The Toynbee Convector

“Great thing about midwifing mysteries is, you don’t have to boil water or wash up. Hand me that papyrus scroll over there, boy, that darning needle just beyond, that old diploma on the shelf, that wad of cannonball cotton on the floor. Jump!”

“I’m jumping.” Charlie ran and fetched, fetched and ran.

Bundles of dry twigs, clutches of pussy willow and cattails flew. The colonel’s sixteen hands were wild in the air, holding sixteen bright needles, flakes of leather, rustlings of meadow grass, flickers of owl feather, glares of bright yellow fox-eye. The colonel hummed and snorted as his miraculous eight sets of arms and hands swooped and prowled, stitched and danced.

“There!” he cried, and pointed with a chop of his nose. “Half-done. Shaping up. Peel an eye, boy. What’s it commence to start to resemble?”

Charlie circled the table, eyes stretched so wide it gaped his mouth. “Why—why—” he gasped.

“Yes?”

“It looks like—”

“Yes, yes?”

“A mummy! Can’t be!”

“Is! Bull’s-eye on, boy! Is!”

The colonel leaned down on the long-strewn object. Wrist deep in his creation, he listened to its reeds and thistles and dry flowers whisper.

“Now, you may well ask, why would anyone build a mummy in the first place? You, you inspired this, Charlie. You put me up to it. Go look out the attic window there.”

Charlie spat on the dusty window, wiped a clear viewing spot, peered out.

“Well,” said the colonel. “What do you see? Anything happening out there in the town, boy? Any murders being transacted?”

“Heck,

“Anyone felling off church steeples or being run down by a maniac lawnmower?”

“Nope.”

“Any Monitors or Merrimacs sailing up the lake, dirigibles felling on the Masonic Temple and squashing six thousand Masons at a time?”

“Heck, colonel, there’s only five, thousand people in Green Town!”

“Spy, boy. Look. Stare. Report!”

Charlie stared out at a very flat town.

“No dirigibles. No squashed Masonic Temples.”

“Right!” The colonel ran over to join Charlie, surveying the territory. He pointed with his hand, he pointed with his nose. “In all Green Town, in all your life, not one murder, one orphanage fire, one mad fiend carving his name on librarian ladies’ wooden legs! Face it, boy, Green Town, Upper Illinois, is the most common mean ordinary plain old bore of a town in the eternal history of the Roman, German, Russian, English, American empires! If Napoleon had been born here, he would’ve committed hara-kiri by the age of nine. Boredom. If Julius Caesar had been raised here, he’d have got himself in the Roman Forum, aged ten, and shoved in his own dagger—”

“Boredom,” said Charlie.

“Kee-rect! Keep staring out that window while I work, son.” Colonel Stonesteel went back to flailing and shoving and pushing a strange growing shape around on the creaking table. “Boredom by the pound and ton. Boredom by the doomsday yard and the funeral mile. Lawns, homes, fur on the dogs, hair on the people, suits in the dusty store windows, all cut from the same cloth....”

“Boredom,” said Charlie, on cue.

“And what do you do when you’re bored, son?”

“Er—break a window in a haunted house?”

“Good grief, we got no haunted houses in Green Town, boy!”

“Used to be. Old Higley place. Torn down.”