Mummy

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Jack picked her up down the block from her apartment building.

  He had borrowed his parents’ van. It was huge and must be a real pain in city parking. But inside—what a great vehicle. Swivel seats, a bar, a little TV-VCR. Its windows were dark glass, so nobody could see in. Someone had brought a cooler full of soft drinks, and a grocery bag was bulging with treats, two kinds of chips sticking out the top. Nobody had much to say.

  Jack drove to the museum, coming up the side street that faced the mansion. The other big, old houses once built in this neighborhood had been torn down a half century ago, and apartment buildings six or eight stories high had taken their place. There was not nearly enough parking for the residents. Street parking was difficult to find. Early in the afternoon, Donovan, who after much pleading and fibbing had managed to borrow his father’s car for a short time, had circled the block over and over till a space opened up.

  When Jack and the girls arrived in the van, Donovan pulled out, and Jack slid neatly into the space Donovan had been holding for them.

  Emlyn could not parallel park She could not imagine parallel parking a van as huge as this, where you could use only side mirrors. “Good work,” she said to Jack.

  “The work is all yours, Em. Good luck.” He had food, drinks, his car phone, and some homework. He would be lying down on the carpeted floor of the van, invisible to the world, waiting for Emlyn and a mummy.

  Donovan would take his dad’s car back and hope it passed inspection. Any new-looking scratch or ding would be charged to Donovan. Then Donovan would catch a bus and come back to join Jack.

  Lovell, Maris, and Emlyn climbed out of the van. Maris wore a corduroy jumper and looked thin and romantic, the high, squishy collar of her shirt showing off her slender throat. Lovell wore bright pink tights and a very pink, very large, very long sweater. Nobody could miss Lovell.

  The three girls walked toward the impressive front entrance. A guard stood on the top of a retaining wall, his boots touching the flowers in their last bloom. He watched traffic, the two museum parking lots, and every person who came and went. There was no expression on his face. He paid no more attention to the girls than he did to the pigeons.

  Emlyn used her Friends’ card while Lovell and Maris paid to get in.

  “We’re here to see the film,” said Lovell to the woman at the desk. Sunday afternoons the museum showed foreign films.

  “That won’t start for half an hour,” the woman said pleasantly. “You’ve time for a quick browse in the museum. Have you seen the current exhibit? On loan from Chicago? Early American oil portraits! It’s quite wonderful. Here’s a brochure.”

  “Oh, thank you!” said Lovell. “Early American oils! Wow.”

  The girls laughed and fell against each other and went on into Dinosaurs.

  “They still don’t have a tyrannosaurus rex,” said Maris sadly. “There’s only so much joy you can get out of a brontosaurus.”

  The guard had been leaning against the wall, but now he stood tall and walked toward them. “Hi,” said Lovell, looking very pink. “We’re here for the film. Are we headed the right way?”

  He nodded and pointed.

  He didn’t look familiar to Emlyn, but it wouldn’t have mattered much; he didn’t really see her. Lovell and Maris were taking up all the space and interest. The guard had not come over because they looked suspicious. He came because they looked adorable.

  Emlyn felt safe in her dull, middle-aged gray. And then, unexpectedly, a tremor shot from ankle to jaw, and her body quivered and ached. A little cry came out of her, and Lovell turned to look, while Maris talked more loudly to the guard.

  Emlyn imagined him holding her against the wall, calling real police officers, being searched, handcuffed, placed in the backseat of a squad car, the way they showed on television, the officer’s palm pushing her head down and in. She imagined the police showing up at the restaurant where her parents and their friends were lingering over coffee.

  A twitch took over her kneecap, as if parts of her body wanted out. My bones are panicking, she thought. I have to stop considering right thing, wrong thing, and think meaningless. Just bones. I’m here for a bag of bones.

  They finished Impressionist Paintings as quickly as any four-year-old. In the middle of the Sculpture Hall was a small silvery stand with a delicate arrow and a curly script sign that said

  FILMS.

