His classmates tittered.
“Hmm… I doubt it,” Albert 3-D answered seriously. “The smell would dissipate long before then. But you’re right about dead bodies. In Mayan mythology, the god of the underworld was called Cizin, meaning stinking one.”
While the rest of her class laughed, Cass slipped the ibis ring onto her finger.
It was a bit foolish of her to wear the ring in public, she knew, but holding a little piece of ancient Egypt in her hand gave her a sense of confidence. Maybe seeing the ibis next to other hieroglyphs in the exhibit would jog her memory; today, she was determined to identify the remaining hieroglyphs of the Secret.
Her backpack, as usual, had everything she might need:
Magnifying glass: check.
Hidden camera: check.
Molding wax for taking impressions: check.
Brush for dusting specimens: check.
Armed like an archaeologist in the field, Cass looked in every place she might conceivably find a hieroglyph. While the other students casually checked out the exhibit, she methodically studied photos of tomb paintings and copies of spells from the Book of the Dead.* She examined the decorations on funeral masks, and the carvings on stone sarcophagi. She inspected tiny shabti figures who were supposed to serve Egyptian nobles in the afterlife, and strange finger-shaped amulets meant to seal wounds and protect the dead.
And yet as far as she could tell, none of the hieroglyphs she saw resembled the hieroglyphs of the Secret. Then again, perhaps the sketches in her notebook were incorrect. There was no way to know.
Her confidence beginning to crumble, she stood, holding her notebook open in her hand and staring at a bowl of natron, the natural salt that is found in desert lakes and that was used by the Egyptians to dry out bodies before they were mummified. Could you mummify a body using normal table salt? she wondered idly. Maybe she should try it on herself. If she didn’t figure out the Secret soon, she might as well be mummified.
As she turned away, Max-Ernest crept up behind her. He reached around and tapped her on her far shoulder—
She spun around, snapping her notebook shut. “What? Oh!”
She rolled her eyes when she saw Max-Ernest standing there, grinning at his little practical joke. “That is so not funny.”
“Did you see the ibis mummies?”*
“Uh-huh.”
Max-Ernest eyed the notebook in her hand. “Is that where you have your notes about… it?”
“Shh!” Cass whispered sharply.
“If you’re so worried about people knowing, are you sure you should be wearing that ring?” asked Max-Ernest, stung.
Cass’s ears flared red. “Why don’t you go think of more jokes for your graduation speech or something?”
Max-Ernest watched her in consternation as she moved on to another display: HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHAT A MUMMY’S SKIN FEELS LIKE? TOUCH HERE TO FIND OUT! It was an interactive wall display containing swatches of leather, plastic, and other materials. She touched a few of the swatches and made a face.
“What’s up with her?” asked Yo-Yoji.
Max-Ernest shrugged. “You know Cass.”
Although Yo-Yoji was a fellow Terces member, it was Cass’s business to tell him—or not—about the latest development in her search for the Secret. And truth be told, Max-Ernest didn’t want to talk much about it. He was beginning to wish she’d never found the papyrus in the first place.
Yo-Yoji squinted. “Is that a ring on her finger? I’ve never seen her wear a ring before….” He looked askance at Max-Ernest. “You didn’t give it to her, did you?”
“What? No! Why, were you planning on asking her to marry you?” asked Max-Ernest, recovering.
“Very funny…”
Yo-Yoji glanced at Cass again. It was almost as if he didn’t like the idea of somebody else giving her a ring.
A moment later, Albert 3-D gathered all the students together and led the class toward a four-sided glass chamber that stood in the center of the exhibit’s largest room.
“Here is our star attraction,” he said, opening the door to the chamber. “We keep the door closed during museum hours—you’re supposed to look in from the outside—but since the public’s not here yet, I thought I’d give you a treat.”
Inside the chamber, a stone sarcophagus lay open for viewing. Next to it were three colorfully decorated wooden coffins that descended in size like Russian nesting dolls, and four clay canopic jars, each about the size of a paint can.* Like many jars of this kind, these ones were topped with the heads of a person, a falcon, a baboon, and a jackal (who were supposed to guard the mummy’s liver, intestines, lungs, and stomach, respectively).
