Mummy

by Caroline B. Cooney

  The mummy lay in the center of the room, staring at the ceiling. She looked frail and breakable in the half-light.

  Emlyn could imagine her alive; trying to stay alive; trying to catch one last breath; trying to say one last word. And then, the embalmers. Turning an innocent girl as flat and thin and dry as old paper. The eternal tightness of bandages, the eternal emptiness where they cut out her lifelines and poured them into jars.

  Amaral. Such a beautiful name.

  Emlyn worked her fingernails under the Plexiglas. The slippery rubber against her skin felt funny, especially because it was invisible under the knit gloves. Her nails were strong and thick, and she easily worked the big rectangular aquarium-like case off its wooden pier. Bracing herself, she inched around the four sides, walking it upward.

  Without sound and without slippage, she got one narrow end all the way up. She edged around, got a good grip, and picked up the whole thing. It was good that she was accustomed to lifting boats.

  She raised it in the air and then over her head, as if she and it were going out on the river together. She was panting from the weight and the angle. She carried it a few steps, slid it down, and rested it on her toes to keep it from slamming on the floor. Carefully, she tilted it back and forth and into a safe place against the wall. She did not think she had made a single sound.

  Amaral continued to lie motionless. Her painted eyes did not blink, and her hidden arms did not wave.

  Emlyn stared down into her face, fighting the urge to rip off her gloves and feel Amaral, feel that linen, its threads, and its woven corners. Run her own bare skin over the gold paint that had encircled Amaral’s head before there was a city of Rome, before there was an English language, before ships had crossed the sea to the New World.

  Propped in tiny wooden slots on the mummy’s slab were the cards that told her history. Emlyn brushed accidently against them, and when they fluttered to the floor she saw that one card had been hidden behind another.

  She could not resist picking it up, but it resisted capture, because her gloves were not able to get under it. Finally she had it in her hands.

  In the same brown ink, the same spidery, square handwriting, was a quote from an ancient Egyptian letter. A personal letter, although not one Amaral-Re had sent

  My heart has stolen forth and goes quietly to a place it knows well.

  Had Amaral had time in her life to fall in love and lose her love? To steal forth and seek the company of a place she knew well?

  Amaral’s real heart, the organ that had pumped blood through her, would still be within her bones. For Amaral’s heart would be judged when she tried to reach eternity: The gods would stand beside her and weigh her heart against a feather, and if her sins and acts of cruelty and wrong were great, the feather would know, and Amaral would not find eternal life.

  Emlyn considered her readings. Philosophy and religion discussed death at length. But Emlyn was not concerned with death. She was concerned with a body. How sacred was a body? Was it sacred for just a few years?

  Would Amaral-Re have been sacred for, say, a decade? Or a century? But now was not? Was the body just something to shove under glass? After thirty centuries, had the body ceased to be sacred? Not to an ancient Egyptian.

  Amaral’s family laid her to rest with the hope of eternal life. That life required her body and her bones. Inside her wrappings would be amulets designed to protect her from evil.

  Evil, thought Emlyn. Will I be the one who is evil, taking her into danger?

  Ancient Egyptians were a people who were sure. They knew exactly what death was: It was life all over again, along the Nile, complete with servants. Amaral-Re’s mummy here in a dull little city in the United States seemed proof that the ancients were wrong.

  But maybe not. Maybe they just had the wrong time frame. In which case, Amaral-Re would still require her body.

  Emlyn read the card again and then tucked it into the upper, inside pocket of the blazer. Stop it, she told herself. You don’t need a souvenir.

  But she did.

  She wanted something to keep, and they were not keeping the mummy.

  Don’t take it, she said to herself. That’s how people get caught, they keep things from the scene.

  But no. Only Emlyn knew this card existed. It had been caught behind another card for decades. It was her secret now and Amaral’s. My heart has stolen forth and goes quietly to a place it knows well. The place Emlyn would know well was the memory of possessing Amaral-Re for a night.

