How to Curse in Hieroglyphics (13 page)

As they ran, Pilot and the twins noticed a faint pulsing of strange, dancing lights—shimmering shades of purple and green—that seemed to be coming from one of the holes on the “back nine.”

“There,” Cheryl pointed out when they got close enough. The steely-bright light of fierce determination had returned to her gaze, and her eyes gleamed purposefully behind her glasses. “The thirteenth hole. The ‘Giza Squeeza.'”

The theme of the old mini-golf range ran along the lines of “It's a Small World”—partly because it was mini, and partly because each hole featured an homage to one sort of exotic international landmark or another. There was a “North Pole Hole,” complete with igloo, polar bear and putter-wielding penguins (on vacation, no doubt, from the
South
Pole); a “Paris Par-Three,” with an Eiffel
Tower and a putt-through Arc de Triomphe; and the “Pyramid Putt-Putt,” to name just a few.

That last one the girls had nicknamed the “Giza Squeeza” because, aside from an almost impossible putting ramp that circumnavigated the miniature pyramid, there was a tiny replica of the famous Sphinx of Giza that players had to negotiate. When the range's animatronic features were powered up and operational, the Sphinx's front paws would open and close, and if you didn't get the timing just right on your putt, they would squeeze shut, popping your golf ball up through the air and out of bounds.

“Boy,” Cheryl whispered, glancing around, “Pops has got his work cut out for him …”

It had been some time since the twins had visited, and while there was shiny new paint on some of the structures and fresh-laid Astroturf on others, the course was certainly looking worse for wear on the holes Pops had yet to refurbish. The “Leaning Tower of Putts-a” on the Italian-themed hole was leaning so much it was almost standing straight! And the wings on the foam-rubber “stone” gargoyles perched atop the Gothic battlements of “Castle Putt-sylvania” were droopy with age and neglect.

All in all, the mini-golf range provided a perfectly creepy setting for a showdown with a—

“Whoa!” Cheryl spun around as something low and fast ran past.

“Yeep!” Tweed jumped up onto a bench as something else swiped at the heel of her boot.

“Dang!” Pilot did a hoppy two-step as two more shadows skittered past him at knee level, hissing and gurgling.

Three flashlight beams swung wildly to converge on the space beneath the miniature span of San Francisco's “Golf-engate Bridge,” where four pairs of glowing orange eyes stared out at the intrepid trio. What the wash of flashlight illumination revealed was … short. And scaly.

In quadruplicate.

Four little monsters stood on hind legs, swishing stubby, reptilian tails angrily. They had lumpy, greenish hides and toothy little snouts beneath bulging eyes. And they looked as if they were all dressed in identical overalls—some sort of evil hench-creature uniforms, perhaps—although it was hard to tell in the gloom.

What wasn't hard to tell was their evil hench-creature intent. They snarled and bared their fangs and made swiping, clawing gestures with chubby, clawed front paws. One of them seemed to be chewing on a brightblue pacifier that was stuck between its snaggleteeth.

“What in the Sam Hill
are
those things?” Pilot wondered aloud, a note of fear creeping into his voice.

Cheryl shook her head, knocked speechless by the sight of the repulsive creatures, and shifted a bit so she was standing half behind Pilot. Whatever they were, the scaly little beasties weren't on the side of the good guys.

Tweed's eyes were wide and her jaw dropped open.

Cheryl thought her unflappable cousin might actually be on the verge of shrieking in terror. But, instead, Tweed lifted her arm, pointing to the lumpy little apparitions one by one.

“John …” she murmured, “Paul … George … and …”

The last reptilian creature pounded its fat green fists on the ground.

“Bingo.”

Cheryl gasped.

Pilot blinked and did a double take at the pint-sized monsters. “What?” He glanced back and forth from the twins to the critters. “What are you … d'you mean … those things … no
way
…”

“They've been transformed!” Cheryl cried, aghast.

Indeed they had.

“Maybe this is too much for us to handle,” Pilot said, the uneasiness returning to his tone. “Maybe we should just go get their parents or something.”

But Cheryl and Tweed had other ideas. They'd seen enough monster movies to know how Pilot's suggested course of action would likely play out.

“We have to find a way to turn them back to normal before their parents see them,” Tweed said.

