Another Pan (13 page)

“Wow,” said Wendy. “I didn’t realize assistant history professors had such action-packed lives.”

“As I said, you’re far too delicate a young lady for this talk,
Darling
.” He looked at the professor as if he expected him to appreciate the jest, but Professor Darling didn’t look amused (and Wendy had heard this joke about five hundred times already).

“
I
heard you spent two nights in the airport until they replaced your passport,” said Wendy, her tone cold.

Simon ignored her.

“Well, we’d better get to work,” said Wendy. “I want to clock in a few hours before dark. Daddy, can you sign my time card?”

Professor Darling nodded proudly.

She turned to Simon, deciding to ignore his protests and pretend that she was the boss. As her father always said,
Do the job you want, not the job you have
. Or, as John would put it,
Fake it till you make it
. “Follow me. The three of us are supposed to start cataloging the artifacts in the basement.”

“Dr. Darling”— Simon’s Brit accent seemed to intensify just then —“I suppose I’ll need the keys, cataloging papers, et cetera.” He held out his hand.

“Wendy already has all that,” said the professor, already busying his mind with other things. He sat behind his desk and was opening research files before Simon had even withdrawn his hand.

Wendy smiled at Simon, who glared back. “Yes, well,” he said, “you’ll have to turn over at least the paperwork. We wouldn’t want any liability issues . . . as a result of mishandling. I’m sure you understand, Wendy.”

“We’ll see if I can find them,” said Wendy sarcastically. “Teenagers tend to be so flighty when it comes to misplacing things. Can we get to work now?” She picked up a couple of clipboards and walked toward the Marlowe basement. The whole way, John examined Simon’s multi-watch, holding up Simon’s limp wrist to his face. He rapid-fired questions, and Simon answered indifferently with line after line from the owner’s manual. John didn’t seem to notice the irritation in Simon’s voice. Wendy hoped desperately that John wasn’t finding a new role model in
this
guy. Those spoiled dorm felons were bad enough. Why couldn’t he just hang out with Connor?

The basement was a huge open space that extended under most of Marlowe. The room was piled high with mounds of trophies, old equipment, and textbooks. The stacks were so tall that they formed a maze. One could see that the janitor had tried to create a path winding around each stack. Along the walls of the room, doors webbed out in each direction, leading to broom closets, boiler rooms, and other utility outlets. It seemed that over the summer, the basement had gone into disrepair — full of mold, dirty rags, and discarded paint buckets. Wendy was shocked to see so many colonies of moths and flies in the corners of walls, in the cracks of doors, and nesting in every nook and on every box. “Gross,” she said.

John and Simon immediately headed to the pile of old computers, pulling out scrap parts. As far as computer nerdery was concerned, Simon seemed like a thirty-year-old version of John. This worried Wendy because in the few minutes that she had known him, Simon had already won the prize for the most socially stunted man-child she’d ever met.

Wendy let the boys pick through the electronic rubble and went over to the artifacts. Professor Darling had already opened the crates. Packing materials were strewn all around the pieces, like colorful paper on Christmas morning. Wendy had to admit, even though this job cut into her time with Connor and her friends (unlike the café, where they would have been able to hang out), the ancient relics filled her with excitement. She had grown up hearing the stories of Cleopatra and Hatshepsut, the most powerful women of their time.

Wendy picked up the inventory list and began organizing the timeworn vases, placing them in groups chronologically, using her best guesses to date the items. A statue of an ibis bird was astonishingly intact. Its impossibly long thin neck had endured centuries of jostling without snapping in half. A few small statues looked like pieces of a child’s game. She placed them with the other Middle Kingdom artifacts. Wendy paid close attention to the papyrus scrolls, which were delicate and discolored. One especially rare item was a book, bound in the European style but obviously containing pages made of ancient papyri. Maybe it was the copy of the
Book of Gates
that her father had mentioned. She laughed as she remembered her father’s high hopes for it. Wendy had no idea what to do with it, and John was too busy shirking work to read the hieroglyphs. The book seemed ageless. There was no category for it. Brown and brittle pages showed images Wendy had seen before in her father’s notebooks. She set it aside to show John when he was done goofing around.

Then Wendy came across something strange. It was a set of canopic statues, which were really jars containing a mummy’s liver, lungs, stomach, and intestines. Usually, there were four jars with four different heads (man, baboon, jackal, falcon) to represent the four sons of Horus, the gatekeeper god. The idea was that the mummy would need all those organs in the afterlife, so they’d put them in the jars for safekeeping. But these jars were all carved to represent the death god, the jackal-headed Anubis. But were these really Anubis? The jars were jackal-headed, with sharp listening ears, ravenous long jowls, and piercing eyes, but their bodies . . . they seemed almost female — as if someone had tried to combine Anubis with someone, or something, else entirely.

