Mummy Read online

  “Every good party,” said Lovell, “requires party favors. And our party favors are inside the cottage. Already wrapped.”

  “It would be so exciting,” said Maris, “here at our mummy party, with our own mummy, to find out if there really is gold.”

  Emlyn’s bare toes turned to ice in the water. The cold moved up her ankles and spread into her legs. She could feel it attack her spine and crawl into her heart.

  “Mummy gold,” breathed Maris.

  “All we have to do,” whispered Lovell, “is unwrap the mummy.”

  The water lapped softly, as lakes do, whispering around their edges, checking on their rocks, murmuring to their sand.

  “No,” said Emlyn loudly. “We cannot unwrap Amaral-Re. First of all, we’re not the owners of the mummy. The museum is. That was our agreement. We will give her back. Second of all, mummies don’t unwrap. The sap is dribbled over every layer. The linen solidifies like plaster. You’d have to use a saw.”

  The moon climbed a bit. It was not quite full. It had the awkward, sinister look of a failed circle.

  “I have a saw,” said Donovan. “It’s in the shed. My grandfather prunes trees with it.”

  “Stop this! We will not unwrap her. There are photographs in the books about those Victorian unwrapping parties. They ended up ripping off the legs and head because the bones stick to the linen, and by the time the party was over, there was just a pile of snapped joints and pieces of skull and torn bandages.”

  “And gold,” said Lovell.

  Everything was a ghost. The moon. The water reflecting it. The peeling white cottage.

  “It doesn’t matter if there is gold. It is the integrity of the mummy that matters. We cannot hurt the mummy.”

  “It’s dead, Emlyn,” said Lovell, in the comforting voice of a baby-sitter. “Nothing will hurt it.”

  “It might get damaged a little teeny bit,” said Maris, “but the thing to remember is, just making a mummy damages it. They took out the brains, Emlyn. With a hook through the nose. They sliced the whole gut open and took out the liver and lungs. That’s called damage. We’re just doing a speck more a few centuries later.”

  “If it’s gold,” said Donovan, “and if it’s precious gems, the fortune is ours.”

  Emlyn drew her feet out of the water. Now they were even colder as the wind wrapped around them and curled under them. “There isn’t a fortune,” said Emlyn. “A fortune would weight a lot. What showed up on that X ray is probably paper-thin.”

  Maris lost patience. She stopped murmuring and began talking stridently, making her point with volume. “Three-thousand-year-old gold bracelets, armbands, and rings? In perfect condition? As fabulous as anything from the tomb of Tutankhamen? Sitting right in our hands? It would be worth a fortune whether it’s gold or painted glass, Emlyn, and you know it.”

  “It is not sitting in our hands. It is part of Amaral. She cannot be ripped apart and plundered.”

  Donovan shrugged. “Come on, Emlyn. Her grave was plundered when they brought her here. We’ll be following a fine old tradition.”

  Emlyn was hanging onto her breath, her brain, and her cold feet. I started this, she thought. Well, here it is. Bad. Bad all the way through. “What about the senior prank?”

  “I think we’ve pretty much lost interest in senior pranks,” said Lovell. “Let those other guys put a cow up there. We have better things to think about.”

  “Gold,” said Maris. “And diamonds.”

  “You’re making up that part about the diamonds,” said Emlyn. “You don’t even know if they had diamonds in ancient Egypt.”

  They were sitting on a row along the dock. Maris and Lovell were staring down into the water, and their long hair shielded their faces from Emlyn’s sight. Donovan was lying down on his back, feet in the water, eyes on the moon. Jack was leaning way back, supporting himself with his hands spread behind him. Emlyn could not see him at all because he was last in line.

  She said, “Suppose we did saw into the mummy and take out this jewelry. What are we going to do with it? It’s not as if we can walk into high school wearing the necklace over a T-shirt. People are going to know we didn’t get it at the mall. And even if most kids think it’s cool that we’re the grave robbers, there’s going to be some kid who won’t think so. There’s going to be some kid who will phone the police. So we can’t wear this. And you can hardly take an authentic three-thousand-year-old Egyptian amulet into some jewelry store and ask them to give you a million dollars for it. They’ve seen the news, too. They’ll know perfectly well where it came from. The police would be there in five minutes. And if you decide to melt the gold down, you won’t have anything. Because the value would be in the thing itself: the actual real jewelry of an actual real Egyptian princess.”

