Spirit and Dust - By Rosemary Clement-Moore Page 0,83
tuned, so well balanced, no one part stood out. The harmonic vibration of it made me feel a little drunk.
“Hey,” said Carson. “Come back to earth and have a map.”
“Thanks.” I unfolded it, reading as I trailed behind him. He gave our tickets to a guard and our raincoats and my umbrella to the coat check attendant, all while I got my bearings from the exhibit descriptions on the diagram.
“The man-eating lions of Tsavo,” I read. “That would be one of the things ringing my bell. The Grainger Hall of Gems. Haunted jewelry would do it.” Once I identified the things tripping my radar, I felt more secure, knowing what to avoid. “Oh, super. The Inside Ancient Egypt exhibit features twenty-three human mummies. That would definitely do it.”
Carson plucked the map from my hands, forcing me to look around. We stood in a vaulted marble hall that made the twenty-foot totem poles beside me seem like a pair of toothpicks. It looked as long as a football field. Columns lined the first floor, leading to the wings on either side, and above that was a gallery that wrapped around the central space. In the middle were two full-grown elephants—taxidermic specimens, that is—and far, far on the other end was a dinosaur.
I may have squealed with excitement.
“Throttle back, Sunshine,” Carson said with a laugh.
“I can’t help it.” I bounced on the balls of my feet in spite of myself. “I love the T. rex.”
“Of course you do.”
The Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton—the most complete ever found, according to the brochure—had been posed as if frozen midrun, her body stretched out, her tail horizontal to balance her gigantic skull and rudder her massive body through the Cretaceous swamp. Her bones had a beautiful fluidity that simulated motion so well, I almost thought I was Seeing her with my psychic senses.
Of course, remnants required a human involved somewhere, and there were no people around when dinosaurs ruled the earth. On the other hand, humans had dug up these fossils and cleaned them and mounted them with dedication and care. She was viewed by millions of people, and even had a name. Sue. Maybe she did have some kind of remnant.
But dinosaur bones weren’t why we were there. Though just for a moment, I wished they were. I wished Alexis were safe and Maguire were arrested and Carson were happy. I wanted to hold his hand with no ulterior motive, and see if we had anything to talk about if we weren’t chasing jackals and running from everything else.
“We should get on with it,” I said, squaring my shoulders, at least figuratively.
The museum would have been crowded if it were smaller. It was Friday afternoon, and the place was full of schoolkids on field trips. It was hard to maintain the proper tension levels about the twenty-three mummies while fourth graders raced to the ancient Egypt exhibit, daring each other to descend into the replica tomb.
Mastaba. The proper name for the tomb entrance slid into my mind as if someone had whispered it.
Carson and I let the fourth graders get ahead of us and entered the antechamber of the tomb, hung with slabs of real hieroglyphs that made my vision go double between the then-and-there and the here-and-now.
“You okay?” Carson asked. “Give me a heads-up if you’re about to go under.”
“I won’t go under.” At least, I hoped not. Twenty-three mummies in here and, somewhere, an artifact that might transform their remnants into unlimited power. There were only about a hundred or so other ways this could go wrong.
The stairs to the exhibit-tomb were authentically dim, but they had inauthentic handrails. Below, the light was faint and I sensed the rustle and flicker of spirit traces, not decently sleeping, as the dead should be, but waiting and watching. Curious about what I was doing there.
That made twenty-four of us.
There was a mummy case at the bottom of the stairs. Wisps of human memory clung to it like cobwebs, brushing pinpricks over my psyche as I passed. I’m just visiting, I told anything that remained. You’re safe from me.
In the next chamber, kids jostled each other, pressing their faces close to see the mummies, dark as old wood, behind the glass. Some were at rest in their cases, some still cocooned in their wrapping. Some were not. One had been unwrapped from the neck up—layers and layers of linen pulled back like swaddling around the man’s head, dried skin over hawkish nose and sunken features.