The Egyptian Building

Chapter 8

The mummy's room was dark. The north-facing windows did not offer much light at that hour of the morning, so close to the winter solstice. Elizabeth turned on the Tiffany lamp, which she looked at closely for the first time. It was fashioned to look like a tree with the bronze stem of the lamp as the trunk and the shade as the canopy. The red stained glass, which cast such a flattering light, was fashioned in the shape of maple leaves. She considered moving it down to her own room, except that it weighed about a hundred pounds and would smash her delicate nightstand flat.

On the top of the dresser where Miss Price had sorted through the mummy-related papers from the medium's trunk, Elizabeth found the grimoire. In a small bowl rested two teabags, some scraps of bark, and a few glass vials of noxious looking liquid. Elizabeth picked up the grimoire and opened it up to the place marked with a few sheets of paper.

Thomas had made notes about ingredients and suggestions for performing the spell with a minimum of damage to the mummy. He wrote in a strong, bold hand which must have been refined over the centuries. Elizabeth was impressed; her handwriting only got worse as time went by. She could almost hear his voice when she read the list of the common names of the herbs and the tea blends in which he had found them, and some notes about preparing Alice for the spell. All references to Alice were written in l337, which Alice had been teaching him because, you know, cool.

The page he'd marked in the notebook included a diagram of the usual circle of power and some symbols, notes on the order in which the symbols should be written, and the steps of the spell written out like a recipe. The title written across the top of the page was "Doomed lovers curse, breaking of". According to Miss Willoughby's notes, the spell had been copied out faithfully from a book with a long and hermetic sounding title. Her own asides were written in a differently colored ink. Miss Willoughby had performed the spell on three different occasions. Twice at the behest of a neighbor who had a haunted outbuilding on his property which none of his hired men would come near, problematic in light of how that shed stored most of the farming equipment. The first time Miss Willoughby had performed the spell, the workmen, who had insisted on watching, were not impressed and continued to refuse to enter the building. The neighbor called her back and the second time she performed the spell in the same way, but added special powders to generate clouds of colored smoke when tossed onto a "magic" candle. After that, the workmen had claimed that the ghosts were gone. Miss Willoughby acidly suspected she could have dispensed with the spell altogether and merely set off a colored smoke bomb, which would have had the benefit of scaring off some unpleasant insect life, a more real problem for the workmen than ghosts. The third time she performed the spell, the circumstances were more appropriate. She was visiting friends in a Hertfordshire village who had taken a house which local residents claimed was haunted. Their hired girl was sleepwalking every night and this time the spell appeared to be both necessary and effective, Miss Willoughby noted.

"Elizabeth? What's up? Did Alice sleepwalk again last night?" Bob walked into the room, dressed for work and freshly showered. His hair clung to his skull in whorls and he smelled like soap and warm water.

Elizabeth took a few steps closer to him. "Yes, But it wasn't so bad. Except that she knocked me out of bed and stepped on me, but I got her back to bed okay. Miss Price did a spell on her before she left last night, but it didn't really hold. I think we should try to break the curse tonight even if Miss Price doesn't want us to mess up the mummy. Thomas found a way to break this kind of curse. He got everything together before—"

"Or we could try moving the mummy out of the house instead," said Bob.

"Or we could break the curse and move the mummy."

"Yeah, I had a feeling that was going to be how it went." Bob grinned. He tried lifting one end of the mummy crate. "This is pretty heavy. We'll have to wait until Dirk and I can do it. I don't think Kevin goes in for heavy lifting much. Or maybe—" He reached into the crate and lifted the mummy case slightly out of its bed of straw. "This doesn't seem to be all that heavy. Are there rocks in this crate? We could carry the mummy case by itself. Miss Price will have a cow, but we could wrap it in a sheet to protect it." He straightened back up and brushed dusty straw from his hands.

Elizabeth had followed him over to the mummy. She stood beside him now and looked up at him. He looked down at her. Their eyes met.

As Alice would have said, a primo chance.

She took a half step forward, touched her fingertips to his arm, and tilted her head back, eyes half closed.

She got his nose in her eye (evidently his eyes weren't all the way open either) and stumbled back a little. With a mortified, mumbled apology, he caught her in his arms and his next kiss landed firmly on her mouth.

Vaguely aware of the thud of the grimoire hitting the floor, she put her arms around his neck and pulled him closer so that their bodies were pressed together, shoulder to knee. With her eyes closed, she could see their auras, blue and green, blending in an aquamarine swirl. The effect was intoxicating.

Time passed.

Eventually, Elizabeth became aware of her sister's voice from downstairs, calling "Hey, Elizabeth, we're late for work. Aren't you coming?"

Not quite yet. She turned her head and called back, "You go on ahead. I'll drive in separately."

"Okay, whatever."

