Tut--My Epic Battle to Save the World

by P. J. Hoover

  Then images of Gil began to fill my mind. Gil and I together, at our townhouse. Gil going away. Gil in the battle I’d just seen in the swamp. Gil being kidnapped. Held prisoner. And with each image, something pulled on my scarab heart, almost like it was being yanked from my chest. And yet it stayed warm and strong. And the energy continued to run through me.

  Finally Nephthys pulled away, releasing my shoulders. Her third eye closed, though the other two remained open.

  “I see how things are, Tutankhamun,” she said. “I see exactly how things are. You want to be strong. You want to do this. But you can’t. No matter how much you want to, you can’t do it alone. And you are in danger. Severe danger.”

  I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. I was immortal. I was more than capable of defeating Apep.

  “If this is about Apep, then I am totally up for it,” I said.

  She slowly shook her head. “No, Tutankhamun. You are not. You will fail if you do this.”

  I hated her words. I hated even considering that I wouldn’t get Gil back.

  “Don’t worry,” Hapi said, stepping up next to her. “Tut isn’t going to deal with Apep anymore. I’m going to retrieve the sun disk, and I’m going to imprison Apep myself.”

  “I have to do it,” I said.

  “Because of Gilgamesh,” Nephthys said. “I see that’s where your thoughts are. You are connected.”

  “Exactly. I am going to free Gil and then imprison Apep.”

  But Nephthys shook her head. “Not you, Tutankhamun. You don’t have the power to do this. And don’t forget the danger. It is coming for you. Because of the connection. It will take you. And then you will be lost to us also.”

  She was wrong. That’s all there was to it. Danger or not, I was totally going to succeed. And I was going to do it before Hapi did, because Hapi had already as good as assumed that Gil was dead. If he imprisoned Apep, Gil would die, for real this time. But I kept my mouth shut.

  “Enough about this,” Nephthys said, pressing her palm to her third eye again. “How is that nephew of mine doing? I’ve seen dreadful things.”

  She had to be talking about Horus, since he was her sister’s son.

  “He’s not doing so good,” I said. “This whole thing with Apep … it’s really got him … well, it’s got him confused.”

  Her third eye closed. “So it’s worse than I’ve imagined. Tell me everything, Tutankhamun.”

  So I told her about how strange Horus had been acting. I kind of minimized the parts about him nearly clawing my eyes out; I didn’t want to worry her. I did mention how mangy he looked. Auntie N kept squeezing her third eye shut, like somehow she could actually see what I was saying and confirm it by my words.

  “It’s the impending darkness. The shifting of the world. Apep’s chaos beginning to take hold,” she said, when I’d finished. “Oh, his mother is not going to be happy at all. Not at all. But enough about that cat.” She spotted Henry, and her third eye flew open wide. “What do we have here?” She pressed a finger to her thick lips.

  “This is my friend, Henry.” I didn’t add that he was the whole reason we were here at all. If Auntie N found out I hadn’t wanted to come, that was the kind of thing that could offend a goddess for hundreds of years.

  But she spun on me. “I can hear your thoughts, Tutankhamun.”

  I took a step back, as she almost seemed to grow taller. And wider. “Yeah, about that—”

  But thank the gods, Auntie N turned back to Henry. “We’ll deal with you later. For now, Henry. Henry. Henry. I do see the problem.”

  “Problem?” I said. “What kind of problem?”

  But Nephthys wasn’t interested in answering my question. I figured Henry was in for the whole third-eye thing, too. But instead she grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him forward. Henry went with her completely willingly, even though I wanted to grab him back. I didn’t want Henry to get mummified. I liked hanging out with him. But Henry must not have been worried, because he followed her to the far side of the room and lay down on a granite slab that was covered with all sorts of disgusting stains.

  Did I mention that funeral homes were not a fun place to hang out? Why had I not found a way to talk Henry out of coming here?

  I hurried over. “What’s going on, Henry?” Maybe he was sick, and I just hadn’t noticed. Except I would have noticed. I spent a lot of time with Henry.

