Heart of the Mummy

by Tommy Donbavand

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” said Luke, trying to hide his irritation. “However, it’s not much use to me. It’s your heart that I need.”

  “But my heart doesn’t look anywhere near as lovely as that,” insisted Heru, tears filling his eyes once more.

  Luke’s patience was beginning to wear thin. “I don’t care what it looks like!”

  Cleo quickly stepped between Luke and the mummy, taking the snow globe in her hands. “I think it’s beautiful, Your Majesty! Can I have it?”

  “What are you doing?” hissed Luke.

  “Play along or you’ll never get his heart,” Cleo whispered.

  Heru wiped his tears away. “You want it?”

  “I do, Your Majesty,” said Cleo, pretending to be enraptured. “It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. You have exquisite taste!”

  A smile played across Heru’s trembling lips. “I do, rather, don’t I.”

  Cleo nodded. “And I think you should punish this ungrateful wretch.”

  Heru clapped his hands in delight. “Ooh, I like punishing people! What shall I do? Throw him to the dogs? Tear him apart with horses?”

  “Something worse,” said Cleo.

  Heru skipped around in a circle. “I could cut him open with a golden knife and fill his guts with scarab beetles!”

  “Much too good for him, sire,” grinned Cleo.

  “Cleo …” muttered Luke.

  “What?”

  “Can we stop with the ‘101 ways to torture me’ thing, please?”

  “Shh! Trust me.” Cleo turned back to Heru. “I have a better idea, Your Majesty. Why not insist that he takes your ugly old heart after all?”

  “You think that would be a suitable punishment?”

  “I do,” said Cleo. “After all, he didn’t appreciate this wondrous gift. Give him something disgusting instead. Make him accept it!”

  Heru grinned wickedly. “It shall be done. Boy — my heart is yours to keep!”

  Luke forced away his smile. “No, your Pharaoh-ness, please!”

  Heru winked at Cleo. “My mind is made up,” he said, “and it was all my own idea — nobody helped me with it at all. You must take my heart!”

  “Oh, what a dreadful reward. I am undone with grief,” Luke acted flatly. He dropped to his knees and held out his hands. “Hand me the punishment I most truly deserve!” “What?”

  “Your heart,” said Luke. “You were going on about it just then…”

  “Oh, my heart’s not here,” said Heru. “It’s in a golden casket at the bottom of the square river.”

  Luke stared. All this, and the heart wasn’t even here!

  Heru, however, was indifferent. He waved a bored hand towards Cleo. “Right, back to our play,” he said. “You can bring me my wine, and when it’s not cold enough I’ll have you whipped.”

  “An excellent idea,” beamed Cleo. “Now, why don’t you step back into your sarcophagus for a moment so you can make an entrance worthy of a pharaoh?”

  Heru looked as though he might faint with excitement. “What a wonderful plan!” he squealed, stepping back inside his coffin. “Ooh, I’m a star! I’m a star!”

  Cleo swung the lid closed and the attic was silent once more. “At last,” she groaned. “Now, let’s go and find this heart!”

  Resus smirked. “You’re locking the mummy back up? What about all that ‘we must worship and adore him’ stuff?”

  “That,” said Cleo with a deep sigh, “was before I knew he was madder than a bucket of pencils!”

  Luke, Resus and Cleo raced out of 5 Scream Street, leaving the Movers chasing a chattering wind-up monkey around the house. “I knew that toy would come in handy one day!” grinned the vampire. “I’ve got another one somewhere.”

  “Hang on,” said Luke. “If you had that monkey in your cloak all along, why did I have to stomp around as a one-man band to get us into the attic?”

  Resus grinned. “That musical stuff’s been weighing me down for weeks,” he said. “I was glad to get rid of it!”

  “And you were very entertaining,” added Cleo.

  Luke tried to look annoyed. “I should throw you two back to the Movers.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said Cleo. “Then who’s going to help you find this ‘square river’, whatever that is?”

  “So Heru definitely said his heart was in a casket at the bottom of a square river?” asked Luke. “I was hoping I’d heard wrong.”