They heard her footsteps on the stairs. The front door opened and closed. Silence might have fallen thereafter, but they weren't paying attention. Bob's cell phone rang. They ignored it.

Finally, Elizabeth said, "Not that I want you to stop, but should you get that?"

He was paying exquisite attention to her neck, but paused, alas, and said, "Mm. Yes, but—Oh no!" He let go of her with his left arm and looked at his watch with growing panic. "Shit. I'm late. I'm so late. I was already late, but—"

"You better go then. We're both late." She stepped back away from him. The mummy crate caught her behind the knees and she would have fallen over, except that Bob caught her again. The next thing they knew, it was fifteen minutes later and his phone was ringing again.

"I really have to go." This time he guided her away from the crate before letting go of her. "I'll be back tomorrow, except that I have to go back in tomorrow night, so I don't know when—"

"It's okay. I'll see you," she said.

"Okay." He backed away from her, knocking over a lion-footed knickknack table and upsetting the collection of carved wooden masks piled upon it. He started to pick them up.

"I'll get that, you go on."

"Thanks." He left the room, facing forwards, but stuck his head back around the door and said, "Tomorrow?"

"Yes! Go."

He went.

Righting the table, she knelt on the floor and gathered up the masks. She picked up Esmerelda Willoughby's notebook and, smoothing the rumpled pages, she marked the place of the curse-breaking spell with Thomas's notes. Oh, Thomas. She put the notebook back on the dresser beside the little dish of teabags, then ran downstairs, nearly breaking her neck at the second floor landing when she made a sudden change of direction to fetch Alice's cocktail dress to take to the cleaners. She felt very virtuous for having remembered, given the circumstances. Besides, she was so late at this point that an extra stop on the way to work didn't make much difference.

She was moving fast enough to make up time till she got to her truck, parked across the street in a great spot beside Libby Hill Park. She'd avoided the rotting tree that dropped limbs every time a stiff breeze came along and the driver's door was a straight shot from the front gate of the house. Or at least it would have been if a big city truck hadn't been double-parked beside it. She threw Alice's dress on the seat and considered the situation. The city truck was positioned such that she couldn't squeeze her truck out without scraping her bumper off on the city truck or putting a huge dent in Trip's BMW which was parked in the next spot. Her pettier self pointed out that Trip deserved some car damage, but her more sensible self, who paid the insurance premiums, quashed that notion. Besides, witnesses.

A small crew of workmen in insulated brown coveralls were working on the fountain at the near end of the park. They looked like they were unbolting it from the base, or trying to. The cast iron Victorian fountain was shaped like a two-tiered birdbath and was surrounded by a low stone wall with three more or less equally spaced breaks for the sidewalk to pass through. The housemates had been monitoring the fountain's rust status and Dirk wanted to set up a neighborhood pool to take bets as to when the half-inch thick iron would rust completely through. In the winter, the fountain was shut off. In the summer, Elizabeth had been told, it shot a prim little jet of water out of the top and people pulled down the "no dogs in fountain" signs and let their dogs play in the doughnut-shaped (doughnuts again!) pool around the base.

The workmen were having issues with the rusted bolts that held the fountain in place. One of them threw his hat on the ground, stomped on it, and then huffed back to the truck to fetch a bigger wrench. Elizabeth asked him to move the truck. He backed it up a few feet. She thanked him and took off, trying not to think about what Miss Price would say when she rolled in to the bookstore forty-five minutes late less than a week before Christmas.

There was a line at the drycleaners even at this late hour of the morning. Okay, an hour late. Even the prospect of the extra verbal flaying couldn't stop smiles from bubbling up onto her face. When some asshole cut her off on the expressway, she even waved at him with all five fingers. She caught herself singing along with mushy songs the radio.

Cursed! she thought firmly. Your sister is cursed and your—your friend is kidnapped and going to be sacrificed to Satan. This is no time for sunshine and kittens. Still, she was humming when she pushed open the front door of the bookstore.

Alice was tidying up the rack of bookmarks by the cash register. She looked up when the door opened, then grinned and said, "Woo! Kissage!"

"Shh!"

Alice raised a hand, palm out. When Elizabeth just looked at her, she grabbed Elizabeth's hand and guided her through the high-five gesture.

"How could you tell?" asked Elizabeth.

"Your mouth looks like it's been mashed on and I think I heard the smacking."

"Oh." Elizabeth blushed.

"Hey, it's okay," said Alice. "We'll all understand. It's been like a year since either of you got even that much."

"Not true, I kissed Trip."

"That is nothing to be proud of. Besides, he's really boring (hot, okay, but still, boring) so it can't count. Oh, Miss Price will be so pleased. She may let you live." Alice smiled with evil sweetness. The ward, refreshed by Miss Price, cast an angelic halo around her head which was at distinct odds with her ensemble for the day. Alice was trying a femme fatale look to go with her cursed status. She wore a black knit dress, slinky, and had heightened the pallor of her fair skin with powder. She had also been a little heavy with the eyeliner and darkened her eyebrows so that at first glance her natural blonde hair looked like a very expensive dye job.