Cheryl nodded in agreement. “Like you said before, Flyboy. Grown-ups don't handle stuff like this very well. Even if we could make anyone believe us, they'd probably
just go all pitchfork-and-torch-mob and burn the mini-putt to the ground.”

The trio swung their lights around, and the crocified Bottoms boys slithered backward into the shadows, out of reach of the flashlight beams.

“The light,” Tweed said. “They don't like the light! Keep shining those beams at them … and … uh-oh.”

As the words left her mouth, Tweed's beam began to flicker and dim. Followed moments later by Cheryl's. Which, of course, made perfect sense. If the girls knew anything about monster confrontations, it was this: the minute you figured out you needed your flashlight, the batteries would invariably up and die. Even though the situation was grave, it was somehow comforting to know that the movies had yet to lie to them.

Cheryl gulped nervously and smacked the side of the light in her hand.

Pilot sighed. At least his batteries seemed to be in working order. “And you were nagging
me
about equipment checks,” he said.

Well, that goaded Cheryl out of the urge to panic and into stunt-double mode.

“Stay here!” she said, tossing her fading light to Tweed. “Keep ‘em at bay!”

Tweed nodded grimly and Cheryl performed a (somewhat unnecessary, but only slightly awkward) shoulder roll, sprang to her feet and took off at a zigzagging run. She disappeared around the other side of
the igloo, heading full tilt in the direction of the range's maintenance shed. The twins knew where Pops kept a spare set of keys: underneath a slightly sinister-looking garden gnome tucked away in a bed of overgrown shrubbery. Cheryl dove headfirst over the hedge, snatched up the keys, unlocked the door and burst inside. One of the things Pops had been working on in his spare time was installing floodlights, so that the putting range could operate at night.

“Time is of the essence, partner,” Tweed called out, and Cheryl glanced back out the shed door to see the croc-tots closing in on her cousin and Pilot, surrounding them on three sides. Pilot was swinging his flashlight beam wildly, but it wouldn't hold them off for much longer.

“She means hurry it the heck up!” he hollered frantically.

Cheryl knew that at least a few of the lights were already in working order, but she didn't know which controls operated them. With no time to figure it out, she just cranked over every control in the place. Then, she threw the main power switch. Through the dusty little window of the shed, Cheryl saw spotlights flood the course with white light. The whole putting range started to creak and groan as the various motors driving the animatronic displays wheezed to life. It was eerie.

A grey pall of fog, belched out by a smoke machine over at the San Francisco hole, rolled across the greens,
gathering in drifts between the miniature landmarks. The penguins by the igloo skated and swung their little clubs. The drawbridge on the creepy castle rose and fell, chains clanking like an uneasy ghost's. The sphinx stirred to creaky life, paws swinging open and shut. And there, standing atop the sphinx's broad back, one sandalled foot planted imperiously on its head, was Zahara-Safiya herself.

And
boy
did she look ticked off.

10

AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTEEN HOLES

L
it up by the sudden wash from the spotlights, the menacing croc-tots retreated toward the Pyramid Putt-Putt, where their undead mistress glared and pouted, spouting rapid-fire orders at them. The mutated Bottoms boys, in typical fashion, ignored her, preferring to tussle with each other and chew on the miniature setpieces. Obviously, the mummy princess hadn't known just what she was in for when she'd chosen the fearsome foursome to act as her magically souped-up minions.

As for Her Royal Highness Zahara-Safiya … she wasn't exactly what Pilot and the twins had been expecting. For one thing, she didn't exactly fit the movie mummy standard of bandage-wrapped and shambling. In fact, with a little less eyeliner and sneakers instead of sandals, she probably could have passed for one of their
schoolmates. Similar in height to Cheryl and Tweed, she had dark brown eyes and black hair styled in elaborately coiffed braids that swept to her shoulders, ending in pointy gold beads that made it look as though she wore a helmet made of scorpion tails. It was a striking optical illusion. In the same way, the golden scales on the snake bracelets she wore on her arms caught the light in ways that made the jewelled reptiles seem to wriggle and writhe just like
real
snakes.

“That
is
just a trick of the light, right?” Cheryl asked as she joined her companions. “The snakes and the bug hair?”

“I hope so,” Pilot murmured back.

“So do I,” Tweed said.

The only evidence that the Princess was—or, at least, had been—subject to any kind of mummification process was the long, faded length of bandage wrapping that trailed behind her. One end of it was stuck to the heel of the Princess's golden sandal.

