Mummy (3 page)

But there was no climate control in the museum. Her container did not protect her from humidity. So even the museum did not care about that.

The guard would soon be back. Emlyn did not want him to see her a third time. She found the great stairs that went down to the first floor and wandered through museum rooms that meant nothing to her.

Unless, of course, she decided to invade them at night, and without permission.

D
INOSAURS WAS THE FIRST
room a museum visitor entered after paying the fee and getting a colored tag. In the center of an enormous space stood a brontosaurus on a bed of stones, separated from the public by a low brick wall and a lot of signs that said PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH.

Touching, however, was the goal of every child.

The immense brontosaurus was supported by curved steel beams strong enough for a road bridge. Anybody could see that it was strong enough for a kid to climb. All across the Dinosaur Room came high-pitched arguments from small children who wanted to climb brontosaurus’s spine, up to the ceiling.

Even now, Emlyn wanted to. But she sat quietly on a wide, backless bench and considered other things.

When I take the mummy, I’ll come as a visitor. I’ll just stay after closing. That should be easy enough. The crucial part is leaving. I’ll be leaving with something everybody can recognize. Every one of these four-year-olds could yell, “That lady’s got a mummy!”

It was not possible for Emlyn to think of an ordinary circumstance in which a girl might be carrying a mummy. Therefore, she must disguise the mummy as something else or leave by night when she could not be seen.

The first seemed impossible. Dress the mummy in something from The Gap and pretend she was taking a sick friend out to the car? People would notice that the friend was actually dead, and had been for three thousand years. Plus, Amaral-Re did not have separated arms and legs; she was a cylinder with a head bump and a feet bump.

Emlyn would have to stay here alone in the night and sneak out into the dark city with a mummy in her arms.

After a minute of eyeing brontosaurus, the older children began yelling, “But where is tyrannosaurus rex?”

“The museum doesn’t have one,” explained the parents. “Let’s look at the camarasaurus instead. Or the edaphosaurus!”

Nobody cared about them. Nobody ever would. No tyrannosaurus rex? Sadly, the children concluded that this was a loser museum.

Only fifty steps and five minutes into the museum and visitors under eight were exhausted. Toddlers wept from frustration, and first graders begged for snacks.

Way high up on the walls were wonderful painted murals of dinosaurs eating plants and one another. Nobody thought of looking up.

Emlyn studied the corners of the enormous room for cameras and sensors. She did not believe there were any. The hall with the valuable paintings and the hall with the sculpture, yes; the cameras were obvious, hanging in the ceiling corners. If there were cameras here, they were hidden, and Emlyn did not believe that this museum could afford state-of-the-art surveillance systems. Here, the museum used a living guard. After all, this was the room most likely to sustain damage. Sure enough, when Emlyn lowered her gaze, she found a guard studying her.

She was the thing in the room that was wrong.

Nobody looked up. Five-year-olds looked across. Twelve-year-olds looked at one another. Sixteen-year-olds didn’t come.

The dinosaur crowd was shorter and younger than Emlyn, with less vocabulary. She was not a mother, nor a grandmother, nor a baby-sitter. It was the guard’s job to notice somebody out of place.

She turned her attention once more to the brontosaurus and thought, I will outwit him. I will outwit all of them. I will get in. I will get out. I will have a mummy.

Children abandoning Dinosaurs rushed through Impressionist Paintings without slowing down or waiting for their parents. They spilled into the Sculpture Hall, a boring room with statues set into alcoves and standing on squares of granite and basically getting in the way of your race to the cafe. Emlyn let herself be swept along with a scout troop on a field trip. Tapes and short films were everywhere. After kids poked buttons to make them play, they ran on. The tapes played to empty rooms.

Suddenly Emlyn saw what she had never seen before, even in her most larcenous moments: Each gallery was separated by heavy iron grilles that swung out like cafe shutters. They were not Gothic decoration. At night they would be closed and locked.

A little boy tried to climb one. The guard didn’t seem to mind and neither did his mother. He got about halfway up, was unable to dislodge it, and could not make it swing. He tried to fit behind it, but he could not squish under or through.