As the sisters stood talking to each other and simply begging for the wrath of their employer, the bell over the door rang.

Trip's sister, the former (or maybe not so former) avatar of Famine, stepped into the bookstore. She was bundled up in a hip-length fur coat and wool slacks which didn't conceal the stick-like thinness of her legs. She pushed her sunglasses back on her head and looked sourly at the sisters. She said, "I hope you're satisfied. How could you send those—those—"

"Really good friends of ours who might help us save your stupid brother?" Alice finished for her.

Jennifer folded her arms across her chest. "So after they left, after they threw doughnuts at me, for Christ's sake, I called Trip and asked him about Titania's holiday plans. He doesn't know, because she says it's going to be a surprise."

"We knew that."

"Yeah, well, anyway. Part of the surprise is a romantic weekend at his place, just the two of them, before they go somewhere and she won't tell him where."

"That's convenient," said Alice. "At least we won't have to go too far out of our way. You wouldn't happen to know anything about how Titania normally handles this tithe to the Devil business, would you? The one time we witnessed the process, it was sort of atypical."

"I don't know either, exactly, except there's some kind of travel involved."

"You're going to have to do better than that," said Alice. "She isn't going to tell us about it. You're the one who can get that information."

"You said you'd help," said Jennifer.

"'Help' doesn't mean that we do everything," said Alice. She let her fingers drift across the bowl of peppermints sitting out on the counter. "Did you find out anything about the break-in at our place?"

"It was probably Carl. Nobody knows where he lives."

Alice tossed a piece of candy up in the air.

Jennifer flinched and took a step backwards. "Don't you start with that, you bitch," she hissed, her eyes on the candies that Alice was now juggling from hand to hand.

"Oh, nice! We'll just come running to help you." Alice threw a piece of candy at Jennifer which grazed her ear slightly. Jennifer ducked away and put a hand on the door pull.

"Ladies!" Miss Price appeared between Elizabeth and Alice. Jennifer slammed out of the shop and the twins cringed under Miss Price's choleric glare. "I suggest that you go find some work to do. There was plenty the last time I checked. We will discuss your arrival time later."

"Yes, Miss Price."

A customer walked up with a question about chocolates and where did they stock them. As if this were some kind of candy store, Miss Price said with her eyes only, but the twins could hear her just fine. They dropped back and let her handle it.

Alice mouthed, "The car?" If Titania was going to be spending time at Trip's place, they would have to hide Marla's Cadillac.

"The carriage house, tonight," Elizabeth whispered back.

Elizabeth ran upstairs to her mail-order department and began pulling orders. She worked straight through till noon, when she was planning to sneak out of the shop, all the way out, for lunch. Alice came sneaking upstairs while she was putting on her coat.

"Can I take lunch first today?" asked Alice. "I have a plan." She reached into her purse and pulled out a golden ring which she held up between her thumb and forefinger. She looked at Elizabeth through the center of it. It was the ring of invisibility which the housemates kept in the sugar bowl. "I'm going to do a little bit of sleuthing. I saw Becky go into the shoe store today, she's even trying to sell some shoes, although since the store hasn't been open for weeks, she isn't getting much traffic. I thought I'd go in and have a look around. For all we know, they might have Thomas's portrait in there or she might have Carl's address written down.

Elizabeth sighed patiently. "If Thomas's portrait were over on the other side of this wall, he would just walk through the wall and let us know."

"Oh." Alice looked crestfallen, but bounced back with characteristic speed. "Well, I'm going anyway. Whatever they're up to, Becky's involved in it. She may know something and have some helpful handy clues lying around for me to read. Or she might talk to people and I can eavesdrop on her. I'll feel better if I can do something, even if it's pointless."

"Go on ahead. I'll cover you at the cash register for the worst hour of the day instead of going to lunch first like it's my turn. I don't mind."

"Excellent."

"And beware of germs. You're going into the abode of Pestilence."

"Already ahead of you." Alice held up a small vial of hand sanitizer. "If she realizes I'm there and tries anything, I'm squirting her with this."

"You really think that that's going to be effective?"

"Hey, I'm working on a theory here. I'm thinking that these avatars of the Apocalypse can be defeated by simple things. Did you see how Jennifer flinched when I threw that candy at her?"

"I'd flinch if you threw candy at me, or hand sanitizer," Elizabeth said. "Since when can you juggle?"

"Oh, for like ages now. I learned while I was dating this guy who liked to go out busking. But anyway, I was thinking that if the avatar of Death could be defeated by water, then the other avatars could be defeated by substances which are sort of in opposition to what they are."

"I don't see how water is the opposite of Death."

