Off the Wall Read online

  “Wait a sec,” she said. “I saw something moving in the kitchen. Maybe it was the mummy!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Daria. “A mummy wouldn’t go in there.”

  “How do you know?” asked Jane.

  “Look!” Lucy yelled before Daria could answer. Lucy’s eyes were wide and scared. She pointed behind the two other girls with a shaking hand.

  Jane and Daria turned around.

  And stood motionless.

  The little black cat that had been dozing in front of the fire was standing up now, its green eyes blazing. As they watched, it stretched for a long second . . . and then slowly began to walk directly toward them.

  “This is not possible,” said Jane. If she could have screamed, she would have.

  The black cat gave a slow blink. Was it Jane’s imagination—or was he staring at Daria?

  He certainly wasn’t scared of her. As they watched, he crossed lazily under the velvet rope and brushed against Daria’s ankle. With a little meow, he curled up next to her feet.

  “Shoo! Go back where you belong!” Daria shoved the cat with her foot, but he wouldn’t budge. He only looked up as if to ask her what was next.

  “He must belong to the museum.” Jane sounded as if she didn’t quite believe her own words.

  “Do museums even have cats?” said Lucy doubtfully. “Like, to catch mice and rats?”

  Mice, rats, and mummies? And not to mention the bugs in the bug exhibit. Templeton Museum was starting to sound jammed with things Jane didn’t want to meet.

  Daria leaned over and patted the cat on the head. Purring, he pressed his forehead up against her hand.

  “Don’t cats have some kind of sixth sense? Kitty, where do you think we should go next to find the mummy?” asked Lucy.

  As if he had understood her, the cat stood up and began to walk away, looking back over his shoulder at them.

  “Prrrrrrt?” he meowed encouragingly.

  It was too tempting to resist. The girls followed the cat out of the room.

  Silently he crossed the wide marble landing that led to the stairs. He padded down the steps, glancing back at them every couple of seconds.

  The three girls tiptoed down after him.

  On the second floor, he walked leisurely down a row of glass cases holding old pottery beads. He turned left at the installation about frogs and sauntered past a room full of models of sea creatures. Then he paused. Tail twitching, he stared attentively at a niche in the wall. In the niche stood a massive carved totem pole. For some reason a long cloth cord was lying on the floor in front of it. One end of the string was hidden behind the pole.

  The cat seemed to be deciding what to do next. Finally he took a deliberate step toward the totem pole.

  “What does he want us to do?” asked Jane. “We can see perfectly well from here.”

  “He doesn’t want anything,” said Daria. “Let’s go. This is—”

  The cord on the floor twitched.

  The three girls froze.

  It twitched again. The cat was watching it closely. He stretched out a paw and gave the cord a pat. The cord began to move toward the totem pole as if—

  As if someone was pulling it in.

  The cat was mesmerized, and so were the girls.

  “Prrrrrowp?” said the cat. It sounded like a question. As the cord began to vanish behind the totem pole, the cat followed it.

  And out from behind the totem pole emerged a pale hand.

  CHAPTER 7

  The three girls stared.

  The hand beckoned the cat invitingly.

  “Don’t,” whispered Jane.

  The hand was still beckoning. Now it reached out a little farther. The girls could see a pale, skinny arm emerging from behind the totem pole.

  “A skeleton!” exclaimed Lucy.

  The hand beckoned again. Silently the cat walked closer. Now he was almost within reach of the hand. And then he was there.

  He slid his head under the pale fingers as if he wanted the hand to pat him. He curved his neck and pushed his head upward.

  The hand stroked his head gently.

  But as he came closer, it made a quick grab and grasped him by the scruff of his neck.

  “MrrrrggggOWWW!” the cat yowled. In a split second he had twisted himself free, streaked past the girls, and vanished from sight.

  The girls hardly noticed that he was gone. They were staring, mesmerized, at the statue. Someone—or something—emerged from behind it.

  It was a girl their own age. She paced slowly and steadily toward them, her eyes unseeing and fixed on nothing.

