkman's face, too quickly for her to catch more than the Historical Society seal at the top. "Specifically," said Mr. Brzycki, tucking the papers into the inside pocket of his rather threadbare sport-coat, "with regard to travel."
"I think he'll travel fine," said Miss Faulkman, who had enough experience of this to know rather than think, but who knew better than to tell Mr. Brzycki so. "Where do you mean to take him?" Another, more important question bubbled up behind that one. "And how long will he be gone?"
Mr. Brzycki smiled. It was a very nice smile, in a certain very well-practiced way. "Well, for good, of course! It needs to be sent back to where it came from."
"I see," said Miss Faulkman. "And where is that?"
They both turned to look at the glass case. The mummy rested in a seated position ("criss-cross applesauce" was the phrase as Miss Faulkman had learned it) with the top of his head against the back wall, in such a way that the outsides of his legs did not fully rest on the bottom of the case. He was wrapped in bands of brownish cloth, both arms individually sheathed and crossed across his chest. Based on the seated position he might very well have been a relic of the Inca or some other South American people; though based on the wrappings themselves he could also easily have been an ancient Egyptian mummy. Or then again, perhaps Chinese? He had no burial mask or jewelry or other ornamentation that would have helped in his identification. Miss Faulkman only referred to him as "him" at all because the mummy hadn't made any effort to correct this initial usage of hers—not because of any outward indication of his theoretical gender.
Miss Faulkman let the uncomfortable silence build between her and Mr. Brzycki, who had gone about pink about the edges. "Well, that is for the experts to assess," he said. "Knowing Captain Follett, it could have been just about anywhere."
Roger Follett was the individual responsible for the presence of the mummy in the library of Boirdeleau. Captain Follett had resided in the town some years before, insofar as his globetrotting permitted him to call any singular place his residence. Follett's expeditions had him described in some of the older town literature as an "adventurer", but Miss Faulkman thought that perhaps "marauder" might have been more accurate. Neither had the man been particularly forthcoming with the accounting of his travels. Fortunately, he'd brought relatively few such souvenirs back to Boirdeleau permanently.
She explained the situation to Mr. Brzycki as ably as she could: the mummy had been here nearly a hundred years, no one knew anything about it, there was no record of its origin. Like the mummy, she was one of the few residents of Boirdeleau who hadn't originated here, and she wasn't as familiar with the lore surrounding Follett as she might have been. In any case, she took care to avoid the words "adventurer" and "marauder" alike. "The only thing I can assure you," she finished, "is that the town will absolutely not part with their, er... " She wrinkled her nose at the placid mask of the mummy's face. "Very important relic."
Mr. Brzycki put one arm on a bookshelf and leaned toward her. He was very slightly taller than she was, and, in the lean, had grown a great deal more annoying as well. "Getting this thing back to its place of origin is simply the right thing to do. Surely someone like you, with an appreciation for the classics, can understand that."
Miss Faulkman withdrew a handkerchief from her pants pocket and dabbed at a smeary fingerprint that the overeager young man had left on the mummy's case. When she'd graduated the LIS program, she'd mailed out forty-two resumes. Only Boirdeleau had called her up for an interview, and she'd jumped at the offered job. She had never thought during that process to enquire about the side duties that might come attached to custodianship of a beloved local curiosity. "I'm sure that you can appreciate my position, too. I can hardly hand out priceless antiquities to the first person who comes along." She folded the handkerchief into tidy quarters before returning it to her pocket. "Even if you had a local library card, which I'm fairly sure is not the case."
"Trust me." Mr. Brzycki's perfect smile didn't flicker one whit as he straightened up out of his lean and adjusted his tie. "You don't want the Journal Sentinel here with a news crew, protests, bad press." Miss Faulkmann opened her mouth to say that the only press she might get in Boirdeleau was the Dollarclip Savings circular that came once a week on Thursdays, but he was still talking. "I'll be back with a moving van and get the whole mess out of your hair."
