“Well,” Dudley harrumphed, “that’s not going to happen now. Spread the word, Delmer. Tonight, we fleece these bumpkins for all they’re worth. Then, in the morning, we’re packing up and moving out. Because a missing mummy’s one thing. But it’s not going to go well for us if all of a sudden we’ve got missing townsfolk showing up.”
Delmer blinked in confusion.
“Erm, not showing up.” Dudley frowned and kicked the sarcophagus lid shut with the spit-shined toe of his boot. “You know what I mean! If we’re not gone by the time our little Princess goes on a murderous, magic-fuelled, bloodthirsty rampage—and she will, mark my words—the locals will run us out of this one-horse backwater burg on a rail! That is, if the mummy doesn’t get us first!”
He stuffed the amulet back under his jacket and headed for the rear tent flap, drawing his sword again. Whether for show—if any of the carnival-goers happened to spot him—or because he was truly frightened of what might be lurking in the dark, it was hard to tell.
In the silence left behind in the Colonel’s blustering wake, Cheryl unrolled herself from her carpet. Tweed unfolded herself from her grandfather clock. Beneath her freckles, Cheryl’s face was a mask of pure outrage. Tweed’s grey eyes smouldered with fiery indignation. Not only was the Colonel a fraud (which, of course, they’d all suspected all along), but the mummy wasn’t(which, of course, they’d all suspected all along)!
And never mind the unforgivable things he’d said about the drive-in. Colonel Dudley had managed, through sheer recklessness, to put the entire town at grave risk of monsterization. That was beyond unforgiveable.
That was a call to arms.
9
THE BIRDS AND THE BEETLES
“What did I tell you?” Pilot said. He’d stepped out from his hiding spot and picked up the softball that he’d used as a distraction when Tweed had accidentally alerted Delmer and the Colonel. “The mummy walks. I knew it.”
“Geez, Flyboy …” Cheryl shook her head slowly and her pigtails swung back and forth. “I didn’t think you really believed in stuff like this. Not really. I mean, I thought you were always just kind of … humouring us. Right, Tweed?”
Tweed nodded.
“Nothing funny about it.” Pilot shrugged a shoulder, but the frown on his face was fierce and determined. “I think we got ourselves a real live game of ACTION!! goin’ on here. There’s a creature of the danged out there on the loose. And that is definitely something the Wiggins folk aren’t gonna understand. But you two girls do. That thing’s out there. It’s got Artie. And if we don’t get it back—if you don’t get it back—then Art-Bart’s not coming back!”
Cheryl swallowed the painful lump that had unexpectedly crawled up her throat at the thought. Okay, sure. Artie could be as annoying as a mosquito in a dark room. And maybe she and Tweed were a little hard on him at times. But it wasn’t because they didn’t like him. In fact, the annoyingness was, for lack of a better word, part of Shrimpcake’s charm. It was what made him such a delightful ACTION!! adversary. The notion of Artie being permanently gone made Cheryl feel almost the way she had in the days after the Sheriff had found her and Tweed alone: as if there was a hole in their world.
Tweed looked at her, and Cheryl knew that her cousin felt the same way.
“He’s right, partner,” Tweed said. “This is it. This is what we’ve trained for. This … is our purpose.” She turned toward the tent exit, hands on her hips, a determined expression on her face.
Cheryl stepped up beside her. “Roger that, Agent Tee,” she said, and headed for the door. “Let’s do this thing—”
The girls weren’t more than half a step out of the carnival tent when they ran into Mr. Bottoms, who, apparently, had managed to misplace his brood of boys yet again.
“Well, if it isn’t my two little rodeo-roundup helpers!” he exclaimed.
“We’re your what-now?” Tweed blinked up at him.
Mr. Bottoms’s distracted gaze drifted over the top of her head. “You wouldn’t happen to have seen my boys wandering around, would you?”
“You mean John, Paul, George and Bingo?” Tweed asked. “Uh … no. Why?”
“Well,” Mr. Bottoms said as he held up a greasespotted paper bag, “I was over getting a bag of minidonuts, and the boys were playing some sort of chasing game with the Bartleby boy—”
“Artie?!”
“You saw Shrimpcake?!”
“Where?!!”
