Egypt Game (9781439132029)

by Snyder, Zilpha Keatley; Raible, Alton (ILT)

  Melanie was having trouble keeping her mind on her reading because she was so worried about what she was planning to do. In fact, they both were having such a hard time pretending not to worry that they were secretly relieved when Caroline came in and suggested it was bedtime for girls who were going to school in the morning. The eyelashes were lying on April’s dresser and Melanie managed to walk right past them as she went out. Because of the sticky stuff to make them stay on your eyelids, she only had to brush her hand against them to pick them up. Feeling triumphant and treacherous at the same time, Melanie took the eyelashes home and hid them in her closet. She kept them there until the first few days of school were over. Then she took them back and put them under April’s dresser, so it would look as if they’d just happened to fall. By that time April had gotten out of the notion of wearing them to school.

  But even without the eyelashes Melanie had a hard time trying to translate April into something that Wilson School could understand and appreciate. April was still wearing her hair in a messy upsweep and her mother’s ratty old fur stole, even though her grandmother had given her a great new jacket. Besides, she still put on her Hollywood act with people she didn’t know, and worst of all, she got furiously angry when she was teased. Melanie could see that to the kids at Wilson, all the stuff April knew made her a know-it-all; her wonderful differentness was only kookiness; and her courage only meant she’d punch you in the nose if you kidded her, no matter how many teachers were looking.

  At least, that was the way it was for a while. But with Melanie working her hardest as go-between, it wasn’t too long before things began to be a little better. The sixth grade began to find out that April had a way of making life interesting. For instance, when she raised her hand in class, her answer wasn’t always what the teacher wanted, but it was almost certain to be fascinating. And when it came to guts—whether it was hanging by your heels from the highest bar, or putting a stinkbug on the principal’s desk—you could count on April to do it first and best.

  By the third week in September, although the sixth graders were still teasing April—from a safe distance—they were beginning to think of her rather proudly, as their own private oddball. But it was when Toby and Ken gave her a nickname that Melanie knew for sure that the worst was over. Toby Alvillar and Ken Kamata were two of the biggest wheels in class, and if you were really hopeless they simply didn’t notice you—it was as if you didn’t exist. So when they started calling April, February, Melanie knew everything would be all right. It was teasing, maybe, but not the kind you use on outsiders.

  In the meantime, in the afternoons and on weekends, the Egypt Game was really beginning to take shape. As soon as school was out every day, the girls picked up Marshall at his nursery school and hurried home. Then they were free to spend their time in Egypt, until almost 5:30, when Caroline and the Rosses came home.

  The lean-to temple now had two altars and two gods. The birdbath altar had been moved to the right side, while on the left was the altar of Set, the Evil One. Set’s altar was made from an egg crate covered by a piece of an old bedspread, and the god himself was a rather pear-shaped figure of dried mud. April and Melanie had looked and looked for a suitable Set. For a while they tried a Chinese kitchen-god figurine from Schmitt’s Variety Store, but he was all wrong—much too nice and pleasant looking. At last, they had to resort to making a Set themselves, from some clayey mud from the Casa Rosada’s dead flower garden. Except for his glowing eyes, which were made of glass buttons of a deep fiery red, he didn’t turn out particularly well. In fact, at first he seemed rather laughable. But as time passed and the game progressed, Set’s face hardened and cracked into a wicked leer, and it became clear that his strange, sunken, formless body was the very shape of evil. Dark and deep as the mud of the Nile, Set brooded lumpily through a mist of sandalwood incense—ninety-nine cents at Schmitt’s—over all kinds of mystic ceremonies, weird rites and wicked plots.

  Opposite the altar of the wicked god stood the birdbath throne of the goddess of goodness. Of course, she was still represented by the plaster bust of Nefertiti, but as the game went on she began to be called Isis most of the time, because she was a goddess and not just a queen. And since the pharaohs were supposed to be related to the gods, it really didn’t matter if Isis and Nefertiti got a little bit confused. Whatever her name, what she stood for was always the same—love and beauty and every kind of perfection.

