Another Pan (34 page)

The next day, he was back at the library, rereading all the obscure books he could find. He now understood the connection between the guardians and the five mummies of Elan’s cursed line. He quickly linked the earthworm to Nailah, never admitting to himself that he had been wrong when he scribbled insults all over Professor Darling’s notes. For days, Simon researched. He read about Garosh and the Bedouins, Elan and his quest, and all the details surrounding their lineage. He tracked the generations using obscure genealogical records, filling in the holes from Elan to Garosh to Harere and beyond. He even made rough blueprints of the school, attempting to tie every little nook to its twisted underworld twin. Soon, he thought, he would figure out how to cross the barrier between the overworld and the underworld. And then those stupid kids could do nothing to stop the up-and-coming scholar from getting his due.

In the innermost depths of her chamber, the Dark Lady fumed. Her home had been breached, and now the boy had three of the five immortal bones. It would no longer be so easy to kill him. Now he had the power to heal, the power to fortify his mortal body. He must be captured. He must be stopped.
He is nearly there
. . . .

She stood in the lowest part of the underworld, the very tip of the pyramid, the deepest part of the abyss. She was covered by a cloud of her companions, her minions, her eyes. They whizzed around her as in a mist, making her seem like a giantess made of black billowing specks. And this is what she was. This was her natural state. She was their mistress. Lord of all flies, mother of all the creeping, buzzing things of the world. She lifted her shoulders, and the insects gave her strength. When she bent her weary body to cough, they propped her up and soothed her throat.

As for the meddlesome children above, the darkness would draw them in. She had been a nanny, after all, before she was ever a nurse. She would distract them with their own petty problems — infatuation and obsession and the longing for validation. She loved these weaknesses most of all, and she would use them to turn the children’s focus from the quest. If that failed, she would fool them with tricks of the eye. Then, if they persisted, she would guide them through the murky depths, to the place where she lived alone — all the way to the heart of the underworld maze. It would not be enough to kill them then. If they persisted in disturbing her slumber, she would bring them deep into the underworld and take back the bones that had been lost. And so the dark nurse schemed. . . .

Wendy stood breathless in front of the boys’ dorm building.
Am I hallucinating?
She had come to visit Peter as he packed his dorm room to leave Marlowe for good. After the incident with Connor, Wendy had spent hours obsessing about their relationship. Now that she was officially single, she analyzed everything Peter had said. She thought about Tina, who had known Peter for so much longer. She just
had
to know where things stood with Peter.

But now, as she stood in front of the boys’ dorm, she was sure the paranoia was getting to her, because there wasn’t just one but
two
black Eyes of Ra singed into the door frames leading into Peter’s hallway. “Is there an open gate here?” she muttered aloud. Should she avoid going in? But she wanted to see Peter. And besides, why would there be an open portal here, in Peter’s (soon to be ex-) hall?

“What gate?” said someone from behind her.

Wendy jumped a foot and screamed at the unexpected voice over her shoulder.

“Sorry.” Wendy turned and saw that she had startled the school nurse, whose hand was hovering just over her chest. “I’m jumpy today.”

The nurse was wearing an eye patch. “Are you OK?” Wendy asked.

“Yes.” The nurse smiled and touched the patch. “Just an infection. Were you talking to yourself, dear?”

Wendy laughed nervously. The way the nurse said
dear
was nice, like a mother or a confidante. “No . . . I mean, yes . . . I’m here to see my boyfriend.”

“You mean Connor?”

Wendy was surprised that the nurse knew about her love life. She scrunched her brow, and the nurse smiled and said, “You hear things around here.” Then she looked away and took out her handkerchief and wiped her forehead. She coughed once while averting her eye and then looked at Wendy again, waiting.

“Right,” said Wendy. “I’m here to see Peter.”

“Peter?” The nurse raised an eyebrow. “Ooooh . . . I heard about what happened, dear.” Then she leaned in like a practiced gossip and said, “I suppose he won’t be moving far.”

“What do you mean?” Wendy asked.

The nurse shrugged. “He can just bunk with his Spanish friend, like he always does.”

Professor Darling kept pushing his glasses farther and farther up the bridge of his nose. Wendy knew the students were waiting anxiously, hoping that he wouldn’t call them out on the fact that none of them had gone to see the Egyptian exhibit. She was livid and full of unanswered questions. What did the nurse mean when she said Peter could bunk with Tina? Peter was supposed to be
hers
. . . or so she thought. She could barely focus her attention on the class or on her father or on the worrisome fact that Simon had been eerily quiet about the Garosh bone incident, which meant that he was up to something.

Wendy was desperate to talk to Peter alone, but Peter, now fired, was reduced to lurking in the background and getting his information through Tina and the Lost Boys. Wendy’s eyes darted from where Peter was hiding, on the other side of a windowsill, to the classroom door. Every passing custodian made her jump at the thought that a faculty member could storm in any minute now, followed by police looking for Peter (and Wendy, too, since she had helped him sneak back onto campus). Wendy glanced at her brother. John had been awfully quiet since the breakup with Connor. He was obviously taking it hard — not that he ever thought Connor was his best friend or anything. But even the occasional charity invitation was better than total friendlessness. Wendy pressed her fingers to her temple. She didn’t think she could handle all this at once.

Simon sat nervously in the corner, but he was
always
nervous, along with nosy, narcissistic, and nettlesome. Since losing his precious artifact, he had been humiliated and had promised himself that he would unlock the labyrinth no matter what. He had drawn up a plan. In fact, he had drawn out maps and charts and all kinds of schematics during his off-hours. On the margins of his plan, there were doodles of a stick figure version of himself dancing on a pile of money. And in a few other doodles, his head was poking out of a poorly drawn biplane as he shot down the Red Baron with photon torpedoes. The plan itself was nothing more than a diary of how he had John wrapped around his little finger, and that he could use this “mole” to extract further information about the book. What more did he need? The schematics were mostly of the huge house/arcade he was going to build after he became the richest Egyptologist ever.