It was the most wonderful idea in the world, even if Maris or Jack had thought of it.
Stealing a mummy.
Two
THE 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 weak
ness 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.
But there was no climate control in the museum. Her container did not protect her from humidity. So even the museum did not care about that.
The guard would soon be back. Emlyn did not want him to see her a third time. She found the great stairs that went down to the first floor and wandered through museum rooms that meant nothing to her.
Unless, of course, she decided to invade them at night, and without permission.
Three
DINOSAURS WAS THE FIRST room a museum visitor entered after paying the fee and getting a colored tag. In the center of an enormous space stood a brontosaurus on a bed of stones, separated from the public by a low brick wall and a lot of signs that said PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH.
Touching, however, was the goal of every child.
The immense brontosaurus was supported by curved steel beams strong enough for a road bridge. Anybody could see that it was strong enough for a kid to climb. All across the Dinosaur Room came high-pitched arguments from small children who wanted to climb brontosaurus’s spine, up to the ceiling.
Even now, Emlyn wanted to. But she sat quietly on a wide, backless bench and considered other things.
When I take the mummy, I’ll come as a visitor. I’ll just stay after closing. That should be easy enough. The crucial part is leaving. I’ll be leaving with something everybody can recognize. Every one of these four-year-olds could yell, “That lady’s got a mummy!”
It was not possible for Emlyn to think of an ordinary circumstance in which a girl might be carrying a mummy. Therefore, she must disguise the mummy as something else or leave by night when she could not be seen.
The first seemed impossible. Dress the mummy in something from The Gap and pretend she was taking a sick friend out to the car? People would notice that the friend was actually dead, and had been for three thousand years. Plus, Amaral-Re did not have separated arms and legs; she was a cylinder with a head bump and a feet bump.
Emlyn would have to stay here alone in the night and sneak out into the dark city with a mummy in her arms.
After a minute of eyeing brontosaurus, the older children began yelling, “But where is tyrannosaurus rex?”
“The museum doesn’t have one,” explained the parents. “Let’s look at the camarasaurus instead. Or the edaphosaurus!”
Nobody cared about them. Nobody ever would. No tyrannosaurus rex? Sadly, the children concluded that this was a loser museum.
Only fifty steps and five minutes into the museum and visitors under eight were exhausted. Toddlers wept from frustration, and first graders begged for snacks.
Way high up on the walls were wonderful painted murals of dinosaurs eating plants and one another. Nobody thought of looking up.
Emlyn studied the corners of the enormous room for cameras and sensors. She did not believe there were any. The hall with the valuable paintings and the hall with the sculpture, yes; the cameras were obvious, hanging in the ceiling corners. If there were cameras here, they were hidden, and Emlyn did not believe that this museum could afford state-of-the-art surveillance systems. Here, the museum used a living guard. After all, this was the room most likely to sustain damage. Sure enough, when Emlyn lowered her gaze, she found a guard studying her.
She was the thing in the room that was wrong.
Nobody looked up. Five-year-olds looked across. Twelve-year-olds looked at one another. Sixteen-year-olds didn’t come.
The dinosaur crowd was shorter and younger than Emlyn, with less vocabulary. She was not a mother, nor a grandmother, nor a baby-sitter. It was the guard’s job to notice somebody out of place.
She turned her attention once more to the brontosaurus and thought, I will outwit him. I will outwit all of them. I will get in. I will get out. I will have a mummy.
Children abandoning Dinosaurs rushed through Impressionist Paintings without slowing down or waiting for their parents. They spilled into the Sculpture Hall, a boring room with statues set into alcoves and standing on squares of granite and basically getting in the way of your race to the cafe. Emlyn let herself be swept along with a scout troop on a field trip. Tapes and short films were everywhere. After kids poked buttons to make them play, they ran on. The tapes played to empty rooms.
Suddenly Emlyn saw what she had never seen before, even in her most larcenous moments: Each gallery was separated by heavy iron grilles that swung out like cafe shutters. They were not Gothic decoration. At night they would be closed and locked.
A little boy tried to climb one. The guard didn’t seem to mind and neither did his mother. He got about halfway up, was unable to dislodge it, and could not make it swing. He tried to fit behind it, but he could not squish under or through.
