Mummy (2 page)

The hieroglyphs on her wrappings identified her as Amaral-Re. Princess.

Emlyn handed the postcard back and shifted her book bag so that she would have something to cling to. She did not want Jack to see that she was trembling with excitement.

“So,” said Jack, “our class has to pull off a really exceptional trick for Mischief Night. Therefore, I thought of the mummy.”

“
I
thought of the mummy,” said Maris sharply.

Jack and Maris gave each other tiny glares and then smiled stiffly.

Emlyn thought, They date, they hold hands in public, they buy each other presents. But they don’t actually like each other.

Emlyn said, “I really can’t imagine stealing a mummy.”

She could imagine it perfectly. She was going to do it. But she didn’t want these four in the way.

Donovan was too open, too practical. Jack and Maris were too vivid, too demanding of attention. She thought highly of them separately, but together they were busy sticking pins in one another and might not be reliable. Those three could never do anything quietly and in secret.

Lovell was an unknown. Lovell hadn’t been in a class with Emlyn since second grade. That made Emlyn uncomfortable. She had not yet executed one of her schemes, but she knew it would be risky to work with a person she barely knew.

“But can’t you just see it, Emlyn?” said Lovell, in a mysterious whisper. “The bell tower on the old high school, open to the wind and weather? The huge steel beam on which the bell once hung and from which students in the past have hung llamas and the chassis of a Chevy? And this year, hanging in the night? Swaying in the starry dark? A real, honest-to-God Egyptian mummy.”

It had been lyrical and correct until Lovell said “honest-to-God.” Whatever else stealing a mummy might be, it did not involve honesty with God. It did not involve honesty.

So Lovell was a girl who did not even listen to herself. She did not actually know what she was saying, or why. And Emlyn was sure that in theft or embezzlement or larceny, you must be sure of what you are saying and why. “So how come you aren’t doing it yourself, Lovell?” said Emlyn.

Lovell giggled. Her laugh was fluty and appealing, and she expected the others to join in. Jack and Maris did. Donovan did not.

Certainly Emlyn did not.

Lovell said, “I don’t want to get caught. I mean, it’s a joke thing, really, and you wouldn’t— like, you know—get arrested or anything. Like, the museum people, once they understood it was just a high school thing, you know, traditional and all, and Mischief Night before Halloween—they’d be cool. But still, they might not be. And I—like—I don’t need that on my record.”

Emlyn smiled sweetly all around, letting her smile rest a little longer on Jack, the ringleader. “But you think
I
would like to be caught?” said Emlyn.

“No, no, no,” said Jack. “We work on it together, as a team. If something does trip us up and we get found with the mummy, Emlyn, you’re the kind of person who can talk us out of it. You led that debate, remember? Nobody could touch you. You practically won even when nobody in the entire auditorium agreed with you. I know it was an assignment and you didn’t care about your side and you didn’t agree, either, but you were so convincing.”

She remembered the debate vividly. The teacher had chosen a real-life local issue: Should a toxic waste dump (which the city must have) be placed on the old elementary school grounds near the river?

Naturally, nobody thought it should.

Emlyn had been assigned to take the positive, and she loved her assignment. She slept with it and cozied up to it, acting as if she planned to manage the toxic waste herself. She didn’t win the debate, but she got an A and a standing ovation.

Emlyn had been downcast. She didn’t care about applause or grades. She cared about winning. Well, it turned out she had won after all. She had won Jack and Maris. They thought she could talk her way out of anything. She would start by talking her way out of this.

She said, imitating Lovell, “Really, I don’t know what to say. Like, I’d love to hang with you guys, and I’d love to, like, be involved if you’re going to use one of Donovan’s great ideas, like the principal’s desk and chair, I mean I love that, and his papers flying in the wind? That’s, like, excellent. But I mean, stealing?” She gave a laughing shrug and spread her hands. “I mean, I think, you know—jail and all. And my parents and all. But good luck. I hope you make it.”

She had, of course, timed this speech, because third lunch was twenty-one minutes long, and Emlyn always knew exactly how much time she had left, and she needed the bell to ring so she could make a graceful exit, with no more explanations or exchanges.

