Mummy Page 8

  Emlyn was close enough that she could have joined the conversation. She pressed her eyes closed and her lips together to keep from repeating that awful little whimper she had made hours ago in front of Lovell.

  Bob departed. Dr. Brisband returned to his office. Again he failed to close his door. The light from his room spilled into the hall.

  There lay her key.

  Far from being swallowed up into the brown floor, it seemed to glow and pulse with a brassy stare. How could Dr. Brisband have missed it?

  Emlyn stood motionless, except for her panting. The key seemed a football field away. She knew it was only six or eight steps.

  Dr. Brisband began muttering to himself. He was sending e-mails. “And Susan,” he mumbled. “She’ll help. And Aaron. Definitely Richard.”

  Go, Emlyn coached herself. Go now.

  She slipped into the hall. She knelt, so rattled that she didn’t stoop in the right place and had to crawl to reach the key. She tucked it back into her pants pocket.

  “San Francisco,” mumbled Dr. Brisband. “Boston. London.”

  Keep sending, thought Emlyn. Think donor, think board meeting. Just don’t turn around and think about me.

  She inched the potted plant away from the mummy. There was nothing between her and Dr. Brisband except a shadow. She picked the mummy up. It did not resemble trash waiting to be tossed, it was far too solid and vertical. On the other hand, she knew what was in it, and Dr. Brisband did not.

  So far.

  Her sneakers made a tiny squeak on the wooden floor, and she imagined herself sounding like a whole basketball team racing out, sneakers shrieking.

  She held Amaral in her arms, only a few inches into the air, took ten steps down the hall, turned, opened the door that took her into the hallway with the freight elevator. Closing that door behind her required holding the mummy, maneuvering in total dark, praying that the lock would not make a racket, and apologizing to God for praying about a criminal act.

  In the dark, she felt around the wall until she found the light switch and clicked it. There were no windows for anybody to watch her through. She was almost crippled by the size and weight of Amaral in her arms. She pushed the elevator button.

  The elevator was old and noisy. It creaked and rasped and clattered. It was not going to be a secret when Emlyn chose a floor. Would Dr. Brisband come running? Would he know that absolutely nobody should be using that elevator right now? Or would he think, oh, good, it’s our Sunday night delivery.

  Did the guard use this elevator? Would the door open and the guard step forward?

  Hi, Emlyn would say. Just taking the trash out.

  So once inside this elevator, assuming it was empty, did she go up to the second floor, unbag Amaral, put her back, and hide out in the bathrooms until the public was allowed back in?

  The cleaning crew would be back in first: Monday night.

  And long before them, Maris or Lovell or Jack or Donovan would have panicked and told somebody or done something.

  Not to mention her parents. They never checked on her because she always got home. But if she didn’t get home, they would check. Her parents were relentless once they put their minds to something Five minutes of interrogation, and Lovell and Maris would spill everything.

  Not my daughter, her father would say.

  Yes, your daughter.

  Her father had almost collapsed this summer when Emlyn’s younger brother was caught in the liquor cabinet and had to admit he’d been taking quite a few sips in the last few months. And Emlyn’s mother had wept for weeks last year when the same brother shoplifted a videotape.

  She thought of the desperate love of parents, trying to surround you and wrap you and teach you, but not really knowing you. Just blundering along, trying. Counting on you.

  She thought of being caught and facing them, two people she loved who counted on her.

  Or … Emlyn could take the elevator to the basement and keep going, blindly and stupidly hoping to rescue herself. If she gave up now, she would definitely be caught and her parents would definitely know. If she kept going, she had a chance.

  The big shiny brown elevator doors slid into the wall, and from inside the elevator, dark, curly fingers reached for Emlyn. She managed to stop herself before a scream came out of her. It was a plastic tree sitting in the corner, a touch of fake nature.

  She got in with the tree and her mummy and pressed B, which she hoped stood for basement.

