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Mummy

by Kelsey Percival Kitchel

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I have always prided myself on being a practical man; prosaic, if you will. In the old days the boys used to call me the man from Missouri.

Well, so I was. I had to be shown — and I was shown. Let me tell you. …

It was in South America that the thing happened. I had been engaged by the Babylonia Copper Company to go to their mine and smelter two miles high in the Andes. Being a metallurgical engineer and having had blast-furnace experience in the New Jersey plant, I was put in charge of the furnaces there in the desert.

At that time Babylonia was in process of growth and organization; it was not the finished affair that it is nowadays with its hospital, married quarters, white women, and a club. When I went down from New York there wasn’t a wife in camp. We men—a handful of us—lived at the mess house and worked eighteen hours a day for seven days a week. Oh, yes, the pay was good; we would not have stayed if it had not been for the high salaries. You see, there was not a thing to amuse a chap. We were fifteen miles from railhead, living in a tiny village clinging to a mountainside that is a desert in the absolute meaning of that much-abused word. You yourself have seen so-called deserts, haven’t you? And they were usually graced with sage-brush, lizards, mosses, and lichens, weren’t they? Well, the Atacama has nothing on it that may be called “life.” Not a thing. Rolling reaches and ridges of black, volcanic rocks and red gray sands; great salt-caked basins; leagues and leagues of alkaline dust blown westward at night by the winds pouring down from the Andes, then blown eastward during the day with the winds coming from the coast.

Yes, you have to be pretty hard-boiled to keep your sanity in such a place. We worked on eight-hour shifts there at the furnaces, of course. My buddy was Preston, a good scout who roomed with me and had the next shift to mine, knew his business and all that. Kellogg looked after the third shift in the twenty-four hours.

After I’d been there a year, more or less, I had naturally absorbed plenty of information about the surrounding country. I’d heard stories of the Indian burying grounds over at Chiu-Chiu; some of the boys had managed to get leave and ride over there—twenty miles of vile going through the desert. They had brought back a few turquoise beads, some pots, and so forth. I had never been particularly interested in archeology, but since I couldn’t pry a vacation loose from the G. M.—and by “vacation” I mean a trip to port where there is a decent hotel; there’s a movie palace, too, and you can sit on a plaza bench and look at white women—as I could not be spared for that, I asked for, and got, a couple of days. Having nothing better to do I decided on Chiu-Chiu and the burying ground. I believe that one should try everything once, and it seemed a pity to go back home to New York, at the end of my contract, without being able to show some honest-to-goodness relics. And I had a notion to get a skull and have it made into a tobacco jar. You can tell by that how young I was.

This place was situated on the River Loa, but don’t run away with a fancy picture of a meadow-fringed stream, clumps of woodland, and fields of waving grain. Nature does not work that way in northern Chile. The Loa struggles down from the snows across a region as desolate and terrible as any inferno. For untold centuries the river has been eating its way through variegated strata laid down eons ago — like the Colorado, you know. In most places the canyon is so steep and deep that no human being could tap enough water for a window box; but in a very few places the escarpment has broken away, leaving an approach to the narrow, turbid stream. In these rare spots the aborigines have, from time immemorial, irrigated and cultivated the ground. Yes, oases, with skimpy fig and pepper trees, some highland corn and alfalfa and small, stony patches of puny vegetables. Life is unbelievably difficult for the desert farmer there in the Andes. The huts, made of stone and mud, cluster around a squat, gray church.

Chiu-Chiu, being the seat of a posthouse on the Inca highway long before Pizarro dreamed of coming to the New World, had buried its dead for centuries in the sandy wastes outside the little sunbaked oasis.

I rode over there alone. I had always preferred doing things by myself because it seemed to me a mark of weakness to want somebody tagging along for company. I do not think so now, but—well, let me go on.

One does not suffer on such a ride. You and your tough pampa horse have a good drink before starting and you take along a brace of water bottles—the horse gets a sip from your hat, you understand—and the sun blisters your parched skin, and your eyes squint in the merciless glare, and you sneer at the deceitful mirages that mock you with their glimpses of blue lake water. …

Chiu-Chiu has a hotel—at least a hovel goes by that name; but you can get a meal there and a shakedown. Being so high in the air you are not troubled with insect life, with the exception of flies.

