The Egyptian Building

Chapter 6

The lab was unhappily short of hiding places, save for the mummy case which was already occupied. They quickly ran around to the far side of the counter and crouched down on the floor.

Out in the hall, somebody tried the doorknob and it came off in their hand. A man's voice complained, "My God! This building is falling apart. I won't be able to get maintenance in here till Monday."

Elizabeth opened one of the cabinet doors under the counter and felt around inside. The space underneath was big and empty. "We can fit in here." She slowly crawled in, making as little noise as possible, and Bob crept in behind her with rather more difficulty. She could almost sit upright, but he couldn't hunch his head down far enough and had to lie down. Once he managed to get all of his parts folded up inside the cupboard, Elizabeth leaned over and pulled the door closed behind them as Miss Price and her companions stopped talking about the doorknob and entered the lab.

They turned on the light, which streamed in through the narrow gaps around the cabinet doors. Her eyes adjusted slowly and she could almost make out Bob's head which he was resting on his arm near her thigh. She absently stroked his hair.

"You brought all the notes and papers from the dig down here?" asked Miss Price. "I would have thought you'd keep them in your library."

"I did, of course," said the male voice which had to belong to Alastair Price. "But when I knew I was going to be working on our friend here, I brought everything over to the lab. It may be down in a basement, but it is climate controlled. It's safe for the papers and it's probably more hospitable for the mummy than that stifling pit at the museum. Unless of course the climate control breaks down too." His statement was followed by a banging noise which must have been the doorknob striking the counter with emphatic force. Price went on, "But what brings you here at this hour anyway, Aunt Glinda? Why do you want to mess around with these old papers in the middle of the night during a party?"

Miss Price laughed. "I wasn't expecting to review anything right here, I just knew that I would catch you here at your party. You are a very difficult person to get hold of sometimes. It's lucky for me that you have everything here."

"But what is it you wanted?"

"There was something about the scroll they found with the mummy. Something I can't quite remember and it's driving me mad. I know I copied it out myself and I can't find it in my notes anywhere. I figured it must have gotten mixed up with some of uncle's papers. He borrowed some materials from me when he was working on that monograph about the scroll. I'm sure my papers are still mixed up with his."

"You still have everything from the dig?" asked Dr. Price eagerly. "If you have any artifacts, I must see them. I may be able to use them for my research here."

Something in his voice set off warning bells in Elizabeth's head. She must have clenched her hand convulsively. Flinching, Bob reached up and took her hand firmly in his.

"I'll see," Miss Price said absently. Elizabeth heard the sounds of boxes being opened and papers rustling.

"Are you going to look through all those boxes?" asked another female voice. It wasn't Titania's voice, for which Elizabeth was supremely grateful. A bit of crimson light reflected through a crack in the cupboard. Charlotte.

"This must be quite boring for you," said Miss Price with a cool edge to her voice. "Why don't you go back to the party?"

Charlotte mumbled something non-committal and began to fidget with the cabinet door handles. The crack of light widened and narrowed. Elizabeth held her breath until Charlotte lost interest in the door.

"And Alastair, I've been wondering. Why your sudden interest in the mummy and things Egyptian? Back when we were excavating you only wanted to lurk around in the marketplaces."

Alastair coughed. "Well, I was a teenager back then. I thought anything was more interesting than a bunch of old stuff pulled out of a sandy pit. But when I heard that they were going to be remodeling the exhibit at the museum, I started thinking about it and thought I should give it another chance. After all, now I've managed to acquire the necessary skills and the interest, it would be a shame to let the opportunity go by."

He went on talking while Miss Price continued to look through boxes and Charlotte continue to sigh and make bored adolescent noises, much like those that Alastair Price must have made back when his family was digging up Egypt.

"Of course, it might be the influence of being in this building all the time. Do you remember when uncle was overseeing the remodeling in the thirties? In midwinter they pulled all the ivy off the skylight and had to replace the glass. The glass was off for the coldest weeks on record and we all had to pray it wouldn't rain or sleet until the replacement glass was ready. I remember seeing the workmen re-laying the floor down in the court. The angle of the sun was so low the sun didn't ever quite reach the floor and there was just this slanting light in the top part of the building. You could see the workmen's breath and they were all bundled up like bears. It looked like an old Dutch painting."

"How poetic, Alastair. And how very unlike you," Miss Price said absently. "Would you mind moving that box over onto this table?"