"It's just a theory. I'm still working on it. Bob was working off The Wizard of Oz when he threw that water on Marla and melted her. Kind of makes you wonder about L. Frank Baum, huh? So, since Carl is the avatar of War, we need to figure out some way to throw peace at him. Give it some thought." Alice popped the ring on her finger and vanished.

Elizabeth sighed again and slipped off her coat. She stomped down the stairs and mustered enough good grace to stand at the cash register for an hour and ring up Christmas cards, gift certificates, and even a few books. She was alone out on the floor. Miss Price had retreated to her office where she was drinking tea and grumbling over paperwork. The high school student who helped with the stock wasn't due in until after three.

Elizabeth kept one eye on the clock and the other eye on the door to catch it being opened and closed by an invisible hand. Alice could simply take off the ring when she exited the shoe store, but she never could resist making an entrance, even when no one could see her.

Before Alice's lunch hour was half over, Elizabeth's stomach started growling. During a momentary lull, she groped blindly around in the cookie jar for some form of sustenance, even a fragment of an Oreo would do.

"Bing!"

Elizabeth jumped, dropping the lid of the cookie jar which clattered onto the counter and made a hideous cracking noise. Alice was standing an inch away from her.

"Did you find out anything?" Elizabeth asked once her heart started beating again.

Alice grinned. "You bet, I'll tell you later. I have to go to lunch now." With that she ran back upstairs for her purse and out the back door.

"Augh!" Elizabeth knotted her fingers in her hair and stomped around in a small circle. She stopped when somebody walked up with a foot high stack of children's books.

Alice came back from lunch when there was a line five deep at the register. Elizabeth finished a transaction, then shoved Alice up to the register and ran away before she went into a hypoglycemic coma.

After a quick lunch at the coffee shop up the street, she went for a walk around the residential part of the neighborhood looking for Thomas, just in case Carl had stashed him in one of the little houses. She didn't have any luck and she kept tripping over the edges of the tilting slabs of the sidewalk when she tried to walk around with her eyes closed to look for auras.

By the time her lunch hour was over, she was nursing a bruised knee and a scrape on her forehead from where she'd walked into a tree. She limped gratefully back into the bookstore and stopped by the office to see if Miss Price was making any headway with the curse breaking.

"Near as I can make out, you can't break a mummy curse," Miss Price said glumly. She leaned back in her task chair. "It's cursed forever. When those ancient Egyptians cursed something, it by God stayed cursed."

"What about Alice?" Elizabeth asked.

"Alice isn't cursed," Miss Price said. "It's just a little spirit possession and the ward should be sufficient to keep the mummy at bay until it gives up."

"And tries to take over somebody else?" Like me?

"That's not likely," Miss Price said. "It seems to be a seasonal sort of thing. Since the curse specifies darkness of winter, it will be most active in winter. When you get Thomas back, have him donate the mummy to the museum. That should take care of the problem once and for all."

"But the ward isn't strong enough," said Elizabeth. "It wears off overnight and Alice starts sleepwalking again. And you can see the curse in her aura."

"That's from the possession," said Miss Price. "She isn't really cursed."

"Thomas found this spell for breaking a doomed lovers curse. Do you think we could try that anyway? Even if it doesn't work on the mummy, it might work on Alice." She rattled off as much of the spell as she could recall from reading it that morning.

"You're certainly welcome to try," said Miss Price, "but I don't know if it's worth the effort. You'll have a hard time making it work without some items belonging to the male person involved. It's just barely possible to make it work without, but—"

"Who is the male person? We don't even know that."

"Really?" Miss Price blinked at her over the tops of her cat's-eye glasses. "It's the museum mummy, Kharis. Consider. Kharis and Ananka are of the precisely same era and they were found close to each other. A mummy was missing from Ananka's tomb, and Kharis had been thrown into our tomb as an afterthought. Besides, it's all written down in the scroll that was found with Kharis." She tapped an archival box sitting on her desk.

"Then we can use that scroll to break the curse," Elizabeth said.

"No!" Miss Price sat upright and the back of her chair snapped up. "You'd have to destroy it in order to use it. I'm not about to let you all destroy a priceless antiquity."

"Can we have a little piece of it?"

"No!"

"But, Miss Price—"

"But, Elizabeth! Have you heard anything I've said?" Miss Price leaned back in her chair again and planted her heels on the edge of her desk. She gestured at the stacks of papers, old and new, swamping her office. "I've got a bookstore to run, all this year end paperwork! And I'm still trying to figure out what my nephew is up to with that mummy. It's no good, I'll warrant, and it's probably rather worse than your sister's sleepwalking episodes. Now let me get to it. And don't even think about coming back here and breaking off a corner of that scroll." Miss Price pulled a pencil from her chignon and bit it in half. She added, "I hate Christmas."