  The elevator sounded like her future: falling and groaning and splitting apart. It stopped with a thud, and the doors opened slowly and remorselessly. She had no idea what would be down here.

  Darkness. That was what was down here. Complete, total, solid dark.

  She got out of the elevator, so tired from fright she could hardly bump Amaral out of the elevator.

  The doors slid closed, and she was alone in a basement in the dark with a mummy.

  Eleven

  EMLYN TURNED ON HER flashlight.

  A huge scarlet mouth and a face dripping with greasy gray hair lunged at her.

  She whimpered and tried to scrabble back into the elevator, but she could not find the buttons. She clung to the mummy as if Amaral-Re could protect her, as if those hieroglyphs painted on her linens were magic spells. Emlyn’s tears spattered on the black plastic that held Amaral.

  It was a mask.

  A huge, hanging mask, three or four feet tall. She recognized it, actually. There was such a mask in the Polynesian Room, so the museum must have an extra or a double and didn’t display it, but just hung it down here.

  The thin, hard beam of her flashlight showed statues, crates, racks of costumes; old textiles and paintings and pieces off things; rugs rolled up and empty picture frames leaning against one another. There was a row of ancient bicycles, the kind where the front wheel was taller than the rider and the back wheel just a toy. An old-fashioned square piano with the ivory peeling off the keys even had a piece of sheet music waiting to be played.

  Just storage, she said to herself. Whatever they’re not exhibiting this week. Or not exhibiting ever. None of it matters. Don’t even look. Find the way out.

  On the wall about two feet from the elevator buttons, her flashlight revealed switches. A whole row. Unlabeled. Did she dare turn those on? Upstairs in SECURITY, would a signal register that somebody was in the basement?

  A museum that failed to fasten its mummy down didn’t seem likely to have such technology, but who knew?

  In spite of the careful taping, Amaral-Re slid inside her bags. She was rattling with every step Emlyn took. What if the mummy had to lie flat or disintegrate? This mummy had been lying flat for three thousand years. What if Emlyn was killing her right now? And by the time she got to the van, Amaral-Re, princess, would be nothing but a bolt of stained cloth and a pile of bones?

  She could leave the mummy here in the basement. They would find Amaral tomorrow, or at least eventually, and put her back, and the damage would be minimal.

  But it was one thing to be slid down a gleaming limestone tunnel for eternal rest in your own pyramid as your servants wailed and your family wept and your priesthood sang. It was quite another to be tossed into a cellar in trash bags.

  Emlyn took a deep breath.

  This wasn’t field hockey, but it had a certain resemblance. She was halfway into the game and hadn’t scored. Both her offense and her defense had been pretty slack. But the game wasn’t over. She still wanted to win.

  She did not turn on the lights.

  Her flash had been strong enough for a small office. It was no more than the light of a struck match in this enormous cellar.

  She was sure of only one thing. Any door would be on a wall. She had to follow the walls to find a way out. But that was easy to deduce and hard to accomplish.

  Things had been jumbled and pushed and stacked and added. Little room had been left for moving around, and in some cases no room. Emlyn couldn’t pass through. And if she could squeeze her own sl
im body between artifacts, she couldn’t bring Amaral.

  She had to carry Amaral on her shoulder, which meant that each end of the mummy risked hitting some crate or hanging object.

  Portraits, boxes, shelving stuck in the middle and filled with vases or dishes. Furniture, hats, glass trays of pinned butterflies.

  This was where they stuck what they were never going to want. People thinking how generous they were to give their grandmother’s wedding gown to the museum, but to the museum it was just one more fragile thing to hang up and worry about. And forget about.

  The flashlight’s path was so narrow that she had to point around the edges of things to figure out what they were. She could balance Amaral for only a moment with one hand, catching brief, slanted glimpses of things and hoping to find a path through the chaos, and then she had to put her flashlight hand back up to support the mummy. In the end, she had to carry Amaral vertically and hope Amaral’s bones would hold.