  Emlyn slid her hands under Amaral’s shoulders. Emlyn had had a nightmare in which Amaral’s bones fell free, and Emlyn had to scoop them back up and stuff them back in. But the mummy felt solid.

  She pulled her fingers back, took off her blazer, and rolled up her left sleeve. The two black bags peeled away in a moment. She edged one bag around the mummy’s lower extremity, the way you would slide a pillow into its case. Properly, Emlyn could call this the mummy’s feet, but you could not tell there were two of anything inside all that wrapping. It was more of a rising right triangle at the bottom of the body.

  The mummy did not feel like dried bones in a sheet, and she did not feel like papier-mâché, which crumbled and broke at a touch. She felt like plaster. Emlyn did not have to worry that Amaral would bend in the middle and ask for a wheelchair.

  The first bag went up to the mummy’s shoulders. Ripping tape off her right sleeve, Emlyn secured the bag as if with suspenders, up and over the shoulders and head of the mummy. Then she slid the second bag over the head and taped that closed at the knees.

  Gauging the best place to distribute the weight, she lifted Amaral a little above the middle, and concentrating, taking a solid stance, found her own center of gravity. Then she raised her arms until Amaral was over her head like a canoe. We’re good to go, Amaral, she said silently to her silent captive.

  If the guard came now, she would have no explanation except the real one. Yes. I’m stealing your mummy.

  Emlyn was grateful this time for the night-lights. Her load was not awkward because she was used to that sort of shape and weight, although definitely Amaral weighed more than the thirty-pound scull.

  The stairs were difficult.

  To balance a mummy on the head while moving blindly down steps wasn’t easy. Emlyn had not stopped to think that the plastic bags would slide around. She was not holding rough linen that would have given traction. She was holding thin, slippery plastic that she had not fastened tightly. If she took the tiniest misstep she was going to lose her grip, and the mummy would shoot out of her hands and down these huge stairs.

  Emlyn kept her thigh against the inside wall of the stair in order to keep herself upright.

  When she reached the glittering marble floor of the Great Hall she saw the door marked SECURITY and her heart clenched. She had meant to take the freight elevator down. What was she doing on the stairs? The guard could be in that very room, coming or going this very moment, and she was sauntering in front of him with the mummy?

  I can’t even remember the strategies I’ve planned for days, she thought, the strategy I went over a hundred times sitting at that desk in the office.

  So now she knew that tension erased thought. It was fine to have plans. But if you forgot them, they did you little good.

  Shaking, exhausted, she transferred Amaral’s weight to her shoulder. The tape ripped free of the bags, and for a horrible second Emlyn was holding nothing but bag: The mummy was sliding out.

  Desperately, Emlyn caught, and scrabbled, and made a save.

  She thought she could fish the key out of her pocket with one hand while balancing the mummy with the other, but it was impossible. Amaral was much heavier than Emlyn had expected and growing heavier by the moment.

  She braced herself, and leaning to the side, got Amaral’s feet on the floor. It would have been easier to stand her on her head, but Emlyn couldn’t do that. Forget Amaral’s dignity, Emlyn told herself. She has no dignity, she’s a mummy. You
can stand her any old way. She won’t know.

  Emlyn straightened, straightening Amaral, too, and the vertical mummy gave a small, short clatter.

  Up inside her, something had fallen loose.

  Oh, no, thought Emlyn. Her bones? Did a vertebra or a rib just land at her ankles?

  It was funny, in a sick sort of way, but Emlyn did not have time to think about falling bones. She crossed the room, unlocked the door, carried the slippery Amaral in just as the bottom bag tore free, leaned the mummy against the wall, scooped up the puddle of black plastic, closed the door, and locked it.

  Then she leaned against the door and swallowed several times. She was dangerously close to throwing up. So many errors. Major acts of stupidity. She imagined the terrible, destructive crash of the mummy smashing into the marble.

  For some time, there was only the sound of her own breathing.