"Yes, Miss Price." Elizabeth backed out of the office and quietly shut the door behind her.

She didn't get a chance to talk to Alice until Alice came up to mail order for a short break that afternoon. Alice staggered theatrically up the stairs and sprawled across the floor.

Elizabeth nudged her ribs with her toe. "What did you find out from your spy mission?"

Alice closed her eyes and groaned. "Not much. Those people don't write anything down. I even looked on the computer when she went out front to harass some poor slob into buying a pair of platform boots. There's almost nothing on the computer, just some store inventory software and some games. She's got this one where you calculate proliferation rates for bacteria and figure out mortality rates in a population. Fun. Where does she find that kind of stuff? Anyway. I pretty much gave up. I even went upstairs and there's nothing up there at all except old furniture and boxes. When I came back downstairs, Becky was on the phone. She was talking to her father and she told him that he'd better 'make sure the city gets it done or there'll be hell to pay.' I hope he knows to take that literally. Even that might not be enough incentive to get the city to do anything fast."

"Did she say what it was?"

"No." Alice rolled over on her side and picked at the carpet.

"Alice!" Miss Price called from downstairs.

Alice rolled back onto her back and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. "Sheesh! I'm supposed to get a fifteen minute break, not a five minute one. I should call OSHA on her." She got up and went back downstairs.

Tonight was Elizabeth's night to work late. She wrapped up her mail-order work by the time Alice left at five o'clock, and then went downstairs to work at the register with Miss Price. Rather, normally she worked with Miss Price, but this evening Miss Price was hiding back in her office, staring at ancient Egyptian scrolls and hating Christmas.

Night had already fallen. Looking out the front window where the streetlights barely held back the darkness, Elizabeth shivered and thought of Thomas. She didn't know what else they could do, besides let the police investigate and try to find Carl's house on their own. She hoped that Miss Price was correct in her assessment of Thomas's abilities to extricate himself. Elizabeth was less sanguine. Enterprising though he might be, he could not manifest with much intensity at any distance from the portrait, and in another part of town he might not have as much power to draw on as he did at home.

A clutch of women, smelling of Thai food and their cheeks flushed from the chill and Singha, burst into the shop and exclaimed over the gift items. Elizabeth rang up their selections and then they hurried on to the shoe store, which they left precipitately, she noticed with satisfaction. After they left, she stretched out her shoulders and her neck, then closed her eyes to view the shoe store on the ethereal plane. As she began to sense the bizarre oscillations of the cursed shoes, the telephone rang.

"Why Not? Bookstore, open till seven every night until Christmas Eve," she chirped into the handset.

"Yes, may I speak to Miss Price please?" the caller asked. The caller was a woman, young, and her voice was almost familiar.

Elizabeth looked over at the office door which remained forbiddingly closed. She thought better of going over and knocking; the light on her own phone indicated that Miss Price was on the other line. She offered to take a message.

"That's okay. I was just wondering how late she was going to be there," the young woman said. "She asked me to come in and talk to her."

"She'll be here until seven too," Elizabeth said. "Is this Charlotte? I'll tell her that you called."

"Oh, no. That's okay, I'll be by." The line clicked.

Elizabeth shrugged and set down the receiver. A youngish woman, bundled up in a winter coat and a cute fluffy scarf from the accessory shop down the block, walked up and asked to look at tarot decks. Elizabeth pulled some from behind the counter and apologized for being totally unable to answer any of her questions about them. "I don't know anything about them, it's my sister who's the expert."

The woman squinted her. "Oh, you two are twins, right?"

"Yes," Elizabeth said, bracing herself for the inevitable chat about mystical psychic twin connections. She was not disappointed. While she talked, the woman fiddled with one of the sample decks and laid out cards. She would lay out the cards, glance down at them, and then pick them up and shuffle them again. Elizabeth didn't really pay attention till the woman said, "Hey. Death keeps coming up here."

Elizabeth looked down at the card the woman was pointing at. "It always does with that one. Why don't you try another deck?"

Eventually, after a few more comments about energies and connections, the woman bought one of the more expensive decks which hadn't been moving too well. Miss Price would be so pleased.

It was a long time until seven o'clock. Finally Miss Price emerged from her office wearing a long winter coat and wrapping a striped scarf around her throat. The ends reached nearly to her toes. "I'm off," she said. "Can you take care of the day end stuff before you go?"

They locked up the shop and turned out most of the lights. Elizabeth took the till back to Miss Price's office. Her hopes of getting her hands on the scroll were dashed when she saw how Miss Price had it warded, bound entirely around with bands of bright green glowing light. Hovering in the air above it, glowing green letters spelled out "Don't even think about it." Some old notebooks and papers dating from the 1890's rested in a tidy stack beside it. A small crystal pyramid with glyphs etched around the base was placed on top of the stack.

