They stopped just before they reached the museum’s front steps.
Yo-Yoji squinted under his sunglasses. “Who are those dudes?”
Across the street stood three men in white turbans and robes. They shook bells and tambourines and held handmade signs, like protestors at a political event.
THE MUMMY RISES
FREE AMUN NOW!
THE PRIESTS OF AMUN
ARE WATCHING
Max-Ernest frowned. “How can Amun be freed? He’s a mummy. Plus, he’s already broken out.”
“Come on, guys,” said Cass. “Forget about them—they’re just some wacky cult. It’s time to go steal a finger.”
The first time they’d visited the museum, they were on a field trip. The second time, they were working there. Neither time had they paid admission, and it was something of a shock to find themselves lining up at the front desk to buy tickets.
The price of three student tickets: eighteen dollars.
What they had between them: nine dollars and thirty-five cents.
“I could try paying with gold,” said Cass. She had stashed a few of the Jester’s gold coins in the bottom of her backpack for emergencies.*
“It’s OK. We can pay what we want,” said Max-Ernest, scrutinizing the writing above the desk. “Look—recommended donation. How ’bout that?”
As it turned out, Max-Ernest was correct, although the man selling tickets was decidedly unhappy about it. “Don’t come back,” he said under his breath as he took one dollar for the three tickets.
The museum didn’t close until five p.m. That meant they had an hour and a half to kill, exploring the museum and trying their best to blend in with ordinary visitors.
They lingered the longest in the Rocks and Minerals Room. It was the darkest part of the museum—the better to show off the crystals and geodes under the spotlights—and they figured it was where they were least likely to be recognized or caught on camera. As a side benefit, Cass was able to compare the gems in the show with the raw gems she’d found in the Jester’s trunk. (She determined that her gems were most likely garnets and not, as she’d first thought, rubies.)
As they walked around, they discussed where to hide at closing time. This would be the most treacherous moment in their day, when they were most likely to be herded out with the other malingerers or, worse, identified as thieves planning to purloin an ancient artifact from the museum.
Their first thought, inspired by a certain book they’d all read, was to hide in a bathroom, standing on toilets in case somebody looked under the stall doors. But experience at school had taught them that there was a good chance the janitors might start cleaning the toilets immediately after the museum closed. (And if they weren’t clean, then… yuck.) They decided against bathrooms. Likewise they decided against trash cans (none were big enough to hide inside) and animal dioramas (all were locked).
Finally, they settled on the spot they knew best. It meant returning to the mummy exhibit. And it would be snug for the three of them, to say the least. But who would look there? After all, it was already known to be empty. The Priests of Amun notwithstanding, a mummy rising from the dead is generally a one-time-only event.
On reflection, Dr. Amun’s sarcophagus was the perfect hiding place.
At exactly five minutes before five, after they’d all availed themselves of their last opportunity to use a bathroom, they entered the mummy exhibit for what they expected would be the last time. It was the last hour of the last day of the show, and the gallery was extremely crowded. This was a good thing and a bad thing: good because they were immediately camouflaged by the multitude of museum visitors, bad because there was no way to slip into the mummy’s chamber without being seen.
Unlike the cost of the tickets, the crowd problem hadn’t caught our young aspiring museum robbers by surprise. A diversion was called for, and they were expert at creating diversions. It hadn’t been long, after all, since Max-Ernest had staged an epileptic fit so masterfully authentic that it brought a hospital emergency room to a halt.
Cass nodded discreetly in the direction of the security guard watching over the mummy exhibit. The guard was somebody they’d seen before but had never met. There was a decent chance she would recognize them, and it was risky to interact with her, but they had no choice if they were to proceed with their plan. They needed to get her out of the room and then to draw the crowd’s attention away from the mummy’s chamber long enough for them to sneak into the chamber and lie down in the sarcophagus. About one and a half minutes in all, they estimated.
Yo-Yoji and Max-Ernest nodded back. The plan was a go.
