A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, April 1950 — page 103: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

_ marvelous kind of codfish filet. ‘Probably - THE LITTLE DOLL DIED 103 him the Great White Doctor, you know.” » Can you beat it? Well; by six o’clock the Great White Doctor wasn’t found, and I was sure he was a fatality. But Mrs. Peabody knew her husband better than I did. I was in an ugly enough mood to wonder if she wasn’t just a wee bit dis- appointed when, just at sundown, he came back, Yes sir, he came back. And how! Spur- ring his donkey at top speed. Rushing into camp with glasses blazing, face shin- ing with excitement. That look on his pan, as if he’d just found the Seven Cities of Cibola or Christophe’s gold mine. He came bursting into the headquarters hut where I was pacing the floor with McCoy and Jenny Lou. “T’ve got it! I’ve got it!” What? Listen, he held it up in front of us, capering like a monkey on a stick. Do you know what it was? I thought it was a doll, myself, when I first saw one of the things—a shabby old leather doll that some Haitian kid had discarded. “A midget mummy!” Peabody glared at us. “A miniature Arawak mummy! I found it in a cave up in the mountains. Look at the hair! The Indian features! Almost perfect state of preservation, and it may be a thousand years old. Isn’t it a beauty!” He laid out the beastly little rélic on my table under the carbide lanip; bent over it, his goggles glowing like electric lights. ; i Bieta It’s only sixteen inches long. Can you realize that figure was once man-size? The headhuniers of Borneo shrink a head only half an inch. The Jivoro Indians of Ecuador reduce a head two-thirds. No one knows how the Arawaks accomplished this diminution. See, McCoy. A taxidermist should appre- ciate this work. Isn’t it amazing ?”” “That it is.’ The Irishman stooped to peer. “That it is.” “Cured and shrunk. The whole body! And boned, McCoy: Boned!” Peabody exclaimed over the thing as if it were some they removed the skeleton first and stuffed the carcass with hot sand. Then they tanned it over a slow fire, patting and ‘Teshaping it as it shrunk to preserve its OE nn Swi ey gee 8S . ier: Sa Se ors ine: > | a 2 human form. The Egyptians possessed wonderful secrets of embalming, and achieved high necromantic art, but they _ never produced a mummy like this.” Word of honor, it made me sick. He. went on babbling about embalmers and mummification and the Arawak technique of body-shrinkage, and I couldn't get a word in edgewise. Zombies were bad enough in the atmosphere without that fig- dried, dwarf of a gobble-gobble on -the ta- ble. I didn’t care if it had once been man- size and shrunk like a shirt in the laundry. Man-size or midget, you don’t want a mummy around Marine headquarters when you are waiting for a Caco raid. I blew up when Peabody started a lec- ture on Arawak history. There was too much modern history going on in Haiti, right then, for me to be interested in the ancient Arawaks. I told Peabody to get ‘himself, his wife and his mummy behind the stoutest wall of the stockade and stay there. I advised him of the impending assault and informed him we'd all be em- balmed broke through. “From now on, nobody goes wandering off from Morne Noir,” I roared. “All the scientific research around here will be done through the peep-holes in the stock- - ade. If the Cacos get in they'll murder us all.” That ought to’ve thrown cold water on Peabody, but it was his wife who looked scared. She looked scared, and she looked if Charlemagne’s black devils — .< ey at Terrence McCoy. I caught the fright- — ened glance and the way her hand reached — out for the Jrishman’s. He was sensible © enough. He said to Peabody, ‘ ‘IT guess it is gettin’ dangerous around here, Wilf. We better do as the captain says.” “But I can’t stay shut up in the stock- ade,” Peabody blurted at me. “Not when I’m just on the verge of my great discov- ery. Don’t you see what this means? It means there are some Arawaks still here in Haiti. ‘The remnants of a lost tribe. They’re hiding up there in the mountains somewhere. There wasn't any dust on this mummy when I found it in that cave, which indicates it was placed there re- cently. Probably for some réligious rite.” — “You'll be laid out for a religious rite if you go wandering off in those hills again,” I warned. “Some Caco sniper comicbooks ~~ com