How to Curse in Hieroglyphics (11 page)

Did they?”

Pilot had a point. Back in the days following “The Incident,” he and the girls had tried desperately— and without one iota of success—to get someone in a position of authority to take them seriously. Instead, police and doctors and nurses alike had all smiled gently
at the “clearly traumatized” tykes and patted them on the head, whispering words like “coping mechanisms” and “shock” when they put forth theories that sounded as though they were plucked from the scenes of a B movie.

Pops, for his part, hadn't ever seemed as inclined to dismiss the girls' claims out of hand. But when he'd suggested that they might be telling at least part of the real tale, the Sheriff had sternly reprimanded the drive-in theatre operator and uttered not-so-veiled threats that perhaps—if Pops, and his movies, proved to be a harmful influence on the impressionable minds of two little girls—alternate living arrangements might have to be found.

Cheryl and Tweed had shut their mouths right there and then and kept their theories to themselves. The movies didn't lie. They'd known they were right. They believed they could see the things that adults had long ago forgotten to even look for. And now, when the whole carnival situation was starting to look as though it would travel down a similar road, Pilot was counselling them to keep their mouths shut once again and think twice about sounding the alarm.

“You and you and me,” Pilot said, pointing, “we
know
that an empty casket wasn't supposed to be part of the show. That shyster Colonel was expecting something to be in there. Whatever it was .”—Pilot reached into the sarcophagus and snatched up the sneaker, brandishing it
before the girls' pale faces—”I'd bet my plane that it's got something to do with Artie.”

Tweed blinked. “You'd bet your
plane
…?”

Pilot nodded.

“Whoa .”

Suddenly, there were gruff voices coming from outside, behind the tent, and someone seemed to be tugging at the ties on a flap there. The trio froze, listening.

“Blast it!” said the Colonel angrily. “Where the devil is my creature?!”

A hand tugged at the flap and the trio glanced around wildly for places to hide. Tweed squeezed herself into a supposedly haunted grandfather clock on display. Cheryl dove for a “magic carpet,” grabbed one end and rolled herself up in it. Peering out the end, she saw Pilot bolt for a medieval suit of armour, trying to hide his lanky frame behind it.

They all held their breath as the tent's back-door flap flew wide and Colonel Dudley stalked in, his face tomato-red and his moustache quivering with rage. In his wake, the weedy-looking carny who had been behind the scenes was pale and clearly nervous. He had long, stringy hair and a long face with an even longer nose, and his eyes darted from side to side as he peered around the tent.

“I dunno, Boss—”

“Well, you'd better find out! And fast! That pathetic roll of bandages is our meal ticket, Delmer. I've made
more money off her scrawny carcass than any other piece of terrible kitsch in this whole carnival! I want to know how that thing escaped!”

Cheryl squinted out of the rolled-up end of her carpet and could just barely make eye contact with her cousin, where she was crouched in the clock cabinet.
“Escaped?”
She mouthed the question silently. “Escaped” would seem to indicate that the mummy in question had a will of its own. That it was something more than just a scrawny carcass. Tweed was marginally more of an expert on mummies than Cheryl, and Cheryl could see by the answering look in Tweed's eyes that Dudley's phrasing was cause for grave—no pun intended—concern.

But then she lost sight of Tweed when Delmer the carny idly kicked at her rug with the toe of his workboot, half unrolling it, almost as if he expected to find the ancient remains of the Princess hiding there. Cheryl held her breath and squeezed her eyes shut, hoping he wouldn't unroll the rug all the way.

“Maybe somebody stole it,” Delmer said, suddenly leaving the rug alone.

Dudley's head snapped around and his eyes narrowed menacingly. “And whose fault would that be, now?”

“Uh … the thief's?”

The Colonel rolled his eyes. “Or yours, you dingbat, for not keeping a better eye on things! First you let those town urchins run amok during set-up, and now this!”

“Sorry, Boss .”

The Colonel sighed heavily. “At least the worst that thing can do is shuffle and mumble,” he said. “That mummy is still under my control so long as . so long . so .”

Colonel Dudley's face suddenly went from the hue of a boiled beet to the colour of a boiled egg as he peered closely at the sarcophagus. More precisely, as he peered closely at the scarab beetle jewel at the centre of the sarcophagus. The one Artie Bartleby had cracked with that killer pitch of his.

