As fast as they could, they ran to the crates. The crates were various sizes, with stenciled arrows and warnings on their sides. The biggest was roughly the size of a refrigerator. Its back was open. The crate was more than half-full, but there would be just enough space for them if they squeezed.
They crawled inside. Yo-Yoji closed the hinged door just before they heard footsteps in the next room.
In their haste, they had failed to notice that they weren’t alone.
They crouched in the darkness, sandwiched between boxes, afraid to speak. Every sound echoed inside the crate. They could hear Albert 3-D and his colleague walking into the exhibit. Then more footsteps. And more footsteps. There must have been four or five people at least, all speaking at once.
“Are all the dead guys going or just the Egyptians?” “What about these statues—the what do you call ’em? Shoddy figures?” “Hey, careful—you don’t want to break another finger! We lost one already!”
Soon the voices gave way to the sounds of banging and prying and hammering. Tools falling on the floor. Workers swearing. The exhibit was being packed up.
Without consulting one another, Cass, Max-Ernest, and Yo-Yoji were all asking themselves the same thing: should they give themselves up now and face the wrath of Albert 3-D, their parents, and possibly the police? Or should they wait until it was quiet again and hope to escape unseen then? The first option was horrifying but sensible. The second was appealing but unrealistic.
Nobody uttered a whisper. They would wait.
Another minute passed.
Max-Ernest was the first to notice the hulking shadow looming behind them.
He pointed. “Uh—”
Cass clamped her hand down on his mouth.
Max-Ernest pointed again, more vehemently.
His friends peered into the darkness. Only a little bit of light was coming through the cracks in the crate, but their eyes were adjusting.
Had they judged by shape alone, they might have determined that their mysterious companion was a Spanish woman grieving silently under her lace mantilla; a wizard sitting asleep under his cloak; or a two-year-old standing under a sheet, dressed as a ghost.
Cass instinctively reached around to get her flashlight, but her backpack was stuck between two boxes. Before she could dislodge it, her phone started vibrating. Cass froze—but luckily she had thought to silence her phone before entering the museum. She looked at the screen. It was her mother calling. Soon the urgent texts would begin.
The light of her phone filled the crate with a soft glow.
Now they could see who was sitting behind them:
A cat mummy.
The layers of Bubble Wrap surrounding the cat mummy had increased its size to that of a dog and had given it the shape of a pear. They could tell it was a cat, however, because the face of a cat was painted on top of the linen bandages where its real face would have been; and legs and paws were painted to show the cat sitting up tall. All in all, the cat mummy was a relieving sight—better a dead cat than a live witness—but not a very comforting one.
Cass shuddered, and she was glad that her friends couldn’t see her.
Yo-Yoji tapped his friends on their legs to get their attention. Then, smiling to himself, he took his Wayfarer sunglasses off his head and put them on the cat mummy.
Cass and Max-Ernest both shook their heads in alarm—what if they damaged another mummy?!—but then they smiled, too. It was the first bit of comic relief they’d had in several hours—make that days.
Yo-Yoji pulled out his phone. He typed, then held up the screen for the others to see: Game… Ask a Cat Mummy.
He gave Cass a nudge—her turn.
She hesitated. It was hardly the time for a game, but suddenly she was feeling punchy. How long will we be in here?
Yo-Yoji typed the answer as quickly as he could: Cat mummy says, until Nile floods or dinner. Whichevr comes 1st.
Cass rolled her eyes. OK, Cat mummy. What is the meaning of life?
Yo-Yoji didn’t miss a beat. Cat mummy says, u will have no life if albert 3d catches u here.
But Max-Ernest had his own answer: *Life* means cellular activity including vital phenomena such as growth, reproduction, digestion.
Yo-Yoji covered his mouth to keep from laughing. Max-Ernest looked at him in the darkness, confused. Was that funny? Then he resumed typing, correcting himself. Oh. I mean, Cat mummy says.