  “Right,” said Maris.

  Emlyn sagged in relief. She had converted Maris, then, who was the tough one. She didn’t believe the boys cared about the jewelry.

  “So what we do,” said Maris, “is split the gold up. A few years from now, when we’re in other states at various colleges or we’ve gotten jobs somewhere, we’ll sell it. We’ll be rich. There’s going to be diamonds in there, and rubies, and pearls, and emeralds. And gold. A whole lot of gold.”

  Emlyn could hardly move her lips. “I read a lot about mummies,” she said. “Nobody mentioned diamonds or rubies or pearls or emeralds.”

  “Gold, though?” asked Donovan. “They mention gold?”

  “No matter when we sell, though,” said Jack, “and no matter where, it will be recognized.”

  “How?” said Lovell. “Nobody has ever seen it.”

  This was true.

  Nobody could identify it. Nobody had seen this jewelry since Amaral’s family put it on her. “No!” said Emlyn. “She’s real. She is a real thing, and she was a real person, and she deserves to stay herself. We cannot do this.”

  “I vote we unwrap the mummy,” said Lovell.

  “Yes,” said Maris.

  “Yes,” said Donovan.

  They had greed, the way ancient tomb robbers had greed, the way the reporters had greed. Grave robbers were greedy for gold and reporters greedy for scandal, but it came to the same thing. What can we destroy in order to get money or attention?

  I who fell into a daydream and felt Amaral’s heavy braids and soft sandals, I will have destroyed her. If it were not for me, she would have had her immortality, even if it was in a museum display. But I will be the instrument that ends her.

  She imagined the saw, its sharp triangles ripping through the chest of a girl who had waited for thirty centuries to be resurrected. She heard the hideous tear, like open-heart surgery. Maris would tuck her fingers into the slit of the chest cavity and rip backward and open the mummy to the air. Maris’s fingers would claw at jewels.

  Amaral’s eyes would continue to stare at the heavens until they sawed off her face and grabbed for her skull to gather in the jewels adorning her real hair.

  “I don’t think we should,” said Jack. He’d been wearing his sweatshirt like a cape over his shoulders, sleeves loosely overlapped to keep it on. He took it off and wrapped it around Emlyn. She needed the warmth. She appreciated the gesture. But was it a bribe? Whose side was he actually on?

  “Oh, come on, Jack,” said Maris. “How many people get to celebrate Halloween by actually cutting into a mummy?”

  Jack said, “We don’t any of us need money.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Donovan.

  “Come on, Donovan. You work to pay for movies and clothes and CDs and candy bars. You don’t work because you’d starve.”

  “If I had gold, I could have my own car.”

  “There’s no place to park your own car in the city.”

  “Enough gold and I could rent garage space.”

  “You wouldn’t be able to risk selling your share for years. All it’s going to be is stuff to hide. We know how hard it is to hide things.”

  “It’s hard to hide
great big things, like mummies,” said Maris. “It’ll be a snap to hide little things, like gold diadems.”

  “No!” said Emlyn. “You touch that mummy and I call the police right now and tell them exactly where the mummy is and what we did.”

  “We?” said Maris. “Emlyn, I don’t think we did anything. You are the thief here.” Maris stood up slowly, looming over Emlyn.

  How narrow the dock seemed. How deep and dark the water.

  “You want to be fingerprinted, Emlyn? Put in a cell with druggies who ripped somebody’s face open with a broken bottle? You want a cell with a hole instead of a toilet? You want your mother getting a phone call from the police? You want those reporters, that JoAnne and that James, all beaming and happy and pushing their microphone in your father’s face? You want to be thrown out of school? You won’t be allowed to finish your senior year, you know.”

  “Maris, give it a rest,” said Jack sharply. “We’re not going to attack Emlyn, okay?”