The bell rang exactly when she expected it to, and everybody laughed in a silly way except Donovan, who didn’t understand random laughter. Then they separated.

If Emlyn had not been a very controlled person, she might have begun yelling and walking on the wall. Mainly boys wall-walked, but if there was nobody watching, Emlyn sometimes raced down the hall and managed a footprint or two on the wall. But she paced evenly to her next class, said a courteous hello to the teacher (she was one of only a handful of kids who bothered), and sat neatly at her desk.

Emlyn got high grades in participation, even when she never participated, because she kept her eyes glued to the teacher. It was one of her favorite deceptions. It was not wrong, and yet in a tiny way, it was. She never ducked her head, never hid in her book, never slid behind her own hair—and never said a single word or asked a single question.

The two classes following lunch required immense self-discipline on Emlyn’s part. She did not permit herself to think of the museum.

When school finally ended, Emlyn’s heart shot into the air. She felt like a Frisbee, thrown across green grass in a fine, clean swoop.

It was the most wonderful idea in the world, even if Maris or Jack had thought of it.

Stealing a mummy.

T
HE EGYPTIAN ROOM WAS
half-lit by long, narrow windows whose glass had strange yellow panes. On the walls was painted plaster taken from a tomb, on which flat, sideways-facing Egyptians in white linen skirts were fishing and tending cattle. There were pieces of statues, including two feet with toes so long they looked like fingers that any moment might start knitting a sweater.

There was a Rosetta stone—pretend, of course, because the real one was in the British Museum in London.

The inside wall was a piece of a temple: columns and some steps, a thing as big as a classroom. Small children could squeeze behind the columns and ambush their friends and make them scream.

But in the center of this room was the only object that really mattered to small visitors.

The mummy.

Even the littlest children understood that this was a dead person. The only dead person they had ever seen. And yet they could not actually see this one, either, for she was wound in hundreds of yards of narrow linen strips. How terrifying was her solitary confinement. The children who were there at the same time as Emlyn were awestruck and afraid.

The mummy was a princess. Her hand had once touched the cheek of a pharaoh. Her fingers had once held a glass. Caught the clasp of a necklace. Played with a cat.

She was an object now. Property. A thing.

How brave you are, thought Emlyn, to lie exposed. Staring at ceilings for all time. A princess who expected to lie in a pyramid beneath the sands of Egypt. Wrenched from her darkness. Imprisoned in a dusty room in a second-rate museum in an ordinary city in America.

And now, I will rob your tomb again.

Emlyn actually changed temperature thinking about it. A great heat of excitement flushed through her core.

A guard drifted into the Egyptian Room. He barely saw the small children and the parents, but his eyes landed on Emlyn and studied her. Teenagers were not often here of their own free will. Teenagers, when asked about the museum, would say, “I went there when I was little.”

Nobody in high school came here now.

And teenagers never went anywhere alone. They were always among friends; they moved in packs, or at least in pairs. Emlyn was visible because she was alone.

The guard moved into another room. Emlyn loved his vague unease. He was not suspicious of her, he was just aware.

If you knew … thought Emlyn, and she was deeply, wonderfully happy.

She studied the mummy again, reading the old, tired cards that lay beneath the glass next to the mummy.

In the Egyptian Room, the cards themselves were historic; probably written eighty or a hundred years ago. In square, spidery writing, the ink slowly losing its color, some ancient curator told everything he knew.

The mummy’s genealogy was unclear. Who were her parents? To what pharaoh was she related? In what era had she been born?

It was known that in 1898, an American traveler purchased Amaral-Re in a street bazaar in Cairo. This, said the card, was common. Mummies were everywhere, under the sand, tucked in tombs, sold on streets.

In England, the wealthy liked to have mummy parties, and the mummy would be hacked open after dinner, presumably with much laughter and delight, and the amulets found inside the wrappings would be distributed as party favors, and the broken bones and linen would be tossed in the garbage.

Amaral-Re, however, had been kept on a pedestal on the balcony of the American’s mansion. When he died, he gave both the mansion and the possessions to start a museum. The museum’s collection had long ago outgrown the mansion, which was now merely a quaint office wing attached to the real museum.

