Jake Atlas and the Tomb of the Emerald Snake

by Rob Lloyd Jones

  Every time I saw her like that, I swore, no more trouble. And each time I messed up again.

  Mum saw me watching her, and slid the book back in a plastic bag that had a cheesy logo of a grinning pharaoh giving a thumbs-up. It was an odd bag for Mum; she wasn’t exactly known for her sense of humour about Ancient Egypt. Most of the time you wouldn’t think she even liked the subject, let alone taught it.

  Maybe that’s not fair. She had moments when her eyes sparkled as she spoke about a pyramid or a tomb. But she’d catch herself and stop. It was as if she’d made a promise not to have fun. She built a wall to keep herself in and the fun out, and it hardly ever came down.

  Mum and Dad both slept for a bit, which is when I saw Pan sneak the guidebook from its bag. She read several pages a minute, her eyes moving at incredible speed.

  Pan is a genius. I don’t mean that in an affectionate way. She has a photographic memory and can read big books in minutes. We’re twins, but you’d never know it. We do look similar – with Mum’s pale skin and Dad’s sandy, scraggly hair – but Pan hides both beneath her black make-up and hair dye. She looks more like the Grim Reaper than anyone in the Atlas family.

  Pan hated me, and for a good reason. She’d not forgiven me for something I did a year ago, an event we called the Ant Farm Incident. She used to get bullied a lot because she was so clever. One day I saw the bullies going after her, knocking books out of her hands and laughing as she gathered them up.

  Something in me snapped. I went into that zone, thinking clearly but not thinking about the consequences. The rest is a blur – stealing the keys to the biology lab from Miss Petigrew’s coat, breaking in, picking up the class ant farm and carrying the tank with 9,000 ants to where the bullies were teasing Pan.

  And, yeah, I tipped it over them.

  They were fire ants, too, little red ones – stingers. You should have heard the screams. I remember that well enough.

  Everyone was furious – the bullies, the bullies’ parents, the teachers. Dad shouted and ranted, and Mum went into a week-long silence, constantly fiddling with her Isis amulet.

  But Pan was the angriest.

  I got expelled, but Pan changed schools too. She was sent to an academy for gifted students. She called it a freak show, and she never really forgave Mum, Dad or me. She started dressing like Dracula – black and black, with a touch of black – and pretended not to care about books and learning. But she still does. Mum and Dad don’t know that she stays up late most nights to read in secret, and always sneaks looks at their work.

  It’s funny; I try to hide how badly I do at school, while Pan hides how well she does. You’d think we’d help each other out.

  But OK, back to the story.

  So there I was on the plane to Cairo, with the tablet pressed against my back, thinking again about what the scarred man had said at the airport.

  This is just the start.

  No chance. This was the end of it. I was far away from the crime scene, the police and the scarred man. Now that my parents were asleep, I could ditch the tablet in the plane’s loo and try to enjoy this trip.

  I clambered over my dad and headed for the toilet.

  I stopped.

  The curtain to the First Class section flapped open, and there was the scarred man.

  He was asleep in one of the fancy seats, a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. Was it a coincidence? Or had he followed me?

  A dozen plans flashed through my mind, and all of them ended with me grabbing the guy by the throat and demanding answers. I might have done it, too, but right then my dad did one of his sleep snorts, a sound like a hippo burping. If he woke and called my name, the scarred man might hear. Maybe he’d tell my parents I’d stolen the tablet, or maybe he planned to blackmail me. I didn’t know what the guy’s deal was, and I didn’t want to find out.

  I rushed back to my seat and pretended to sleep.

  The tablet could stay where it was.

  4

  We landed at Cairo International Airport in the afternoon, and still none of us spoke as we went through passport control.

  As we waited for our bags, I kept looking for the scarred man. Had I really seen him on the flight? I’d have doubted any of it had been real if I couldn’t feel the tablet jammed down the back of my jeans. I was still desperate to ditch the thing, but didn’t dare go to the toilets alone for fear that the scarred man might grab me.

