Relic

by Steve Whibley

  “Trust me, I know.” An itch started under my cast. I tried to reach my finger down the side to scratch it. The worst part about casts is the itching. Dry spaghetti was the best thing to use for scratching, but it always broke. When the cast finally came off in a few days, I wondered how much broken spaghetti would be in there and what the doctor would say when he saw it.

  I looked up when my sister gasped.

  “You think they’re all here for the coprolite exhibit?” she said.

  A police officer leaning against his cruiser blocked most of my view, but there seemed to be a crowd gathered just beyond the officer, near the entrance. Plus, news vans from at least three different stations were parked along the street.

  “Maybe,” my mom said excitedly. “Or maybe they got a new art exhibit. That would be fun.” She turned to face us in the back seat. “Don’t you guys think so?”

  “Oh, yeah, goody,” I mocked.

  I wasn’t sure what to expect when my mom parked and we walked around the corner and headed for the entrance. I wouldn’t have been too surprised to see TV reporters interviewing the museum curator. I was even ready to see a few photographers snapping pictures of a giant turd, but all five of us stopped dead in our tracks as soon as we reached the front of the building.

  A dozen or so people stood just off to the side of the main doors, moving together in a tight circle and chanting, “Give it back. Give it back. Give it back.” Others held signs with slogans like, “Buddha is not for display,” and “Overton Supports Thieves.” There were other signs too, but they were covered with seemingly random squiggles and dots, almost like a painted snake had slithered across the cardboard. I wasn’t sure what the language was, but it wasn’t English.

  The most interesting thing, though, were the four Asian men standing near the main entrance. They all wore identical orange robes that exposed one shoulder and hung to their ankles. They had shaved heads. Three of the men were withered and wrinkled and looked so old they should probably have been on display in the museum themselves, but the fourth guy was young enough to pass as my older brother—if I had a bald Asian brother who liked robes. He kept his head down, and it took a moment, but I realized he had a cell phone and seemed to be texting someone.

  “Are those monks?” Lisa asked.

  “They look like monks,” Colin said. “Except for that young one. Are monks supposed to have cell phones? And can monks be that young?”

  “Yes, Colin, they can.” My mom inched us toward the short line of normal-looking folks at the entrance. “I don’t think this has anything to do with the coprolite exhibit, Becky,” my mom added.

  One of the protestors, a middle-aged woman with tight curly hair and a “Free Tibet” t-shirt, broke away from the group and rushed us as we got in line. “Don’t you care that you’re supporting thievery?”

  Becky pressed tighter into my mom’s side as the woman first sneered at us and then pointed a stern finger at my mom. “They’re displaying stolen artifacts.” She gestured to the monks. “These monks came all the way from Cambodia to get them back.”

  A couple of news crews rushed in and pointed their cameras and bright lights at us. My mom cleared her throat. “If there’s something in the museum that was stolen, you should report it. There are better ways than trying to intimidate people.”

  “Report it?” The protestor laughed. “Who should we report it to? Cambodian authorities don’t care, and the curator doesn’t care. All they care about is making money and drawing a crowd.” She scowled at the camera crew and then back at my mom. “Which is exactly what you’re helping them do. You make me sick.” She turned to the camera. “Imagine a woman bringing her kids to see a stolen head.”

  “Stolen head?” Colin’s eyes widened to the size of Roman shields, and a smile tore his face in half. “As in an actual human head?” He laughed. “I thought we were here to see a giant turd. This is way better than I expected.”

  The protestor blinked. “A giant what?”

  Colin looked up at the camera. “Can I say turd on TV?” The cameraman smiled and gave Colin a thumbs-up.

  Museum security stepped up and blocked the crazy lady from getting closer to the entrance. She grumbled, raised a fist over her head, and then returned to her group and resumed chanting, “Give it back. Give it back.”

