Gary edged around the display case, not wanting to get near the undead thing in its grisly chrysalis in case it finally broke the glass. Not wanting to be near it at all. He lead Faceless and Noseless deeper into the Egyptian exhibit, through poorly-lit rooms full of hulking sarcophagi and broken statues and scarab jewelry and stained cerements. Every time he turned around he found more mummies thumping against their enclosures-everywhere he went he saw scarabs and white eyes staring at him from the walls. In one tiny alcove a blackened mummy surrounded by the skeletal horns of long-dead antelopes smeared itself across the glass-in another a wooden coffin intricately painted and inlaid with gold shook itself until splinters fell from it like dry rain. The sense of anger and fear and horror he read off the convulsing bodies made him cringe and press his hands against his temples, unable to bear their thwarted torment.
Finally they emerged into a wide open room with one whole wall made of glass that let in grey sunlight. On a raised platform stood the Temple of Dendur-a square structure carved with hieroglyphics, a massive monumental arch standing before it. A low bench ran before the arch and on this platform someone had laid out three of the writhing mummies. Their golden masks had been torn off and lay in a heap nearby, priceless artifacts just tossed away. Crouched above them a brown form worked with a feeble hand at picking apart the cloth that bound the dead. It was the Benefactor, Gary knew it at once. He raised his head and gestured for Gary to approach.
See me as I am, Gary. I am Mael Mag Och, and I need your eyes.
He was nothing like the apparition that had come to Gary in the megastore. His skin was hard leather, tanned to a uniform deep brown, hairless and wrinkled in some places, in others stretched smooth and tight over bones that stuck out from him like sharp points. His head lolled on his shoulder as if he could not lift it, and indeed, his neck was clearly broken, fragments of the uppermost vertebra of his spin exposed at his nape. He had only one arm and his legs were horribly mismatched. One looked strong and muscular, the other withered and skeletal. He wore no clothing except a rope tied tight around his neck-a noose, Gary saw now-and a band of matted fur around his arm.
“You’re not… like them,” Gary said, staring down at the twitching mummies.
Not half so old, nor as wise. Come, come here. No, I was never in Egypt, lad. I hail from an island off of what you would know as Scotland. Please, look here. This is one reason I called you, to help me see this.
Gary had no idea what the other meant-and then he saw. Mael Mag Och had no eyes in his head, just gaping sockets.
I can see what you see, through theeididh that makes us one. I had no idea how ugly I had become. Here.
Gary looked where Mael Mag Och pointed. “Theeididh?” he asked.
What you call the network, though it is so much more than that.A thick wad of stained wrappings came away from the mummy and an arm was revealed, a thin arm terminating in five bony fingers. The hand snatched at Mael Mag Och’s face but lacked the vitality to do any damage. The eyeless corpse reached for another strip of linen and started peeling it back, his fingers fumbling with the rotten cloth.We must get them free. They were promised paradise, Gary. These wretches believed they would wake in a field of reeds. I cannot bear their shock. Help me.
The gentleness, the compassion of the act moved Gary in a way he had no longer thought possible. He knelt down to help remove the bandages and called Faceless and Noseless to do the same. With so many hands they soon had the mummy free of her constraints. She rose slowly from the bench, a skeletal form shrouded in tatters of her linen. A glinting golden brooch sat just above her heart in the shape of a scarab beetle while other amulets and charms dangled from her side or hung from cords around her neck.
Her face remained hidden by the wrappings except for a ragged hole where her mouth had once been.Their final ritual made that-thewpt-r, the “Opening of the Mouth”. It was done with a chisel and a hammer. The cloth around the wound was stained brown and yellow by long-dried fluids.Fucking barbarians, Mael Mag Och muttered. She moved on unsteady feet away from them, hobbling to the arch where she slouched against the weathered sandstone as if reading the hieroglyphs with her body. Gary would have crushed her, smashed her head to pieces if he had found her in a glass case still wrapped so tightly as she had been. Mael Mag Och had seen the animate creature, the humanity, below the bandages.
“What are you?” Gary asked.
A humbleDraoidh.The way Mael Mag Och pronounced it sounded like “Druid”.
“Well, okay, then who are you?” Gary asked.
Well, now, that’s an easy one. I’m the fellow who turns off the lights when the world ends.
David Wellington - Monster Island