The Book of the Dead (27 page)

Chet sits abruptly on the floor.

“Hello,” says the mummy. He can see eyes, black and gleaming, through an opening in the wrappings.

Miss Klein is still gasping with laughter, laughing and crying at once.

“Hello,” says Miss Klein. “I’m Shira.” She lifts the thing from its case.

“Thank you,” says the mummy, its voice soft and sweet. “It was close in there.”

Chet feels his temples throbbing, his neck pinched at the base of the skull. Starving for nothing he’s ever tasted before. “What is this?”

“I met your father in Cairo. He said I’d be welcome here, and that he’d send a letter of introduction,” says the mummy. The bandages are old and crackling.

Miss Klein is cradling the mummy in her arms like it’s a bandaged bride. Her hair is now unpinned and falls to her knees. She is panting, slightly. Miss Klein’s dress is hitched up, and he can see, yes, a cameo of jet on the garter button, which spontaneously unbuttons, and flips down onto the floor, a tiny child’s spinning top, catching the stormlight for a moment. Miss Klein seems neither to notice nor care that her stocking slips down, showing her long, white thigh. He measures it in his mind. He measures the mummy too. The mummy is petite, unless Miss Klein has gotten larger.

“I’m going to get our guest a hot drink,” says Miss Klein. “It’s freezing here, and our visitor isn’t used to the cold like we are.” Her tone shifts into the usual peremptory. “Give me your jacket.”

Chet tucks it around the mummy’s shoulders. The mummy gazes at him, its lashes long as spider legs –
no, why would he think that?
– and he’s broken by the scent of heavenly honeycomb. Chet can see a damp place in the bandages where its mouth must be. He wonders about its mouth.

“Why did my father send you here?” he says. “Did he buy you? Did he steal you? What are you? Who are you?”

“He sent me to be of use,” says the mummy, looking over Miss Klein’s shoulder. It wiggles its fingers. “I was alone in the dark. He found me there, and I came out. I was lonely. I’d been listening to the living a long time. I’m seeking employment now, in the light.”

Employment?

Chet staggers back into the factory, feeling his blood freezing in his veins. He sends everyone home and by the time he’s done, Miss Klein is gone too, and with her the mummy. The sarcophagus sits empty in the delivery bay. Chet considers reclining in it, but it’s too small. He runs his finger along the edge, and then puts his finger in his mouth. He can’t taste anything but dust.

He marches up the stairs, and into the office files. He flicks until he finds a card with Miss Klein’s address neatly typed, the first version care of her father, that one crossed out, and the new one typed below it, a rooming house for unmarried, respectable women. He stares at the card for a long time. He opens a book kept in the shelf beside his father’s desk, takes out a bottle resting in a carved cave in its bindings, and drinks a slug of Canadian whiskey.

He wipes his mouth, stows the contraband back in its safe, and goes out into the freezing wilds of Chicago to search for hothouse flowers.

Miss Klein is in her room, unwrapping the mummy, gently. It’s dripped a little, where it’s warmed against her body. She’s marched back down the stairs to the kitchen and fetched a pot of boiling water for tea, and now the mummy has had some through a small opening in the bandages, lapping like a kitten fed with a dropper.

“Sanctuary,” Miss Klein keeps repeating to herself. She’s not at all sure what she’s done. “Respect for the dead.”

But that is not quite what this is. Dead isn’t this. She considers feeling anxious, then decides that anxious is beside the point. Her heart pounds. Her skin feels prickled. Her mouth waters. Her fingers are sticky.

The mummy’s skin, crystallized in the cold, warms nearer to the radiator, and becomes pliant. The mummy is like a grape, or a balloon full of syrup. There is something brittle about it, but it’s the sort of brittle that anyone would know needs sucking.

“I was swimming in honey,” says the mummy. “I ate only honey, until I was made of it. My heart was with me, kept in a jar of honey. But that, I gave away long ago.”

“To whom did you give it?” Miss Klein asks, but the mummy will not say. “Is it in a museum, or is it still underground?”

The mummy is half-unwrapped now, parts of its flesh visible, smooth and glowing, seeping with sweetness.

“I was lonely,” says the mummy. “I came to be of use.”

It beckons Miss Klein. “Unwrap yourself,” it says.

Shira Klein flushes. She’s never taken off her clothing in front of anyone but her sisters. A drop of honey runs down her throat, left from where the mummy was resting.

