Treasures of Egypt

October 15, 2:59 a.m., Year of the Curtain

Orlando Museum of Natural History

For Michael Cort, the night the curtain was pulled back began the same as any other night. He arrived at the Museum at 7 o’clock, just as the day shift was finishing their rounds of the premises to make sure there were no stragglers wandering around after hours. He signed in and made his first sweep of the building, nodding to the janitorial staff as they mopped the floors in the “Treasures of Ancient Egypt” exhibit that was on loan from the Cairo Museum, and returned to the guard room where he could keep an eye out through the miracle of the surveillance camera.

It was a pretty sweet gig, Michael had to admit. He got to sleep all day, and his only real responsibilities at night were to take a walk every few hours and sign a card. It was bliss. He sat in the guard room and played his Sudoku puzzles most nights, or spent a little time farting around on his phone, beating the tar out of people at “Words With Friends.” Hell, the Museum even helped with that at times. One night he nailed 72 points with “desiccate,” a word he’d never even heard of until he saw it on one of the signs describing the mummification process.

The mummies, he reflected as he made his third sweep of the museum that night, were kind of pathetic by the time they actually got to his care. He’d watched some of those old movies when he was a kid, with Boris Karloff roaming around wrapped in bandages like he’d fallen down a flight of stairs or something. Real mummies, like the one he was looking over at 2:59, didn’t look like that at all. This pharaoh, King KrappenKooken or whatever his name was, looked like a dried up Halloween decoration more than a once great and powerful ruler. There were still a few thin strands of dingy fabric binding his arms to his chest, but his face was exposed and hollow, the flesh long gone and only a thin, sunken membrane of filthy skin remained over his skull. He lay in a heavy sarcophagus lined with gold and inlaid with jewels. The lid was off, with the mummy laying open to the air, his face frozen in an eternal rictus, clutching his own chest as though he was trying to keep the last splinter of life from escaping. Frankly, the real thing looked a lot scarier in the Museum’s night lighting scheme than anything Michael ever saw in the old movies.

Although the eyes were sunken in and sealed shut, whenever Michael looked at it he felt terribly as if the thing was looking up at him, following him with its eyes, as though it was blaming Michael somehow for what happened to his remains, and the fact that his body and all his golden, jewel-encrusted worldy possessions were now on display in a museum in a strange land instead of keeping his cold flesh company in his final resting place.

“But it wasn’t that final after all, was it?” Michael asked the mummy, who gave no response. He chuckled at his own wit and turned around, ready to continue on his rounds through the section of Sumerian artifacts, then back to the room to ponder what word he could build with an “X,” a “C,” three “E”s and two “F”s. This round was kicking his ass.

At the same moment his watch ticked over to 3 a.m., he heard the familiar hourly chime peep at him, followed by an unfamiliar jingling sound. He stopped. In a place this big there were always Night Sounds – a mysterious tapping or rustling that could usually be attributed to the air circulation system or some other innocuous source of origin. Sometimes he was sure about that, but more often he just decided he heard something tame make the click or the creak. Jingles may have been new, but nothing worth worrying about. In two and a half years as a guard at the museum, he’d heard a lot of sounds without any identifiable starting point. None of them had ever turned out to be a threat to any of the exhibits or any of the guards, and he was a bit too worn out to backtrack and check it out. He laughed quietly as he imagined turning around only to find Tom Cruise wearing all black, dangling from a cord that rolled down from the air duct, with one hand clutching the rope and the other one trying to pick up a fanciful diamond the size of a grapefruit.

When he turned to look in the direction of the sound, though, he didn’t see Tom reaching out for a diamond. Even Tom hopping around on Oprah’s couch and making a fool of himself would have been a welcome sight compared to what he was looking at. The ornate sarcophagus was empty now, and on the far side of the bier where it lay stood an enormous man wearing rags pulling back his arm to punch the glass in front of the pharaoh’s most ornate necklaces. He pumped his fist down and smashed through the three-inch thick pane as though it were sugar glass, wrapped his long fingers around the necklace, and turned.

Michael reached for his nightclub, the only real weapon he was given in this cushy security guard job, and ran at the intruder. “Stop!” he shouted. “Put the necklace down, or I’ll–”

The intruder casually lifted his free hand and Michael ran right into it. His fingers wrapped around Michael’s neck and he was lifted into the air, legs flailing. The intruder turned to look at him, and Michael began to kick harder, trying to scream and wail, but none of his panicked sounds could make it past the iron grip around his throat. It was the pharaoh, the mummy, the one he’d been laughing at just moments before, but somehow he’d grown to seven feet tall. He still had the same horrible, shrunken face, but his empty eyes now glowed with a blue fire, as though his eyeballs had been replaced with miniature gas stoves. Around him, shreds of wrapping writhed and curled up his body like snakes, wrapping his limbs and torso and giving him more of a conventional mummy’s appearance. He opened his mouth and hissed at Michael, pushing thousands of years of stale air out of his lungs and into Michael’s face. The guard gasped and thrashed, and the only comfort was that he couldn’t actually breathe in the foul stench, because he couldn’t breathe at all.

It was front page news, the next day, when the guard at the Orlando Museum was found dead. His neck was covered with bruises and his throat crushed, but the marks on his throat were far too thin to be the hands of a full-grown man with the strength to actually do the deed. Stranger still was the fact that nothing was stolen from the exhibit. Except for the murder, the only crime was a bizarre act of vandalism – the glass around an old Egyptian necklace was shattered, and the necklace placed on the neck of the mummy in the display… the mummy which lay in state, undisturbed, the only witness to Michael Cort’s gruesome death.