How did they lose the river? Wendy wondered. It was so long and winding. Sure it was so dark and gray that it was almost a part of the deathly miasma that made up the air they breathed and the fog that touched their faces, but its stench would surely keep them close to it. But no. It was as if they had sleepwalked away.
Peter shook his head. “See? This is what this labyrinth does. It’s the worst kind of maze — the kind you don’t even see coming. By the time you realize it’s not a straight line, you’re already lost.”
Wendy glanced around at the empty landscape. Suddenly she noticed the menacing stone walls of the pyramid bearing down on them, moving closer and closer until she could barely breathe. “Anyone else feel that?”
The walls continued to approach, and Wendy could feel a rough rock jutting into her back. “Peter, just say the name of the hour,” said Wendy, breathing loudly. She tried to swallow some air, but there was very little of it. The space around them was shrinking.
“We could appear anywhere in Marlowe,” said Peter.
“Well, we can’t stay here!” shrieked Wendy.
Peter checked his watch. He grabbed both of their hands and shouted the name of the third hour into the tiny space around him.
None of them saw the eye appear over their heads. The second it appeared, they were on the other side, jammed in a dark space so small that Wendy again found it impossible to breathe. It was like being in a coffin, but at least that dreadful, ominous feeling of the underworld was gone (almost). The three of them were pressed up against one another in the pitch black. Wendy could feel a number of hard objects poking her in the back. She could smell brand-new books, erasers, and Magic Markers. She reached for a doorknob and threw the door open.
The three of them fell on top of one another, right in the middle of AP calculus.
Mrs. Flanagan, the calculus teacher, jumped back.
A roomful of students stared.
John’s jacket was still dripping black goo.
Wendy rubbed her eyes.
Then the room erupted in laughter. Wendy heard one of the cheerleaders snicker and say to her friend, “You’d think someone would have told her that you’re not supposed to invite your little brother into the closet with you.”
Wendy, John, and Peter were in the hallway, long after everyone had cleared out. John, visibly exhausted, was sitting cross-legged on the floor. Wendy was leaning against a locker. Peter was pacing. Wendy and John had both been dragged into the office and written up for hiding in the closet and skipping class. Professor Darling would hear about this for sure. Peter had been reprimanded severely, received a pay cut, and only avoided being fired by explaining that he was there first, looking for supplies, and that the Darling kids had just shown up, presumably wanting to avoid class and listen to music instead. What could he say? He didn’t want to antagonize their father. For the past forty-five minutes, the three of them had been sitting in the hallway, ignoring the eerie, unclean feeling that told them that Marlowe was still contaminated, trying to figure out why the river wasn’t the right spot. Wendy suggested that maybe they had the wrong river. But there were no other options besides the pool. John had suggested that maybe they had missed it, but Peter said that the mummies were always in a shrine. It would be hard to miss if they had the right spot.
Finally, just as Peter was returning from a detour to the pool to retrieve the Book of Gates, Wendy had a thought. “Identity is a complex thing,” she said.
“Huh?” said John.
“I can’t believe it!” said Wendy, her eyes lighting up. “I can’t believe we missed such an obvious clue.”
“What are you talking about, Wen?” John got up off the floor. Peter had stopped pacing.
“We heard the story, but none of us really understood the nature of the injustice.” Wendy was breathing hard, rushing through her words, her excitement pouring out all at once like a burst water balloon. “Daddy said this story was the hardest to grasp. To truly grasp. But I think I have it.”
Peter looked at her sidelong, as if, after all this brainstorming, he didn’t want her to have it. Wendy got the feeling that Peter still didn’t trust her — that he didn’t trust anyone except himself. Maybe he didn’t even care what she thought she knew. Then, reluctantly, Peter pulled a rolled-up stack of notebook paper from his back pocket. It was crinkled from multiple readings. He handed it to Wendy. “I thought I’d find something in your dad’s margin notes. Something we’d missed,” he said. “But no luck.”