“Please, please, don’t touch anything. Despite the fact that his grave was robbed repeatedly, this handsome fellow is one of the best-preserved mummies ever unearthed. His tomb was excavated just a year ago, and it’s the first time the Egyptians have allowed him to travel.”
Everyone gathered around the sarcophagus and eagerly stared down at the perfectly desiccated citizen of ancient Egypt.
“He’s something of a mystery mummy. We don’t even know his name. Around the museum, we call him Amun, which means the hidden one.”
Tightly wound linen bandages surrounded most of the mystery mummy’s body, but his head was bare, and his hands stuck out of the bandages just above his waist. His hair, assuming he’d ever had any, was long gone, and his skin had turned the color of bronze sculpture. His eyes were closed, but his mouth was open, revealing a few rotten teeth and a dark hole where his tongue should have been.
“He looks like that painting they make Halloween masks out of,” said Yo-Yoji. “What’s it called?”
“The Scream,” Max-Ernest volunteered.* “Maybe he was screaming in pain when he died. Then his mouth stayed open when rigor mortis set in. How ’bout that?”
“People scream for other reasons,” said Cass. “He could have been trying to warn somebody about something. Like a sandstorm or a plague of locusts—”
“I think he looks like he’s laughing,” said Glob.
“Actually, none of you are right,” said Albert 3-D. “His mouth was opened after his death. The Egyptians opened the mouths of mummies so they could breathe in the afterlife.”
“So how did he die, then?” asked Cass.
“All we know about Amun is that he was a young doctor who rose to become the pharaoh’s personal physician and adviser,” said Albert 3-D. “Then, suddenly…”
He ran his finger across his neck—the universal sign for execution.
He pointed to the smallest of Dr. Amun’s coffins, where some hieroglyphs were painted in black and red beneath the stylized face of a handsome young man.
“Daniel, do you want to read these glyphs for your classmates?” he asked, looking expectantly at his son.
Daniel-not-Danielle, who had remained remarkably quiet ever since they entered the museum, shook his head. His dreadlocks swung back and forth like a spinning mop.
“I’ll read them,” said Max-Ernest.
Albert looked at him in surprise. “You read hieroglyphs? Your Egypt unit was more in-depth than I thought.”
Max-Ernest shrugged. “It’s kind of a hobby.”
“Some people collect trading cards or play video games.” Glob snickered. “Max-Ernest reads hieroglyphs.”
“I do those things, too!” Max-Ernest protested.
“He was being sarcastic,” said Cass. “Just read it.”
She looked over his shoulder, hoping that she might recognize one of her unidentified hieroglyphs. No luck.
Max-Ernest coughed exaggeratedly. “Ahem. OK, here goes—‘The name of this man is… secret’? Is that the word?”
Albert 3-D nodded. “Go on.”
“ ‘Also secret is the reason for…’ ”
Max-Ernest stammered because a wild idea had just occurred to him. Could Dr. Amun be the doctor who had discovered the Secret? No, he thought, there’s no way.
“
‘… for his death,’ ” read Albert 3-D, finishing the sentence. “That was very good. Have you considered going into Egyptology?”
“Yeah, I’ve considered it. But I still want to be a comedian. Or a comic magician.” (Max-Ernest had a pretty good idea he was going to wind up being a writer instead, but he hadn’t fully accepted it yet.)
“So nobody knows why Amun was executed?” asked Cass, who’d had the exact same idea about the mummy that Max-Ernest had had. (Only she didn’t think the idea was so wild.)
Albert 3-D shook his head. “The inscription continues: ‘Pharaoh asked for his wisdom, but he gave pharaoh only his wit.’… It sounds as though he made some kind of smart remark at the pharaoh’s expense—the kind of thing one of you guys might say about, oh, a teacher or a principal.”
He grinned at Mrs. Johnson. She didn’t grin back.
“Whatever he did, I doubt we would think he deserved to die for it.”