If I get stuck in a room overnight, thought Emlyn, I’ll really be stuck. I might be able to find a corner and stay here alone in the dark, but I won’t be able to change rooms.

This was sobering. What if she got the mummy in her arms but could not leave?

She walked slowly to the Great Hall, the only part of the old mansion still used by visitors. It rose in a golden dome, sparkling with tiny windows.

When Emlyn’s mother was a girl, the museum had consisted only of the old stone mansion, a horrid, frightening place with a cageful of monkeys trapped on the stair landing and parrots screaming from an enclosure on a balcony. Looming out of dark rooms were colossal Greek statues, and gathering dust in corners were collections of nothing in particular. The mummy and this wonderful room were the only traces of the old museum.

Why would you have a room like this in your own house? A state legislature might want a room like this, but ordinary people? On the other hand, not much was ordinary about a man who went to Cairo and bought a mummy at the corner store.

Not much is ordinary about me, either, thought Emlyn, and she had to lower her eyes to veil her excitement.

Among columns and arched openings were two old-fashioned wooden doors. Stenciled in gold on one was
SECURITY.
Stenciled on the other was
MUSEUM OFFICIALS ONLY, NOT FOR PUBLIC USE.

That, then, was the door that brought you into the old rooms of the mansion, once dining room, parlor, and butler’s pantry, now offices. Emlyn stared at it with longing, but she turned around and left the museum. The only exit was next to the only entrance. You could not come and go without passing a metal detector and a guard.

Emlyn went outside and down huge, wide granite steps that also gave the museum a state capitol look. She crossed the street to walk around the museum on the far side.

The north wall was a flat, doorless, windowless expanse. This was the theater where they showed movies with subtitles. She was not going to shimmy up ropes with or without a mummy in her arms, so this side was useless.

The east side had a high but roofless wall, with one regular door and one extremely large garage door. Neither had an outside handle. Could this be a parking and delivery area? Emlyn retreated half a block and sat on the curb, eating a bagel from a vendor’s cart. Fifteen minutes later a car pulled up, facing the garage door. The driver tapped his visor, which must have held an automatic door opener, because the huge door slowly opened upward and the car entered.

Emlyn caught a glimpse of a garbage Dumpster, a few parked cars, a van with the museum logo, and a high cement walkway, the right height for a truck to back up to. So there was at least one exit from the museum into the utility parking.

The garage door folded back down, and the east wall was solid and silent again. The two door outlines facing her had to be emergency exits as well, and therefore they’d never be locked. Opening them probably set off an alarm, but you would be out in one step, across the street in ten, and vanishing into the city before anybody could react to the alarm.

You would, however, be holding a mummy.

This might alarm other people on the sidewalk.

Emlyn walked to the south, mansion side. The old stone house had many windows and doors. They still had their big round brass handles in the shape of lions’ manes, but they also wore signs that said NOT AN ENTRANCE.

Inside high windows and behind the curve of elaborate drapes, she could see people at desks.

She walked back to the public entrance side and stared at the huge steps. The whole idea seemed ludicrous. When she’d been near the mummy, Emlyn had believed. Now she did not. The whole thing could not happen.

It was this detached calm that made it possible for Emlyn to take her first real step toward Bad.

She reentered, showing the little metal button on her shirt collar that proved she was a legitimate visitor. She went directly to the Great Hall. She walked up to the door that said MUSEUM OFFICIALS ONLY. NOT FOR PUBLIC USE. She opened it and walked in.

T
HE SECRETARY COULD NOT
have been nicer. She was so pleased that the high school newspaper hoped to carry an article about the new direction in which Dr. Brisband was taking the museum.

Emlyn deduced that this woman was not the mother of teenagers. Any real parent would know that there were no teenagers in this city or any other city who cared what direction a museum went in. If there was such a thing as a school newspaper (and in Emlyn’s school there was not), they would know better than to waste good column space on museums.