  She was certainly acting strange, but she wasn’t a mummy.

  “Megan!” gasped Lucy. “What are you doing here?”

  Megan didn’t answer.

  She just kept walking. She would have passed them without stopping if Jane hadn’t reached out and touched her arm.

  “Jane,” said Megan in a dead-sounding voice.

  “She’s sleepwalking!” whispered Jane. “What should we do?”

  “I think I read online that you’re not supposed to wake someone who’s sleepwalking,” said Lucy.

  “Fine,” snapped Daria. “Leave her here and let’s keep looking for the mummy. She’ll find her way back to the Great Hall sooner or later.”

  “We can’t leave her,” said Lucy. “What if she bangs into something and sets off an alarm? She’ll die of embarrassment or fright.”

  “Well, we can’t bring her back. Someone else might wake up, and then how would we explain everything?” asked Daria.

  Lucy bit her lip, thinking. “You’re right. We’ll have to wake her up.” Gently she shook Megan’s shoulder. “Megan? Megan? You need to wake up.”

  Megan blinked and shook her head a few times. “Hi, guys,” she said. Then suddenly she seemed to realize that she wasn’t in bed. “Lucy! What are you doing here? Wait, what am I doing here?”

  “That’s exactly what I was going to ask you,” said Lucy. “Why were you hiding behind that totem pole?”

  “Totem pole?” repeated Megan. “What on Earth are you talking about?”

  Lucy pointed, and Megan made a face. “Ewww! I was totally not hiding behind that dusty thing!” Then she frowned, thinking. “But I did have a dream that I was hiding behind a tree. I was trying to signal someone, or something.”

  “Was it a cat, by any chance?” asked Jane.

  “Y-y-y-yes, I think so. Yes, that’s what it was. I dreamed a cat was lost and I was following it, and it ran up this huge, huge tree. I knew I had to try to coax it down without scaring it. It came closer and closer, and—and then I don’t remember what happened. I woke up and I was here.”

  “Megan, do you sleepwalk a lot?” said Lucy.

  “Sometimes, if I get nervous.”

  “So what you’re saying is, you sleepwalk all the time,” put in Daria sourly.

  “No, no,” said Megan. “But I did once wake up in bed with my parka on the night before a test. I must have put it on in my sleep. And once I started playing the piano at three in the morning the day before I had a piano recital. So I guess I must have been nervous about this lock-in or something. I’m so lucky that you guys found me!”

  Suddenly she frowned in a puzzled way. “But how did you find me? What are you doing here, anyway?”

  “We were, uh . . .” Jane’s voice trailed off.

  “We had to . . . ,” Lucy said at the same time.

  “We have an errand to attend to,” finished Daria crisply. “It has nothing to do with you. So you might as well go back to the Great Hall. And don’t tell anyone you saw us!”

  Megan looked horrified. “Go back by myself? I’m not walking through this museum alone!”

  “Why not?” said Daria. “Nothing happened to you when you were sleepwalking alone.”

  “But now that I’m awake, I’ll be afraid something might happen!” Megan looked pleadingly at Lucy.

  “I could walk her back,” Jane offered,
trying to seize the opportunity to end this little adventure.

  “No,” said Daria, simply. “The three of us are in this together.”

  Jane was too tired to protest.

  “Please let me come with you on your errand. I can help!” Megan whined.

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea. You wouldn’t like it, I promise,” said Lucy.

  Megan crossed her arms defiantly. “Well, I promise you that if you don’t tell me, I’ll start screaming right now. And I’m really good at screaming. Do you want to hear me?”

  She stretched her mouth open and drew in a big breath.

  “Fine,” said Jane. “You can come with us. It’s okay.”

  Still holding her mouth wide open, Megan made a questioning sound in her throat.

  “But you have to promise you won’t scream if you come with us,” Jane added.

  Megan snapped her mouth shut. “I promise,” she said.

  “Wait,” Jane said. “Let us tell you what we’re doing before you decide. If you end up not wanting to come, you can walk back to the Great Hall. But either way, you can’t tell anyone about this.”