Wendy recognized the pages. They were her father’s third lecture, written out for Simon and read to the class earlier today. She flipped through the pages. How did Peter get his hands on Simon’s notes? “Did you steal these?” she asked, and he shrugged. He must have gotten them as everyone was leaving class, or maybe when they were in the auditorium talking to Professor Darling. It seemed that Peter, with his black Centurion card and his army of street-savvy, designer-clad boarding brats, was a world-class thief.
Wendy skimmed the pages, eager to tell Peter what she thought she knew. The pages captured her attention. Even a cursory glance through them revealed that Simon had rushed through the lecture; he had skipped details, rolled his eyes over the parts he considered overly sentimental. He even crossed out a line here and there and added notes. Not likely. . . . Internally inconsistent. . . . Would never occur in ancient Egypt. . . . Anachronistic. . . . And so forth. Wendy’s eyes fell on a segment about Nailah and Harere’s childhood. She read it fast and skipped ahead to the part about the merchant husband. The full extent of his evil hadn’t been mentioned in lecture. Simon had marked it Implausible. Then Wendy’s eyes fell on a line near the end, words in italics, underlined twice by her father. She recognized the shaky double lines he always used under the sign-off on his birthday cards.
Nailah of the Nile.
A few lines later, Wendy spotted another line marked by her father’s unmistakable double lines.
Nailah the elder. She was condemned in all their hearts to die a watery death.
Wendy reread that line, her heart pounding. Her theory had been right. Now she had proof. Nailah of the Nile. Nailah of the watery death. She started bouncing up and down with the paper in her hand.
“Peter!” Wendy shrieked. “I knew it. This is why we couldn’t find Harere.”
“Why?” Peter asked, trying to hide his excitement.
“It’s because we didn’t really understand the nature of the injustice,” said Wendy. “The tragedy here is that Harere’s identity was gone. Gone forever — even in the afterlife. She’s the one that died in the Nile, but everyone thought that was Nailah! We should look in the place that Nailah died, because everybody thought she was Harere.”
Peter considered that for a moment. “I don’t know, Wendy.” Then after some thinking, he conceded. “But I guess it does make a good hiding place for the real bones. . . . No one would look for the boring other girl who lived a normal life.”
Wendy spotted another line in the lecture notes that Simon had neglected to read. He had marked this one Logical fallacy. “Listen to this,” she said, her voice shaking with excitement as she read out loud. “And the other, an heiress to a stolen life. Wiling away her ill-gotten days. Wilting in a merchant village. Harere, the old crone in the marketplace.”
“Total injustice,” said John. “She can’t even get her identity back in the afterlife.”
“It makes sense,” said Peter. He was staring at Wendy with obvious admiration, as though she were an equal. Even Tina, his right hand, had never deserved that.
“So we’re looking for a village,” said John.
“A marketplace,” corrected Peter.
“A ‘marketplace’ could mean lots of things,” said John as they made their way through the halls. “Maybe it means stock market. There’s a Bloomberg machine in the econ lab on the second floor.”
Peter raised an eyebrow. “You guys have an econ lab?” He shook his head thoughtfully. “Food,” he said, aft
er a moment’s pause. “Merchants usually sold food.”
“Yeah,” said John. “The other connections were that simple. Sand for the desert. Water for the Nile. Food for the market.”
Wendy checked her watch. It was night in Egypt, happy hour in New York, which for teachers at Marlowe meant another drawn-out faculty meeting. Professor Darling wouldn’t be back for an hour. The trio slipped unnoticed down the hallway and, without another word, headed straight for the dining hall, trying to ignore the moths and the unexplainable nimbus of rot overhead.
