Another Pan (47 page)

Wendy and John glanced around at the coffins. Some of them were adorned with hieroglyphs, others with jewels and gold, and some were simple and timeworn.

“Seti is here,” said Peter. “I can feel it. It’s one of these.” He patted the satchel at his side, obviously itching to add this ingredient to his immortal cocktail.

“So we just go through them?” said John. “How’re we going to get through so many before the guardian or the death god gets here?”

“Can’t,” said Peter matter-of-factly. “And my lighter’s running out.”

The lighter flickered and went out. Peter struck it again and a fainter light appeared. If they took too long, they wouldn’t just be clueless about which sarcophagus to pick; they’d be clueless and covered in darkness.

Suddenly, they heard a noise. Peter turned quickly, taking the light with him. It went out, and a cold chill ran through the tomb. Wendy thought she heard a sigh, then a deep sickly groan, something almost painful. But then the light came back on, and Peter told them what he had already figured out.

“See these hieroglyphs?” he said, running his fingers across the pictures on one of the coffins resting against the wall. “They’re clearly from the wrong century. All the ones on this wall are from the same period, so we can forget about these.”

Then he moved across the room to another section. “These over here are just decoys,” he said. “They’re not even Egyptian. There are inscriptions here, but you can see certain letters that don’t appear in Egyptian script. My guess is that they were written to fool the really stupid bonedust hunters — the ones in a hurry, with nothing but a rudimentary knowledge of modern Arabic and too little research.”

Wendy was impressed. As Peter ran across the room dismissing half the sarcophagi, spewing facts about ancient Egyptian burial rites and death rituals, she thought about how much work he had put into this. And now that it was time to make the final discovery, it was natural that he would trust himself with the task. He had only tried to keep her from harm. She believed that with her whole heart.

“So that still leaves us with . . . a lot,” said Peter, waving an arm across the thick space around them. Wendy and John, too, began running their hands along the inscriptions on the coffins, trying to figure out which could be the right one.

“Is there any kind of clue in the legend about what the mummy might look like?” Wendy asked. “The others all had clues.”

“This last one is really vague,” said Peter. “They were all passed down through word of mouth, and this one didn’t get told much, since people thought it was cursed. But my guess is it has something to do with Neferat, the nursemaid.” His eyes searched her face for signs of understanding. “Do you remember her?” Wendy nodded. “She’s the key to all this. . . . Besides that, the big difference in this legend is that it’s more than one person’s injustice.” He rubbed his hands together and added with a smirk, “Should make for some real good bonedust.”

Peter went back to examining the contents of this mass tomb. Wendy walked past the many coffins lining the walls of the cave. Some of them were bright and shiny, glinting beautifully by the glow of Peter’s lighter. Others were covered with dirt and scratchings. John was doing the same thing, scanning the sarcophagi for any sign or clue. Wendy eyed the fading flame from Peter’s lighter. She stood motionless under what felt like hundreds of pounds of heavy air, trying to figure out where to start, trying to read the pictures on the sarcophagi, and thinking about how the ancient stories depicted here would help find the last bonedust. She couldn’t help but think that it didn’t matter anyway, though. As soon as they were outside, Simon would take it all away from them.

“Help me move these, Wendy,” shouted Peter. “We don’t have much time.”

“How are we supposed to move giant coffins?” Wendy asked.

Peter scanned the room, whipping this way and that, holding his lighter up against each coffin and down to the floor. “There,” he said, pointing to a slab of rock beneath their feet.

Wendy noticed that most of the floor was a circular grid of carved stones covered in a thick layer of dust. Peter began wiping away the dirt with his hands to reveal the hieroglyphics etched into each one. Each cartouche tile was the shape of dog tags and roughly the size of a loaf of bread. “See this?” Peter said. “It’s an exact map of this room. Every cartouche corresponds to one of these coffins. Count if you want.”

John started to count, but it took Wendy only a moment to realize that Peter was right. Peter put his palm against one of the tiles and began to move it. The coffins (and the matching tiles) weren’t tightly packed, so there was a foot or two of empty space between every coffin and each of its neighbors. As Peter moved each tile, the matching coffin moved, too, so that they might be able to rearrange them and create a path to the wall. It was almost like an ancient Egyptian version of John’s 14-15 puzzles from when he was a kid — those rickety wooden squares with sixteen spaces and fifteen tiles that you move around until the numbers are aligned or the image unwarped. John pulled out a piece of paper from his gym bag and started to scribble strategies. The goal was to allow Peter to get a good look at each sarcophagus, deciphering the markings to find the right one, while making their way toward the wall of the cave.

They maneuvered one layer of coffins after another, moving them this way and that, up, down, and back again, burrowing deeper and deeper into the recesses created by their work. The coffins scraped across the floor, crunching and creaking like stubborn geriatrics determined not to move. Peter worked faster than all of them, working the tiles until the groaning sound returned, accompanied by the strong stench of rotting flesh. Wendy shivered, thinking that this must be the worst part of the labyrinth, this stinking place in the deepest part of the pyramid below Marlowe — it felt like the tip of the upside-down pyramid, a point far below the earth. If there were any place for the Dark Lady to live, this would be it, this shadowy place full of death, this place that felt like being buried alive. She thought about the goddess, how the Egyptian legends showed death as a jackal-headed man but the five legends called it the Dark Lady. She thought of the hooded figure that had shredded John’s arm with her hook, and she wondered what would greet them once they reached the fifth mummy.

“Keep going!” Peter said as they zigzagged through the boxes, peering closely at each one and slowly approaching the wall of the cave.