Mr. Bottoms was unfazed by the three frantic young people peppering him with questions. He just pointed toward the game booths with one powdered-sugar-coated finger. “Over there,” he said. “Y’know, you should tell your little friend that corndogs and spinny rides don’t go so well together. He was looking mighty green around the gills. Mighty green.”
Cheryl, Tweed and Pilot took off to the game booths, with Mr. Bottoms close behind. There was a small crowd gathered to watch little Binky Barker going bananas with the Whack-A-Mole mallet, but Artie and the Bottoms boys quartet weren’t among them.
“Where did he go?” Cheryl asked, near frantic. If this all proved to be just some crazy prank of Artie’s, she was going to give him such a wedgie …
“Same place my boys wandered to, I’ll bet.” Mr. Bottoms scanned the crowd and shovelled mini-donuts into his mouth at the same time. “Danged if the missus didn’t tell me to keep an eye on the little monkeys, and double-danged if they didn’t just go and scamper off somewhere again …
Tweed groaned. Under any other circumstances, this would, of course, have been an excellent opportunity for the C+T Team to turn in another star sitter performance. As it was, the girls’ dance card was full up. Also, Mr. Bottoms didn’t seem too frantic. After all, Wiggins was a small community, close knit, and the good folk of the town tended to look after one another. Unless, of course, a lurking supernatural threat was stalking the good citizens.
“Ooh!” Mr. Bottoms suddenly exclaimed, pointing to one of the concession stands. “Fresh-squeezed lemonade! Maybe the boys are over there. I’d better go see. If they’re not, why then I’m sure they’re probably back with Mrs. Bottoms.” He crumpled up the nowempty donut bag. “These sugary little devils sure do make you thirsty …”
And off he went.
Cheryl and Tweed could actually hear Pilot’s teeth grinding together in frustration. Adults.
“C’mon,” Pilot said.
There was another distant shriek of fear, and a column of greenish fire shot into the air several tents over. The trio took off at a run, but by the time they got there, all they saw was a group of ladies, giggling nervously and fluttering their hands, chattering amid a haze of swampy-smelling fog.
“What a Halloween costume!” one of them said, pointing in the direction of the carnival’s main gate. “She ran that way! The dear little thing was all ratty bandages and rubber snakes, but they looked so real! Scared the dickens out of me—especially when her eyes lit up like they were on fire and she lobbed that smoke bomb! POOF and she was gone—just like that!”
“I think it’s terribly clever the way these carnival folk are pretending the mummy princess is real. It does make up for the shabby character of the rest of it,” another lady said.
Tweed looked at Cheryl. “Holy moly,” she murmured, pulling Cheryl out of earshot of the excitedly chattering women. “Pilot’s right. We’ve got a real live undead situation here, partner. And it’s going to be up to us—and our trusty crop-dusting pal—to save Wiggins Cross from the mummy’s wrath. Whatever that may be!”
Cheryl nodded, the cheery waggle of her pigtails at odds with her fierce expression. “We’d better suit up.”
To do that, they were going to have to go back to the barn to get their gear. Pilot waited, impatiently tapping one sneakered foot, as Tweed put her finger to her nose. Cheryl did the same. They winked. Nodded.
And then it was time for …
“… ACTION!!”
INT. THE JUNGLE-BOUND HEADQUARTERS OF THE
COMMANDOS -- NIGHT
CAMERA CLOSE-UP on a GLOVED HAND reaching
for a sleek black HIGH-TECH WEAPON, checking
the CARTRIDGE. This is the start of a classic
“ARMING SEQUENCE.”
SFX: MUSIC BEGINS A SLOW BUILD.
COMMANDO CEE swings the weapon up and checks
the calibration of the LASER-GUIDED SIGHT.
COMMANDO CEE
Weapons locked and loaded …
COMMANDO TEE
Check.
CAMERA PANS over two sets of GREEN-LENSED
GOGGLES, glowing in the darkness.
COMMANDO CEE
Night-vision goggles powered up …
COMMANDO TEE
Check.
SUPER-FAST JUMP-CUT SEQUENCE of all manner
of techno-gear being loaded into a black
messenger bag by gloved hands.
COMMANDO CEE
Non-lethal counter-measures,
spring-loaded containment coils,
projectile projection projector—
and projectiles …
COMMANDO TEE
Double-check.
