Poppy Pym and the Pharaoh's Curse

by Laura Wood

  A great big cheer exploded from the audience, and I joined in whole heartedly. I may not have had a single lesson yet, but even I knew that a day off and a big party was good news.

  “Yes, yes,” laughed Miss Baxter, “it’s all very exciting. Now, it’s time for the first lesson of the year, so run along and be brilliant. Here’s to a really wonderful year.”

  We all burst into a round of applause, and with that everyone stood up and started filing out the main doors and into the sunshine, off to officially start the first day of school.

  Chapter Seven

  Luckily, Ingrid and I were in the same class so we headed towards our first lesson together. While we climbed the stairs towards the classrooms, I heard someone calling my name.

  “Poppy, OY! Poppy! Hang on!” And there was Kip puffing over to us at full speed.

  “Hiya, Kip,” I said with a grin, “this is Ingrid.” Kip and Ingrid smiled and waved at each other. When the two of them were standing next to each other, Kip’s smallness and Ingrid’s tallness seemed even more obvious.

  “What have you got now?” asked Kip. I glanced down at the timetable screwed up in my hand.

  “History, with Professor Tweep,” answered Ingrid. She had already memorized her timetable, and it was in her backpack in a neat plastic folder even though she didn’t need it any more, instead of twisted up in a grubby ball like mine.

  “Oh, cool,” said Kip, “me too. Let’s all go together.”

  We pushed through into the corridor, reading room numbers and trying to work out where we were going. Well, Kip and I did; Ingrid may have looked as dreamy as usual, but she seemed to be headed somewhere.

  “D’you know where you’re going? I don’t think I’ll ever be able to find my way around this place … it’s huge!” panted Kip, trying to keep up with Ingrid and her long legs.

  “I studied the map,” murmured Ingrid.

  “What, already?” I asked. “We only got them yesterday, and Kip’s right … Saint Smithen’s is massive!”

  Ingrid smiled modestly. “I have a good memory. Once I look at things I usually remember them pretty well. And I’m sure we’ll get used to it soon. Oh, here we are.” And she stopped outside one of the doors that still stood half open. The three of us pushed through and took seats together in one of the rows of desks arranged in front of the blackboard. Remembering Luigi’s advice, I began blasting people hopefully with my biggest smile, but it only hurt my cheeks and seemed to make one boy who was going to sit in the seat next to me back away nervously.

  “Why are you pulling that face, Poppy?” asked Ingrid. “Are you feeling sick?”

  “Er, no, no, I’m fine,” I said quickly and I pulled out my pencil case and notebook.

  Now, maybe if you’ve been going to a big school all your life, you wouldn’t understand the feeling of apprehension and excitement swelling inside me like a well-shaken fizzy drink at the start of my very first lesson. Or maybe you feel like that too after the summer holidays, when you’ve got your shiny new pens and a fresh notebook sitting on your desk, and you’re with your pals waiting for school to start. Either way, I was feeling pretty mixed up about my first real school lesson when I spotted the blonde girl who had been laughing at Kip yesterday. I smiled at her, but she gave me a look so chilly it made me want to put my mittens on. Then, slowly and very deliberately, she turned her head away and started talking to the girl sitting next to her. I felt my cheeks warming up like a red-hot whistling kettle.

  “Who’s that?” I asked Kip quietly, nodding at the girl in a way that I thought was very secret and in the manner of a top spy.

  “Who?” asked Kip loudly, swinging his head around and undoing all my stealthy work.

  “SSSSSSSSSHHHHH!” I hissed, rolling my eyes at him. “Her,” and I nodded again. Kip stared at the girl for a while.

  “Dunno,” he finally said, with a shrug.

  “Brilliant. Thanks for all your help,” I muttered, looking over at the girl’s back again, hoping that she hadn’t seen Kip staring at her.

  “That,” chimed in Ingrid, her nose wrinkled up like someone had waved some stinky cheese under it, “is Annabelle Forthington-Smythe. I went to primary school with her and she is the WORST.”