  “Shhh…” Auntie N said, placing her finger to her wide lips. Unlike Auntie Isis, Nephthys didn’t wear any makeup or nail polish or anything like that. They didn’t even look like sisters. Or act like sisters. Auntie Isis would have covered Henry in mummy wrappings by now. Auntie N, though she was probably an expert in the whole mummification thing, didn’t seem to want to pull Henry’s brains out through his nose. She grabbed a scarab-beetle amulet that was as big as my fist and placed it on Henry’s chest. I guess his nervousness had finally set in, because he was breathing really fast, and his muscles were all clenched up. And then she grabbed a deck of oversize tarot cards.

  “Try to relax, Henry,” Auntie N said. “If you don’t relax, we’ll be here all day.”

  Seeing as how it was midnight—the start of a fresh new day—being here for the next twenty-four hours was not what I had in mind.

  Auntie N flipped the tarot cards over, one by one, laying them on Henry’s stomach. With her other hand, she pressed her palm onto the scarab-beetle amulet, and it began to glow a bright green. Underneath it, Henry started to glow also, not just from a scarab heart, like I do, but all over his body, like he had with the scorpion bouncers. Then Auntie N started reciting a bunch of Egyptian words. It only took a few of them for me to recognize them as a spell from the Book of the Dead.

  There were lots of spells in the Book of the Dead. Hundreds. There were even some that had never made it to modern-day translation. But I still knew them. And I recognized this one after the first four words. It was a spell to Thoth, for not dying again. Seeing as how Henry had already kind of died once, and that Thoth was now protecting Henry, it made sense for Auntie N to pick this spell. But the longer she chanted it, the more Henry glowed. The entire room lit up around us as the green light shone from the scarab amulet and from Henry. Hapi hurried around Auntie N, handing her various incense burners and feathers that she waved over Henry. And Henry, for as nervous as he’d been only minutes ago, looked really relaxed.

  I didn’t dare speak. I didn’t want to interrupt the work of the gods. I prayed to Osiris as Auntie N chanted, willing him to not let Henry get hurt. I still didn’t know why Henry wanted to come here, but Nephthys obviously did. The light was almost blinding. Energy brimmed at the edges of my skin, like it had when she was looking into my soul. I opened myself to that energy, and my scarab heart began to charge. To fill with the immortal energy that kept me strong. I normally charged it at obelisks, but that’s only because they collected this power from the gods. Auntie N was here now, generating the power.

  I lost track of how long I recharged. I wasn’t aware of anything going on around me. And when the green glow finally faded, I was sure I could do anything. I could jump to the top of mountains. I could swim under the sea. And above all, I knew I could defeat Apep, no matter what Auntie N said.

  Auntie N pulled the scarab amulet from Henry’s chest and handed it to Hapi. Henry sat up. He didn’t look any different than before.

  “So, what’d you find out?” Henry asked. He swung his feet off the side of the granite table like he was at the doctor’s office.

  Auntie N came around to face him. She grabbed him by the shoulders, and I knew she was giving him the third-eye stare.

  “You, Henry, are a complete mystery, that’s what you are.”

  This was not the answer Henry was expecting. “What do you mean, a complete mystery?”

  She shook her head. “I mean that I just don’t know. But don’t you worry. I’ll talk with my sister. We’ll devote our time to researching the issue.”

  “What
issue?” I finally said. I was sick of not knowing what was going on. This was my best friend we were talking about.

  Auntie N tilted her head in my direction. “You don’t know?”

  I shook my head. What hadn’t Henry told me?

  “It’s about my … immortality,” Henry said.

  “So are you immortal?” I said.

  He threw his hands up in the air. “I don’t know. That’s why I came here. I wanted to ask the gods.”

  “And I should have been able to tell you,” Auntie N said. “I was sure that the spell would tell us. But I’ve never seen anything like it. It seems that you are neither mortal nor immortal.”

  “But he has to be one or the other,” I said.

  Auntie N narrowed her third eye at me. “Why?”

  “Well, it just makes logical sense. Either you’re mortal or you’re immortal.”

