The Egyptian Building

Chapter 4

She woke the next morning with the smell of coffee in her nose and found Alice and Dirk in the kitchen hunched hollow-eyed over their mugs. Kevin was already suited up for work and adjusting his tie before collecting a kiss from Dirk and heading out. Dirk was dressed for work too, but since he was a personal trainer at a health club, his dress for success was a dark blue track suit and immaculate sneakers.

Alice was still huddled in her robe. She hadn't even brushed her hair before coming downstairs and her skin was pale and damp. Elizabeth paused on her way to the coffeepot to touch the back of her hand to her sister's forehead. Alice's skin was cold to the touch. "Did you have any more dreams?" she asked.

Alice shook her head and took another sip of coffee. "I avoided the whole dream thing by not sleeping any more. I feel like crap. I'd call in sick and stay home and sleep, except sleep is the problem."

"Last night Thomas said he'd find a way to stop it from happening." Elizabeth poured herself some coffee and carried it to the library where she found Thomas sitting at a desk and paging through a heavy volume laid out before him. It was one of the locking ones and the halves of the locks flopped out onto the desk to either side.

He leaned back in his chair when she entered the library.

"Any luck?" she asked.

"Not exactly. I found quite a lot about curses in general and breaking them, but nothing specific for our case." He gestured at a waist high stack of books beside the desk. "We have a surfeit of last resorts. The selection of first resorts is rather slim."

"Slim, like?"

"I found one vague reference to mummy curses in an old apothecary's handbook to the effect that one shouldn't make cursed mummies into medicine. All the other mummy-related information is of the pulp novel variety, I'm afraid." He opened a desk drawer and removed a stack of tattered paperbacks which he placed on the desk. "Based on Mummy from Beyond the Grave, we should try to find a scroll conveniently dropped near the mummy and read it aloud, at which point the mummy will wake up and try to kill us, but I'm sure we can take a mummy. All the rest are variations on that. According to Mummy of Doom, we should read the writing on the mummy's shroud aloud, except mummies don't have shrouds, and the mummy will attempt to kidnap a maiden. In Curse of the Were-Mummy's Jewels—"

"That is not a real book."

He held it up so she could see the cover. "No lie. They give the mummy special tea in this one. Then the mummy bites everyone. Here's anthology of mummy stories. Some people turn the mummies into slaves who do their evil bidding, like eliminating pesky rivals for the maiden's hand."

"So, basically, you don't know what to do about the mummy."

"I couldn't find any mummy-specific suggestions, no, at least not credible ones. But we can try to break the curse, or cast out the mummy's spirit from Alice, although it would only try to possess her again."

"Can't you squish energy streams, or the ether, or whatever, so that the curse goes away?"

"A curse doesn't work like that. A curse is more of an infinite ordering of the ether folded into a very small space. A rather poor analogy would be a black hole, which bends everything that gets near it. A curse tends to order things, like a seed crystal in a solution."

Elizabeth sat down on a small horsehair sofa by the desk. She tucked her feet up under her and warmed her hands on her coffee mug. "Is breaking a curse like doing the warding spell that we did at Halloween?"

"It's not dissimilar in the sense that you have to perform a spell to break a spell. There are some we can try tonight. If they don't work, we can let Miss Price have a shot at it. Given her family history, she may have better insight into this situation anyway."

"Miss Price says she's not a Price Collection Price," Elizabeth said. "Can't you do it?"

"She's lying," said Thomas. "In any case, as I am cursed myself, my involvement would likely make the curse worse."

"How do you know she's lying?"

"Because when the Prices brought their Egyptian plunder back to Virginia, I read all about it in the papers. She was there. She was involved with the excavation and she assisted with the original installation of the collection in the museum. She wrote a number of papers that were published in some archaeology journal or other."

"But that's not possible," Elizabeth said. "She's only like, what? forty years old? The collection was brought back in 1910. It must have been her mother or grandmother."

"That's what she wants you to think. She's a lot older than that, you can take my word for it. Ask her about it today. In fact, she probably has more information about mummies and curses than I do. She certainly couldn't have less. I think we should leave the whole thing to her." Thomas rose from his chair and stretched out his back from force of corporeal habit.

