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.

ca 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. “Tve 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. ; mE 08! 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. Noone 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 _ marvelous kind of codfish filet. “Probably - they removed the skeleton first and stuffed the carcass with hot sand. Then they tanned it over a slow fire, patting and Tesiapiog it as it shrunk to preserve its F 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. J 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 if Charlemagne’ s black devils 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 f. a scared. She looked scared, and she looked <- at Terrence McCoy. I caught the fright- ened glance and the way her hand reached — out for the IJrishman’s. He, was sensible — enough. He said to Peabody, ‘ ‘T guess it is gettin’ dangerous around here, Will. 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 snipet ——~ comicbooks.com