His nose only inches away from the scarab, the Colonel whispered something under his breath that might very well have been, “Oh
no
.”

From their various hiding spots, Cheryl, Tweed and Pilot strained forward.

“That's done it .” Dudley said in a strained, dry,
frightened-sounding
voice. “The cat's out of the bag.”

“No it ain't.” Delmer held up what looked like a linen bag, shaped like a cat—with a cat's face painted onto it and everything—that was part of the Egyptian exhibit. “It's right here.”

“Put that thing down!” the Colonel snapped. “I
mean
Zahara-Safiya is not only on the loose—she's awake! That crazy old desert rat I bought her from in Cairo, he warned me . he said that the curse that binds the Princess is locked in this jewel. And so long as it remained intact, I could control the creature”—he clutched at the charm around his neck—”with the Eye of Osiris!”

“Horus, “
Tweed muttered under her breath. The Colonel and the carny froze. Tweed squeezed her eyes shut, berating herself silently.

“I say . did you hear something?” Dudley asked in a whisper.

Just then, the Bob Ruth softball fell from the shadows and rolled to a stop at Delmer's feet. He stooped and picked it up.

“Oh,” he said. “That's all it was. I gotta fix the stand for this dumb thing. It keeps rolling off.”

“I see …” Dudley eyed the softball suspiciously. When it remained inert for several long moments, the Colonel's jaw unclenched a bit. But when he turned back to the casket with its broken jewel, it clenched right back up again. He raised one chunky finger to the scarab, but didn't quite touch it.

“Listen, Delmer,” the Colonel said. “Right now, all we've got is a missing meal ticket on our hands. And that, in itself, is bloody inconvenient. This place is remote enough that none of the rumours of our past run-ins with the authorities—unfounded though they may have been—have come close to making the papers. Why, I was even thinking about setting up shop in this town for a while. Maybe take over that movie lot across the way once we'd run off all of their business. It wouldn't have taken long. Did you see the triple bill they had up on the sign?
Creature from the Black Lagoon?.
That old
chestnut? Blimey! Who on earth are the dunderheads who programmed that?”

Pilot held his breath and squeezed
his
eyes shut, hoping desperately that Cheryl and Tweed could keep hold of themselves and not leap from their hiding spots to run at the Colonel in twin fits of rage. As it was, Pilot was mighty indignant on their behalf and almost took it upon himself to do it. Who did that pompous old walrus think he was, talking like that about the Starlight? Before he could charge to his pals' defence, however, the Colonel was talking again. And what he said made Pilot's blood run suddenly cold.

“Well,” Dudley harrumphed, “that's not going to happen now. Spread the word, Delmer. Tonight, we fleece these bumpkins for all they're worth. Then, in the morning, we're packing up and moving out. Because a missing mummy's one thing. But it's not going to go well for us if all of a sudden we've got missing townsfolk showing up.”

Delmer blinked in confusion.

“Erm,
not
showing up.” Dudley frowned and kicked the sarcophagus lid shut with the spit-shined toe of his boot. “You know what I mean! If we're not gone by the time our little Princess goes on a murderous, magic-fuelled, bloodthirsty rampage—and she will, mark my words—the locals will run us out of this one-horse backwater burg on a rail! That is, if the mummy doesn't get us first!”

He stuffed the amulet back under his jacket and headed for the rear tent flap, drawing his sword again. Whether for show—if any of the carnival-goers happened to spot him—or because he was truly frightened of what might be lurking in the dark, it was hard to tell.

In the silence left behind in the Colonel's blustering wake, Cheryl unrolled herself from her carpet. Tweed unfolded herself from her grandfather clock. Beneath her freckles, Cheryl's face was a mask of pure outrage. Tweed's grey eyes smouldered with fiery indignation. Not only was the Colonel a fraud (which, of course, they'd all suspected all along), but the mummy
wasn't
(which, of course, they'd all suspected all along)!

And never mind the unforgivable things he'd said about the drive-in. Colonel Dudley had managed, through sheer recklessness, to put the entire town at grave risk of monsterization. That was beyond unforgiveable.

That
was a call to arms.