Dirk called a goodbye from the doorway. As he lifted his arm to wave, Alice shuffled under it into the library. Yawning, she nestled beside Elizabeth on the horsehair sofa and leaned her head on her sister's shoulder. "What are you talking about? Am I under some kind of spell?"

"You're under a curse," Elizabeth said. "And we are going to break it. Tonight if we can figure out how to do it."

"I thought you were going to that Christmas party thing with Bob tonight," Alice said.

Elizabeth slapped her forehead. "Oh, that's right! Can I borrow your dress that's red and black at the same time?"

"Sure," said Alice. "If I can borrow your black mean-lady boots for my next date with Museum Boy."

"Only if it's not raining," Elizabeth said.

"I'm glad to see you girls are taking the curse so seriously. I'd hate to have to be dealing with frivolous—"

"Point taken, Thomas. I'll be back from the party before midnight and Alice isn't going out this evening, is she?"

Alice shook her head. "Have to work late and I'm too tired. Besides, Museum Boy has got some Thing happening anyway. So what kind of a curse is it anyway?"

"It's a mummy curse," Elizabeth said.

Alice perked up. "Oh! From the museum? Is it because we got too close to it? You're the one who touched the sarcophagus and started chanting. How come it didn't get you?"

"It isn't the museum mummy. It's a mummy here in the house that somebody forgot about," Elizabeth said, with a pointed look at Thomas.

Alice bounced off the couch and did a little dance. Elizabeth's coffee cup went tumbling to the floor and Elizabeth after it.

"That is so cool," Alice said. "How do you forget a mummy? I mean, it's too bad about being cursed but, hey, not everybody's got mummies just propped up in closets. Where is it?"

Elizabeth blotted spilled coffee from the rug with the tail of her bathrobe. "It's upstairs in one of the third floor rooms. But—"

Alice, suddenly energized at the prospect of something gruesome, scampered out of the library and started up the stairs. Elizabeth and Thomas followed more slowly. Alice was already up on the third floor while they were rounding the second floor landing.

"So, how do you break a curse?" Elizabeth asked. "Like in sort of a generic way."

"It depends on the curse, the standard procedure is to call upon the same powers that were called upon when the curse was made and ask for it to be undone. There's usually some kind of offering involved. For curses like this, the doomed lovers in the afterlife business, one usually needs items belonging to both of the lovers. Our chances of getting something that belonged to this mummy's boyfriend are not very good, to say the least. But we do have her property in the form of the mummy case, various amulets and charms that will be in her wrappings, and whatever else might be in that crate. It's possible that the canopic jars of her organs may have been included in the sale of the mummy as well."

"Yuck. You mean we have to undo the mummy wrappings? And look in jars of her dried up innards?"

"No, of course not. You can continue to have nightmares about suffocation and let your sister stayed cursed. It's entirely up to you. Be as squeamish as you want."

Ghostly in the gloom and her pink robe, Alice stood over the open crate gazing down on the mummy case.

Elizabeth turned on the Tiffany lamp, but it failed to make an appreciable dent in the dimness. "Is the lamp cursed too?"

"It's only a four watt bulb," Thomas said.

Elizabeth went over to the second window, which still had its shade pulled down all the way. She tried to raise the shade and it fell off its brackets. She jumped back and sneezed in the cloud of dust that billowed up from the floor. Since her robe was already half soaked with coffee, she mentally put it in the laundry hamper and wiped her nose on her sleeve. She joined Alice beside the open crate.

The girls brushed away the rest of the straw from the top of the mummy case. The gilt face painted on the mummy case glowed more brightly than the weak December light should have allowed. The serene wide eyes gazed steadily up towards the heavens, or at least the ceiling. The painting depicted a young woman richly dressed with a golden collar and holding a staff and a rattle. Her headdress was picked out in tones of cobalt, ebony, and scarlet, with an empty throne above her forehead. The details were undimmed by the passage of millennia.

"Is she in such good shape because of that preservation spell you have on the house?" Elizabeth asked Thomas. "Which evidently doesn't extend to the window shades?"