  We stepped inside. A man in a dark suit stood just inside the door. “Good morning, ma’am,” he said to my mom. “My name is Jonathan Overton. I’m the curator of the museum. I just wanted to extend my apologies for any discomfort caused by the protestors.” He pursed his lips and blew a breath through his nose. I imagined he’d been giving the same apology to everyone who’d come in. Then he seemed to give my mom a second look. “Professor Curse?”

  She extended her hand. “I’m sorry, Mr. Overton, do we know each other?”

  “No, no, but my predecessor mentioned you had a lot of input on our art exhibit, and I was at your lecture on Caravaggio this past spring. Riveting.”

  My mom’s grin widened. “Why, thank you. I was trying to introduce the…”

  I stopped paying attention to the conversation and glanced at my friends. The three of us slipped away—or in my case, crutched away. Becky did too, but she went the opposite direction.

  “Let’s go find that head,” Colin said.

  A map situated in the middle of the foyer showed that each floor of the museum was shaped like a giant U.

  “Second floor is artwork,” Lisa said, muttering mostly to herself as she read the map. “Here.” She tapped a section marked in red. “New exhibits and items on loan. I bet the head’s here. First floor.”

  She pointed to the right. “That way.”

  Chapter 4

  The three of us made our way through the Native American exhibit and past the display of medieval weaponry. Colin stole one of my crutches and had a mock sword fight with a knight on display. He only stopped when he noticed the models of early man and jumped the ropes. He hunched over, situating himself among a trio of cavemen roasting something over a fake fire.

  “Aw, that’s sweet,” Lisa said. “Colin’s found his birth family.”

  “Don’t listen to her, Dad,” Colin said, speaking to the wax caveman to his right. “She's just jealous.”

  We laughed and Colin stood up and took a step but his foot clipped one of the logs in the display and he stumbled backwards through some fake foliage and smack into the back wall, then disappeared.

  “Colin?”

  “A little help,” he said, groaning.

  Lisa and I exchanged glances and I gestured to my leg. “I can’t climb over all that.”

  Lisa sighed and glanced down the hallway. Museum security must’ve been mostly outside because there weren’t any guards in sight. She sighed again and quickly stepped over the barrier, pushing aside the fake bushes to reveal a door. She disappeared through it and emerged a second later, pulling Colin by the wrist.

  “That hurt,” Colin said, once he was back on the correct side of the display.

  “Serves you right,” Lisa said. “You’re just lucky no one saw you.”

  “Where did you disappear to?” I asked.

  “A garage or a loading bay of some kind,” Lisa said as we started walking again. “There was a door a truck could fit through, and the room had loads of boxes and crates.”

  Near the end of the corridor, the hall widened into a large circular atrium, where people on the second and third floors could look down at the exhibit below. A humongous skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex stood directly in front of us. It must’ve been nearly twenty feet tall and forty feet long. Its head—about the size of a small car—leaned out over half the atrium, and its mouth, filled with teeth that looked bigger than my leg, opened threateningly to the people on the second floor. The colossal beast stood on a large platform covered in dirt and thick plastic bushes and large ferns that I guess were supposed to resemble its natural habitat.

  The museum had had dinosaur exhibits in the
past, but usually they were small, like the size of a truck. This was bigger than anything I’d ever seen. “Hard to believe they were so big,” I said.

  As if the skeleton were made out of some giant kid magnet, the three of us gravitated toward it until we were at the velvet rope barrier.

  “I have to touch it,” Colin said.

  Lisa shook her head. “No, you don’t. This isn’t like messing with mannequins dressed like cavemen. I’m sure there are real fossils in there. You could get in loads of trouble.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Lisa. I could duck behind some of those bushes and they’d never see me. Besides, if they didn’t want people going across, they’d have put up something more threatening than velvet ropes.”

  “Like razor wire and a Rottweiler, perhaps?” The voice came from over our shoulders, and the three of us spun around. The security guard was a sinewy older man with graying hair. He had a name badge on his chest that said FISHER. He wore a tired expression and tapped the end of his oversized flashlight into his hand like it was a baton, seemingly prepared to bash us with it if we dared to inch too close to the dinosaur. “Just look,” he said. “Don’t touch.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “we weren’t going to touch.”