Elizabeth heard footsteps and the sounds of boxes being shifted about. Charlotte sighed and fidgeted with the cabinet doors some more.

Alastair rhapsodized about his new-found interest in the glories of ancient Egypt until Miss Price finally suggested that he take Charlotte back to the party. She said, "There's really no need for you to stay down here. I'm only looking for one very specific thing, and I'll probably give up before I find it. You should send a security guard down here to watch the door while this party is still going on."

"Okay, let's go," said Charlotte with great alacrity, certainly more than she had shown about the glories of ancient Egypt.

"But, Glinda, I haven't seen you in so long and I would really value your insight into the details of that dig. I think it would be very valuable—"

"Well then, by all means, do try returning my calls sometime, Alastair. We could have lunch, or you could even come to the family bash on Christmas Day and we could catch up then."

"Yes, Alastair, let's go," Charlotte repeated.

Elizabeth heard the sounds of dragging footsteps and the door of the lab opening and closing. Miss Price continued to rifle through boxes. After a minute or so, she said, "You two had better come out now. You have no idea how lucky you are that Alastair is stone blind to the ether."

Elizabeth pushed open the cabinet door and crawled out onto the floor. Bob followed, dragging himself out and sprawling across the floor.

"My feet fell asleep," he said. He pushed himself so he was sitting with his back against a cabinet with his long legs stretched out before him. He wiggled his feet back and forth to try and get the blood flowing to them again. He was covered with dust and his hair stood up on one side where Elizabeth had fiddled with it while eavesdropping on the Prices' conversation. Dark smears of something black marked his shirt and he was covered with dust. Elizabeth glanced down at herself and hoped that she could get the dress to the dry cleaners before Alice got a look at it.

"You take me to the nicest places," Bob said. He ran a hand through his hair so it stood uniformly on end.

"What are you two doing down here?" Miss Price demanded. She did not stop searching through the boxes to scold them.

Elizabeth and Bob exchanged a sheepish glance. Elizabeth said, "We were looking for the mummy? Because it was here and Bob hadn't seen it?"

"Are you quite certain?" asked Miss Price sarcastically. "What ever possessed you to hide? If you'd been wandering out in the hallway, no one would have thought anything of it."

"After I broke off the doorknob, it seemed like we'd have a hard time passing ourselves off as innocent tourists," Bob said.

"You're probably correct," said Miss Price. "Once you can stand up, you can help me with some of these boxes, but you two should run along before Alastair comes back or his security guard turns up." She looked narrowly at their disheveled selves. "You should probably not go back to the party."

"So, tell me, Miss Price. How old are you really?" Bob asked.

"You don't honestly expect me to answer that," she said. "Suffice it to say that we are a very long-lived family. Aha! My notebook!" She pulled a leather-bound notebook from the box which was her current victim and dropped it into her dainty beaded clutch. The notebook was much larger than the purse, but it went all the way in without the purse showing any sign of strain.

"What are you looking for?" asked Elizabeth. She stood and helped Miss Price pull the tape off another box.

"I wanted to review some information about the tomb my family excavated. One of the mummies that we found was cursed (that one there). I remember very clearly translating the text of the curse and making notes, but I don't remember what I wrote. It's so frustrating. I was hoping that the details of this curse might give me some inkling of what to do about Alice's curse."

"You found extra mummies?"

"Yes, that was the strange thing about this tomb. It was the tomb of a civil servant, essentially a tax collector, and it was a fairly rich tomb. But there was a second mummy from a much later period. It had obviously been thrown in simply to get the mummy out of the way, what with the cursing and all. Most of the material in the tomb related to the first mummy, the tax collector, but there was a scroll in the sarcophagus of this later mummy which contained the curse. Although we didn't think so at the time, I suppose it was fortunate, given our current problems, that when the Department of Antiquities was selecting which objects they wanted to keep for Egypt, they chose the tax collector's mummy and left us the cursed mummy." Miss Price flipped her hair back over shoulders and extracted an archival box which she opened up. "And this is the scroll." She closed the archival box and placed it carefully in her handbag.

Bob struggled to his feet. "God, you're like Mary Poppins of the Sith!"

"I've been called a lot of things, but that's a new one."

Elizabeth was still eyeing the handbag with interest. "Can you teach me how to do that?"