If I get stuck in a room overnight, thought Emlyn, I’ll really be stuck. I might be able to find a corner and stay here alone in the dark, but I won’t be able to change rooms.
This was sobering. What if she got the mummy in her arms but could not leave?
She walked slowly to the Great Hall, the only part of the old mansion still used by visitors. It rose in a golden dome, sparkling with tiny windows.
When Emlyn’s mother was a girl, the museum had consisted only of the old stone mansion, a horrid, frightening place with a cageful of monkeys trapped on the stair landing and parrots screaming from an enclosure on a balcony. Looming out of dark rooms were colossal Greek statues, and gathering dust in corners were collections of nothing in particular. The mummy and this wonderful room were the only traces of the old museum.
Why would you have a room like this in your own house? A state legislature might want a room like this, but ordinary people? On the other hand, not much was ordinary about a man who went to Cairo and bought a mummy at the corner store.
Not much is ordinary about me, either, thought Emlyn, and she had to lower her eyes to veil her excitement.
Among columns and arched openings were two old-fashioned wooden doors. Stenciled in gold on one was SECURITY. Stenciled on the other was MUSEUM OFFICIALS ONLY, NOT FOR PUBLIC USE.
That, then, was the door that brought you into the old rooms of the mansion, once dining room, parlor, and butler’s pantry, now offices. Emlyn stared at it with longing, but she turned around and left the museum. The only exit was next to the only entrance. You could not come and go without passing a metal detector and a guard.
Emlyn went outside and down huge, wide granite steps that also gave the museum a state capitol look. She crossed the street to walk around the museum on the far side.
The north wall was a flat, doorless, windowless expanse. This was the theater where they showed movies with subtitles. She was not going to shimmy up ropes with or without a mummy in her arms, so this side was useless.
The east side had a high but roofless wall, with one regular door and one extremely large garage door. Neither had an outside handle. Could this be a parking and delivery area? Emlyn retreated half a block and sat on the curb, eating a bagel from a vendor’s cart. Fifteen minutes later a car pulled up, facing the garage door. The driver tapped his visor, which must have held an automatic door opener, because the huge door slowly opened upward and the car entered.
Emlyn caught a glimpse of a garbage Dumpster, a few parked cars, a van with the museum logo, and a high cement walkway, the right height for a truck to back up to. So there was at least one exit from the museum into the utility parking.
The garage door folded back down, and the east wall was solid and silent again. The two door outlines facing her had to be emergency exits as well, and therefore they’d never be locked. Opening them probably set off an alarm, but you would be out in one step, across the s
treet in ten, and vanishing into the city before anybody could react to the alarm.
You would, however, be holding a mummy.
This might alarm other people on the sidewalk.
Emlyn walked to the south, mansion side. The old stone house had many windows and doors. They still had their big round brass handles in the shape of lions’ manes, but they also wore signs that said NOT AN ENTRANCE.
Inside high windows and behind the curve of elaborate drapes, she could see people at desks.
She walked back to the public entrance side and stared at the huge steps. The whole idea seemed ludicrous. When she’d been near the mummy, Emlyn had believed. Now she did not. The whole thing could not happen.
It was this detached calm that made it possible for Emlyn to take her first real step toward Bad.
She reentered, showing the little metal button on her shirt collar that proved she was a legitimate visitor. She went directly to the Great Hall. She walked up to the door that said MUSEUM OFFICIALS ONLY. NOT FOR PUBLIC USE. She opened it and walked in.
Four
THE SECRETARY COULD NOT have been nicer. She was so pleased that the high school newspaper hoped to carry an article about the new direction in which Dr. Brisband was taking the museum.
Emlyn deduced that this woman was not the mother of teenagers. Any real parent would know that there were no teenagers in this city or any other city who cared what direction a museum went in. If there was such a thing as a school newspaper (and in Emlyn’s school there was not), they would know better than to waste good column space on museums.
But the secretary picked up her phone and said, “Dr. Brisband, I know how very very very busy your schedule is at the moment, but could you possibly fit in a high school reporter? Or perhaps you and she could determine a suitable hour during which you might give an interview at a later date?”
Emlyn was glad she had her purse with her and that in her purse was a small notebook and a sharp pencil. She could look quite reporterish. She wondered how long it would take to arrive inconspicuously at the subject of security systems.