"You can't do that!" objected Miss Faulkman, as he brushed past her. On the off chance that he could indeed do exactly that, she called after him, "You'll have to go all the way down to La Crosse to rent a truck!"
But Mr. Brzycki didn't respond, other than to duck his head and mutter an excuse-me when he bumped into old John Goodbear on his way out the door. Mr. Goodbear stared after the man for a moment, holding the door open as he did, until Miss Faulkman scolded him over the cool wet draft off the river that he was letting in. "Is he in town to see our friend here?" he asked, wiping dirt off on the rug. Though no one in town did much to broadcast the mummy's presence, word did get out from time to time. "I thought I recognized him for a second, but… I suppose not. You just get to expecting familiar faces in a town like Boirdeleau."
"Yes, he was here about the mummy," said Miss Faulkman briskly. "But never mind about that." Her hands fluttered briefly at her sides, as if on their own accord they would just as soon have gathered up Mr. Goodbear into a firm embrace. That wasn't her place, though. He wouldn't care for a stranger fussing over him so. But she thought she knew why he was here, and pressed gently for the reason. It didn't serve her well to pry too much. The residents of Boirdeleau were an insular sort, with good reason. But library degrees didn't grow on trees—or in vineyards. "Your daughter was able to take you up to the Twin Cities yesterday, wasn't she, Mr. Goodbear? What did they say?"
"I keep telling you, just call me John. Everyone else does." Mr. Goodbear took off his hat, and spun it around between his big hands. "And, well, it's stomach cancer. That's what we expected. There's a program for treatment, one of those experimental groups, but there's a waiting list, and I was hoping our friend here—"
Of course the mummy was already moving, legs unfolding and straightening. Miss Faulkman hurried to open the glass case as he got all the way up and lumbered forward. "Let me get that for you," she cried, and swung the door out of the way just before he reached it. He didn't always seem to remember that the case front was there, and there wasn't any space in the library budget for a new case again this year.
The mummy stopped just in front of Mr. Goodbear, whose face had split in a smile even as tears rolled down his wrinkled cheeks. "Bless you," he said. "I don't know what we'd do without you."
The mummy's head inclined briefly. Then one bandaged hand shot forward, burying itself in John Goodbear's belly.
Mr. Goodbear's head pitched back, and Miss Faulkman looked away when a guttural moan ground out of his wide-open mouth. She would never get used to this, no matter how long she lived in Boirdeleau. She didn't think this was the sort of thing a person ought to get used to. But she stared down at the red tips of her shoes where they peeped out from under her pants, and counted breaths until the library grew quiet again.
She looked up just in time to see the mummy's hand pull back from Mr. Goodbear's belly, covered in gore well past the wrist. In the knotty brown fingers there was a handful of—best not to look too closely. Miss Faulkman had a degree in library science and not biology for several very good reasons. Instead she shooed Mr. Goodbear to a chair, while the mummy loomed in the background. She did not watch to see what he did with the handful of muck he'd dredged up from John's innards, but rather passed Mr. Goodbear a fresh handkerchief from her purse so that he could dry his brow.
Mr. Goodbear wound up blowing his nose into the handkerchief a few times before he was quite ready to stand up again; Miss Faulkman deftly declined his attempts to return it afterward. He asked for a moment alone with his "old friend", and she went to tidy up in the Young Adult section while Mr. Goodbear pressed the mummy's hand and spoke quietly to him. When the door jingled at last, she looked up again. The mummy stood alone, looking in her direction. Or at least with his head turned toward her; she had never been certain how much he saw or heard or simply knew.
She put both elbows up on the shelf of crime novels that abutted Young Adult to peer back at him. "Sometimes I wonder," she said, "what it is that you get out of this particular bargain."
The mummy shook his head at her. She ducked her head, feeling strangely admonished. "Yes, I know, we should get going. Let me find my car keys."