The game continued, the cell phone screens lighting their faces with an eerie glow. To an outside observer, it would have looked as if they were engaged in some kind of electronic séance, attempting to summon the spirit of the cat mummy with their phones. Alas, the cat uttered not a single meow.
The only spooky voice they heard came about five minutes later. It was Albert 3-D’s:
“Hey, have any of you guys seen three kids around? Two boys and a girl. Something was stolen and I think they took it.”
“What was it?” asked one of the workers.
“Just a finger—this time.”
The three kids sat frozen in the crate, only a few feet away from him. Just when they thought things couldn’t get any worse, they were being blamed for another one of Lord Pharaoh’s crimes!
Cass returned to her phone, fingers flying. LP couldn’t hv planned it better if he wanted to set us up!
Maybe he did set us up, wrote Max-Ernest. We should hv known not to listen to dr L.
Yo-Yoji held up his phone. So what now?
Before either of his friends could answer, they heard a beeping sound. The kind a truck makes when it’s backing up. The beeping got louder and louder as they listened, until it sounded as if it were right next to them.
What’s that? typed Max-Ernest.
Pickup truck? guessed Cass.
Inside a museum? scoffed Yo-Yoji.
A moment later, they heard the hum of a motor, and they could feel something sliding under the crate. The crate tilted slightly, sending Max-Ernest skidding into Cass.
“Aaak!” Max-Ernest cried out spontaneously.
“You hear that?” It was one of the workers.
“What?”
“I just thought I heard somebody cry out. In here—” He knocked on the side of the crate.
The other man laughed. “Yeah, a mummy!”
“Hello, anybody home?” There was more knocking and more laughter. “OK, going up—”
At these words, the kids could feel the crate being lifted in the air. It felt as if they were in an elevator—a very small elevator.
Forklift! typed Yo-Yoji.
Cass looked at her friends. Should we say something??
Max-Ernest nodded. Yeah. Like right now. Time to get out!!
No! wrote Yo-Yoji. This is perfect. They’ll take us out of the museum. Then we get out and nobody sees us.
They heard the sound of the forklift being put into gear. And suddenly they were moving forward.
(If you can call it forward when you’re trapped in the darkness with no room to move, headed for an unknown destination, unsure whether you’re ever going to get out or if you’re going to be inadvertently entombed alongside a cat mummy.)
After a few minutes, they heard a clanking sound: a hook attaching to the crate.
As they clutched their stomachs, fighting nausea, the crate was lifted to what could only have been an extremely dangerous height. It swung left, then right, then up, then down, further down, left again, right again, and right some more.
Crane? Cass typed. Or that’s what she meant to write. In actuality, she typed, oakdgpai upg.
By the time the crate stopped swinging, Cass had somehow ended up with her foot caught between Max-Ernest’s knee and Yo-Yoji’s face.
It was a good thing they couldn’t see her.
As they disentangled themselves, the three bruised and embarrassed friends heard the clang of a gate closing—and the whine of a diesel motor.
Uh-oh, wrote Max-Ernest.
None of them said anything for a minute as
their situation sank in.
Max-Ernest typed into his phone again: We better text our parents while we still have batteries.
Yo-Yoji showed his phone to Cass. u hv supplies, right?
Cass nodded. Water and trail mix in backpack. And m-e has chocolate.
Max-Ernest paled in the darkness. He had just taken a chocolate bar out of his bag. How did she know?
The chocolate is mine!
Cass wrote back: If u want water, u have to share. Next time, don’t crinkle the wrapper, it makes noise.
Hate you! Max-Ernest responded, breaking off a couple of modestly generous pieces of chocolate for her and Yo-Yoji. (Had he known just how long they were going to be in there, he might have been even stricter about the size of the rations.) Then he settled back and started working on a new draft of his graduation speech.
Note: The text below was originally written on a cell phone. I have corrected all errors and abbreviations for ease of reading.
GRADUATION SPEECH—THIRD DRAFT
TITLE:
The I’m-Never-Going-to-Graduate Graduation Speech, aka Max-Ernest’s Last Will and Testament
JOKE:
What did the cat mummy say to the dog mummy?… No, wait, I’ve got it…. What is a dog mummy’s favorite trick?