  The airport was spotless, freezing and packed with tourists. Some wore T-shirts with pictures of pyramids and slogans, like EGYPT, LAND OF WONDERS, even though so far they’d only seen the inside of the airport. Egyptian men in turbans and brightly coloured gowns collected their bags.

  “Why are those men wearing dresses?” I asked.

  “They’re called jellabiyas,” Dad replied. “They’re traditional Egyptian dress.”

  Pan plucked a headphone from her ear, unleashing a tinny blast of rock music. “Egyptians traditionally look stupid?” she asked.

  “They probably think you look stupid,” Mum said. “Dressed like the Grim Reaper.”

  “They don’t believe in the Grim Reaper,” Pan replied. “The Muslim personification of death is called Malak al-Maut.”

  “Ha!” I blurted. “Burned!”

  I went in for a high five with Pan, but she left me hanging.

  Dad glanced at Mum, and a slight smile creased his cheeks. Mum shook her head, discouraging him from continuing the discussion.

  “Actually the jellabiya is light and airy,” Dad explained. “Perfect for working in heat.”

  Heat? The airport’s air conditioning was so cold I wondered if we’d accidentally landed in Antarctica. But as soon as we went outside, I understood. It was as if we’d stepped into a sauna. My throat dried and my back beaded with sweat, causing the tablet to slide further down my jeans.

  “Feels like a thousand degrees,” Pan said. She wore black, so must have felt it bad.

  I’d begun to look around again for the scarred man, when another weird thing happened.

  Mum smiled.

  That might sound odd, but this was my mum. I’d seen pictures of her smiling on archaeological digs with Dad, long before we were born, but it rarely happened in real life.

  She tilted her head back and breathed in, and her face looked instantly younger. Her wrinkles eased away and her eyes shone in the glare of the airport strip lights. She looked pretty.

  For some reason Dad started grinning as well. His smile was goofy. His whole face creased up, so his glasses almost slipped off his nose.

  I was grinning now too. It felt good to see the Atlas family in happy mode, and I hoped maybe this could be the start of a proper family holiday. I nudged Pan, thinking she might join in, but she sighed and shoved her headphones back in her ears.

  Even so, I thought things were looking up, which only goes to show how stupid I am. Because if I had known how things would turn out, I’d never have left that airport. I’d have shouted about bombs and caused whatever trouble I could to make the police drag us inside and send us straight back home.

  5

  The taxi ride to the hotel was – until then – the closest I’d ever come to death. Our driver must have been blind or suicidal, or both. I’ve never seen so many cars, or heard such honking. It was late afternoon and it seemed as if the entire city was rushing home from work. There were sharp-suited men with sports cars and smart phones, donkey carts overloaded with watermelons, buses crammed so full that people clung onto the back. Drivers leaned from windows and shrieked at each other. Ours didn’t bother indicating. He just stuck out an arm, pointed and charged, like a mad general on a horse.

  Mum and Dad watched it all through the windows, both still smiling. I noticed Mum was breathing faster, as if the place had made her breathless. Or maybe it was just the fumes in the city air.

  “There are fourteen million people in Cairo,” Dad told us. “That’s almost twice the size of London.”

  I pressed my face to the
window, fascinated. The pavements were about as busy as the roads. A group of men gathered outside a mosque. People crammed into cafés and sat at low tables, smoking pipes that I later found out were called shishas. We passed a street market, where stalls sold heaps of dates and cones of spices. Butchers hacked at hunks of meat. Wasps swarmed around sticky, sweet pastries.

  It was brilliant!

  “Where are the pyramids?” I asked. “The ancient stuff?”

  I’d expected to see pyramids and temples and tombs around every corner.

  “Aha,” Dad replied. He sounded excited, childish almost. “Cairo is a medieval city, Jake, not an ancient one.”

  Mum chipped in from the passenger seat. “Cairo was built over the ruins of the ancient capital, Memphis,” she said. “The tombs of the early Egyptian pharaohs, the pyramids, were outside Memphis in a place now called Giza.”