The mummy fit in the passenger side of Miss Faulkman's car, albeit with his lower legs crammed snugly under the dashboard. Miss Faulkman coaxed the engine to life, and they glided down out of the street-side space in front of the library and out along Main Street. Gaily-painted storefronts lined a two-block space on either side. Mrs. Lorson, who owned Ole and Lena's Handcrafted Norwegian Goods and Foods, waved from just inside her glinting window. Miss Faulkman hesitated, and then lifted the fingers of her left hand from the steering wheel in greeting. Her thumb stayed hooked behind.
It wasn't a long drive to Boirdeleau School, which took the town's children up to the seventh grade. After that they were bussed farther up the river to attend the junior high and then the high school in Pepin. But something drew Miss Faulkman farther northward on Main Street, up out of town and onto the highway that followed the Mississippi. You could see the water, sometimes just a distant glint on the far side of train tracks, sometimes a broad muddy bathtub between the two hillsides. If the mummy had any opinions on this jaunt, he kept them to himself, as ever.
Finally she pulled over in a shady overlook, just off the highway and up around a grassy hillside. She got out of the car, looking down on Boirdeleau to the southeast. She picked up her purse for a cigarette, and then remembered that she didn't smoke anymore.
The mummy rolled down the window.
Miss Faulkman came around the car to the passenger side. "Good thing they're automatic," she said. "I bet you'd have a devil of a time with a hand crank. Do you want to get out?"
A nod.
Soon enough he stood ramrod-straight beside her as she slouched against the hood, with a faded parasol in one bandaged hand to protect him from unwanted UV rays. "It's my job to take care of you," she said, and realized she was speaking as much to herself as to him. That wasn't right. She looked up at him, put a hand on his bony arm. "Do you—I mean, I should ask you, shouldn't I? Do you want to go home? Wherever that is?"
The mummy's arm lifted, stick-straight. Pointing back down the river to Boirdeleau.
"No," said Miss Faulkman. She squashed her annoyance. "Not your right-this-minute home. I mean, your real one. The one where you're supposed to be. Egypt? Mexico?" She let her arms fall by her sides. "Other-fill-in-the-blank?"
The mummy's arm didn't waver. But his head swiveled slowly around to her.
Miss Faulkman sagged. "Okay," she said. "We'll figure something out."
She parked at the school and hurried around the car to open the door for the mummy. He had offered her his arm so that she might assist him to a stand when the oddity of the situation struck her: as if they were a pair of junior high students themselves, on an awkward date in a parent's borrowed car. A laugh burst out of her before she could smother it—the town already must think their out-of-towner librarian was odd, no reason to give them additional fodder on that account—and the mummy's great head drifted in her direction.
"Sorry," she said, and gave another cautious yank. She wouldn't like to explain to the good people of Boirdeleau how she'd come to dismember their local mascot. "Just—look at the pair of us." Either of them as plainly from out of town as the other.
The mummy silently lumbered to his feet. She was just about to turn toward the school when a cold, well-wrapped hand tucked itself in the inside of her arm. When she turned to gape up at him, his head was canted to one side. "I didn't know mummies made jokes," she said, and a sound like sifting sand came out of his throat as he led her off toward the school's main doors.
"He's here!" someone squealed, as Miss Faulkman and the mummy edged their way into the back of the auditorium (which was really just the cafeteria with a row of risers dragged in). Several children ran up to wrap hugs around the mummy's knees, while their parents pressed him with firm handshakes. Miss Faulkman ducked out of the way, tucking herself into a seat at a ketchup-sticky lunch table, where shortly thereafter, the mummy joined her.
The concert, ostensibly to celebrate the end of the school year, proved to be a bit of a mummy-themed love fest. Aside from the usual songs devoted to academic achievement and the niftiness of the fifty United States, there were at least three lauding the local hero. Based on the liberal use of slant rhymes and awkward meter, these had been written by either the current crop of schoolchildren or a previous one. In any case, the mummy slowly bobbed his head in time to the beat.