Miss Klein unbuttons the same long black dress she wore to her father’s funeral. She stands barefoot, dressed in her only concession to modernity, a set of the thinnest triangles of black silk, each of them embroidered with flowers. They were a trousseau at one point, and she hand stitched their borders in preparation for a marriage.

The mummy is recumbent and careless.

The mummy offers itself to the tip of Miss Klein’s tongue.

Five flights below, Chet Savor waits, clutching a bundle of funereal lilies.

“To be of use,” he murmurs to himself. “Seeking employment.”

But Miss Klein refuses to come down. She does not respond to the bell. Chet is forced to leave the lilies as a delivery. He scrawls a note in his lovely pen. It bleeds brown ink onto the paper.

“
Dearest
,” the note says. Chet stalls. “
Dearest
.”

He underlines it twice,
Dearest
, and adds three exclamation points. The pinched woman at the desk looks at him.

“I hope you don’t imagine Miss Klein to be that sort.”

“Of course not,” he says. There’s something odd in him, something he doesn’t understand. He feels shaky. “They’re not for Miss Klein. They’re for her friend. The one staying with her.”

The woman looks harder at him, and sniffs the air. “This is not that sort of establishment,” she says. “Single ladies only. You, sir, would do well to rinse your mouth of whiskey, before you encounter anyone else who might report you for public disorder. You might also do well to button the top of your shirt.”

Chet feels for the buttons, but they’re gone.

The rooming house woman smashes the lilies and the love note into a wastebin.

He flees into the street, and as he stands, trying to imagine which of the windows might belong to Miss Klein, he hears a cry of rapture coming from the building, a singing spiral of bliss. He can’t tell which window it comes from. He stands helpless in the ice storm, looking up, hearing again and again, the cry, the moan, the gasping delight of someone in the thrall of someone else.

“What in heaven’s name did you think I meant, Chet?” his father says in exasperation. He’s just off the train, scarcely taken off his coat, not even unloaded his cases full of candies, and he’s already demanded to see the mummy. “What’ve you done with my mummy? I told you to be wary when you opened it.”

“Miss Klein took it,” Chet says, and bites his inner cheeks savagely. He tastes blood. It helps, a little. “She’s been out sick for a week, and I’ve been to her rooming house over and over again, with no success.”

“Well, you’ll have to fetch it back. The mummy’s a volunteer, you know. It came to be of use.”

Chet wants to strangle his father. “Of use,” he says. “What use can you mean? Did you hire it to be my secretary? It didn’t care to be. Miss Klein’s absconded with it and taken it off to her den of sin.”

“Miss Klein is incapable of sin,” says Chet’s father calmly. “As for the mummy, it’s mellified man. Old technique. Not usually found in Egypt, but the mummy tells me this is the ticket. It drank honey, ate honey, nothing but honey for a year before it died. It’s body mellified. It became honey, bones and blood and all.”

Chet thinks woefully of the sounds he’s heard coming out of Miss Klein’s window.

Chet’s father smacks his lips.

“Said that the last few weeks before it died, everything tasted sweet, and it nearly ate its own fingers. I’ll tell you, Chet, it cost me dear to get that mummy out of the country, but it’s worth its weight in whatever you got. Grind it up and it’s medicinal. A little dash into batter, and it’s the sweetest thing you ever tasted. Secret ingredients. It’s a fortune waiting to happen. We’re making a new candy bar. The mummy’s an ingredient. I sampled a little in Cairo. I’m too old for more, but the memory of it will last me. It wasn’t cheap, no, it wasn’t, but who needs cheap? Besides, the mummy wanted to leave town.”

“Whatever the mummy is,” Chet says, “The mummy isn’t mellified man. The mummy’s a woman.”

“How do you know? Have you checked?” asks Chet’s father, and raises an eyebrow at Chet, who has to look away.

The mummy is the sweetest thing, the dearest thing, and the mummy is in the possession of Miss Klein. There is only one thing to do. He doesn’t like it, but it will serve.

“Your secretary,” he says to his father.

“Miss Klein,” his father says. “Miss Klein, the lovely, the competent, the proper.”

“Shira Klein,” Chet counters. “She’s unmarried.”

“That’s true,” says Chet’s father. “By choice, as I understand it. Miss Klein is a real find.”

“I’ve decided to marry her,” Chet says.

His father looks at him. “I should have known.”

