How to Curse in Hieroglyphics

by Lesley Livingston

  In the distance, they heard the muted Ka-Blaaam!! of the World-O-Wonders’s Human Cannonball as the stuntman once again soared up, up and over the tops of the carnival tents in an arc toward a great big catcher’s net at the other end of the midway.

  Pilot suddenly got a faraway expression on his face.

  “Hey …” he said. “What if I fly her somewhere that’s close, but ain’t got a soul nearby?”

  Tweed and Cheryl looked at him.

  “I was thinking about Flat Top Plateau. Y’know, in the foothills—”

  “We know where Flat Top is,” Tweed reminded him quietly.

  Flat Top was where the twins had been found, alone, after “The Incident.” And Pilot was right. No one ever went there.

  Cheryl shifted her shoulders. “Thought you said your flyer had the sniffles or something,” she muttered, not entirely comfortable with the idea of Pilot taking his plane out there.

  “A shimmy. I said a shimmy, not the sniffles,” Pilot said. “And she does. But I can handle it. It’s just a short hop, and it’s for a darn good cause.”

  “And your mom’ll fry your bacon if she finds out,” Tweed noted dryly.

  “She’ll have to catch me first.”

  Cheryl and Tweed knew the stubborn set of that jaw. When Pilot set his mind to doing a thing, he was as stubborn as … well, as stubborn as Cheryl and Tweed.

  “Okay, then.” Cheryl shrugged. “We take our girl here out to Flat Top. Let’s do it.” She turned to where Zahara stood listening intently to them. The Princess was once again cradling a blissfully floppy armload of rumbly fur. “Um. She … she can’t take Mr. Sniffers with her, Artie. You’ll have to tell her.”

  Tweed nodded. “That’s right. Miz Parks charged us with a sacred sitter duty, and we have to return a full count of fifteen furballs back to her or she’ll dock our pay.”

  Artie explained, and Zahara nodded solemnly and said something that ended with the word “Isis.” Then she put Mr. Sniffers down and sighed. It was the saddest sound any of them had heard in a long while.

  “What did she say?” Tweed asked. “Why’s she so sad? Who’s ‘Isis’?”

  “She shaid she undershtandsh,” Artie said. “She jusht misshesh her cat from back in the old timesh. Ishish.” His crocodile teeth impeded the pronunciation of the name so much a cloud of spitty-spray fogged his glasses. “It’sh part of the carnival exhibit now. At leasht the mummified version of it .”

  The girls both gaped at the Princess in horror.

  Zahara blinked at them in confusion and then seemed to understand their distress. She turned and spoke to Artie, who turned to the girls and, while cleaning his glasses with the hem of his shirt, explained the reasoning behind that particularly gruesome-seeming custom. Zahara’s people believed that a person needed to be buried with all their worldly possessions and comforts from this life in order to have them accompany them into the next. That, of course, included beloved pets. Which posed a bit of a problem, Artie went on to explain. If Zahara crossed over into Aaru without all of the grave goods that made up most of Colonel Dudley’s travelling exhibition, then she would be a pauper in the next life. And that just didn’t seem right.

  “So … what you’re saying is that she needs her stuff,” Tweed summarized.

  Zahara nodded.

  Cheryl’s expression grew fierce. “Well, if that’s what she needs, then that’s what we’ll get her. While the carnival’s still in full swing, we’ll sneak back into the exhibit tent, get the Eye of Horus and pack a travel bag for the Princess. Then all we have to do is get her to Pilot’s plane so he can get her out to Flat Top, where she can throw the switch on the scarab, activate the portal, and it’s bon voyage, fare-thee-well, don’t forget to send a postcard. Zahara goes off into the happy lands of the beyond.”

  A general murmur of agreement rippled around the barn.

  Cheryl straightened up and clapped her hands together briskly. “Okay then!” she said. “Let’s get a move on.”

  “One lasht little thing …” Artie said, perching his specs back on his muzzle and plucking the glowing headband from his scaly brow. He fiddled with it while he addressed the Princess a bit shyly. “Uh, Zee? Much ash I’m enjoying my role of hench-boy, I think my mom might kinda object to the tail. Can you change me and the Bottomsh-sh back before you go?”