  “Of course, we’re not going to attack Emlyn,” said Maris sweetly. “We’re going to unwrap a mummy.”

  But it was Donovan who made the first move. He walked solidly and rhythmically up the dock to shore. The old wooden pier swayed beneath his pace and his weight. On the back corner of the tiny cottage was a small lean-to. Its padlock was for show because he just opened the door while the padlock hung off the hasp. He took something out He came back down the dock.

  Emlyn had pictured a saw blade several inches wide, a long rectangle, slanting to a narrower front end. But this was a shaped like a very large capital D, with the blade the straight line. The blade was an inch high and perhaps two feet long, with vicious teeth. The curve of the D was red metal, which Donovan gripped where the curve ran into the upright.

  He grinned. It was no sloppy, friendly grin. He shoved the saw into the air like an executioner with an ax. “The mummy,” said Donovan, “awaits.”

  If it came to some sort of grappling—actual, real fighting, which made Emlyn physically ill—the thought of her fists and their fingernails—there would be a fragile mummy between them. Amaral would be smashed and ruined even if Donovan didn’t cut into her.

  “The metal kitchen table opens up,” said Donovan. “It’s this old-fashioned thing from when my grandmother was a girl. Plenty of room for a five-foot mummy. Be easy to clean afterward, like a surgical table.”

  “We won’t hurt the table,” Maris assured him.

  “No, because we won’t cut all the way through the mummy,” agreed Donovan. “We’ll cut through the plaster and when we hit jewels or bones, we stop. I promise not to sever any heads or hips, Emlyn.” He was laughing. “And no matter how you complain, you get your fair share of gold. After all, you’re the thief.”

  Fifteen

  HOW STRANGE TO FIND that being caught in the museum would have been better. Emlyn would have been in trouble, yes; but it would have been her trouble. Not Amaral’s trouble.

  “Emlyn, you okay?” said Jack, as if puzzled.

  “Of course, I’m not okay! This is terrible. Jack, please help me. Please be on my side.”

  Jack looked embarrassed. “Em, I can’t really get into this.”

  “You are in it, Jack. We’re all in it.” She had no plans. She had no strategies. In fact, Emlyn did not seem to have much of a brain right now.

  “No, you don’t understand,” said Jack. “I mean, I can’t seem to work up a lot of interest. I wouldn’t saw the mummy up on my own, but I’m not going to go to war to stop it, either.”

  Emlyn felt desperately tired. Her father’s philosophy of life was that everything would look better in the morning. He often said to his three children, “Have a good night’s rest. You’ll know what to do when you get up.”

  But the advice did not apply. If she went off to get a good night’s rest, in the morning there would no mummy. She must stay awake, and she must prevent this.

  But she was afraid of the saw. She was afraid of Donovan, and his smile, and his tight grip on the saw handle. The blade was rusty. It was not sharp. He did not hold the saw with care but with greed. His strength was considerable. When he yanked on that blade he would go right through Amaral. He would slice her actual bones, her real chest.

  “You know what, guys,” said Jack. “Let’s cool off. Literally. Let’s go for a swim.”

  Okay, thought Emlyn. They swim. I run to the cottage, lift the mummy, leap like Superman from the loft! Speed to the van! And then they’ll just get out of the water and stop me. And Jack has his keys. And if I get into the van with the mummy and lock the doors, he’ll just press the remote on his key chain and open them again.

  “You and Emlyn go for a swim, Jack,” laughed Maris. “And when you get back,” she said, singsong, “it’ll be a whole different mummy.”

  Think swimming, Emlyn told herself. There’s a skiff tied to the end of that neighbor’s dock. I can row—but so what? First I’d have to get the mummy down here.

  Donovan was headed back up the swaying dock, Maris and Lovell trotting after him, discussing the order in which the mummy’s jewels should be divided. “You have an attitude, Emlyn,” said Lovell. “You come last.”

  In a minute they would be groping in brittle bones, screaming with joy as they retrieved gold from a dead person.

  One by one they left the dock, crossed a scrap of grass, climbed three sagging steps, and went through a torn screen door. The tiny screened porch had old, sagging wicker chairs and a huge geranium with scarlet blooms. You could slump there and retrieve yourself, and when you had pulled yourself together there would be a lake waiting. But Emlyn could not slump. And she could think of no way to retrieve this situation.