Thirty-five increasingly sweaty minutes later (the school was not and probably never would be air-conditioned), Miss Faulkman finally unbent her cramped knees and stood. The mummy required some assistance untangling himself from the little bench, and by the time that task was accomplished, the cafeteria had half-emptied, as parents swarmed the risers to congratulate and collect their offspring. Miss Faulkman, of course, had no relations here; she carefully dodged eye contact as the room cleared out. Best if she made her way clear fast, before someone had to take pity on her with an attempt at small talk. They had their own friends and families already; no sense in her stealing that precious time with forced questions about the weather or the Packers or the cost of gasoline.
She glanced up and smiled only for Mr. Robinson, the retired librarian, as she guided the mummy back out to the waiting car. How did you do this for fifty years? she wanted to ask, but she certainly didn't know the man well enough to ask such a silly question, and so it went unsaid. Instead she offered only a solemn nod.
But Mr. Robinson caught her by the elbow. "Was that Gene Mitchell I saw going into the library this morning? How long is he in town for? Lori—that's Lori Mitchell who works for the postal service—didn't mention at Euchre Night that he'd be here to visit."
"I'm sorry," said Miss Faulkman. She glanced up at the mummy for reassurance, which was hardly forthcoming. "There was just the Ladies' Knitting Circle in this morning, and a gentleman from—from out of town." She swallowed the words "historical society." Best not to start a mummy-related panic in the middle of the elementary school cafeteria.
"Oh! Oh, well my eyes must be playing tricks." That would be no great surprise; Mr. Robinson's glasses must have been half an inch thick at the outsides. He gave Miss Faulkman's elbow one more kindly pat and released her. "That makes sense. The big Follett reunion isn't till August, anyway."
"Follett!" Miss Faulkman repeated. An electric jolt of she-wasn't-quite-sure-what shivered through her. "I thought you said Mitchell?"
"Lori Mitchell, nee Follett," Mr. Robinson explicated with the patience of a lifetime librarian. "Bill and Sandra Follett's middle girl." He smiled, and nudged those Coke-bottle glasses back up his nose. "There's not so many people in Boirdeleau, you'll learn them up in no time, dear."
"I'm sure I will," said Miss Faulkman. Her fingers tightened on the mummy's reed-thin arm. "Remind me. Gene is the one who went off to school in Madison?" She had no idea which, if any, of the expansive Follett clan might have gone to the University, but she waited for the side serving of small-town gossip that would come alongside the inevitable correction.
"No, no. Close, though! That was Sandra's sister's boy, Jonathan." Mr. Robinson tapped the side of his nose. "Gene's been in and out of some trouble, you know. Nice young man. Just made some bad decisions along the way." Miss Faulkman leaned away from the sudden gleam in Mr. Robinson's eyes. "Say, he's about the same age as you. When he comes around for the big get-together, I'll send him down by the library, I'm sure you two would hit it off something beautiful."
"I'm sure that won't be necessary! Thank you! Have a lovely day!" Miss Faulkman glued a smile to her face as she hustled the mummy outside. How much were those old bones worth to a collector, or in some Internet auction? How much more, if its seller knew exactly the value of what was on offer?
Money, she reckoned, was the best—or at least the most common—sort of solution to the kinds of trouble that a young man was likely to get himself into.
For the duration of the afternoon, the mummy puttered around toward the back of the library while Miss Faulkman answered questions, checked books in and out, and planned for the summer reading festival. Once, she caught him ducking out of her office, and broke her own library rule in shouting from the circulation desk to mind that he didn't mess up her carefully organized paperwork.
When she finally locked the front door and went to retrieve her purse and coat from the back, she found a rumpled piece of notebook paper lying atop her desk. In a wobbly scrawl, someone had drawn the outline of a knife, and the sort of sad face a child might draw, with two dots and a rainbow-shaped frown. She picked it up and held it at the full length of her arms, as if that would focus it into something like clarity. Finally, purse and coat in hand, she stopped at the mummy's case and held the drawing up to the glass. "You made this?" she asked.