  It was strange to hear her sound so into Ancient Egypt. Back home she spoke about it in a dull, slightly confused way, as if she was reading from an instruction manual for something she didn’t want to make. But now she sounded totally focused.

  “Wait!” she called. “Wait, stop the taxi!”

  I don’t know how we stopped. Mum just somehow made it happen with a grasp of the steering wheel, a yank of the handbrake, a skid and a screech. I screamed and Pan screamed, but by then we’d already parked on the side of a road, exactly where Mum had wanted.

  “John,” Mum breathed. “Look.”

  Dad leaned to see out the window. “My God,” he muttered.

  There was a mosque, with a turquoise dome and a thin white tower – a minaret – sticking up like a spear. Beside it, a tourist hotel had a cheesy sign that reminded me of the logo on Mum’s plastic bag. It showed a woman dancing in silks and sequins, above an offer of Cheap belly dancing!

  I looked up to the pointed top of the minaret. “What is it?”

  “That,” Dad replied, “is where your mother and I got married.”

  “The mosque? But you’re not—”

  “No,” Dad interrupted. “The belly dancing club. We had the service in full belly dancing kit.”

  “What?”

  Pan and I said it at the same time. How had we not known this before? It was by far the most interesting thing I’d ever heard about Mum and Dad.

  “That’s so cool,” I said.

  I glanced at Pan and noticed her eyes wide with interest, even as she flicked down her fringe to hide them.

  “It’s … it’s weird,” she mumbled.

  “What do you say, Jane?” Dad said. “Shall we all go and have a look?”

  Mum grasped the door handle. But then her smile vanished, and her hand rose to the Isis amulet around her neck. Her wall was back up.

  “Let’s get to the hotel,” she replied.

  I was about to protest but the driver was keen to get moving, so off we went again into the swarm of traffic. Dad looked back at the club, the dancing girl reflecting in his glasses, but Mum just kept rubbing her amulet, eyes fixed ahead.

  Neither of them looked to the other side of the road. They didn’t see the black van that had stopped when we stopped, and pulled away as we did. I had no idea what was really going on, of how much danger we were in, or that our lives were about to change for ever.

  6

  The taxi dropped us outside our hotel, and for a moment we all stood on the pavement and stared. A rat scurried across a flickering neon sign: The Grand Old Lady of Cairo.

  “Please tell me we’re not staying here,” Pan said.

  The Old Lady of Cairo might have been grand once. Now she had a bad skin disease. Chunks of plaster had fallen from the walls, revealing bricks that glistened with damp. The windows were black, and every ledge was layered an inch thick with pigeon poo.

  I thought Mum might snap at Dad about the hotel, but now they did it again – the smiling. It was as if they’d arrived at a luxury resort.

  “Do you know this place too?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Dad said.

  “No,” Mum replied.

  Well, that cleared that up. I was about to go in, when Pan grabbed my arm.

  “Why does Mum keep grinning?” she asked. “It’s freaking me out.”

  “Maybe she’s just happy?”

  “Mum? Happy?”

  I shrugged and we entered the hotel. One glance around the lobby revealed that The Grand Old Lady of Cairo didn’t just have a skin disease: she’d died decades ago and her corpse was rotting from the inside. The place reeked of damp and stale sweat. Paper peeled from walls, and the carpet was stained with dark splatter marks that looked worryingly like blood.

  Only the reception desk seemed new – a white marble slab with crimson swirls. A man lay on it, his large belly rising and falling with rumbling snores.

  Dad cleared his throat. The man didn’t wake up.

  Mum cleared hers. The man still didn’t wake up.

  I gave the guy a shove, and he woke up. Actually, he fell off the desk.

  He shot up from the other side, eyes rolling with sleep and confusion. He grabbed a can of Red Bull, finished it in one go and burped. I guessed he was the manager of the hotel.

