Horus and the Curse of Everlasting Regret

by Hannah Voskuil

  Peter asked Horus, “What happens if you try to leave the room?”

  Horus looked uncomfortable. “It is…terribly unpleasant. It feels a bit like, uh, drowning. Burning lungs. Also like walking on coals and being attacked by voracious fire ants and stinging bees and venomous snakes. Not my favorite thing to do,” he said. “Enough about me. I know about me. Let’s talk about you all for a moment. I can help you, you know—if you do some things for me.”

  Tunie swallowed the last of Peter’s cookie. “Help us with what?”

  Horus said, “You’re interested in finding the girl who was kidnapped from my exhibit at the fair, aren’t you?”

  Peter leaned over the table toward Horus.

  “Were you there?” Peter asked.

  The mummy made a face. “Oh, yes. Distasteful situation. I’ll tell you what I know, if you make me a promise.”

  “What’s that?” Tunie said with suspicion.

  Horus blinked his luminous eyes. “Promise me you’ll come back. You’re the only people who have been able to interact with me since a toddler greeted me with a rag doll once, in England. That must have been a hundred years ago. Promise you’ll come back—and bring me something to read, to pass the time.”

  Tunie looked over the mummy. He was stained a bit brown and gray with age, and the bones where they showed through his wraps were disturbing, but for all that—and his former thieving ways—he seemed…polite, at least.

  “I’ll bring you some library books, Horus,” she said.

  Peter looked thoughtful. “My father reads the paper, too. I can bring some of those.”

  “Excellent! Someone left one in here once. It named all kinds of wonders—moving pictures, motorcars, bubble gum!” The mummy clapped his hands. “I want to know more about everything. Oh, and I especially liked the comics!”

  “Great. I’ll bring as many as I can. Now, please,” Peter said fervently, “tell us! What do you know about Dorothy James’s kidnapping?”

  Peter tried to sit still, but he felt keyed up, knowing the mummy had been at the scene of the crime. An undead eyewitness! This was something the coppers definitely hadn’t discovered!

  The mummy took a sip of tea and began. “They were unsavory fellows, much like my grave-robber comrades. Not to be trusted, of course, but they knew how to have fun! Well, at least, they did at first….Where was I? Oh, yes. There were two kidnappers. One had a terrifically nasal voice and smelled of hickory woodsmoke. He came quite near my sarcophagus, and though I couldn’t see his face, I distinctly heard him say he had to be back at Franklin Street by midnight.”

  Peter was breathless with elation. “This is great! Inside information! What about the accomplice?”

  Horus appeared pleased by Peter’s exuberance. “The other was also a man, but his voice was low and muffled. I heard the girl shriek from his direction, and then it sounded like he was covering her mouth.” The mummy looked thoughtful for a moment. “There was something else. He made a strange tapping sound when he walked.”

  “That’s keen! I know where Franklin Street is,” Tunie said delightedly. “All we have to do is find the man with the nasal voice!”

  Peter frowned. “Wait a minute. This is my investigation. I need that dough.”

  He touched the injured corner of his mouth, remembering what he had to escape. “I’m going to have every bone in my body broken this summer if I can’t get out of town.”

  Tunie blinked. “I need the money, too. My dad is sick and we can’t afford a doctor.”

  Peter stared at Tunie for a moment. He liked her. He knew from experience, though, that most people couldn’t get away from him fast enough once the twins appeared, and his stepbrothers were almost impossible to avoid. What if, during their research into this kidnapping, she decided she didn’t want to be near Peter? What was to keep her from using the information they’d gathered together, going after the reward on her own, and taking all the money?

  “Once I get it, I’ll share some with you, but I have to get that reward myself. It was nice to meet you, Horus,” he said, standing. “Thanks for the information. I’m going to work on the case now. I promise I’ll bring you something to read.”

  “Wait! You’re leaving?” Tunie sounded stunned.

  “Sorry, Tunie. I gotta get started tonight.” Peter took his mug to the sink. The disappointment on her face made him feel ashamed. In his friendliest voice, he said, “I’ll be seeing you, okay?”

  Tunie simply kept looking at him with wide eyes and open mouth. Feeling decidedly uncomfortable, Peter hurried out of the room.

