You Have to Stop This

by Pseudonymous Bosch

  There were a few laughs and a few jeers. Mostly jeers. But one person shouted, “Oh, give the kid a chance—he’s kinda funny!”

  That gave Max-Ernest an idea: if he couldn’t do magic, he would try to make the audience laugh—at him or with him, either would have to do.

  “OK, I know I’m not the only magician around here. So who knows this one? How many magicians does it take to change a lightbulb?”

  He waited just long enough for the question to sink in before answering it: “Well, that depends on what you want the lightbulb to change into!”

  I’ll admit there were more than a few groans, but I also submit that there were a few laughs. So it wasn’t the greatest joke in the world. Or the newest. What lightbulb joke is? For Max-Ernest, at the time, it represented progress. He didn’t even try to explain the joke after he told it.

  And then Max-Ernest had a little moment of comic inspiration; he made up a joke on the spot, as opposed to merely repeating one he’d read. “But the real question is, how many lightbulbs does it take to change a magician?” he said.

  After a beat, he answered, “I’m not sure exactly, but tonight a lightbulb went off in my head, and I realized I’m not much of magician anyway. So I changed into a comedian.”

  This time he got a real laugh. And he learned an important lesson: when in doubt, make fun of yourself. Self-deprecating humor is the surest kind.

  “And just now another lightbulb went off in my head.” He paused. “I bet you thought I was going to say I’m not a comedian, either, huh? But actually, all I meant was that it’s time for me to go.”

  It had been about three minutes—enough time, he hoped, for Cass and Yo-Yoji to get out of the hotel.

  Max-Ernest smiled and bowed. “And now, if you’ll excuse me—”

  While the audience watched in confusion, he leaped off the stage, ran up the aisle, and exited the theater.

  Which really is the most legitimate sort of disappearing trick, don’t you agree?

  They hadn’t agreed on a meeting place. How often had it been drilled into their heads? By parents and Terces Society leaders alike. Make sure you decide on a meeting place. And yet they hadn’t done so.

  When he got out of the hotel, he looked around, vaguely hoping he would see his friends, but he feared they were long gone by now—either on the way to a bus station or in the hands of the Midnight Sun.

  As he stood hesitating, wondering whether he should stay or go, he gradually realized that the eye of the Egyptian-style “living statue” nearest to him kept twitching—seemingly winking at Max-Ernest. Seeing Max-Ernest glance at him, the statue started shaking his head ever so slightly.

  Max-Ernest looked at him questioningly. Was he trying to tell Max-Ernest something?

  The statue kept shaking his head, but it must have been obvious that Max-Ernest had no clue what he was trying to communicate. Finally, he beckoned Max-Ernest closer with a slight movement of his index finger.

  Max-Ernest walked over nervously. Was he finally going to hear from the Midnight Sun? The man wasn’t wearing gloves, but his hands weren’t bare, either—they were covered in makeup. Perhaps that was enough.

  “Somebody across the street’s been waving to you for the last three minutes, you blind idiot!” he said through gritted teeth, then quickly refroze in his statue pose.

  “Oh. Thanks.”

  Max-Ernest looked across the street, expecting to see Cass or Yo-Yoji. Instead, he was greeted by a very peculiar sight: the Priests of Amun, no longer carrying their signs, now sitting on motorcycles. They wore colorful motorcycle helmets over their turbans, and black motorcycle boots under their robes.

  Two of the priests now had passengers riding behind them, also wearing helmets. Max-Ernest recognized Cass and Yo-Yoji by their clothes. His heart skipped a beat. His friends had been kidnapped! Well, it was only a matter of time. He knew they’d all gotten away too easily.

  The third biker-priest motioned impatiently for him to join them.

  Quickly, Max-Ernest examined his options. If he made a run for it—and managed to escape—he could try to contact Pietro and get help. But he wouldn’t know where the priests had taken his friends—or where to go to rescue them. Besides, what were the chances he could outrun three men on motorcycles? If he went with them willingly, however, he and his friends might find a better moment to escape later that night. And the three of them working together would improve the odds of success.