SFX: MUSIC CONTINUES TO BUILD.
CAMERA PUSHES IN on the sleek contours,
flashing lights and super-high-tech body
armour detailing.
COMMANDO CEE
Ballistics-grade body armour, powered
up and ready to engage …
COMMANDO TEE
Triple-check-arino.
CAMERA PULLS BACK TO REVEAL: the COMMANDOS, fully armed and ready.
CAMERA ZOOMS IN on the COMMANDOS as they
exchange steely-eyed glances and raise
their weapons.
SFX: the sound of weapons cocking and an
ORCHESTRAL MUSIC SWELL.
COMMANDO CEE
Move out!
COMMANDO TEE
Move out!
CUT TO:
The COMMANDOS, fully armed and ready --
and now joined by PILOT COMMANDO, who has
outfitted himself in a STYLE ALL HIS OWN --
perform a SUPER-SLO-MO “HERO WALK” toward the
CAMERA. In SILHOUETTE …
The super-slo-mo sequence from the barn petered out into a kind of awkward, directionless shuffle as Pilot and the twins suddenly came face to face with … nothing much.
“Cut!” Tweed said again, frowning. Something wasn’t right. “Okay,” she said. “Um.”
Cheryl blinked at her cousin and waited, equally uncertain in the silence that followed their hero-strut.
“Let’s see now,” Tweed said. “We’ve got the gear …”
“Right.” Cheryl nodded, holding up a gear-festooned hand.
In actuality, the girls’ movie commando gear consisted of two sets of hockey shoulder-pads rescued from outside Wiggins’s only skating rink, a welding mask (Cheryl), a pair of cardboard 3D glasses with one blue lens and one red lens (Tweed), and a gear bag full of six cans of Day-Glo Silly String, a homemade crossbow and quiver stocked with two dozen spongy suction-cup Nerf arrows, a couple of coiled lengths of bubblegum-pink skipping rope, a dodge ball, a whiffle bat, several Slinkys, two pairs of fisherman’s hip waders, collapsible poles with green nylon fishing nets attached to the ends and a bag of Double Stuf Oreos with the word “BRIBES” written on it in black Magic Marker. Lastly, there was the pair of big old military-issue walkie-talkies—as with digital movie technology, the twins were wary of cellphones and preferred “old school” analog methods of communication—one painted candy-apple red, the other a glossy, gothy black, both sporting Dymo labels: CEE and TEE.
Oh yes. They definitely had the gear.
“We’ve got the grit …
“Check.”
That there was no denying. Grit they had aplenty. Buckets full.
Pilot was the one to step up and ask the obvious question. “Now what?” Now what, indeed?
The girls looked at Pilot. They looked at each other. They were all dressed up and ready to dish out some real-world Monster Mashing Mayhem. The only thing notably absent … was the monster. And that sort of rendered the whole situation, well, awkward.
Away from the carnival’s chaotic Tilt-A-Whirl atmosphere, the night was eerily still. All around was darkness, and silence broken only by the faint chirruping of crickets. Cheryl squinted back in the direction of the carnival, where all seemed to be carrying on in the usual fashion, without mayhem or murderous monsters running amok. It seemed that the creature might, indeed, have made a break for it and left the blaze of the midway lights behind.
“Huh. All quiet on the carnival front …” Cheryl jammed her fists on her hips. “Where d’you think our prehistoric princess shambled off to?”
“Can’t have gotten far.” Tweed frowned. “The typical mummy, according to my movie-based calculations, travels at a speed of 1.5 miles per hour, or roughly half the rate of a normal human.”
Another couple of circles and … nothing.
Cheryl shrugged. “Maybe Pilot could do some aerial scouting—”
“Are you nuts, Cher-bear?” Pilot spluttered. “My mom’ll kill me if I take my flyer out at night. And anyway, she ain’t in the best of shape right now! I told you before. She’s picked up a wicked shimmy—”
“Your mom’s a belly dancer?” Tweed frowned.
“No!” Pilot rolled his eyes. “I mean ‘she,’ the plane. Something’s up with her stabilizers and—”
“Wait.” Cheryl suddenly held up a silencing hand. “‘S’okay, Flyboy. Thanks for the offer, but we don’t need eyes in the sky. Not with that big ol’ chicken pointin’ the way for us.”