"Yes, but," Thomas said. "This mummy was a few thousand years old before it arrived in this house. You would think it might show some evidence of the passage of time."

"Maybe it's a fake," Alice said. "It looks like new."

"We can ask Miss Price about it," Elizabeth said. "Thomas says we may have to ask her to break the curse anyway. He says she's a Price Collection Price."

"No kidding? I would totally believe that. Especially after that picture in the slide show. How can you tell if it's cursed?"

"You mean aside from the nightmares and the sleepwalking and the chanting?" said Thomas.

"You can tell by the aura," Elizabeth said. Alice laughed at her. "Hey, I can see auras now, don't laugh at me. Besides, Thomas found the archaeologist's notebooks and they said the curse was written all over the inside of the tomb except where it got water damage."

"Really?" Alice leaned over the mummy case and silently examined her nemesis. Her long golden hair fell over her shoulder and the ends brushed across the serene face of the cursed priestess. The dark holes in her aura grew darker.

Elizabeth rubbed her eyes. When she glanced at her sister sideways, she could perceive Alice's shimmering, besmirched aura as an overlay to her visual perception of her sister's form. When she looked at her sister directly, the impression of the aura disappeared.

The telephone rang and shattered the quiet of the girls' breathing and of Thomas fiddling with the notebooks as he watched them. Elizabeth ran over to Bob's room and picked up the extension.

"Do you girls know what time it is?" Miss Price's voice demanded. "It's the week before Christmas and I am unlocking the front door in fifteen minutes. You should have been here a half-hour ago."

"We'll be there right away," said Elizabeth. "We've got … stuff to tell you." She ran back into the other room where Alice stood gazing raptly at the mummy case and dragged her sister down the stairs.

They made it to Carytown in record time. Their lateness worked in their favor as rush-hour was totally over. What didn't work in their favor were the clots of shoppers attempting to parallel park extremely large vehicles built for broad, twentieth century suburban roads, not nineteenth century city streets. Elizabeth drove down the alleys for several blocks and pulled her truck into the one free employee space behind the bookstore. The other spaces were occupied by Miss Price's car and an illegally parked Jeep. They ran in the back door and Miss Price glared at them from behind the cash register where she was already ringing up sales.

Alice hurried to the register to receive terse instructions and a rather disturbed look from Miss Price who must have picked up on Alice's cursedness. Good. It would be that much easier to get her attention for a chat about curses and mummies at some point during the day. Unless Miss Price was just annoyed about Alice's sweater being on inside out which, given Alice's tendency towards costume, she probably wouldn't even notice.

Elizabeth ran upstairs to her mail order department and stockroom, where she was confronted with twelve unopened boxes of new books to be checked into the inventory management system, three days' worth of unopened mail, and seventy-nine orders neatly arranged in rows on the floor waiting to be packed.

Elizabeth quailed.

She quailed for precisely ninety seconds which she timed with the sweep hand on her watch, then she picked up a utility knife and, instead of opening a vein, attacked the first of the boxes. She worked ferociously, scanning in the books and checking the original order against the packing invoices. She stacked the books neatly beside the shelves where they would eventually, probably sometime in January, get shelved. It was more likely that staff would run up into the stockroom, grab books at random, and run back down and throw them on the shelves.

She grabbed a tape dispenser and began packing up the orders. As she worked, she tried out her developing aptitude for seeing auras with her eyes open. Her goal was to keep packing without falling over from the distraction of the auras. This slowed her down, but given the nature of the job, she figured that anything that kept her awake and moving was more helpful than not.

With the multicolored ethereal overlay in her peripheral vision, the world looked downright festive. Bands of green streamed along the bookshelves in the stockroom and the people in the bookstore below moved around beneath her feet like brightly colored fish on a reef. It was like being in a glass bottomed boat, except when she looked directly at the floor and the auras disappeared.

A movement of red light from the shoe store drew her attention. She recognized the aura she had seen previously and which she assumed was Becky's. The red mist of the shoes she could almost ignore. Another aura appeared in the shoe store. Not a customer, she figured, when the two auras moved together up the stairs at the back of the shoe store and into the room on the other side of the wall from where Elizabeth stood, all packing forgotten, with her eyes closed.