  “What do you think he was talking about?” said Cleo.

  A smile began to creep across Resus’s face as an idea struck. “Follow me,” he said, running towards a garden on the opposite side of Scream Street.

  Moments later, Luke found himself staring into a tank of filthy swirling water, surrounded on all sides by mud and overgrown reeds.

  “Of course, technically it’s more of a rectangle than a square …” said Resus.

  “What is that?” asked Luke as a series of gloopy green bubbles popped across the surface.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” replied Resus. “It’s a swimming pool.”

  Luke stared at him. “Surely no one has a swimming pool like this!”

  “Mr and Mrs Crudley do,” grinned Resus.

  “And Heru’s heart is at the bottom?”

  “Someone’s coming!” hissed Cleo, pulling the boys down behind a compost heap that dominated one side of the garden. Luke pinched his nose and watched as a pulsating mound of something brown slithered out of the house, putting on an orange armband festooned with cartoon characters as it did so.

  “What,” whispered Luke, “is that?”

  “A bog monster,” replied Resus. “I take it you haven’t met the Crudleys.”

  “I have, though,” announced Cleo, jumping to her feet. “Fifi!”

  With a scream that sounded like a whale breaking wind in an ocean of whipped cream, the bog monster jumped with fright and toppled into the pool. It thrashed about for a few seconds, then vanished beneath the rancid water.

  A much larger, much angrier bog monster oozed out the back door and glared at Cleo. “What have you done to my baby?” demanded Mrs Crudley.

  Fifi’s head broke the surface again and a mouth the size of an armchair gasped for breath.

  “Keep kicking, darling,” screamed her mother, racing up and down beside the pool leaving a sticky trail of mud. “Somebody will save you!”

  “I’ll do it!” yelled Cleo, and thrusting the snow globe into Resus’s hands she dived into the churning green cesspool. Within seconds the dirty water had soaked into her bandages and she too was being pulled beneath the surface. She screamed through a mouthful of goo.

  Luke and Resus looked at one another.

  “I could have told you that would happen,” sighed the vampire as the two boys leapt head first into the bubbling pool of slime.

  “I still don’t understand why you have a swimming pool if none of you can swim,” said Resus as he dried his hair with a very rough towel provided by Mrs Crudley. Fifi was now sitting happily in a high-chair made from steel, playing with a lump of soil the size of a small car.

  Mr Crudley oozed across the living room, a dark stain glistening on the carpet behind him. “It adds to the value of the property,” he sniffed, snatching a picture of Fifi from Cleo’s hands and rubbing at the wooden frame with his muddy fingers.

  “Please,” he begged, “I must ask you not to touch anything. Children are such messy creatures, and we’re very proud of our home!”

  Cleo stared at the lumpy black mess now dripping over the photograph and stifled a laugh. “Of course, Mr Crudley,” she said.

  “There was no sign of Heru’s heart down there, though,” sighed Luke. “Just gallons of slime.”

  “And not just any slime,” boasted Mrs Crudley as she took the towel from Resus and ran her hand proudly over the goo that coated it. “This slime was imported directly from an unexplored tributary to the River Amazon!” She sucked the green mess from her fingers and smiled.

 
; “If it’s unexplored,” said Resus, “who went up there to get it for you?” Cleo busily rearranged the bandages on her face in an effort to disguise another laugh as Mrs Crudley oozed across the room.

  “Was there ever a golden casket at the bottom of your swimming pool?” Luke asked the nearest mound of brown gunk, hoping he was looking at its face.

  “Yes,” gurgled Mr Crudley. “Disgusting, shiny thing. I put it in the cellar.”

  Luke cleared his throat. “Do you think we could see it?”

  “If you stand on newspaper!” screeched Mrs Crudley as she led Luke, Resus and Cleo towards the cellar door. “And I’m only doing this because you saved my darling Fifi!”

  A thick trail of gunge seeped from the bottom of the bog monster as she slithered across the carpet, laying down pages from the Terror Times for Luke, Resus and Cleo to stand on.