  There was always a great deal to do in the land of Egypt. Right at first April and Melanie got terribly involved in composing and practicing rites and ceremonies for the two gods. The rituals were very complicated and the correct order of processions, chants, prostrations, sprinklings with holy water and sacrificial offerings had to be carefully written down so that they wouldn’t be forgotten. At first the records were on ordinary notebook paper, but then Melanie, whose handwriting was the nicest, put it all down on onionskin paper rolled on pieces of an old fishing pole they’d found in the alley. Each page was glued on two pieces of pole so it could be rolled and unrolled like a papyrus scroll. Someday, they decided, they would do it all over in hieroglyphics, when they’d found time to finish their hieroglyphic alphabet, but for the present it was just written in English. Then, when Marshall discovered that the wooden base of the Diana statue was hollow, and one side was a little loose, they had a perfect secret vault for the storage of sacred records.

  Of course the temple and the two altars had to be decorated, too. It wasn’t at all difficult to find the right sort of things for the altar of Nefertiti-Isis. Flowers, candles, beads, pretty stones, blown-glass figurines of birds and deer, in fact, anything beautiful, seemed to suit the lovely goddess. One day Melanie brought her poster paints and they painted stars and birds and flowers on the fence in back of the altar; and another day they made a canopy to hang above Nefertiti’s head. They made it from an old fluffy half-slip of crinoline and lace, but when they were through cutting and pinning and tacking, it looked exactly like a canopy and not like a petticoat at all.

  Set was more of a problem. For a while he had only his incense burner, which was made of an old metal ash tray. April suggested that they might find something suitable in the Professor’s store, but Melanie wouldn’t go with her to help her shop. Melanie had lived too long in the neighborhood and been almost brought up on all those scary rumors about the Professor. And besides, she said, what could they buy for fifty cents, which was about all they could scrape up at the time. So Set had to settle for some spiders and snakes painted on the wall behind him, and a dry bone that hung on a string above his head. April had gone to the trouble of tricking an unfriendly dog out of the bone because it was so large and sinister looking; and it had just the right effect hanging there over the evil god, twisting and turning in the wind.

  Then one day on the way to school Melanie found a strange dark stone. It was lying in the middle of a sidewalk, where a stone had no reason to be; but even more mysterious, when you held it at just the right angle it looked exactly like a pair of long pointed jaws with a bulging snout and jagged teeth.

  “There’s no doubt about it,” April said, “it’s no ordinary rock, that’s for sure.”

  So they put it on the altar, too, and called it the Crocodile Stone, and from then on it became the mysterious and powerful source of much of Set’s power.

  At first Marshall only watched everything that was going on, but after a while he began to be impatient and wanted to know, “When are you going to play about the pharaoh some more, like you said?” When April told him they wouldn’t be ready for that for a long time, his chin began to stick out. So, to keep him happy, they let him start being a sort of junior high priest. At the next ceremony, which was to be the presentation of a dead lizard as a sacrificial offering to Set, Marshall marched at the head of the procession and sprinkled holy water from a tuna can. He did a good job, too, except that he wouldn’t put Security down, not even to be a high priest.

  At first April said nobody c
ould be the high priest of an evil god with a toy octopus hanging around his neck, but she finally agreed they could pretend it was some kind of a fancy ceremonial robe. And when the procession was over she had to admit that Marshall had done awfully well, for a little kid. “He even remembered all the words to the chant and he sprinkled in all the right places,” she said wonderingly. But Melanie wasn’t surprised at all.

  “That’s the way with Marshall,” she said. “He’s been awfully grown-up ever since—oh, since about the time he started walking. That is, about everything except Security. I guess he’s not very grown-up about that. Dad says the reason Marshall needs Security is that he had such a hard time being a baby. Dad says being a baby offended Marshall’s dignity.”

  April shrugged. “Yeah, I guess everybody has something they’re not very grown-up about,” she said.

