“What are you doing here?”
“What happened to your nails?”
“Hi,” said Cass. She’d been so consumed with her thoughts about the Secret that she’d forgotten all about her friends. And about her fingernails. She wanted to hide them in her fist, but she was worried they were still wet. So instead she spread her fingers wide.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Give me your best shot. Let me have it.”
“No, no, they look… nice,” said Yo-Yoji.
“Yeah… nice,” said Max-Ernest.
“You bet they do!” said Felicia angrily. “Have some respect. This here is an Egyptian princess, and for the rest of the day you must address her as Your Royal Highness. Make that Your Royal Hotness!”
“OK, for sure, will do,” said Yo-Yoji. He looked at Cass, barely able to contain his laughter. “Is Your Royal Hotness ready to go?”
“Yeah, we’re late, Your Royal Hotness.” Max-Ernest doubled over. He couldn’t help it.
Cass punched him, even though Felicia tried to hold her back. “Think of your nails!”
YOU MISSED.
I’M STILL HERE.
NOW
IF YOU’LL EXCUSE ME,
I’M RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE
OF TELLING A REALLY GOOD STORY.
When they entered the theater lobby, they found themselves surrounded by images of Lord Pharaoh—depicted as the shadowy outline of a man in a gold cape. Seemingly overnight, the “Invisible Magician,” as he was called, had become an industry unto himself. Kiosks sold Lord Pharaoh T-shirts and posters. There were DVDs and calendars. There was even a magic set that came in a big gold box; Max-Ernest looked at it wistfully. Cass might have let him buy it, too, had the timing been better—and had Lord Pharaoh’s name not been on it.
“Can you believe—all this stuff for that creep?” asked Cass. “He sure works fast.”
“Actually, a calendar is pretty easy to make,” said Yo-Yoji. “You could make most of this stuff in under an hour if you wanted.”
“Sheesh! Listen to what they’re saying,” said Max-Ernest.
Everybody around them was talking about Lord Pharaoh:
“Supposedly, he’s just a shimmering cloud of dust—you never see him!” “It’s like he’s really invisible….” “They say he’s the greatest magician since Houdini….”
“That’s an insult to Houdini,” Max-Ernest muttered, offended.
Cass shushed him, and they filed into the theater.
It was a vast, Vegas-size theater, with a mezzanine and several balcony levels. As they found their seats near the stage in the orchestra section, the audience continued to buzz with anticipation:
“I heard he’s a real alchemist. He can actually turn lead into gold!” “Even other magicians don’t know how he does it….” “Is it true he’ll turn your watch into gold right in front of everybody?”
Cass rolled her eyes. “What they don’t know is they could be just as amazing as Lord Pharaoh—all they’d have to do is eat Señor Hugo’s chocolate,” she whispered, sitting down.
“I thought there wasn’t any more chocolate left,” Yo-Yoji said, sitting down next to her. “So they couldn’t eat it, even if they knew about it.”
“We don’t know that,” said Max-Ernest, sitting on the other side of Cass. “I keep thinking, for him to have gotten all this way, he must have figured out how to make the chocolate himself.”
“Anyway, that’s not the point,” said Cass. “The point is, he’s a jerk, and all these people think he’s a genius. He’s like the Wizard of Oz—just a little old guy behind a velvet curtain.”
“Actually, the Wizard of Oz was a time traveler, too, come to think of it,” Max-Ernest mused. “Remember, he’s that quack medicine salesman from Dorothy’s own time who winds up in Oz, just like her? Well, I guess Kansas-to-Oz isn’t time travel, technically. More like interdimensional travel. Or is it intradimensional? I always forget the difference….”
Yo-Yoji gave Max-Ernest one of his increasingly frequent you-are-totally-insane looks.
“Shh, they’re starting,” said Cass.
Their expressions grew serious as the lights dimmed. Jerk or genius or both, Lord Pharaoh had bested them in the past. They would need all their wits about them if they were going to get through the evening unscathed.
“Welcome to Golden Dawn,” said a soothing voice over a loudspeaker. “No cameras and no recording devices, please. Anybody caught recording the show will be escorted out of the theater immediately.”
