Here There Be Monsters by Tim Curran

Author:Tim Curran [Curran, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781925493146
Amazon: 1925493148
Publisher: Severed Press
Published: 2016-04-04T22:00:00+00:00

8

Winston Burnham’s office was big with a nice view of the campus, but it seemed close and crowded with all the books spilling off the shelves, the stacks of manuscripts, the Egyptian statuary and relics stacked in boxes. He sat behind his desk, pushed an urn out of the way and right away, started talking.

“What do you know of Egypt, Officer? Of its dark past, lore, and history? It’s Pharaohs and deities?”

I told him I didn’t know much. “I saw some of those mummies over at the Exhibit Museum, some of those relics you have in the Hall of Egyptology. Dried-up looking things like your friend. Didn’t look much like Karloff in that movie.”

He allowed himself a slight laugh over that. Guy like me, though, I get most of my learning at the movies. I told him I heard about King Tut and his curse. All those guys that died because they entered the tomb. Not that I believed it or anything.

“That’s good. I’m glad you know about Tutankhamen and the curse. I want you to keep that in mind as I tell you…tell you what happened to us.”

“What did happen to you?”

He didn’t answer that directly. As I soon learned, Burnham wasn’t real big on answering anything directly. He went about everything in his own way and at his own clip. He told me about funerary cults and fertility gods of ancient Egypt, how it was often very difficult to ascertain the actual history of those long-gone people for to them there was no dividing line between the real and the unreal, the natural and the supernatural. Their gods were an everyday part of their lives. He told me about jackal-headed Anubis, the god of embalming, and Nekhbet, the vulture goddess. Hawk-headed Horus and serpent-headed Set. The crocodile cult of Sebek and Khepri, the scarab-headed god. I got the feeling the Egyptians had a god for every day of the week.

“I mention Khepri specifically, for insects were very important to the religious and symbolic life of this great vanished people,” Burnham said. “The scarab beetle was used in everything from talismans and good-luck charms to burial rites and religious ceremonies and tomb hieroglyphics. This lowly insect was the embodiment of life and rebirth. But other insects also figured prominently. Honeybees symbolized the Nile’s fertile delta. Flies symbolized death and resurrection. And grasshoppers, which were ravaging pests to crops, were symbolic of attacking enemies. It’s very fascinating, don’t you think?”

I told him it was. But I wasn’t much interested in history. I wanted to get to the meat of the matter. I wanted to know about men who were reduced to mummies and what those weird bugs had to do with it.

And maybe Burnham saw that, my impatience, because he started telling me about another god called Kharnabisor Karnabik, depending on the translation which was either pictured generally as an insect-headed man or more specifically as a locust-headed man. This deity was almost unknown and that was because the Egyptians had gone out of their way to wipe its existence out of their history.

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