  Neferbeth

  NEAR THE END OF SEPTEMBER A NEW GIRL MOVED into the Casa Rosada. Her name was Elizabeth Chung. She and her mother and two little sisters had rented the little semibasement apartment next to where Mr. Bodler, the janitor, lived. Caroline went down to call on Mrs. Chung the evening the family moved in to see if there was anything she could do to help them get settled. She asked April if she wanted to go along to meet Elizabeth, but April said, “No thanks.”

  When her grandmother came back upstairs, April found out all about the new family. Mr. Chung had died recently and his wife was going to have to get a job to support her three little girls. She had moved to the Casa Rosada because it was only a few blocks from where her parents lived. Mrs. Chung’s mother was going to take care of the two smallest girls while she was at work.

  “Elizabeth is only a little younger than you and Melanie,” Caroline said. “Perhaps you could ask her to play with you. She’s probably feeling lonely and worried about starting in at a new school.”

  April was ambushed by a quick pang of sympathy, remembering how it was—missing someone and having to face a new classroom. But she pulled herself together and shook it off. It occurred to her that Caroline ought to know that you didn’t pick your friends just because they were handy—or even lonely. You picked them because you thought alike and were interested in the same things, the way she and Melanie were. “How old is she?” she asked, letting her eyes go narrow.

  “I think her mother said she was nine,” Caroline said.

  “Nine,” said April, with a cool smile, “is a lot younger than eleven.”

  “Well, of course, it will have to be up to you and Melanie to decide,” Caroline said calmly, but as she turned to leave the room April was sure she heard a rather exasperated sigh.

  April tried to feel pleased about the sigh, but something prickled uncomfortably. She decided she didn’t want to think about it. She called to Caroline that she was going down to talk to Melanie. Melanie would understand how impossible it would be to invite someone else to be part of anything so private and secret as the Egypt Game.

  Mr. Ross called, “Come in,” when April knocked. He was sitting on the couch surrounded by books and papers. He was studying to be a college teacher and he always had a lot of work to do in the evenings. He was a big man with dark brown skin and a teasing smile. He was always kidding April about her name. When April opened the door he said, “Just as I thought, it’s springtime. Melanie! the cruelest month is here.”

  Mr. Ross was going to teach things like poetry and literature, and he was always making jokes that weren’t very funny unless you knew what he was talking about. That “cruelest month” business, for instance, was something he was always kidding April about. It didn’t make any sense to April until Melanie found out about it and explained. It seemed it came from a big long poem that started out about how April was the “cruelest month.” April still didn’t think it was any riot, but she guessed it was okay for that kind of joke.

  As soon as the girls were alone in Melanie’s room, April brought up the subject of Elizabeth. Sure enough, Melanie’s mother had been after her, too, to make the new girl feel at home.

  “I don’t know what they think we can do,” April said. “We can’t let her in on the Egypt Game. She’d be sure to fink about it and ruin everything.”

  “Well, we’ll have to get to know her first,” Melanie said, “and see if she’s the kind who can keep a secret. And then—”

  “Keep a secret!” April interrupted scornfully. “For one thing, she’s only nine years old.”

  “Well, Marshall’s only four,” Melanie said, “and he doesn’t ever fink.”

  “Marshall’s different,” April said impatiently. “This Elizabeth is probably just like any other blabbermouth fourth grader.”

  Alarmed at what seemed to her to be a rather wishy-washy attitude on Melanie’s part, April didn’t go home until she felt sure they had reached a firm decision. No matter what, no new girl was going to be let in on the Egypt Game. If they asked Elizabeth to walk to school with them, and maybe talked to her at recesses for a while, until she got around to making fourth-grade friends, that would be enough.

  The next morning April and Melanie went dutifully down the little dark basement hallway and knocked on the door of the Chungs’ apartment. Almost immediately the door across the hall opened and Mr. Bodler, the janitor, looked out. “Oh, hello there, young ladies,” he said. “Thought I heard someone knocking on my door.”

  “Hello, Mr. Bodler,” Melanie said. “We’ve come to get the new girl and take her to school with us.”

  “Well now, isn’t that nice. I think that’s right nice of you young ladies.”