  Leaning against an old heart-painted blanket chest was an immense, antique black-and-white photograph. It was an excellent shot. Scrambling up huge blocks—a giant’s blocks—a great, impossible tower of pale, shining children’s blocks—was a man in dated safari clothing. She stared for several moments before she realized it was a pyramid he was climbing. He might even be the very tourist, and future museum founder, who had acquired Amaral-Re.

  She had not known how huge blocks in pyramids were.

  She had not known you could climb them like that, scrambling, reaching, stretching, risking a terrible fall.

  She closed her eyes against the deep, heavy dark of the basement, and something else deep and heavy took hold and Emlyn fell into a hot blast of sun off those blocks. The blinding reflection and the blistering heat charred her thoughts. How dry the wind. She, too, would be a husk, left out in this sand to dry.

  Gripping the elbows of Amaral-Re, Emlyn felt herself hung with gold: gold bands on her wrist, gold belt around her waist, gold amulet at her throat, gold rings on her toes. The gold weighted her down, pulling her under. She could not get out of the sun.

  “No,” Emlyn mumbled, “I’m here, not there.” She pulled herself up into the dark and the dust.

  If I spend any longer in this place, dreaming of papyrus and pyramids, I will go a little bit insane, and they will find me someday, mummified in a corner, under a mask, thought Emlyn.

  Where does this come from? I’m a sensible person. I have a sensible family. We read Consumer Reports before we purchase a car or microwave. Our meals are balanced and we exercise frequently. We are not reincarnated from Egyptian royalty. We do not time travel. We floss. We do not even mislay our remote controls.

  Emlyn felt in need of a little remote control. If she could slow everything in the museum down, slow herself down, slow her heartbeat and her skipping brain, she could still make this work.

  There, behind carpets hung like giant towels from giant dowels, was the soft pink of neon. EXIT. It was a regular door, not a bulkhead, and she was grateful. She had imagined opening two slanting metal doors of a bulkhead, and Dr. Brisband would be looking out his window and see her rising eerily in the moonlight with her mummy.

  She worked her way toward the pink neon. The area in front of the door was entirely clear, and in fact a wide path extended from the EXIT door into the clutter of the basement. It led in a straight line to another door. Definitely not the way Emlyn had come in.

  She flashed her light all around the windowless exit. There were no signs proclaiming that alarms would go off if the door opened. There was not a handle but a bar against which a person carrying something heavy, such as a mummy, could shove her hip and get out without needing to use hands.

  Emlyn pressed the bar.

  Please let it open.

  Please let it open to some nice quiet dark place.

  Please let it have a route to Jack and Donovan.

  The door opened quietly and easily. No bells rang. No sirens squealed.

  Emlyn peered out. Once again, there was a lot less dark than she had hoped for. The utility courtyard was lit by high, strong lights that sputtered to themselves, as if infested by bumblebees.

  There were two parked cars alongside the museum van and a truck-sized trash container. Down the wall to her right was a lit window. As far as she could tell, its shade was pulled. She couldn’t see into anything.

  Two cars. One for Dr. Brisband? One for a guard? Was that the ratio of good guys to bad guys? Two against one? Emlyn ought to be able to outwit two people at a time.

  She had not had a second in which to think about what she had accomplished so far, but now that she could breathe fresh air, and imagine escape from the museum, she thought, I did outwit the guard. I did outwit Dr. Brisband.

  And then she thought, But I’m taking so long. Wasting time with dreams and silly pats on the back. It isn’t my time that matters. It’s the guard’s time. Is he this very instant staring down in disbelief at the empty pedestal? Am I going to hear sirens the moment I step outside?

  And just because there are only two cars doesn’t mean there are only two people here. A hundred other guards could have parked on the street

  She and the mummy eased out, Emlyn keeping a toe in the door so it wouldn’t close. There was the terrible possibility that she could not get out of the courtyard, either, and would have to go back into the basement and find another route. She could not let the basement door lock after her.

