Off the Wall Read online

  “That can’t be right,” said Lucy. “Look around this room! Well, I mean, not this room, because after all, this is a spider exhibit. But if we go into—say—the middle of the Great Hall—or my family room—there won’t be a spider seven feet away.”

  “How do you know? Look how tiny these baby spiders are. Maybe you just don’t see them.”

  For some reason, Jane’s skin suddenly began to itch. She didn’t hate spiders, but she didn’t like them, either, and the idea that one might be close enough to crawl on her really creeped her out. To her relief, Willow called out to the group.

  “I know we said we just wanted to show you one room . . .”

  More groans from the girls.

  “But they did give me and Katherine permission to take out one of the tarantulas. Does anyone want to see it? It’s in a tank in the next room. Anyone who’s interested, come with me. The rest of you can wait in here with Katherine.”

  About twenty girls followed Willow, including Megan.

  “I wouldn’t have thought you were interested in tarantulas, Megan,” Lucy said.

  “I’m not! But it would be way worse to stay in the other room waiting and waiting and wondering what would happen if the tarantula broke free and viciously attacked everyone.”

  “Tarantulas are actually harmless,” said Willow, who had overheard this. “Nothing to worry about. They’re even kind of cuddly, if you look closely.” She had reached a row of glass tanks and was lifting the wire top off one of them. “Hey, buddy,” she said. “Ready to make some friends?” Gently she lifted out the creature inside.

  Even Jane caught her breath when she saw the tarantula. Its furry black body was the size of two plums, and its legs were about six inches long.

  “This is Trudy.” Willow lightly stroked the tarantula’s back. “Her species is found in South America, and she eats mostly cockroaches. Does anyone have any questions about her?”

  “How does she spray her deadly poison?” asked one girl named Stella.

  Willow laughed. “Tarantulas aren’t poisonous! Except to their prey. They do sometimes bite, but their bite is no more dangerous than a bee sting.”

  Megan had lurked in the doorway instead of fully coming into the room. Now she took a giant step backward.

  “But they only bite the insects they catch,” Willow continued. “Or—in the case of really big tarantulas—the mice and birds.”

  Megan took another step backward.

  “That’s not a big tarantula?” asked Lucy. “She looks huge to me.”

  “Some tarantulas are as big as dinner plates,” Willow told her. “They’re big enough to eat snakes.”

  Megan stepped back yet again—and tripped.

  “Watch out!” called Willow. “The spider web is right behind you!”

  Megan had stumbled only inches from the forty-foot fake web in the first room. She threw out a hand to break her fall—and her arm went right through the web. She grabbed the web with her other hand—and the whole web collapsed on her.

  Willow leaped forward to help. The sudden movement must have startled the tarantula, who fell off Willow’s hand and began to scuttle away.

  “EVERYBODY FREEZE!” Willow yelled at the top of her lungs. “Or you’ll step on Trudy!”

  Of course all the girls had been about to scatter—but now they halted instantly. Only Trudy continued her skittering path across the floor.

  “She’s coming for me! She’s going to attack!” Megan wailed. She tried to jump to her feet but only managed to get herself more tangled in the giant web.

  “She is not going to attack,” said Willow. “She’s much more scared than you are. Hold still, everyone—and you, too, Megan. I need to pick her up.”

  She walked calmly over to the tarantula and scooped her up. Just as calmly, she brought her back to the tank and closed the lid. Jane was sure she was just imagining things, but it seemed like the tarantula was happy to be back in its cage. Then at last she turned toward Megan.

  Katherine had reached Megan by then and was kneeling on the floor beside her. “Megan, could you try to stop squirming around?” she said. “You’re just getting more tangled.”

  “I bet you’d squirm if millions of poisonous spiders were attacking you!” said Megan tearfully.

  Katherine looked over at Willow and sighed. “This will be hard to explain to the staff,” she said.

  “I think it’s good that it happened,” said Lucy. “If that web could fall on Megan, it could fall on anyone. The museum people should be glad it happened before the exhibit was open to the public. Someone could have gotten hurt!”