  I looked at Ingrid in surprise, and Ingrid’s pale cheeks turned a bit pink. “Well, sorry, but she is. Her dad’s some big-shot bajillionaire and she thinks she’s so much better than everybody else. She can be really nasty.”

  I wanted to ask her some more questions about Annabelle, but then Professor Tweep crashed into the room and dropped his books on his desk with a loud thud. Professor Tweep, it has to be said, looked a lot like a bespectacled walrus. (If you look at a picture of a walrus right now, you’ll understand exactly what I mean. Go on, it’s OK, I’ll wait. Are you back? Good. Now imagine that with a pair of glasses, and a little bit of grey hair on top … got it? That’s Professor Tweep, exactly.)

  He also had a slightly grubby napkin stuck in the front of his shirt. So you might want to imagine that too.

  “Hello all,” he boomed, “I am Professor Tweep. Well, well, good to have some fresh blood around the place. Let’s have a look at you. You first years look younger and younger every year.” And he peered over the top of his glasses at us. “Hmmm, sorry-looking lot, aren’t you? Still, we’ll have you bang up to the mark and shipshape in no time.”

  With that, he heaved himself into his battered-looking chair, which wheezed comfortably underneath him. There was a moment of silence, and Professor Tweep yawned and scratched his ear.

  “Who can tell me when the Great Pyramid of Giza was built?” he asked suddenly. Everybody looked down at their desks as if they were the most interesting things in the whole wide world.

  “You, the daydreamer,” he boomed, snapping his fingers and pointing at Ingrid, who was staring out of the window with a distant look on her face, “do you know the answer?”

  Slowly, Ingrid turned her vague stare towards Professor Tweep. “I believe it was 2500 BC,” she said in a clear, carrying voice, “originally built for the pharaoh Khufu, also known as Cheops.”

  I looked at Ingrid like she had grown another head, and then I noticed Kip was doing the same. The thing about Ingrid is that you think because she looks all faraway and dreamy she’s not really paying attention, but then she comes out with something like that.

  “Humph,” said Professor Tweep, eyeing Ingrid over the tops of his glasses, as a Cheshire cat grin grew on his face. “Excellent. Well, well, perhaps there’s hope for you lot yet.”

  With that the professor swung his legs on to his desk and began talking about Ancient Egypt. Then it was like someone had cast a spell over the classroom. Nobody moved, nobody spoke, it seemed like nobody was even breathing. (But, of course, that bit is just what they call poetic license, where I’m using my words to make the story sound more dramatic and interesting, because if we had all really stopped breathing then it would have made the rest of this story a bit difficult, and I certainly wouldn’t be the one telling it, what with being completely dead and all.) What I’m really trying to explain is that Professor Tweep was telling us stories that were almost as exciting and adventurous as a Dougie Valentine book. There were explorers, and mummies, and ancient tombs, and lost treasures. Somehow, when Professor Tweep started speaking about these things, he stopped being a bespectacled walrus, and he became a dashing adventurer – his eyes big and gleaming as he leaned forward in his chair, rubbing his hands together.

  Suddenly, he stopped talking and pulled the napkin out of the front of his shirt and looked at it in a slightly surprised way. “Hum. Must have left that there since breakfast.” He shrugged and dabbed at his face, now hot and red from the effort of such splendid storytelling.

  The spell was broken, and everyone looked around, boggling at each other – each of us surprised to find ourselves in the classroom instead of
in the hot, sandy desert. Professor Tweep clapped his hands together sharply.

  “So,” he said, “we will be spending a lot of time with the Egyptians in the next couple of weeks, leading up to our grand exhibition. Exciting stuff, eh?” He swept his eyes from side to side as we all bobbed our heads up and down like those nodding dog toys.

  “Yes, you?” Professor Tweep pointed to Kip, whose hand had shot up in the air.

  “Excuse me, sir, er, Your Honour, I mean, Mr Professor … sir,” mumbled Kip in the voice of a boy tying his tongue in the sort of knots a circus contortionist would be proud of.

  “Speak up, Lad!” roared the professor.

  “Yes, sir, sorry, sir,” gulped Kip a bit louder. “I was just wondering… Can you tell us a bit more about the artefacts that are coming here – to the school, I mean?”

