Dark Universe details: The Mummy

Okay, this one’s complicated by the fact that there’s no consistent story. Dracula is always a vampire pursuing power and a woman; Frankenstein’s monster is always a huge, rather childlike creature seeking love and vengeance. Both are based on novels, and almost every version at least pays lip service to the books.

But there’s no original book for “The Mummy.” Reportedly, when Carl Laemmle decided to make a mummy movie he tried to find a suitable novel to base it on, and couldn’t, so his scriptwriters just made it up. The 1932 version was a one-shot; the 1940 version, which launched the series, had no source material but the earlier movie, which it didn’t follow very closely. Later versions didn’t keep much of anything from any of those.

The elements that did stay fairly consistent are these: An ancient Egyptian sorcerer was involved in a forbidden love and was buried alive and cursed in consequence. Restored to life in the 20th century, he tried to find or create a reincarnation of his lost love, but was defeated by modern-day folks who disapproved of his scheme. Everything else, even the mummy’s name, is variable.

And we have a problem here in that I think the reincarnation plot is dated and silly. I want to discard one of the only two consistent elements, and alter the other. About the only thing I want to keep is the idea of a living mummy freed from its tomb.

And even that… well, archeologists operate somewhat differently now than they did in the 1920s, they don’t go casually breaking into tombs without lots of preparation and recording, and I’m not interested in doing a period piece. I also don’t think that the ancients would have put a traitorous heretic in a fancy tomb. I think they’d have buried him in an unmarked grave in the middle of nowhere.

So… modern-day Egypt. Islamist terrorists set off a car bomb someplace that has heretofore been of no archeological interest to anyone. Soldiers, cops, and rescue personnel rush in to help the wounded, and find that the explosion has blown open a mysterious crypt, previously undiscovered, beneath the street. There are signs that it was a burial place, but there’s no body. Our protagonist, an anti-terrorism specialist named Karim el-Masry (I am not going to drag a British or American hero into a story about Egypt), investigates the crypt, thinking perhaps it was a weapons cache or some such thing, and finds himself caught up in a mystery. Every indication is that this burial vault is thousands of years old, and that it hadn’t been touched until the explosion caved it in, but there’s nothing to indicate who was buried in it, or what happened to the body. El-Masry gets hold of some archeologists, who aren’t much help.

Then the murders begin. But they aren’t targeting corrupt officials or foreign tourists or Coptic Christians or any of the usual victims el-Masry would expect terrorists to go for. In fact, terrorists start turning up dead, along with police, clergy of assorted faiths, drug dealers…

Our ancient sorcerer, you see, wants to remove foreign influences and restore Egypt to its ancient glory — which means no Christians, no Muslims, no foreigners, no secular government. He intends to set himself up as a new Pharaoh, and is using his magic and immortality to build his power base. For now, he’s establishing himself as master of a hidden empire of crime.

El-Masry figures this out, but doesn’t dare tell anyone the truth, because who would believe him?

And we go from there.

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