9

THE BIRDS AND THE BEETLES

“W
hat did I tell you?” Pilot said. He'd stepped out from his hiding spot and picked up the softball that he'd used as a distraction when Tweed had accidentally alerted Delmer and the Colonel. “The mummy walks. I knew it.”

“Geez, Flyboy …” Cheryl shook her head slowly and her pigtails swung back and forth. “I didn't think you really believed in stuff like this. Not
really.
I mean, I thought you were always just kind of … humouring us. Right, Tweed?”

Tweed nodded.

“Nothing funny about it.” Pilot shrugged a shoulder, but the frown on his face was fierce and determined. “I think we got ourselves a real live game of ACTION!! goin' on here. There's a creature of the danged out there on the loose. And that is
definitely
something the Wiggins folk
aren't gonna understand. But
you
two girls do. That thing's out there. It's got Artie. And if we don't get it back—if
you
don't get it back—then Art-Bart's not coming back!”

Cheryl swallowed the painful lump that had unexpectedly crawled up her throat at the thought. Okay, sure. Artie could be as annoying as a mosquito in a dark room. And maybe she and Tweed were a little hard on him at times. But it wasn't because they didn't like him. In fact, the annoyingness was, for lack of a better word, part of Shrimpcake's charm. It was what made him such a delightful ACTION!! adversary. The notion of Artie being permanently gone made Cheryl feel almost the way she had in the days after the Sheriff had found her and Tweed alone: as if there was a hole in their world.

Tweed looked at her, and Cheryl knew that her cousin felt the same way.

“He's right, partner,” Tweed said. “This is it. This is what we've trained for. This … is our purpose.” She turned toward the tent exit, hands on her hips, a determined expression on her face.

Cheryl stepped up beside her. “Roger that, Agent Tee,” she said, and headed for the door. “Let's do this thing—”

The girls weren't more than half a step out of the carnival tent when they ran into Mr. Bottoms, who, apparently, had managed to misplace his brood of boys yet again.

“Well, if it isn't my two little rodeo-roundup helpers!” he exclaimed.

“We're your what-now?” Tweed blinked up at him.

Mr. Bottoms's distracted gaze drifted over the top of her head. “You wouldn't happen to have seen my boys wandering around, would you?”

“You mean John, Paul, George and Bingo?” Tweed asked. “Uh … no. Why?”

“Well,” Mr. Bottoms said as he held up a greasespotted paper bag, “I was over getting a bag of minidonuts, and the boys were playing some sort of chasing game with the Bartleby boy—”

“Artie?!”

“You saw Shrimpcake?!”

“Where?!!”

Mr. Bottoms was unfazed by the three frantic young people peppering him with questions. He just pointed toward the game booths with one powdered-sugar-coated finger. “Over there,” he said. “Y'know, you should tell your little friend that corndogs and spinny rides don't go so well together. He was looking mighty green around the gills.
Mighty
green.”

Cheryl, Tweed and Pilot took off to the game booths, with Mr. Bottoms close behind. There was a small crowd gathered to watch little Binky Barker going bananas with the Whack-A-Mole mallet, but Artie and the Bottoms boys quartet weren't among them.

“Where did he
go?”
Cheryl asked, near frantic. If this all proved to be just some crazy prank of Artie's, she was going to give him such a wedgie …

“Same place my boys wandered to, I'll bet.” Mr. Bottoms scanned the crowd and shovelled mini-donuts into his mouth at the same time. “Danged if the missus didn't tell me to keep an eye on the little monkeys, and double-danged if they didn't just go and scamper off somewhere again …

Tweed groaned. Under any other circumstances, this would, of course, have been an excellent opportunity for the C
+
T Team to turn in another star sitter performance. As it was, the girls' dance card was full up. Also, Mr. Bottoms didn't seem too frantic. After all, Wiggins was a small community, close knit, and the good folk of the town tended to look after one another. Unless, of course, a lurking supernatural threat was stalking the good citizens.

“Ooh!” Mr. Bottoms suddenly exclaimed, pointing to one of the concession stands. “Fresh-squeezed lemonade! Maybe the boys are over there. I'd better go see. If they're not, why then I'm sure they're probably back with Mrs. Bottoms.” He crumpled up the nowempty donut bag. “These sugary little devils sure do make you thirsty …”