  “How do you know I didn’t get hurt?” complained Megan.

  “Well, did you?”

  “No, I guess not.” Megan sounded disappointed. “I could have, though.”

  Willow’s voice was brisk. “But you didn’t. And neither did Trudy. And if we all work at it, we can get you untangled before you know it.”

  “Wow, this is amazing,” Jane said fifteen minutes later.

  “I think it’s horrible,” said Megan. “What if it springs a leak?”

  The group had untangled Megan, folded up the fake web, and then gone on to dinner, hungrier than ever. Now they were in the Templeton Museum’s restaurant, which had been built to look like a submarine. The walls were lined with portholes that showed superrealistic fish “swimming” past the sub. As the girls watched, a cloud of transparent jellyfish floated from one porthole to the next. The jellyfish were followed by a huge hammerhead shark. After the shark, a squid shot past. Starfish crept up the portholes and vanished from view. A school of seahorses wriggled by. Jane was pretty sure that none of these sea creatures shared the same spots in the same ocean, but who cared? As long as a mermaid didn’t show up, it was easy to believe they were really underwater.

  In the front of the sub, Katherine and Willow were setting out pans of lasagna, stacks of garlic bread, and a huge bowl of salad. “Come and get it, girls!” called Katherine. “After you’ve served yourselves, you can sit wherever you want.”

  Jane and Lucy ended up sitting with a bunch of Lucy’s friends, plus Megan. At the last minute, Daria also plunked herself down at their table. From her expression, she seemed to think she was doing them a favor.

  Lucy, Grace, and Cailyn all went to the same school. They knew Megan and the other girls at the table from summer programs at the museum.

  “Where do you live, Jane?” asked Cailyn.

  Jane could feel herself blushing. “I . . . I know this sounds stupid, but I don’t remember the address. We just got here.”

  “Well, do you know where you’ll be going to school?” Cailyn pressed.

  “I don’t think I’ll be going to school,” Jane confessed. She hated the way everyone was staring at her. “My mother . . .” She trailed off.

  “Oh, you’re homeschooled!” said Cailyn, and Jane nodded uncertainly.

  “Lots of kids around here are homeschooled,” Grace told her. “That’s why a lot of them come to the classes and stuff here at the museum—it’s a good way to meet kids their own age.”

  “That must be the only thing this museum is good for,” said Daria.

  “Give it a chance!” protested Lucy. “We haven’t seen any of the real stuff yet. Like the new Egyptian wing.”

  “Big deal. Lots of museums have Egyptian exhibits,” said Daria with a sniff.

  “Yeah, but this one’s been totally fixed up and added to. Willow said the museum bought the whole collection of an Egyptian museum that had to close for some reason. They got tons of stuff from some royal tombs that were discovered about twenty years ago. And solid-gold jewelry and papyrus scrolls and . . . oh, you know, royal pottery and things. And a lot of mummies. Now only two other museums in the country have bigger Egyptian exhibits than Templeton.”

  “I love Egyptian stuff,” said Grace. “We did a whole unit on ancient Egypt last year. We each got assigned a character that we had to study and then pretend to be. I w
as a pharaoh.” She giggled. “People had to obey my every command.”

  “There weren’t any girl pharaohs,” said Daria.

  “Yes, there were! Not a lot of them, but a couple,” Grace answered. “We studied that exact thing.” She stopped to take a bite of lasagna. “Mmm, this is really good.”

  Daria didn’t seem to agree about the museum’s food, either. She wasn’t eating much, Jane noticed—just pushing things around on her plate with a discontented face. Jane wondered why Daria was even at the lock-in if she hated everything so much. Maybe her mother had made her come, the way Jane’s had. But even if she didn’t want to be here, couldn’t she try to be nice?

  For the first time since she’d signed in, Jane suddenly got up the nerve to start a conversation. A conversation about the one thing that had been secretly haunting her all day.

  “I’ve heard something interesting about the Templeton Museum,” she blurted out. “That it’s haunted.”

  Everyone at the table stopped eating and stared at her.