  He ran across the street.

  “Get on, sahib!” said the priest gruffly from under his helmet. His Arabic accent was thick.

  “No, let my friends go!” said Max-Ernest. He knew he sounded foolish, but he figured it couldn’t hurt to put up a little bit of a fight.

  “Sorry—they’re coming. You can stay or go.” The priest gunned the bike’s motor as if he were about to leave.

  “Who are you?” asked Max-Ernest, stalling. “The Priests of Amun—is that, like, some secret cult descended from ancient Egypt?”

  The biker coughed under the helmet. “You could say that.”

  Max-Ernest gagged. So it was true—they were an ancient order of vengeful Egyptians. Who knew what kind of strange ritual tortures they planned!

  “We didn’t do it! We didn’t touch the mummy,” said Max-Ernest in a rush. “It was Lord Pharaoh!”

  “We know.”

  “You do?” Max-Ernest looked at him in surprise. “You’re not really the Priests of Amun, are you?”

  The man shook his head.

  “I knew there was something off about you guys. Now that I think of it, Amun isn’t even the mummy’s real name! It’s just a pseudonym the museum gave him. So how could there be Priests of Amun?”

  “You got me.”

  Max-Ernest eyed the bikers’ motorcycle gloves, an awful realization overtaking him. “You’re the Midnight Sun!”

  The biker laughed. “No, that we’re not, but I’m sure they’ll be here any second, if you want to wait.”

  A passenger on one of the other bikes lifted his helmet: it was Yo-Yoji. “Just get on, dude!” he shouted.

  The other passenger lifted her helmet: Cass. “They’re taking us home, silly!”

  “They are?” Astonished, Max-Ernest looked from his friends to the priest in front of him. “You are? Are you sure you didn’t threaten them to make them say that?”

  “If I wanted to kidnap you, you’d already be kidnapped,” said the priest, lifting his visor and losing his accent at the same time. “Now get on the bike already—”

  “Owen?!”

  “Yes, doofus.”

  Max-Ernest reddened. “Don’t call me that,” he said, climbing onto the seat behind Owen. He couldn’t believe he had thought Owen was an ancient Egyptian priest—he knew he was never going to live it down.

  “Is that your way of saying ‘thanks for rescuing me’?” asked Owen, chuckling.

  “No, it’s my way of saying ‘where were you when we needed you in the theater’?”

  “Playing blackjack—what do you think? I knew you guys could handle it.”

  Max-Ernest slipped, then pulled himself back onto the bike, trying not to think about the trip ahead. (I probably don’t have to tell you that this was his first time on a motorcycle.) He hoped Owen’s motorcycle riding was smoother than his car driving, but he had a sneaking suspicion that it wasn’t.

  In front of them, the other two bikes were already pulling out into traffic.

  “Who’s driving those ones?” asked Max-Ernest.

  “Mickey and Morrie.”

  “The clowns!? No wonder you were playing blackjack. I’m surprised you ever got them out of the casino.”

  “Here, wear this—” Owen handed Max-Ernest a helmet like the ones the others were wearing.

  “Cass’s mom is going to kill her,” said Max-Ernest, putting on the helmet. “She hates motorcycles. She works in the insurance industry, so she knows all about accident statistics.”

  Owen chuckled. “Hold o
n!”

  “Wait!”

  “What?”

  “Somebody’s got to call Albert 3-D and tell him the mummy’s waiting for him onstage.”

  “Already done. He’s on the way.” Owen revved his engine, and suddenly Max-Ernest’s head whipped backward.

  Just as Max-Ernest was about to sail off the back of the bike, he reached around Owen’s waist and gripped his priestly robe. Max-Ernest’s palms were sweaty. He could feel the wind rushing by. They were off.

  And he was terrified.

  To calm his mind, he started counting down in his head. But that only made him think of rocket ships taking off—and the high likelihood of launch explosions. He tried to imagine a peaceful forest scene instead, but in a flash, his forest was consumed by fire—a fire sparked, of course, by a motorcycle accident on a mountain highway.