This new aura was red shot with gray. It couldn't be Jennifer, whose aura was gray shot with red. This one must be Carl. Carl, as one of the avatars of the Apocalypse, he had represented War, and he was also Dirk's ex-boyfriend, Marla's brother, and Titania's half-brother. If he and Becky were cooking something up it would be to the disadvantage of Elizabeth, her household, Miss Price, Miss Price's coven, or possibly everyone in the greater metropolitan area. She wasn't entirely sure how much power they could muster between them, but she had no doubt they could be inconvenient.

Elizabeth set down her tape dispenser and drifted closer to the wall. She kept her eyes open and her feet under her, no accidental astral projection was going to leave her lying on the floor with the books this time. She squeezed between a filing cabinet and the table on which her computer rested, along with the mail that she should be opening instead of pressing her ear against the wall. The walls of the bookstore were brick and at least a foot thick, but she had located one of the closed up doorways from when the upstairs rooms were connected. The doorway had been blocked up with plywood, not bricks. At a spot somewhere down around her knees, the plywood had been gouged away by some long gone office equipment. She contorted herself so she could press her ear against the damaged area. She closed her eyes and tuned into the auras as if that might assist with her listening.

It didn't help, but she allowed herself to pretend that some of the whispering she heard might have been from next door rather than from the customers in the bookstore downstairs. When she thought she heard the word Marla, she pressed her head harder against the wall. She felt a splinter niggle its way into her ear canal. She was about to give up and go back to work when a third aura joined them.

This one she recognized instantly as Titania's hot white light. Titania strode into the shoe store and suddenly appeared beside the other two, bypassing the mundane process of walking up the stairs. Elizabeth jerked away from the wall and banged her head against the filing cabinet.

"Ow!" She raised a hand to her forehead and froze when she sensed the same focus of attention that had stabbed into her mind at the museum. She held her breath and slowly crept away from the wall. She thought little mouse thoughts as she moved quietly back to her work table and picked up the tape dispenser. I'm not thinking of anything. I'm just picking up this book here and placing it in this box. Then I'm sprinkling these little Styrofoam worms on it and then I'm closing up the box and sticking the label on. Oh yes, nothing going on here at all, just this boring little job. Slowly her sense of being watched faded. She felt like the mouse when the cat has turned its back and sat down a few steps away to wash his face.

I'm just picking up this book here and putting it in this box.

Titania would be a cat, of course, a mean cat, pure white with green eyes. The sort of cat who purrs, but scratches without warning.

The sort of cat who never goes hungry.

Slowly Elizabeth relaxed and allowed herself to see more than what was right before her. The tiniest bit of awareness of the three auras, red, red-gray, and white, showed her how they clustered together as Titania spoke with Carl and Becky, probably giving them instructions, Elizabeth thought, and then drifted apart. First Titania left the bookstore. Then Carl. For a while longer, Becky bumbled around the store like a bee in a flower garden all alone.

Elizabeth reached for the next order to pack and her hand met air. She had packed them all while she was busy thinking like a mouse. She moved all the packed boxes to the downstairs staging area and got to work on the unopened mail.

Time passed. The staff of the bookstore took their lunch breaks on a staggered schedule. Alice hid up in the stockroom to eat her lunch while Elizabeth joined Miss Price downstairs in the store.

"It's so busy," Alice told her. "I've never seen it like this before. Miss Price is practically gleeful, but she keeps giving me these weird looks."

"Your sweater's on inside out," Elizabeth said.

By late afternoon, they were all reeling with fatigue and the girls still hadn't found a moment to ask Miss Price about Alice's curse. Around about five o'clock they were all three huddled on the floor behind the cash register eating cookies.

Trip's sister Jennifer walked in. She leaned over the counter and hissed, "I need to talk with you."

Miss Price rose and brushed cookie crumbs from her hands. "What on earth could you possibly have to say to us?"

The girls rose up behind her.

"Yeah," said Alice.

"Want a cookie?" asked Elizabeth. She held out the jar and Jennifer shuddered.