  She had expected the basement to be below ground, but now that she thought about it, you had to go up a lot of steps to get into the building’s main floor, steps on which she had sat and had ice cream and waited for people. But she’d been too dumb to analyze this. The first floor was high. So the basement was not a basement but a ground-level storage area. She emerged onto the truck-high cement walkway she’d seen from the road.

  The garage door was marked by red reflectors.

  She could not see any other door, although she knew there was one. She could not walk around the entire enclosure feeling for cracks. Especially not with a mummy in her arms. Especially with time running away from her.

  She looked at the lit windows. Still blurry, definitely covered in some way.

  There were no handy rocks or sticks with which to prop open the door. She took off one black glove and wedged it between the door and its lock.

  She thought hard.

  People got careless, and this was a careless museum to begin with. They did not have alarms, they did not have grilles at every opening, they did not frequently examine every room every night. They hired secretaries who talked too much and guards who just assumed that an office door that ought to be locked was locked.

  And so it was just possible that the museum van had been left open.

  Because it was quickest and because she could not use up more precious seconds, Emlyn lifted Amaral once more, carrying her horizontally on her shoulder, and walked straight across the parking area right under the blazing lights.

  She had guessed right. They were counting on the courtyard for security. The driver’s door of the van was not locked.

  She opened the driver’s door, leaned up, and tapped the automatic garage door opener with her finger. Then she shut the van door and ran across the entire, wide-open, well-lit asphalt to the garage door. It clattered and clanked—and opened, rising upward.

  Emlyn ran as if she were carrying the scull to the river, as if there were a whole team with her, as if they were all yelling to raise her own excitement, as if there were no mummy and no museum and no danger and no drowning in gold.

  She ducked out into the street. She was on the far side of the museum and had to circle two long blocks to get back to the van. She ran.

  I’m out, I’m out, I’m out! she screamed in her head. I have the mummy! I did it! I’m safe!

  But she was not safe.

  Emlyn ran the block, turned the corner, ran harder. She was now running past the windows of the mansion, and should Dr. Brisband look out, he wou
ld see—what?

  Just a moving shape. Neither boy nor girl. As for the mummy, it would just be a thing.

  She was falling apart.

  Not the mummy. Emlyn. She was starting to sob, and she could not afford the breath or the breakdown. Her wrist felt rebroken and her shoulder dislocated. Her head ached and her fingers could hang on no longer.

  She must get to the van.

  The rows of parked cars seemed impenetrable. She had not looked at her watch in ages. Was it two in the morning? Or were people still having dinner and strolling around the block and getting in and out of their cars?

  There was the van.

  She darted between cars parked on her side, crossed the street, and got safely to the far sidewalk. Now there were two rows of parked cars between her and the museum. She did not see how she could support the weight of the mummy another step, but she had a half block to go. She was staggering, lurching, and the mummy was sliding inside its bag and blistering her shoulder, and then the side door of the van slid open and hands reached out to help.

  Twelve

  “HOUSTON!” YELLED JACK, Á la space launches. “We have a mummy!”

  They rested the mummy flat on the floor, her head behind the front passenger seat and her feet pressed up against the rear bench.

  Jack threw his arms around Emlyn, no mean feat in the cramped van with the floor occupied. He hugged her exuberantly.

  “Tell us everything!” demanded Donovan. He kissed her on the forehead and then on the cheek.

  “Open the bag,” said Jack.

  “We thought you’d never get here!” said Donovan.

  “We’ve been crazy with worry,” said Jack “We’ve been on the phone every ten minutes with Maris and Lovell for advice.”

  “Get going,” said Emlyn. “Now. I had to open the automatic garage door to get out. They know somebody was there who shouldn’t have been there. They just don’t know yet what I did. But they will. In one minute.”

  “Right,” said Jack. “Right.”

  He was so excited he ground the gears and the car sounded like wounded lions.