In the Middle Ages, in Europe, “thousands of Egyptian mummies preserved in bitumen were ground up and sold as medicine”.[34] The practice developed into a wide-scale business which flourished until the late 16th century. This “fad” ended because the mummies were revealed to actually be recently killed slaves. Two centuries ago, mummies were still believed to have medicinal properties against bleeding, and were sold as pharmaceuticals in powdered form (see human mummy confection).

[From Cannibalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

The Epic of Gilgamesh of ancient Sumer includes a mention of zombies. Ishtar, in the fury of vengeance says:

Father give me the Bull of Heaven,
So he can kill Gilgamesh in his dwelling.
If you do not give me the Bull of Heaven,
I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,
I will smash the doorposts, and leave the doors flat down,
and will let the dead go up to eat the living!
And the dead will outnumber the living!

[From Zombie - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

He thought it might be the way that those among them that had pets felt, getting similar animals. Sometimes there were weird moments of familiarity and deja vu, but he realized that was probably just coincidence. Centuries of experience had taught him that coincidence came easier with age, simply as a matter of statistical probability. But he could see why some of them believed in reincarnation.

Jack had met her in the BookHaus. He’d been glancing through a dictionary of hypothetical Indo-European words and grammar. (It seemed mostly correct, thought some words were just wildly off. But not a bad effort, from what he could remember of those early days when the men in the wheeled carts had first swept into his people’s lands.) She was sorting throught the new arrivals, a book junkie for sure. She’d spotted what he was looking at, and he could she was tell she was waiting for him to put it down so she could get a look at it.

He smiled and handed it to her.

They’d started talking. She was on a buying spree, looking for new books that she didn’t have time to read but wanted to buy anyway. Onto her shelves they went, taking up room that might have gone for a stereo or TV in most people’s flats. It wasn’t a very big one, either, just a converted den in a big room, with a little bathroom in one corner, and a kitchenette in the other. But it had a huge fireplace, and the mantle was stacked with books, which was why she rented the place, paying maybe a little too much. It was a really great fire place.

They’d talked a long time about books. He’d read a lot of them over the years, and since he didn’t sleep, he had lots of time on his hands when he was around them as they hibernated every night to regenerate their bodies and spirits. It still creeped him out a little, and no matter how angry, confused, or dissapointed his lovers had been, he’d simply refused to lay in bed with them through the night. Some had thought he was a drug addict, and many had figured out he wasn’t human, though he denied it to all but a very small few.

He admitted it to her earlier than any of the rest. He wasn’t sure why, but he’d felt confident that she’d understand. She was the kind of girl that accepted things easily. Sure, my new boyfriend is from Faerieland. Why not? At first she probably thought it was some sort of idiosyncratic joke. But after he took her on a walk, out in the wooded park near Minnetonka, and took her part way into his homeland, he believed her.

She didn’t see anything. It was frowned upon to bring humans home. Some of the Elder ones thought it was rude, the way a human wouldn’t bring a monkey home to fling poo everywhere.

But it slipped her into the weird time slip that all of Faerie lived in, but nobody understood. Time passed so quickly, a half hour walk taking up a whole weekend camping trip, that she believed him for sure after that.

She handled it well, asking a couple of snarky questions about gnomes, hobbits, and dragons, which he’d answered to the best of his ability. (“Snotty little pricks who charge too much for their work”, “No, only that ultra-conservative freak could’ve imagined a race of tiny, idealized British peasantry”, and “Well, you have nuclear weapons. We had our own ugly little cold war.”)

Sara was the only one he left.

The others, he’d stayed with them for a long time. He’d pretended to age, altering the Glamour he wore among them to get wrinkles, gray about the temples, and generally look as if it was slowly shuttling off the mortal coil.

None of them had ever seen him. He didn’t feel bad about it (well, maybe a little), since he probably would’ve looked kind of repulsive to them. Maybe not; his kind looked *kind* of like humans, but there was just something subtly different. An ear a little too long, a finger that moved in a way a human joint just couldn’t quite have done.

When the ones in their wheeled carts came, they’d shown their true selves, and that hadn’t gone well. There’d been blood and magic. It was the first time the strange new creatures had asserted themselves. The rest had just run away. Since then, Jack kept the Glamour on when he went Out.

Jack had lived a lot of lives with humans. He’d been a warrior chief, a peasant (work was as easy as setting his Glamour on what he had recently come to think of as ‘Auto-Pilot’), a daring explorer (there were places in Out that were a mystery to both Faerie and human), and once even a king. And he was always the best at what he did, always excelling at the things the humans valued so much that his kind didn’t care that much about.

He’d been telling her about all the things he’d done in his past ‘lives’, things that usually impressed the women he was with. He’d already impressed her with the number of books he’d read; he got the impression that was the only thing she really envied him. Because all the other exploits didn’t seem to impress her.

In fact, as he spoke, her forehead got tighter and tighter, and she was frowning. Frowning! He told outrageous story after outrageous story, telling her about some of the famous humans he’d bounced around and goofed on. (He’d always thought that whispering questions while invisible to that mason was one of his best pranks.)

“How long have you been alive?” she asked. She was glaring at him.

“Umm…I don’t know. We don’t really deal with time very well. Bouncing back and forth, you know, between Faerie and Out. It’s not like we age, so it isn’t like we notice…well, we do age…I guess. I mean, there are the Elder ones. They’re *old*, so I guess that makes me, you know, young.”

“Okay, well, how about this? How long have you been around humans? As a fraction of your lifespan, so far as you can remember?”

“Not that long. I mean, that’s what I love about being Out. It’s still all so new, and changing all the time.”

They’d been together for a year or so. He’d been crashing at her place, but she knew he had his own place. His real Home. She was a nice person, and no matter how angry she was, she wouldn’t actually turn someone out onto the street. So she started gathering up his clothes and things and packing them into a bag.

“What are you doing?”

“I want you out. Out of my life. Out of my flat.” She looked at him, calm but angry. “Preferably, out of Out. Go back. Leave us alone.”

“But…Why? I don’t get it.”

“You’re a daytripper. You’re a tourist. You’re so used to being the exotic and different one, and everyone here loves you because you’re magical and foreign. I loved you because you’re you, though.”

“Look, I love you, too…”

“No.” A little angry tear formed in her right eye. “You love novelty. You love excitement. You make love to me, it’s just like a guy getting excited about new car smell. You didn’t realize it worked both ways. I’m exotic to you. You just like a woman who speaks a foreign language. A weird piece of ass. Well, I’m not a souveneir or Authentic Experience for you to have.”

She shoved the last of his things into the bag and shoved it into his hands. “I don’t even know what you look like. You probably think you’re making things easier for both of us. But you’re really just looking to enjoy the local flavor without getting charged the tourist price.”

He briefly thought about throwing the Glamour aside, showing himself, but thousands of years of habit stopped him.

She looked him in the eye. “Fuck you, Yankee. Go home.”

Jack left his things floating in the arms of his fading Glamour, until they fell to the ground when the magic no longer had enough power to keep them up. He had fled almost immediately.

Sara cried, then, for the love she’d gave.

Jack cried for the love he realized he’d never given.