Max-Ernest looked at his watch, then started counting down with his fingers. Three… two… one… time to move.
As the three friends separated, taking their respective positions across the mummy exhibit’s main room, they held their breath. They weren’t entirely inexperienced when it came to criminal activity. As you may recall, in the course of their past adventures, they’d been forced to acquire certain necessary objects through, let’s say, creative methods. Nonetheless, they’d never robbed a museum before, and they couldn’t help feeling more than a little anxiety about the job ahead. A museum robbery is the kind of thing you see on the news; you don’t necessarily expect to be involved in one yourself. The fact that they intended to return the mummy’s finger later, reattached to the missing mummy, might or might not have justified their actions on a moral level, but it didn’t make what they were doing any less terrifying.
Their plan had two parts:
First, Yo-Yoji uncapped a water bottle and stealthily emptied it next to his foot, creating a large puddle on the marble floor. Before anybody noticed the puddle, he walked quickly to the animal section of the exhibit and pretended to examine a display of a mummified cat. Only after staring at the display for a moment did he realize that the cat was missing; all the animal mummies had been packed in crates that were lined up against the wall in preparation for the exhibit’s move to Las Vegas. He glanced around—happily, nobody had seen his mistake.
Meanwhile, Cass, the most fully disguised of the three of them—and, hopefully, the hardest to recognize—ran up to the guard.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Cass said in a polite but urgent voice. “Somebody spilled water over there.” She pointed across the room to the spill, just visible between the legs of museumgoers.
The guard shrugged. “The show closes in five minutes.”
“Yes, and that’s more than enough time for somebody to slip,” said Cass firmly.
“I guess you’re right.” Giving Cass an evil look, the guard sighed and reached for her walkie-talkie.
Uh-oh, thought Cass. Instead of leaving the room, the guard was going to call for help. Thinking fast, Cass shook her head. “You’d better go get a mop right now. It could take forever for a janitor to get here. In the meantime, any of those people could fall and fracture a wrist, or even suffer a traumatic head injury.”
The guard hesitated, not wanting to leave her post.
“Think about the lawsuits—you could lose your job,” urged Cass. “Go, go, there’s not a second to lose!”
Now seriously worried, the guard nodded and ran off.
As Cass breathed a sigh of relief, Max-Ernest was initiating phase two of their plan: the stink bomb.
As happens occasionally when you take care of a baby for long stretches of time, Max-Ernest had earlier that afternoon found a full diaper balled up inside his backpack. He’d been about to drop it into a trash can, when Cass stopped him. They might have use for something smelly later.
It worked beautifully. The diaper had been festering in a Ziploc bag for several days, and when Max-Ernest opened the bag, he could almost feel the smell slapping him in the face. People started looking around nervously, wondering who or what had caused the terrible stench. As the smell filled the room, visitors filed out as fast as they could.
There was a momentary scare when, as Cass had warned might happen,
somebody slipped on the wet marble. Luckily, it was a young man, who quickly regained his balance and walked out with nothing bruised but his ego.
Cass, Max-Ernest, and Yo-Yoji held their noses until the last person had left the room. Then Max-Ernest hastily closed the Ziploc bag and tossed it into a waste bin. (He had no intention of using it as a stink bomb a second time.)
Wordlessly, the three friends darted over to the mummy’s chamber and let themselves in.
Because the sarcophagus had been built to hold a coffin, which in turn had been built to hold another coffin, which in turn had been built to hold another coffin, the container was quite large. The bottom of the sarcophagus was covered with a layer of sand, however, and they had to shift around a bit to get down far enough to feel safe from detection. It was a difficult operation for three people to perform at once.
Without thinking about it, they fell into their usual formation from the school bus, with Yo-Yoji stretched out on one side and Max-Ernest and Cass scrunched up on the other. It wasn’t the most comfortable hiding place in the world, but not terrible. Considering.
“So far so good,” whispered Max-Ernest.
“Yeah, nice job, dudes,” said Yo-Yoji.