The mummy's head canted slightly.
"An unwilling sacrifice." Her voice trembled.
But the mummy's head shook slowly, side to side. Miss Faulkman's brow creased, and so did the paper between her fingers. "Willing, then. But how is it any different here? You sacrifice for them every day, nurse them, give them nearly anything they ask. You live in a tiny glass box, for heaven’s sake!" She leaned forward until her nose smudged the glass. "What do you want, really want, from life? Or, I mean—from undeath? Not to be somebody's collector item, I'm sure. But wouldn't you like to be helped, for once, instead of doing all the helping?"
She stepped back and pulled the case open, and thrust the paper and dull-pointed pencil into his featureless face. But in answer, he only laid one hand on his chest, over the spot his heart might have rested if he still had a desiccated organ of that variety. They stared at each other while Miss Faulkman drew another ragged breath. "Fine," she said. "Fine. I'll see you in the morning. Once I've got this whole thing figured out."
Miss Faulkman typically favored eight and a half hours of sleep, but that night she dipped down toward four and a quarter. Schemes, scribbled on notebook paper and increasingly elaborate, littered the floor of her little flat over the Chinese restaurant.
She woke up with a start at a quarter to eight, and the clarity of exhaustion blindsided her with most obvious idea of all: why not just hide the mummy in her own stupid apartment for the day, and keep hiding him until this ridiculous Follett scion simply ran out of patience or rental-truck money? But it might already be too late—she cursed her alarm clock as she floundered out of bed. Mr. Brzycki, or Gene, or whatever she should call him, might arrive at the library at any moment. If he had no qualms about returning to his hometown in disguise to abscond with the local mummy, he also might not object to forcing the rather shaky back door of a public building. She flung on the first clothes from the laundry pile and crashed out the door and into her car with an armful of supplies. She had never engaged in anything remotely resembling a heist or even an escapade before, but a roll of duct tape, a skein of twine (she didn't have any rope), and the baseball bat she usually kept by her bed seemed enough to cover all eventualities.
When she arrived, there was a U-Haul parked behind the library, and she found the back door open. She called out as she rushed through her office, but no one answered—she dropped the twine and duct tape, which bounced off her foot, to brandish the bat as she came out into the library proper.
The glass case was open, and the mummy was out of it. He stood in front of Gene Mitchell-Follett-Brzycki, who had crumbled to his knees. His head, though, listed sharply backward. The mummy's hand was wrist-deep in his cranium.
"No!" cried Miss Faulkman, who certainly had not had jotted down murder on her list of potential outcomes for the day. "What are you doing? Stop!"
The mummy's empty face swiveled around to her, but his hand stayed where it was. A soft moan came out of Gene's mouth, as did a long tendril of saliva.
"I mean it!" Miss Faulkman said, and she realized she did. If she had to rough up Boirdeleau's oldest friend to save the life of one irritating man, she would do it. The loss of a job didn't amount to much next to that. She hefted the baseball bat and edged closer. Which joint might be more most vulnerable: a wrist? Possibly a shoulder? The anatomy shelves were two rows over and hopelessly out of reach. "Put him down!"
She braced herself for impact, and jabbed at the mummy's left elbow as hard as she could with the far end of the bat. He simply sidestepped. Miss Faulkman cursed her lack of Little League experience, and readied for another go.
But as the mummy moved, his hand pulled back from Gene's forehead. With it, there followed a slender trail of something like spider-webbing, but more delicate. It came free of Gene without a sound, and Miss Faulkman lost sight of it then. Gene staggered, but did not fall. Miss Faulkman clutched her bat and looked between the two. "What did you do?" she whispered. "What did you take from him?" Brain cells. Neurons? The spiderweb she'd seen had been spun out of secrets and memories.