When Elizabeth finished the accounting, she locked everything up and sat looking at the papers. She took the notebook from the top of the stack and opened it to a random page. She looked at it for a moment, then flipped through the rest. Every single page was filled from top to bottom in a cramped, narrowly spaced hand. Just the sight of it made her head ache. No wonder Miss Price was in a bad mood. She replaced the notebook beneath the pyramid.

At home she found the house empty, except for Rififi who came running up to greet her and lead her back to the kitchen and his food dish. Elizabeth poured a can of soup into a saucepan and set it on the stove to heat. From the window she could see a light in the carriage house. Turning off the heat under her soup and ignoring Rififi's pleas, she went out back to investigate.

Alice had enlisted Kevin and Dirk to help her hide the Cadillac. They were all dressed in grubby clothes, Elizabeth didn't think the boys even owned grubby clothes, but maybe they'd found some lying around in the house. The large doors of the carriage house stood open while the housemates tried to clear enough space for the Cadillac. The carriage house was filled with an old carriage, the corpses of innumerable lawn mowers, and other, more functional gardening equipment.

The boys were stacking the lawnmowers in a corner where they formed a fanged heap reeking of oil, dirt, and gasoline fumes. Alice carried smaller items upstairs to stow them on the second floor. Elizabeth hoped the floor was solid. The joists were as big around as Dirk. It would take a lot of hungry wood-boring beetles a really long time to compromise the structural integrity, but the carriage house had been built a really long time ago.

"Yay! You're here," Alice called. "You can help us push."

"Yay! Lucky me."

Dirk and Kevin hoisted a final lawnmower on to the pile. "I think we've got enough room now," said Dirk. "Too bad you didn't steal a compact car, Alice, we'd have been done ages ago."

Alice sat in the Cadillac of Death and took it out of gear. The rest of them clustered at the back bumper and heaved. Slowly the Cadillac began to move and Alice turned the wheel. They edged it into the narrow cleared space where it left barely enough clearance for them to close the carriage house doors. Alice couldn't even open the driver's side door. She had to lower the top and crawl out over the trunk.

Dirk was about to lock the door behind when Alice said, "Hold on a second, we still need to move the mummy out here."

"Again with the heavy lifting?"

"Well, there's a reason why you work out." Alice brushed dirt off her hands.

Back in the house Elizabeth looked longingly at her soup when they passed through the kitchen. The boys stopped to wash off the worst of the grease from their hands. Elizabeth followed Alice up to the mummy's room. She said, "We can still try to break the curse. Thomas got together most of what we need to try it."

"We can try it out in the carriage house," Alice said. "I want to get the mummy far away from me while I still have the guys around to lift it. I think they're looking for reasons to go out tonight."

The boys appeared, discussing that very thing.

"We can't depend on the police to find him in time," said Kevin. "Carl can't be that hard to track down. Even if you don't know where he lives, you still know where he might live. And you know what kind of car he drives."

"So we should drive around random scary neighborhoods and look to see if his car's parked outside? He has a red SUV and I don't know what the license plate is."

"Oh. That doesn't narrow it down any." Kevin looked downcast, but only for a second. "What about bars? You know which bars he goes to."

"Bars! Why didn't I think of that? I can think of a few places we should try."

"I knew they were going to work around to that sooner or later. Sure enough, it's sooner," said Alice.

"We're helping," said Dirk. "Last night it was doughnuts, and tonight it's alcohol and loud music. If Carl were more accommodating, he would have taken off for someplace warm with a beach, but that's too much to hope for."

The boys each took an end of the mummy's crate and lifted. Kevin couldn't get his end off the floor at all, and Dirk only managed to raise his end a few inches.

"This thing weighs a ton," Dirk gasped.

"Bob says the mummy case is light. Just take that," Elizabeth said.

"And risk the wrath of Miss Price?" Dirk reached into the crate and lifted up the head of the mummy case. "This isn't bad at all, there must be rocks in the bottom of that crate." The boys lifted the mummy case out and set it on the bed, where they wrapped it in a convenient dust drape.

Leaning into the crate, Alice swished some of the dirty straw around and whistled. "Take a look at this. These are like those reliefs they have in the museum."

The others gathered around her. Even in the low light, the fragments of the relief sprang out at them. The slabs of stone were encased with wooden frames to protected them from the mummy case. They depicted scenes of Isis putting her dead husband back together. A few smudges of the original coloring remained on the stone.

"Miss Price will be so pleased," Elizabeth said faintly.

"Were these on the packing manifest for this crate?" asked Dirk.

"I don't know. Miss Price has it," said Alice. "She didn't say anything. I guess we'll find out tomorrow."

The girls picked up the small boxes holding the stone canopic jars of the mummy's innards. The boys picked up the mummy case and carried it carefully down three flights of stairs and out into the backyard. Elizabeth hoped that none of the neighbors was looking out back while they crossed the lawn. Draped in the white dust sheet, the mummy case looked exactly like the coffin it was. She decided that if anybody asked, they could claim to be putting Halloween decorations away.