  Two heavyset women were standing by the arrow, discussing last Sunday’s film and whether tonight’s program was really worth waiting for.

  Lovell checked her watch. “We have twenty-six minutes,” she said clearly. “Let us broaden our minds. I suggest that we gaze upon Early American oil portraits.”

  “No,” said Maris. “I want to see the mummy.”

  The middle-aged women smiled, and the girls left giggling, like junior high idiots whose slumber party lasted too long, and bobbled toward the Egyptian Room. Except that by the time Maris and Lovell reached the Egyptian Room, Emlyn would no longer be with them.

  In the Great Hall, while Maris and Lovell kept their eyes open, Emlyn took out her key and approached the door marked MUSEUM OFFICIALS ONLY.

  Lovell gasped when she saw the door marked SECURITY and yanked on Emlyn’s sleeve to point it out to her.

  “I saw,” said Emlyn. This was the moment. Either she had a master key or she didn’t. Her hair was prickling. The shudder of her scalp slithered down her arms, lifting her skin, peeling it away from her.

  “It isn’t too late,” whispered Lovell, her eyes wide-open and scared. “We can still just forget it.”

  The thirst of fear had dried out Emlyn’s mouth and throat. Even her thinking was dried out, as if she were in a sandstorm in the desert.

  “My dad’s a lawyer,” breamed Maris, “if you need one.”

  “What do you mean, if I need one?” whispered Emlyn. “If I need a lawyer, we all need a lawyer.”

  “Right. I just meant—well—you have the phone number, right?”

  Emlyn could not respond. They had been over this ten times. Anyway, she did not trust her voice. What if she agreed? What if she said, yes, let’s run, let’s bag it, we’re out of here?

  Then her chance, her great and wonderful chance, would be over, and she would despise herself forever.

  “Emlyn, what if somebody has gone into the office since you phoned?” whispered Lovell. “I mean, you phoned ten minutes ago, and just because nobody answered the secretary’s line, and nobody answered the director’s line, doesn’t mean there isn’t somebody in there now!”

  Emlyn could not stand having to worry about Maris and Lovell and whether they followed through.

  “Let’s not,” said Lovell in a regular voice. “I mean it. Come on, let’s leave. This is too risky. This is downright stupid. We are all total jerks. We could—”

  Emlyn pulled her sweater sleeves down to cover her hands. She slid the key into the lock. It fit. She pressed it to the right. It turned. The deadbolt snicked clear.

  Lovell made a tiny moan.

  “Go watch the doors!” Emlyn hissed. But they stood next to her, waiting. With her other sleeve-covered hand, Emlyn turned the knob and opened the door marked MUSEUM OFFICIALS ONLY.

  She withdrew the key, slid into the darkness of the old mansion, and shut the door behind her.

  It was as dark as a tomb.

  It had a silent, dusty, half-occupied feeling.

  But it was not a frightening dark. It was soft dark, like her own bedroom in the middle of the night. Emlyn leaned against the door, listening through the crack.

  Lovell and Maris were supposed to move on, see the mummy, be regular people, and then go to the film and go home.

  Lovell had done some cleaning crew investigation.

  The museum was open Sunday from two to five and not open at all on Monday. There was no cleaning Sunday night. Weekend cleaning occurred Monday night. Sunday was the only night of the week when the lights would actually be off and the museum silent. />
  Presumably, since guards existed to keep the people from hurting or taking anything, there wouldn’t be many on a Sunday after the museum closed. Lovell guessed that after the doors were shut at five, there would be sweeping and picking up of brochures and so forth left on benches, but the staff would be exhausted and looking forward to time off. Surely by six P.M. there would be nobody around.

  Any remaining guard would have little to do. Surely he would wander only occasionally and without paying much attention. He would not tiptoe or creep. He’d just walk. The floors were stone. Emlyn would hear a guard coming.