Once inside the underworld pyramid, Peter immediately ducked behind a fruit stand. Wendy and John stood on a step inside the invisible doorway and gaped at the site. It wasn’t some august landscape or a terrifying sea. It wasn’t a goblin market or a skeleton bazaar or a market for shrunken heads and dusty old bones. It was just an ordinary food market, which — even though they were looking for exactly this — was really scary when they stopped to think about it, or if you stopped to look at the way every row of stalls exactly matched the rows of Marlowe’s dining tables. Or the way the soothing cream walls of the dining hall translated to a sickly hue between gray and bone, and the sweet smells of muffins and coffee had become rank, putrid, and thick with death.
Row after row of covered stands gridded the space in front of them. Each stand was heavily laden with pomegranates, clementines, dates, and a hundred other fruits they’d never seen. Burlap sacks leaned on one another, filled with sunflower seeds, sesame, and chickpeas. On the ground, lining the front of each stand, stood wooden barrels with pickled vegetables bobbing in brine.
Nailah’s market should have been teeming with bodies and noise, peddlers and customers, bargaining for the right price. But this deserted market felt unnatural and eerie, as if something had run the people off.
“Get down!” hissed Peter. John and Wendy squatted behind the stand.
“Hey,” said John, “did you guys notice this?”
John had a habit of asking vague questions so people would have to admit not knowing.
Wendy breathed out and said, “No, we didn’t. What is it you noticed, John?”
“Just that every stall is the same.”
“They’re stalls, John,” said Wendy. “What do you want?”
“But look,” said John through gritted teeth. “Every stall is the same. It’s really hard to tell, unless you step back a little. The whole market is a grid, and each stall is so cluttered with bags, and barrels, and stuff that it’s easy to look at all the variety in each one. But if you look from one stall to the next, they’re carbon copies.” John tapped his foot impatiently.
Peter and Wendy got up from their cover to take in the view. “It’s obvious once you see it,” he said. “Like, look at the stall keeper.”
At the right of the stall nearest to them, Wendy and Peter saw a figure, hunched, barely distinguishable from a burlap mound. It looked like an old crone, like a gypsy fortune-teller, a beggar woman of the East Indies, or a Salem witch. The only part of her body exposed under the draped cloth was her nose, hooking out from under the shadow of her hood. Maybe she was the proprietor of the stall. Except, of course, she was dead, or a mannequin. She didn’t move or breathe.
“Once you see her, you see them all,” said John.
Wendy and Peter realized it at the same time. At the right of every stall huddled the same dead stall keeper, with her burlap covering, her hooked nose.
“It’s like someone cut and pasted the same little food stand over and over again,” said Wendy, scanning her eyes over the identical burlap sacks, the jars of pickled vegetables stacked in exactly the same numbers, with exactly the same vegetables. Where two pomegranate seeds had fallen to the floor of the first stall, two pomegranate seeds had fallen to the floor of every stall.
“And arranged them in a grid,” mused Peter.
Wendy glanced at one of the stall keepers. “Looks a little like Tina,” she joked.
Peter raised an eyebrow, as if he was trying to decide what to make of the comment. “If this really is Harere’s tomb,” he said, “then Harere’s mummy is somewhere in this grid.”
“And it’s protected by this puzzle, where you can’t figure out which stall is the right one!” John interrupted Peter’s speech to show he’d figured it out, too.
“Well, that and some kind of guardian,” added Peter. John thought he was just adding it to get the last word.
“Whatever,” said John. He started to walk down a row of stands, fingering the dried fruit carelessly. “It’s probably one of these old lady statues. Let’s just find the old bag that looks the most like Nailah, or Harere . . . or whichever. Ancient puzzles are so level one.”
“Thanks, Indiana,” said Wendy. “We don’t know what they looked like. We need a clue.”
“And we need to keep an eye out for the guardian,” said Peter.
John turned and walked backward. “What’re you, scared?”
John was sneering at Peter, daring him to come along. But Peter only shook his head and smirked. Stupid smirk, thought John. “What?” said John.
“Nothing,” said Peter. “You’re just so obvious.”