  “What a curve,” Tunie said, disappointed. “I thought we were going to be a team—the Harbortown Investigators or Horus and Company. Something like that.”

  Horus looked thoughtful. “He did rush off, didn’t he? I wonder why he’s set on doing this himself. He must have some reason.”

  Perch squeaked.

  “I know,” Tunie said. “I’d better get around to cleaning the rest of this place. What can he do with a head start at night, anyway? Thanks for the lowdown, Horus. And the tea.”

  With a crinkle, Horus rose from his chair. “I’ll help you clean, if you like. I’ve been bored for centuries.”

  Alone with the little mummy, Tunie was beginning to feel spooked. She thought about the curse drawing her and Peter here like some unseen supernatural current, and the statue of Nephthys, protector of the dead, that Horus had broken. Could this Nephthys be watching them? She shivered.

  “Uh, I’m about done here. I need to get to the other exhibits. Thanks, though.”

  The mummy slumped, looking even smaller. He scraped the floor with one bandaged foot. “I wish I could go with you! I’d give anything to see even one more floor of this place.”

  He gestured to the floor overhead, linen strips flapping around his hands. Tunie felt sympathetic suddenly. How unspeakably boring it would be, sitting in this exhibit night after night, all alone! She might not want to spend too much time rubbing elbows with a curse, but she did pity Horus. An eternity was a long jail sentence. Everyone had regrets. Tunie winced, remembering the time she and her dad had a bad stretch of days with no food. Tunie had snuck into Eleanor’s Elegant Sweet Shoppe when she knew the baker would be taking her lunch break. She’d stolen a warm loaf of bread straight off the cooling rack and darted out. Nobody had ever mentioned it to her. Tunie didn’t know if anyone had even noticed the missing loaf. Every time she spied that cooling rack, however, she felt ashamed.

  Tunie turned to the mummy and said, “I’ll swing by with some library books tomorrow. We can stash them in one of the kitchen cabinets.”

  Horus’s yellow eyes grew wet. He clasped his hands together in front of his chest. His voice trembled with eagerness. “That would be a miracle!”

  Tunie patted the dry bindings on Horus’s hand.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she promised.

  She grabbed her mop and headed for the door. Looking back, she watched Horus staring after her with his weirdly illuminated eyes. Why couldn’t she shake this creepy feeling that he was hiding something?

  After Peter and Tunie left, Horus was filled with excited energy. He’d been seen! He’d interacted with the living!

  “I do hope I came across as likable,” he said, climbing on top of the table in the small staff kitchen, his sling stone in hand. He hadn’t been lying about wanting a familiar; he’d been alone for so long he’d developed the habit of speaking aloud to himself.

  “If they like me, they might come back! Of course they’ll come back. They said they would.”

  Swinging his arms, Horus jumped down with a satisfying thump. Then he stepped on a chair and climbed up on the table again.

  “I’ll start small, yes. Just books at first. Then a pen! Yes. Yes, yes, I need a pen. Then—what else? Oh, a musical instrument! Several! Art supplies! Games of some kind!”

  He jumped down again, shaking the furniture slightly, then immediately climbed back up.
>
  Table jumping was one of the many pastimes Horus had taken to over the decades. He’d done everything he could think of to amuse himself. He’d built gigantic dioramas of Egyptian cities out of cups and sugar packets. He’d used water and newspaper to make a kind of paste, and created paper-paste sculptures of sphinxes and rams and the sun god, Ra. Talking to Tunie and Peter, he’d glossed over the true horror of his afterlife. For example, he’d spent his first century motionless in the pitch-black dark of a tomb. He could see nothing. He could not get up and walk about. There was nothing to do during his animate hours but lie in the dark and cry and shout and, finally, scream. He had screamed for what seemed like forever. Then, mercifully, he’d gone into a kind of fuzzy hibernation for centuries, until some archaeologists had dug him up.

  That night decades ago, when he’d initially woken in the British Museum and could escape the prison of his sarcophagus, he’d been filled with wicked glee. The very first evening, he’d trashed the exhibit, smashing jars and vases and centuries-old carvings, ripping paintings off walls, tearing everything apart.

