Off the Wall (9 page)

The hand was still beckoning. Now it reached out a little farther. The girls could see a pale, skinny arm emerging from behind the totem pole.

“A skeleton!” exclaimed Lucy.

The hand beckoned again. Silently the cat walked closer. Now he was almost within reach of the hand. And then he was there.

He slid his head under the pale fingers as if he wanted the hand to pat him. He curved his neck and pushed his head upward.

The hand stroked his head gently.

But as he came closer, it made a quick grab and grasped him by the scruff of his neck.

“MrrrrggggOWWW!” the cat yowled. In a split second he had twisted himself free, streaked past the girls, and vanished from sight.

The girls hardly noticed that he was gone. They were staring, mesmerized, at the statue. Someone—or something—emerged from behind it.

It was a girl their own age. She paced slowly and steadily toward them, her eyes unseeing and fixed on nothing.

She was certainly acting strange, but she wasn't a mummy.

“Megan!”
gasped Lucy. “What are you doing here?”

Megan didn't answer.

She just kept walking. She would have passed them without stopping if Jane hadn't reached out and touched her arm.

“Jane,” said Megan in a dead-sounding voice.

“She's sleepwalking!” whispered Jane. “What should we do?”

“I think I read online that you're not supposed to
wake someone who's sleepwalking,” said Lucy.

“Fine,” snapped Daria. “Leave her here and let's keep looking for the mummy. She'll find her way back to the Great Hall sooner or later.”

“We
can't
leave her,” said Lucy. “What if she bangs into something and sets off an alarm? She'll die of embarrassment or fright.”

“Well, we can't bring her back. Someone else might wake up, and then how would we explain everything?” asked Daria.

Lucy bit her lip, thinking. “You're right. We'll have to wake her up.” Gently she shook Megan's shoulder. “Megan? Megan? You need to wake up.”

Megan blinked and shook her head a few times. “Hi, guys,” she said. Then suddenly she seemed to realize that she wasn't in bed. “Lucy! What are you doing here? Wait, what am
I
doing here?”

“That's exactly what I was going to ask you,” said Lucy. “Why were you hiding behind that totem pole?”

“Totem pole?” repeated Megan. “What on Earth are you talking about?”

Lucy pointed, and Megan made a face. “Ewww! I was
totally
not hiding behind that dusty thing!” Then she
frowned, thinking. “But I did have a dream that I was hiding behind a tree. I was trying to signal someone, or something.”

“Was it a cat, by any chance?” asked Jane.

“Y-y-y-yes, I think so. Yes, that's what it was. I dreamed a cat was lost and I was following it, and it ran up this huge, huge tree. I knew I had to try to coax it down without scaring it. It came closer and closer, and—and then I don't remember what happened. I woke up and I was here.”

“Megan, do you sleepwalk a lot?” said Lucy.

“Sometimes, if I get nervous.”

“So what you're saying is, you sleepwalk all the time,” put in Daria sourly.

“No, no,” said Megan. “But I did once wake up in bed with my parka on the night before a test. I must have put it on in my sleep. And once I started playing the piano at three in the morning the day before I had a piano recital. So I guess I must have been nervous about this lock-in or something. I'm so lucky that you guys found me!”

Suddenly she frowned in a puzzled way. “But
how
did you find me? What are you doing here, anyway?”

“We were, uh . . .” Jane's voice trailed off.

“We had to . . . ,” Lucy said at the same time.

“We have an errand to attend to,” finished Daria crisply. “It has nothing to do with you. So you might as well go back to the Great Hall. And don't tell anyone you saw us!”

Megan looked horrified. “Go back by myself? I'm not walking through this museum alone!”

“Why not?” said Daria. “Nothing happened to you when you were sleepwalking alone.”

“But now that I'm awake, I'll be afraid something might happen!” Megan looked pleadingly at Lucy.

“I could walk her back,” Jane offered, trying to seize the opportunity to end this little adventure.

“No,” said Daria, simply. “The three of us are in this together.”

Jane was too tired to protest.

“Please let me come with you on your errand. I can help!” Megan whined.

“I don't think that would be a good idea. You wouldn't like it, I promise,” said Lucy.

Megan crossed her arms defiantly. “Well,
I
promise
you
that if you don't tell me, I'll start screaming right
now. And I'm really good at screaming. Do you want to hear me?”

She stretched her mouth open and drew in a big breath.

“Fine,” said Jane. “You can come with us. It's okay.”

Still holding her mouth wide open, Megan made a questioning sound in her throat.

“But you have to promise you won't scream if you come with us,” Jane added.

Megan snapped her mouth shut. “I promise,” she said.

“Wait,” Jane said. “Let us tell you what we're doing before you decide. If you end up not wanting to come, you can walk back to the Great Hall. But either way, you
can't tell anyone
about this.”

Megan nodded, and the three other girls quickly filled her in. The argument about the mummy at dinner. The bet. The search so far. Being chased by the guard. Seeing the cat that led them to her.

When they'd finished, Megan said—pretty calmly, for her—“If you think I'm going back to the Great Hall alone to wait for a mummy to come in and shred me with its hook, you're crazy.”

