Curse of the Mummy's Uncle

by J. Scott Savage

  Cupping the light with the palm of his hand, Angelo stepped through the stone archway. Nick couldn’t help noticing the carvings of strange, horned beasts, fanged snakes, and humans in all manner of pain.

  “Reminds me of going to the dentist’s office,” Carter said, studying a particularly gruesome image of a man screaming.

  The three boys moved quickly through the dark building. The flashlight’s beam revealed stone benches, intricately patterned floors, and strange carvings on the walls. One room was empty except for six curved stones sticking out of the floor and a pair of circular holes close to the ceiling.

  “What do you think those men were carrying out?” Nick asked.

  “Gold,” Carter said. “And jewels. Crowns and necklaces and coins, like in that movie where the kids look for the pirate treasure.”

  “Goonies,” Nick said, remembering the boatload of riches all too well. One of those gold necklaces would buy every game system and video game imaginable. Not to mention every monster movie, and the materials to build some amazing Halloween costumes.

  “No way.” Angelo broke up their dream. “If it was treasure, why would they go to all the trouble to sneak it out? Jiménez must have told Dr. Canul what I said about aliens, and now he’s trying to remove the evidence. I think it’s a huge government conspiracy.”

  They turned a corner and Nick realized they’d gone completely through the temple. “Where’s the entrance to the pyramid?”

  “Maybe there is no entrance,” Carter said. “Maybe the workers were just carrying down their equipment for the night.”

  That would be a relief. If there was no secret entrance, the boys could go back to the tent before they got caught, or shot, or eaten.

  “Maybe,” Angelo murmured. He turned around and walked back through the temple, knocking on walls and touching carvings.

  Nick noticed Carter had started knitting again. “What are you making, anyway?”

  Carter held up a rectangle striped with different colors of yarn. There was a hole in the middle. He stuck his head through the hole, and the front of the rectangle barely reached his chest. “It’s one of those Mexican poncho things.”

  “A serape,” Nick said. It was ragged looking and lumpy in places, and it looked like it would take weeks, if not months, to finish. But the fact that he’d made it himself was pretty cool. “Maybe my mom could show me how to do that.”

  “I don’t know. It’s a lot harder than it looks. It makes Dark Souls II look like finger painting.” Carter pulled off the serape and went back to work with his needles. “When it’s done, I’m going to make a big hat to go with it.”

  A heavy grating sound came from inside the temple. Nick and Carter spun around.

  “Angelo?” Nick called.

  There was no answer. Nick stepped farther into the temple and called again. The building wasn’t that big. Angelo should have been able to hear him from anywhere inside.

  Without a light, it was hard to see anything. The boys shuffled slowly forward. Nick held a hand out in front of him to keep from running into anything.

  “This is how it happens,” Carter whispered from the darkness. “One minute there are three of you. The next minute there are two. Then one. The next thing you know they’re making a TV movie about how you all disappeared without a trace.”

  “We’re going to find Angelo,” Nick said. But his heart was pounding. What if one of the archaeologists grabbed him? Or an alien? Or the pus demon?

  Something moved behind them. Nick turned. Glowing orange eyes stared down at him. Fire shown from diamond-shaped nostrils. Sharp teeth as big as his arm glittered. It was a demon with a head as large as the room. The demon opened its huge, gaping mouth, and Nick screamed.

  Carter held out his knitting needles, hands shaking. “Touch me and die!” he shouted in a quivering voice.

  “Touch me and die?” Angelo stepped out of the demon’s mouth, a wide grin on his face. “What are you going to do, knit me to death?”

  As Angelo emerged from the opening, the demon’s eyes and nose stopped glowing, and Nick realized the teeth were the curved stones he’d seen earlier. “It’s a door,” he said, his voice weak and still a little shaky.

  “I told you the entrance might look like a monster,” Angelo said. “Look, it’s pretty cool.” He pushed on one of the teeth in the floor and a stone swung down, blending in with the wall. Angelo pushed the tooth again and shoved the door open, making the grinding sound Nick and Carter had heard earlier.