  “That’s what they say,” said Jane more quietly. “In fact, it’s the Egyptian exhibit that’s supposed to be haunted. People say that one of the mummies comes to life every night.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Daria.

  “It’s true! I mean, it’s true that it’s what I’ve heard,” Jane said more carefully. “I mean it could be just a story, but—”

  “Of course it’s just a story,” said Daria.

  “Well, then, the story is that this mummy comes to life every night and walks through the museum.”

  Megan looked as if she was about to cry.

  But Grace looked excited. “Ooooh,” she said. “I like that kind of story.”

  All the girls at the table were leaning their heads in closer to listen.

  “Who told you such a stupid lie?” asked Daria.

  “Actually, it was—” Jane stopped midsentence. Her mother had told her the story. But it would sound so babyish to say that out loud.

  “I’ve just heard people talking about it,” Jane said weakly.

  “Why would a mummy do something as stupid as walking around this stupid place?” asked Daria.

  “Why not?” Grace snapped. “It would be a lot more interesting than lying on the floor in a casket or whatever.”

  Daria pushed her chair back to stand up. “You’re all crazy. I’m moving to another table.”

  Lucy’s cheeks had turned red, and her eyes were bright with fury. She’d finally had enough of Daria’s attitude. “You’re just scared!” she accused.

  Daria plunked herself back down into her seat. “I’m what?”

  “It’s all right, Lucy,” said Jane quietly. “Just forget about it.”

  But Lucy was obviously too mad to stop. “I said, ‘You’re just scared!’ Too scared even to listen. I bet Jane is right. This museum has a lot of weird history. Why shouldn’t a mummy be haunting it?”

  “Because Jane is just making it up, that’s why.” Daria’s smooth, fake-grown-up voice was infuriating.

  “I’m not making it up!” Jane said. “I swear I’m not!”

  “Then prove it!” Daria shot back.

  “I . . . I . . .” Jane faltered. “There’s no way I can prove something like that. How could anyone—”

  “Oh, giiiiiirls!” Katherine’s voice suddenly trilled through the air. She was standing up by the buffet tables. “Dessert’s ready! Or should I say, lots of desserts are ready? Come help yourselves! There are make-your-own sundaes and brownies and cupcakes and lemon squares and—”

  The rest of her sentence was cut off as people jumped up and rushed toward the desserts. Megan, finally happy, was the first one in line.

  But Daria didn’t move from her place. Her eyes were still fixed on Jane and Lucy.

  “You can prove it by coming on a midnight hunt for the mummy,” she said in a low voice. “We’ll go after everyone’s asleep.”

  “But why should I?” asked Jane. “I didn’t say I believed that there’s a mummy, only that I heard a rumor.”

  Daria didn’t argue with her. She didn’t say anything at all, or even blink, until finally she slowly mouthed the word chicken at Jane.

  How did I get myself into this? Jane thought, anguished.

  She had just wanted to shut Daria up. Instead she had . . . wound her up!

  “I dare you, chicken,” taunted Daria.

  “You know what, I’ll take you up on that dare,” Lucy suddenly said. “Only Jane, you really should come along too,” she added in her regular, not-mad voice. “It’ll be fun.”

  Fun? Fun walking around in a deserted museum after dark? Fun breaking the rules? Fun looking for a mummy?

  But after all, Jane reminded herself, I was the one who started this. And she didn’t want to seem scared of her own shadow, like Megan.

  “Of course I’ll come,” she heard herself saying.

  “Do you both promise?” asked Daria.

  “We promise,” Jane and Lucy answered together.

  “Good. I’ll put my blankets near yours. As soon as everyone is sleeping, we’ll set out.” Daria’s voice was firm. Very firm.

  “Come on, slowpokes,” called Willow. “The ice cream is melting!”

  But Jane had totally lost her appetite. As she trailed along behind the others, she stared unseeingly at the fake portholes on the walls. She hoped against hope that Daria just fell asleep later and didn’t make them follow through on the dare. After all, she didn’t know which was worse: actually seeing a mummy, or Daria making fun of her mercilessly for bringing it up.

  CHAPTER 4

  “And this is some of the treasure the explorers found,” explained Willow.