Amaral-Re was no longer on her balcony. The donor’s will required that the mummy be displayed so that the children of the city might forever find the fascination that he had found in her mysterious eternity.

A second card explained that because the mummy needed her body in the afterlife, she had been dried out so she would last. Her lungs and stomach had gone into separate jars. She’d been cleaned with palm wine, and then for seventy days covered with a salt called natron, until she was a dry, stiff husk.

Amaral-Re had been only four feet eleven inches tall. There was a painted stick standing next to the mummy, so living children could measure themselves and compare.

Suppose, thought Emlyn, that in life Amaral weighed one hundred pounds. If a body is seventy percent water, and if the embalmers dried all water out of her, there would be thirty pounds left.

Thirty pounds was the weight of the scull Emlyn rowed and carried easily from the boathouse. So carrying her won’t be a problem, thought Emlyn. Only hiding her.

Emlyn’s fingers actually itched from the desire to touch the mummy, and she had to rub her hands together, as if to soothe a rash.

After Amaral’s body was dried out, the card continued, she had been washed with hot resin, an oil from trees, to keep her soft. (Emlyn imagined this as maple syrup.) Then came hundreds of yards of bandages. With every wrap, the linen was brushed with more sticky resin, which glued the layers together and made them stiffen. Her linen was high quality; she was no common housewife wrapped in old, torn clothes.

The guard was drifting her way again. Emlyn did not want him to remember her, so she moved ahead of him, slowly taking herself into Birds. Just why Birds was adjacent to Egypt, Emlyn did not know. Birds was a hideous room. Most little children would not even go into it, and those who were dragged in began to sob right away.

Three hundred thirty-one different stuffed birds. How evil they were: glass eyes glittering, beaks apart. Even friendly birds, like robins, were stiff and hostile on their twigs. What would they do if they knew she was going to steal their neighbor?

Would they sing and fly with sweet abandon, thrilled that at least somebody was going to be set free? Or would they attack with sharp beaks and vicious claws?

Stop it! she said to herself. They are stuffed animals, and that mummy is a stuffed person. They have no emotion. They have no meaning.

The guard continued his circuit on into the next room, so Emlyn went back to Egypt. She stared at a dusty diorama opposite the mummy. Along its painted Nile were lotus flowers and papyrus. Slaves and rowers and geese. Baskets and urns and priests.

Emlyn fell into the diorama.

She could hear the oars dipping into the Nile as pharaoh’s royal barge slid by. She could hear the beating of stork wings as they left the shelter of the papyrus. She felt the leather strap of sandals between her own toes and the soft dark fur of the preening cat against her leg. Dry, baking heat rose from the distant desert and laid itself against her cheek. Her hair was heavy, bound with a gold band and knotted at the bottom, like the fringe on a scarf.

“Would you mind moving over a bit,” said a parent politely, “so my children can see, too?”

Emlyn stumbled away.

Amaral-Re lay as calmly and silently as she had for three thousand years.

Three millennia ago, you ran and laughed and sang, thought Emlyn. And then, for thirty centuries—one hundred generations—you’ve been dead.

You were dead before the Crusaders, before the Pilgrims, before the wars of Napoleon, before the computer. You were dead before Mohammed, before Christ, before Buddha. You have known death for so long.

And in that long, incredible space of time, who else has owned you?

I will own you next.

Emlyn touched the case that covered her mummy. It was not glass. In spite of what the ancient card said, it was Plexiglas or some other kind of plastic. Therefore it weighed very little. Lifting a glass case five feet long, two feet high, and two feet across would be difficult for one person. Lifting plastic was not.

Perhaps the real purpose of the lid was to keep Amaral-Re safe from the fingers of children, and their peanut butter, and their gum. To keep bacteria away, in case her dry bones had any points of weakness that might still be invaded by microscopic creatures and destroyed.

So the enclosure was not to prevent theft. It was to prevent touch.

We won’t only be touching her, thought Emlyn, feeling a cold, sick shudder, like the first winter wind. We’ll be lifting, flinging, tying with plastic cord. Hanging her from a tower, exposed to American weather—she who needs dry desert air.