Cass nudged her friends: guards with headsets stood at all four corners of the room and by the exit doors.
She was relieved to see that the guards weren’t wearing gloves, but it also made her nervous. Where was the Midnight Sun? Why hadn’t they shown up anywhere?
The stage was dark.
An orchestra began to play, first softly, then more loudly, until it opened up into the big brassy beginning of the James Bond theme song “Goldfinger.”
Two identical female voices began to sing in duet about “the man with the Midas touch, a spider’s touch.”*
Suddenly, spotlights created circles at opposite ends of the stage. In each circle stood a slim young woman with long blonde hair, wearing a clingy gold bodysuit. Or maybe I should say young-seeming woman. For these were the Skelton Sisters. Young by the standards of the Midnight Sun, they were at least forty years old by any reasonable estimation—and yet they still looked, talked, and behaved like teenagers.
“Which one is Romi, and which one is Montana?” Max-Ernest whispered. “I can’t tell them apart.”
“Don’t know, don’t care,” said Cass. “Thought we’d never have to see them again.”
“Wishful thinking,” said Yo-Yoji.
The sisters continued to sing about the sinister Mr. Goldfinger and his “web of sin,” swaying in unison and wagging their fingers like Motown singers of old.
More stage lights came on, revealing several dozen scantily clad dancers, male and female, whose bare skin was covered with gold body paint. They flipped and spun and twirled in an acrobatic blur of golden limbs and torsos.
Then, as the song ended, the dancers receded into the background and Lord Pharaoh’s voice echoed throughout the theater. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once:
“Gold. The most malleable of metals, and the most precious. A symbol of power and perfection. Of royalty and immortality. It never tarnishes….”
A light—first dim, then brighter—shone on the center of the stage, revealing a gleaming gold coffin. It bore no hieroglyphs or markings of any kind, but it had the unmistakable shape of an Egyptian sarcophagus.
“The ancient Egyptians adorned the dead with gold to pave their way to the afterlife,” Lord Pharaoh continued. His voice was sonorous and authoritative, with just a trace of his sixteenth-century European roots. “The Spanish conquistadores sailed the globe, courting death and disaster, in their search for El Dorado, the mythical City of Gold. Today, gold is placed around the necks of Olympians and on the heads of kings. But it was the medieval alchemists who loved gold best. In their quest for the philosopher’s stone, they strove to turn ordinary objects into gold and hence to achieve the greatness of Midas. Their dream is alive tonight!”
The lid of the gold sarcophagus rose slowly into the air and then stopped, seeming to hover about five feet above the base.
“Allow me to introduce myself….”
As the music reached a crescendo, the Skelton Sisters stepped forward. Simultaneously, each threw a handful of shimmering gold dust in the direction of the sarcophagus.
“I am Lord Pharaoh.”
The crowd gasped.
The shadow of a man—literally the outline of a man, but shadow better describes the effect—had emerged in the shimmering dust and was now stepping out of the sarcophagus.
Cass grabbed Max-Ernest’s hand. Yo-Yoji grabbed Cass’s arm. Max-Ernest screwed shut his eyes.
They couldn’t believe what t
hey were seeing. Even though they’d been looking for him—even though they’d hawked the coin and bought the tickets and waited to see him—it was almost too terrible to watch now that he was here.
“But I am not only Lord Pharaoh. I am all the pharaohs of the past… and future.”
As he spoke, one of the Skelton Sisters held up a long cape of gold satin and draped it over his shimmering-dust shoulders. The cape was topped with a big gold collar and appeared to float in the air. Scarabs and eyes of Horus and other Egyptian symbols were embroidered into the fabric. The other Skelton Sister placed a crown on his shimmering head. (Max-Ernest recognized it as the double crown worn by pharaohs to symbolize the union of Upper and Lower Egypt.)
Meanwhile, the Skelton Sisters reprised the “Goldfinger” chorus.
As gold dust floated to the ground, Lord Pharaoh grew fainter and fainter, until he was nearly invisible underneath his cape. Just as he was about to disappear altogether, he held a single solid-gold finger aloft.