The horse was fed and watered while I got a snack myself; then I started for the burying ground; the hotel keeper was a trifle reluctant to direct me but he did not hold off long. You see, the farmers depended on selling their green stuff to the Babylonia Mine, and consequently nobody wanted to offend a gringo. We foreigners could arrange to secure our pumpkins and green corn from the port, you see, and the people at the oasis knew it.

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Well, I found the place and, with a trench shovel that I’d fastened to the saddle, I began to dig after having done a little preliminary stamping, which, I had been told at Babylonia, was the way to locate a grave. If there is a hollow sound underfoot, why, you have come to a likely place to dig, see?

It was interesting, that delving there in the limitless desert under the towering, snowy peaks of the Andes.

I uncovered a brown, dried figure, mummied by the arid climate. It sat with its arms wrapped around its bony knees and with its head bent; clinging to it were fragments of ancient cloth, and from the fine sand close to it I lifted out darts, lances, arrows, pots, and a few rough necklaces of shell and low-grade turquoise. No, he was not a prince; or if he was from a royal house he must have been desperately poor. God knows how long he had been squatting there, looking east and waiting for Judgment Day.

The face was a splendid aquiline one with deep eye sockets; the brown skin was drawn incredibly snug over the skull. Every bit of flesh was gone—dried away; there was nothing left but what is popularly termed “skin and bone.

He was quite freed of sand by the time I had laid my discoveries on the crusted surface of the desert. I sat down to roll a cigarette and have a swig at the canteen, and I fell to thinking that what I was doing would be called grave robbery if it were carried on in a modern cemetery; but if a burying ground is ancient, why, we illogical little microbes called men name our digging “archeological excavation.”

I had a feeling of discomfort that I could not understand; I wondered whether the long ride in the blistering heat had anything to do with it. An intuition came to me that I’d better leave that mummy alone with his worthless trumpery; but being a practical man and taking no stock in intuitions, I pulled myself together and rather halfheartedly selected the best of the trash from the sandy grave and packed it in the saddlebag. That one hole in the ground was enough for me; I did not search for any more; somehow the whole affair seemed a dubious sort of pleasure. I was sick of it and decided suddenly that I would change my plans and return to Babylonia that night instead of sleeping in the tambo. I knew that by going slow the horse would be able to make the trip.

I went to work at the head, which I intended using for a tobacco jar. There was little difficulty in cracking it loose. Brittle, friable, dusty, musty, it came off in my two hands and I stuffed it in the bag along with the other things. . . .

Something seemed to impel me to cover up that stark, headless thing; something seemed to tell me that I should leave him as I had found him. But I obstinately ignored these intuitions.

Back at the tambo I bought the horse a good feed and tested him, but could not eat the disgusting supper of beans and tough steak offered me. As the moon rose I started for Babylonia, going slowly for the sake of the tired animal under me. There was no danger of my getting lost, as there is a fairly clear trail from the oasis to railhead; and from there I had the mine lights to guide me.

There was a curious tingling sensation all over me; I thought that perhaps I had a touch of sun; or maybe I was getting scurvy, for in those days that disease was not infrequent in the more remote mining camps in the Andes; we could not depend with any certainty on the oasis vegetables and it was pretty hard to get fresh food up from port. I felt sick, and had delusions. I was sure I was being followed. . . . Now, the natives are as gentle as sheep; they never bother gringos. In spite of that I kept looking behind me; I saw nothing but the long shadows of the rocks. It was cold. You know that at an altitude of ten thousand feet the nights are bitter even in the tropics. The sudden changes of temperature crack the rocks, night and day, and in the pampa silence you can hear the soft whispering “ping” of flaking granite as it comes away and rolls down to the skirt of sand at the base of every boulder.

Once I was sure that the saddlebag quivered and wriggled. The horse was aware of something extraordinary, to judge by his behavior, because tired as he was he acted the terrified child that night, jumping, shying, shaking.

