The Vandemark Mummy

by Cynthia Voigt

  “All right, look,” Casey finally said, words bursting out of him. “I’m sorry about what my father’s been saying. The trouble is, the family is used to getting its own way. Except for Great-Grandfather, nobody ever crossed the family, and as soon as he got old they moved in, with doctors and nurses and practically kept him a prisoner, to keep him from doing the things they didn’t like. I know it’s not your father’s fault about the collection. I’m sorry about the way my father talks. Mother says that it’s lucky he never had to work for a living, because he’s so tactless he’d never have gotten above the bottom rung on any ladder. I said I was sorry.”

  Althea was as puzzled as Phineas. “We don’t mind,” Phineas said.

  “I have a pretty crappy life,” Casey said.

  “I’m going to the library.” Althea stood up. “I’ve got work to do.” She didn’t ask if either one of them wanted to go with her. Phineas might have wanted to go with her, that afternoon.

  “What work does she do?” Casey asked.

  Phineas decided he might as well talk to the kid. He might as well find out if they had anything in common, since this was the first kid he’d met in Portland. Unless he wanted to be stuck dealing only with adults—and Althea—until school started, which he didn’t, which he seriously didn’t, he’d better make an effort. “She’s studying Greek.”

  “Why?”

  “To learn it.”

  “No, I mean why.”

  “To learn it,” Phineas repeated, stubbornly. Then he reminded himself that Casey was just trying to be friendly. “She’s got this idea, she wants to read Sappho in the original.”

  “I guess Sappho’s Greek?”

  “Ancient Greek, even before Homer. You know Homer?”

  “Not to say hello to.”

  It was a pretty weak joke, but Phineas appreciated the effort.

  “Why Sappho?” Casey asked.

  “Because she’s a woman, and a poet, and my mother always says women never had much of a chance to really accomplish much, in art. My mother’s a feminist, and it always used to be she and Althea agreed about everything. See”—he turned to face Casey—“the Portland where my mother is is Oregon. She got a job there, and she took it.” End of subject, as far as Phineas was concerned. He got up from the steps.

  “Is that what’s wrong with your sister?”

  Phineas turned around. “Nothing’s wrong with Althea. Maybe she’s shy, because people who don’t know her think she’s weird. Actually, she’s just brilliant.” Phineas didn’t know why he felt like he needed to defend Althea. She didn’t need defending. “Maybe she is upset,” he admitted.

  “But you aren’t?”

  Phineas shrugged.

  “Why, did they fight a lot or something like that?”

  Phineas drew the line. “What makes you so nosy?”

  But Casey refused to take offense. “I thought—maybe we’d be friends, and if we were, I thought, I should know.”

  “Why should we be friends?” Phineas demanded. He didn’t care how rude he sounded.

  Casey’s face lit up with mischief, which made him look much more like someone Phineas would like to be friends with. It made him look like his flannels and blazer, tie and tasseled loafers were a costume. The wrong costume, Phineas thought.

  “Because I know something you don’t. The newspaper reporter was only guessing, but she was guessing right. There is a mummy’s curse.” Casey was lying and Phineas knew it, and Casey knew Phineas knew. Casey was just messing around. “What nobody has told you, or your father, is that when my great-grandfather died he looked—nobody had ever seen anyone look like that before. They wouldn’t let me see him, but Mrs. Willis went in, and she told me. He looked as if he’d seen something—and his heart stopped. Because when he saw it, it was so terrible, he died. And his hands . . .” Casey held his own hands out in front of him, fingers outspread.

  Phineas was mesmerized, waiting for whatever it was he was going to hear next, which would be worse than anything he’d ever heard or imagined before in his life.

  “His hands—both of them—all of the fingers were disjointed. The knuckles pulled out of their sockets. As if he’d been trying to pull back against something, something with incredible force that was pulling him out of bed, to take him—Who knows where? Who knows what? Something so strong it dislocated his fingers, and you know what that means?”

  Phineas shook his head. This was terrific.

  “It means the thing probably had hands too.” Casey waited a beat. “Like a mummy had come up to his room, when he was alone in the middle of the night, and pulled his life out of him.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Am I?”