Because the Cadillac filled up most of the available space in the carriage house, they couldn't get in to carry the mummy up the stairs. Instead, Kevin backed up over the trunk of the Cadillac carrying his end of the mummy case. Dirk stood on the back bumper and raised his end. They wedged the mummy case in a semi-reclining position in the backseat. They managed to not bang it on anything hard. Elizabeth hoped it had not collected any additional chips and damage to bring the wrath of Miss Price down upon them. After Kevin got out of the Cadillac, the girls crawled over the trunk to place the canopic jars beside the mummy.

Back in the house, the boys ran upstairs to dress to go out and Elizabeth began to heat up her soup again. Alice popped popcorn in the microwave. While she stood beside the microwave and watched the bag puff up, she said, "Are we really going to try breaking the curse tonight?"

"Sure," said Elizabeth. She stirred her soup and tasted a bit off the spoon. It was still too cold for her taste, although she expected Bob would have pronounced it palatable. She dropped the spoon back in the saucepan. "Thomas left his notes and he got together the ingredients. We can use the canopic jars for the mummy's property, assuming that they are her canopic jars. Thomas said the spell might not work, but we don't really have a choice. It's too bad Miss Price put some major wards on that scroll."

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"The museum mummy is our mummy's boyfriend. The scroll was found with him so it's as close to being his property as anything. If we could use that, we might have a better shot with this spell. Miss Price says we can't because that would destroy the scroll."

"You couldn't get a little piece of it?"

"Miss Price was ahead of us on that one. The whole thing is totally inaccessible. For all I know, if we touch those wards we'll be turned into frogs."

"Well, it's not like she wouldn't turn us back," said Alice. "Although we'd have to spend all night as frogs and then get lectured in the morning. Do you think she would turn us back before or after the lecture? Do you think that as frogs we'd still understand English?" She pulled her popcorn out of the microwave and emptied the bag into a mixing bowl.

"I don't want to find out the hard way." Elizabeth stirred the soup a little more. It finally started to simmer and she decided it was hot enough. She dumped it into a bowl and joined her sister at the dinette.

Alice was munching popcorn thoughtfully. "I wonder," she said slowly and then paused for another handful of popcorn.

"Wonder what?"

"I wonder about the other stuff that was in the mummy pit at the museum. Like those broken pots and so on, and the jars. Do you think those were real Egyptian artifacts, or just junk there for decoration? Maybe they were found with the mummy."

"Alice, you didn't!" Elizabeth froze, her spoon halfway to her mouth. She stared at her sister who was crunching away without a sign of concern.

"I didn't take potsherds or anything," said Alice. "But I found those leaves in that one jar. And I was holding them in my hand, and then we were all locked in and panicking, and I sort of put the leaves in my pocket. So I have those leaves, and even if they weren't found with the mummy, we found them with the mummy. They must've been sitting down in that pit with him for forty years. It's like they were his."

"You could look it that way." Elizabeth brought the spoon the rest of the way to her mouth and sipped her soup. "It might sort of distract you from how it's stealing."

"It wasn't stealing, it was a few leaves. If it was dirt from the floor, you wouldn't say anything."

"Sure I would. I would ask why you are stealing dirt."

Alice affected offense and the girls ate in silence for a while. Dirk and Kevin came bounding down the stairs, all cleaned up and dressed in black.

"Where're we going?" asked Kevin.

"That depends. Are we going out to find Carl? Or are we going to hang out in bars and pretend like we're trying to find Carl."

"Of course, we should try to find him," said Kevin. "At least for a while. So, where're we going?"

"It doesn't have a name," said Dirk. "But it's the place where Carl goes most often. The problem is that it moves around a lot, because it's not exactly licensed."

"So we're going to a bar of no fixed address to look for a guy with no fixed address? Sounds appropriate."

Alice wished them luck and they headed out.

Elizabeth finished her soup and put her dishes in the sink. "We might as well go for it. Miss Price says you can't break a mummy curse, but maybe we can dent it a little bit." The girls trudged all the way back up to the third floor. The stairs seemed to get longer every time and Elizabeth better understood why Bob often crashed on the futon in the downstairs hallway when he came in. Up in the mummy's former room, they collected the items Thomas had laid out and took it all back down to the kitchen. Alice made a brief detour to Dirk's room to pick up the bucket of sidewalk chalk and some candles.

Elizabeth spread the materials across the kitchen table and reviewed the instructions for the spell from both Miss Willoughby and Thomas. She handed the sheet in l337 to Alice and said, "Translate this."

