The Egyptian Building

Chapter 5

Night fell early in late December. Elizabeth drove home alone in the gloom. It was Alice's night to work late and she was going to catch a ride home with Kevin. In the darkness, the static lines of taillights stretching off into the distance seemed extra oppressive. Or maybe the traffic actually was worse in midwinter than at any other time of year.

Elizabeth parked her truck in front of the house by Bob's green Chevette and wondered how late she was. She went inside and flung her coat into the pile on the futon. The sounds of water running in the pipes indicated that Bob was already getting cleaned up for the party. She ran up to Alice's room to search for the dress she wanted to borrow and kicked herself for not asking Alice to set it out. Praying that her sister had hung up the dress since the last time she wore it and not left it balled up under her bed, she pawed through Alice's closet and wardrobe.

"Aha!"

The dress hung quietly in the back of the closet, all sealed up in a dry cleaning bag.

Elizabeth grabbed it and ran back to her room where she brushed her teeth and hopped in and out of the shower. She was ready in no time, at least compared to how long Alice would have taken. She was admiring herself in her mirror and congratulating herself on finding a pair of stockings without runs when there came a knocking at the door.

She opened the door. Thomas stood in the hallway holding a book.

"Are you decent?"

"When am I not?" She stood back from the door and ushered him into the room.

He entered and sprawled in his customary boneless position on the chaise longue. "You don't want me to answer that. So that is the dress that is red and black at the same time?"

"I don't know what this kind of fabric is called," Elizabeth said and modeled the dress for him. The dress was made of a fabric that looked red when viewed straight on, but shaded off into black when viewed at an angle. The cut was uncharacteristically simple for a dress of Alice's, and was content to be snug in certain places, loose in others, and not require masochistic foundation garments.

"Very nice," said Thomas raising his eyebrows appreciatively. "I think your sister wears it with some absurd hair thing."

"I won't," said Elizabeth.

"Good. That's settled then. While you've been toiling in the salt mines of retail, I've been looking up curses and how to break them. I believe I found a fairly generic version of a spell to break a doomed lovers curse which may work even without an item belonging to the male involved. Did you get anything useful out of Miss Price, by the way?"

"She said she would look through her old notes. And that she would come over later tonight." Elizabeth sat down on the end of the chaise lounge and pulled a throw around her shoulders so she could inch a little closer to Thomas without a serious outbreak of gooseflesh.

"Excellent," said Thomas. "I would prefer that she work the breaking of the curse, although with supervision, you might manage it." He flipped open the book he was holding and paged through it till he found what he was looking for. "We should be able to find all the necessary components for this spell here in the house. You all will need to open up the mummy case and extract one of the charms that are sure to be in her wrappings. The alternative is to use something from the canopic jars, which could be worse or less bad depending on how you feel about rooting around in the coffin. And if you could find a charm for Isis, that would probably be even better since this mummy was a priestess. Or Neferthys. Neferthys and Isis were sisters and since you and Alice are sisters too, that might result in some resonance that magnifies the effects of this spell."

"Right, abuse of a corpse. Anything for Alice, I guess. Are we going to do this curse-breaking on Alice or on the mummy?"

"I was thinking about that myself. The curse is not as firmly embedded in Alice as it is in the mummy and so should be easier to break in her. If that doesn't work, we can try to break the curse on the mummy, at which point the part of the curse on Alice should simply dissolve. Anyway, here." He ran his finger along a line of text. "Some of the ingredients are herbal and should be in those abominable teabags you and your sister are incessantly using. I believe Dirk has a bucket of sidewalk chalk which you can make use for creating this diagram and he seems to have no shortage of candles either."

Elizabeth leaned over and looked at the symbols inscribed in the book. She noticed that these pages were handwritten in looping girlish penmanship. The diagram, two concentric circles with a pentacle in the inner circle and a runic-looking thing at each point of the star, had been drawn by the same careful hand with the assistance of a compass and ruler. She could see the pencil marks the author had used as a guide.

"What is this book?" She took the edge of the cover between her fingers and raised it to take a look. There was no title on the cover, which was stamped with a floral pattern, the leather colored with now-faded dyes of green and red. Some of the pages in the book were ruled. Thomas relinquished his grip and she flicked to the hand-drawn frontispiece. "Miss Esmeralda Willoughby's Stupendous Grimoire? What is this? Some kid's book?" She looked through the book some more. It was entirely handwritten in the same girlish hand. Each page held a spell with a description of its attendant rites, the opposing page held notes, commentary and outcome, and the dates on which trials were attempted. All of the dates were in the first half of the nineteenth century.