Cheryl giggled with nervous laughter when she saw that.

Really? For a technically terrifying monster type, Zahara-Safiya was kind of scrawny. She didn't look so tough. Just a little grumpy.

Cheryl had a thought. If the Princess was just another kid, like them, then maybe they should take the “high road” approach. Be friendly. Neighbourly. Nonthreatening.

“Um … hiya!” Cheryl stepped forward and greeted the Princess with a friendly wave. “Welcome to Wigg—”

That was as far as she got before one of the scarab beetles swarming at Zahara-Safiya's feet, on command, suddenly sprang up into the air on crazy, whirring wings, and burst into a bright-green ball of roaring flame … which the Princess snatched out of the air bare-handed and hurled straight at Cheryl's pigtailed head.

“Whoa!” Cheryl exclaimed, yanking the visor of her welder's mask down in front of her face. The beetle-bomb bounced off the industrial flame-retardant surface of the shield as Cheryl dove for cover, and then ricocheted a few times off various miniature landmarks before disappearing with a gaseous
POOF!

“Hey!” Tweed shouted in outrage, nocking a Nerf arrow in her crossbow and pulling the trigger. “That's my cousin you're trying to barbeque!”

Before they'd left the barn, Tweed had taken a few extra precious minutes and used a Shake ‘n Bake baggie to coat the spongy projectiles with chili powder pilfered from Pops's kitchen spice rack (the girls liked to sprinkle it on their popcorn when they watched westerns). While the chili-darts might not have packed the same punch as a flaming scarab beetle, even an indirect hit would hopefully send the Princess into a debilitating sneezing fit.

But a hit—indirect or otherwise—seemed to be beyond Tweed's (admittedly pretty excellent) marks
manship. Zahara-Safiya moved with the speed of a desert wind. Her slender form blurred as she leaped from the back of the sphinx and dodged, in a flash, behind the pyramid. A string of angry curses echoing through the night followed in her wake.

“Holy moly!” Tweed exclaimed.

“Not really the shambling type, is she?” Pilot said over his shoulder as he kept an eye out for croc-Bottoms.

“I'll say!” Tweed chewed on a knuckle, calculating furiously. “I'll have to revise my calculations—”

“Or
… you could just duck and run for cover!” Pilot grabbed Tweed and pulled her to safety, diving to join Cheryl where she was hiding behind Abraham Lincoln's big stone head on the “Mount PuttsMore” hole, just as another beetle-bomb screamed past them, trailing a tail of bright-green flame. “Our mummy girl's not foolin' around!”

“Flyboy has a point …” Cheryl panted, pushing up her mask. There was a scorch mark on the front of it.

“Don't I always?” Pilot said. “That girl there?” He pointed at the Princess, who at that moment was hopping nimbly up the side of the “Giza Squeeza” pyramid like a big-horned sheep up a miniature mountainside, lobbing bug-grenades in their direction as she went.
“She's
the difference between stop-motion special effects and the computer-generated ones I was telling you about!”

If his analogy was true, Cheryl thought, perhaps for their next programming effort—assuming they survived
that long—well, perhaps they
should
investigate booking a few of the more current cinematic releases. Of course, that was a discussion for another time. Perhaps one when they weren't rendered quite so speechless by what they saw next.

One of Pops's floodlights was a bit twitchy and slow to power up. But suddenly it did, flooding the shadowy space behind the mini-sphinx with light. And then Pilot and the twins spotted the shambling figure that had been lurking there. Startled by the light, the creature—whatever it was—spun and threw what appeared to be a golf ball at the floodlight, shattering the bulb with uncanny accuracy.

At the same time, it made a noise that sounded an awful lot like, “Glaack!”

Pilot swung his flashlight beam over.

The creature hissed and threw a hand up over his face, but not before Pilot—and Cheryl and Tweed—saw the horrifying truth … that Artie Bartleby, like the Bottoms boys, had been transformed! Or, not exactly like the Bottoms boys. Maybe he was still in the process
of
transforming. Or his mutation had been interrupted somehow. That was probably more like it. Because, truthfully, whatever it was he had become, he didn't look quite … done. Whereas the toddler quartet looked almost entirely reptilian, Artie looked more like someone's half-finished art project—an abstract sculpture of a crocodile that had been left untended over the weekend.