The Mummy's Curse Page 9

  Leila shook her head. “I can’t read it either,” she said.

  Something about the look on her face, though, told me she might have understood at least some of the writing—enough to frighten and disturb her.

  I wondered if anyone else had seen that momentary flicker in her eyes. I hoped not.

  Jurgen held the light high overhead, while Nels taped the papyrus, zooming in close.

  Tommy was still steaming. Now he stopped punching the wall and turned his rage on Samantha instead. “You are so stupid! You brought us all this way, and for what? For nothing!”

  “ME? I’m stupid?” Samantha shot back. “Maybe you’re right—I was stupid to fall for a brainless wonder like you!”

  “Ha! You should talk!”

  “What good are you, anyway? Those big muscles are totally useless, Tommy. And you know where the biggest muscle of all is?” She tapped him on his forehead—hard. “THERE!”

  The video crew immediately started taping the big fight between the leader of the expedition and her boyfriend. Joe tried to get between Tommy and Samantha, and Ahmed tried to restrain Tommy.

  While everyone else was distracted, I took Leila by the hand and led her outside the burial chamber.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “You understood that scroll,” I said. “You know what it says, don’t you?”

  “I …”

  “Tell me the truth, Leila! It’s our only hope!”

  She took a deep breath. “All right,” she said. “I will tell you. You are not arrogant like Samantha and Tommy. I believe I can trust you.”

  She glanced back inside the chamber, where the fight was starting to calm down. “The scroll said, ‘You who have come to desecrate my tomb and steal what is mine—you will die before the next full moon. You shall never possess my greatest treasure, for it lives with me and my beloved. We lie nearby, in eternal peace, where no eyes can see.’”

  “The full moon … that’s tomorrow night, isn’t it?”

  Leila nodded. “We have only one day left to live, it says.”

  “You don’t believe that, do you?”

  “I believe that if we do not leave this place tomorrow, we will all die here.”

  I didn’t disagree with her. The danger did seem to be mounting, with the killer—who was looking more and more like Volsky—on the loose.

  “We’ve got to tell Joe,” I said.

  “Why?” Leila looked alarmed.

  “It’s okay; he’s my brother. He’s on our side, take my word for it.”

  “But he will tell Samantha! He loves her, can you not see it?”

  “He won’t if I tell him not to,” I assured her. “We’ve got to let him in on the secret. Together, the three of us can think of something.”

  We reentered the burial chamber just as the group was plotting its next move.

  “Now, what about Volsky?” Samantha asked. “We’ve got to find him before he gets away with—”

  “With what?” interrupted Leila. “What exactly could he have taken with him? Do you think there was treasure in this chamber? If there had been, there would have been a lot of it.”

  “With the mummy itself, maybe?” Ahmed suggested.

  “Maybe,” Theo said, frowning. “Anyway, we’ve got to find him, and fast. He could have read that scroll easily—and maybe it leads to the treasure, if there is one.”

  “I agree,” I said. “We’ll split up and start searching. Same method—tear off some strips of cloth from your shirts and robes to mark which way you went. We’ll all meet up back here in an hour—hopefully, with Volsky in tow.”

  We broke into teams. I made sure that our team consisted of me, Leila, and Joe. Tommy, Nels, and Jurgen made up a second team. Samantha, Ahmed, and Theo made up the third.

  Theo and Nels carried the two cameras, to record their teams’ progress. Even with everyone’s life on the line, it seemed, the taping still had to go on.

  Once the other two teams had gone off in search of Volsky I told Joe what the inscription on the scroll said.

  He whistled softly. “So this isn’t the real burial chamber at all!” he said.

  “At least we know the real one’s nearby,” I said. “The other two teams will be searching all over the place. We’ll search close to this spot. That gives us an advantage, right?”

  “But without the map, I don’t know how we’re ever going to find it,” Joe said. “With all these passageways, it could take days—weeks, even. And meanwhile, Volsky’s got the map. He can get away with as much treasure as he can carry, and be gone before we find anything!”