  “Well, when you make the rules, that’s what you can decide,” Auntie N said. “For now, it remains a mystery.”

  16

  WHERE I ALMOST GO FOR A SWIM

  It was two o’clock Sunday afternoon when we finally walked out of Dynasty Funeral Homes. Somehow, that whole tarot card reading/scarab beetle amulet spell that Auntie N had done had taken over twelve hours. Now it was way too late in the day to find the disk and trap Apep. It would be sunset in a couple hours. But I could at least get the sun disk. Then tomorrow there would be no stopping me.

  “We’re going to the Library of Congress,” I said. There was no way I could let Hapi get to it before me. He wouldn’t save Gil. He’d just imprison Apep and not worry about who died. At the thought of Hapi, a couple thorny vines sprouted from the ground and twisted around my feet, reaching toward Henry.

  My Osiris-given powers! They were returning!

  Whatever Auntie N had done, they were coming back. I tried to make a couple more vines grow, but it was like the more I thought about it, the harder it got. Still, it gave me hope that with time, all my Osiris-given powers would return. I’d be better than I’d ever been, what with the powers of both Osiris and Nergal at the tips of my fingers.

  “Watch where you grow that stuff,” Henry said, stepping to the side so the vines wouldn’t twist around his ankles. “And I can’t go with you.”

  “What do you mean you—oh, this is about your parents, isn’t it?” I said, plucking one of the vines and running it between my fingers. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life.

  Henry nodded. “They like you. A lot. I swear it’s not you.”

  Of course it wasn’t me. People loved me. It was part of the magnetism that came along with being pharaoh. It wasn’t some weird mistake that the royal families always came to power. There was something special about the pharaoh lineage. We were descended from Osiris himself, if Horus could be believed.

  “You can’t get out of it?” I wanted Henry along, but I didn’t want to wait. Hapi had stayed at Dynasty Funeral Homes as long as we had. He’d helped Auntie N. But now there was nothing to keep him from getting the sun disk himself. He could be getting closer with each second.

  Henry shook his head. “I’m supposed to go to some musical.”

  “Like a real musical?” I said. Musicals were worse than cleaning cat litter. There was all that singing and dancing. Not that I cleaned cat litter. The shabtis did that for me. But I’d watched them clean it plenty of times. I’d smelled it.

  “They got tickets six months ago,” Henry said. “My mom bought me a new shirt and a tie and everything. I can’t get out of it. Plus they promised to take me out to eat.”

  With the way Henry had been eating these days, I hoped his parents were going to bring some extra cash. I didn’t say anything, but I would have suffered through a musical if it meant I had parents to take me.

  We parted ways, Henry off to listen to singing for the rest of the night, and me alone to the Library of Congress. There must be some way I could get in to the Hall of Artifacts in the middle of the day without a whole bunch of people noticing. But around about the time I got to the Lincoln Memorial, my head started to swim. I blinked a couple times to clear it, but the world only got murkier. If it was another vision of Gil, I didn’t want to miss a second of it. It might tell me where he was.

  Chills ran through me. My scarab heart thrummed. Reality started slipping away, and little flashes filled the edges of my vision. Something black blurred around me, moving so fast I could barely see it. And then a voice sounded in my head.

  “Are you there?” the voice said. It sounded a lot like Gil except kind of muffled.

  Gil! This was great! He was trying to get in touch with me. He could have found a way to communicate through whatever link we had. Maybe it had something to do with my scarab heart being charged.

  “I can’t see you,” his voice said, and this time, even though it was still muffled, it sounded even more like him.

  “I’m here,” I said, aloud. I wasn’t sure if anyone around me could hear. The entire world had slipped away. I couldn’t see anyone. Couldn’t see anything but the Lincoln Memorial and the steps and the Reflecting Pool.

  “Great Master, who are you talking to?” Colonel Cody asked.

  I looked down for him, but I couldn’t see him or Majors Rex and Mack either.

  “It’s Gil,” I said to the shabtis. I didn’t want them to worry.