  Phineas thought for a minute, checking his impression. “Yeah, you are.” Casey shrugged, grinned, shrugged again. “Listen,” Phineas said, “you want to go climb some trees? Or can you, in those clothes? There are some good trees right over there in the woods. I could show you some good climbing trees.”

  Casey was already undoing his tie. “I’ve got plenty more clothes. Aren’t you even a little scared of the mummy?”

  “Why should I be?” Phineas asked. “It’s just a dusty old dead person, isn’t it?”

  CHAPTER 5

  It was lucky for Phineas that the Egyptian Collection had turned up. It gave him something to write about to his mother, in the letter that accompanied a sock he’d worn for three days before he put it in a plastic bag, put the plastic bag into a thick manila envelope, and put the whole shebang into the mail.

  Phineas didn’t like writing a letter to his mother. He’d have preferred talking to her. They had always talked a lot. But when she wasn’t actually around, when she wasn’t right there—yelling at him about his messy room or wondering if he was getting along all right with his friends or reminding him that he was one of the new generation of men with what she hoped would be a new attitude to women . . . It was easy to talk with his mother, but he didn’t have anything to say to her in a letter, not really. So he was glad the collection was there, to write about to her.

  The Egyptian Collection also gave him somewhere to go and something to do. He only went as far as room 015 in the library cellar, and what he did there wasn’t much—he just put his hands down into packing straw and pulled up whatever his fingers found—but that little was a little like Christmas, which made it an okay level of fun. It was like a Christmas where nothing was anything you were hoping for, but since everything was wrapped up there was some excitement in finding out what everything was.

  Except when Mr. Hall had classes, they spent all day unpacking the collection. Dr. Simard joined them. He’d asked Mr. Hall’s permission, as if he were a kid in a TV sitcom asking to use the family car; and Mr. Hall had said yes, as if he were the father and Dr. Simard was the kid. Between his father, and Dr. Simard, and Althea, there wasn’t much they didn’t know about the pieces in the collection. Phineas felt pretty stupid sometimes, but he didn’t mind. Stupid was better than bored, and he was picking up some interesting new words, like wedjat and stela. Wedjat was his favorite, partly because the idea of the two Egyptian gods fighting, and one ripping out the left eye of the other, gave him the shivers. The collection contained what Ken called “A rather fine obsidian wedjat,” which stared out at Phineas from the shelf where they had placed it.

  Dr. Simard had asked right away if they would all call him Ken, since they were all on the same work crew. Phineas’s father was about to object, but Ken looked as if it was something he really, really wanted, so Mr. Hall let it ride. Althea approved, but Phineas wasn’t so sure; if grown-ups were equals, then they wouldn’t leave you alone to be a kid. But there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

  In any case, they found out the first day they were unpacking that Ken wasn’t going to be around all that much longer. He was going to study in England—“Oxford, I’m pleased to say. They have a papyrus collection I’d like to write a paper on.”

  “Do you have a grant?
” Mr. Hall asked, sounding impressed.

  “Unfortunately not. My list of publications is good enough, but when nobodies at Nowhere University are writing your academic recommendations—you don’t stand much of a chance, do you?” He gave them no time to answer. “But,” with a flash of teeth, “you can’t keep a good man down. Isn’t that what they say? Our finances permit me to go over for five weeks this summer, so I’m going ahead with the project, grant or no grant.”

  Phineas held his breath and hoped Ken would stick to the subject of grants and off the subject of papers. He already knew too much about Ken’s papers. Ken was only thirty-one, but he’d already published a dozen papers. Just writing the papers didn’t count; you had to publish them for them to count. Count for what, Phineas wasn’t sure.

  “Did you ever publish anything, Dad?” Phineas asked. His father had his hands deep in a crate, and the other three were waiting to see what he’d pull out. Althea was in her usual place on a stool at the end of the table, where she kept a list of what they unpacked, complete with brief descriptions.

  “Just a couple of little pieces.”

