Stories (2012) by Joe R. Lansdale

Author:Joe R. Lansdale
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: SFF, SSC, custom
Published: 2012-04-05T18:18:03+00:00

THE MUMMY BUYER

Nayland Jones wondered, as he picked his way through the Cairo streets, if he was wearing the proper clothes for purchasing a mummy. He felt certain that he looked like an escapee from one of those sweat-and-gin movies that Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Humphrey Bogart had appeared in so often. He was even wearing a pith helmet, the crowning touch to his uniform.

Through the Muski he strolled, long legs carrying him over streets mercilessly baked and cracked by the sun. Past peddlers, beggars and merchants.

One beggar squatted at the edge of the street, his back against a crumbly clay wall. As Nayland passed, the beggar plucked his milky dead eyeball from its socket, let it descend on well-worn tendons and dangle on his cheek. It looked like some sort of long-tentacled jellyfish reaching out and groping for the edge of a small, dark cavern, preparing to pull itself up into the black interior.

The beggar held out a hard, dirty palm.

More out of disgust than charity, Nayland put a coin in the beggar’s palm. The beggar put the coin in his pouch, and his eye in its socket.

Nayland thought: "Disgusting country." He remembered what he had been told about such beggars. From birth the man had probably been prepared for his "profession." He had been taught to massage the eyeball daily, until the sight died and it became nothing more than a rubbery pulp that could be pulled from its socket and dangled on the cheek at will.

Nayland shivered. The whole country was full of crazies. Civilization had touched the place, but just barely. It was still a country of backward savages as far as he was concerned.

But he hadn’t come to Cairo to study the people. He had come to purchase items for his unusual collection. Already he had compiled such rare things as a supposed Yeti’s scalp from Tibet; shrunken heads from the wilds of New Guinea; spears and shields from Africa; and a number of other rare articles.

He kept all of these locked away in his private museum for his own personal pleasure. No one was allowed to see his goodies. They were his and his alone. And at night, he gloated over them.

But one thing of importance was missing from his collection: a mummy. Well, he intended to remedy that. He had obtained a very substantial lead concerning a man who would sell him a mummy–a mummy from a Pharaoh’s tomb.

The address he was seeking was off the main street–what was main about the street, Nayland failed to see–and down a dark alley bordered by leaning buildings that cast shadows on the cobbles below.

Nayland didn’t like the idea of the dark doorways that bordered the alley on either side like hungry mouths, but he was determined to get his mummy.

He walked along the alleyway counting doors. He was looking for the fifteenth on the right. On either side of him, partially hidden by shadow, were rows of beggars, cripples, eye-pluckers, and a few (Nayland

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