  Megan nodded, and the three other girls quickly filled her in. The argument about the mummy at dinner. The bet. The search so far. Being chased by the guard. Seeing the cat that led them to her.

  When they’d finished, Megan said—pretty calmly, for her—“If you think I’m going back to the Great Hall alone to wait for a mummy to come in and shred me with its hook, you’re crazy.”

  “Um, Megan? It’s pirates who have hooks,” Lucy corrected her.

  “Whatever. If a mummy rips me to shreds with its hook, my parents will sue the museum. I’m just saying. I’ll go back to the Great Hall, but not without you guys. You have to come with me.”

  “You know, maybe we should give up anyway,” said Lucy slowly. “Even if the mummy’s out there, it’s not standing there waiting for us to find it. It’s probably moving around too. And the museum’s way too big for us to search the whole thing.” She turned to Daria. “Let’s just say you’re right. There’s no mummy.”

  Daria looked very smug. “You sure wasted a lot of time figuring that out.”

  “It wasn’t a waste of time,” Lucy protested. “We had fun. Didn’t we, Jane?”

  “I guess we did,” replied Jane. She was surprised to realize that it was true.

  And she was happy that this ordeal would soon all be over.

  “Now all we have to do is find our way back,” said Daria.

  “I knew we’d get lost,” fretted Megan a few minutes later. “Remember how Willow said this place is like a maze? We could be trapped here for weeks! Don’t you think we should scream until a guard finds us?”

  “No, no! Terrible idea. Look, there’s a sign for the Egyptian wing,” said Lucy. “We can retrace our steps to the Great Hall from there.”

  “Doesn’t it seem like days since we were last here?” said Jane as they passed through the entrance to the Egyptian exhibit.

  “More like years. Centuries.” Lucy yawned with all of her body. She felt so tired, she could have fallen over right there, but instead she put a hand out to steady herself against the wall. Except Lucy’s hand didn’t stop at the wall—it went right through—and Lucy almost fell over for real.

  “What?” Lucy said to no one in particular.

  “What is it?” asked Jane.

  Lucy studied the dusty, dark curtain that her hand was gripping. Its color blended perfectly with the paint color of the wall, but even so, Lucy couldn’t believe that for all her times in this museum, she’d never noticed it before. She pulled it back to reveal a small hallway. “Hold on,” she told the other girls. “What’s in here?”

  “Lucy, let’s just go,” said Daria impatiently.

  “One second,” Lucy whispered back.

  She peeked her head in and then began to walk through. Right now, it was pretty dark, with only the museum’s nighttime lights illuminating the displays. It was more of the same stuff she was so used to seeing in the Egyptian wing. Inscribed jewelry, marble jars, and stone statues. Why these were hidden, Lucy had no idea.

  And that’s when Lucy noticed it. At first she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her, but there it was in front of her, as plain as day.

  “Jane, Megan, Daria,” she whispered. Her voice was barely audible.

  The other three girls joined her in the corridor and Lucy pointed ahead.

  At the end of the small hallway stood a sarcophagus only a little taller than the four girls. Its painted face should have been staring back at them. But it wasn’t. Instead the massive stone lid of this sarcophagus had been moved and pushed open. It must have weighed hundreds of pounds.

  And with the lid off, the girls could see that there was nothing at all inside the sarcophagus.

  Megan had been peeking fearfully over Jane’s shoulder. When she finally spoke, she sounded stunned.

  “It’s empty! Jane, you were—you were right after all.”

  Her voice was rising to a scream.

  “A mummy is loose in this museum!”

  CHAPTER 8

  “Shut up, Megan!” hissed Jane, Lucy, and Daria in unison.

  “The last thing we want to do is attract another guard’s attention,” Jane said.

  “But the mummy climbed out! It could be anywhere!” whimpered Megan.

  “It did not climb out,” Daria said emphatically. “Don’t be dumb. There are all kinds of reasons a sarcophagus might be open.”

  “Like what?” said Megan.