  “Time,” Ken called, holding his hands up in the familiar coach’s signal. “Time, time out here.” Phineas couldn’t help laughing. “Your father has a way of selling himself short, Phineas,” Ken said. “I read one of your papers, Sam, the one in the Classical Language Journal. The one on the history of the alpha privative.”

  “That,” Mr. Hall said. He had both hands buried in straw, and pieces of straw in his hair and on his arms. “How did you come across that?”

  “The library subscribes to CLJ, so when I looked up your publications, I found it. To see what kind of man you were.”

  “Why would the alpha privative interest you?” Mr. Hall asked, not really paying attention.

  “CLJ turned down a paper I offered them,” Ken said. Phineas was afraid he would tell them all about it, but just then Mr. Hall pulled his hands up out of the straw. One hand held something round and flat and wrapped in cloth. The other hand gradually uncovered it. Ken had stopped speaking, to watch. Phineas caught Ken’s mood, like measles, and like Ken he fixed his eyes on his father’s hands, on what was about to be revealed.

  It was only flowers, just some circle of flowery leafy stuff. It looked like a small Christmas wreath, made out of ivy leaves and little berries. Ken, his father, even Althea, they all just stared at it.

  It was in good condition. Phineas guessed that made it different, made it valuable. Besides, the more he looked at the wreath, the more Phineas liked it: The ivy leaves floated as if they were on water, somehow, floating between the clumps of berries that joined the twined leaves, or separated them.

  “May I?” Ken asked, holding out his two large hands. “If this is genuine,” Ken said, cradling it in his hands, “you have yourself a treasure.”

  “You mean the college does,” Mr. Hall said, in a dreamy and distracted voice.

  Phineas looked more carefully. It didn’t look like any treasure to him. He wouldn’t mind having it in his room, but that didn’t make it a treasure. There was lots of stuff in his room nobody would ever call treasure. “What’s so special about it?” he asked, figuring that, as usual, there might be something he didn’t know that would explain everything.

  Ken held the wreath out in front of him. He looked, just for a second—never mind that he was in his gray jogging sweats after his daily six-mile run—he looked like an ancient Viking about to make an offering to his gods. “This is a funerary crown, Phineas. They were used during the Hellenistic period, about five hundred to two hundred B.C. The leaves are ivy, see? But they’re wrought in bronze, or so I hope, then gilded. The berries are formed from clay. If it’s genuine, it’s in remarkably fine condition. Museum condition.”

  “Why shouldn’t it be genuine?” Phineas wondered.

  “Often wealthy collectors were sold fakes,” his father said. “They were sitting ducks for anyone who wanted to bilk them, because they didn’t often know anything about what they were buying. This Vandemark man is liable to be a collector like that, in which case all of this may be worthless.”

  “That would make Mrs. Batchelor happy,” Phineas said.

  Ken rotated the crown around in his hands, looking at it.

  “How do you know if something’s fake?” Phineas asked.

  “The papers, the provenance of each item,” his father told him. “Expert opinion, if there’s any question. You sort of get an eye for what’s real, experience, knowledge, the same way—you know when you meet someone if he’s honest. I mean, usually you know. Or if she is. Never mind that, you know what I mean. The wreath looks good to me, doesn’t it to you, Ken? I assume from its condition that the crowns weren’t buried with the bodies,” Mr. Hall said.

  “No.” Ken couldn’t take his eyes off it. Althea got down from her stool to come look more closely at it.

  “The Greeks in Egypt cremated their dead, didn’t they, Ken?” Althea asked.

  “Very good,” Ken said, as if she had answered a tough question in class. “Yes, they did, and the ashes were put into hydra vases, and then these crowns were hung around the necks of the vases. I can’t believe I actually have one in my hands. May I have it, Sam?”

  “Have it?” Althea sounded shocked. “But—”

  “Think, Althea,” Ken scolded. “If you want to be a scholar, you’ll have to learn to think before you speak, in order to avoid sounding like a ninny.”

  Ken was certainly putting Althea in her place. Phineas wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Althea’s red cheeks told him how she felt—embarrassed.

