Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre (4 page)

Because this mummy wasn’t playing a role.

He was embodying one.

Which is another way of saying: He was living a dream.

Charlie’s bandages were ripped Egyptian cotton, dredged in Nile

river-bottom he’d ordered from some Rosicrucian mail-order outfit.

He was wound and bound and wrapped tight for the ages, and he

wasn’t wearing a Don Post mask he’d bought from the back pages

of
Famous Monsters of Filmland
. No. Charlie had gone full-on Jack Pierce with the makeup. Furrows and wrinkles cut deep trenches

across his face like windblown Saharan dunes, and the patch of

mortician’s wax that covered one eye was as smooth as a jackal’s

footprint . . . add it all up and drop it in your treat sack, and just the sight of Charlie would have made Boris Karloff shiver.

[34] THE MUMMY'S HEART

And you can round that off to the lowest common denominator

and say that Charlie Steiner would have scared just about anyone.

Sure, you’d know he was a guy in a costume if you got a look at him.

But even on first glance, you might believe this kid was twenty-three going on four thousand.

Look a little closer, you’d see the important part: Charlie Steiner was twenty-three going on insane. There was no dodging that if you got close enough to spot the mad gleam in his eye—the one he hadn’t covered with mortician’s wax. Or maybe if you spotted his right hand, the one dripping blood . . . the one he’d shorn of a couple fingers with a butcher’s cleaver. And then there was his tongue, half of it cut out of his mouth with a switchblade, its purple root bubbling blood.

Charlie wrapped those things up in a jackal’s hide he’d bought

from the back pages of a big-game hunting magazine with Ernest

Hemingway on the cover. Who knew if that hide was real but Charlie believed in it, same way he believed in the little statue of a cat-headed goddess he added to the stash, along with a dozen withered red roses, his own fingers and tongue, and a Hallmark Valentine’s Day card.

The same way he believed in the dream those things would

deliver to him.

The same way he believed in the madman’s trail he was about to

travel.

Charlie tossed all those things in the back of the family station

wagon (along with one other important ingredient), and he drove

down to the local lover’s lane, which wasn’t far from his house. At that time of year, the place was deserted. By the time Charlie had things set up to his satisfaction, he had swallowed so much of his own blood that he might as well have eaten three raw steaks. But he kept on moving—readying his incantation mummy-slow . . . sure but

steady. Just the way you’d expect a mummy to do business, moving

like the sands of time.

Just the fact that Charlie could do that was a little slice of a

miracle all by itself. Whittling himself down like that, how’d he even keep walking? Chalk it up to drugs he stole from the VA hospital. All through high school, Charlie worked in an after-school program up

there, pushing guys around in wheelchairs. He learned about pain

NORMAN PARTRIDGE [35]

management during that time, and he’d continued working as a part-

time attendant after he graduated. In other words, Charlie knew what he was doing with the needle and the knife.

So Charlie Steiner was walking on a cloud that night. Or an

imaginary dune overlooking an Egyptian oasis, with jackals howling in his head and a mad priest’s plan in his heart. On this single night, at long last, he’d finally become the sum of his dreams . . . or maybe a dream
personified
. And what wasn’t locked up in his own skin was wrapped in that mojo hide . . . or waiting, bound, beneath a blanket in the back of the station wagon.

Put it all together and it was an offering, a single wish boiled up, and Charlie had a place for it.

Not in the plywood temple he’d abandoned. No. His place was

out in the night and under the Halloween moon . . . just a stone’s throw from lover’s lane.

Beneath the same stars that shone down on Egypt.

If you’ve seen those old mummy movies, you know something

about mummies and their dreams. And Charlie knew that, too. He

knew those movies backwards and forwards, and he knew that

mummy was always after the same dream. Kharis was looking for

a reincarnated princess, Ananka, who died on the altar of a dark

Egyptian god and left Kharis alone to pay the price for their twin blasphemies. Which, when you strip the Hollywood mysticism and

curses and
high priests of Karnak
window-dressing off the tale, means one thing: Kharis died for love, and he came back from the dead

looking for a second eternal helping of the very same thing.

