Off the Wall

by P. J. Night

  “It’s payback time,” Willow said cheerfully as she passed Jane and Lucy. “You kept us up late, and now we’re waking you up early. I only wish I had a megaphone. C’mon, girls! Get dressed! Breakfast in fifteen minutes! We’ve got to have you ready to go before the museum opens for the day.”

  Groaning, Jane lifted her head. Next to her, Lucy was scrunching up her face in protest.

  “That light’s tooooo briiiiight,” Lucy grumbled. “What time is it, anyway?”

  Jane glanced at the clock. “Seven a.m.”

  Megan walked up to them, wide-awake and already cramming her sleeping bag into its stuff sack. “I knew I wasn’t going to get enough rest on this lock-in,” she fretted. “Now I’m going to be tired all weekend! And it’s your fault,” she added, frowning at Jane and Lucy. “Both of your faults.”

  “Keep it down,” said Lucy. “We don’t want Willow or Katherine to hear.”

  “Oh my gosh, that’s right!” said Megan. She looked around quickly. “You don’t think they heard me, do you? Should we have some kind of—of cover story ready in case they question us?”

  Jane laughed. Now that the weird night was over, she felt carefree and relaxed and ready to enjoy the day. It didn’t even matter how tired she was.

  “They won’t ask us anything if they don’t hear us,” she pointed out to Megan. “I think we’re safe. Let’s go eat breakfast.”

  As the girls dressed and packed up their sleeping bags, blankets, and pillows, Jane suddenly remembered: Daria! Had she come back from her trip to the bathroom or wherever she’d gone? Jane scanned the room, but there was no sign of Daria.

  “Your pancakes are getting cold. Let’s get a move on, girls,” Willow remarked as she passed.

  “Willow, where’s Daria?” Jane asked. Lucy moved closer to hear the answer.

  “Daria?” Willow asked. “Who’s that?”

  “One of the girls we hung out with last night,” replied Lucy. “She has dark hair. Wasn’t too friendly. Her stuff was next to ours. But she’s nowhere to be found now.”

  Willow frowned and glanced at the clipboard she was carrying. “What was her last name?”

  “I—I don’t know,” Jane admitted. Lucy shrugged in agreement.

  “Maybe you didn’t catch her name right,” suggested Willow. “Because no one named Daria signed up for this event. I bet the girl you think is Daria is already at breakfast.”

  Jane and Lucy glanced at each other. They were very confused, but they didn’t have any other option except to see if they could find Daria—or whatever her name was—in the dining hall.

  But even though Lucy and Jane paced through the dining hall three times looking for Daria, there was simply no sign of her.

  The girls were confused, but not panicking yet. “Does it really matter where Daria is?” asked Lucy. “Don’t you think she can take care of herself?”

  “I guess so,” Jane said unwillingly. “But I’d still like to know what happened to her. Maybe we should check the Egyptian wing?”

  Lucy’s eyes opened wide. “The Egyptian wing! Why on Earth?”

  “Because—because—Lucy, I know this is going to sound strange, but I had a horrible nightmare after we got back to the Great Hall.” Quickly Jane described the dream, and the way she’d woken from it to see Daria leaving. “I don’t know why,” she finished, “but I feel like my dream had something to do with Daria. I can’t explain it. And since I dreamed about mummies, we need to look at the mummies. And that means checking out the sarcophaguses—I mean sarcophagi.”

  “All right,” said Lucy. “But let’s hurry, before people start to notice that we’re missing too.”

  When the girls got there, the sarcophagi in the middle row of the room were lined up as still and silent as ever. But both Jane and Lucy knew where they needed to go. They found the hidden corridor again, and peered to the end of the hallway. The sarcophagus that had been open last night was now closed shut. They hadn’t been able to see the painting on the lid the night before with the way the lid had been angled, but now, even though the painting on the lid’s surface was highly stylized, they both thought the same thing: The face kind of looked familiar.

