Avon Fantasy Reader 18

"Out of the Eons" by Hazel Heald is a supernatural horror novella set primarily in Boston's Cabot Museum of Archaeology. In 1879, the museum acquires a grotesque mummy and mysterious metal cylinder containing an undecipherable scroll, recovered from a newly emerged Pacific island that subsequently sinks. The mummy—a medium-sized figure in a terrified crouch with an expression of cosmic dread—defies archaeological classification. For fifty years it remains a curiosity among Boston scholars until 1931, when reporter Stuart Reynolds investigates the museum for the Boston Pillar. Reynolds becomes obsessed with the mummy and cylinder, extensively photographing the strange hieroglyphic text. The narrative suggests that this publicity inadvertently attracts the attention of dangerous secret cults devoted to the artifact's occult significance, resulting in the deaths of several museum officials—Dr. Minot murdered, Dr. Johnson dying mysteriously, and taxidermist Wentworth Moore disappearing—before the curator records this account.