  “Welcome to The Grand Old Lady of Cairo,” he said. “Where style meets … meets…”

  He started to fall asleep again, so Pan prodded him.

  “You’ve redecorated,” Dad said, giving the marble desk a slap.

  “In the style of the pharaohs,” the manager declared, slapping it harder.

  Even then I knew that swirly marble was nothing whatsoever like the style of the pharaohs, but still my dad smiled.

  “They’ve stayed here before,” I explained.

  “Long ago,” Mum added.

  Dad’s grin grew wider and this time his glasses actually did fall off. He shot out a hand, crazy fast, and caught them. Then he started to sing! I’m not joking – my dad started to sing!

  “Long, long ago when the world was sand…”

  He nudged Mum, encouraging her to join in. It was a geeky ancient history song.

  “Before the First Dynasty made its stand…”

  A smile curled the corner of Mum’s mouth, but she looked away, trying to hide it.

  Pan stared at Dad as if he were melting, as his song echoed around the lobby.

  “Way back then, when the Nile was a—”

  “We’ve reserved two rooms,” Mum said. “The Atlas family.”

  We got our keys and three of us squeezed into a tiny lift with a rail door. There wasn’t enough room for Dad, who took the stairs, still humming his weird song.

  You’ll know by now that we weren’t a particularly chatty family. But with all the smiles and singing, things seemed to be picking up. So I tried a bit of small talk in the lift.

  “Where’s your lecture tomorrow, Mum?”

  For a moment I thought I’d shocked her so much that she’d forgotten.

  “Oh! It’s… It’s at a university,” she replied. “The American University of Cairo.”

  “Can we come?”

  “No! I mean, it’s an academic lecture, Jake. I’m not sure you’d enjoy it. You two can relax here. We’ll be back by the time you wake up.”

  I tried to look disappointed, but really I didn’t want to go at all. I’d just thought it might help us all get along. “What’s the lecture about?” I asked.

  “It’s a talk about … um, pre-dynastic kings.”

  I nodded, although I didn’t have a clue what that meant. “Did they build the pyramids?”

  “No, they came before.” Mum’s voice relaxed and her eyes twinkled. Once again she was talking about Ancient Egypt as if she loved the subject.

  I realized something then. My mum enjoyed ancient history. She didn’t show it much; not at home at least. Her wall was always up, hiding her emotions. But I’d seen it since we’d landed in Egypt – that twinkle.

  “Imagine that, Jake,” she continued. “A time when the pyramids hadn’t even been built.”

 
“Is the sphinx here too?”

  “It is! The Great Sphinx. Half-lion, half-king. It guarded the pyramids from tomb robbers, you know.”

  “Robbers?”

  “Your kind of people, Jake,” Pan muttered.

  I ignored her. I wasn’t thrilled at the idea of museums but I was psyched to visit the pyramids. “When will we see them?”

  “How about tomorrow?” Mum suggested. “After the lecture. Pandora, are you keen?”

  “Not really.”

  Mum’s voice tightened. “What do you mean not really?”

  “They’re just big stone hills.”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t want to go,” I said. “You probably know more about them than Mum and Dad, from all the books you secretly read.”

  “Shut your face,” Pan spat.

  “That’s enough,” Mum said. “We can discuss it over dinner.”

  “Do we have to go out?” Pan asked. “I’m tired.”

  “We will all go out,” Mum replied. “Like a normal family.”

  “Well, we’re not a normal family, are we? Normal families like each other.”

  “Stop being such a cow, Pan,” I said. “You should have stayed home if you don’t—”

  “I wish I had stayed home. I’m three years older than you.”

  “We were born on the same day! You’re just three years ahead at school.”

  “Because you’re a thief and you punch your classmates,” Pan said.

  “Better than running off crying, like you.”

  “Want me to show you how well I can punch?”

  “Enough!” Mum snapped.

  She closed her eyes and looked exhausted. I remembered those moments – just minutes ago – when she’d been happy, with lights in her eyes. They’d been well and truly put out now.