"Eventually, perhaps," said Miss Price. "But space-time inversions are a little beyond your current level. Now you two should run along. Don't go back the way you came, but continue on down the hallway to the next staircase, so you can avoid meeting Alastair or the security guard." Miss Price reached for another box.

"Aren't you done?" asked Elizabeth.

"I'm done rifling through the archives here, but I think I want to have a little talk with Alastair. All of this romantic nonsense about the glories of ancient Egypt doesn't ring true. Alastair's motivations for doing anything generally boil down to money and I'm curious to see what financial gain he thinks he can squeeze from this project. I'm also wondering how Charlotte fits in, she's not his type at all. And with Titania grasping about, well, there's something up."

Elizabeth and Bob bid her farewell as she continued to rummage around in the boxes, occasionally dropping an item of interest into her clutch. She stuck her head out in the hallway and looked both ways. She neither saw nor heard any sign of Alastair Price or a security guard, so she and Bob tiptoed away down the hall. A thought struck her and she looked at Bob with dismay. "You never got to see the mummy."

"That's all right, I can look at the one we've got in the house."

After they rounded a corner, the hallway got dirtier. The signs on the doors were missing or illegible with age. From somewhere down the hall, the wind whistled and they heard a sound like somebody whispering. Elizabeth could make out words.

"I'm supposed to be outside, just watching traffic, but no! Those guys at the door have to take a break and it's 'come here and watch the door.' And then they don't come back and that doctor guy comes over and wants security down in the basement. Great! I'm not even supposed to be inside this building and why the hell do they want security in the basement anyway? Because somebody broke into the room where the mummy is!'

Ahead of them, Joe rounded a corner and stopped, jaw dropped, as he saw Elizabeth and Bob walked towards him.

Elizabeth waved.

"Doesn't that figure," he said as they drew closer together and he could see their clothes were covered with dust. "I should have known."

"Hi, Joe," Elizabeth said cheerfully. "I think you took a wrong turn, the lab they want you at is back that way." She jerked a thumb back towards Price's lab.

"Yeah, I took a wrong turn all right, and it was when I asked your sister out for pie."

"We could have warned you," said Bob. "But you wouldn't have listened."

Joe nodded. "Too true."

They had met in the middle of the hallway, at a spot approximately in the center of the eastern side of the building. Elizabeth recalled that there was a ground-floor entrance at about this location, brass double doors visible from across the valley. On the basement level there was only a boarded-up opening with a rough door made out of plywood. The door was held closed by a chain fed through a hole in the wood and around a doorjamb banged together out of two-by-fours. In response to some change in air pressure, a sudden draft whistled through the chain.

"What's behind that door, do you think?" asked Elizabeth.

"Oh no," said Joe.

"A tunnel, probably," said Bob. "Supposedly a lot of the older college buildings were connected by tunnels. There was that ugly brick building that they just tore down a few months ago, because they're going to put in a new building. Well, the building that was there before that building was much older. There must have been a tunnel to it."

Joe looked interested in spite of himself, although he winced when Elizabeth went over to the door to rattle the chain. "I don't know about tunnels over here," he said. "I know that over around the Capitol there are some that connect the state office buildings. Not like up in D.C., where supposedly they've got a train and everything, but still, pretty extensive."

The chain was not secured with a padlock or anything, as Elizabeth found when it slipped through the hole and onto the floor on the far side of the door. "Oops," she said. She pulled the door open and knelt down to pick up the chain.

A damp wind smelling of clay and mildew blew up out of the tunnel. Elizabeth sneezed. In the light from the hallway she could see that the tunnel extended for about ten feet and then dropped precipitously down a staircase. "The other end must be open."

"Maybe into the construction site. I bet they found the tunnel when they started excavating for the cancer center," Bob said.

"Well, as long as we're here and all filthy anyway, we might as well check it out," said Elizabeth, rising to her feet.

"The lights aren't working," said Bob.

"That's okay, Joe has a flashlight." Elizabeth held out her hand.

Joe slowly pulled the flashlight from its loop on his belt which bristled with gear, a fair percentage of which did not look regulation. "I thought you were supposed to be the good twin."

"You know, you don't have to do everything they tell you to do," Bob told him as Elizabeth took the flashlight.

Elizabeth turned it on and took a few steps down the tunnel. "Come on, Bob," she called over her shoulder. Bob automatically started after her. Joe burst out laughing at him, but followed closely behind them.