"It's about Titania. She's planning something," Jennifer whispered, leaning forward.

The sounds of the bookstore faded away. Elizabeth and noticed a small quick motion of Miss Price's wrist and a flash of green light.

"And you want to tell us all about it?" asked Miss Price.

"Yes." Jennifer's eyes rolled desperately and she gripped the edge of the glass counter till her knuckles turned white. "I need your help. She wants to trade my brother for Marla. When you all messed up the paying of the tithe and the devil took Marla, Titania vowed to get her back. To do that she has to make another tithe and she's decided to use Trip. I need you to help me stop her, like you stopped her from taking that spirit from your house."

"You can stop her yourself," Elizabeth said. "All you have to do is, when she tries to take him, hold on to him and don't let go."

"It can't be me," Jennifer said. "She'll stop me somehow. She'll know. And she's stronger than I am."

"How about your mother," suggested Alice. "I've seen her. She has arms like a wrestler."

"I can't," whispered Jennifer. "I can't let her know what we've done, what I've become."

"Of course you can. All you have to do is tell her that you decided to become an avatar of one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse so that you could get unlimited power, immortality, and be really skinny," said Alice. "Not that she'll believe you. But I'm sure if you tell her she has to hold onto her darling son while he gets changed into a block of ice, a bear, and what all, or else he goes to hell, she'll be right there with you."

"She'd take my mother too," cried Jennifer. "Titania won't stop with Trip. She remembers what you did to her sister. She'll come after you too."

A shopper carrying a stack of books wandered towards them, took in the tense tableau, and suddenly became absorbed with a display of teddy bears in Santa hats.

"I noticed," said Elizabeth, "that Titania met with Becky and Carl next door earlier. Don't you think it's strange that they didn't include you?"

Miss Price shot her an inquiring look.

Jennifer didn't notice, she just touched her hand to her throat and fumbled for words. "No, they wouldn't."

"They're leaving you out of the loop, aren't they?" said Elizabeth. "You're really on your own. You may even be next on their list of offerings."

"Help me or you'll regret it. I'll make sure you will. I'll—" Clasping her hands on the counter in front of her, Jennifer said something her under her breath that sounded like swearing.

Elizabeth thought she caught something about Nyx and Sycorax. Oh, that again. More chaos, she thought.

Jennifer's hands were engulfed in a fractal swirl of red fire and gray mist. The bookstore shuddered on its foundations and a few books popped from the shelves. Jennifer repeated herself and the special effects around her hands intensified. A cardboard display of legal thrillers fell over onto a customer who was kneeling down to examine the contents of a lower shelf. Light bulbs popped and Miss Price's charmed balls of mistletoe flared with ethereal fire. Distraught cries from the customers penetrated their bubble of silence.

"Stop that at once," Miss Price ordered. She placed her hands over Jennifer's and recited a verse about balance. Green fire hissed and popped at her fingertips.

The uproar in the bookstore worsened and a tall bookshelf came loose from its moorings. A customer who was paying attention caught it before it could overbalance and shoved it back up against the wall.

Jennifer raised her voice and cried out once again for the spirits of chaos to descend upon the bookstore. Chaos. Order. The cursed black holes in Alice's aura writhed away from Jennifer. Elizabeth grabbed her sister's hand and pressed it to Jennifer and Miss Price's hands.

Chaos.

Order.

A shock wave bubbled out from their hands as atoms reordered themselves, tumbling back to lower energy states. Order tends to disorder.

With a shriek, Jennifer stumbled back from the counter and rubbed her hands together, the red fire gone and the gray mist looking more like smoke. Smelling like it too. She glared at them and cried, "You'll regret this. If she doesn't come after you, I will."

Alice raised the half-eaten cookie she held and threw it at Jennifer, who flinched away and flung herself out the door.

"Like Titania won't come after us if we help her." Alice's hair was standing on end. She withdrew her hand from Elizabeth's and smoothed her hair back into place.

Everyone in the bookstore looked like they'd had a bad brush with static electricity. The bundles of mistletoe sizzled and filled the air with a scent of resin. Miss Price set her glasses straight and considered the burned spots on her hands.