  Zahara smiled brightly at Artie and, patting him on his lumpy head (presumably for a job well done), informed him that the curse was, like the portal, dependent on her magic. Once Artie and the boys were out of range of her powers for any length of time, they would revert to their natural, non-crocodilian, regularly scheduled boyness states. Well, that was a relief.

  “Okay,” Tweed said when Artie passed on the information to the others, “but, in the meantime, we can’t exactly leave John, Paul, George and Bingo on their own while we get the Princess headed on her way.”

  And so, for the second time in as many days, Team C+T called upon their “Sitter-Fu” expertise and wrangled the toothy toddlers. This time they had the aid of a laser-pointer cat toy Miss Parks had left behind (which seemed to hold the very same appeal for transformed croc-tots), which they used to entice the boys into a quartet of cat carriers. They were going to have to take the quadruplets with them.

  If only they could have put this on their supersitter resumé. They’d have been invincible. Well, that is, in a Perfect World. Of course, in the Wiggins World, just as with all of their other adventures, real or imagined, no one in town would ever have believed they’d successfully managed to mind a quartet of mystically transformed tots, vanquish a big-league out-of-town no-goodnik and rescue an honest-to-Pete mummy princess from a life of misery and woe. Certainly not all at the same time. The girls could hardly believe it themselves. And it was the kind of story that, if it ever made the rounds, would just convince the Wiggins folk that the twins were even weirder than everyone already thought. They’d be thought of as the Wiggins Weird.

  And that would be bad for business.

  No. This job would have to stay under their hats, so to speak.

  They left Miss Parks’s puddins to wander the locked barn free-range style, with plenty of food, water and catnip toys to amuse themselves, put the Bottoms-occupied pet carriers into the back seat of the Moviemobile, and put the big old boat of a car in neutral. Cheryl climbed behind the wheel and Pilot and Tweed got ready to push the car out of the barn and far enough away from the house so they could start the engine without waking up Pops. They’d been lucky so far that night, in that he seemed to have slumbered peacefully through all of the mini-golf mayhem and barn ambush shenanigans. But Pops would have them hog-tied if he knew just what they were planning on doing. If he’d ever even suspected that the girls would pull a stunt like this, he probably never would have taught them to drive in the first place.

  And so they didn’t intend for him to find out.

  Cheryl steered, looking over her shoulder, as Pilot and Artie pushed the car in reverse out of the barn. Once they started moving forward, she would have to rely on directions from Tweed, on account of the big old TV that was permanently bolted to the hood of the car, which completely blocked the view out the front windshield. It wasn’t an ideal situation, to be sure. But the carnival was only on the other side of the road, and they really didn’t have much in the way of options. Zahara needed her gear, and the car’s trunk was big enough to hold a pool party in if you filled it with water. Zahara’s stuff would easily fit into it, and then they could drive out to the airstrip, halfway between the drive-in and Bartleby’s Gas & Gulp, where the Armbrusters had a hangar where they kept their planes. Once there, they could load the stuff on board Pilot’s plane for the brief trip out to Flat Top Plateau.

  “Stay in touch,” Tweed said to Pilot, digging into the gear bag and hauling out the army-surplus walkie-talkies. She gave him Cheryl’s and switched her own on. “With any luck at all, we’ll meet you at the rendezvous in ten minutes.”

  Pilot switched
his walkie-talkie on and nodded, his expression set and determined.

  “Roger that,” he said, and then spun on his heel and disappeared down the lane into the darkness.

  12

  THOSE MAGNIFICENT KIDS AND THEIR FLYING MACHINES

  Artie climbed into the back seat with the Princess and the crated Bottoms quartet while Tweed slid into the front passenger seat. Once everyone was on board, Cheryl put the pedal to the metal, jamming down hard on the accelerator, and the old convertible leaped forward like a racing greyhound that had been kept in a kennel too long. Standing on the front seat and hanging on for dear life, Tweed peered over the top of the windshield, navigating for her cousin. It was a bit of a rough ride, but with Tweed calling out directions, they managed to make it all the way to the carnival’s back fence—to the place where they’d used the ropes to get into the enclosure the last time—undetected.