An image of the finger, magnified many times over, appeared on a silver screen behind him—so that people in the back rows could see it. Although it appeared to be made of gold, it was thin and bony and crooked. There was no mistaking whose finger it was.
“That’s it—the mummy’s finger!” Yo-Yoji whispered.
“He must have dipped it in gold or something,” said Max-Ernest.
When the music died down, the Skelton Sisters removed Lord Pharaoh’s cape and crown. All that was left for the audience to see was the mummy’s golden finger, shown on the screen again, and the barest hint of gold dust.
“The gold finger that you see once graced the hand of the greatest doctor in ancient Egypt—a man who knew the most precious Secret in the universe,” intoned the invisible Lord Pharaoh. “This man is now a mummy. Soon, through the power of gold, he will live again!”
The audience murmured in awe as images of ancient Egypt flickered behind him.
The Skelton Sisters rolled the golden sarcophagus to the center of the stage. As ominous music played, it began to rise in the air. When it was a few feet off the ground, it began tilting further and further forward, until it was floating upright.
“Behold—the mummy!”
As Lord Pharaoh spoke, the lid of the sarcophagus floated away. A spotlight revealed the sarcophagus’s occupant: the mummy.
“When I have brought him back to this world from the next, he will be my slave, and I will possess all his power.”
Lord Pharaoh murmured a few words in ancient Egyptian, then translated: “O mighty Thoth, let this finger rejoin the hand of its master.”
The finger glowed a fiery orange as he reattached it to the mummy’s hand. From where our friends sat, it looked like pure magic, but of course it also was possible that he was using glue.
Behind Lord Pharaoh, hieroglyphs appeared on the screen. They looked as though they were being burned into a sheet of gold.
“I have only to place the golden Ring of Thoth onto the mummy’s finger, and this once-great man will breathe once more.”
“I don’t get it,” Max-Ernest said to Cass. “You still have the ring, don’t you?”
She touched her neck. “Uh-huh.”
“Not for long,” said Yo-Yoji darkly. “Look who’s coming—”
His friends turned just in time to see their old adversary Daisy hoisting Yo-Yoji out of his seat. “Hey, let go of me—!” cried Yo-Yoji.
“Gladly,” said the massive Midnight Sun member. She tossed him into the aisle as if he weighed no more than a pillow.
“Aak!” He held his shoulder in pain.
The audience murmured nervously.
Lord Pharaoh guffawed loudly. “Ha! Do not be alarmed, Ladies and Gentlemen. All part of the show, of course…. And now if my lovely assistant, Cassandra, will please bring me the ring—”
A spotlight fell on Cass where she was sitting. Suddenly, an entire roomful of eyes were on her. She shrank back in her seat.
Daisy reached for Cass. “You, come with me.”
“No way! You can’t take her,” said Max-Ernest bravely.
“Do not worry; this is only a game,” Lord Pharaoh reassured his audience. “Cassandra, she likes to play—what is the contemporary expression?—hard to get.”
The audience laughed, like any good Vegas audience—probably because a track of prerecorded laughter cued them in the background.
Cass, on the other hand, did not feel like laughing at all.
She looked over at Yo-Yoji for help, but he was now being held by two security guards. She looked in the other direction—there were guards waiting in the opposite aisle. There was no escape.
“Don’t fight! Then they’ll take you, too,” she whispered to Max-Ernest.
He didn’t fight, but they took him anyway.
Their arms pinned behind their backs, Yo-Yoji and Max-Ernest watched in horror as Daisy escorted—or, more accurately, dragged—Cass down the aisle and into the orchestra pit.
As soon as Cass disappeared, they were dragged in the opposite direction—and out the exit. The guards pushed them roughly into the lobby. Then—wordlessly—the guards went back into the auditorium.
Yo-Yoji stared suspiciously at the doors closing behind the guards. “Why did they let us go?”
“Because Lord Pharaoh doesn’t care about us—Cass has what he wants,” said Max-Ernest. “But what are we going to do?”
“Well, we could always try these.” Yo-Yoji gestured to the badges hanging from their necks: each one said BACKSTAGE PASS in big black letters.