The lights grew brighter and larger as I neared camp, and I heard the roar of the ore crushers; for the first time I liked the sound. It seemed almost homelike. It meant that there were human beings round-about — lots of ’em! Mostly Bolivian and Chilean laborers, to be sure, but humans at any rate. I was ashamed of myself for wanting to be with my own kind; I was unreasonable, foolish, I told myself.

The corral was below the plant and I stopped there to leave the horse, which was pretty well tuckered out. I left the saddlebags, too; common sense warned me that I should go up to the mess house and turn in, for night was nearly gone and I needed sleep. But I did not do that. Preston was on shift at the furnaces and I wanted to get near my buddy. I wanted to tell him what a fizzle my paseo had been. He would laugh at my disappointment, perhaps, but I didn’t care. He had told me before I started that burying grounds are not what they are cracked up to be. He had tried that sort of dissipation himself and had found it dull.

So I plowed through the heavy dust and sand, over loose stones, up to the furnaces.

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Preston was on the feed floor; he had one man working under his eye, a burly fellow who pulled the loaded barrow of mixed charge off the elevator and dumped the contents into the furnace mouths. As I drew near I saw Preston on the platform above me and climbed up to him. Again I felt that there was something behind me; it was close, too; I seemed to feel two hands on my shoulders —bony, claw-like hands —and yet when I reached back quickly there was nothing there — nothing.

Preston watched me mounting the iron steps but instead of his cheery grin I saw, in the bright glare of the sputtering arclight, an odd, startled expression on his face.

“What in hell?” he shouted as he looked over my shoulder and down toward the lower floor. I turned, too, but there was nothing unusual to be seen.

“There was somebody behind you—with the thinnest face that ever came down the pike!” Preston laughed sheepishly. “Guess I must have been half asleep. I didn’t expect you back for another twelve hours — what’s the matter?”

I was thinking of that bony face in the saddlebag at the corral; the head that was to be cleaned up and fashioned into a jar —bah! I shuddered while I was angry with myself for giving in to nerves. Before I could formulate an answer Preston glanced down from the feed floor, then ran past me down the stairs, two steps at a time. Below, a laborer, tapping the copper, could not stop the flow when the ladle was full. The sparkling, iridescent stream ran wild, and Preston was needed, pronto. The Bolivian on the platform had no business to leave his job, but he caught the excitement and ran down the stairs, too, leaving me alone.

A full barrow was standing on the elevator facing the furnace mouth. It came up just as the Bolivian ran below. There was no reason why I should stay there and do his work, but I saw that the furnace needed another charge, so I stepped across and took hold of the handles of the car, thinking to dump it and close the furnace.

Then two hands seized mine — and, man, I saw them! . . . Disembodied hands, claw-like, brown, and shriveled, with each bone showing through the papery, dark skin. They clutched my wrists, holding me fast while they forced the barrow and me along with it toward the open door where the white-hot hellfire raged. . . .

I struggled while the car trundled slowly, jerkily, straight toward the fury of the fire. The gripping hands dug dark nails into my wrists. . . . I have the scars yet. Look! You see them? Ten white crescents that I shall always carry. . . .

The barrow moved faster and I felt a cold breath on my cheek in spite of the searing heat from the open furnace. For a Second I looked over my shoulder into the eye sockets of a mummied head with skin drawn thin and tight over the bones; coarse, harsh hair brushed me. … I saw it, felt it—yes. . . . The barrow tipped.

I slid with it—down. . . .

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You have guessed, of course, that Preston returned to the platform just in time to grab me as I fell.

A wave of unconsciousness swept over me. When I opened my eyes I was flat on my back panting like a branded steer and Preston was examining my bleeding wrists. The workmen from various parts of the building had gathered near, and one of them said, in his slurred, rapid Spanish: “Those wounds never came from the car. The patron has had dealings with a spirit!” He spoke with the surety, the finality of an Indian who sees and knows, perhaps, more than we foreigners do.

Just then Kellogg, the lad in charge of the 7-to-3-o’clock shift, came along fresh from his bed and breakfast; so Preston was free to get me back to the mess house.

