“You want an answer that I just can’t give you.” The hollow voice came from the mummy’s chest, the corpse’s inner glow, escaping through its eyes and sundry small cracks in its body, flaring up with each syllable like the light of a furnace when the bellows are pressed. Then that weird, green light faded as the voice grew silent.
“But you know it,” I said. “You know the answer.”
Again, the corpse glowed with an inner fire, but it did not speak. I was accustomed to such spectacle. The mummy was thinking, speaking with itself. Finally, it answered:
“There are things I am forbidden to say. Even now, if I were to only hint at the answer, OH!” he suddenly wailed, and it seemed as if sparks were flying from his hollow eyes. The light died down, and he continued, “They would know. They would kill you, and worse things you don’t know of. Me, they would tear this frail body apart and scatter the ashes of my soul to the four winds.”
“How would they know?”
“How would they know!” the mummy exclaimed. “They’re here, even now, invisible. There are always corners and cracks leading into the terrible nothingness. All they are are eyes, unblinking, formless perception, staring in at us, longing for reality. Do not draw their attention.”
“You seem to know a lot about them. You’ve had dealings with them?”
“When I was alive,” the mummy answered, “one of the magicians called them forth. They killed everyone, perverted them, twisted their bodies into strange and mockish caricatures, butchered them and sowed them back together, but the one who had called them, they took him away between the cracks into that unreality they’re from where there is no death nor life but only ceaseless longing.”
“How did you survive?”
“Some of us, mostly the magicians, a few nearby priests, we were chosen. These things have no existence outside themselves. They have to take it, share it. They needed our hands to do the work, to try to build themselves bodies through us.
“When the sun rose,” the mummy’s voice had changed now, rising from its rasping whisper into full, clear tones, “the streets ran with rivers of blood, and in the center of our city, the tangled mass of interlocked corpses writhed as those things tried to exist, tried to be the abominable thing they had made us make.
“This was before the sun had grown drunk on human blood, and he still had some sympathy for those below him. He sent down his fire and scorched our city.”
I gazed upon the charred body burning with a strange, inner, green flame.
“So, why didn’t you die?” I asked. “I found a lot of burned corpses at the dig, but only yours, only you, after all these uncounted millennia, still persist.”
“You want an answer that I just can’t give you,” the hollow voice replied.
Tale Told 