  “Couldn’t you just have said, ‘Look, guys, I found a door’?” Carter asked, lowering his needles. “You had to scare us half to death?”

  Angelo laughed. “Sorry. I shut the door behind me and was trying to figure out how to open it. It’s pretty awesome how the light makes it look like a monster though, isn’t it?” He stepped through the door and shined the light, turning the wall back into a demon.

  “Yeah, awesome,” Carter grunted.

  “Let’s go down and have a look around before the archaeologists come back,” Angelo said.

  Nick peered down the dark passage. The walls were coated with moss and the floors looked wet and slick. “Are you sure it’s safe? What about those traps you were talking about?”

  Angelo handed him the second flashlight. “The archaeologists went down, and they survived.”

  “That’s what the people with Indiana Jones say, right before they get hit by poison darts,” Carter said.

  Nick stepped through the demon’s mouth, ducking his head to keep from hitting the stone. “It can’t be too dangerous, can it? I mean, they wouldn’t let families come here on vacation if they could get seriously hurt.”

  “So far, your family is the only one here,” Carter said. “Maybe that should tell you something.” But he followed Angelo when he walked into the tunnel.

  The passage was just as damp and slippery as Nick had imagined. He took small, shuffling steps to keep from falling, and ran one hand along the wall.

  Angelo stopped at a section of wall with a series of holes drilled into it and shined his light excitedly up and down. “Look at this!”

  Carter pushed past Nick to get a look, then shook his head in disgust. “Yeah, these are some totally cool holes. Maybe next we can find a rock. Or some dust.”

  “These aren’t just holes. They’re stars. See how they form constellations?” Angelo pointed his finger from one dot to another. “That’s the Big Dipper, also known as Plough. And that’s Orion.” He handed Nick his flashlight and swabbed a couple of the holes, carefully noting the time and date in his notebook. “It’s important to write down where we took each sample. That way, when we get an alien hit, we will be able to track everywhere they went.”

  Nick glanced the way they’d come, wondering how long it would be before the men came back.

  “Is it time?” someone asked.

  “Time for what?” Nick said.

  Carter looked up from his knitting. “Dinner?”

  Nick snorted. “What are you talking about? We already had dinner.”

  “What are you talking about?” Carter asked, clearly irritated. “You asked me what it was time for, and I said dinner. If that’s not it, I give up. What’s it time for?”

  “How should I know? You’re the one who asked.”

  “Would you two stop arguing,” Angelo said, tucking the swabs into his testing kit. “You’re going to wake the dead. And there are probably at least a few of them down here.”

  Nick glared at Carter, wondering what the point of the argument had been, but his friend had gone back to work on his serape.

  The three of them continued down the hallway, Angelo taking DNA samples every so often.

  “Are you here to free me?” a voice asked.

  Nick spun around, sure Carter was messing with him again, but Carter had drifted behind a little and was fiddling with his serape.

  “Did you say something?” Nick asked Angelo.

  Angelo barely glanced up from h
is work. “Nope. Why?”

  Nick shrugged. “No reason, I guess I thought I heard something.” Maybe it was the strange carvings on the walls, or maybe it was the fact that they were going deeper and deeper down a pathway that supposedly led to the underworld, but he was starting to feel a little freaked out.

  The deeper they went into the pyramid, the cooler the air got and the narrower the passage grew. Soon, Angelo had to duck to keep from hitting his head. Nick tried to imagine what it would be like to be shut up in this cold, small tunnel, and he shivered.

  At the top of a staircase, Nick noticed a carving of a man in a small boat floating down a river. The man was wearing a feathered crown and a fur that might have been the pelt of a jaguar. “What’s that all about?” he whispered, running his finger along the curving lines of the river.

  “The river of the dead,” a voice whispered back.

  This time both Carter and Angelo were too far away to have said what he’d just heard. “That’s it,” he said, backing away from the wall. “I’m getting out of here.”

  Angelo, who had been kneeling a little farther up the tunnel, put away his swab and walked over. “What’s wrong?”