She pointed to the vulture gliding through the darkened sky. It was the same bald-headed, beadyeyed, scruffy-winged thing that had appeared, perched on the carnival tent pole, right around the time that the sarcophagus had lost its contents. A species of bird that, as far as Cheryl could remember, she’d never seen in the skies above Wiggins. She took a step forward, in the direction the bird flew, but the moon suddenly came out from behind a cloud, casting a spooky, silvery glow on the landscape, and Tweed hissed a sharp warning.
Cheryl froze, one foot hovering in the air, mid-step, and looked down at where Tweed pointed to the ground.
A swarm of scuttling beetles, just like the ones they’d seen at the carnival, carpeted the ground in front of the barn—a broad swath of them, flowing like a shiny, clickety-legged stream over the packed earth.
“Eww …!” Cheryl backpedalled rapidly, forgetting that she had told Pilot the day before that insects were harmless and to be left in peace. These bugs clearly hadn’t gotten that memo. They hissed menacingly, and their yucky little antennae waved in a threatening manner.
Tweed unsheathed her magnifying glass and twirled it around one finger like a wistful gunslinger, grimly wishing for a sunbeam to shoot in the direction of the beetle brigade. Their backs were to the barn door. There was no escape. Ahead of them was nothing but creepycrawly, buggy-bitey doom.
The bugs surged forward …
The trio cringed …
But suddenly, there was a yowl from inside the barn. One of Miss Parks’s fluffy little darlings—no doubt annoyed by the fact that they had yet to be given numnums—meowed loudly. The other fourteen furballs joined in the vocal protest, caterwauling with one voice. At the sound of their off-key yowl, the swarm of beetles reared back on their hairy little legs and hissed, flapping their wings. Then, like a throng of tiny synchronized swimmers, the bugs all spun around and skedaddled, disappearing in a flash into the long grass at the edge of the field by the barn.
Pilot and the twins sighed with relief.
“Betcha Mr. Neiderbach over at Bug-B-Gone gets a flood of phone calls tomorrow,” Tweed murmured, referring to the one and only pest control service in Wiggins. She watched the beetle brigade vanish with morbid fascination, and then turned and looked back through a crack in the barn doors at the stack of cat carriers.
&
nbsp; “Did the cats spook them off?” Pilot asked nervously. “I think the cats spooked them off.”
“A reasonable hypothesis,” Tweed agreed.
“I don’t care!” Cheryl shuddered. “Just so long as they’re gone and I don’t have to scrape bug guts off the bottoms of my shoes.”
She turned back to the sky just in time to see the tail feathers of the buzzard disappearing over the field. At least they now knew what direction to head in.
“Let’s go. Time’s a-wastin’. And if that creepy old bird has anything to do with our creepy old mummy, and those bugs were trying to keep us from following it, then we’re on the right track,” Pilot said. “Right?”
“Vultures were symbols of ancient Egyptian royalty,” Tweed said. “Just like the scarab beetle. I’d say that hypothesis is also scientifically valid.”
“Big ol’ bugs and bald ugly birds.” Cheryl shook her head. “Doesn’t sound very royal to me!”
“We’ll find out soon enough. Follow those critters,” Pilot said.
Both bugs and bird had headed in an easterly direction, out beyond the drive-in lot. Beyond where Pops was—hopefully—still blissfully sawing logs in the white farmhouse, to where the jumbled, tumbledown shapes of the mini-golf range loomed up above the tall grass. The course had been closed down for as long as the twins could remember, but Pops had recently restored power to the mechanical features and begun repairs. Still, that didn’t stop the place from looking like a par-three ghost town, stark and eerie, in the middle of the night.
As they ran, Pilot and the twins noticed a faint pulsing of strange, dancing lights—shimmering shades of purple and green—that seemed to be coming from one of the holes on the “back nine.”
“There,” Cheryl pointed out when they got close enough. The steely-bright light of fierce determination had returned to her gaze, and her eyes gleamed purposefully behind her glasses. “The thirteenth hole. The ‘Giza Squeeza.’”
How to Curse in Hieroglyphics Page 8