  Luke went to open the cellar door but Mrs Crudley slapped his hand away. “Children have sticky fingers!” she snapped as she turned the handle, leaving behind tendrils of dripping slime. The stairway down to the basement was steep and vanished into menacing darkness. Luke led the way down.

  Once Mrs Crudley had left them, Resus pulled the flaming torch from his cloak, lighting the rest of the stairway. “I didn’t think she’d appreciate the fire near her precious Fifi!” he grinned.

  Luke climbed down the remaining stairs and studied the cramped cellar. Piles of furniture, carpets and boxes filled every available space.

  “Last season’s styles,” said Cleo. “The Crudleys are very fussy when it comes to keeping up with the latest fashions.”

  It took the trio almost an hour of shifting sofas and moving dining tables to locate the golden box. Eventually Cleo found it near a mound of disturbed earth in the corner. She dragged the casket to the centre of the room.

  “Ready?” asked Luke.

  “Ready,” confirmed Resus.

  Holding his breath, Luke opened the lid of Heru’s golden casket. Inside was a slip of torn paper containing just a few words in scrawled handwriting.

  Luke read the message aloud. “Dude, IOU one heart!”

  “You’re sure it’s Doug who took the heart?” asked Luke as they stepped out onto the Crudleys’ front lawn.

  Resus examined the note again. “Well, it’s written in blood, so it’s definitely a zombie, and there’s only one I know of who speaks like that.”

  “Like what?” asked Cleo as Resus pulled a can of strong lager from his cloak and opened it with a psst!

  “Dude!” said a muffled voice. A green decayed hand shot out of the grass and grabbed the can. As the hole widened, a scabby face appeared. “You sure know the way to a zombie’s heart, little vampire dude.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” smiled Resus as Doug drank the beer. He held up the bloody note. “Was this you?”

  “Guilty as charged,” admitted the zombie.

  “How?” asked Luke. “It took us ages to convince Mrs Crudley to let us search the cellar, and even then we weren’t sure we’d find it.”

  Doug tapped the side of his nose, dislodging it in the process and causing it to fall off into the dirt. “Never fails me,” said the zombie as he spat on the back of the nose and pressed it noisily back in place. “I can smell a human organ at a hundred metres!”

  “And the bog monsters just let you go down there and get it?”

  “I don’t mess with old man Crudley,” said Doug. “He can produce sludge that’ll just burn the skin right off you!” The zombie shook his head. “No, I tunnelled into their cellar in the dead of night.”

  “But why do you need the heart?” asked Cleo.

  “I’m cooking Sunday lunch for Turf and Berry this weekend,” said Doug. “That juicy heart will taste righteous with roasted eyeballs on the side.”

  Cleo clamped a hand over her mouth. “You’re going to eat it?”

  “No, Cleo,” said Resus sarcastically. “He’s going to staple it to a piece of paper and make a Valentine’s card with it.”

  “Berry loves a bit of heart,” continued Doug. “She’s been saving a bottle of spinal fluid for this weekend, too.”

  “Special occasion?” asked Resus.

  The zombie nodded. “It’s Turf’s re-birthday. Exactly thirty-eight years since he burst out of his grave and joined the undead.”

  “I know it’s an important day,” said Luke, “but I need that heart to help get my parents home.”

  “You can’t take our heart, dude,” protested Doug. “It’s a celebration!”

  “What if we found you something to replace it with?” said Resus. “A nice juicy stomach, perhaps, or a plump gall bladder?”

  Cleo whimpered and grabbed the vampire’s cloak, clamping it over her mouth. Resus glared at the sweating mummy and yanked it back. “You’re not helping here!” he hissed.

  Doug paused to consider the offer, lifting off the top of his head to scratch his brain as he did so. Jamming the piece of flesh back in place, he grinned with decayed yellow teeth.

  “OK, little dudes,” he beamed. “In the spirit of harmony, if you can find us a replacement main course, the heart is yours!”

  Doug drained the last of the beer as Luke, Resus and Cleo climbed to their feet. The zombie dipped his hand into the pocket of his filthy shirt and produced a handful of crisp brown curls. “Deep-fried finger before you go?”