"What did I take from who?" asked Gene Mitchell, and clambered to his feet with the mummy behind him. Miss Faulkman took a step back in spite of herself, and dropped the bat behind the display of newly arrived books. Gene looked around. "I'm... early for the family reunion, I think."
"Also for the library," said Miss Faulkman, cautiously feeling her way onto surer ground. Behind Gene's back, the mummy retreated quietly to his case and closed the door "We don't open till ten on Thursdays."
"Oh," said Gene. He looked down at his shoes, then around at the tidy shelves. "Sorry?"
"Quite all right," said Miss Faulkman, and mustered an absolute rictus of a smile. "As long as you're here, is there a book I can help you find?"
Gene Mitchell spent the next ten minutes browsing the paperback mysteries. When he'd finally selected a promising volume, Miss Faulkman checked him out, then unlocked the front door of the building to usher him on his way.
The very second the door shut behind him, she stormed across the library to the mummy. After a moment's hesitation, she flung open the door of his case to get in his face in the most satisfying way. "What the devil was that?"
The mummy held out both hands in a shrug. There was nothing to see on his fingers; whatever he had taken out of Gene Mitchell had disintegrated, or been absorbed into those many-stained bandages. "You can't just," Miss Faulkman said, and had to pause to decide what it was that the mummy couldn't just. "You can't just rewire a person to make them do what you want!"
The mummy's head craned over the New Arrivals bookstand to peep at the discarded bat, and Miss Faulkman's face flushed red. "Well, that's not the same thing at all!" she cried. "You just—you just fixed him, just like that! All this time you could do that, and you never... you never let me think I could belong here."
She was already moving toward him when he lifted one hand, his fingers right at head level. She walked into that outstretched hand without hesitation, and she choked as his fingers slipped inside.
A pounding at the front door slammed Miss Faulkman back into herself. She spun, stars bursting behind her eyes, to see Mrs. Lorson peering in through the blinds. Mrs. Lorson shook the door again, as if that might suddenly unlock it, and it rattled on its elderly hinges.
Miss Faulkman tossed her head to clear it, which didn't work. She looked back over her shoulder at the mummy, who stood just in front of his case. His fist was closed around a few sparse threads of absolutely the finest spidersilk she'd ever seen. When she peered closer, he opened his hand, and she lost the threads to a trick of the light. She grimaced. "Didn't the pages dust for cobwebs just two days ago?" she asked, and shook her head as she hurried down the central aisle to open the front door. "I'm sorry! I'll check their work more closely next week."
"Is everything all right in here?" Mrs. Lorson said, pink-faced and out of breath, as soon as she was inside. She waved across the stacks of books at the mummy, who lifted a hand in answer. "I just saw someone driving a moving van out of here like the devil was after him, and I thought you'd been mugged or robbed or something!"
"Oh," said Miss Faulkman, for the second time that day. "Oh! Patty! It was just Gene Mitchell back in town to steal our old friend."
"Gene Mitchell!" Mrs. Lorson gasped, delightedly scandalized. Miss Faulkman laughed. And Miss Faulkman, to her own great astonishment, flung an arm around Patty Lorson's shoulders.
"Don't worry! We took care of everything, our friend and I. Come on; I'll make you a cup of coffee in my office. It's quite a story."
Patty said she couldn't wait to hear it, but wouldn't it be better over some fresh lefsa? She'd left the oven on and didn't want to burn down Ole and Lena's, after all. Miss Faulkman agreed and locked up the library behind her. She paused with the key in the door, and stuck her head back inside to promise the mummy she'd be back in time to open the library at the proper hour. Then she followed Mrs. Lorson down the hill.
The mummy climbed back into his case, and shut the door carefully behind himself. He sat down on the floor, folded his arms across his chest and his legs in front of him. He leaned back, back, back, until his head touched the glass behind him and his stiff legs lifted ever so slightly off the ground.
About the Author
Aimee Ogden’s work has also appeared in Apex, Shimmer, and Escape Pod. Find her on the web at http://aimeeogdenwrites.wordpress.com/.