Pure love. Eternal love. Love that didn’t backslide.

That’s what Kharis was after, and almost every knockoff mummy

who came in his wake wanted the same thing. That’s what Charlie

Steiner was after, too, and his madness started on the day he wrapped his needs in the bandages of the most accessible mythos he could

find. And while that’s a ticket that buys us an egress to Charlie’s story, it’s a long way from the whole deal, because there was a lot of other mumbo jumbo that Charlie Steiner believed. But eternal love was

the final destination Charlie had in mind, and the path that led to it

[36] THE MUMMY'S HEART

traveled through Egypt and Hollywood. As crazy as he was, that’s all Charlie really wanted. The quest for same lay beneath the insanity, and the magic, and the bad things he’d done and was about to do.

Who knows.

Maybe the whole thing came to him in a dream.

Of course, I didn’t understand any of that back then. That’s because I was just a kid, out on the prowl on Halloween night in 1963, looking for candy and ready (or so I thought) for whatever came my way.

We were out trick-or-treating for the very last time before our

teenage years closed the door on the holiday. My brother Roger and me and Roger’s best friend. On the loose without the parents, or any adult supervision at all. I was twelve, Roger was thirteen. We were a pair of Irish twins, as they used to say back in the day, brothers born just eleven months apart.

Me, I was dressed up like a soldier—mostly courtesy of the local

army surplus store, but with a coat my dad had worn in Korea. Roger was a baseball player. Yankee pinstripes just like Roger Maris, and a Louisville Slugger, too. The preacher’s kid who lived next door to us was a vampire. Hair slicked back with Brylcreem, he looked like the greaser son of Bela Lugosi himself.

Of course, our parents had given us ground rules for the night.

Stay on the streets. Don’t go anywhere the street lights don’t shine.

But we had our own agenda, and we got down to business with it

once our treat sacks were full. And that put us on the edge of town, where the blacktop ended at a rust-flecked twenty-foot stretch of

guardrail capped with a NO TRESPASSING sign.

Beyond that was a dirt trail that twisted through a eucalyptus

grove. And beyond the grove was a cattail-choked hollow, a place

called Butcher’s Lake. Maybe that was the only place for us to go that night, because by then we wanted to find out if there was something more to Halloween than knocking on doors and getting candy. We

were looking for something a little more exciting.

Butcher’s Lake seemed like the best place to find it. Though there were a few ghost stories about the place, it wasn’t named for a murder spree or anything quite that exciting. No. The far side of the lake NORMAN PARTRIDGE [37]

just happened to mark the border of a couple of neighboring cattle ranches, and that’s how it got its name. The only other thing about Butcher’s Lake was that it was the local lover’s lane, but by the time Halloween rolled around that action had pretty much shut down for

the season.

That night, it was ghosts we were after.

So Butcher’s Lake was where we went.

That’s where we found Charlie Steiner.

Or the thing he’d become on Halloween night.

Or the thing he most wanted to be.

As soon as we climbed over that rusty guardrail, Roger’s friend, the preacher’s kid, said, “I don’t know, Rodge.” He said that practically right away, before we took a single step on that trail that led through the eucalyptus grove, as if he was already primed to turn tail and head for home. But my brother gave him a look. “We’ve been planning

this for weeks,” Roger said. “We’re not turning chicken now.”

Rodge meant it. Every word. Like I said, he was only thirteen,

but he’d grown up on John Wayne movies and TV cowboys and

that was how he operated. If you didn’t grow up back then, it seems impossibly archaic now. But in those days, they built us to do what we set out to do, and finish the job. Or, as our old man always said,

“If you talk the talk, you walk the walk.”

So we set out, putting one foot in front of the other. Roger took

the lead on that snaking path through the eucalyptus grove. He had a flashlight, but he didn’t turn it on—we were counting on the moon that night, and we didn’t want to spook anyone who might be down

by the lake Anyway, the trees grew close in the grove. Straight. Thick-bodied. Tall. And the moon was full, but you wouldn’t have known

it. Those eucalyptus trees blocked out the light and made everything you heard seem twice as loud.