  “You think one of us should guard the camels, to make sure he can’t make a run for it?” I asked.

  Joe looked at Leila, then shook his head. “It would have to be one of us,” he said to me. “She wouldn’t be able to overpower him.”

  “Who says I couldn’t?” Leila said, insulted.

  “Besides,” I added, “we’re not even sure Volsky knows where the real burial chamber is. He probably didn’t find that papyrus scroll, or he would have taken it with him.”

  “He has the map,” Joe pointed out. “Corson had found the real chamber, remember, because he said it contained huge amounts of treasure. So the map is everything.”

  “But who says Volsky’s the one who has it?” I argued.

  “Duh, isn’t it obvious?”

  “Not really. The guy who stole it from Sam, we’d decided, worked for Mounir, so he probably stole it for him—except whoever killed him took it before it could be handed over. We can’t assume that was Volsky.”

  “If it wasn’t, then why did he sneak into the burial chamber by himself?” Joe asked.

  “Maybe he just wanted to get there first,” I said. “That guiding fire changed things, remember. It showed us all where the mummy was—or at least, that’s what we all thought till now. Remember, if Volsky had the map, he would have known where the real burial chamber was. But he till had to see what was in the chamber we’d found. The mystery must have been irresistible.”

  “Well, the fact is, without the map, we’re still flying blind,” Joe said with a sigh.

  “No,” Leila said, looking from me to Joe and back at me again. “We are not lost.”

  “Huh?”

  “I have the map,” she said.

  I was floored. “You stole Sam’s map?” I said. “You mean, you—”

  “No, it is not like you think,” she told us. “I did not take it from her tent. And I did not kill the man who took it.”

  “Then how …”

  “I was afraid it would be stolen, and lost to those of us who want to preserve it for the people of Egypt—so I snuck into Samantha’s tent … and I copied it.”

  Her lips curled into a sly smile as she held up her hennaed hands. “Here is the map that will lead us to the mummy’s treasure, and the source of the curse we have all been under.”

  I stared in amazement at the miniature map Leila had drawn on her hands and arms, and wondered at how brave and clever she was.

  If she ever got tired of archaeology, I had a feeling there was a job ready for her at ATAC.

  14

  Secrets of the Tomb

  The Tomb of the Golden Mummy was built as a maze. That much was obvious. If you’ve ever been in one of those hedge mazes they have in cornfields, you’ll know what it felt like.

  But this maze was dark and creepy, and Dr. Volsky was somewhere in the darkness, lurking, lying in wait with whatever weapon he happened to have on him.

  Luckily, while the other two teams were searching blind, we had Leila’s map. I had to hand it to her, she’d been smarter than any of us, copying it onto her hands that way.

  She led us now, seemingly in circles, but the scraps of clothing we left as markers did not reappear, so I guessed we had to be covering new ground.

  For a while we heard the sounds of the other groups. But after descending another staircase and edging through a narrow passageway, we found ou
rselves in a whole new section of the tomb. Here there was only silence—until we heard a scampering noise up ahead in the darkness.

  Frank shone his flashlight that way, but whatever it was dodged behind a corner of the stone wall. We followed, carefully. None of us was armed, after all.

  The skittering sound led us onward. “It is taking us in the right direction,” Leila said, examining the map on her hands.

  We rounded another corner and were greeted by a loud screeching noise. A huge shadow rose up over us—a shadow that wasn’t quite human.

  Frank aimed his flashlight at the source of the shadow: a large, angry-looking monkey! What it was doing in here, and how it managed to feed itself (on spiders, maybe?) was a mystery.

  The monkey scampered away from us, disappearing down a side passageway to the left. “Should we follow it?” I asked.

  Leila checked her hands, then nodded. We followed the monkey’s retreat, rounding a sharp corner—and found ourselves at one end of a long, high-ceilinged passageway. Halfway to the other end of the passage stood Dr. Volsky!