The entrance to the backstage area might have been exclusive, but it was hardly hidden. On the contrary, it was advertised with a large illuminated sign.
Max-Ernest and Yo-Yoji were glad to see that the bouncer standing at the velvet rope was not wearing gloves. Appearing not to recognize the two of them, he checked their badges, then waved them in as if it were perfectly natural that they would want to take advantage of their backstage access.
They didn’t have a plan yet, but at least they were getting back inside.
Daisy pushed Cass onto the stage, then receded into the wings.
Cass tried to take stock of her surroundings and create a mental map of all potential pitfalls and hazards, not to mention enemy combatants. But her attention was drawn inexorably to the center of the stage, where the mummy was still floating upright in the open sarcophagus. Here, just a few feet away, was the thing she had so desperately been seeking, and she couldn’t take her eyes off it.
The last time she’d seen Amun, the mummy’s bandages were wound tightly around him. Now they were loose and frayed. His hands, previously bound to his waist, were hanging free at his sides. His parched face and gaping mouth, however, looked just as they had before—equal parts haunted and haunting. Hanging from a tree on Halloween, he would have scared the heck out of a trick-or-treater, it occurred to Cass. But the mummy wasn’t a Halloween decoration, he was—
Well, what was this thing, this body, this corpse, this man, this… whatever it was? Skin and bones—was that all? No, there are also teeth, and fingernails, and dried fleshy tissues, she could hear Max-Ernest saying. But that wasn’t the point. He never got the point.
“Look—it’s back,” hissed Romi (or was it Montana?), snapping Cass back to the present.
“Yeah, we just can’t get rid of it,” hissed Montana (or was it Romi?).
“It… is happy to leave anytime,” said Cass sarcastically. Microphones hanging from the stage picked up her words, and they reverberated through the auditorium.
“No, please, stay,” purred the invisible Lord Pharaoh.
“Where are you?” asked Cass, pulling her monocle out of her pocket.
“I’m right here,” answered Lord Pharaoh before she could put the monocle to her eye.
She jumped. Lord Pharaoh was so close she could feel his breath.
“I’m glad you found your way here.”
She looked at him through the monocle. He s
miled an awful smile, knowing she could see him now.
“For a second, I thought you might not be foolish enough to fall into my trap,” he whispered. “But I see you took the bait.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t miss this show for the world!” said Cass loudly.
She had already decided there was nothing to be gained by fighting. It would only wear her out. Her sole strategy was to buy time. It wasn’t much of a strategy, true, but in her experience, opportunities usually presented themselves if you waited long enough. Everybody’s armor showed its chinks eventually.
She lowered her voice. “But as my friend Max-Ernest pointed out, it’s pretty easy to do illusions when you’re invisible.”
“True enough.” Lord Pharaoh snatched the monocle out of her hand, making himself invisible to Cass again. “Of course, this sort of magic is child’s play for someone who is involved in the real Work.”
“You mean alchemy, right?”
“Alchemy, that’s right…. Nonetheless, our audience is waiting.” He raised his voice: “The ring, please.”
“Um—”
Cass pretended to fumble for the ring like a best man at a wedding.
“Oops! I think I dropped it!”
Max-Ernest and Yo-Yoji raced down the hallway, past rooms full of props and costumes. Many of these items obviously had not been used in years and were displayed for tourists, but some of the rooms seemed to be bustling.
“Can I help you?” A uniformed attendant tried to stop them with a smile. “Would either of you like a drink?”
“No, thanks!” Yo-Yoji called out as they continued running.
“Wait, what’s that?” asked Max-Ernest.
“What?” Yo-Yoji turned to see Max-Ernest standing frozen, his nose twitching.
“I smell… chocolate.”
“So what? There’s no time—”
“Dark chocolate…” said Max-Ernest, his eyes glazed.
“Yo, dude—you just had all that hot fudge fifteen minutes ago. How can you even—?”
“Wait, just a minute, I have to—”
Max-Ernest darted into the nearest door, the one with a star on it—and the freshly painted name LORD PHARAOH.