  Jane’s heart was pounding hard enough to wake the dead as she and Lucy crept toward the end of the hallway. The night before, the card next to the sarcophagus had been missing. Now she could see that it was back. When she and Lucy got close enough, they silently read the card together.

  “This sarcophagus, found in the Valley of the Kings, contains the mummy of an unknown princess. Her tomb contained few clues about her background. Judging by her size, however, she was probably ten to thirteen years old when she died. A small mummified cat—perhaps a pet—was entombed along with her. The hand hieroglyphic seen in various places on her sarcophagus probably stands for something resembling our modern letter D. It’s quite possible that the princess’s name started with the D sound.”

  Daria. It had to be.

  “So the rumor was true,” Jane said quietly.

  Lucy nodded. “A mummy was haunting the museum.”

  A mummy who had pretended to be a mummy to play a trick on them.

  “I wonder if she comes out a lot,” said Jane. “Maybe she’s lonely in there.”

  Lucy snorted. “She didn’t act lonely. She acted snotty.”

  “Well, if she’s a princess, maybe that’s the only way she knows how to act,” Jane replied. “Maybe she doesn’t really know how to make friends.”

  She stared down at the lid of the sarcophagus. The body of a girl their own age was in there, with only her cat to keep her company. She had been in there for so long.

  Good-bye, Daria, Jane thought.

  “So, new friend!” said Lucy brightly as the two girls made their way back to the dining hall. “How about some pancakes?”

  EPILOGUE

  FOUR YEARS LATER

  “Please, people. We’re representing our school. People, please exit the bus in an orderly fashion.”

  “Why do teachers always call us ‘people’?” Lucy whispered to her friend Cailyn as they stood up to get off the school bus.

  “I guess they think it makes us feel more grown-up,” said Cailyn. “Doesn’t work for me, though.”

  The girls’ high school art teacher, Mr. Flaren, was hovering outside the bus now. He looked as flustered as a hen who’s lost a chick.

  “This way, please, people,” he said. “Right up the steps and in the main entrance.”

  “How else would someone get into the museum?” Cailyn muttered.

  Lucy smiled without answering. She knew there were other ways into a museum than just the main entrance.

  Not that Lucy remembered the lock-in all that well. She was in high school now, with a lot going on. And she and Jane had never managed to connect after the night in the museum. In all the confusion at pick-up time, Lucy hadn’t had a chance to get Jane’s e-mail address or phone number. She hadn’t even gotten to say good-bye.

  Lucy had been sorry about that. She’d liked Jane a lot, and she had the feeling they could have been good friends.

  She had also wondered about Daria from time to time. As her memory of the lock-in began to fade, Lucy became more and more sure that Daria hadn’t been anything more than a grumpy middle-schooler.

  Probably nothing unusual actually happened that night, she told herself now, as she and her art class climbed the broad museum stairs. It’s so easy to remember things wrong. And even to remember things that didn’t happen.

  Still, she had never managed to entirely shake the feeling that Daria had been the mummy rumored to roam the halls of Templeton Memorial. A mummy that must have been lonely and bored and just wanted to have some fun with them, so she dared them to go on a hunt in a museum in the middle of the night for something she knew they’d never find.

  What did it matter now, though? They were visiting the museum during the day. So were tons of kids from other schools. Any supernatural being would have to be nuts to
show itself in front of so many people.

  Lucy herself hadn’t been back to this particular museum since the night of the lock-in. But she was glad to be back at Templeton where she had spent so much time when she was younger. As the years of high school passed, she was becoming more and more sure that she wanted to work in an art gallery or museum, or maybe even become an artist herself. When her school had offered the kids in Lucy’s painting class a chance to take a field trip to the Templeton, Lucy had accepted eagerly.

  The lobby hadn’t changed at all, Lucy saw. It was bustling with field trips from all over the city. A group of excited preschoolers was being shepherded up the stairs. A fifth-grade teacher was telling her class, “I don’t want any snickering when we get to the Greek and Roman statues.” And Mr. Flaren was practically hopping up and down, he was so flustered.