  “Volsky!” Frank yelled. “Stop where you are!”

  Volsky stumbled backward, surprised by our sudden appearance and blinded by the light of Frank’s flashlight shining in his eyes. “You! How did you find me?”

  “Never mind that. Hand over the map!” I ordered.

  “Map? I have no map!” He started slowly backing away from us. We didn’t have to chase him, though—there was nothing but a big, blank wall behind him.

  “Sure you do,” I said. “Corson’s map. You killed the camel driver to get it. Now hand it over.”

  “I killed no one,” he insisted, “and I have no map.”

  “Then how did you find this place?” Frank asked.

  “The same way you did—our monkey friend.”

  “Well, if you didn’t kill anyone,” I asked, “who did?”

  Volsky kept backing away until he bumped up against the wall at the far end of the passage. His hand reached out and touched a stone on the wall.

  Not just any stone, though—this one was carved with an ankh, one of the most common Egyptian hieroglyphs.

  The moment Volsky touched the stone, it slid right into the wall. The next thing we knew, the wall slid open in the middle!

  Volsky staggered toward us. A loud rumbling came from behind the wall that was sliding open.

  Then I saw what was causing it: a huge, black stone ball was rolling right down the passage, headed straight for Volsky—and us.

  Volsky screamed and ran toward us, but not fast enough. The stone ball caught up with him and rolled right over him, crushing him!

  We didn’t stop to think—there was no time for that. We made it to the end of the passageway and leaped out of the way, just as the stone ball hit the wall behind us, smashing into a thousand pieces.

  “Everyone all right?” Frank asked when the smoke and dust cleared.

  “I’m fine,” Leila said.

  “Me too,” I said. “But I think Volsky might not be.”

  We made our way past the jagged pieces of the stone ball, to where Volsky lay in the passageway.

  He was obviously dead—a victim of the Golden Mummy’s curse?

  Beyond his body, the entrance to the Golden Mummy’s real burial chamber was wide open before us, lit by torches. We walked up to the door and peeked inside.

  In the center of the room were two golden sarcophagi—the Golden Mummy and his beloved, I guessed. The coffins were surrounded by piles of priceless objects, all made of gold and jewels.

  We’d found the mummy’s treasure!

  “Aha, there you are!” came a man’s voice from behind us.

  We wheeled around and were blinded by a light much brighter than a flashlight’s.

  “Thank you so much for finding the treasure for me.”

  The light went out, and we saw that it was Theo, holding his camera as usual. He put it down now and held up something else that he drew from his pocket.

  A gun!

  Cocking it and leveling it at us, he said, “It’s too bad you won’t live to enjoy it.”

  15 The Riddle Solved

  “Theo!” Joe said. “Well, I have to say, you had me fooled. I wouldn’t have pegged you for a stone killer.”

  “I was an actor before I became a director,” Theo said, smiling at the compliment.

  “So you killed the camel driver to get the map?” I asked.

  He nodded his head. “Correct. Too bad, it was a complete waste of effort—I didn’t need to kill him, as it turned out. You see, I hadn’t planned on you, Miss Leila, sneaking into Samantha’s tent and copying the map onto your hands.

  “My videotape would have told me everything I needed to know—but by the time I figured that out, I’d already killed both the driver and Mounir.”

  Leila looked at her temporary tattoos now, as if they were some useless thing, or worse. “I did not know about the camera,” she said, “or I would have hidden the map better.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered,” Theo said. “I would have taken care to follow your passage through the tomb the minute you broke away from the rest of the group. There is no way you could have kept me in the dark.”

  “What makes you think you won’t get zapped by the mummy’s curse?” I asked. “After all, look what happened to Dr. Volsky.”

  Theo snickered. “Do you think I believe in that nonsense? I am a self-made man, my boy. I learned how to lie and steal from my own father, and my grandfather, too.”

  “I suppose Jurgen and Nels are in on the whole thing,” Joe said.