  “Ahh. Yes. Very interesting.” The professor stood and moved to the front of his desk, leaning back against it. His hands were clutching the top of the desk on either side of him, so hard that his knuckles were poking up like snowy mountaintops. “These particular artefacts, as you know, belonged to Sir Percival Van Bothing, a former student of Saint Smithen’s; a keen collector in his own right, of course, who also inherited a great deal of the pieces that had been in his family for many, many years.”

  Professor Tweep’s grip on the desk loosened as he drifted into storytelling mode once more.

  “The Van Bothing collection is truly one of the most outstanding in the world. And not simply because of the quality of the pieces it contains, but because of the story that goes along with them.” He eyed us all beadily, and paused, like a brilliant actor, making sure he had our undivided attention, making sure we were sitting right on the very edge of our seats, waiting to hear his next line. He cleared his throat, and then in a hushed tone, he said, “I am speaking, of course, of the Pharaoh’s Curse.”

  Chapter Eight

  A great big gasp blew through the classroom like a gale-force gust of wind. A curse. A real curse. Had he just said that? I couldn’t believe it.

  “But what is the Pharaoh’s Curse?” I blurted out, my voice sounding too loud in the quiet, still room. Professor Tweep’s eyes locked on to mine with a frown, and I felt my face heating up like a fiery furnace. Slowly, I raised my hand.

  “Yes?” snapped the professor.

  “But what is the Pharaoh’s Curse, sir?” I said meekly.

  He smiled a big crocodile smile that showed off all his teeth.

  “I shouldn’t tell you, really – it’s far too horrible and will frighten you all to death,” he muttered. “but I suppose that can’t be helped. So would you like to hear the tale of the Pharaoh’s Curse?”

  “YES!” we all shouted, with one giant voice.

  “… please,” came a small, polite voice from somewhere near the back.

  The professor nodded and returned to his chair. He closed his eyes slightly, a sign that I had already begun to realize meant the start of a story.

  “The Van Bothing collection contains many interesting pieces, but the most interesting artefacts of all are connected to the mummy. This particular mummy lies in a beautiful wooden sarcophagus, covered in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. From these hieroglyphs we know that this mummy is the body of Ankhenamun, the powerful high priest of the sun god Ra, which meant he was in charge of all the rituals and prayers that had to do with that particular god. Our story begins, so the legend goes, over three thousand years ago, when Ankhenamun was the most trusted advisor to the great pharaoh Amenhotep.

  “The pharaoh had many treasures, but his most prized possession was a ruby, as big as a fist, carved into the shape of a scarab beetle. In Ancient Egypt, the scarab, or dung beetle, was an emblem of rebirth – the way it rolled its dung ball along the ground was similar to the way they thought the sun god Ra rolled across the sky each day. The pharaoh believed that his precious scarab beetle was somehow the key to his own regeneration and so he guarded it jealously. The story goes that the ruby was bewitched: that it was so beautiful, so tempting, that it would dazzle anyone who looked at it for too long to the point of madness. The desire to own the ruby drove several men insane, as their obsession consumed them, and in fact, a few unsuccessful efforts were even made to steal the scarab from the locked chamber in which the pharaoh kept it safely hidden. Those who were caught were buried alive, their tormented souls destined to haunt the ruby for all eternity.”

  I could already feel my heart hammering like a tap-dancing gerbil. My detective senses were tingling, and I pulled out my notebook, furiously scribbling down Professor Tweep’s every word.

  “One day Ankhenamun came to the pharaoh with a prophecy,” the professor continued. “Ankhenamun told the pharaoh that the ruby scarab would be stolen in the next three days, and that the pharaoh himself would not live for more than twenty-four hours after the theft took place. The pharaoh was frightened, and he immediately went to the special chamber where his ruby was kept. There it was, safe and sound, sparkling wonderfully. The pharaoh picked it up and vowed that for the next three days it would not leave his side. He kept the ruby with him wherever he went, and when he slept, he slept with the scarab under his pillow, and with fifty guards posted outside his bedroom doors. On the third morning he awoke to find the ruby scarab had disappeared. The pharaoh shouted, and in rushed the fifty guards, all of them swearing that no one had entered or exited the room all night. They tore the bedroom apart, searching for the ruby, until eventually one of the soldiers gave a cry. In the corner of the room, under one of the stones on the floor, they found a tunnel, one that must have taken many months to dig, and that led out past the edge of the palace. Whoever had crept in and stolen the ruby had escaped that way hours earlier.