Alice skimmed the notes. "It's nothing, it just says how I'm not specifically cursed, just affected by the curse. I'm supposed to stand between the inner and outer circles and under no circumstances am I to 'help' you. If you break the curse, then you should be able to look at my aura and see if it goes away."

Since they were working with unorthodox ingredients, Thomas had made some changes to Miss Willoughby's instructions for compounding the herbs, scraps of bark and a hard white substance which Thomas's notes said was bone. Elizabeth followed his directions, sniffing the teabags before ripping them open to make sure that she was adding the right teas in the right order. She pounded up the contents of the small wooden bowl with the handle of a kitchen knife.

Alice watched with great interest. "Should I put in the leaves?" She held up the small bundle of Kleenex in which she had wrapped her ill-gotten leaves.

"No, we use those later when we're performing the spell. We have to do this in the carriage house since the mummy and all her stuff is out there." Putting a piece of foil over the bowl of herbs, Elizabeth gathered up all the paraphernalia and a box of matches. Alice took the keys and the chalk and kept her packet of leaves securely in her pocket. The girls trooped back out across the back lawn, their breath showing misty white in the light from the back porch.

Alice unlocked the door to the carriage house and pulled it open. "The car is totally in the way. But the trunk is big and flat, I guess we can draw the circle there."

"We really don't have any alternative. The chalk won't mark the dirt." Elizabeth looked over the expanse of the pale broad trunk at the ghostly form of the mummy projecting over the back seat. She set everything on the trunk and squeezed around the car to turn the overhead light on.

"Aren't we supposed to have candlelight?"

"It says candlelight, but it doesn't say we can't have some other kind of light too. I figure, the more light, the better." Besides, it made the atmosphere marginally less creepy. Elizabeth crawled back over the car to join Alice.

Alice was flipping through Miss Willoughby's notebook. "This is really neat. There's all kinds of stuff in here we could try."

Elizabeth retrieved the book and studied the diagram. Wondering about the wisdom of performing a curse-breaking on top of a cursed Cadillac, she picked up a piece of chalk.

"Aren't we going to do the thing with salt and water? Or the cone of power?"

"This isn't Wicca stuff," Elizabeth said.

"We aren't going to call on the four quarters or anything?"

"Says here, I draw the circles, I draw the runes and say certain things when I do it, then we put the mummies' property here on these runes, you go in the outermost circle, and so on. Then I say this one last chant that I can't pronounce so who knows if it's going to work, and then we're done. It doesn't say anything about the four quarters."

Instead of being downcast, as Elizabeth had expected, Alice looked interested. "So you mean, when we do Wicca stuff, we could dispense with all that?"

Elizabeth shrugged. She personally did not think that the Wicca had all that much to do with witchcraft. Her own theory was that Miss Price was using her Wicca coven as a farm team for collecting and training actual witches. With a piece of chalk in her right hand and the notebook in her left, Elizabeth crawled onto the gently sloping surface of the Cadillac's trunk. The fins projected out towards the door like horns. Carefully, and wishing that she had a compass or even a piece of string, she drew the outermost circle. One advantage to the Cadillac having a really beat up finish was that the chalk made a healthy white mark on the pale paint. She drew the inner circle and began with the runes and the chanting, feeling only slightly foolish. Unable to sense the involvement of any power at all, she went through the motions, but gradually the chalk marks glowed more than they should have under the weak light from the bulb overhead. As she drew the final stroke on the final rune, something crackled and she heard a rattling from out in the yard. The chalk circle glowed even brighter.

"What was that?" Elizabeth asked.

"Just the lid on the well rattling again."

"I hate that," Elizabeth said. "Okay, now it's time for you." She had Alice join her on the trunk and directed her to stand between two particular runes as per Thomas's instructions. She took the box holding one of the canopic jars and set it on the rune close to north on the edge of the circle. She placed Alice's packet of leaves, weighted down with a stone, on the southern rune. Referring to the notebook, she chanted some more while she lit the candles. She hoped that the oh, shit interjected into the chanting every time the match blew out and a candle failed to light wouldn't affect the spell.

Setting the bowl of powdery herbs and bits in the center of the circle among all the candles, she pulled out her pocket knife. She set down the notebook and jabbed the little fold of skin at the base of her thumb where the wineglass had slashed it the night before.

"Ow," she said and didn't even break the skin. She poked a little harder and a bit of red finally welled up. She squeezed her hand over the bowl until a drop of blood dripped in. The chalk circle flared up more brightly and the candles burned green. She glanced up at Alice, whose eyes had gone perfectly round.

Elizabeth picked up the notebook and read the final chant, wondering about the workmen who had been so unimpressed by Miss Willoughby's performance of the spell. She was getting chills herself and not from the December breeze whirling lightly into the carriage house. When she reached the last word of the chant the candles flickered up to the rafters and winked out. The chalk circle faded to a dull glow, and then it was only a smudgy collection of dusty marks on the Cadillac.