  “Sure you weren’t.”

  “We weren’t,” Lisa said, backing me up.

  “Fine.” The guard straightened up and looked at Colin. “You weren’t going to, either, I bet.”

  “No, I was probably going to touch it.” Colin smiled and looked back at the dinosaur and then muttered under his breath, “I’ll have to wait ’til you leave, I guess.”

  “What was that?” the guard asked.

  Colin turned back. “Erm, nothing. How is this dinosaur standing up? I don’t see any wires.”

  “They’re replica bones,” the guard said. “They’re fastened together and then balanced the way a real T. rex would have been balanced.”

  “So I could just give it a shove and it would topple over?” Colin asked.

  “Hardly,” the guard answered. “It’s bolted to the platform and there is metal running through most of the pieces, so unless you have a crowbar to smash the legs completely, I’d say you’re not going to have much luck.”

  Colin tapped his chin. “A crowbar, eh?”

  The guard drew a deep breath and exhaled through his nose, then turned and marched off.

  “He was friendly,” Colin said.

  “Bobby, don’t touch that!”

  We turned toward the scolding voice—on the opposite side of the T. rex and through the skeleton, and saw a woman holding a porky little kid in her arms.

  “But, Mo-om!”

  “No buts, Bobby. You don’t touch poop. I don’t care how old it is. Let’s go look at something else. Something clean.”

  We stepped around the T. rex display and saw what Becky had been making such a fuss about. On a bone-white platform just a couple of meters to the right of the dinosaur was a dark gray blob, about two feet long and about half a foot across, which didn’t seem large considering how big the dinosaur was. It looked like a giant golf tee dipped in concrete.

  Becky was already there, snapping pictures and jotting down who-knows-what in her little notebook. She turned away and pretended she didn’t know us when we walked up.

  “I thought it would be bigger,” Colin said.

  Lisa pointed to the sign beside the display. “It’s five kilograms. That’s pretty big.”

  “I guess so.” Colin turned back to the dinosaur. “But look how big he is. His turd should be like the size of a truck or something.”

  “Maybe it was the size of a truck,” Lisa said. “But that’s all that managed to last over the past million years or so.” She gave her head a shake. “Are we really discussing this?”

  Colin’s eyes widened and he nodded down the atrium a bit farther. “There’s the head.”

  “And one of the monks,” Lisa said.

  The head was on a podium, like the kind the principal speaks behind during assemblies, and covered in a glass box. And sure enough, one of the monks—the young one—was standing beside the head with his arms crossed over his chest, looking incredibly unfriendly.

  “What are we waiting for?” Colin said.

  Lisa shook her head and grabbed Colin’s arm to hold him back as a couple wandered close to the monk and the severed head. The monk must’ve said something because both people suddenly took a step back, and the woman looked positively insulted. They shook their heads disapprovingly at the monk and abruptly walked away.

  “I don’t think he’s there to answer questions,” Lisa said. “Maybe we should just keep our distance.”

  Colin shook out of Lisa’s grip. “No way. When will I ever have a chance to see a severed head again? Probably never.” He tilted his head toward another exhibit near the monk. “We’ll wander that way and casually make our way over.”

  We did just that—even stopping at a display called the Rube Goldberg machine—a huge pinball-type contraption—and playing with it for a few minutes, just to make sure we didn’t seem overly interested in the head.

  When we finally reached the Cambodian head display, we all responded with the same unimpressed expression: “Oh.”

  I think we were all expecting something different. I thought it was going to be an actual severed human head. I thought it would be like the movies, that maybe the guy’s tongue would be hanging out the side of his mouth or maybe his eyes would be rolled back in his head. But no, it was nothing like that.