Playing dead. (Heh. Good one, Max-Ernest!)
SPEECH:
Most speeches are written to be read aloud, but not this one because (a) I am most likely going to die of suffocation and/or starvation, trapped in a dark crate, and (b) even if I survive this insane adventure, there’s no way Mrs. Johnson is going to let me graduate, let alone read a speech. On the plus side, that means I can write whatever I want. So what do I want to write? What’s the really mean and terrible thing I’ve been wanting to say or the huge confession I’ve been wanting to make? Hmm, I don’t have one, really.
I guess just this—Cass and Yo-Yoji, if I die first, and this phone drops from my cold, dead hands, and you have the bright idea to see if I wrote anything on it, and there’s still some battery power left, and you haven’t yet gone blind from hunger, I just want to say I’m glad I was with you guys at the end. There’s nobody I’d rather play cat mummy with. Or even be mummified with. You’re the best friends I ever had. Well, you’re the only friends I ever had, but you know what I mean.
Four variations on the word touch:
Don’t touch Pseudonymous Bosch on the head.
Mr. Bosch is very touchy about his head.
Old Bosch, you could say, is touched in the head.
Ask him for money—Bosch is a soft touch due to soft head.
Poor Bosch! Such a touching story about his head!
Bosch responds (off the top of his head):
Touché!
Cass awoke in darkness, curled up in a ball and aching all over. She fought the urge to panic. Where was she? Had she been kidnapped? In an accident?
Reflexively, she felt her wrists to see if she’d been tied up. Or had any injuries. No, she was fine.
She sat up—and hit her head.
Oh. The crate. She was still in the crate.
She could hear Max-Ernest and Yo-Yoji snoring. Otherwise, it was strangely quiet. The low hum they had heard for hours and hours was gone. The crate was no longer moving. Wherever they were, they were sitting still.
She clicked her phone on. She was just able to see the time before the battery gave out: six thirty a.m. The morning! They’d slept all night. There was no way to know how far they’d traveled. For all she knew, they could have journeyed halfway around the world. On the other hand, they could be less than a mile from the Natural History Museum.
Afraid to make any noise, she felt around for Max-Ernest and Yo-Yoji, then awakened them by shaking a leg and an arm, respectively.
“Huh?”
“Where are—?”
“Shh!” she hissed. “Don’t say anything!”
They were groggy and sore, but there was no need to debate next steps. They all wanted to get out. As soon as they could.
The operation was a little more difficult than they’d anticipated. The crate was not meant to carry live human passengers, only dead feline ones, and therefore the door was not designed to be opened from the inside. Using Cass’s flashlight, a screwdriver, and a toothpick, they had to pick the lock from the back—which is often easier than picking a lock from the front, but it takes some getting used to. It’s like reading upside down or tying somebody else’s shoes. (I assume you have plenty of experience picking locks the usual way; but for the record, I don’t condone reading your best friend’s sister’s diary, only your own sister’s diary.) Eventually, however, the springs and levers gave way, the door swung open, and the crate was flooded with light.
Temporarily blinded, our friends held their breath, hoping there were no unfriendly forces waiting outside, whether museum workers or Midnight Sun members. But nobody attacked them. Nobody yelled at them or expressed shock at seeing them. There were no sounds or movements of any kind.
“Where the heck are we?!” asked Yo-Yoji when his eyes started to adjust.
They peered out the door in astonishment.
The crate was sitting inside what appeared to be the stone ruins of an ancient Egyptian temple. On either side were walls covered entirely with hieroglyphs so well preserved that they still showed the colors of the original paint. Gods and pharaohs, slaves and children, plants and animals, the whole panoply of Egyptian life was depicted. Directly in front of where the crate sat was a row of thick decorative columns that ended in capitals designed to look like lotus flowers. Beyond the temple, the desert stretched out in all directions, a sea of soft, rippling sand dunes. A perfect yellow sun hovered above a sky that was the same brilliant blue as the lapis lazuli on the Ring of Thoth. Wispy white clouds slowly floated by, almost disappearing as a bird burst through them and flew off toward the horizon.
