Jake Atlas and the Tomb of the Emerald Snake

by Rob Lloyd Jones

  The lift stopped. We slid our suitcases out the door and into a gloomy corridor. I tried to get out first, but Pan pushed past. Stupidly, I shoved her back, causing the lift to slam and shake.

  “Stop it!” Mum screamed. “Can’t you two get on for one minute? This is supposed to be a holiday.”

  Her voice was cracking. She was on the edge. Even Pan knew it, and muttered a rare apology. I did too, but as I reached for my bag, the back of my shirt snagged on the door rail.

  The tablet fell out.

  Dad appeared at the top of the stairs, and we all just stood there for a moment, looking down, our faces reflected in the screen.

  The tablet I had no money to buy.

  The tablet I must have stolen.

  “Huh,” I muttered. “How did that get there?”

  Mum broke down at that point, collapsing into Dad’s arms and crying. Dad led her to their room and closed the door.

  And that was the last I saw of my parents for what seemed like a very long time.

  7

  Of the next few hours I mostly remember the air conditioning unit. It squatted in the corner of our hotel room, grumbling and groaning and doing absolutely nothing to keep the room cool.

  I jumped up and gave it a kick. Black smoke rose from the top and I collapsed back onto my bed, coughing.

  Pan hadn’t said a word since we’d been left alone. She just lay on her bed, staring at patches of damp on the ceiling as if she were making shapes of clouds. One was a triangle. I wondered if that might be the closest we’d now get to a pyramid.

  Guilt was like a zombie chewing at my guts. I kept thinking about Mum and Dad, and how devastated they’d been when they saw the tablet. Things had been getting better. Since coming to Egypt, Mum had looked more relaxed than I’d ever seen her. Then Pan had picked a fight and…

  No, it wasn’t Pan’s fault.

  After the Ant Farm Incident, I’d promised I would change. Right then I swore I’d try even harder. I’d do everything I could to turn this into a fun family holiday. I’d keep my mouth shut, my hands in my pockets and my eyes to the ground.

  I felt bad about Pan, too. I shouldn’t have teased her about being bullied at school. She probably thought about it all the time. She saw her intelligence as something freakish. That’s why she tried to hide it. She didn’t need her brother making fun of her too. I’d make it up to her as well.

  I rolled over, tried a little chitchat.

  “Wanna play I Spy?”

  “Shut up, Jake.”

  There was no TV, nothing to do. Neither of us said anything else until Pan’s stomach rumbled.

  “I’m starving,” she said.

  I’d eaten the airplane food and wasn’t hungry. But we’d been here a long time. It was almost ten o’ clock.

  “Mum and Dad must have fallen asleep,” I guessed.

  “Let’s wake them up.”

  The corridor was barely ten metres long, but it felt like a mile. I’d have to apologize, swear to Mum and Dad I’d stay out of trouble, and make sure I did.

  “Mum?” Pan knocked on the door. “Dad? It’s dinnertime.”

  She pressed an ear to the wood, banged harder. “If you’re still angry at Jake, we can leave him behind.”

  We waited a minute. It seemed no one was in.

  We returned to our room and assessed our dinner options: two complimentary biscuits and a tube of toothpaste.

  Pan stuffed both of the biscuits in her mouth. “You eat the toothpaste,” she said, and she flopped back onto her bed.

  Sweat.

  That about sums up the night. Also: dry mouth, parched throat, mosquito misery, muscle cramps, no sleep.

  Pan kept turning, grumbling about heat and thirst and hunger. I swatted at mosquitos that buzzed by my ear and splatted them against the walls with my trainer. Outside, the traffic was an orchestra of blaring horns and screeching brakes. Just as I finally slipped off to sleep, I was jolted awake by a voice wailing from a mosque over the road, calling people to come and pray.

  Pan threw open the window and screamed at the voice to shut up, only she used more swear words.

  She stormed out of our room and banged on our parents’ door.

  She marched back. “Breakfast. They’ll be there.”

  Only they weren’t. The hotel dining room was empty.