The strange thing was that one of the statues was missing. The inventory list expressly stated that there were four alabaster statues, but all Wendy could see were three. Three jackals. She wondered if anyone had been down there. What was even more odd was that next to the three statues Wendy found an alabaster ball. It looked like one of the eyes of the jackal god. It must have dropped from the missing statue. Professor Darling would be appalled if he knew. Wendy stared at the globe, wondering what it had seen, where its body had gone. But she was overcome with an uncomfortable feeling, as though the eye was staring back at her. And the creepiest part was that the eye didn’t seem vicious, the way she imagined the death god would be, but scared, as though it had seen something truly terrible.

“How’s it going?”

Wendy jumped at the noise. It was John. He and Simon were holding a few scrap pieces they had found.

“Are you OK? Did we scare you?” said John.

“No,” said Wendy. “You two should be helping.”

“But look what we found,” said John, holding up his scraps. “Simon showed me all kinds of stuff.”

Simon stood to the side, taking the compliments like tributes laid at the feet of a pharaoh.

Wendy wasn’t in the mood. She had been doing all the work by herself, and the afternoon was wasting away.

“You guys can start over there,” she said. She reached out to hand Simon the inventory list, but Simon didn’t reach out to take it.

“You two go ahead and finish up here,” said Simon, changing tack from his previous attempts to get his hands on all the paperwork. “It looks like you’ve got it under control.”

It seemed that now his game was to play boss by
not
doing work.

A flare went off behind Wendy’s eyes. “What? You’re supposed to help.”

“I’m supposed to make sure that you children don’t harm the artifacts,” said Simon. “I’ve monitored the quality of your work, and I’m willing to let it slide.”

“You weren’t monitoring anything. You were playing with that pile of electronic junk and your stupid watch,” said Wendy.

“
Adults
can do two things at once,” said Simon. “I’ve been tested and can do five.”

Simon turned and marched out of the basement as Wendy tried to control the anger rising up from her chest.
What a total prick!
Did he really think that kind of crap would work? She was sixteen, not twelve. And she could see right through this guy. Just another résumé-padding loser who thought that if he ordered people around with enough condescension, they’d just blindly do everything he wanted. Wendy let out a frustrated groan. She went back to the daunting task of organizing the exhibition by herself. John put down his scraps and knelt by her side. Wendy was too angry to give him any instructions at the moment. So he hovered, waiting for an opportunity to make himself useful. Wendy worked in silence. A few times, she reached for something and John jumped up to get it and hand it to her.

When she placed a limestone vase in the Thirteenth Dynasty section, John made a little coughing sound to catch her attention. Then he nodded at the Fourteenth Dynasty artifacts, and Wendy realized he was right. She placed the vase in the right pile and smiled at her little brother. John grinned. “Thanks,” said Wendy.

“No problem,” said John.

They were silent for a little longer, until John said, “Wendy?”

“Yeah?” said Wendy.

“You know, you probably shouldn’t have insulted the multi-watch.”

“Shut up, John.”

As they sat cross-legged in the semidarkness, sorting statues and scrolls into piles, the thick walls of the Marlowe basement ricocheted the sound of their laughter.

“Can you believe we’re allowed to do this?” John asked Wendy as he carefully swirled a Q-tip in one of the cracks of an old statue. He came up with a clump of grayish grime.

“You mean can I believe our nerd-core dad subjected us to a childhood of learning to restore priceless antiques at museum quality only to force us into his lame-sauce career?”

“Yes!” exclaimed John.

“Yes,” mumbled Wendy.

“Did you know that the
Book of Gates
used to be called the
Book of the Netherworld
?”

“How do you know that?” said Wendy. She was dusting a papyrus scroll and sorting through a stack of placards — wishing that there was just one other person at Marlowe qualified to take this job. She glanced at a clock.
3:10 p.m
. They’d been working for only ten minutes, but it already felt like hours. Outside, she heard her friends laughing and making weekend plans. She felt a momentary hint of jealousy — that they were born into a particular family and so had license to do whatever they wanted with their free time. No need to work. No need for money. But, hey, some of them had really overbearing parents, always pushing them to get ahead. Get into this school. Get into that club. At least her father didn’t do that. And after finally meeting Connor’s mother a few days ago, she was starting to think that she was lucky not to have one around.