How to Curse in Hieroglyphics (8 page)

He took a half-step back as Cheryl advanced menacingly toward him.

“If there's any
breaking
to be done …” She trailed off ominously.

“Oh,
yeah?”
Artie gamely put up his fists and hopped around like a boxer, but Pilot stepped between the two of them before another skirmish erupted.

“Hey now!” he interrupted, glancing over his shoulder. “I think we might want to look for some cover—pronto. There's a whole buncha carnival folk headed in this direction.”

Cheryl and Tweed instantly took off running in a weaving pattern across the grounds toward the nearest tent, waving their complex military-style hand gestures at each other. Pilot rolled his eyes and grabbed Artie by the collar of his shirt, dragging him along as they ran to catch up with the twins.

“What are we runnin' for?” Artie sputtered in a choked voice.

Pilot looked down and saw that Artie's face had turned bright crimson. He let go of his collar and the little guy let out a gasp, waving weakly in the direction from which they'd bolted.

“They look harmless enough!” he said. “All they want is to bring us wonders, and rides, and upset stomachs . There's nuthin' sinister about it!”

“Says you.” Tweed rounded on him. “We happen to have reliable intel that indicates to the contrary.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means we know stuff.” Cheryl pulled him behind a sandwich board, garishly painted with a nightmarishly grinning clown, and into an alleyway between two tents.

“Now shut your yap if you want to be a part of this mission!”

“But I—”

“Better do what they say, Art-Bart,” Pilot said, following them into hiding, “unless you really feel like entering into an argument you've got no way of winning.”

“You got that right.” Tweed nodded. “If you knew half of the whole of what we know, you'd be running out of here screaming for your—”

“MUMMY!” Artie blurted.

Cheryl blinked. “That didn't take long.”

“No .” Artie was positively bug-eyed. “Look!”

He pointed toward a gap in the back wall of a canvas exhibit tent, half hidden by a bunch of painted railcars from a ride all parked in a row. The twins and their companions crept toward the tent and peered inside. In the gloomy shadows of the tent's dim interior, they could see wooden packing crates strewn about, half of them with their tops off and spilling out entrails of shredded newspaper and wood chips.

A large, painted plywood sign resting on one end informed the gang that, once it was set up and ready for carnival-goers, the tent would host a “Weird, Strange, Wondrous and Phantasmagorical Collection of Curiosities and Rare Artifactual Flotsam.”

Pilot was skeptical. “Sounds like a cross between a flea market and a wax museum to me .”

“See?” Artie hissed in an exaggerated stage whisper
that carried just as well as if he'd yodelled.
“Mummy!
There. Right there!”

“Gadzooks!” Cheryl murmured, grabbing Tweed by the sleeve. “Look …”

The girls stuck their heads farther through the opening. In the far corner of the tent, lit by a shaft of sunlight that poured through a gap in the canvas roof like the beam of a spotlight, a raised platform stood, decorated with a backdrop of purple-and-gold curtains hung on a wooden frame. In the middle of the little stage stood a bulky, vaguely person-shaped object covered in a drop cloth. Above it, a sign illuminated by a border of light bulbs, three of which were burnt out, read:

ZAHARA-SAFIYA

ANCIENT PRINCESS OF EGYPT

And then, in bright, drippy crimson paint underneath those words—and made to look like someone had scrawled a hasty last warning—it read:

BEWARE THE
MUMMY'S
CURSE!!..-

Cheryl crossed her arms and glared through the tent flap. “So, Sa-ra-fa … er … Za-ha-ha … um … Mummy-
Girl! Our paths have crossed once again.” She turned to Tweed. “Coincidence, partner?”

Tweed thoughtfully tapped her chin. “I think not.”

“Well, of
course
it isn't!” Pilot rolled his eyes. “We came here lookin' for this kinda stuff, didn't we?”

Cheryl ignored his attempts to deflate the exquisite drama of the moment and nodded decisively. “This calls for further investigation,” she said to her cousin, giving her the C+T sign.