  “I thought I heard something,” Nick said, the skin on his arms breaking out in goose bumps. “A kind of whispering.”

  Carter joined them and tilted his head. “I hear something too.”

  “You do?” Nick asked. Maybe he wasn’t going crazy after all.

  Angelo nodded. “It’s coming from down there. A kind of shhhhh sound.”

  The three of them looked down the staircase.

  “I’m officially freaked out,” Carter said.

  Angelo started down the stairs, but both Nick and Carter grabbed him.

  “Are you crazy?” Nick asked. “There could be anything down there.”

  “Which is why we have to find out,” Angelo said. “I want to find the room those men were bringing the boxes from. That might be our best chance to find alien traces.”

  Nick rubbed his lips. The voices had totally freaked him out, and all he wanted to do was go back into the tent.

  “You can wait here,” Angelo said. “I’ll take a quick look and come right back.”

  “No,” Carter said at once. “As soon as we split up, the mummies will come and rip out our eyeballs.”

  Nick crossed his arms in front of his chest, hands cupping his elbows. “Thanks for those encouraging words.” But Angelo was right. They had to find out what was going on now, or they might never get another chance. “Okay, we go down. But only to the bottom of the stairs. Then we’re out of here.”

  Carter and Angelo nodded.

  Walking single file, they started down the staircase. The steps were treacherous, worn smooth and slippery by who knew how many footsteps. Angelo led the way—flashlight probing the darkness ahead of him. Carter came next, and Nick was in the back, constantly checking over his shoulder.

  The farther down the staircase they went, the louder the whispering became. Nick began to imagine what awaited them at the bottom of the steps. Poisonous snakes, giant scorpions, three-headed aliens, mummies with bandages trailing behind them. Each image was worse than the last.

  Carter must have been having the same thoughts, because he held his serape out to Nick. “If I don’t make it, I want you to have this.”

  “We’re all going to make it,” Angelo said. “Look, we’ve reached the bottom of the—”

  Before he could complete his sentence, something reached out of the darkness and grabbed him.

  Angelo yelped and dropped his bag of swabs. Carter wheeled around and ran straight into Nick, covering him in loose yarn and knocking the flashlight out of his hands. Wrapped in Carter’s yarn, like a fly in a spiderweb, Nick could only watch in terror as the dark figure turned Angelo around.

  “What are you boys doing down here?” a stern voice asked.

  “Dr. Canul,” Nick said, a wave of relief washing over him. A bright light shined in his eyes, almost completely blinding him.

  “I told you three to stay in your tents.”

  “We, um, had to go to the bathroom,” Carter said, trying to untangle the yarn from himself and Nick.

  “The bathroom? At this time of night?” Dr. Canul’s dark eyes glared at each of the boys. “And you chose to do it inside one of the greatest archaeological digs of this century?”

  Nick felt something sharp jabbing him in the back, and retrieved one of Carter’s knitting needles. “Well, we didn’t exactly go to the bathroom. We were going to, but . . .”

  “We saw flashlights,” Angelo jumped in. “And we were afraid thieves were breaking into the pyramid. And look who we found. Maybe you can explain what you’re doing down here at this time of night.”

  The doctor’s thin lips pressed so tightly together that they looked sharp enough to slice cheese. “I have no need to answer to a bunch of trespassing children. But if you must know, my men discovered a new cache of valuable pieces just after dinner. I wanted to get them safely stored and cataloged before morning.”

  “Pieces?” Angelo asked. “Are you sure you don’t mean alien artifacts?”

  “Aliens?” Dr. Canul sputtered. “Is that what this is about? Please tell me you’re not one of those crazies.” He rolled his eyes. “Take me to your leader.”

  Angelo dropped his head. Nick couldn’t help feeling sorry for his friend.

  “What are these?” Dr. Canul asked, picking up the bag of swabs.

  Carter snatched it out of his hand. “Q-tips.”

  The doctor narrowed his eyes.

  Carter stuck a finger into one ear and twisted it. “Jungles give me nasty earwax. I could start a candle factory.”