But after we were away from the furnaces I refused to go to my room. I told him everything —“and I’ve got to get that thing back to its body — now!” I finished

He was a good sport; he did not laugh as many a man might have done, although I think that I could have killed him if he had sneered. No, he looked at me, nodded, and remarked quietly: ”I saw something behind you as you came up the steps.” He put his arm through mine and without another word we went to the corral; he had his own horse saddled and chose a fresh mount for me. The bags he took care of himself, remarking as he picked them up: “You cannot have those relics, old man.”

Together we rode back to Chiu-Chiu. I no longer felt that there was something behind me; the thing, whatever it was, moved at my side, waiting.

It did not have to wait long. The horses were fresh and we arrived at Chiu-Chiu before noon, making a wide circuit around the oasis to avoid curious villagers.

Back on the shoulders I put the head of that seated Thing and I replaced each piece of trash I had pilfered. Then we covered the mummy from the light of day. The sand was smooth when we had finished. . . .

That’s all. I’ve never had a haunted feeling since; being a practical man I won’t either, for J shall never again disturb a dead man. No, never again.

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Host Commentary

PseudoPod Episode 960

January 31st 2025

Mummy by Kelsey Percival Kitchel

Narrated by Matt Arnold

Hosted by Alasdair Stuart with audio by Chelsea Davis

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Hi everyone, welcome to PseudoPod! I’m Alasdair, your host, Chelsea is your audio genius and this week’s story is the last in our showcase of work that’s entered the public domain this year, having been published in 1929

Our story this week comes to us from Kelsey Percival Kitchel and we want to thank, and will link to, Tellers of Weird Tales for this bio.

Kelsey Percival Kitchel was born on October 6, 1881, in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where her father practiced dentistry. She was an adventurer even as a young woman: in May 1905, she returned to New York City from Puerto Cortés, Honduras, on a ticket she had purchased herself. What drew her to Latin America at the time is an open question. She would later return with her husband.

 

Kelsey P. Kitchel began writing at a young age. Her earliest credit that I have found was called “Pirate Treasure,” a short story published in Pearson’s Magazine in June 1909. Even after she had married, she wrote under her own name. Magazines that printed her stories and poems included Adventure, The All-Story, The Crisis, Ghost Stories, Gunter’s Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Smart Set, Tropical Adventures, and Young’s Magazine. A story for The Crisis, “The Rains,” was set in Jamaica. Her lone contribution to Weird Tales, a short story called “Mummy,” is set in Chile. Kelsey Kitchel lived in both places with her husband, and thereby hangs a tale.

 

Indeed it does. That story is narrated for you by Matt Arnold. Matt Arnold’s podcasts are The UNSONG Audiobook at unsong.libsyn.com, and Fluidity Audiobooks at fluidity.libsyn.com. He narrates fiction and nonfiction which take problems of meaning-making, typically considered spiritual, and turn them into practical problems, which are more tractable. For 20 years, Matt ran Penguicon, a combination science fiction convention and open source software conference. He now runs the annual Fluidity Forum, which can be found at fluidityforum.org. He is a previous staff member for Escape Artists Inc, having shipped the PodDisc archive CDs from 2008 through 2010.

 

So saddle up. Because the truth is, boredom can be a very dangerous thing.

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This has been such an interesting, challenging month as a host. Challenging because these stories exist at the edge of the sort of time period I know. Challenging too because horror as a genre has a tendency to be desperately concerned with the opinions and work of a couple of dead white men. And before anyone thinks I’m picking a fight, I’m not. It’s just the truth. Throw a rock in any horror community and if you don’t hit a discussion about Lovecraft, you’ll hit one about Machen. If, somehow, you don’t hit a discussion about the dead at all you’ll land in the endless circular discussions of King, Campbell, Koontz. And, again, as I hear the pitchforks being lit and the torches sharpened, not picking a fight, just saying how things often seem to be.

But here’s the interesting thing. These days that really is what it seems to be, not always what it is. A friend of mine works tirelessly to champion the Retro Hugos, an offshoot of the Hugos which are a brilliant idea endlessly misinterpreted as an opportunity to give more awards, shine more light, on a different but complementary group of authors and editors whose shadow we all, at times, seem to spend too much time trying to get out from under. I thought of her when I read this story, and the successes she’s enjoyed using the Retros, like this month, to do something far more interesting and useful. To shine that light on the contemporaries of these big names, the people whose work has been lost to time not because it’s bad, but because they were coming up at the same time as the industry was assembling itself into the form that’s a great foundation but not a destination.