“You are
so
right,” agreed Tweed, returning the gesture. Then she thrust one booted foot through the gap in the tent's canvas wall. “Our regularly scheduled Mummy Week appears to have arrived early this month. Cameras rolling, aaaand—”

“
Whoa!
Whoa there …” Pilot wasn't so sure that what they were about to do was a very good idea at all. “This isn't one of your standard everyday monster-mashing make-believes. It looks like there might be real live—uh, dead—archaeological whatchamacallits in there. I don't think those carnies are gonna be too happy to find us nosing around—”

He stopped in mid-sentence as both girls disappeared through the flap in the tent, hand signals aflutter.

“C'mon, Bartleby,” sighed Pilot, holding back the tent flap. “We've come this far, might as well make sure the girls don't get themselves into any real trouble.”

“Yeah,” agreed Artie. “We men gotta stick together and look out for the little ladies.”

Pilot looked down at his companion. “Art-Bart, do me a favour—
don't
say that when they're in earshot. And don't touch anything.”

“I will keep my hands inside the ride at all times!” quipped Artie as he took a shortcut, hopping through one side of a garish little railcar and out the other, and disappeared into the tent.

Following on his sneakered heels, Pilot
seriously
wondered if Artie even met the minimum height requirements.

6

THE MUMMY STRIKES OUT!

"H
eeeyyyy!” Artie said as he stood peering closely into a dusty glass box—close enough that he left a nose print in the middle of one pane. Whatever the artifact inside was, it clearly had him excited. “Check it out, little ladies …” He waved an arm, beckoning them over.

“Babe Ruth's baseball! It's even signed!”

The others crowded around for a look.

Sure enough, the little brass plaque glued to the display case on a slightly wonky angle read:

B. RUTH's First Home Run Hit!

… and the off-white orb on the stand in the middle of a square of artificial grass sported faded red stitching and a scrawled signature written in age-pale ink.

“Umm, are you sure?” Tweed asked, squinting at the ball. “That signature looks more like
‘Bob
Ruth' to me.”

“Also?” Pilot straightened up and tapped the glass. “
That's
a softball. I don't think Babe played slo-pitch.”

Artie looked a bit crestfallen. “Maybe in his spare time?”

Pilot shook his head and picked up an exhibit program from a stack on a crate, thumbing through the outlandish descriptions of what was, in all likelihood, just a bunch of old junk.

Artie frowned and tipped the glass case up, plucking the ball off its perch for a closer inspection. “Huh.” He said, peering at the thing. “Whaddaya know. Bob it is.” He shook his head and stuffed the ball in the bib of his overalls, trotting over to another case.

“Hey!” Cheryl exclaimed. “That's not yours!”

“Oh, yeah?” Artie shrugged, a defiant scowl pasted on his bespectacled mug. “Well it's not Babe's, either. So I'm not stealin' it from nobody. Find me out who it belongs to and I'll give it back.”

“You little monster—”

Pilot rolled his eyes and stepped between the two of them before another scuffle broke out. “C'mon, Cher-bear. You know he's not leaving here with that thing,” he said in a quiet voice. “We'll make him put it back before we go. Just let him carry the silly thing around for a minute or he's gonna cause a ruckus. And we're
gonna get caught. We're here to check out the mummy princess, remember?”

Tweed was way ahead of them on that. She'd ignored Artie's questionable Hall-of-Famer find and had already navigated her way through all of the other half-set-up display cases full of arcane and mysterious thingamajigs. Cheryl turned around in time to find her tugging at the edge of the cloth that shrouded the object on the stage.

One good yank and the dust sheet fell away, revealing an elaborately decorated casket painted to resemble what its occupant had no doubt looked like in life, over four thousand years earlier. The ancient Egyptian princess Zahara-Safiya.

Cheryl, Tweed and Pilot stood staring. Even Artie was rendered momentarily speechless.

After a few silent seconds, Cheryl rooted around in the pocket of her jeans, found a key chain penlight she liked to carry (it doubled as a handy space laser during games of ACTION!!) and shone it up into the image of the Princess's face, rendered in once-vibrant colours and gold leaf, now faded with age.

“Little heavy on the icing, don'tcha think?” she murmured to her cousin.

Tweed didn't answer. The kohl-rimmed eyes of the sarcophagus were pretty much exactly what
she
aspired to in terms of gothy-cool eye makeup—that is, if Pops ever actually relented and let her wear the stuff.

“Looks kinda stuck up, if y'ask me,” Pilot said with a nonchalant shrug.

