Good stuff here. Really appreciated the take on Egyptian art influence on the periods of the 1920s and the Sixties. Especially the stuff on Rick Griffins. I’ve heard the travelling Tut Show is a bit Disney-fied, but I think I’ll try to make it before it leaves the country all the same.

I was having my third one when I heard someone settle down on the next stool and wheeze “Straight whiskey, please.” It was such a strange accent and a weird dry voice that I glanced up from the puddle of beer I was drawing circles in to see the owner. He was shriveled and dry-looking, just as his voice had led me to expect. He was hunched forward, and the fingers that he extended to grasp the shot glass were like sticks. Under a shapeless hat his face was wrinkled and gray, and beneath his long trenchcoat I could see the wraps and folds of ancient grimy bandages.

No doubt about it; the guy sitting next to me was the Mummy.

He sipped carefully on his drink. Probably afraid of fires, I mused. Maybe he’s just whiffing the fumes and not really imbibing the stuff. He saw me watching and glanced over.

“I used to hang out over at Gavagan’s, but it shut down a few years back. Now I drop in here whenever I’m in town.” His voice was a bit smoother now, so maybe the whiskey actually did him some good. Wet his whistle.

“You, uh, travel around a lot?” I pictured him hitchhiking, or maybe mailing himself in a dusty sarcophagus. He cracked a smile, almost literally.

“It’s the curse,” he said briefly, tilting the shotglass to his clenched teeth.

“Curse?” I gave him the straight line, rolling my eyes. The kooks always sit next to me in a bar, I swear they do. Maybe I’m cursed.

“King Tut’s Curse,” he explained, tapping the glass against his teeth to get the last drop. Setting the glass on the bar, he continued. “You remember old King Tut? Dug him up in 1922? Put him in a museum?” I nodded, or grunted; he continued. “Well, there’s this curse. ‘Whosoever opens the sarcophagus or gazes upon the face of the mummy inside must die by the hands of the servant of the curse.’ That’s me, servant of the curse. Hell of a job.”

I ordered two more shots, good stuff this time, not the crappy stuff he was drinking. He tasted carefully, then trickled more inside his lips and shook his head from side to side.

“So I’m working along, whacking the people who dug him up, until they died from old age because I couldn’t catch them mostly, and watching the museum to see who visited the Tut exhibit and trying to shadow them home and kill them. Do you know how hard it is to follow people home when you’re a living mummy? Cabs won’t stop for you, I swear they won’t. I was already way behind when they put him in a traveling exhibit, and it got completely out of hand.”

I gulped my shot as if it had been cheap bar whiskey and staggered to my feet. “You mean – ” I gasped.

“Oh yes,” the Mummy replied. “I’m compelled by the curse to track down and kill every one of the thousands of people who saw the King Tut exhibit on tour in the nineteen-seventies.”