"Not at all," said Thomas. He took the book back and smoothed the pages protectively. "This is amazingly useful. I got it in an odd lot of books from the library of a Mr. Maximilian Willoughby who fancied himself a sorcerer, although he was more effective as a book collector. He allowed his daughter Esmeralda the run of the library, and it's a good thing too. She was more talented than her old man by half. She started working on these grimoires when she was quite young, perhaps eleven? Her notebooks provide an amazing digest of the contents of the library, which is invaluable as there was an unfortunate fire and some irreplaceable … volumes were lost." His normally smooth voice became uneven. He returned to the page with the spell he was interested in.

"Did you know her?" she asked.

"Mmm. But that's a story for another time."

"You never tell me anything," she complained pulling the blanket more closely around her and leaning back in the chaise.

"I could tell you everything, but it would take about a century and you'd be fidgeting within the first half-hour," he said. "For now, let us consider this spell alone."

"Was your portrait in the Willoughby house?"

"As I was saying," Thomas went on. "I will try to make some of these preparations while you are out at this event. If Miss Price arrives before you get back, we may even get the curse broken before you return."

"What if it doesn't work?"

"We can try putting some distance between Alice and the mummy and waiting for spring. This seems to be a rather proximity-dependent and seasonal curse."

"And in the meantime?"

"She sleepwalks and acts out arcane Egyptian rituals."

At that point Bob appeared in the doorway, cleaned up and nearly unrecognizable. Never before had Elizabeth seen him simultaneously vertical, fully awake, dressed like a grownup, and not eating bizarre food combinations. The effect was surprisingly attractive. When he asked if she was ready to go, she stammered until Thomas poked her in the side, then managed to find her shoes.

---

The party at the Egyptian Building was fancy enough to merit valet parking, although the valets were less than enthused about Bob's ugly green Chevette. They had to wait a bit while the valets slobbered over the Jaguar that pulled up behind them and argued about who would have to park Bob's car. The matter was finally settled when Bob started waving a five dollar bill around and the valets flocked to him like seagulls to a French fry.

Under the benevolent eyes of a bust of Hippocrates, they walked across the plaza towards the tall papyrus pillars dominating the entry. The night was brisk, but not uncomfortably cold, and partygoers lingered out in the plaza under the clear sky. Warm, inviting light beamed out from the diamond-paned windows of the Egyptian building.

The woman walking ahead of them seemed familiar, but Elizabeth couldn't quite place her without seeing her face. Waves of chestnut hair shot with a single platinum streak rippled down the woman's back. She wore a black velvet dress cut very low in the back and slit very high on the side. At second glance, you might notice that she was very tiny, but between her posture and the high heels, you might not. Elizabeth's ankles ached sympathetically though the woman strode along as if the extra four inches of air beneath her heels was hers by right. She paused and withdrew a compact from her handbag. When she checked her makeup in the mirror, she turned slightly to the side and they saw her face in profile.

"It's Miss Price," choked Bob.

"Miss Price?" Elizabeth called.

Miss Price turned to them and her face lit with a bright smile. "Elizabeth, and Bob! What a surprise. I wasn't expecting to see you here." She snapped her compact closed and slipped it back into her handbag. Miss Price was not wearing a coat, but didn't appear to miss it despite having the greater part of her skin bared to the December evening.

"What brings you to this party?" Miss Price asked.

"Bob," said Elizabeth.

Bob smiled sheepishly. "I had invitations through work and Elizabeth said she wanted to get inside the building, so … "

"How thoughtful," Miss Price cried. She linked arms with Elizabeth on the other side from Bob and walked with them towards the door.

"Hey, Elizabeth, Bob, Miss Price." A man in a police uniform stepped out from behind one of the pillars near the entrance.

"Hi, Joe. Are you having to work security here too?" Elizabeth wished Alice were here for her to throw in Joe's general direction and watch.