Cheryl couldn't help noticing that, shrug notwithstanding, he didn't exactly stop staring at the image of the beautiful princess. She nudged him sharply with her elbow and moved closer to see if there was some kind of latch or hinges or something on the lid of the casket.
Not
that she really wanted to open it—

“Let's open the thing!” Artie suggested with gruesome enthusiasm.

“No!” the girls squawked in tandem.

“Yeah …” Pilot shook his head. “That would be … uh … rude?”

“Rude's one way to put it,” Tweed agreed. “If that sarcophagus is, in fact, the final resting place of ZaharaSafiya, then she should remain there, undisturbed.”

Artie kicked at the dirt and groaned in boredom. “Killjoys,” he muttered, and wandered away to find something else cool or gory.

Cheryl was peering at the casket. “I don't know,” she murmured, gesturing for Tweed to hand over the magnifying glass she'd shoved in her belt back at the barn. She held it up and leaned in even closer. “I'm starting to think this whole darn thing might be a hoax.”

“A scam?” Tweed asked, intrigued.

“The movies don't lie, partner,” Cheryl said in all seriousness.

“And movie
mummies”
—Tweed picked up on her
cousin's suspicions and took over the magnifying glass, lifting it to her eye—”reside in much posher digs than this old crate!”

It was true: the paint was cracked, the gold detailing flaking off, bits of enamel were missing, and there was a general aura of shabbiness to the artifact. The only thing that stood out to the girls' critical inspection was a large, greenish stone, swirled with flecks of fiery opalescent colour, that was carved in the shape of a beetle. It rested at the centre of a painted jewelled collar, above the painted crossed hands. Just about where the heart of the mummy inside would be .

“A scarab beetle,” Tweed said in an ominous whisper. “The pharaoh's symbol of eternal life.”

Cheryl shifted uncomfortably, her skin suddenly itchy as if there were a
real
beetle crawling around under her plaid shirt. As she stared at it, the silly darn bug almost seemed to wink at her, full of wicked mischief and bad intent.

“There isn't a
real
mummy in there,” Pilot said, pacing a full circle around the sarcophagus. “Can't be. It'd be in a museum if there was.”

His words confirmed Cheryl's own feelings on the matter. She was silently relieved to hear him say so, and she shook her arms out to rid herself of the creepy-crawlies. Pilot was right. The thing was a big old fake. Had to be. Still, there was something about that stone .

“Hey!” Artie's voice was suddenly muffled-sounding. “You guys should see all the rest of the crazy mummy stuff that's still in these boxes!”

The others turned to see Artie's legs sticking out from the top of a box, feet pedal-kicking in the air as if he were riding a bicycle upside down. Packing material erupted from the crate as he dug through its contents, seemingly too caught up in the moment to employ proper treasure-hunting precautions.

“Gotta be something worth a nickel in here,” he said.

“On second thought, maybe it
is
real.” Cheryl glanced back at the sarcophagus, pigtails swinging around her head, their cheerful bounce at odds with the seriousness of her expression.
“Really
real … and all that stuff comes from the same place. Remember
The Mummy's Tomb
, 1942?”

Tweed nodded, equally serious. “Of
course.
Egyptian nobles were buried with all of their worldly belongings packed up and put into the tomb with them so that they could enjoy their luxuries in the life beyond. They even mummified their pets—”

“WoooOOO!!!”

Pilot and the girls almost jumped out of their skins when Artie started to howl in terror. His legs flailed madly in the air. Pilot leaped for the whirling red Keds and, grabbing him by the ankles, yanked Artie free from the box. Artie's hair was standing on end, his face was ghost-pale beneath the freckles, his eyes were huge and
buggy behind his specs … and his fingers were clenched around the toothy muzzle of a wizened, snarling, petrified crocodile!

When Pilot uprighted him on the dusty ground, Artie spun around the room as if he were doing a square dance with the reptile, his high-pitched, terrified squeals
wooOOooOOoo-ing
like an ambulance siren. He finally got hold of himself long enough to let go of the scaly critter, flinging it back into the box, and stood there, panting. Colour flooded back into his face and dyed his ears bright red. Meanwhile, Cheryl, Tweed and Pilot were flopping about among the crates, all three of them weeping with laughter at what had clearly been a performance worthy of comedy gold.