  “Who’s cursed now?!” he’d shouted, laughing maniacally at the pure devastation.

  Then, as the clock had ticked toward the early hours of the morning, everything had been restored to order in a blink, and he had once again been frozen in his sarcophagus.

  He’d gone on and ruined the exhibit, night after night, raging against his curse, until one day the desire to break things simply dissipated.

  After that, he learned that anything he took from people in the exhibit returned to its place as soon as he was back in his sarcophagus. Horus attempted to steal things—he pulled a trailing scarf from a night watchman’s neck, a thermos from a janitor’s bag. The owners never seemed aware they were missing anything, but the items vanished from Horus’s hands with the sunrise. Only items truly forgotten by their owners or purposefully left behind in the exhibit remained.

  Eventually, he’d taken the time to look around the exhibit. He read the brass plaques on various cases and found out what had happened to his people. He learned that his older brother, Taharqa, whom he’d envied, had eventually become pharaoh, and had reigned during what was considered a renaissance period. He’d even built new temples and a great pyramid. In the end, however, he had lost to Esarhaddon, the Assyrian king, and had to flee. His enemy took away Taharqa’s children and queen. Instead of feeling any kind of satisfaction at this revelation, Horus fell to the floor. He hunched, his back pressing against a case of crumbling rock art, and wept for his proud brother’s defeat. Then, in another case, Horus discovered a marvel: the very sling stone his brother had once given to him as a present, carved with a symbol of Taharqa’s own design. Horus shattered the case and pulled out the rock. It was all he had of the family he’d lost. He gripped it as if it were his brother’s hand.

  After this period, there was a long stretch during which Horus hoarded things people dropped in the exhibit—candy wrappers, calling cards, informational pamphlets about the museum, pencil stubs, bobby pins, string.

  He’d lied to Tunie and Peter about the girl who’d greeted him with a rag doll back in England. It was a lie of omission; there was more to the story, but he was ashamed of it. One night, there had been a charity event in the museum—a special showcase with food and drink—to help raise money for impoverished children. It was shockingly well attended. Horus’s exhibit was crowded, wall-to-wall with people. The girl with the rag doll also had a set of colored pencils. She had wandered away from her parents, and Horus discovered her sobbing in the corner.

  “I can’t find my mum!” she cried, looking right at him.

  She could see him! Instead of wanting to help the lost little girl, however, Horus was overcome with longing for her colored pencils. For ages, he’d yearned for someone to leave behind just such a thing, and now here they were, within reach! The desire for them was so strong, he didn’t pause to appreciate the marvel of the human contact that was taking place, until it was too late. He never would learn how she had seen him.

  “Give me your pencils,” Horus said, “and I’ll take you to your parents.”

  The girl clutched the pencils to her chest and shrieked. “Noooo!”

  Horus could hear a man and a woman calling, “Clara? Clara?”

  “I’ll help you find them. Just give the pencils to me!”

  “They’re mine!”

  “Give them to me!”

  The girl screamed, and people around her began to stare. Horus managed to wrest the colored pencils from her damp hands and dash off with them, leaving her wailing. Soon she and the other guests departed. In a kind of frenzy, he drew all over the walls, on every blank space. He furiously sketched everything he could remember from his life—the crocodiles and fish and ibises with curved beaks he’d seen when he visited the river Nile, the clouds making their easy travels across the sky. He drew fig trees and cattle, antelopes and hippopotamuses, and every face and temple he could recall. At the end of the evening, however, the stolen colored pencils vanished with the rising sun. Horus wept for days, not only for the loss of those most precious art supplies and the home he’d never know again, but for his own behavior. He’d had the opportunity to help a lost little girl and what had he done? He was a monster.

  Horus ceased jumping from the kitchen table and stopped to think on a chair.

  Here, once again, he’d had the opportunity to help others, and what had he done? Well, he had helped them, Horus told himself. He’d given them useful information that could in turn save a kidnapped child! Surely, that was good. But deep down, Horus knew he’d done it first and foremost out of greed: he’d helped them because he wanted something from them. This avaricious part of himself had always gotten him into trouble, Horus thought with a sigh. Millennia later, and he still could be a better person.