  “The pharaoh was furious, and terrified, knowing that according to the prophecy he did not have long left to live. He had the tunnel blocked up and locked himself in his room, this time with one hundred guards stationed outside. He had all his food and drink brought to him by a trusted servant who had to taste everything before the pharaoh would have any himself, and who had to sit at the pharaoh’s side while he slept. The pharaoh summoned Ankhenamun to his room and told him that he had placed a curse on the ruby scarab, that whoever had stolen it would come to an untimely end, and that the spirit of the pharaoh himself would haunt whoever possessed it. Ankhenamun tried to soothe the pharaoh, but he was in a towering rage and he shouted terrible curses, vowing revenge on the thief in this life and the next.”

  A collective shudder ran around the room, and Professor Tweep’s voice dropped down lower.

  “The next morning the guards opened the door and found both the servant and the pharaoh were dead, an empty wine glass still gripped in the pharaoh’s cold hand. He had been poisoned. The ruby scarab was not found, and the kingdom was dealt another blow when, only two days after the death of the pharaoh, his beloved advisor Ankhenamun dropped down dead as a stone.

  “Two hundred years ago, when Ankhenamun’s tomb was discovered by Sir Percival Van Bothing’s ancestor, Lord Anthony Van Bothing, archaeologists carefully examined the mummies’ remains, and when they unwrapped the bandages, imagine their shock when they found, in the space where the priest’s heart had once been, the precious ruby scarab beetle sparkling there instead. It had been Ankhenamun himself who had stolen it, and who on his deathbed had ordered his servants to conceal it inside his mummified body so that he could keep it all to himself even after death. He was very cunning, you see – by bringing his so-called prophecy to the pharaoh, Ankhenamun had tricked him into removing the ruby from the safe chamber in which it was usually hidden. He must have been planning for months, digging his tunnel, all the time consumed by his own obsession. I leave it up to you to decide whether his death was simply a coincidence or whether the Pharaoh’s Curse had claimed its first victim!”

  Professor Tweep finished his story with a flourish of his hand and a stroke of
his moustache, clearly enjoying the look on our gobsmacked faces. After a small pause, everyone started talking at once.

  “But what happened next?”

  “Is the curse real?”

  “Did anyone else get hurt?”

  “Is that the ruby beetle that was on the poster this morning?”

  The questions wriggled all over one another like a basket full of puppies, each person trying to make their voice the loudest.

  “That’s enough!” shouted Professor Tweep, and the whole room fell silent again. “Yes, the ruby beetle is the same one that was on the poster. Both the scarab and the mummy of Ankhenamun will be appearing in the exhibition, so you may see them for yourself” – he paused dramatically – “if you dare!”

  “But what about the curse?!” squeaked the girl sitting next to Annabelle Forthington-Smythe.

  “Ah, yes, the curse…” sighed the professor. “Yes, it is interesting indeed. There are those who claim that the curse exists. And it is true that the Van Bothing family have had more than their fair share of bad luck since they discovered the ruby.”

  “What do you mean, professor?” asked Annabelle in a wispy, lisping little voice. “The Van Bothing family were very rich and successful. Sir Percy was a great friend of my father.” She smiled around the room, smugly, her blue eyes like two little ice chips.

  “Ahhh, yes, but at what cost, eh?” asked Professor Tweep, rubbing his balding head. “There were so many tragedies in that family,” he muttered, picking up his napkin once more to rub his red face as he stared into the distance “They’ve had such terrible luck for a long time now.” His musing was interrupted by the shrill twang of the school bell, and this seemed to snap the professor out of his daydream. “Yes, well, superstitious nonsense, of course. That’s quite enough of that. Humph. Now, off you go to your next lesson. No dilly-dallying!”