  “Keep together, people,” he kept repeating. “I don’t want you to get mixed up and think you’re part of another class.

  “Now, before we go to the Portrait Gallery, we’ll take a brief walk through the Egyptian wing, since I know that’s a favorite section for many of you,” said Mr. Flaren.

  Not mine, thought Lucy.

  Ever since the lock-in, Lucy had avoided Egyptian art. Somehow it didn’t appeal to her anymore. But as she stared at the half-remembered exhibits, she could feel her interest returning.

  There was Prince Amun’s sarcophagus, and there were the turquoise beads—still as bright as when they’d been made four thousand years earlier. The onyx statue of Horus, the falcon-headed god of the sky. The shards of pottery that were valuable because they showed such realistic scenes of ordinary Egyptian people doing ordinary things.

  And down the hidden hallway was the other sarcophagus—the one Lucy couldn’t help but check out. The one that had been open and empty on the night of the lock-in. The one that had been closed the morning after. The one that possibly housed Daria’s mummy.

  The sarcophagus was closed now, just as it had been the last time she saw it. The ancient painting on its surface stared blank-faced at the ceiling. The image of the unknown princess looked serene and untouched, as if the princess herself had never felt a single emotion.

  Lucy leaned over and stared into those intensely black painted eyes. “Are you in there, Daria?” she whispered.

  Of course there was no answer.

  With a little sigh, Lucy followed Cailyn and the rest of her classmates out of the exhibit. Mr. Flaren was talking about their next stop—the Portrait Gallery one level below. Now that he wasn’t so worried about losing people, he had relaxed into his usual teacher-speak.

  “There are several things I want you to keep in mind as you study the paintings,” he said. “Look at the eyes first. They’ll tell you the most about the subject’s personality. What about the sitter’s expression? And look for little details that might be clues. What about the clothes? What about jewelry? Is the subject rich or poor? Is there anything that shows what interests the subject might have had? And take notes, because we’re going to talk about these in the next class!”

  Lucy had always loved portraits. She walked into the gallery so eagerly that she almost banged into the guard at the door.

  “No need to rush, miss,” said the guard in a friendly voice. “The people in these paintings aren’t going anywhere, believe me.”

  The members of her class began to drift around the first room, but Lucy wanted to be more organized. She decided to start with the closest paintings and work her way around the whole gallery.

  It’s almost like meeting new people, she thought. The longer you look at the face, the better you get to know the person. She decided to make a little game out of reading each painting’s title before looking at the picture itself. Then she’d be able to compare her expectation with the actual painting.

  Frau Schmidstorf Making Lace.

  Lucy envisioned a stern, stout middle-aged woman, but Frau Schmidstorf turned out to be frail and elderly, just examining her lace.

  The Honorable Hugh Nettlestone.

  Instead of the white-wigged old judge Lucy had imagined, Hugh Nettlestone turned out to be a little boy patting a pet rabbit.

  Charles Dickens at His Desk.

  Lucy already knew what Dickens looked like. No surprise there!

  Madame Isabelle Meunier and Her Daughter Jeanne.

  This would be a woman giving her baby a bath, Lucy guessed. But no—the two were outside. The woman had her arm around her daughter, who looked about twelve. She had a shy smile and wavy blond hair.

  Wait.

  Lucy stopped in her tracks.

  Jeanne looked just like Jane, the girl she had met that fateful night so many years ago.

  Lucy read the card again. Under the title were the words “Early nineteenth-century watercolor by an anonymous artist. A gift to the museum.”

  And the year that that gift had been made? The same year as the lock-in.

  Jeanne . . . Jane. Jane was the English version of Jeanne. . . .

  Lucy suddenly remembered that Jane had said something about how she had just gotten here, or just moved in, or something similar to that. She remembered that Jane hadn’t known her own address. Was that because she didn’t actually have an address outside of the Templeton Museum? She had seemed so shy and awkward at first. Was that because she had never been around real girls?