"You don't have to come along, Joe," Elizabeth said. "We'll only be a few minutes and I'll bring your flashlight back."

"Yeah," said Bob. "You can go keep an eye on Miss Price and make sure she doesn't steal anything from the lab."

Elizabeth giggled. "Make sure to check her handbag to see if she's filled it with reams of notebooks and artifacts."

"Ha ha. Very funny," said Joe.

A sudden gust of wind twirled sand into their eyes and banged the door back on its hinges. The staircase descended about fifteen feet to a low-ceilinged passage wide enough for two people to walk side by side. The walls were made of roughly laid brick and met in a low arch overhead. The ceiling was periodically studded with rusty metal light fixtures suspended from an electrical conduit which ran along the highest point of the arch. The floor was brick as well and in the low light everything was stained red. With its curving walls, the passage looked uncomfortably organic and Elizabeth could not escape the sense of walking down an enormous digestive tract. Mucousy white streaks of mineral deposits on the walls, from where water had leached through over the past century and a half, did nothing to dispel the impression. A sudden low vibration shivered the walls of the tunnel. Drops of water which had been gamely clinging to the arched ceiling pattered down on them.

"We must be under College Street," said Bob.

Ahead the tunnel opened abruptly into the construction site. At this end there was no door. The entrance was supported with a rough scaffolding which extended outside and provided a bit of shelter. The inside of the tunnel near the door was littered with cigarette butts and food wrappers. From the shadow of the scaffolding, they looked out over the sleeping construction site. Like dinosaur skeletons in a museum, enormous pieces of machinery were silhouetted against the streetlights and the sky.

"Now this is what I call a security problem," said Joe. He stepped out from under the scaffolding to look around. He pointed up the hill towards Broad Street. "Look, they've only got one of those portable fences set up. Anyone could shove it apart and crawl down that slope … "

"Hey, who's down there?" came a loud voice from above, followed immediately by a very bright beam from a flashlight much more powerful than Joe's. The beam fell on Joe's face. He froze for a moment, blinking like a rabbit, before he darted back under the scaffolding.

They hurried back up the tunnel, trying to make as little noise as possible, except for Joe who was whispering to himself. "Shit, shit, I'm too stupid to live. Shit."

By the time they reached the Egyptian Building end of the tunnel, they realized that nobody was following them. Apparently the night watchman was not interested in sliding around in the red clay of the construction site to chase phantom police officers. When they reached the plywood doorway, Elizabeth handed the flashlight back to Joe who took it with forced politeness. Bob picked up the chain and looked around on the floor inside the door until he found a padlock that somebody had been at with bolt cutters. He showed it to Joe. "There's your security problem."

"Not mine," said Joe, "I don't work here, or at least, only for a couple more hours."

Bob shrugged and threw the padlock back on the ground. He pulled the door closed and secured it with a few loops of the chain.

Joe said goodbye and marched off down the hallway to the lab like a man facing a firing squad. Elizabeth and Bob went on around the rest of the building till they came to a staircase which Bob said would put them out on the first floor near the entrance.

"Do you think they'll block up that tunnel?" Elizabeth asked.

"Maybe not," said Bob. "It seemed pretty stable and it might end up being useful for something. Hopefully with better locks than what they're using right now. Hold on a second, you have cobwebs in your hair."

They quickly brushed the loose dirt and dust off each other, hands passing lightly over each other's bodies. Elizabeth returned Bob's jacket which covered up the worst of the damage to his white shirt. He shrugged his jacket on, spotted another cobweb in her hair and reached out to smooth it away. Their eyes met and Elizabeth recognized one of Those Moments. She could take a half step forward, place her hand on his arm, tilt her head back with her eyes half closed, and they would kiss. Her higher brain functions dithered about whether it was a good idea to get involved with a housemate and whether involvement came on a sliding scale. Also, he is hot, now that I'm paying attention …

In the tenth of a second occupied by all this internal dialogue, someone hit the breaker bar on the door at the far end of the hallway and Bob drew her into the stairwell and up the stairs.

By good fortune, this staircase took them up to the entrance hall right by the coat check, where Bob retrieved their coats from a sloe-eyed girl in black who batted her eyelashes at him and called him Bubba. He just rolled his eyes and helped Elizabeth on with her coat.

"Word spreads fast," said Elizabeth.

"It's the hive mind around here," Bob muttered.

The parking valets called him Bubba too.