“In mummy movies, it’s always the ones who are wrongfully executed who come back to life,” said Yo-Yoji.
“Yeah, we better watch out,” said Glob. “Or we’re all going to die from the mummy’s curse!”*
Albert 3-D chuckled. “I think the people burying him were a little worried about that, too. At the very end of the inscription, it reads: ‘In life he had the magic touch. Now may his hands lie still.’ Guess they were afraid he might reach out and grab them—”
As Albert 3-D led the class out of the sealed glass room, Cass, Yo-Yoji, and Max-Ernest leaned over the edge of the sarcophagus to examine the mummy more closely.
“So—do you think it’s him?” Cass whispered excitedly after everybody else had left.
“Who?” asked Yo-Yoji.
“Who do you think? The doctor who discovered the… you know.”
Yo-Yoji nodded. “Right! And he was killed right after he told it to the pharaoh. Or after he refused to tell him. Whatever. It’s almost exactly the same story.”
“I thought of that, too, but it would be a pretty huge coincidence,” said Max-Ernest. “Of all the mummies in the world, for this one to be that one particular doctor, here in our town, in an exhibit organized by our friend’s dad. I highly, highly, highly doubt that is the case.”
“A lot of things seem highly, highly, highly coincidental,” said Cass, irked. “That doesn’t mean they’re not true.”
“Plus, the hieroglyphs only said that the reason he was killed was secret,” Max-Ernest persisted stubbornly. “Not that the reason was a secret or the Secret.” Actually, he remembered as he said this, in ancient Egyptian the words a and the weren’t always used, so there was little difference. But he didn’t correct himself; he didn’t want to give Cass the satisfaction.
“Well, I say it’s him,” said Cass, leaning in even closer to the mummy.
She didn’t know how she knew, but she knew.
She’d come to the museum hoping to translate the rest of the Secret, but instead she’d discovered something potentially much more significant: the man who had discovered the Secret and who, for that reason, had suffered a pharaoh’s wrath.
It was his dying hand, she was certain, that had written the Secret on a piece of papyrus thousands of years ago. And it was the same hand—with its long, bony fingers—that held Cass’s attention now. Though the mummy’s wrists were bound to his waist, his fingers stretched upward, as if the mummy were straining to break free of the linen bandages. As if he wanted to touch her. To grasp her.
Transfixed, she stared at the mummy’s fingers. She and Max-Ernest had found the ibis ring tied to a piece of shredded linen just like the bandages that wrapped the mummy. Could the ring once have encircled one of the mummy’s fingers? Albert 3-D had mentioned something about the mummy’s tomb being robbed….
The fingers were dark and crooked, with broken fingernails the color of wood. She didn’t see any signs of scraping or stretching where a ring might have been pulled off, but she couldn’t be certain the signs weren’t there because—frustratingly—a few of the fingers of the mummy’s left hand were blocked from view by a stray bandage. If only she could move the bandage aside for a second…
She glanced over her shoulder. Max-Ernest had turned away, and Yo-Yoji was about to walk out of the glass room.
Taking a breath, Cass leaned down and gently pulled the bandage away from the mummy’s hand. Immediately, she noticed the index finger: below the knuckle was a faint but discernible ring where the mummy’s skin had turned black. The black ring narrowed at the sides of the finger and widened on top into a black oval. It was the exact shape of the ibis ring—
“Cassandra! Max-Ernest! Yoji! Get away from there!” Mrs. Johnson’s voice broke Cass’s concentration. “What part of ‘do not touch’ do you not understand?”
Cass spun around, her arms flailing in her attempt to distance herself from the mummy.
Too late, she realized her sweatshirt sleeve had caught on something.
She heard a snap, like the sound of a twig breaking, and the next thing she knew, a slim, dark projectile was flying through the air.
It arced over Max-Ernest’s head, and as they all watched openmouthed, it landed
right in the palm of Yo-Yoji’s
hand.
He stared at it as if he had caught a live grenade.
It was the mummy’s finger.
Let me take a wild guess:
You have never broken the finger off a mummy. (Don’t feel bad about it; there’s still time.)