"Yeah," he said. "They brought that mummy from the museum over here today and said they wanted extra security, although I didn't want to be it. I saw enough of that mummy already. And then after that mummy thing at the museum, I go home and what's on the Late Late Show? A mummy movie. Now I tell you, mummies are just disgusting, they aren't scary at all. The mummy in the mummy movie? He can't even walk very fast and he's all wrapped up, so what could he really do to you? You could outrun him just by walking a little bit faster than usual and you don't need to get in a fight with him if you've got a cigarette lighter handy. Like that mummy downstairs, now he'd go up like a torch."

"Yo, Joe." Another police officer leaned out from behind a pillar and made a throat-slitting gesture.

"Oh, yeah," Joe stammered to a halt. In a lower voice, he said, "Anyway, if you all get locked in with the mummy, don't come crying to me to let you out."

"We aren't planning on it, Joe," Elizabeth said. "But we'll keep that in mind."

As they drew away towards the doors, Miss Price shook her head and tsked. "Alice has had a most deplorable influence on that young man."

Elizabeth and Bob exchanged a glance. Bob bit his tongue and Elizabeth said, "I kind of think he was already like that."

"Oh? Well, never mind then."

In the cramped entryway, a table was set up where the guests showed their invitations and had their names checked off a list. Bob fumbled around in the breast pocket of his suit and pulled out two dog-eared invitations as they took their place in line. Miss Price dropped arms with Elizabeth and, with a little wave, headed towards the guards at the inner doors.

One of them, wearing the uniform of a private security firm, stepped forward and blocked her way. "Excuse me, ma'am, but you need get checked in."

"Oh, I don't need an invitation," said Miss Price with a warm smile.

"You don't need an invitation," said the man. He stepped back and waved her through the door.

"Miss Price is a Sith Lord," Bob sputtered like a pot on the boil.

Elizabeth giggled. "I wonder if she could teach me how to do that."

Eventually they reached the head of the line where Bob's grubby invitations were sniffed over and held by their edges, but eventually the gatekeepers said, "Go on ahead, Bob."

Elizabeth and Bob walked past the last line of security guards and into the tall narrow gallery at the center of the Egyptian Building, which managed be both brightly lit and gloomy at the same time.

High above the central court, a huge skylight made of many panes of glass glittered from the lights of the party down below. All four stories of the building looked out in galleries over the central court. Tall papyrus columns, narrower than the ones outside, rose from the floor all the way to the roof. The posts of the balustrades on each floor were shaped like mummy cases and the ceilings over the walkways were coffered and painted with brightly colored images cribbed from the tombs of ancient Egypt. The floor, which was mostly obstructed by partygoers and catering tables was inlaid with tile and colored stone in images of scarabs and gods. A broad staircase to the second floor gallery extended like a tongue into the center of the court opposite from where they entered.

"It's really something, isn't it?" Bob looked around with as much curiosity as she did. "This building used to be the whole Medical College, but it's just offices and a few labs now."

They strolled around the edges of the crowd in the area under the second story gallery. The walls were lined with glass cases holding exhibits of medical instruments through the ages. One case held a crusty saw, other rusty cutting instruments, and leather straps which were labeled as tourniquets.

"How old is this stuff?" Elizabeth leaned over case and tried to read the labels in the gloom.

"Could be just about any age," said Bob. "They were using those kinds of instruments up until pretty recently."

Further down the hall they passed seven uncomfortable leather couches which were clearly 1970's waiting room furniture. Hanging on the wall over the couches was an assortment of sabers labeled as having been the property of various alumni during the Civil War.

Other party guests drifted past nibbling on frilly canapés and sucking wine from tall, fragile glasses. The invitation's instruction to wear "festive business" had been confusing for most people. Some men strutted around in tuxedos, others wore khakis and Christmas sweatshirts. A few people had on Santa hats. One woman walked by looking like a Christmas tree. She had on a Santa hat, earrings shaped like Christmas ornaments, a jingle bell around her neck, a light up Santa brooch, and a little black dress deserving of better treatment.

Some people had wandered directly over from the hospital and were wearing lab coats over their clothes. Some of them waved and called, "Hi, Bob!"

He waved back as he and Elizabeth walked by a display of preserved things in jars. Elizabeth took one glance and decided that she would pass on reading labels and maybe on food in jars altogether.

A giggling group of administrators who had also taken the festive part of festive business a little too seriously, although mostly in the sense of their behavior, waved and called, "Hi, Bob."

Bob waved back.

"Does everybody always just call you Bob?" asked Elizabeth.