  Theo smiled. “My cousins. We’re a very talented family of thieves and con men, not to mention artists.”

  “And murderers,” Joe added. “Don’t forget that.”

  “Now, now. I always try to avoid killing people. So messy.”

  “What about Roger Corson?” I asked.

  Theo’s smile vanished. “Oh. Him. Well, it wasn’t planned that way. I assure you. It just made me furious that he’d given the map to that moronic girlfriend of his. So when I heard that he’d done that, I couldn’t help killing him.”

  “So that was you in the mummy suit,” I said.

  “Just so. And on the boat, also. Costumes are something I know well from my acting days. But I meant what I said—I don’t enjoy killing. I try to avoid it.”

  Theo sighed. “Killing you three will make things even worse. I’m so sorry—not that that’s going to stop me. After all,” he added, looking past us into the chamber, where the incredible pile of gold and jewels twinkled in the light of the wall torches, “that’s quite a haul in there. It would be a shame to let someone else have it.”

  “Like the Egyptian people?” Leila said, her voice full of outrage. “It’s theirs! It belongs to them, and you have no right to take it.”

  Theo sighed sadly. “I have to agree with you, Miss Leila,” he said. “But you see, I’m just a very bad man. I’ve already tried to get rid of you all once—Miss Leila with the snake, and you boys with the scorpions.”

  “What’s the matter,” Joe said, sneering, “you don’t like getting too close to your victims?”

  Theo looked unbearably sad. “So true. You know, you’re making me really hate myself for what I’m about to do.”

  “Then don’t do it!” I shouted. “You don’t have to. If you turn yourself in …”

  “Then what? I’ll get life in prison? Joy.” Theo held up the gun and pointed it right at Joe. “No, I don’t think I’ll do that.”

  Just then, Nels and Jurgen showed up, their pistols aimed at the backs of Ahmed, Tommy, and Samantha, who all held their hands high in the air.

  “Ah, now our party is complete!” Theo said happily. “Good. Now you will please all march down the corridor, that way”

  He pointed away from the treasure chamber and to the left. “Yes, into that long, narrow chamber. That’s it….”

  We did as he said. Theo, Jurgen, and Nels stood in the doorwa
y—the only entrance to the chamber—while the rest of us waited to die.

  “There,” said Theo. “Ah, what a wonderful map Roger Corson made. So instructive.” He reached up and to his right, where another stone etched with an ankh protruded from the wall. “And now, I’m afraid it’s time to say good-bye.”

  He pushed on the stone, and it slid into the wall. There was a heavy, grinding noise, and suddenly, the back wall started moving forward, pushing us toward the entrance where Theo and his gang stood.

  A second later, the half of the floor between us and the entrance gave way, revealing a twenty-foot-long, ten-foot-deep pit, filled with hissing, poisonous snakes.

  We couldn’t leap across the pit to the entrance, and the back wall kept inching forward bit by bit. Soon we would be forced to jump right into the snake pit!

  “Come on, boys,” Theo told Nels and Jurgen, and the three of them went off to gather up the mummy’s treasure.

  “Now what?” Joe asked me as we watched their retreating figures disappear around the corner of the passageway.

  There was no time to think, so I just said what came into my head. “There’s only one way out of here,” I said. “And that’s down into the snake pit and out the other side.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Joe said. “No possible way!”

  “We’re done for!” Tommy said. He turned to Samantha, furious. “Now look at the mess you’ve gotten us into!”

  “Me?” Sam shot back, jumping into the argument and forgetting completely about the fact that our lives were about to be snuffed out. “This is all your fault! You were the one who interviewed the video crew and recommended them!”

  “Well, they were cool guys!” Tommy said. “How was I supposed to know they were crooked?”

  “Just be quiet, the two of you!” Leila cried out, in a voice that made them stop at once.

  “If you’ll permit me,” Ahmed spoke up in the silence. “I think I may be able to help us get out of here.”

  “You?” Tommy said with a snicker. “What are you gonna do, cook up something for the snakes?”