  A buffet was spread across a table – mounds of toast, jam and butter, all shaped like pyramids. There were jugs of coffee and something that looked like orange juice but didn’t smell like orange juice.

  None of it had been touched.

  We scoffed jam sandwiches, Pan slurped coffee and I tried the not-quite-orange-juice and spat it back into the glass.

  “Nine o’ clock,” Pan said. “Where are they?”

  She was beginning to sound worried, and I didn’t blame her. This was getting weird.

  The manager took our plates. He had dark rings around his eyes, as if he’d spent the night being punched in the face. He swayed like he might fall asleep on our table.

  Pan reached and propped him up. “Did you see our parents leave?”

  His eyes rolled, but he fought back sleep and shook his head.

  “Maybe you were asleep?” I asked.

  That woke him up. His face went the colour of beetroot. “Sleep!” he bellowed. “For fifteen years I never sleep. I am always at my desk. I do not sleep!”

  Pan edged her chair back, freaked out by the guy’s outburst, but I’d been yelled at enough times to not really mind.

  “We haven’t seen our parents since last night,” I explained. “Could you open their bedroom so we can check?”

  He agreed and we followed him up.

  The room was like ours, except the beds were made up and the window looked out to a rubbish-strewn courtyard instead of a street. My parents’ bags were gone. Their coats were gone. There wasn’t even a toothbrush in the bathroom. The only thing that proved they’d been there was Mum’s guidebook. It was on one of the beds, wrapped in the plastic bag with the cheesy pharaoh logo.

  “OK…” Pan said. “Maybe they went to a better hotel and left us here to sweat it out as punishment.”

  She didn’t sound like she believed that. They would have come back by now. And Mum and Dad had liked this hotel for some reason.

  A knot began to tie in my belly. Something really strange was going on.

  The hotel manager watched from the doorway. “Your mother and father were angry,” he said. “Big shouting.”

  He used his hands to show how big the shouting had been.

  “We had a fight,” I explained.

  “Lots of fights,” he replied, hands widening. “Now they gone.”

  “They wouldn’t just leave,” Pan snapped.

  I looked around the room, trying to make sense of it all. “Maybe they were kidnapped,” I suggested.

  “Why would anyone kidnap Mum and Dad?” Pan asked. “They’re the most boring people on the planet.”

  “Which makes more sense, that they were kidnapped or they just left us?”

  Pan had to think about that. I saw the uncertainty and fear in her eyes. Deep down she agreed with the manager. She thought they’d abandoned us.

  I refused to believe it. We just needed to look harder.

  I grabbed the bag with Mum’s guidebook. “This is just a dumb joke to teach us a lesson,” I said, trying to sound more certain than I felt. “We’ll go to the university, where they’re giving the lecture. They’ll be there.”

  8

  “I am sorry, but there are no lectures.”

  We stood outside the American University of Cairo, in the shade of an arched marble colonnade that formed the main entrance. A door was open. The corridor beyond was dark. A guard with a clipboard checked and rechecked the same two sheets of paper.

  “The university is closed today. Perhaps you are looking for somewhere else?”

  “Somewhere else?” Pan said.

  “Another university.”

 
The knot in my belly pulled tighter. We’d walked for an hour through the blazing heat, squabbling over directions as we’d studied the guidebook map. I’d been so sure our parents would be here.

  “Doctors John and Jane Atlas,” Pan told the guard. “It’s at ten o’clock.”

  “What is?”

  “Their lecture.”

  “The university is closed.”

  “Closed for the lecture?”

  “Please can you leave?”

  Pan stepped closer, pale hands bunching into fists. “Or what?”

  The guard edged back, surprised at the sudden threat from this strange Goth girl. Seizing her chance, Pan barged past him and into the corridor. She yanked on locked doors, yelled into the darkness.

  “Mum? Dad? Joke’s over! This is turning into child abuse!”

  Other guards came charging. Pan kicked one of them and swore at the rest. In the end they dragged her out and dumped her beside me on a grass verge. It was all a bit ugly but she was OK.

  Pan shoved the guidebook back in the plastic bag. “So we wait here,” she said. “They’ll turn up soon if—”

  “There is no lecture, Pan. They lied.”