Cass put her finger to her lips; it wasn’t over yet. But she allowed herself a small smile of victory.
And there they lay, like three squirming mummies awaiting their burial.
Hiding in the sarcophagus, they could hear somebody cleaning up Yo-Yoji’s spill. It seemed to take an awfully long time, but finally they heard the sound of a mop being dropped into a pail and then heavy footsteps leaving the room. After waiting an additional three minutes to be safe, Yo-Yoji stuck his head out and gave the all clear.
With sand pouring off their clothes, they climbed out of the sarcophagus and glanced nervously around Dr. Amun’s chamber and out into the exhibit area beyond. They knew they were being filmed, so they covered their faces with their hands as they made their way out of the chamber. Anybody watching the video later was likely to recognize them, but they hoped that with their disguises and their covered faces, they might plausibly deny they were there.
The stairs leading down to the Restoration Room were only a few dozen feet away, but it felt like they were crossing a football field. Or, perhaps more aptly, a graveyard. They could almost feel the mummies’ eyes on them as they passed. Twice they heard voices coming from other parts of the museum, but they made it through without being interrupted by anybody, dead or alive.
They stopped at the bottom of the stairwell, where there was a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.
When they’d last passed through it, they’d practically been employees themselves, accompanied by a senior curator of the museum. This time, they approached the door with considerably more trepidation. Now they were thieves in the midst of a heist, even if the only thing they planned to steal was a severed finger, which they meant to return soon.
Above the door handle was a keypad-style lock. Albert 3-D had explained that the five-letter pass code changed weekly. “Or when I can remember to change it,” he’d told them with a self-deprecating smile.
Rather than informing the other staff every time he changed the code, he always left clues on the door. It was sort of a game. A twig, for example, might mean the code was STICK. A piece of tape might mean STUCK. (Then again, I suppose, it might mean STICK, too—in the sense of sticky.)
Today, two images were pasted above the lock. The first was an image taken from an Egyptian tomb painting: a falcon-headed man standing under a large disk. The second was a child’s sticker: a cartoon image of a school bus.
Cass looked at Max-Ernest. “Well?”
There was no question that figuring out the pass code was his department. The question, her tone conveyed, was whether he could figure it out before they were caught red-handed by a security guard.
“The first one is easy,” said Max-Ernest. “That’s the sun god, Ra. You can tell by the disk over his head—it represents the sun. I’m not sure what the school bus means. Maybe just school? Which would give us RA SCHOOL as the clue….”
“What about RASCAL?” asked Yo-Yoji. “I like that word.”
Max-Ernest shook his head. “Has to be five letters, remember? That’s six.”
“Just RA BUS, then?” suggested Cass.
“I doubt it—too random,” said Max-Ernest. He tried the words anyway, but the light remained red.
Cass was bouncing on her feet with impatience. “So what is it, then?”
“I don’t know. Just give me a—oh no,” said Max-Ernest, turning pale. “It can’t be….”
“What? Tell us already,” said Cass.
“Yeah, you’re scaring us, man,” said Yo-Yoji.
“Not RA… BUS…” Max-Ernest said slowly. “ROB… US…”
They all looked at one another. The implication was scary: they were expected.
“No way,” said Yo-Yoji. “How would he know?”
His hand shaking slightly, Max-Ernest tried the password. It didn’t work.
They all exhaled in relief. The robbery wasn’t anticipated after all.
“We still have to get in,” said Cass. “If we stand here forever—”
“I know, I know. Let me think,” said Max-Ernest. “Without the disk on top, the god would be called Horus… but I don’t think that helps. Sometimes RA is spelled RE, with an E.”
“RE BUS, maybe? Does RE stand for any kind of bus?” asked Yo-Yoji. “You know, like the name of a bus line?”
“No, but you just got it anyway,” said Max-Ernest, starting to giggle. “REBUS—I can’t believe I didn’t think of it right away. It’s hilarious.”
His friends looked at him quizzically. By now, Max-Ernest was about to fall down laughing.
“Don’t you get it? The rebus is REBUS!”