Looking back down this month, what really shines for me are the two stories written by female authors and their wildly different approach to the structures of privilege and oppression all these stories enjoy. The Shout, and last week’s Power of Darkness are both about the consequences of those structures and both are intimately concerned with what the people inside them cannot see. Namely that they’re inside them. Both are arch, clever pieces that trade off the emotional engagement we talked about last week for intellectual structure. Like I said last week that’s not a bad thing. But it’s different to an emotional connection with a story, and that’s something I feel both with this and with The Old Lady from earlier this year.

The reasons for that comes down to awareness of both societal structures and the coping strategies we need to get through them. That awareness is manifested here in a narrative that is one heartbeat away from being a shaggy dog story but pulls it off with such charm and wit that you don’t mind. Both of these qualities are found in the main characters’ continual willingness to accept their fallibility and the constant flashes of empathy you see.

 

‘Life is unbelievably difficult for the desert farmer there in the Andes.’

Is an acknowledgement of the humanity of the locals in the region that The Shout’s villain or the characters in Power of Darkness are psychologically incapable of. The main character’s life is very similar to that of the leads in Power of Darkness but they’re aware no one has it easy.

“…but if a burying ground is ancient, why, we illogical little microbes called men name our digging “archaeological excavation.”

I love this line, even as the Jones boys, Nathan Drake and Lara Croft all shuffle awkwardly towards the door not making eye contact. The self-awareness of how things are for the lead is central to the lack of cruelty you see here. Cruelty is like fascism, it’s entirely defensive, destroying anything that it feels is at fault. It can’t build, it can’t learn, it can’t make new things. Empathy can, and one of the things empathy is exceptional at making…is horror.

‘…But I obstinately ignored these intuitions.’

The man character’s almost cheery admission that they have, in every sense, played themselves gives the story a rounded edge even as it slides a roll of nickels into it’s fist. The horror here is threefold; the way that boredom drives our lead to desecrate a grave, the fact there are instant supernatural consequences for it and the fact they survive to know that. We talk a lot here about Friedkin’s definition of horror and how he viewed it as seeing something approach. I like the definition here just as much: horror approaching, looking you dead in the eyes and at the last minute saying ‘Yeah, okay. Not this time.’

That pragmatism ties the story to The Old Lady and the cheerfully chilling admission that this happens so often that the main characters there have people they can call to help. To paraphrase one last very, very successful white guy whose work I have a very complex relationship with, the night is dark. The night IS full of terrors. Sometimes we walk out to poke them to see what happens because we’re bored and we’re idiots and sometimes if we’re very, very lucky, we live to realise that.

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Onto the subject of subscribing and support: PseudoPod is funded by you, our listeners, and we’re formally a non-profit. One-time donations are gratefully received and much appreciated, but what really makes a difference is subscribing. A $5 monthly Patreon donation gives us more than just money; it gives us stability, reliability, dependability and a well-maintained tower from which to operate, and trust us, you want that as much as we do.

If you can, please go to pseudopod.org and sign up by clicking on “feed the pod”. If you have any questions about how to support EA and ways to give, please reach out to us at donations@escapeartists.net.

If you can’t afford to support us financially, then please consider leaving reviews of our episodes, or generally talking about them on whichever form of social media you… can’t stay away from this week. We now have a Bluesky account, and we’d love to see you there: find us at @pseudopod.org. If you like merch, you can also support us by buying hoodies, t-shirts and other bits and pieces from the Escape Artists Voidmerch store. The link is in various places, including our pinned tweet.

 

PseudoPod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don’t change it or sell it. Theme music is by permission of Anders Manga.

 

Join us next week for Mirri Glasson-Darling’s Body Heat, narrated for us by Lindz Mcleod. Chelsea will be your audio producer, I’ll be your host and you’ll be the audience. It’ll be great. We’ll see you in seven days but before then PseudoPod wants you to remember He must have been someone of great importance. Or he did something *very* naughty.