  There, I’d said it. Neither of us had wanted to, because if there was no lecture, then what was there? Part of me wanted to believe they were simply doing something they’d kept secret. Anything other than that they’d abandoned us. If they had left us, it was because of me.

  “So … they just disappeared?” Pan said. “And we have no one else to help us?”

  I remembered what the scarred man had said at the airport – This is just the start – and wondered if he had something to do with this. He’d told me to keep the tablet, but I’d left it at the hotel, and I doubted the manager would let us back in now that he knew we couldn’t pay.

  “We’ve got no food,” Pan said, “no water and no money. And it’s three hundred degrees. This is your fault.”

  She’d been itching to say that all morning, and now it came bursting out. She jumped up, stood over me. “You pushed them over the edge.”

  “Like you’ve never done anything to upset them?” I replied, rising. “Moaning the whole time, making their lives miserable?”

  She shoved me, but I pushed her back. “Touch me again and I’ll break your face.”

  But her blood was up. She swung the bag, so the guidebook clobbered me around the side of the head.

  “See this?” she seethed. “This book is our inheritance, Jake. It’s all they left us.”

  I was about to punch her, when something else hit me – an idea. It was as if Pan’s blow had knocked it loose in my head.

  “Wait,” I said. “The book.”

  “What about it?”

  “It wasn’t all Mum and Dad left us.”

  “Their room was empty. There wasn’t anything else.”

  “There was. The bag.”

  I snatched it from Pan. It was the plastic carrier bag, with that dumb cartoon pharaoh. The name of a shop was written below in pink bubble letters.

  Egyptomania.

  “Why would Mum have a bag like this?” I asked.

  “I dunno. She liked it.”

  “Mum? Liked this?”

  Pan knew that was crazy too. Friends had given Mum tacky souvenirs from Egypt as jokes, but she always threw them away. The only thing she kept was the Isis amulet. That was something she seemed to love. Why keep that cheesy bag? Not just keep it, but bring it to Egypt, wrap a book inside, and leave only that in their room?

  “Maybe this shop is where they’ve gone, Pan. There’s an address: Khan el-Khalili. Where’s that?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Because you’ve read this guidebook, probably memorized every page. Stop pretending you’re not clever and help find Mum and Dad.”

  “But why, Jake? They don’t want us.”

  “They wouldn’t just leave us, Pan.”

  “You don’t think? We all hate each other.”

  “That’s not true. I know we fight, but we can change that. We can make this a proper family holiday.”

  “Proper family holiday? You’re crazy, Jake. And what about you? Whatever it is that makes you get in trouble all the time, you can’t magically stop that. You’re never going to stop; you can’t.”

  I can’t explain what happened next. It was like a volcano erupted inside me. I shoved Pan so hard that she fell to the verge.

  “I can!” I yelled.

  I stood over her, breathing heavily. This wasn’t helping. I had to calm down.

  “Please, Pan, we have to find this place, Khan el-Khalili. Besides, where else have you got to go?”

  She rose, and for a second I feared she might swing the book at me again. But she turned and marched off.

  “Pan, come on!” I shouted. “Where are you going?”

  “Khan el-Khalili,” she called. “It’s Cairo’s main souk. It’s a long walk, so we’d better get moving.”

  I watched her stomp off, relieved she was willing to go, and wondering if she really had memorized the whole book. I didn’t know where this would lead us, but I was certain of one thing: as much as my sister annoyed me, she was the right person to be abandoned with in a strange city.

  9

  Egyptomania.

  “It’s just a souvenir shop.”

  My voice sounded as flat as I felt.

  “What did you expect?” Pan asked.

  Something else. Anything else. This shop had been our last hope of finding our parents. After this we had nowhere to sleep, no plane ticket home, no money for food or water.

  My shirt clung to my back, and my mouth was so dry I could barely suck up enough spit to lick my lips. Tantalizing smells wafted from all directions – fried fish, grilled meat, fresh-baked flatbreads.

