A Magic Trick by Jess Hindes
Eighteen chairs are arranged in rows across the room, facing the archway that divides it from the sitting-room beyond. There is a table in the centre of the arch and over it, Adeline can see a man with a long face, mild like a cow’s, and wisps of white hair on the crown of his head. Pettigrew. Behind him, a younger man bends over a battered metal box. It is perhaps eight feet long, the surface pitted with dents and scratches. As he lifts the lid she sees the rounded shape of another container inside. This must be the mummy.
She had thought she might be able to smell it. There are churchyards in London which fester palpably; Lincoln’s Inn Fields on a hot summer’s day is heavy with putrefaction. But even as Pettigrew and his man lift the coffin-case from its housing, whatever scent this body carries is overpowered by the fumes of the gas lamps, the men’s tobacco, the women’s perfume.
William has already claimed a seat in the first row. As Adeline joins her husband, Pettigrew steps up to the table and raises his hand. The chattering behind her dies away. She hears the swish of the women’s skirts, the clatter of the chairs. A woman she does not recognise sits beside her. She smiles at Adeline and Adeline thinks, there is a corpse in the next room. And then it is in this room, here, as the young man takes the mummy from its case and sets it on the table. Pettigrew stoops to lift the coffin upright. He is talking about the decorative painting. His fingers indicate hieroglyphs: a hook, a bird.
Adeline is watching the body. It is swaddled tightly in worn, yellowing linens. The layers are so thick that the corpse’s shape has become distended. An image coalesces in her mind: a child, bundled in woollens, its limbs swollen into fat inaction, its face peeping like a bud.
The face on the mummy’s coffin is roughly chiselled, its eyes outlined in kohl. Thick snakes of wooden hair fall stiffly at either side.
The woman on the table is called Nefrina.
“Now,” says Pettigrew. His assistant steps forward, accompanied by another man in knee-breeches and a dirty shirt. They lift the body, tipping her into a standing position. Even under the weight of all those linens she is small, built on a different scale to the men whose living hands support her.
Pettigrew stands beside her. The lapels of his frock-coat gleam darkly in the gaslight. He smiles. Adeline watches him as he preens before his audience. This is his moment: his magic trick.
Reaching into his jacket, Pettigrew takes a pair of silver scissors in his hand. He displays them to the onlookers: now you see them. Then he stoops and with a swift movement, slits the outer layer of linen. It falls onto the carpet, stiff as a beetle’s shell. Pettigrew nods. He takes off his jacket and hands it to his assistant. He rolls up his sleeves.
“Let us begin.”
It is not he, but the corpse which moves. The men rotate the body as it stands, shoulders passing rapidly from hand to hand. Pettigrew grips tight onto a bandage. As the corpse turns, the strip peels free. The mummy dances and the linen falls, drifts of it piling around her feet. Every now and again, there is a bright flash of metal and a trinket falls: a scarab, a charm. Pettigrew pauses the men each time, lifting the item to the light.
“Gifts for the afterlife.” He takes a tiny, golden falcon and offers it to the woman on Adeline’s left. “The dead woman believed that she would bring these items with her into eternity.”
And this is where she has brought them, Adeline thinks: to the year 1845, to a living room on Bedford Square.
The shape of the body is becoming clearer, pirouetting slim and straight among the bandages. At last, a dark limb emerges; a forearm, bitumen-black. Pettigrew takes a chisel and taps at it. Adeline flinches. William frowns. It is the first time he has noticed her all night. When the leathery hand sheds its chrysalis, Adeline notices that the fingernails have been painted gold.
The last few layers of wrapping are large sheets of a finer linen, dyed pink. As Pettigrew pulls them back, the dry ghost of a flower falls to the floor. He bends, takes it, and holds it aloft. “A token from a loved one,” he says.
Adeline is aware of her stays, stiff and constricting; of the binding that is holding her in. She tucks her hands into fists.
The flower has long petals, pointed like a lily’s, but Adeline has never seen another such before. It is nothing like the roses she piles on the grave at Brompton, the forget-me-nots that she ordered cut into the stone.
Pettigrew places the flower on the table. As he turns away, the tail of his coat brushes against it and it disintegrates into dust. Adeline's fingernails cut sharply into her palms.
The mummy’s face is covered with a stiff mask of bitumen and linen, stuck hard in place. Even with his chisel, Pettigrew struggles to remove it, and it breaks in two before it finally comes free. As he lifts the broken parts, a pair of eyes flash white in the face below. Adeline feels a scream rising in her throat before she sees that they are false: enamelled discs placed into the empty sockets of the corpse. The effect is uncanny. The mummy gazes out at them, surveying her captors, the eyes grotesquely vivid in her shrunken face.
Her skin is brown and taut like a drum; the mouth pulled tight, the teeth exposed. Perhaps she will bite him, Adeline thinks. She can hear it in her mind, the snick of the teeth as they clamp around Pettigrew’s wrist, his scream. And the audience, screaming too.
“Nefrina,” says Pettigrew. He bows.
………………..
Jess Hindes lives in London, where she is completing an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck College. She has a PhD in Victorian literature and finds that most of her stories have to do with bodies.
Twitter: @bleakho