"Yeah," said Bob. "I don't know why, the other doctors in our section get addressed as Doctor whatever. I don't think I should even bother with a lab coat. I think should get some bowling shirts made up with 'Bob' embroidered on them and wear those instead. Maybe it would be like reverse psychology and they'd all start calling me Doctor Southell. At least Bob is better than Bubba," he added.

"Who calls you Bubba?" Elizabeth asked in a slightly louder voice than she intended. Her remark fell at a brief lull in the surrounding conversations. People turned around to stare and Bob turned red.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"That's okay. It was only a matter of time. Back home I got called that at school, but then there were six other guys called Bubba too. It worked out to my advantage, though, because whenever one of us did something bad and people said Bubba did it, they never thought it was me."

A flock of caterers fluttered by. Elizabeth and Bob took glasses of wine and spinach pies from their outstretched trays as they passed. Elizabeth took a sip of wine and watched a jazz trio set up over by the stairs. A flash of red light caught her eye and she examined her spinach pie more closely.

"Don't eat it," she said to Bob who was about to bite down on his. He told the spinach pie out of his mouth and looked at it. Except for the teeth marks, which were his, it didn't look that ominous, but when Elizabeth looked at it sideways, she could see a red glow like that of the shoes at Drastic Steps.

"What's wrong with it?"

"It has an aura," she told him. "A red one. That means it's evil."

"You're kidding, right?"

"I wish. The wine's okay though." She took another sip and looked a little more carefully at the caterers. Over by the tempura table she saw a familiar lumpy form with gummy dreadlocks tied up under a black scarf.

"It's Becky," Elizabeth said quietly. "Our apocalyptic friend Pestilence is working for the caterer." She nodded her head towards Becky.

As she did so, Becky sneezed into her hand and then touched the chopsticks in the chopstick container.

"Someone hired her? To handle food?" Bob looked at the spinach pie with genuine suspicion now that germs were in the picture.

"I can't imagine anyone would, she even looks diseased," Elizabeth said. She continued to look around in the crowd. She spotted Miss Price across the court. About to bite into a cream puff, she looked at it with sudden horror, then hastily dropped it on the floor and kicked it under a table. Over by the bar, she saw one of the caterers, a little more formally dressed than the others, give directions to the bartenders, and then break away to speak with the person in charge of her, who happened to be Titania.

"That figures," Elizabeth said.

Titania appeared to give the woman instructions and the woman darted off to another hors d'oeuvres table.

Elizabeth stared and then, remembering the headache than the night before, she slid to the side of a column and hauled Bob around so he could block her from Titania's view. Not that he would be much of a shield if Titania was looking around on the ethereal plane, but Elizabeth felt safer being out of Titania's direct line of sight.

"What's going on?" asked Bob. He looked over his shoulder uneasily.

"I don't know," said Elizabeth. She leaned back against the pillar and felt the stucco dig into her shoulder blades. "Is Titania catering this thing? I don't know why she'd want to poison everyone. Did you see any caterers' trucks outside? Maybe I'm just imagining things."

"I did, actually," said Bob. "White trucks with green lettering and a green flower on them. The company was called Virginia Gentry."

"It must be her. But why? I guess fairy gold is no good in this town. What does the human sacrifice have to do with mummies, or is that a silly question?" She peeked around Bob's shoulder to see what Titania was up to, or if any of the guests had started projectile vomiting.

The party looked pretty much like any holiday company party, people were rosy with alcohol and talking shop. She saw Miss Price trying to work her way through the crowd and Titania was on the move too, slithering through a cluster of large men monopolizing the bar. Her line of travel seemed to be directed towards the same location as Miss Price's. In her mind's eye, Elizabeth extended their paths and found the point of intersection at Dr. Alastair Price.

"Aha." She glanced up at Bob. He was standing very close to her, sturdily being a big meaty shield, and looking down at her with a puzzled expression. He said, "Don't tell me that this means we're going to have to fight those people again and rescue that idiot."

"That's what we get for being heroes," she said. "Unless Miss Price is going to take pre-emptive action."

"Hi, Bob." A woman about Bob's age, with the requisite dark circles under her eyes and fatigue-etched lines around her mouth, approached them. She wore a lab coat and was carrying an end of twenty hour shift cocktail and a handful of canapés. These didn't appear to have the red aura, but that didn't mean they didn't have germs. Bob winced every time his friend took a bite of one while they exchanged small talk. Elizabeth smiled when Bob introduced her and put on her attentive date face.