Alice looked thoughtfully at the cookie jar. "Do you think if we threw cookies on her she'd melt?"

"What happened?" asked a customer, crawling out from under a display table.

"Power surge?"

"I think really big truck went by," said somebody else. "Look how the books got knocked over."

Elizabeth and Alice came out from behind the counter and made a quick pass through the bookstore to make sure nobody was hurt. They rapidly reshelved the fallen books and heartily thanked the man who had caught the bookshelf. Miss Price stood at the cash register and rang up purchases from people who wouldn't let the end of the world interrupt their Christmas shopping.

"What did happen?" Alice asked Elizabeth quietly.

"Jennifer was just screwing with us. If she wants help for her brother, she needs to figure out that threatening people and breaking their stuff is not a good way to win people's trust and get their assistance."

"But, you stopped her. Or I stopped her, but you made me."

"It was your curse," Elizabeth whispered. "Thomas said curses are tightly ordered. Jennifer was trying to bring down chaos, which is total disorder. I thought they would cancel out."

"It appears you were correct," Miss Price said coolly. The sisters turned and found her standing behind them, giving them an appraising look from over her glasses. She said, "I believe we need to have a little talk—"

A customer rang the bell by the cash register and Alice zipped over to help the customer purchase a self-help book illustrated with gnomes.

Miss Price steered Elizabeth firmly into the office, stepping on customers' toes and leaving stacks of books teetering on the edges of display tables. When the office door was shut, Miss Price spun around and demanded, "What have you done to your sister? Have you been experimenting? Has that infernal spirit been messing around with dark powers?"

"No! Thomas wouldn't and I don't know how. It was something in the house that cursed Alice. We wanted to talk with you about it. I think that you might have some insight into the situation," Elizabeth said.

"Insight?"

"Yes, insight. Into mummies and their curses. There's a mummy in one of the upstairs rooms of the house and it seems to be waking up, at least enough to pass its curse around. Thomas said that, given your family connections and archaeological experience, you might be able to help us break the curse."

Miss Price took a deep breath as if she were going to counter with bluster, but deflated slightly when Elizabeth went on to describe the mummy, and the curse, and Thomas's familiarity with the origins of the Price Collection and the associated Prices.

"Damn!" Miss Price flung herself into her task chair. She took off her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose, squeezing her eyes shut. "I knew this mummy fad was going to be problematic."

"It doesn't have to be," said Elizabeth cautiously. She fiddled with the pencils in the mug on the Miss Price's desk and carefully observed her employer's roiling green aura. "We won't tell anyone about your … family business. No one would believe us if we went around saying you were 100."

"I'm not 100," Miss Price said hastily.

"200, then?" Elizabeth gave her a look of wide-eyed innocence.

Miss Price returned the look in full with an eyebrow raise, but she broke first. "As long as you don't intend to pry … "

"Wouldn't dream of it," Elizabeth lied. "We only want to break the curse. Alice was sleepwalking last night, she might have been hurt. Thomas looked around in his library, but he couldn't find any mummy-specific information about curses, so we were going to try something else tonight. He thought you might know about this priestess Ananka and her curse since she was found near where the Prices were digging."

"The curse of the mummy was a legend."

"The mummy in the museum looked cursed too," Elizabeth said. "Are you sure you didn't happen to learn anything about curses, say, in passing?"

"It was cursed but the curse was not active," Miss Price said. "Besides, it's been in the museum for decades. Anything might have happened over the years. I don't know if I can help you. Half my reference books I donated to the museum's archives and my notes are in the attic, buried under years of junk. We took a lot of notes on that dig. We had so much data, just the thought of going through it again is daunting. Even if I went home and started now, I couldn't guarantee I'd find anything of use this decade."

"Thomas said that he would have something worked out tonight," said Elizabeth. "If it doesn't work, then we'll have to get your help. We can't let Alice stay like this."

"Yes, I know. Very well," said Miss Price. "I'll see what I can find, but I think it would be more helpful if I could see the notes that you found with your mummy. How could Mr. Penrose simply forget about a mummy?"