  April and Melanie turned back to the Chungs’ door, but Mr. Bodler went on standing behind them. They exchanged sideways “wouldn’t you know it” glances. Mr. Bodler was a fattish man with faded blond hair who was always nosily cheerful at children. The situation was already uncomfortable, and Mr. Bodler, who was a naturally uncomfortable person to be around, wasn’t making it any better.

  The door of the Chungs’ apartment was finally opened by a very small Asian girl. “Hi,” April said. “Is your big sister ready for school? We’ve come to take her.”

  The girl smiled shyly. “I’m Elizabeth,” she said.

  On the way to school Elizabeth walked between April and Melanie. She really was amazingly tiny for a fourth grader. Her thick black hair was pulled back into a carefully curled ponytail that bounced when she walked. And there was something about the carved perfection of her face that made her smile seem like magic—an enchanted ivory princess warming suddenly to life. She was shy, but not in the stiff embarrassing way that makes other people feel embarrassed, too. It was a gentle friendly shyness that made other people feel important, sort of in charge of things.

  April had been afraid—well, looking at Elizabeth’s upturned face and pretty tilted eyes, wide with wonder at almost anything you told her, it was hard to remember just what she had been afraid of. She almost wished she hadn’t been so convincing when she talked to Melanie the night before about how they didn’t want anybody else butting into their friendship.

  By the time April and Melanie delivered Elizabeth to the door of the fourth-grade room, they had completely forgotten that taking care of Elizabeth had been anybody’s idea but their own. Melanie’s forehead wrinkled with worry as she watched Elizabeth make her way timidly through the noisily assembling fourth graders, to the teacher’s desk. And a couple of boys who were saying, “Hey, look at the new girl!” and, “Ugh! A girl!” and other typically fourth-grade remarks were suddenly silenced when they met April’s ferocious glare.

  That afternoon April and Melanie walked Elizabeth home and by the next morning they were both wondering if it wouldn’t be all right, after all, to let her join the Egypt Game. But it was a touchy sort of thing to bring up, not knowing for sure how the other one felt about it. And then a very strange thing happened.

  Elizabeth had arranged to meet them that morning on the front steps of the Casa Rosada and when April and Melanie were crossing the lobby they could see her through
the glass of the front door. She was sitting on the railing and looking off up Orchard Avenue so her profile was towards them. All of a sudden April grabbed Melanie’s arm. “Look!” she whispered.

  “What?” Melanie whispered back.

  “Elizabeth,” April said. “Who does she look like?”

  Melanie caught her breath. “Nefertiti,” she breathed.

  Sure enough. Elizabeth’s ponytail pulled her hair back away from her face and neck; and there was certainly something about her delicate, slender-necked profile that was very like the statue of Nefertiti. Of course, Elizabeth’s nose was a tiny bit shorter and maybe her chin a little rounder, but the resemblance was there just the same.

  She saw them then and bounced through the door to meet them before anything more could be said, but it wasn’t really necessary. April and Melanie just looked at each other and nodded, and on the way to school they started telling Elizabeth all about the Egypt Game.

  Prisoners of Fear

  ELIZABETH TURNED OUT TO BE JUST WHAT THE Egypt Game needed to make it perfect. Of course, she didn’t have many ideas; but then, she was younger and hadn’t had a chance to learn much about ancient history. Besides, April and Melanie had almost more ideas than they could use anyway. Elizabeth helped in other ways.

  She was just crazy about every part of the Egypt Game, and she was full of admiring comments. For instance, she loved the “Hymn to Isis” that Melanie had made up almost by herself, with just a little bit of help from a book of Egyptian poetry. Elizabeth said it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever heard. And the first time she saw April do a ceremony for Set she kept jumping up and down with half-scared excitement. For a few days it was fun just doing everything over for Elizabeth to appreciate; and after that they got around to starting a new part of the game. In the new part, Marshall finally got to be the young pharaoh, Marshamosis, again, and Elizabeth was the queen, Neferbeth. April and Melanie were priestesses. First they were evil priestesses, leading Marshamosis and Neferbeth into the clutches of the wicked Set. And then they were priestesses of Isis coming to the rescue.