  After dinner, the group had continued its tour of the museum. After going through the Hall of Mythology, they soon wandered into the Egyptian wing—an exhibit that the group leaders said would be fun to walk through before heading back to the Great Hall for bed. And it was fun, even though Jane wasn’t exactly in the mood to think about ancient Egypt. Right now the girls were looking at a room filled with treasure. Daria didn’t seem impressed, but Jane was sure she was faking it. How could anybody not be impressed? The room wasn’t that big, but it was filled with actual heaps of gold—like a hoard in a fairy tale. There were hammered bracelets, necklaces of gold and turquoise beads, gold chains, jeweled hair ornaments, gold sandals, even what must have been a solid-gold chair.

  “There’s lots more gold. But this is what the archaeologists found in the outer chamber when they unsealed the tomb in 1932,” said Katherine.

  “Broke into the tomb and robbed it, you mean,” Jane heard Daria mutter.

  There was no way Katherine could have heard Daria, who was all the way in the back with Jane, but as if by coincidence, Katherine went on to explain, “Today’s archaeologists do believe that tomb robbers tried to steal this treasure—but centuries ago, not in 1932. Treasure wouldn’t have been piled up this way by the ancient Egyptians. It would have been arranged neatly near the caskets of the people who were expected to use it in the next life. It definitely wouldn’t have been left by the outer door. The thieves may have been startled by a noise. They dumped the gold, resealed the tomb, and ran off. And no one found the tomb again for almost three thousand years.”

  Now Willow took up the story. “The tomb had been carved out of a cliff. It had about thirty rooms, so we know it must have belonged to an important king. Let’s go into the next gallery and find out more.”

  “Sar-co-pha-gus,” Willow pronounced in a teacher-ish way a few seconds later. She gestured down at the vast alabaster form lying on the floor in front of them. A row of similar objects had been arranged down one wall of the room. “A sarcophagus is a stone case that holds a coffin, inside a coffin, that’s sometimes inside another coffin. This sarcophagus belonged to Prince Amun, one of the pharaoh’s seven sons.”

  “Is the prince in there?” Megan asked her.

  Willow chuckled. “Well, his mummy is. That’s
the whole point of a sarcophagus!”

  Megan took a couple of steps backward.

  “Why weren’t ordinary coffins enough to hold the bodies?” asked Jane. “It’s not as if the people inside them were going anywhere. The regular coffins didn’t need to be put into stone coffins.”

  “Ancient Egyptians believed bodies needed extra protection after death,” said Katherine. “Since they were going on a trip to the afterlife, they needed to be in good shape when they arrived.”

  Jane couldn’t help but wonder if one of the mummies in this room was getting ready to pop out of its sarcophagus.

  She hoped against hope that all the layers of coffins would keep the mummy from getting up and walking around the museum that night.

  “Do you think Prince What’s-his-name is in good, uh, shape in there?” asked Jane.

  Willow paused before answering. “I guess that depends on what you call ‘good shape,’ ” she finally said. “Ancient Egypt was hot and dry. That would preserve a body pretty well on its own. And the meticulous mummification process definitely helped too. But I’m guessing that his body is probably . . . um, not quite . . . Let me put it this way. He’s not going to get up and walk out of this room.”

  Jane saw Lucy cringe ever so slightly at Willow’s comment. She couldn’t help glancing at Daria. But the other girl was staring down at Prince Amun’s sarcophagus. Jane couldn’t see her expression.

  “Who’s in these other sarcophaguses?” asked Grace.

  “Sarcophagi,” Willow corrected her. “They all belong to different members of Egyptian royal families. Prince Amun’s wife is next to him, and the Prince’s brother and his wife are next to them. Then there are a bunch of more distant relatives.”

  Lucy, who had wandered a little way off, hadn’t been paying attention to the last part. “What are these little sarcophaguses for? And why do they have animal heads?” She pointed at a glass case holding a row of heavy stone jars about a foot high.

  “Sarcophagi,” Willow said again. “But they’re not sarcophagi. They’re canopic jars.”

  “What are—”