They shook their heads. They didn’t get it. And they didn’t get him, either.
“A rebus is a kind of code in which pictures or words equal sounds. Like Ra and bus for ROB US, even though that wasn’t right. Or, like, if you saw a drawing of an eye—it could mean an eye you see with, but it could also mean the sound of the word. You know how people will draw an eye and then a heart and then the letter U—and it means I love you?”
Cass made a face. “Gross.”
Max-Ernest blushed. “I wasn’t saying—”
Cass laughed. “I know. Aren’t I ever allowed to make a joke?”
“Oh, I mean, yes,” said Max-Ernest, relieved. “Anyway, it figures that Albert 3-D would be into rebuses because hieroglyphs work like that, with pictures for sounds.”
“Come on, let’s go snag the mummy’s finger and then bail,” said Yo-Yoji, looking over his shoulder to make sure they were still alone. “This is getting—”
“Rebus-ulous?” finished Max-Ernest, cracking himself up again.
He punched the word into the keypad. The light turned green.
They made it all the way to the Restoration Room without hearing or seeing anybody aside from the sewn and stuffed and reassembled residents of the Osteology and Taxidermy Room. Of course, they’d been hoping not to meet anybody, but there was something eerie about it, nonetheless.
“I feel like at any second people are going to jump out and yell ‘surprise!’ ” said Cass.
“Yeah, only instead of singing ‘Happy Birthday,’ they’re going to arrest us,” said Max-Ernest.
“Way to think positive,” said Yo-Yoji. “Look, it’s right there. Everything’s copacetic.”
He pointed to the shelf. The shoe box in which Albert 3-D kept the mummy’s finger was exactly where they remembered it being placed, between the urns. Using the bottom shelf as a step, Cass reached up and took it down.
All three of them looked inside simultaneously—and simultaneously their three faces fell.
“What the—?!” exclaimed Yo-Yoji.
“Is that what I think it is?” asked Max-Ernest.
“Uh-huh,” said Cass bleakly.
There wa
s something lying on the linen inside the box, but it wasn’t the mummy’s finger. It wasn’t anybody’s finger.
It was a gold-framed monocle. The Double Monocle. The monocle that Lord Pharaoh had taken from Cass when they’d tussled months earlier. Somebody—no doubt, Lord Pharaoh—had removed the mummy’s finger from the box and left the monocle in the finger’s place.
“He’s sending us a message,” said Yo-Yoji.
“Yeah, that he’s one step ahead of us,” said Max-Ernest.
“Watching us…” said Cass, looking over her shoulder.
Remembering the unique powers of the monocle, Cass put it to her eye and looked around the room. With the monocle she could see around corners and even through a few walls, but she didn’t see Lord Pharaoh or any other ghosts—only Albert 3-D entering through the employee exit.
“C’mon, we gotta go!” she whispered, replacing the shoe box on the shelf (minus the monocle). “Albert’s coming!”
It was a lucky break she’d tried the monocle when she did: one more minute and Albert 3-D would have caught them with the shoe box in their hands. But where to go? They’d been planning on leaving through the employee exit, but if they went that way, they would run directly into him.
“Back that way!” Cass pointed at the door to the Osteology and Taxidermy Room.
Trying not to make any noise, they raced out of the Restoration Room just before Albert 3-D entered it. They could hear him following behind them, speaking to a colleague.
“We’re just going to have to set up in Vegas as planned and hope we get the mummy back. The Cairo Hotel is not going to be happy, but what else can we do?”
Alas, the footsteps didn’t stop. Albert 3-D was headed in their direction.
“Upstairs,” said Yo-Yoji. The others nodded; they had no choice.
When they got to the top of the stairs, the door below started to open. There would be no time to get out of the exhibit area before Albert 3-D entered it.
“Quick—the sarcophagus!” whispered Cass.
“No, that’s probably where they’re going,” whispered Yo-Yoji. “What about those crates in there?” He nodded in the direction of the packed-up animal mummies.