Cass blinked. The scene reminded her so much of her dream that she wasn’t quite sure she was awake.
“Are we where I think we are?” asked Yo-Yoji.
“Well, we’ve been in this crate long enough,” said Cass. “I mean, how long does it take to fly to Egypt?”
“I don’t know; there’s something very weird about this,” said Max-Ernest. “This seems like a pretty big temple for a little cat mummy. You would think they’d just put him in a museum somewhere. Even in Egypt.”
“Maybe this is a tourist site, and there’s, like, one of those little museums connected to the ruins—and they’re just storing the crate here until they unload it?” suggested Yo-Yoji.
“Maybe,” said Max-Ernest. “Something about this doesn’t make sense, though.”
“C’mon, let’s get out before somebody sees us,” said Cass.
Still staring at their new surroundings, the three tired stowaways stepped out of the crate onto the stone floor of the temple and stretched their wobbly legs.
Before going any farther, Yo-Yoji reached back into the crate and carefully removed his sunglasses from the face of the cat mummy. “Bye, little guy—it’s been real.”
He closed the door with more force than he meant to, and the bang echoed in the temple. They froze for a moment, waiting for the sound of Egyptian soldiers, but nobody came running. They still appeared to be alone.
Max-Ernest looked out at the vast desert vista. Snaking through the sand was a twisting line of green, and peeking through the vegetation was a sparkling river. “Is that… the Nile?” he asked.
“Let’s go see,” said Yo-Yoji, heading down the temple steps. “Maybe we can catch a boat out of here.”
“If we’re where we think we are, it would take us a seriously long time to get home by boat,” said Max-Ernest. “First, we’d have to travel up the Nile, then across the Mediterranean Sea—”
“You have a better idea?” asked Yo-Yoji.
Cass, overwhelmed by a sense of déjà vu, stopped halfway down the temple steps. “Isn’t that the same bird we saw a moment ago?” she asked, scratch
ing her head.
“What do you mean? How can you tell from here?” asked Max-Ernest.
“I can’t—never mind.”
Cass’s sense of dreamlike unreality intensified as they stepped onto the sand. Each grain glittered in the sun like a tiny pebble of gold. She grabbed a fistful and let it fall from her hand like sand in an hourglass—it was her dream again.
“Watch out!” cried Yo-Yoji.
A large scorpion was scurrying across the sand toward them. They jumped back onto the temple steps. But it veered away before reaching them.
“Wow, that thing is huge—it’s like a dog!” said Yo-Yoji, watching it go. “And so shiny. It almost looks like it’s made of metal.”
Tentatively, they stepped back into the sand.
The river had looked to be at least a quarter of a mile away, but it was much closer than that—perhaps thirty feet. Indeed, as they walked toward it, they thought their eyes were playing tricks on them. Palm trees that from a distance had appeared to be twenty feet high now seemed hardly taller than they were.
When they were only a few feet from the river, they looked down into the rushes.
“No boats,” said Max-Ernest. “Time to make a new plan.”
“What’s that?” asked Cass, cocking her head to one side.
“Waaaa!” The crying came from the river.
“Is that a baby?!” asked Max-Ernest, who knew the sound only too well.
Indeed, it was—a baby swaddled in linen and lying in a basket. It looked as if it had floated down the river and become lodged in the papyrus plants along the shore. Crying at the top of its little lungs, the baby waved its arms and legs in the air.
Cass eyed the baby with concern. “Did somebody just leave it there?”
“Is anybody else remembering a story about a baby in the Nile?” asked Yo-Yoji.
The others looked blank.
“Um, the baby Moses? Sent down the river to be saved from being killed by the pharaoh’s soldiers? Raised by an Egyptian princess? Gets the Ten Commandments? Neither of you two smarties ever heard of the Bible?”