Mummy’s Curse!

The British Museum’s Ancient Egyptian galleries were bizarrely disrupted when it was stormed by an angry mob waving table lamps. “We wanted to use flaming torches, but the authorities at the British Museum refused to let us in with them for health and safety reasons,” the mob’s organiser, thirty six year old Adele Slaney, later told The Sleaze. “And then they weren’t going to let us plug the lamps in! For God’s sake, we’d already paid the full ticket price to get in to the bloody ‘Treasures of Mesopotamia’ exhibition by mistake, before we realised that admission to the main museum was bloody free!” Once inside, the mob rushed toward the sarcophagus containing the mummified remains of the boy Pharaoh Rubateeti IV, lamps in hand. Unfortunately, many of the appliances had insufficiently long power leads, causing several of the mob to fall over as their cables became taught. Nevertheless, the remaining members of the mob were sufficiently frightening for the 4,000 year old mummy to leap up out of his sarcophagus and make a break for the exits. “We chased the bastard all the way to the Thames,” Slaney gleefully relates. “He was trapped between us and the river – he started pleading, trying to play the sympathy card: ‘I’m only nineteen, I was the descendant of a heretic Pharaoh who was struck from the records – is it any wonder I went off the rails?’ Ha! Bloody juvenile delinquent, as if cared about his excuses! Eventually he just sank into the mud!”

Museum officials are understandably furious at the loss of one of their prime exhibits. “Rubateeti IV was about to be the subject of a major scientific project,” explains Professor Ian Firk, head of Egyptology. “We were planning to remove his wrappings and expose his face for the first time in four thousand years!” However, according to Firk, the Pharaoh’s face isn’t the main part of his embalmed body that interests the Professor’s team. “Obviously, we’re more interested in his genitalia,” Firk says. “Let’s not forget that Rubateeti IV’s main claim to fame is that he was the son of the notorious Rubateeti III, the heretic Pharaoh whose name was removed from the historical record by his successors. Known as the ‘cross dressing Pharaoh’, not only did he allegedly promote all manner of sexual orientations and decadence, but it was rumoured that he had both male and female genitalia – he was the Pharaoh with a cock and a fanny!” The Egyptologist hopes that the unwrapping of Rubateeti IV will reveal whether he too has this attribute. “We only know of Rubateeti III from a few surviving fragments of hieroglyphics – his mummified body and tomb were destroyed by the priests of Ra, so we have no way of knowing whether the stories about his genitalia are true,” he muses. “We’re hoping that if he really did have both sets of bits, he will have passed this genetic quirk on to his son.”

Slaney has defended herself, claiming that she was forced into taking such extraordinary action by the legendary curse of Rubateeti, said to afflict anybody who gazes upon his face. Indeed, of the archaeological expedition that discovered his tomb in 1931, Major John Scoppers was subsequently castrated in a bizarre incident involving a lawnmower, whilst Lady Gladys Fritworth had her pubic hair scorched off in a freak camping stove accident. It never grew back. “It was said that they had both looked on his face when they removed his golden death mask, so when I read that they were going to reveal his face at the museum, I knew there’d be trouble,” she says, claiming the she, herself, had already glimpsed the Pharaoh’s dead visage, peering through her bedroom window one night last week. “When I finally saw it, a chill went down my spine! Those mummies are notorious peeping Toms. Although you have to admire him – it was very impressive for someone of his age to be able to climb up that drain pipe.” According to Slaney, no sooner had Tutankhamen’s face vanished from her window, than she found her bedroom filled with a swarm of ladybirds. “It was horrible! They were buzzing and crawling everywhere – I had to suck them up in the vacuum cleaner, then spray fly killer down the nozzle to finish them off. I felt like bloody Hitler,” she recalls. “I also ran outside with the vacuum cleaner, in the hope that I might be able to catch that bastard mummy. But he was long gone.”

The ladybirds weren’t the only manifestation of the curse, as Slaney soon discovered. “I quickly developed this migraine – it went on for days, no matter what I tried. I knew then that it was him or me – if I didn’t do for the embalmed bastard, then sooner or later something a plague of locusts or something would descend on my pubes,” she says, arguing that her subsequent actions were motivated purely by self-defence. “So I decided to consult my friend, who is an expert Egyptologist. Well, he’s seen a lot of mummy films. Anyway, he reckoned we needed to find the Scroll of Thoth, either that or cut off the mummy’s supply of Tana leaves. Failing that, we needed to organise a mob to chase the mummy into a swamp.” Slaney found it surprisingly easy to recruit a mob, through the ‘Sexually Harassed by a Mummy’ group on Facebook.

Professor Firk is dismissive of Slaney’s claims. “This woman is clearly insane,” he declares. “That mummy hasn’t left the museum since 1933, certainly not to shin up her drainpipe and spy on her!” He also disparages the very notion of a curse of Rubateeti. “It’s true that several members of the original expedition suffered unfortunate accidents, but that’s all they were – accidents,” he says. “They certainly didn’t look upon the mummy’s face, either. This whole curse business is a load of old claptrap cooked up by the tabloid press!” He is currently planning an attempt to recover the mummy from the mud of the Thames. “That bunch of bloody neurotic women are lucky they haven’t been charged with the criminal destruction of a priceless archaeological artefact,” Firk fumes. “But, incredibly, the police claimed that he was on the sex offenders register!” For her part, Slaney remains unrepentant. “There’s no doubt that things have improved since we drove him into the mud,” she muses. “My headache has gone and I won £40 playing internet poker last night. Mind you, I did lose £200 in the process…”