The castanet rattle of dry leaves.

The soughing wind tearing snakeskin flaps of bark from straight,

smooth trunks.

The short whispering breaths of three kids on the prowl.

Ahead, near the lake, the sounds were moist and alive. Crickets

[38] THE MUMMY'S HEART

cut their music in the night. Frogs croaked a hundred yards away,

where the trees gave ground to a muddy little patch of beach that

rimmed the first wall of cattails.

And there was another sound just ahead . . . one that hung over

the night like a shroud. It was enough to make us slow our pace as we approached the last stand of eucalyptus trees, and I remember

telling myself that it was probably just the sound of the wind cutting through the cattails.

It might have been . . . but it wasn’t.

Chanting. That was the sound waiting for us down by the water.

Bright moonlight shone over that muddy little beach. It washed

in waves, as if buffeted by the winds and the clouds—silver light

lapping over the dark water and the sandy banks of the lake, each

little glimmer of moonlight washing in rhythm to the sound that I’d mistaken for a soughing wind.

Because now I knew what that sound was. Someone was down

there, ahead of us in the night. He stood before the lake and the

swaying cattails, silhouetted by the glow of the moon, watching the water. We didn’t know it then, but he was watching for a sign.

Of course, there were a lot of things we didn’t know then. All we

knew was what we saw, and we couldn’t believe it as the moonlight

spilled over the figure and turned that silhouette into something we could recognize.

A big thing pacing back and forth along that shore. Wrapped in

bandages.

Gray and silent as a mountain of cobwebs.

A mummy. At Butcher’s Lake. On Halloween night.

The preacher’s kid said something, and Roger cut him off with

a sharp whisper. The monster didn’t see us. We stood frozen at the edge of the grove. Every once in a while he’d stop and stare at the water, but there was nothing waiting for him except the sound of his own chanting rolling over the surface. The moon washed over it and spilled a reflection on the murky waves like a spotlight that could open a hole into a black brimming pit. And that mummy would stare

at that white hole in that black sky, and the white hole in the water, NORMAN PARTRIDGE [39]

and the emptiness of both seemed to drive him mad. He stared up at the heavens, and he swung his free arm like a crane, and the wrinkled fist on the end of it was like a wrecking ball ready to tear down the universe.

Of course, we didn’t know the reason for that then. We had no

idea that it was Charlie Steiner beneath those bandages. We didn’t know he was casting a spell to that dark water and that bright moon and whatever gods or demons worked their magic in it, tossing the

contents of his jackal-hide mojo bag into Butcher’s Lake. We didn’t know he was waiting for a sign that would tell him it was time to

conduct the most difficult and dangerous part of his spell. We didn’t know he was trying to raise a dream woman from the depths of

Butcher’s Lake. All we knew was that his pendulum wrecking-ball

fist was swinging in a way that told us he was coming up empty, and he wasn’t happy about it, and that there was going to be hell to pay.

From some god we hadn’t heard of. Or some devil. Or the

universe itself.

Or maybe us.

Then Charlie Steiner started screaming, and it got worse.

I’ll never forget the sound of that tongueless scream. Even though we were hidden from view in the tree-line twenty feet away, I’ll

never forget the sight of it, either. The mummy turned toward us,

and his cobweb lips opened into a black hole that even a full bucket of moonlight couldn’t illuminate, and more black spilled out of it, dripping blood that ran in rivulets through the irrigation-ditch

wrinkles that covered his chin. And then came the sound—a buzz-

saw screech that descended into a roar so heavy with anguish it could have made a deaf man jump up and take notice.

“Oh, God,” the preacher’s kid said, and just that fast he was

gone.

We didn’t even hear him running back to the road. The mummy

was coming toward us now, still screaming, taking one sloughing

step after another. At first I thought he’d spotted us for sure, but then he suddenly reversed course and headed toward the deep shadows