  If I could get the mummy, she thought, I’d give it back. I got into that museum. I can get into it again.

  Donovan and Lovell were already getting the mummy down from the loft, and Maris was fussing with something in the kitchen, and Jack had not yet gotten in the tiny door. Finally, he moved ahead, and Emlyn was inside.

  It was minuscule. Truly a vacation kitchen, where meals were simple or cooked outdoors. You would keep no extra dishes here, no vase of flowers. If you made a pot of coffee and scrambled an egg, the whole kitchen would be used up.

  There was no dining room, just a trio of windows in the living room that looked through the screened porch and across the lake. In front of these were the metal table and six sturdy wooden chairs that looked as if they had been purchased before Donovan’s grandparents had been born.

  She had noticed the telephone when they arrived. It was as old-fashioned as the rest of the place and still had a dial. Emlyn had hardly ever used a dial.

  The phone was gone. They had taken her seriously. They were going to make sure she could not call the police. She had not brought her purse and did not have her cell phone or even her driver’s license. What would she say if she could find a phone? If she did dial 911? “Hi. A friend of mine who’s been dead thirty centuries is being threatened”?

  Donovan ran his thumb along the evil teeth of the saw and cut himself.

  How stupid he is, thought Emlyn, knowing that rust carried tetanus; knowing that most of the people in this room would have had their last booster shot when they were four or five.

  “Don’t get blood on the mummy,” said Maris. She was laughing wildly. “After all, old Emlyn here is going to bag up the bones when we’re done and carry them back to Dr. Brisband. They’ll test the blood spots and get your DNA. So—”

  “Forget it,” said Lovell, “Emlyn is not carrying leftover bones anywhere. Once we have this gold, we can’t let anybody know. Right now, we’re still within reach of senior prank. We take the gold, and it’s really theft and it’s really us and we’re all really doing it.”

  This did not slow anybody down. If anything they were twice as excited.

  “What are we going to do with the bones?” said Jack.

  Donovan set down the saw, washed his cut, and put on a Band-Aid.

  “Bury th
em in the backyard?” asked Maris.

  “No,” said Donovan, “divide the stuff into trash bags and drop them off in the wastebaskets at gas stations on the way home.”

  Oh, Amaral-Re! thought Emlyn. From a pyramid to a trash can at a truck stop. “We are not going through with this,” she said.

  “Yeah,” said Jack. “Let’s slow down. We have the mummy. We have time. There’s no rush. The gold has waited centuries. It can wait longer.”

  “Not here, it can’t,” said Donovan. “My grandparents come back this week. They’re always here for fall foliage. Then they close the cottage. That means screwing big, flat boards over every window and door. I mean, we could still get in—a screwdriver is all it takes, and time. But still.”

  “But still,” said Jack. “We want to stay friends and all. And it was Emlyn who did the real work. We just had the idea. I think she gets two votes. In fact, I’d say Emlyn gets the only vote.”

  Emlyn prayed this time. It was all right to ask God for help when you were doing a right thing. God, she said, thank you for putting Jack on my side.

  “If you were voting, Jack,” said Maris, “what would your vote be?”

  An odd look passed between them. It meant a lot, but Emlyn could not read it. Was it affection? A message?

  “I want to think about it,” said Jack

  And then the whole thing changed. Lovell got bored. She buttoned her jacket. “Listen, guys, we have school tomorrow, and I haven’t done a lick of homework. It’ll be late when we get home. We need to get going.” She turned to Emlyn. “We were just wired, Emmy. We weren’t going to do anything. Donovan, you shouldn’t have gone and gotten the saw. It got us bent out of shape.”

  “And Donovan, get a tetanus shot,” said Maris. “That was dumb, cutting yourself on a rusty tool.”

  Donovan nodded for a while. This time he ran the Band-Aid down the blade. He was more careful. No blood. He smiled at Emlyn. “We wouldn’t really have done it, Em,” said Donovan. It was a lovely smile. Completely charming.