  “Well—for cleaning,” said Daria after a second. “Even a sarcophagus probably has to get cleaned once in a while. And look!” She pointed to a dark square on the wall. “All these sarcophagi should have information plaques. But you can see that this one’s card is missing.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything about the sarcophagus.” Megan sounded sulky.

  “Of course it does. It proves they’re changing something or moving something or—well—doing something with this exhibit. Or maybe there was never any mummy in this sarcophagus. Maybe some grave robber stole it centuries ago. Maybe the museum didn’t bother putting a plaque up because this one is just for decoration. Think about it.”

  “Well, I don’t care. I hate this place. Let’s get back to the Great Hall. We go out that way.” Megan pointed at a distant exit sign. And for once, all four girls agreed on something, and they followed Megan out of the exhibit.

  “Before we go back, can we eat something?” asked Lucy a few minutes later. “I’m starving. Do you think the restaurant where we had dinner is still open?”

  “Now that you mention it, I’m hungry too,” said Jane.

  “I’m too upset to eat anything,” said Megan, dramatically. “But maybe my appetite will pick up when we’re out of this exhibit. It would probably be good for me to have a snack.”

  There was no chance of getting lost on the way to the restaurant—it was right off the main lobby. But the girls walked in silence. They were all tired. Even with their discovery of the open sarcophagus, they hadn’t actually seen anything and were all weary from the night’s adventure.

  Unfortunately the museum restaurant wasn’t going to solve any problems for them. A big security grate had been pulled across the entrance.

  Jane sighed as they headed back to the lobby. “Why didn’t I eat more at dinner?”

  “I think there’s a vending machine in the basement, next to the bathrooms,” said Lucy. “Which reminds me that—”

  “Which reminds me that we don’t have any money,” said Jane.

  “People can’t starve to death in a few hours, can they?” said Megan anxiously. “Because suddenly I’m starting to feel faint.”

  She tottered over to the fountain in the center of the lobby. It had been turned off for the night. Megan plunked herself down on its edge in a swooning kind of way. Then she dipped the tips of her fingers in the water and patted her face dramatically.

 
“That’s a little better,” she said in a weak voice as she dipped her hand again.

  “I guess it’s too late to tell her how germy the water probably is,” Lucy murmured to Jane.

  Abruptly, Megan sat up straight. “Hey, look! There are a lot of coins at the bottom of this fountain! Couldn’t we borrow a few for the vending machine? We could pay the money back tomorrow. I, for one, swear I will.”

  “Yes! Great idea, Megan,” said Lucy. “Everyone try to get quarters.”

  Splashing their hands in the cool water revived the girls, and sharing an activity cheered them up. Besides, there were tons of quarters on the pool’s tiled floor.

  “Eight quarters each ought to be enough,” said Lucy. “This is fun! It’s like panning for gold.”

  “Or harvesting pearls,” Jane agreed happily.

  When they’d collected enough change, the girls headed down to the basement. Five gleaming vending machines were waiting for them at the bottom of the staircase. The machines must have been freshly stocked—they were jammed with candy, drinks, and snacks.

  “Thank goodness they have peanuts,” said Megan, “because I definitely need some protein.”

  “What’s a peanut butter cup?” asked Jane as she stared at the candy display.

  “You don’t know what a peanut butter cup is? That’s like not knowing what a shoe is!” said Megan.

  “My mom never has any candy,” said Jane. “Are they worth getting?”

  Lucy and Megan assured her that they were.

  “What are you going to get, Daria?” asked Lucy. But Daria didn’t answer. In fact, she wasn’t with the three girls anymore.

  “I think she’s in the” —Megan paused before mouthing the last word—“bathroom.”

  Lucy slid down the wall to sit on the floor. She opened her candy bar and took a bite. “We can eat while we wait for her.”

  But when they’d finished their snacks, Daria still hadn’t come out of the bathroom.

  “I don’t want to bother her,” said Lucy. “She might be, you know, busy. But maybe I’d better go in there and make sure she’s all right.”

  Megan swallowed her last handful of peanuts and nodded. “Good idea. She may have passed out from hunger in there. It happens to people.”