  “It’s really not very polite to throw up on a zombie,” said Resus as he, Luke and Cleo emerged from the garden into Scream Street.

  “Not polite?” demanded Cleo. “He offered us human flesh to eat!”

  “And more to the point, you offered him something to replace the heart,” said Luke, turning to Resus. “What did you have in mind?”

  The vampire shrugged. “I dunno.”

  “You don’t know?” exclaimed Luke in surprise. “I thought at the very least you’d have an elderly relative’s liver tucked away inside your cloak!”

  Resus shook his head. “My mum made me bury them all after my bedroom was invaded by maggots.”

  Cleo paled again and clutched at a nearby garden gate for support. “It’s at times like this I’m glad I’m a vegetarian,” she groaned.

  “That’s it!” said Luke. “We’ll get the zombies a vegetable replacement.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Resus. “I talked Turf into trying a carrot once, and he went on a crazed rampage once he found out it hadn’t come from something that used to breathe.”

  “So let’s not tell them what it is,” suggested Luke.

  “You don’t think they’ll notice if they’re eating a turnip instead of a heart?” asked Cleo.

  “You said last night that your dad’s lotus-flower fritters taste like beef,” said Luke. “What else has he got in the fridge?”

  “There’s a mushroom and dandelion bake,” Cleo said thoughtfully, a smile beginning to show between her bandages. “And that tastes just like pork …”

  “Brilliant,” grinned Resus. “We can soak it in blood from the tap and tell the zombies it’s a gall bladder or something.”

  The trio arrived at Cleo’s front gate and the mummy raced up the path and pushed open the door. Running to the kitchen, she began to rifle through the fridge. Her father appeared.

  “Dad, we need to—”

  Cleo froze as she saw that the bandages over his face were soaked with tears. “What’s wrong?”

  “Hello, Cleo,” came a voice from behind her father.

  Cleo turned to stare at the female mummy standing in the kitchen doorway.

  “Mum?” she breathed, before everything went black and she fainted.

  Resus and Luke dashed out of the zombies’ house. “I have to admit, I’m amazed that worked,” said the vampire, clutching Heru’s heart in his hands. “I was sure they’d notice that mushroom bake was a vegetable dish.”

  “What? After you poured an entire jug of blood over it?” grinned Luke. “I’ve no idea what a gall bladder tastes like — and I
hope I never have to find out — but I’m sure that much blood could mask the flavour of just about anything.”

  “What a house, though!” said Resus. “Did you see the zombies’ furniture? I never would have thought you could make a three-piece suite out of body parts.”

  “And the deep carpets,” said Luke. “How can they afford stuff like that?”

  Resus shrugged. “Human hair’s pretty cheap if you raid graves and harvest it yourself.” The vampire grinned. “Cleo would have puked everywhere!”

  Luke sighed. “It didn’t feel right, getting the heart without her,” he said. “She did so much to convince Heru to give it to me.”

  “She’s got other stuff to concentrate on at the moment,” Resus pointed out. Luke nodded and the boys walked in silence for a few minutes.

  “You think that’s really her mum?” he asked.

  Resus frowned. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “I don’t know,” admitted Luke. “One minute she’s telling us about her mum for the first time, and the next minute she’s there, as large as life.”

  “Yeah,” grinned Resus. “Sounds like the plot to Heru’s soap opera.”

  “Sounds more like a massive coincidence to me.”

  “You’re in Scream Street,” said Resus. “Coincidence is a way of life here!”

  “Hm,” muttered Luke.

  “Look, if it’ll make you feel any better, let’s go in and show Cleo the heart,” said Resus, handing over the relic. “That way you can thank her for helping out and it’ll put your mind at rest about her mum.”

  As the boys turned down the street that led to Cleo’s house, Luke pushed Heru’s heart deep into the pocket of his jeans. Something about this just didn’t feel right.

  “After my sarcophagus was washed overboard, I spent almost five hundred years at the bottom of the ocean before sharks finally broke through the casket and dragged me out for food …”

  Resus grinned as Cleo’s mother continued the story of her arrival in Scream Street. “I think we’ve found out where Cleo gets her luck from,” he said.