  Instead of trying to go over the fence, this time Cheryl just drove right into it—at a speed of about three miles an hour. The front end of the car nudged the thin plywood sheet away from the support pole, creating a gap just wide enough to sneak through. Fortunately, it was close to the tent that housed the mummy exhibit. Unfortunately, the alley between the fence and the exhibit tent wasn’t exactly … vacant. Mrs. Bottoms happened to be drifting between the tents, checking behind stacks of packing crates. She spotted Cheryl and Tweed just as they wriggled through the gap. At least the convertible— and its transformed occupants—remained hidden from Mrs. Bottoms’s view by the fence.

  “Oh! Girls!” she exclaimed. “Have you seen—?”

  “With their dad!” the girls sang out in chorus, ducking back outside the fence and shushing the growly, thumpy croc-tots in the back seat.

  “Thanks, girls!”

  They waited until they could hear the sound of Mrs. Bottoms’s footsteps retreating toward the midway, then counted to ten before peeking back through the gap in the fence. The coast was clear. A hastily scrawled sign outside the tent housing Zahara’s sarcophagus informed carnival patrons that the exhibit was temporarily off limits due to a “maintenance issue.” The girls supposed that tracking down and recapturing the tent’s main attraction could loosely be interpreted as “maintenance.” Mostly, they were just grateful that it was, for the moment, unoccupied.

  Leaving the quadruplets secure in their crates in the back seat, the girls and Artie and Zahara made their way into the tent. Once inside, they stopped to assess the situation. There were at least a dozen different display cases filled with all sorts of supposedly arcane and mystical artifacts, and it would take too long to ask Artie to ask Zahara to tell them which ones were originally hers and which weren’t.

  They decided right off the bat that Zahara would have to do without the flea-bitten, stuffed camel mounted off to one side of the stage, which Colonel Dudley advertised as having come from the desert along with the Princess. The Princess would just have to find other modes of transportation in Aaru, or get around on foot. She didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she and the camel almost seemed to be glaring at each other with mutual dislike. Tweed figured they’d just been cooped up in the back of a transport truck together for far too long.

  “Just grab as much of it as you can!” Cheryl said, lifting a glass box off its stand and sweeping the contents beneath into one of the packing boxes they’d found stacked at the back of the tent, covered in a sheet. “I figure she’s had to spend all that time crammed into the back of a truck with all this junk? It pretty much all belongs to her by default.”

  Tweed found what looked like a lump of frayed strips of linen wrapped around something in the vague shape of a chubby bowling pin with a painted picture of a cat on it, and she remembered Dudley and Delmer’s “cat’s out of the bag” exchange. It was Isis. She gently handed it over to Zahara.

  “Here, Princess,” she said. “You can hang on to this. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride and I imagine you’ll wanna keep your kitty safe.”

  Tweed wasn’t exactly sure how the Princess would react to the mummified remains of her dear pet, but she breathed a sigh of relief when the other girl’s face broke into a delighted smile and she hugged the bandaged bundle to her chest.

  “We’re gonna have to leave the sharcophagush here,” Artie said ruefully, eyeing the size of the thing. There was no way it would fit into the Comet’s trunk, even without the camel. “Sho much for eternal resht. I hope they have hammocksh in Aaru!”

  “Just don’t forget the scarab beetle,” Tweed said as she hurriedly emptied out the contents of several more display boxes, not bothering to notice whether they were of the ancient Egyptian variety or not. “See if you can find something to pry it off with.”

  Cheryl found an “Ancient Mayan Sacrificial Dagger” (complete with a faded “Made in Taiwan” sticker on the back of the hilt), and together she and Artie used it to pry the cracked scarab jewel from the lid of the painted coffin.

  Artie held the jewel aloft triumphantly. “Now all we gotta do ish—”

  “Stop right there!”

  Cheryl and Tweed and Artie nearly jumped out of their skins. They whirled around to see Delmer the carny standing at the tent flap. His eyes nearly bulged out of his head when he saw what was happening.

  “You kids!” he gasped. “You’re the ones that were here earlier, ain’tcha? I’ll bet my good boots you’re the ones responsible for stealing the mummy girl!”