  Dr. Canul puffed out his cheeks and exhaled loudly.

  “There’s something down here,” Nick said, pointing past the archaeologist. “I heard it whispering.”

  Dr. Canul rolled his eyes. “Did you really?” He waggled his fingers in the air. “Maybe it’s ghosts. Booo. Booo.”

  “I heard it too,” Carter said. “It was kind of a whooshing sound.”

  “We all heard it,” Angelo agreed.

  “Come with me.” Dr. Canul marched them around the corner to a small waterfall dropping into a pool of deep blue water. “What you heard was this. You boys could easily have stumbled into it in the dark. And drowned.”

  The archaeologist pointed to the stairs. “This is exactly the sort of reason you shouldn’t be here. And I will see to it that you do not step a foot inside this site again. You three will return to your tents, where I will wake up your parents and tell them exactly what you have done.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Nick said, thinking of his mom’s reaction. “You have things to do here, and we can tell them ourselves.”

  The tall, bearded man shook his head and marched them up the stairs.

  Nick gulped. This wasn’t going to be pretty.

  “I can’t believe you did something like that,” Mom growled. It was seven o’clock the next morning, and she was still furious. “If we were home, I’d ground you for the rest of your life. I’m tempted to leave you in the tent for the rest of the day.”

  Angelo opened his mouth, but Nick shook his head. He knew his parents well enough to understand that nothing he and his friends said now would make a difference. Besides, he could just imagine his parents’ response to one of Angelo’s rambling lectures on how the pyramid was actually the home to aliens. “It was really dumb, and we’ll never do it again,” Nick said.

  Dad pulled his Indiana Jones hat low on his head. “You’re right, you won’t. The least you could have done was invited me to come with you.” Mom gave him a look and he quickly backtracked. “What I meant to say was that you will not leave the tent without letting one of us know where you are at all times.”

  “Yes,” Nick said. Some vacation this was turning out to be.

  Mom gave them all a disapproving look. Even Carter, whose knitting progress had clearly blown her away, wa
sn’t spared.

  “Let’s get some breakfast,” Dad said. “I’m so hungry I could eat a flying monkey.”

  Silently the five of them trooped across the camp to the meal tent. Along the way, Nick noticed that most of the men were already at work. “Why are there no women archaeologists?” he asked.

  “Maybe they’re too smart to come out here,” Carter said, slapping a bug on his neck.

  “More likely Dr. Canul is sexist,” Angelo said. “Some of the best scientists in the world are women.”

  Nick yawned. “Guess they start early around here.”

  “The early archaeologist unearths the worm,” a cheerful voice said. Mr. Jiménez walked out of the meal tent with a straw hat tilted jauntily on his head and a red bandanna tied around his neck. “It’s an archaeologist joke. Because we dig things up, and worms live in the ground.”

  When no one laughed, he lifted his hands. “I didn’t say it was a good joke.” He nodded sympathetically at the boys. “I understand you had a little run-in with the good doctor last night.”

  “Don’t bring it up,” Carter said.

  “Ahh.” Mr. Jiménez twined his fingers together and leaned toward Nick’s parents. “Don’t be too hard on them. Boys will be boys. And the doctor can be a little, shall we say, intense when it comes to his projects.”

  “It won’t happen again,” Mom said.

  “Of course not.” Mr. Jiménez grinned. “Come, let’s get you fed. We have a busy day ahead.”

  “Are we going inside the pyramid?” Dad asked. His hand went to his belt, and Nick noticed his father’s Indiana Jones whip coiled at his side.

  “Not today.” Mr. Jiménez led them into the tent, which was thick with the aroma of fresh tortillas and eggs. He nodded to Mom and Dad. “We will start the two of you with cleaning and sorting valuable artifacts.”

  “Treasure?” Dad asked, beaming.

  “Priceless treasures,” Mr. Jiménez said with a wink.

  “What about us?” Nick asked as the cook filled his plate with steaming eggs.

  “Do we get to look at the treasure too?” Carter asked.

  Mr. Jiménez patted Carter on the head. “We have a very special job for you boys.”