  The next day, as the Harbortown trolley rattled through the early-morning mist, Peter held his knapsack to his chest and thought about the night before. If he’d slept at all, he would have thought meeting Horus was a dream. It seemed surreal, compared with this moment. The streetcar was filled mostly with women and men presumably going to work, the women in knit day suits, the men in subdued coats and flat hats and trousers. He was heading to Franklin Street to follow up on Horus’s clue from the night before and feeling decidedly guilty.

  I certainly will share the reward with Tunie, and Horus, too, if I can find a way, Peter thought, to make himself feel better. Tunie had seemed nice, but what if she got the reward? Would she really share it with him? Peter couldn’t take the chance. He gently placed a hand on his ribs where they still ached from Randall shoving him against the hard sink. He had to get away from his stepbrothers. It wasn’t just that they hurt him; it was how they made him feel—helpless, weak, and ashamed somehow. He clenched the bag in his hands harder, just thinking about it. Going to the camp wouldn’t be a simple escape, either; it would be something he’d achieved himself, proof that he could do anything if he tried hard enough.

  As the trolley approached Franklin Street, Peter pulled the string, ringing the brass bell up front and signaling the driver to stop.

  On the relatively empty street, Peter donned the headpiece he’d spent the entire night creating. It was a metal headband affixed to two ear trumpets, like weird, twisty tin rabbit’s ears. He’d designed his own with modifications from pictures of ones Beethoven had used. They were like funnels, with a wider end to collect sound waves and a smaller end to direct the waves to the ears.

  “Time to try them out, WindUp,” Peter said over his shoulder to the robot, who was peeking out from the back of his knapsack.

  “Lookin’ for space aliens, kid? Or are you one yourself?” Two men in boaters and linen suits laughed together as they passed Peter on the street. Their voices were loud in his ears, and Peter flinched. Still, he was pleased—the ear trumpets worked amazingly well. He could hear the creak of shutters as someone opened a window over a shop.

  A woman carryi
ng a basket of bread passed by and smiled at Peter. “Bit early for a costume party, isn’t it, hon?”

  Peter only shrugged, listening for any voice that was particularly nasal, as Horus had mentioned. None yet. Peter had been to this part of town only a few times; it was near the wharf, and there was a whole section of high-crime neighborhoods farther south. This stretch, however, was a fairly viable commercial neighborhood, with two- and three-story buildings that had shops on the ground-level floors and residences above. Most of the shops weren’t open yet. Here and there, homeless people lay across the sidewalks, sleeping. There weren’t as many as there had been a couple of years ago, but Peter’s father said the country was still recovering from the Great Depression.

  He was too early. There weren’t many people around to investigate. Peter decided to sit on a bench with WindUp, read an old Weird Tales comic, and eat the breakfast he’d packed, until the day’s hubbub was really under way. He kept his headpiece on, just in case, but soon became absorbed in the comic. After a while, a traffic cop’s shrill whistle reverberated in his ears. He looked up, startled to see that the morning bustle had begun in earnest when he wasn’t paying attention.

  Peter started making his way up the busy sidewalk, eavesdropping on conversations between shopkeepers:

  “That display of pumps is looking snazzy, Lila.”

  “I hope the customers think so!”

  “Good morning!” Peter said to the people who were walking alone beneath the scalloped awnings of the ice-cream parlor and café, and to the man in the straw panama hat lingering outside the radio repair shop. Most of them returned the greeting, surprised at this odd-looking but friendly child, and he listened to their voices to hear if they were nasal. No luck.

  Then, walking into a crowd, Peter realized his mistake.

  When he’d passed people one at a time, the listening device had worked well, but in a group the din of voices was overwhelming, the cacophony painful and impossible to parse. He cringed at the earsplitting clamor. He’d never be able to pick out a nasally voice from this ruckus! Peter turned and tried to get away from the clutch of people. He bumped into someone and looked up. There, waiting outside a woman’s dress shop, were Larry and Randall, looking dully displeased, their wet yellow hair neatly combed across their foreheads. He’d forgotten that their mother was dragging the twins around today to buy new summer clothes, as they’d outgrown last year’s. Larry’s eyes lit upon Peter, and he smiled.