While they talked, she kept Bob between herself and Titania and kept her eyes on the courtyard. Miss Price and Titania reached Alastair Price at about the same time. They appeared to be exchanging cutting remarks to the amusement of Dr. Price. A third woman walked up to Dr. Price and took his hand as Bob's friend was taking her leave. Absently, Elizabeth said goodbye while she tried to place the familiar face of Dr. Price's date. Bob's friend took a while to leave all the way. First she stopped briefly when approached by a caterer, and then stopped again to ask Bob about his work schedule, and then she bumped into the column and Bob extracted the drink from her hand before she made more bad decisions about alcohol. Once they were alone again, Elizabeth pointed out the woman across the room with Alastair Price. "Who's that with them now? She looks familiar."

"That's Charlotte," Bob said. "From Miss Price's coven." He coughed over the last word.

"That helped you ward the third floor?" Elizabeth asked sweetly. She looked more closely at Charlotte who was wearing a flame-colored cocktail dress and a lot of lip gloss. "What do you think she's doing with Dr. Price?"

"I don't know, but it doesn't look like Miss Price is happy about it."

"Maybe we should go over there and—"

"Let's not," said Bob. He put an arm around Elizabeth shoulders and steered her behind the column. "Miss Price can deal with them on her own. She and Dr. Price are probably related."

"Yeah, right. She invited herself here to talk to him about the family mummy." Elizabeth glanced back over her shoulder. At that exact same moment, Titania happened to look in her direction. Titania's eyes narrowed and Elizabeth felt a stab of pain at her temple.

Instead of clutching at her head and screaming, Elizabeth forced herself to keep her hands down and her mouth shut. She was betrayed only by her fingers, which spasmed and snapped the stem of her wineglass. The glass fell to the stone floor, shattering and splashing white wine on their feet. The guests around them squealed and drew back.

"Are you all right?" Bob drew her away from the mess as a caterer scuttled up with a broom and dustpan. Bob took her hand in his and gently spread her fingers.

"I'm fine," Elizabeth said. Her voice shook and her temples throbbed.

"No, you're not, you're bleeding." He pulled the pocket square from his suit pocket and wrapped it carefully around her fingers. He held it loosely and said, "You might have some glass in there. Come. I need better light." Bob bulled a path through the crowd which closed in around them once the caterer swept up the broken glass. He towed her firmly along towards the entrance, where he turned through a small side door and led her down a narrow hallway.

As soon as they left the public spaces, the Egyptian revival decor faded to plain plaster painted in an industrial shade of dinge. Doors and plastic nameplates lined the hall. The floor was still stone, but the bugs and gods did not extend into the working parts of the building. Bob pushed through a door and they took a staircase down to the basement.

"The break room down here should have a first-aid kit," he said. "And you can have a glass of water. You look really pale."

"Thank you," Elizabeth whispered as a fresh wave of pain through her head made her stumble against him. Bob put his arm around her waist and half-carried her the rest of the way.

Down in the break room behind a thoroughly modern metal door with a tall narrow window of wire-reinforced glass, he set her in a chair of steel tubing and orange plastic, then rummaged through the contents of the cupboards. He found a glass, cleaned it, and filled it with cold water from a water cooler in the corner. He brought it to her and then washed his hands and brought over the first-aid kit he had found shoved underneath the sink. The first-aid kit had been rifled of most of its contents, but Bob found some saline to clean her cuts and some adhesive bandages. He gently pulled the pocket square away from her fingers and tweezed a sliver of glass from her thumb. She had a shallow slash across the joint of her thumb and a smaller cut in the side of her index finger.

"Oh, great," she said, "that looks really gross."

"Yes, but you should see that wineglass," Bob said.

Elizabeth tried to smile, but pain pulsed through her temple again. She took a sip of water instead.

"What happened back there?"

"Titania saw me. She can give me a headache from a distance," Elizabeth said. "For real. It caught me by surprise."

"More of that witch stuff?" Bob finished dressing her cuts and cleaned up the mess of bandage wrappers and gauze. He pitched at all with his bloody pocket square into the trash can. "This is going to be a problem. I mean, if you have to fight with her again."