But the secretary picked up her phone and said, “Dr. Brisband, I know how very very very busy your schedule is at the moment, but could you possibly fit in a high school reporter? Or perhaps you and she could determine a suitable hour during which you might give an interview at a later date?”

Emlyn was glad she had her purse with her and that in her purse was a small notebook and a sharp pencil. She could look quite reporterish. She wondered how long it would take to arrive inconspicuously at the subject of security systems.

Through the open door of the secretary’s office she saw a small sign with an arrow. FREIGHT ELEVATOR. Well. That would bypass the iron grilles, would it not?

The secretary hung up. “He’s on the phone, but he expects to be off momentarily. I’m so pleased it’s going to work out. Sometimes he simply cannot squeeze another person into his very very very busy schedule.”

“What a help you must be to him,” said Emlyn.

The secretary admired Emilyn’s outfit and wished that other teenage girls would dress so nicely. Emlyn chatted about Western High and what a great place it was. Emlyn herself went to Eastern.

“He wants you to wait in the Trustees’ Room,” said the secretary, and from the middle drawer on the right hand side of her desk she removed a large key ring. Emlyn thought there must be fifteen keys hanging from the brass circle.

“I can never remember which is the master,” confided the secretary, “so I have it marked with a little blue tape.”

Emlyn agreed that keys were such a problem. She herself was always mixing up her front and backdoor keys. What sympathy she had for the secretary, with so many many keys to juggle.

The secretary led Emlyn down the hall and opened up a room that must once have been the mansion’s library. It held a stunning and immense table surrounded by twelve chairs of the sort used by the writers of the Constitution. Over its grand fireplace hung a painting that most people never saw, and Emlyn had a feeling it was the finest painting in the collection, reserved for the finest people.

This was where potential donors were fawned over. Where reporters were tucked so that they would be impressed.

“He’ll be with you shortly,” said the secretary, “and if by any chance he isn’t, I’ll be back from my cigarette break in ten minutes, and I will rescue you.” She beamed at Emlyn, and Emlyn beamed back.

The secretary was in desperate need of nicotine. She darted into her office, tossed her key ring back into the drawer, yanked open another to pull out her pocketbook, and from the pocket-book took a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She tapped on another door, and it was opened by an equally desperate smoker.

Doors to both offices were left open, and the two women rushed to the exit.

Emlyn looked around the Trustees’ Room. Row upon row of old books with beautiful bindings covered the shelves, as entombed in here as a mummy in a pyramid.

Shockingly, a section of the paneled wall suddenly tilted inward.

It was a hidden door! So the mansion builder—the mummy buyer—the museum donor—had also been a builder of secret compartments. I wish I had known him, thought Emlyn, and a corner of her imagination drafted plans for the house she would build one day, with hidden doors just like that.

Sitting on a swivel chair at an enormous desk was the man who must be Dr. Brisband. He had opened the panel from his side. Cupping one hand over the phone and smiling as if she had made his day, as if talking to teen reporters was a highlight in the life of a museum director, he said softly, “I’m going to be another ten minutes. I’m so sorry. Please look at any of the books, and I will fit you in just as soon as I can.”

She tried to look embarrassed. “I’ll be right back,” she mouthed, pointing toward the hall. Let him think she was going to the ladies’ room.

He gave her a sort of salute and continued his discussion on the phone, and the secret door closed slowly and silently.

Emlyn stepped into the hall, crossed into the secretary’s office, and slipped her right hand into the thin pocket of her linen jacket. The secretary hadn’t even fully closed the key drawer. Using the pocket as a glove, Emlyn scooped up the key ring. The thin silk lining snagged on the sharp edge, but she got her fingernail beneath the double brass loop and removed the key with the blue tape and slid it into her pocket. She replaced the key ring and left the drawer as it was.

The key was too small to be weighty, and yet it carried the burden of all her years of wanting to do something Bad. For the very first time, Emlyn really was taking something that was not hers.

She had stolen.

So far it was a tiny crime. But it was the key, literally, to a larger one.

This is how it works, she thought. Opportunity comes and you seize it.