  “I was about to ask the same question,” Mr. Hall said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Sam, I meant, have it for a paper.”

  “Sure,” Mr. Hall said. “Be my guest.”

  “I’m serious,” Ken said. “If anyone else inquires, you’ll tell them it’s reserved?”

  “You have my word,” Mr. Hall said.

  “Including—I have to ask—yourself?”

  “I’m already too busy. No, listen, you can have it in exchange for the help you’re giving me with the collection.”

  “Wonderful. That’s just—wonderful. I tell you, Sam, it’s promising for the mummy, isn’t it?”

  “Why don’t we open the mummy crate now?” Phineas suggested. He’d never seen a mummy up close before, but he’d seen plenty of late-night movies.

  “Not until Saturday, Phineas,” his father reminded him. “That’s only one more day, and we’ll have everything else uncrated by then. I’ve arranged with President Blight for a viewing Saturday after lunch. He’s having a previewing lunch for certain selected guests. I’ve also promised O’Meara she can be here. The mummy is the big occasion.”

  “Phineas doesn’t care about the occasion—he’s just hoping to be scared out of his wits,” Althea said.

  She was making Phineas sound bad. He thought of telling her she was wrong, but he figured she was probably right. When he pictured what the mummy would look like, it was pretty horrible, and he could almost feel the chills running up and down his spine. He was looking forward to that. Almost as good as a really good roller coaster, that’s what he was hoping for, like the Devil’s Loop. He’d look at the mummy’s face, at its empty eye sockets especially, and his stomach would slam up into his heart. . . .

  * * *

  The Halls spent Saturday morning getting the cellar room ready, sweeping—Phineas’s job—and setting out labels on index cards by the artifacts lined up along the double shelves—Althea’s and their father’s. Then they went home to wash up, become presentable. They returned by 1:15 to the room that now looked, to Phineas’s eye anyway, more like a hospital operating room than a workroom. The mummy’s crate waited like a coffin on the long table in the center of the room. Behind it, odd shapes and colors lined the shelves. The light was bright and the machinery hummed patiently.

  After a while, Ken arrived. Mr. Hall greeted him. “You’re dressed up.” T
he Halls wore jeans and sweatshirts. Ken wore white slacks and a long-sleeved knit shirt with a polo player embroidered on its chest.

  Ken looked down at himself and you could almost see him deflating. “Do you think I’ve overdone it? If there’s publicity, I wouldn’t mind being noticed, and you have to dress for success sometimes.” Mr. Hall tried to say something, but Ken talked on. “All of us here know that what a man looks like is no indication of his abilities, but you have to admit we live in an ivory tower.” Mr. Hall opened his mouth, but Ken gave him no chance to speak. “Not that I don’t like the college, don’t get me wrong, but—this isn’t Harvard, is it? If I had kids,” he added quickly, with a flash of his teeth for Phineas’s father, “I’d seriously consider making Vandemark my life work. So maybe it’s lucky I don’t. Have kids, I mean. My wife doesn’t have time for a family anyway. Not with her career as hot as it is. It’s no time for her to be starting a family.”

  “What’s her career?” Phineas asked. A hot career might be something really cool—like a singer or actress. Phineas had never met a real singer, or actress, or anyone married to one.

  “Michelle is a stockbroker, with Merrill Lynch.”

  “Oh.”

  “She’s an incredible woman, Michelle, and charming too—one of the new women, you know. You’d approve of her, Althea, she’s impressive. Last year her earnings topped . . .” His voice dribbled off. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to boast, I’m just so proud of her I forget other people might not be interested.”

  “She sounds successful,” Althea observed.

  “That she is. And she thrives on success. You probably know what I mean. She’s probably a lot like your mom.”

  None of the Halls had anything to say about that.

  “Don’t get me wrong, I’m really proud of her.”

  Phineas hoped Althea would let that pass, but his sister couldn’t, of course.

  “Is she proud of you?” Althea asked.

  “The kitten has claws, doesn’t she?” Ken said. His mouth stretched as if he were smiling. “It’s open season on men these days, isn’t it, Sam?”