Second wild guess:
You have, however, broken something valuable—maybe more than one something?—in the past.
They say time heals all wounds, but as you know from experience, that isn’t true. Certainly, time does not mend all broken pots. It especially doesn’t mend priceless Ming dynasty bowls, but I won’t bore you with that story right now. (I will tell you this: I wasn’t the one who thought it was a good idea to rest a fragile Chinese antique on top of a box of Belgian chocolates. Enough said.)
To return to the subject at hand, as it were, a broken finger is one thing; a broken-off finger, another. And a finger broken off a three-thousand-year-old corpse is an altogether different kettle of, er, something or other.
Everybody had an opinion about what to do with the miserable miscreants who had maimed the museum’s mystery mummy.*
Mrs. Johnson suggested reporting the young offenders to the police right away—and, for good measure, to the Egyptian authorities as well.
“Vandalism is like a cancer,” she said. “It must be treated quickly and brutally, or it will spread. Today it’s a mummy. Tomorrow they will be defacing the Mona Lisa.”
The administrators of the museum, who did not look very kindly on the breaking of ancient artifacts lent to them by foreign countries, were inclined to let the principal decide her students’ fates.
Thankfully, the exhibit’s curator had a cooler head.
The mummy was a priceless treasure, true, he agreed. This was a terrible accident, yes. But it was an accident. And accidents happen. Even to mummies. Even to King Tut!*
As the person who’d let students into the mummy’s chamber, he, Albert 3-D, took full responsibility for the incident. He would deal with any problems on the Egyptian side, and he would also put his mind to ways in which the kids could remedy their misdeed.
“Calling the police would not be helpful,” he concluded.
Reluctantly, Mrs. Johnson surrendered the young offenders to his control.
“But as far as I’m concerned, you’re all on probation,” said the principal to Cass, Max-Ernest, and Yo-Yoji. “If you want to graduate from middle school, you will do exactly as this man says. Otherwise, you will find yourselves repeating a grade. And, worse, spending another year with me!”
Albert 3-D soon came up with a plan, and late the very next afternoon—which happened to be a Saturday afternoon—the three chastened friends found themselves returning to the museum for their first round of “archaeology boot camp,” as the curato
r called it.
Their new home-away-from-home, the Restoration Room, looked like a combination art studio and science lab—and, in fact, that’s exactly what it was. On one side were the art supplies: paints, pens, and pencils; plasters, clays, and waxes; rolls of fabric and paper; spools of thread and twine; scissors of every size; and more types of glues and mastics than you ever imagined could possibly exist. On the other side were burners and beakers; acids and solvents; scales and thermometers; and all sorts of other substances and instruments for measuring and determining the age and composition of ancient and not-so-ancient objects.
Left to their own devices, I’m sure our enterprising young heroes could have done any number of things with all the materials at hand, from painting a masterpiece to building a bomb. Unfortunately, Albert 3-D had other plans for them.
When the archaeologist greeted them, he was holding an ordinary shoe box in his hands as delicately and carefully as if it were a Fabergé egg. Indeed, the shoe box contained something extraordinarily fragile: the mummy’s finger, lying on a bed of linen like a miniature mummy in a miniature sarcophagus.
“I want you all to see this so you understand the situation you’ve left us in,” he began sternly, without saying hello. “If you thought we could simply sew the finger back on, you’re wrong. There are many questions to think about: will the operation further damage the mummy? What type of thread should we use? Would it be better to glue the finger to the hand? Or should we leave the finger off to show how the body is affected by the passage of time?”
As for the shoe-box sarcophagus, its purpose was to re-create the conditions of mummification. Until the museum conservators figured out whether and how to reattach the finger, they wanted to store it in such a way that it would be preserved exactly as if it were still entombed under the sands of Egypt.
“Are you ready for your assignment?” Albert 3-D asked, placing the shoe box on a high shelf, next to a few urns that were in the process of being reassembled.
His three nervous charges looked at the long table in the middle of the room. It was covered with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of broken pieces of pottery.
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