  The shabtis didn’t answer.

  “Let me see you,” Gil’s voice said.

  I didn’t know why Gil would want to see me. Maybe he wanted to make sure it was really me. But if he couldn’t see me through the link, I wasn’t sure what his plan was.

  “I’m right here,” I said. “I’m looking for you. Where are you? Are you okay?”

  “Walk to the water,” Gil said. “I can see your reflection there.”

  It seemed a little strange, but if he was suspicious, then I wanted to show him it was really me. I walked toward the water, but each step I took, the dizziness in my head became stronger.

  From far away, only the monuments and stuff could be seen in the Reflecting Pool, but as I got closer, other images began to take shape. Trees and benches lining the pool. Clouds overhead in the gray sky. They crystalized in the still water, perfectly reflected, like a mirror.

  Just like a mirror.

  Like the mirrors in the funhouse.

  I halted my steps.

  “Why do you want to see me?” I asked, and skepticism filled my voice.

  “Go to the water,” Gil’s voice said, except it had gone back to being muffled. Or maybe it wasn’t muffled. Maybe it wasn’t Gil’s voice after all.

  “Why?” I said.

  “I need to see what you look like.”

  “No.” I planted my feet on the ground and looked once more for my shabtis, but I still couldn’t see them in the vision.

  “Yes,” the voice said. “You can’t defy me, scarab heart.”

  Before I realized what was happening, my feet started moving again … without me controlling them. My scarab heart yanked me forward, step after unwilling step.

  I pulled back, but I couldn’t stop moving. And I knew, more than anything, that I couldn’t let myself get to the water. This was Apep, communicating with me through the link. Trying to see me. I fought as hard as I could, but my feet kept moving.

  I pulled for the powers in my scarab heart, but they didn’t come. But even were I to manage to use my powers, I wasn’t sure what I would do. This was a vision. I couldn’t fight it with fire.

  “Almost there,” the voice said. It sounded nothing like Gil. It hissed like a snake and made me shudder. “Almost where I can see you.”

  Nephthys’s words kept slipping into my mind. You are in great danger. This had to be exactly what she’d meant. I hated that she was right. But it made no sense. Why would Apep want to see me? Why would he want anything with me? He had Gil, immortal or not, and Gil was the one Apep had the vendetta against.

  I tried to stay confident, but with each step, despair crept in.
I kept walking. I kept fighting. The complete lack of control was infuriating. And then someone stepped in front of me, and sounds erupted in my ears.

  It was like I’d been dropped in the front row of a rock concert, like there were huge oversize speakers that were blasting at top volume. They played some weird trance electronic music with all sorts of digital beats that sounded like a hacked-up version of rap music. Instantly my feet stopped moving. Relief filled me. I was still far enough away from the Reflecting Pool that my image wasn’t visible.

  I tried to raise my hands to my ears, to block out the noise, but I couldn’t do it. All I could do was stand there and listen to the music. My ears would be ringing for days. But as the seconds ticked by, the world around me began to return. To fill in with tourists and joggers and everything else that belonged in Washington, D.C., in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. Finally, I was able to raise my hands. When they touched my ears, I discovered that I was actually wearing a pair of huge headphones.

  I blinked my eyes and looked forward. There stood Igigi, with Humbaba next to him, body lowered, tail straight in the air in attack posture. Igigi motioned at me to keep the headphones on. So I did.

  He roved his eyes around—all eight of them—watching the people pass us by. The Mall was packed, what with everyone getting ready for the Fourth of July. And they’d wheeled in giant towers of lights to help brighten up the place, since it was getting so dark so early.

  My head cleared with each beat of the music, and my body relaxed. Igigi kept two of those eyes fixed on me, watching every twitch of my muscles. And after a solid five minutes had passed, he tapped his own ears and gave me a huge thumbs-up. I pulled off the earphones and let them hang around my neck.

  “Got yourself in a bind, didn’t you, King Tut?” Igigi said.

  Humbaba finally relaxed. He sat back on his haunches and his snake tail wagged back and forth.