  She didn’t even know what a peanut butter cup was, Lucy thought.

  “Look at the eyes,” Mr. Flaren had told the class. Lucy knew that the eyes in a portrait often seemed to be following whoever looked at the painting. That was an effect used by lots of artists. It had something to do with the way our brains perceive two-dimensional objects.

  But Jeanne Meunier’s eyes were definitely following Lucy now. It wasn’t an effect. Jeanne’s eyes had widened at the sight of Lucy—just the way Lucy’s eyes must have widened when she saw Jeanne.

  So Daria hadn’t been the only strange guest at the lock-in that night. Like Daria, Jane too had come to life and wandered through the museum. Lucy wondered if Jane had even known that she was only a character in a painting when she was outside of it. She certainly had acted just like one of the girls. And no one had suspected a thing.

  As Lucy stared at the painting in shock, Jane gave her the smallest possible wave—nothing more than the fluttering of a fingertip, really.

  Then she winked at Lucy.

  And the painting was still again.

  Nora used to have a normal life. It was so normal it was boring. She went to school, did her homework, hung out with her friends, had dinner with her family, and avoided her irritating younger brother.

  That was before. Before the fire swept through their apartment and her parents changed into nervous freaks.

  The fire was in late August. When the school year started in September, her parents wouldn’t let her or Lucas out of the apartment. Seriously. Not even into the hallway.

  They wanted to be with Nora and Lucas all the time. Protect them from the world. Nora’s parents, who had never been afraid of anything, were suddenly afraid to let their children out of their sight. For weeks after the fire, Nora insisted that “lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice,” but her parents said she was wrong.

  Her mother quit her job to homeschool them. Her father quit his job to stay at home as well. They disconnected the Internet. Never replaced the TV, cell phones, or computers that had melted in the flames. Their furniture was charred and all their clothing smelled like barbecue, no matter how many times they were washed.

  Nora wished things would go back to the old kind of boring. She’d never complain again.

  “Pssst.” Lucas stuck his shaggy brown head into Nora’s bedroom. “Whatcha doing?”

  It was on Nora’s tongue to say None of your business and toss Lucas out of her room, but she knew that the fire and everything after had been hard for him, too.

  Unfortunately, Lucas had a lot of energy to channel.

  It was hard, superhard
to be nice, but since she didn’t have any one else to hang out with, she tried her best.

  Nora had gotten permission to push her bed over by the window. The lock still didn’t open, but at least she could look outside. There were a few shops and a park across the street.

  “Still staring out the window every morning?” her brother asked.

  “And afternoon,” Nora said.

  “You never give up, do you?”

  That wasn’t really a question, so Nora didn’t reply. It was 7:37. Three more minutes. She didn’t want to miss seeing her friends. This was the only way.

  A few days after the fire, Nora had tried calling them on the only phone that wasn’t destroyed in the fire—the one in her parents’ bedroom—but the connection was always bad. Although she could hear them perfectly, they could never hear her. Figuring the heat from the flames had melted the wiring, Nora asked her parents to contact the telephone company. That was around the time they called a “family meeting” to announce that they were both quitting their jobs, staying at home, and letting the less important bills lapse. They could no longer afford phones, Internet, and cable TV.

  “I have to try,” Nora told Lucas. “Maybe if Hallie and Lindsay finally look up at my window, they will see me and come over. There’s no way my friends could have forgotten me already.”

  Seven thirty-eight. She couldn’t be distracted. “You can stay here,” she told Lucas, “but no talking.”

  Lucas said, “Even if they did see you, Mom and Dad would never—”

  Nora whipped her head around and shot him an evil look. “Shhhh.” She put a finger to her lips.

  “Forget about them,” Lucas said. “We can have an adventure together today. I found this really great—”

  “Quiet!” Nora hissed. “I have to pay attention.” Just past the park was an apartment building much like Nora’s. But that one had been renovated. None of their windows were stuck shut, and all their wiring worked.