  No footsteps, no doors opening, no grilles slamming, no distant radio, no nothing.

  Emlyn looked at her watch. It had taken eleven minutes.

  It was probably some kind of record for stealing a mummy.

  She had lots more tape. This time when she put Amaral into her bag, she taped it around the waist and knees as well, so it could not slip as much. It was surprisingly easy to do in the dark. Tightness was something your fingers knew, not your eyes.

  At the planning sessions, Donovan and Jack had thought she was being sentimental and emotional to waste time worrying about bags. “It’s just a thing,” Jack had said. “So what if somebody spills Coke on it? Skip the garbage bags.”

  “She wants the dark of it,” Lovell had said.

  “It won’t be dark, because it’s plastic, and plastic shines,” Donovan had argued.

  Emlyn and the mummy made their way down the hall and once more into the office under whose desk she had sat those three hours. There was the door that faced the street where the van was parked.

  She rested Amaral-Re against the wall. She had been scrupulous about not using her flashlight, but when she felt her way to the door she couldn’t find it. There was streetlight coming through the window, but somehow it didn’t illuminate the door. She knelt on the floor, keeping the bulky desk between herself and the window, and turned her light on. When she felt in control of the slender beam, she crept over to the door, as beautifully carved as she remembered, and led the beam along the door to the handle.

  There wasn’t one.

  Emlyn blinked. Her heart went cold. Inside her double gloves her joints hurt.

  She looked around her. She was exactly where she had planned to be. This was the door she had picked out. She had checked inside and outside.

  She ran her hands around the door.

  It had been stripped of its hardware and sealed.

  It was only a door on the outside, keeping the integrity of the mansion. On the inside, it was just a pretty wall.

  This was not a door.

  She couldn’t get out.

  Ten

  CALM DOWN, SHE SAID to herself. Calm down. There are other doors, I counted them on the outside of the mansion. I chose this door because I was sure it wouldn’t be connected to an alarm, and at least I’m right about that. I’m locked in. I’m stupid, but I’m right.

  At the end of the hall was the door the secretary used when she had her cigarette. Emlyn did not walk toward it. It opened onto a different block than the one where the van was parked. Whereas the van was on a true side street without traffic, that other door opened onto a major intersection. Maybe at three in the morning she could go out that way, but it was barely eight thirty. There would be cars and witnesses everywhere. She couldn’t bump out that door with a mummy on her shoulder.

  And that door was certain to be wired to the alarms, and there she’d be, not with a single two-lane street to cross but with a block and a half to walk and a much-heavier-than-expected mummy on her shoulder.

  Okay.

  Check the other doors.

  There were two more, each inside a separate office. She would have to unlock those offices, check to see if those outside doors worked, bring the mummy—

  You can do it, she said to herself. This is a minor little fluff of a problem. Okay. Don’t drag the mummy around. Put her in the hall, find a door, come back for her.

  She felt like two people: the terrified loser who didn’t know what to do, and the coach giving instructions and pep talks.

  She lifted Amaral straight up, like a department store mannequin she planned to set in the window, and bizarrely, she could feel Amaral-Re’s elbow in her side, as if they were girlfriends poking each other. How strange. Shouldn’t there be enough padding so you couldn’t feel separate bones? Amaral’s arms must not be straight down at her sides but folded on her chest. Somehow it seemed a more comfortable eternity to have your arms folded than to have them straight and bound by your sides. You were less of a prisoner all those centuries.

  From inside Amaral-Re’s shroud came a little metallic scrape. It was not the same as the previous little clunk.

  Emlyn felt her eyes glaze.

  What had moved?

  Bones shifting?

  Some dreadful insect chewing?

  Emlyn steadied herself, gripping the heavy doorjamb of the Trustees’ Room. It was the kind of molding that craftsmen had worked on for months, when the mansion was being built. It felt solid and sure under her fingers.

  The floor in the hallway was dark wood, polished to a rich and beautiful gleam.