  And yet, he reminded himself, as long as he was afraid, he was still alive. But then why was it so dark? It took him a few seconds to realize that his eyes were closed. Tentatively, he opened them—

  The brilliant lights of the Vegas Strip passed by in a dizzying blur—as if they had entered warp speed and were shooting through entire galaxies in a matter of seconds.

  A moment later, they were flying through the cold, dark desert.

  This is what it must feel like to be abducted by aliens, he thought.

  Terrifying, yes. But grand.

  He wouldn’t have traded it for the world.

  What a difference a day and a returned mummy make.

  The trio’s reception at home wasn’t at all what they’d expected. Rather than being “grounded for life,” as they’d predicted, Yo-Yoji and Cass and Max-Ernest were greeted like returning war heroes.

  It seemed everybody (meaning mostly their parents) accepted their story about being kidnapped at gunpoint by that villainous magician known as Lord Pharaoh. If he was capable of stealing a mummy, all agreed, why wouldn’t he wrap three kids in linen bandages, throw them into a sarcophagus, and ship them to Las Vegas with only cat food to sustain them? (You will notice that our creative young runaways threw a few reality-based elements into this rather heavily embroidered story.) As for his current whereabouts, Lord Pharaoh was believed to have fled north to Canada under the protection of a ruthless gang of bikers with ties to the Egyptian mafia. The erstwhile Vegas entertainer was now the subject of a nationwide police manhunt.

  Most surprising of all was the greeting they received at school. When they arrived Friday morning, after having missed two days of school, a smiling Mrs. Johnson stood in front of the school gates under a giant banner painted to look like a movie poster.

  RETURN OF THE MUMMY:

  The Defeat of Lord Pharaoh

  Starring

  Cass, Max-Ernest, and Yo-Yoji

  As was clear from the paint all over his clothes, if not from the grin on his face, Daniel-not-Danielle had created the banner. And not a bad job, he had done, too. (Perhaps in the future, comic-book illustration would be his thing.) Even Glob gave them a thumbs-up.

  With cameras flashing, Mrs. Johnson welcomed them back, telling them they were heroes and a credit to their “institution of higher, er, middle school learning.”

  Now, a skeptic might say that it was the presence of journalists that had turned Mrs. Johnson into such a warm and sunny principal. (Like most people in her profession, Mrs. Johnson was very sensitive to the way her school was portrayed in the media.) However, in her defense, after the cameras had left and there were no longer any witnesses, Mrs. Johnson did not suddenly turn back into her old sourpuss self.

  On the contrary, she told her surprised students that she had a special, private congratulatory present for the three of them to share.

  “It hasn’t felt right since you returned it. I just don’t think it belongs to me anymore,” said Mrs. Johnson, taking a familiar Aztec artifact out of her purse. “Who would like to be responsible for this?”

  The boys looked at Cass, and Mrs. Johnson handed her the Tuning Fork.

  As official mummy-rescuing heroes, Cass and Max-Ernest were allowed to go where they wished on a Saturday afternoon without having to employ the least bit of subterfuge. They merely told their parents that they were getting together for a walk.

  True, Cass’s mother did volunteer something about not wanting her daughter to be kidnapped again, but Cass pointed out that if she could escape from a mad magician, she could escape from anyone. Besides, she couldn’t live her whole life in fear of being nabbed and taken (or, rather, shut up in a box and mailed) to Las Vegas, could she? And true, Max-Ernest, who was once again the apple of his parents’ very separate eyes, had to promise both his mother and father individually that he would spend the next Saturday afternoon with them, but he managed to get out of the house without even his baby brother crawling after him.

  The walk was not quite as cheery as it sounds, however. Cass, at least, remained rather sullen most of the way to the circus. Occasionally, her ears would flare red, and it looked as though she might be about to say something, but Max-Ernest hardly noticed. As was often the case, he was speaking enough for the two of them:

  “… or what about starting with a joke that goes like this: ‘Sorry, I was going to bring my graduation speech today, really, I swear, but my dog ate it this morning….’ Get it? It’s a joke on the classic line ‘the dog ate my homework,’ or ‘the cat ate my homework,’ or whatever, only it’s the dog ate my graduation speech—”

  “Huh?” Cass was paying little attention—so little, in fact, that she accidentally put a questioning inflection at the end of her “huh,” which made Max-Ernest explain himself (rather than continuing to babble on without bothering her too much with what he was saying, as she would have preferred).