  Cheryl hoped he didn’t mean the ones he was wearing at that moment, as they seemed to be held together mostly with duct tape and twine. She glanced back to see that Zahara had smartly ducked behind a display case to hide and was staring at the carny through narrowed eyes.

  “Come back to finish the job, eh, ya little criminals?” he said with a sneer.

  “Hey! Who’sh callin’ who a criminal?” Artie snorted indignantly and took a step toward Delmer, his scaly tail swishing angrily.

  “GAH!” The carny jumped back, a look of confusion and horror on his face as he took in Artie’s appearance. “What in the world are you?”

  “I’m a minion, bushter,” he said fiercely. “And that there’s my princessh you’ve been messhing with. You wanna tangle with me now?” He put up his fists in a boxer’s stance.

  “Whoa,” Cheryl murmured. “Go Artie …”

  “What d’you mean that’s your princess?” Delmer sneered. He squinted, peering into the shadows at the back of the tent. “Where’d you kids hide that ol’ bundle of rags? You don’t know what you’re playing around with, y’hear? This is dangerous stuff and … and … uh …”

  He faltered as the Princess herself stalked slowly forward, stepping into a shaft of moonlight that spilled in through a gap in the tent’s canvas roof. The golden beads and bracelets adorning Zahara’s hair and arms glittered coldly, and her eyes sparked as she stared unblinkingly at Delmer. The carny looked at her, and then to the image depicted on the sarcophagus, and then back again. The resemblance was unmistakable, but for someone who had only ever been familiar with the Pharaoh’s daughter in a bandaged and shambling state, Delmer must have thought he was looking at a ghost. He certainly resembled one himself in that moment as all the blood drained from his face, leaving him deathly pale.

  “Del-mer,” the Princess said haltingly.

  “Looks like she knows her jailers by name, pal,” Cheryl said, thoroughly enjoying his befuddlement. “That can’t be good for you.”

  “Is that … really her?”

  “In living Technicolor,” Tweed said in her best grim, gothly monotone. It made for very effective scolding. “She’s been alive all this time. And you and your boss have been treating her like some kind of unfeeling puppet. Shame on you.”

  Delmer’s eyes went wide and he stammered, “A—A— Alive?! What d’you mean alive? I always thought she was just a regular mummy. Like … mummified and such!”

  “You thought wrong,” Cheryl said fiercely. “She wasn’t evil. It’s not like Dudley said. She really was cursed by the temple priests
and buried alive, and Dudley knew it all along. He’s been using her to fleece money off people, and all the while he’s been treating her like a thing. She’s not a thing. She’s a person!”

  Delmer frowned deeply, and his lower lip actually seemed to tremble a bit. He took a step forward and looked the Princess in the eye. “Is … is that true? Can you—can she understand me?” He glanced at Artie and the twins.

  Artie nodded. “Oh shure. She’sh had to lie there, all wrapped up and under a shpell, lishtening to folksh yap for yearsh without being able to shay anything back. She undershtands. Go ahead. Talk to her. But mind your mannersh or I’ll have to busht out my minion movesh on you!”

  “Uh. Okay, okay … calm down there, little fella …” Delmer still looked uncertain, but he nodded and spoke directly to Zahara-Safiya. “I’m real sorry, Princess,” he said. “I didn’t know. I mean … I know that the Colonel is as mean as a snakebite—heck, of course I know that— but I mean, I never knew you were … well … you. I thought that creepy amulet of his was just a way of reanimating a … well … a mummy. Heck, I thought you was dead. And I still never thought it was really right, the way folks gawked at you. It weren’t respectful. I always thought your history was so fascinatin’. All these art-y-facts and such. I even taught myself a little bit o’ that picture writing, y’know. Nothing fancy—just the basics … but I thought it might, I dunno, honour your memory or something.”

  Zahara tilted her head and said something that Artie listened to for a moment before translating. “She shays she knowsh. She’sh heard you grumbling shometimes after the show. And you were alwaysh careful when you packed up her shtuff … She shays she kinda almosht thought of you like a friend.”

  Delmer blinked and the colour flooded back into his face. He mumbled something that was too low for the others to hear.