“She’ll do it,” says Chet, though there is an urgency inside him, a panic that she won’t. But the mummy won’t like it at the rooming house. The mummy will be cold.

“She’ll have to agree,” says Chet’s father. “And that isn’t likely. Tell her, though, that she’ll have to bring my mummy back. She can’t keep it locked up in the dark. That’s where I found it, in the dark, calling out that it was looking for light.”

And for just a moment, Chet’s father looks quite unlike himself. There’s a question in his cheekbone, a shifting tic. Chet looks at his dad. His dad looks back.

“How is mother? How is she finding India?” Chet asks, attempting to shame him.

“You can try your luck,” Chet’s father says. “You can try your luck, Chet. Maybe an old man wasn’t what that mummy was looking for. But I doubt it will be looking for you either.”

Chet’s father pops a green lolly into his mouth and sucks at it, ruminating. When he removes it, Chet sees that it contains a little insect of some kind, an earwig, stuck there like a ancient in amber.

Chet leaves his dad’s office and goes back to drafting his official letter, in which he reports Miss Klein to her rooming house for having a male visitor in her rooms. He encloses cigar ash and a rumpled shirt, procured from his own closet. He signs it “Anon.” and waits.

He is still waiting when Miss Klein comes down the five flights of stairs, her suitcase in one hand, the mummy in the other, curled into the crook of her arm. Miss Klein looks at Chet.

“I got your proposal,” she says. “It seems convenient at best, irritating at worst. I’ll still work at the factory. We’ll have separate rooms, of course.”

“Of course,” says Chet.

“If it’s no bother,” says the mummy, crooning, lolling against Miss Klein’s shoulder, “I’d like a hot drink. It’s cold here, and I’m crystallizing. I’ve been very cold in Chicago. Perhaps a fire? Perhaps a laprobe?”

Miss Klein turns her head, and Chet looks at Miss Klein’s cheekbone as she runs her tongue along a slice of the mummy’s jawline. Miss Klein is looking sleek. Her hair shines, and her skin glows.

The mummy moans, and Chet moans too. They drive directly to the courthouse. Miss Klein wears a wreath of white flowers. The mummy witnesses the wedding.

“I was lonely,” says the mummy. “I was in the dark, for a long, long time. They say the dead don’t dream, but I dreamed of this. I have a higher purpose.”

The mummy stirs its finger in a cup of boiling tea, and then offers it to Miss Klein to lick at until part of the fingertip is gone. It unwraps a bit more of its finger, and casually crumbles it into a dish. Miss Klein, her hair unbound, eats it.

The mummy looks at her and smiles beneath its wrappings.

The place where the bandages meet the mouth is always damp.

The oldest – and most splendid – traditions!

You’ll love BIT-U-MEN, a crunchy-munchy sweet treat!

Conveniently cut into pieces for sharing,

This treasure of a bar is the chewiest, mouth-meltiest confection,
perfect for young and old!

Almonds, nougat, honey, and special ingredients.

Squares of wax paper, cut precisely to fit, drifting from the wrapping section, along with labels, inked and drying. Orange and blue. Swooping letters. A picture of a hive, a border of bees. An eye lined in kohl, discreetly placed on the back.

The candy itself is vat-mixed, poured onto cold slabs, and then into molds, hot squares solidifying, soft but slightly resistant, texturally similar to a shoulderblade kissed through a chiffon dress. The bars are pale white-gold in color, peppered throughout with black.

“Bit-U-Men is an inaccurate name,” says Miss Klein, who has been doing research. “A mistranslation of mummification methods. The Arabic word for bitumen is
mumiya
. People thought it meant bitumen and mummy were the same thing. They thought bitumen was medicinal, and then they mistook it for medicine made of ground up mummy.”

She glances up from her book.

“I’m not saying they’re medicinal,” Chet says. He licks his fingertip where it’s touched one of the new candy bars. “I’m saying they’re commercial. Or my dad’s saying that.”

Miss Klein looks at him, her lips tight. “If people knew,” she says.

“People don’t need to know,” Chet says, and he sticks his finger wholly in his mouth. “Special ingredients. And the mummy is a volunteer.”

He can feel the remains of a Bit-U-Men square dissolving on his tongue. He’s brought a small jar of mellified man to the office, meant to shake into the batter for the new shipment of bars, but he’s already taken an entire greedy spoonful and eaten it in secret, door closed, his hands shaking.

Miss Klein sighs.