“You mean, you’re scared,” John shot back.
“No,” said Peter, “I mean, you’re being that kid in the movie.”
“The one who isn’t scared,” said John, trying to get under Peter’s skin.
“The one who’s making a fool of himself,” said Peter. “You’re walking through this market like it’s that rich-kid nursery you call a high school. You’ve already gotten shredded for trying to act cool, but you still think you’re invincible because you get too much ‘positive reinforcement’ from all the adults in your life who’re all too afraid to tell you that you’re acting like a spoiled idiot, just in case you try to shoot up the school.”
John was taken aback. He stammered, “Well, well, you’re nothing but a — a —”
“Shut up,” interrupted Peter. “Don’t say anything. Just come back, before you hurt yourself or get us killed.”
Wendy didn’t say anything to defend him, and John thought he saw Peter’s hand brush hers. He glared at his sister and mumbled, “You’re totally doggin’ Connor.”
Wendy blanched and Peter said, “Scratch that. I’m gonna hurt you myself.”
Just as John was about to respond, a tremor shook the dirt beneath their feet. A distant rumbling began to increase, as if something was coming toward them from behind the spot where John stood frozen. Peter and Wendy looked wide-eyed at John, who was shaking visibly, and at the ground rising up beneath him.
Over John’s shoulder, a mound of earth barreled toward them down the aisle between the food stands. It moved like a shark in the water, tilting the stands on either side with the wake it left behind. “John,” Wendy shouted, “run!”
John didn’t dare to look, but Wendy’s voice got him moving. He ran to one side, hoping the mound would follow the course it was already on. Peter and Wendy ran parallel to John, two stalls down. John wasn’t very fast, but it didn’t matter. Just as the mound was about to overtake him, it veered and circled around in another direction, tearing up the dirt and sending it high into the air. As it moved away, the sand near its front end broke, and John saw a slippery brown head break through, for just an instant, before it retreated back into the ground. It had no eyes, just a big, round opening where its face should be, jam-packed with a circular set of gigantic teeth. The rest of its body was just a long tube, covered with moist brown rings marking each segment.
The trio sprinted for another few blocks of the marketplace before stopping to catch their breath, an effort made far more difficult by the gelatinous, unhealthy air of the underworld. Every breath was like sucking pudding through a straw.
“Now that,” said Peter, “is a proper guardian.”
“You didn’t say it’d be a giant sandworm,” said John between breaths.
“You didn’t ask,” said Peter. “Also, I didn’t know.”
“Because this is the tomb. And that thing is Nailah, Harere’s sister. She’s been turned into the guardian,” said Peter.
John suddenly remembered. In the story, Nailah had been called a worm, not a snake, as he had thought. “Gross,” he muttered.
“No matter what she looks like,” said Peter, “her whole purpose is to protect Harere’s bones. It’s her punishment, just like the Bedouin I fought to get Garosh.”
“Hey, wait a minute,” said John. “I think I got it . . .”
“What?” Wendy said impatiently. “Will you please be specific?”
“All right. I’m just catching my breath. Geez,” said John. He took a big breath and began: “We know the worm isn’t following the grid, since it went under a few of the stalls and uprooted them, right? And we know it’s protecting Harere’s bones.”
They nodded.
“I figure, it’s going in a circle around Harere.” John pointed to the horizon, where the worm was taking another turn and uprooting a patch of earth parallel to them. For lack of a proper sky, the rising sand made the entire scene look like one giant dirt wall. It was grim — dirt below, dirt above, and over their heads, the gray stone ceiling of the pyramid. But it did look like a circle. “So, basically, all we have to do is look at the area the worm is circling, and we can assume that if we calculate the center of that circle, we’ll more or less have the location of Harere’s stall. We could use the standard geometric equations for the derivation of the center, but I would enter a few variables to account for the elliptical nature of the perimeter, caused by the worm’s inertia, which will narrow the results slightly but, I think, significantly.”
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