Wendy was trembling, but she kept at it — until finally, something caught her eye.

“What’s this?” she said, motioning the others to join her.

She had just wedged herself between the last two rows and was pushing against a dusty coffin that stood in the last row, hoping to uncover the wall. But where she should have found the earthen side of the cave, she found a hard wooden surface. She knocked on it. It was hollow. When she ran her hand across it, she noticed that there was a hole, big enough to fit her hand, like a primitive doorknob. “I think it’s a door,” said Wendy.

“Look there,” said Peter. Above the door was a large inscription, like a sign. Peter translated.
“Throne Room.”

“That must be it,” said John. “The pharaoh must be in the throne room!”

Peter put his hand in the opening and started to pull. Wendy and John waited. But then, before he had a chance to pull on the knob, Peter’s face went white and he let out a gasp.

He was pulling now, but not on the door. From where Wendy stood, holding the fading lighter, it looked like Peter was trying to free his hand.

“What’s happening?” Wendy said in a frightened whisper.

Peter continued to pull, his breath growing quicker and louder. “Something’s . . . got my hand . . .” he croaked.

John and Wendy rushed toward him and started to pull him back. Something on the other side jerked, and the door flew open, freeing Peter in the process. Immediately, the door flew shut again. But it was too late. All three of them had seen it.

It was a shadow, female-shaped and hooded, just like the one that had hurt John. Two lines of blood snaked Peter’s hand, like rivers on a map. Fueled by waves of rushing adrenaline, Peter lunged at one of the floor tiles, moving a sarcophagus to block the door.

“I knew it,” he said, turning in a circle to look all around the circular cave wall. “It’s a puzzle. If we pick the wrong door, we could be killed.”

“What do the others say?” Wendy asked, pointing to three other inscriptions like the first one. They were spaced evenly around the cave, each perched above a door hidden by stacks of coffins.

“That one says
Battlefield,
” said Peter, rubbing his hand. “And those two are
Inner Chamber
and
Nursery
.”

“It has to be the inner chamber,” said John. “That’s where a king does most of his work, right? We must be in the antechamber now.”

“You sure about that, little guy?” said Peter. “The kingdom was stolen on a
battlefield
.”

Wendy didn’t say anything. She looked over the coffins at the walls of the cave a few feet away and saw for the first time that there were dusty etchings all around them, not just on the coffins but on the cave itself. She examined them closely. There were kings, men, armies, battles. One of the pictures caught her eye: a nursemaid with a vicious face, surrounded by little children and babies. Something about the nursemaid’s hungry face seemed familiar to Wendy — but then again, faces in old sketches all looked alike.

“You know what’s weird?” said John as he began to map out the fewest steps to the inner chamber door. “This whole injustice depends on the pharaoh being inherently good, right? But what kind of a good pharaoh is so selfish that he lets his whole country go to hell while he parties? I mean, I’ve met a lot of partiers at Marlowe, and none of those guys would
ever
make a good president. Look at the boarding students — sure, they’re cool, but you wouldn’t want them thinking up fiscal policy.”

Peter laughed at John’s nerdiness. Then he turned thoughtful and said, “It’s fun to be young. You can’t blame the guy for having a good time. Besides, legends are full of holes and exaggerations.”

“
I’m
young and I wouldn’t let anyone screw
me
like that,” said John.

Peter chuckled. “If we get out of here alive, maybe I’ll take you out for some real fun, and you can see how easy it can be to forget everything else.”

It must have been something in John’s comment. Maybe she had already started to put the pieces together, or maybe it was the fact that John brought up that point right as she was looking at another picture of the nursemaid, this time with her hand extended over a crib, her back bent in a sinister bow, and her broken left eye glinting despite the centuries of dust, but suddenly Wendy had an idea. She darted to the coffins blocking the nursery and began wedging herself through the layers, pushing herself into the crevices with renewed vigor, mumbling excitedly as she crept toward the door. She didn’t even bother with a cartouche this time. She just squeezed her skinny frame in.

“What are you doing?” asked John.

“Look at the walls,” said Wendy. “The story is written there.”

“How about you just explain?” said John, looking up from his notes about tile positions.

“The epic battle between Seti and his queen was a total sham!” said Wendy. “Just look!”

John walked toward the etchings in the cave walls. There it was, the whole story. The nursemaid with her roomful of children, the new king crowned, the epic battle.

“Hey,” said John, surveying the battle scene, “are these girls? And what are they holding there? It’s not swords.”

No, it didn’t look like swords at all. In fact, it looked as though the entire army consisted of women, fighting an epic battle with nothing in their hands except masks pinned to the ends of long, pointy sticks. From afar, it might look like warriors with spears, but up close, that wasn’t the picture at all.

John remembered the battle scene from the story.

Later in Seti’s life . . . a great battle was waged, a battle unrecorded in the history of men, for in this battle, women’s tricks played no small part. Some say it was a long and bloody battle between the armies of the pharaoh and the new queen, a takeover that should have made the history books. Others say it was quiet and that Seti was cut down with little fanfare, because he was sickly, nearly mute, and lacking true wisdom. . . .

    Suddenly, all the pieces fell into place. “No way!” shouted John. “Seti was replaced as a baby! The story never says how many years passed until Seti was crowned and his throne was stolen from him. I bet there wasn’t a battle at all. He was crowned as a baby, and then the wife killed him and ruled in his name.”

“Sickly, nearly mute, and lacking true wisdom,”
said Peter, shaking his head and looking around at the now obvious sketches on the wall, “just like a baby.”