"I can learn to shut her out," Elizabeth said. "I hope I can learn quickly. But maybe we should stay down here until she gets distracted and forgets about me."

After washing his hands (again-), Bob pulled up a chair beside her and put his arm around her. He was warm. The air down in the basement was chilly on Elizabeth's bare shoulders and she nestled gratefully against him. She leaned her head on his shoulder and listened to his breathing and beating of his heart until her headache started to fade. She dozed off, but didn't realize it until his head nodded down and bumped hers.

"Whoa." He straightened up and rubbed his face. "Some party, huh?"

"Like the thing at the museum last night," she said, straightening up herself and drawing a little bit away from him. He slowly removed his arm from around her shoulders. "Except that we haven't gotten trapped in a room with the mummy yet."

He grinned. "They say the mummy is actually here, so that could happen any minute now."

"We could try to find it," Elizabeth said. Mummy hunting was more appealing than returning to the party and she was feeling quite restored by the nap. "Since you didn't get to see it at the museum, you're still owed a look."

"I think the lab where they're going to work on it is down here in the basement. But we should go on home. You're hurt and we can't eat the food here. I guess that leaves the bar, though," he said doubtfully.

"My head isn't hurting all anymore. Let's give it a try." Her hand still stung, but the distraction of the mummy would be therapeutic.

Bob quickly put away the first-aid kit, then cleaned her drinking glass and put it in the drainer. When he saw her shivering, he put his suit jacket around her.

They went back out into the hall and dithered for a moment.

"Away from the party?" Bob suggested.

"Makes sense," she said.

They turn as one and headed down the hallway away from the stairs. The basement of the Egyptian Building was even less prepossessing than the office area. The walls of the hallway were lined with gleaming, ivory-colored rectangular tiles and the floor was painted concrete. It looked easy to hose down; drains placed periodically in the floor led one to think of the more disgusting aspects of medical practice through the ages. The ceiling and light fixtures had been updated to a drop ceiling with grayish acoustic tiles and flickering panels of fluorescent lights. By contrast, the rest of the basement looked industrial revolution at the latest. There were fewer doorways and the labels on the doors were older and more ominous. Elizabeth hoped they weren't still doing autopsies down here.

"You'd think he would have gotten a nice lab in one of the new buildings," Elizabeth commented.

"Maybe he wanted to get a lab close to his office. Anyway, these labs are really big and really quiet. If you want to work without being disturbed, then this is the place."

From down the hall behind them, they heard a sound of the stairwell door opening and closing and an echo of voices, rendered unrecognizable as they were smeared along the tiled hallways.

"This is it," said Bob. He stopped by a door which had which was marked Archaeological Medicine.

"Kind of strange label. I think the mummy is beyond help."

"Price is actually a pathologist. The door is probably locked." Bob rattled the knob. It didn't budge, so he applied a little muscle and the knob came off in his hand. "Oops."

The door swung open with a long threatening creak.

The lab was dark except for a tiny bit of light from the street which came in through a small window set high in the wall. Grass outside the window threw stringy shadows against the wall. The mummy case rested on a long counter which ran down the center of the room.

They stood in the doorway for a while and looked at it.

"Well, we found it," Elizabeth. "I guess we should go on in."

Bob was still looking at the doorknob in his hand. "I didn't mean to break it," he said. "I only wanted to see if it was maybe sticky or something."

"We'll just put it back in the hole and pull the door closed behind us when we leave. No one will notice till they come in here to work on the mummy. Besides, you'd think they'd have better security. At least when they find the doorknob broken, they'll replace it with a better one."

A tapping of feet in formal shoes echoed down the hallway.

"Someone's coming," said Elizabeth. "Come on." She took the doorknob from Bob and nudged him into the lab. Shoving the doorknob back into place, she made sure that she could still work the latch from the inside and gently pushed the door closed behind them.

His back to the light from the window, Bob loomed over her. He whispered, "You know, we really don't have to hide. I mean, except for the broken doorknob and the breaking into the lab thing, but we could just keep walking down the hall like we're allowed to be here. These other people obviously aren't allowed to be here either, so who would they report us to?"

"So why are you whispering?" Elizabeth listened intently as the footsteps drew closer. She still couldn't make out what the owners of the footsteps were talking about, but she recognized one of the voices. "It's Miss Price," she whispered.

"Let's hide."