  It was also slippery. The combination of slick plastic bag against glossy wood was too much. The mummy would not stand upright. The moment Emlyn let go, Amaral slid out from under herself. Emlyn did not want to jostle the mummy anymore. She could not be slinging her around like some bag of groceries.

  Emlyn put the mummy against the wall, supporting her on one side with a chair that must be for people who didn’t deserve to sit in the Trustees’ Room. On the other side, she dragged over an immense potted plant She patted her pocket for the key in case she had to unlock the exit door, in case it was not a push-bar safety exit The sharp, used-only-once jags in the key’s edge felt strong and sure, even through her double gloves.

  Halfway down the office hall she stumbled and dropped the key. She knelt, trying to find it swiping the tiny ray of the flashlight back and forth. The key was not visible.

  “Oh, I think so, I completely agree,” said the strong, intense voice of Harris Brisband.

  From the Great Hall came the smack of heavy feet on marble floors.

  Emlyn scrambled up without finding her key and put out her flashlight.

  There was the distinct slotting sound of a key going into its hole.

  Dr. Brisband was about to unlock MUSEUM OFFICIALS ONLY, and she was standing in his hall with a stolen mummy.

  She had one second in which to vanish. One second in which he would seize the knob, turn it, open the door, and see a huge black plastic bag containing his mummy.

  Almost dead herself, Emlyn yanked open the bathroom door and slid in, but she ran out of time before she could close it all the way. She stood in the dark next to the sink, fingers gripping the inside knob, pressing the door up to the lock but not into it.

  The hall lights came on.

  Male voices continued.

  The men were speaking English, but she was so horrified she had to reinterpret it. She shivered and again almost threw up.

  “Look at this,” said Dr. Brisband irritably. “They can’t even take the trash out to the Dumpster. It’s impossible to get good cleaning help. We had our own staff; it was a miserable failure. We tried private contracting; that was worse. We’ve gone back to our own cleaning crew, and I was beginning to feel hopeful—and look at this. Garbage stuffed behind a plant next to the Trustees’ Room. After you, Bob.”

  She could see the shadow of Dr. Brisband ushering Bob forward. She heard another lock click and another door open. They were going inside Dr. Brisband’s office.

  Shut the door after you, prayed Em
lyn.

  They went inside. They did not shut the door after themselves.

  This was when Emlyn knew that if anything goes wrong, a thousand things go wrong. Huge blocks of wrong, tumbling down on you like a collapsing pyramid.

  She had to get out of here while he still thought that was trash. There was no question of hiding in the kneehole of a desk now. When the guard came around again and found the mummy missing, he would shoot down here to tell Dr. Brisband, and they would figure out what the trash was. They would certainly figure out that the person who had taken the mummy was right there next to it.

  She would go down the freight elevator, out into the service courtyard, and through its exit into the street. Of course then she’d have to walk around the entire museum block with the mummy in her arms in order to reach the van.

  The van. It felt as if she had been here for years. It felt as if Jack and Donovan might have finished high school and gone on to college by now. She prayed that they were still waiting for her.

  Forget the mummy, she said to herself. Just get your own body out of here.

  She eased the bathroom door open another few inches. Dr. Brisband’s office door was wide open. Its slant prevented her from seeing inside and presumably prevented them from seeing out, as well.

  How long would they be in there?

  She heard the sound of a computer booting up and the singing cues of a program coming on. A few clicks. A pause. Another click, a whirr, and the distinct sound of pages. He was printing something out.

  “There you go, Bob,” said Dr. Brisband.

  “Glad I could help,” said Bob, which sounded incorrect to Emlyn. If Dr. Brisband was printing out the information, he was the one helping.

  The two men came out of Dr. Brisband’s office without having turned off the computer or the printer. “This is just right,” said Bob.

  They began a long, detailed good-bye, standing in the door to the Great Hall. Bob would see Dr. Brisband at the board meeting next week. Bob fully supported Dr. Brisband’s position. But the votes did not look good.