  It had taken for ever to find the shop, across Cairo on foot in the blazing heat, and then in among a maze of lanes and alleys that made up Khan el-Khalili, a huge covered market in one of the oldest parts of the city.

  It was as if we’d reached the middle of a beehive, with everyone buzzing and scurrying around. Shop owners called to us in fake American accents, offering mint tea if we came inside to see their rugs. Tourists crammed into tacky souvenir stores, haggling over prices of backgammon boards, belly dancer outfits and statues of Egyptian gods.

  The more souvenir shops we passed, the more convinced I became that Mum’s bag was a clue. The names of the places alone would have given her a rash – Cleopatra’s Cave, Ramesses’ Warehouse, King Tut’s Temple of Terrific Bargains. It just didn’t make sense that Mum carried that bag around.

  Egyptomania.

  But now we’d found it, the idea seemed ridiculous.

  It was a small, cave-like shop tucked into one of the souk’s arches. A cheap cardboard sign taped over the doorway showed that stupid, grinning pharaoh sticking his fat thumb up. I wanted to tear it down and punch the guy in the face.

  “We should go in at least,” Pan said.

  My heart sank deeper as we entered a world of cheap trinkets in cabinets and on shelves. There were statues of Egyptian gods, pharaoh fridge magnets, mummies in snow globes, gods in sand globes and pyramids carved out of stone, soap, amber and glass. Tutankhamun stared at us from every direction, the white eyes painted on golden – but very plastic – death masks.

  The shop owner sat behind a counter, watching us through a haze of smoke from a shisha pipe. He was old and short, with a round and wrinkled face, like a walnut, and a rainbow-coloured jellabiya.

  “Welcome,” he said. “Lots of beautiful treasures to take back to England. Come, look around. I give you good price.”

  Pan moved along a shelf, examining a row of mugs with slogans. EGYPT LAND OF GODS… EGYPT LAND OF KINGS… EGYPT LAND OF… whatever.

  She picked one up and whispered, “Jake, how does that man know we’re English?”

  You know in movies when surgeons zap dying people with electric paddles and bring them back to life? That’s how I felt a
t that moment.

  Pan was right! Every other shopkeeper in the souk had thought we were American. They’d all yelled the same things. “I make you mint tea. New York! Chicago!”

  But this guy had said England before we’d spoken a word.

  “He’s watching us,” Pan hissed.

  Taking a silver plate from a shelf, I watched the old man in its reflection. He’d stepped from behind the counter.

  “Look around,” he said. His voice had turned harder. “Tell me, what are your names?”

  Pan’s fingers tightened around the mug. “Don’t tell him.”

  This was crazy. Was she about to attack this guy with a coffee cup? But the more I glanced around the shop, the fishier it seemed. We needed time to think.

  I whirled round, clapped my hands.

  “Aren’t you going to offer us tea?” I asked. “The other shops did.”

  The man’s eyes widened, but he smiled. “Of course. I make best tea in Egypt. Please, look around.”

  He returned to his counter and prepared the drinks.

  We’d bought ourselves two minutes, but I didn’t need that long. I’d gone into that zone again, my instincts taking over. My eyes homed in on details around the shop.

  “Look at the top shelf,” I whispered to Pan. “Between the Valley of the Kings tea towels. There’s a security camera. It looks pretty high-tech too. There’s another hidden among those plastic pyramids.”

  “So? It’s a shop.”

  “It’s a trinket shop. Why would a shop like this need cameras like those? And see their aim? Both cameras point across the back wall. Whatever they’re guarding must be back there.”

  “Plastic Tutankhamun masks,” Pan said.

  “Yeah, but one of them has a sign, see? ‘Display only’. But that mask is the same as all the others.”

  “Why isn’t that one for sale?”

  “Exactly. Maybe it’s got nothing to do with Mum and Dad, but it’s weird. We gotta check it out.”

  “I… How did you see all that?” Pan asked.

  She sounded impressed, but I just felt ashamed. I was a thief, a troublemaker. I noticed CCTV cameras and security guards wherever I went. It was a problem, not a skill.

  The shop owner carried a tray from his counter. “Hibiscus flower tea,” he said. “Egyptian custom.”