“Um, Megan? It's pirates who have hooks,” Lucy corrected her.

“Whatever. If a mummy rips me to shreds with its hook, my parents will sue the museum. I'm just saying. I'll go back to the Great Hall, but not without you guys. You have to come with me.”

“You know, maybe we should give up anyway,” said Lucy slowly. “Even if the mummy's out there, it's not standing there waiting for us to find it. It's probably moving around too. And the museum's way too big for us to search the whole thing.” She turned to Daria. “Let's just say you're right. There's no mummy.”

Daria looked very smug. “You sure wasted a lot of time figuring that out.”

“It wasn't a waste of time,” Lucy protested. “We had fun. Didn't we, Jane?”

“I guess we did,” replied Jane. She was surprised to realize that it was true.

And she was happy that this ordeal would soon all be over.

“Now all we have to do is find our way back,” said Daria.

“I knew we'd get lost,” fretted Megan a few minutes later. “Remember how Willow said this place is like a maze? We could be trapped here for weeks! Don't you think we should scream until a guard finds us?”

“No, no! Terrible idea. Look, there's a sign for the Egyptian wing,” said Lucy. “We can retrace our steps to the Great Hall from there.”

“Doesn't it seem like days since we were last here?” said Jane as they passed through the entrance to the Egyptian exhibit.

“More like years.
Centuries.
” Lucy yawned with all of her body. She felt so tired, she could have fallen over right there, but instead she put a hand out to steady herself against the wall. Except Lucy's hand didn't stop at the wall—it went right through—and Lucy almost fell over for real.

“What?” Lucy said to no one in particular.

“What is it?” asked Jane.

Lucy studied the dusty, dark curtain that her hand was gripping. Its color blended perfectly with the paint color of the wall, but even so, Lucy couldn't believe that for all her times in this museum, she'd never noticed it before. She pulled it back to reveal a small hallway.
“Hold on,” she told the other girls. “What's in here?”

“Lucy, let's just go,” said Daria impatiently.

“One second,” Lucy whispered back.

She peeked her head in and then began to walk through. Right now, it was pretty dark, with only the museum's nighttime lights illuminating the displays. It was more of the same stuff she was so used to seeing in the Egyptian wing. Inscribed jewelry, marble jars, and stone statues. Why these were hidden, Lucy had no idea.

And that's when Lucy noticed it. At first she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her, but there it was in front of her, as plain as day.

“Jane, Megan, Daria,” she whispered. Her voice was barely audible.

The other three girls joined her in the corridor and Lucy pointed ahead.

At the end of the small hallway stood a sarcophagus only a little taller than the four girls. Its painted face should have been staring back at them. But it wasn't. Instead the massive stone lid of this sarcophagus had been moved and pushed open. It must have weighed hundreds of pounds.

And with the lid off, the girls could see that there was nothing at all inside the sarcophagus.

Megan had been peeking fearfully over Jane's shoulder. When she finally spoke, she sounded stunned.

“It's empty! Jane, you were—you were right after all.”

Her voice was rising to a scream.

“A mummy
is
loose in this museum!”

“Shut up, Megan!”
hissed Jane, Lucy, and Daria in unison.

“The last thing we want to do is attract another guard's attention,” Jane said.

“But the mummy climbed out! It could be anywhere!” whimpered Megan.

“It did
not
climb out,” Daria said emphatically. “Don't be dumb. There are all kinds of reasons a sarcophagus might be open.”

“Like
what
?” said Megan.

“Well—for cleaning,” said Daria after a second. “Even a sarcophagus probably has to get cleaned once in a while. And look!” She pointed to a dark square on the wall. “All these sarcophagi should have information
plaques. But you can see that this one's card is missing.”

“That doesn't prove anything about the sarcophagus.” Megan sounded sulky.

“Of course it does. It proves they're changing something or moving something or—well—doing
something
with this exhibit. Or maybe there was never any mummy in this sarcophagus. Maybe some grave robber stole it centuries ago. Maybe the museum didn't bother putting a plaque up because this one is just for decoration. Think about it.”

“Well, I don't care. I hate this place. Let's get back to the Great Hall. We go out that way.” Megan pointed at a distant exit sign. And for once, all four girls agreed on something, and they followed Megan out of the exhibit.

“Before we go back, can we eat something?” asked Lucy a few minutes later. “I'm starving. Do you think the restaurant where we had dinner is still open?”

“Now that you mention it, I'm hungry too,” said Jane.

“
I'm
too upset to eat
anything
,” said Megan, dramatically. “But maybe my appetite will pick up when we're out of this exhibit. It would probably be good for me to have a snack.”

There was no chance of getting lost on the way to the
restaurant—it was right off the main lobby. But the girls walked in silence. They were all tired. Even with their discovery of the open sarcophagus, they hadn't actually
seen
anything and were all weary from the night's adventure.

Unfortunately the museum restaurant wasn't going to solve any problems for them. A big security grate had been pulled across the entrance.

Jane sighed as they headed back to the lobby. “Why didn't I eat more at dinner?”

“I think there's a vending machine in the basement, next to the bathrooms,” said Lucy. “Which reminds me that—”