  “Do you like the joke? It’s my favorite kind, the joke on the joke. I made it up from scratch. I didn’t even read it in a book. I’m writing all my own material now. All the best comics do. Although even the best guys sometimes buy jokes. Did you know you can sell jokes to comedians for fifty dollars each? How ’bout that?”

  Who knew that a single turn on a Vegas stage could do so much for one fledgling comedian’s confidence. And yet there was no doubt that Max-Ernest had a new humorous spring in his step, a comic twinkle in his eye, that he’d never had before. He didn’t just look funny; the possibility existed, for the very first time, that he might be funny.

  Cass, however, was immune to the charms of the new Max-Ernest. She looked at him darkly. “Don’t talk to me about jokes.”

  “But the speech is due tomorrow! If I don’t figure out the joke now, when will I?”

  Cass’s ears glowed red. “Don’t. Talk. About. Jokes.”

  “Uh, OK,” said Max-Ernest, taken aback by the fierceness of her tone.

  “I hate jokes!”

  “OK. We won’t talk about them.”

  “Good.” She walked ahead.

  “You didn’t used to hate them,” said Max-Ernest nervously, following behind her. “I mean, you didn’t like my jokes. But that was because you didn’t think they were funny or because I didn’t tell them right. Not because you hated jokes in general—”

  “That was before.”

  “Before what?”

  Cass gave him a look.

  “You mean with the mummy?”

  Cass didn’t say anything.

  “That means yes.” Max-Ernest was not always very astute about nonverbal clues, but in this case Cass’s meaning was clear.

  Earlier that day, Max-Ernest had tried to press Cass for details about what transpired onstage between her and the mummy, but she wouldn’t tell him anything. He knew she had tried to put the ring on the mummy—he’d seen that much. But he didn’t know whether she had learned the Secret. It was quite strange, really; his memory of the moment was a total blur. All he knew for certain was that Cass had been in a terrible mood ever since then.

  “What does the mummy have to do with jokes?” he asked.

  “It’s not the mummy himsel
f; it’s what he said.”

  Max-Ernest stared at his friend in surprise. “He spoke to you?”

  She nodded.

  “In English?”

  “Uh-huh. Well, I think so.”

  “Wouldn’t he speak Egyptian? If he were going to speak. English wasn’t even invented when he was alive.”

  She hesitated. She hadn’t necessarily meant to talk to Max-Ernest about this. But now that she was talking to him, she had to admit it was a big relief.

  “It was kind of like a dream,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know if the mummy was really talking or if it was more like telepathy. Or maybe he was talking in Egyptian and somehow what he said got magically translated in my brain—?”

  Max-Ernest looked dubious. “On a purely statistical basis, all those things are pretty unlikely.”

  “Well, something happened. I heard him talk to me.”

  “OK, let’s say—hypothetically—that you heard him talk to you,” said Max-Ernest, humoring her. “What does that have to do with jokes?”

  “Well, I guess you could say he told one.”

  “The mummy told you a joke?” Max-Ernest was incredulous.

  She nodded.

  “So he didn’t tell you the you-know-what?”

  “No, well, yes, I mean, that’s what it was—”

  Max-Ernest blinked in astonishment. This was a possibility—one of the few—that he had never contemplated. “The you-know-what is a joke?”

  Cass nodded unhappily.

  “A joke joke or a joke as in, that’s so dumb, it’s a joke.”

  “A joke joke.”

  “A joke joke?”

  Cass nodded. “A joke you know.”

  Max-Ernest, the joke lover, was appalled. “The you-know-what, the thing that nobody is supposed to know, the thing that we’ve done all those things for, the thing that you went back in time to find out—you’re saying that thing is a joke I already know?”

  Cass nodded.

  “Now you’re joking, right?”