  Emlyn felt her way down the hall to the third door on the right, the room with desks and computers and stacked boxes of things. Its door, when she reached it, was neither closed nor locked. From a street lamp outside came a little light through a single window. The mansion sat very high on its foundation. Nobody could look in that window without a ladder. Emlyn sat at the rear desk, facing the door. Even if a guard brought a ladder and put his face up against the window, he would not see her. She was too far back and to the side.

  If anybody came into the offices, she would hear the heavy metallic snick of the deadbolt. She would have time to slide to the floor and hide in the kneehole of the desk. It was inconceivable that the clerk who used this desk for storage would show up Sunday after closing.

  She thought of Amaral-Re, quiet in her own dark. For Amaral-Re, it was always dark, for she had only painted eyes, and whatever was left of the girl herself was varnished solid.

  I will touch her, thought Emlyn, and hold her and know her weight. She will be mine. And I, in some way, forevermore, will be hers.

  She took her watch off, the better to stare at its fluorescent numbers, and sat silent and motionless while the minutes ticked.

  She had hours to wait. Two hours of foreign film, one hour of letting staff filter away.

  Three hours before her next move.

  Nine

  SIX P.M.

  The museum should be empty. Maris and Lovell would have left by a theater exit, one of the flat-to-the-wall doors with no handle on the exterior. At this moment, not only should every visitor be gone, so should every staff member. Emlyn should be alone in this building except for a guard or two.

  Even so, she waited another forty-five minutes.

  Her legs cramped. She felt as if she were on a flight to nowhere, strapped to a hard, unfriendly seat.

  She put on her disposable gloves. They stuck to her fingers. When she had practiced at home, in the dark of her walk-in closet, she had found that the gloves glowed a tiny bit in the dark, and so she had decided on a second glove layer. Flexing her fingers to make the plastic fit, she pulled her thin, supple knit gloves over them. She would leave no prints. She would not transfer her skin oils or bacteria to the mummy.

  Slowly, she moved toward the door that opened into the Great Hall. She would stand with her ear pressed against the crack, waiting to hear a guard make his rounds. That was what guards did, wasn’t it? Once he passed by, she would simply follow him, because he would not come back into the same room but make a circuit, the way museumgoers did. She ought to have plenty of time before he entered Egypt again. But once she began, Emlyn had to be quick, because the pedestal on which the mummy lay would be so very visibly empty on the guard’s next tour.

  Still, it did not seem to Emlyn that she could have less than an hour in which to work. She had pretended every bit of this at home in her bedroom, going nowhere, not even lifting her feet, but counting steps and seconds and writing them down. But no matter how carefully she timed everything, she really didn’t know anything. She was only guessing that she could even get the Plexiglas cover off to start with.

  She was desperate to get going. But she had to know that the guard was ahead of her and not behind her, and she could not leave the office until that had happened.

  Seven ten. Seven thirty. Seven forty-five.

  What if the guard watched TV someplace until midnight?

  What if he didn’t bother with rounds at all, and she just stood here, hour after hour, her ear turning into the shape of a crack?

  What if the guard sat next door, in the room marked SECURITY, his door open so he could watch the Great Hall while he sipped coffee and worked on a bag of jelly doughnuts?

  She did silent exercises to keep from getting stiff.

  They had decided that Lovell and Maris must go on home. Lovell must be at her house to talk to Emlyn’s parents, should they call, which was impossible, they never had, but suppose they did.

  Maris really did have to go home; they were having cousins over for dinner. She had to keep the baby happy while her aunt and uncle relaxed. “Though how I’m going to relax, I don’t know,” Maris had said.

  Donovan and Jack would be in the van.

  She wondered what they were talking about, or thinking. They had all realized that they would not know when she was going to burst out of the museum. They just had to be ready. It could be seven P.M. or ten P.M. Midnight or two in the morning.

  The silence of the museum was broken by a horrific crash, metal against metal, like a car driving through the wall, like a sculpture falling from its niche. Emlyn almost cried out.

  What could be wrong?

  Should she go help? What on earth could have happened? She had absolutely no idea what that sound might have been.