  There were three podiums. The first held a stone hand that looked like it should be holding something. The second, the one in the middle, had a bare foot, also carved from stone. And on the third podium was the severed head. It was about twice the size of a normal head and had a round face and a pleasant expression, as if the man hadn’t been at all upset about being separated from his body. A small white card beneath it read: Sandstone Buddha Head, Cambodia, 12th Century.

  “That’s it?” Colin asked. “That’s what all the protesters are shouting about? I thought it was supposed to be a real head.”

  “I thought it would be creepier,” Lisa said.

  I nodded. “Yeah, I didn’t expect him to look so happy.”

  The monk stepped forward, his hands hidden beneath the folds of his robe. “Are you done?” He didn’t wait for us to respond before adding, “Good. Get lost.”

  Lisa looked about as shocked as I felt. “W—What?” she asked.

  “You heard me.” He spoke with an English accent, which was completely at odds with what the protestors had said. Unless my geography was really wrong, Cambodia wasn’t at all near England.

  “First of all, baldy,” Colin said, “this is a public place, and we’ll stay if we want. And second, if you have a problem with people looking at your village’s statues, maybe you should hire a lawyer.”

  The monk lowered his chin and muttered something that sounded like, “I’m done dealing with lawyers.” Then he took an aggressive step forward. Now, Colin may be the movie buff in our little group, but I’d seen enough to know that monks can be trained fighters. I tried to step back out of striking distance, but my stupid leg didn’t move as quick as my mind told it to, and I staggered. My arms flailed, my crutches clattered to the tiled floor, and I tipped backward.

  This is going to hurt.

  I clenched my eyes shut, preparing for the impact, only to feel someone grab me. I tried to spin around and regain my balance but only managed a half turn before my elbow struck something that I might have seen if my eyes weren’t still closed. The impact felt softer than it should’ve, and when I opened my eyes, all I could see was orange.

  I groaned, then blinked as a bright light flashed to my right. I must’ve hit my head on the tiles, I thought, still blinking. It took me a moment to realize that the orange mass I was lying on was really the monk. No sooner did that realization strike than Colin and Lisa were beside me, hauling me to my feet.

  “Did he push you…or help
you?” Lisa asked. “It happened so fast I didn’t see.”

  “I think he pushed him,” Colin said.

  The monk sat up and rubbed a red mark on the side of his head. I figured it was probably from my elbow. There was another flash, this time on my left. A man, crouched low, snapped one picture after another. Then something else caught my eye. Another man. He was standing just behind a book display, and I only caught a glimpse of his face. It was just a flash before he pulled back into the shadows. But one glimpse was all I needed. I knew where I’d seen him before.

  At the mall. He wasn’t wearing his uniform anymore, but it was still him—the man in white.

  Chapter 5

  Colin hauled me to my feet and handed me one of my crutches. I grabbed his shoulder both for support and so he’d know that what I was about to say was serious. “He’s here.”

  Colin blinked and then focused on my eyes. “What? Who?”

  “The man in white.”

  Colin blinked again and I remembered I hadn’t told them about him.

  “A guy from the mall—I think he might be following us.” I looked over Colin’s shoulder and spotted the man standing beside the Rube Goldberg pinball machine. “There,” I said. I turned and pointed. “We need to find out who he is.”

  “Probably a reporter,” Colin said with a grin. “Probably wants an interview.”

  “That would be bad,” I said, reminding him that we’d agreed to keep a low profile so that we wouldn’t draw any attention to the Society. “We don’t need them having second thoughts about letting us join.”

  The monk staggered to his feet and muttered something under his breath that I’m pretty sure wasn’t English. I turned to face him as Lisa stepped beside him and steadied him.

  “I’m sorry about hitting you,” I said. “It was an accident.”

  The monk glowered and rubbed his temple. “Sure it was.”

  I glanced back over my shoulder as the mystery man turned and casually made his way down the corridor toward the exit. “There,” I said. “There he is, in the blue windbreaker.” I looked expectantly at Colin and Lisa. Neither of them moved. “I can’t follow him,” I said, gesturing to my leg. “C’mon, at least get his license plate number.”