  It happened again.

  The third time, she realized it must be the clanging of the heavy iron grilles as the guard slammed them shut after himself. He didn’t care how much noise he made. There was nobody here to hear it.

  Now she could hear his steps.

  The sound was so regular and so loud that each smack of his heels could have been a bullet. She had never dreamed how noisy it would be here. Was it the marble floors? The lack of carpet and drapes? Or did this man weigh two hundred fifty pounds, and was wearing boots with steel toes, hoping to crack a few tiles? Or a few heads?

  Did he carry a club and a revolver along with his boredom? If he caught her, would he slam her against the wall just for something to do? Or was the guard a pleasant, tired, overweight woman with a particularly heavy gait?

  I’ll never know, she told herself. I’m not planning to let the guard see me, and he won’t check in here because it’s locked and—

  She had not locked the door after herself.

  She had been so relieved that her key worked. So glad to get away from Lovell and Maris. So proud of herself for not giving in to her fears and running away from this adventure. So glad that it was dark and empty in the offices the way she had insisted to the other four that it would be. So relieved that the game had finally started and she was in.

  I left it unlocked, she thought. I can’t believe it. What a classic error. From Watergate to me.

  She blushed in the dark.

  The guard’s eyes would be flitting from corner to corner, shadow to shadow, door to door. Of course he would try this door. That was his job—to see that everything was locked!

  She could turn the lock from the inside, but it would make that great, loud snick.

  Should she hide? Should she scurry like a rat back to the desk’s kneehole and hunch down? What if she banged into something in the hall? What if she couldn’t find the right door in the dark? What if—

  He was in the Great Hall. He could probably hear the creaking rasp of her desperate breathing.

  But the footsteps came no closer. They faded without a break in rhythm. Just the pacing of somebody slow and dull. Somebody who had walked this a thousand times and would walk it a thousand more and no longer even saw what he was looking at, because an empty museum was always the same as it had been a minute ago.

  The steps changed sound, adding a slight shuffle. A minor scrape.

  He was going up the stairs.

  After ten minutes, she opened the door a crack and nearly cried out.

  The Great Hall was not dark.

  She almost slammed the door shut again but caught
it with an inch to go. It had never occurred to her that there might be lights on. The inch wide opening revealed very little. She had to step out, still half in the safety of the door, and look at this lighting.

  The museum had night-lights. Close to the floor were low-wattage bulbs that cast a friendly yellow light.

  She had pictured herself sliding through darkness like a cat through an alley. But no. The pale walls took on the shadows of every object, because the light came from the bottom and nothing could escape. Her dark clothes would make her stand out.

  There was nothing she could do now unless she took Lovell’s advice and quit. She could slide back into the office, go to the exit door she had chosen, and fly across the street to the safety of the van. They would accept whatever she said. “There are guards everywhere—it won’t work—we were wrong. Drive away fast!” she could cry to Jack and Donovan.

  But there were not guards everywhere. She could no longer hear the feet of the one guard. Do it! she said to herself. You weren’t afraid of the dark. Do not be afraid of the light.

  Very slowly, she shut the door marked MUSEUM OFFICIALS ONLY behind her and carefully turned the key. This time the lock did not snick quite so loud. Perhaps her double gloves had muffled it. She put the key safely in her pocket and patted it for comfort.

  The stairs were so wide. So exposed. You could walk four abreast up these stairs. But you could not see what was at the top; the high banisters hid your view. Emlyn just had to walk up, trusting that no guard was waiting for her.

  She took each step as softly and quickly as she could.

  When she got toward the top she crouched a little, trying to see but not be seen.

  How open it was! By day, she had been sure there were hiding places. By night, she saw that there were none. The dark corners were lit, the floor gleamed like mirrors, and the circulating confusion of children and the press of visitors did not exist.

  If the guard returned, her only choice would be to stand still and hope.

  She crept between huge glass walls of stuffed bison, forever grazing on painted prairie. Then, changing continents in a single step, she entered Egypt.