On the ride home the three boys sat in the back of Mrs. Davenport’s car listening to Jane, who sat up front next to her mother, crying and sniffling. She repeated her sad opinion of her birthday party over and over.
“The worst party ever. Nobody even got to sing to me. Just eat the cake and go home. People left like it was a fire drill. Everybody’s going to hate me in school”
“They won’t hate you, sweetheart,” her mother counseled.
That brought a scream, more tears, and a new burst of sadness. “The worst party ever!”
Mrs. Davenport dropped the boys off at Emery’s house.
“Walk me home, will you, guys?” Leon begged. “You saw the mummy, right?”
“We saw it,” Philip said.
“It said my name. My name. Me! It wanted me! What did I do? I didn’t do anything.”
“Don’t worry about it, Leon,” Philip said. “The mummy disappeared right away.”
“Yeah, but where’d it go?” Leon asked. “It could be anywhere.”
“No, it’s probably back in its hole in your backyard,” Emery said.
Philip’s eyes brightened at Emery’s suggestion. He felt bad about totally messing up the party. If he could quiet Leon and settle him down, he’d feel much better. “Sure,” he said. “You’ll see it’s right there where you buried it, asleep as always.”
“But the mummy we saw at the museum was way bigger,” Leon said, his eyes dancing over the neighborhood, expecting the worst.
“Mummies can change like that,” Emery assured his cousin. “They do in all the movies.”
“Do they?” Leon asked turning to Philip.
“Absolutely. The mummy gets bigger, takes a walk, shrinks, and goes back to sleep. Mummies think it’s fun to do stuff like that.”
“Suppose it wakes up again,” Leon said. “It’s right in my backyard! Maybe it doesn’t like where I buried it, and now it’s angry at me.”
“Then dig it up and bury it someplace else,” Philip said. “Someplace nice with flowers or you can even flush it down the toilet. Pull out the tissues and flush them. Throw the Band-Aids in the garbage.”
“You think it’ll stop bothering me then?” Leon asked, bubbles of hope surfacing in his mind.
“If it’s flushed down the toilet, how could it bother you, Leon?” Philip asked. “Let’s go and dig it up before it gets too dark.”
“Yeah, good idea. I don’t want to be messing with the mummy when it’s dark,” Leon answered quickly. The boys hurried off.
By the time the boys stood above the spot where Leon buried the mummy, the sun had dipped low in the sky, and the bushes and trees separating Emery’s backyard from other yards blocked out what little light remained in the day.
“Dig,” Philip ordered.
“Me?” Leon asked.
“You have to be the one to destroy the mummy,” Philip said.
Leon stared down. “Uh oh,” he muttered.
“Start, Leon,” Emery said. He looked down. “You… Uh oh. Philip, do you see?”
Emery pointed.
“See what? I don’t see… Uh oh.”
In a tiny voice, Leon said, “It looks like something clawed its way out…”
The grave had been dug up and dirt lay scattered over the nearby grass.
“Is it there?” Emery asked.
Philip knelt and ran his fingers through the dirt. He dug down and found nothing.
“How deep did you bury it?” Philip asked.
“Not deep,” Leon said. “Is it there? Tell me you found it.”
Philip lifted his head. “It’s not here, Leon.” He looked at Emery, who shook his head to indicate he had nothing to do with its not being there.
“Oh, it’s out there!” Leon cried, stamping his feet and shaking his hands in terror. “There! Ah, there it is! I see it! I see it!”
Philip and Emery looked. In the direction of Mrs. White’s backyard, something white flickered by, appearing and disappearing through the tiny spaces between the leaves in the bushes.
“It’s there! It’s here!” Leon screamed. “It’s coming for me again!”
Philip and Emery stood speechless.
Leon took off as fast as he could back to his house. Philip and Emery ran right behind him.
Philip phoned for his dad to come pick up him and Emery and told him to be sure to drive. They dropped Emery at home, the boys promising to meet in the pyramid tomorrow. Philip insisted his father not pull away until he saw Emery safely inside his house.
~ * ~
The next day, Emery wriggled through the bushes and found Philip waiting.
“I just called you,” Emery said. “You weren’t home.”
“Of course, I wasn’t home. I’m right here. Why’d you call?”
“Leon.”
“Scared of mummies?”
“No. Worse. He phoned me and said when the museum people gathered up the Egyptian stuff that flew across the floor yesterday, they couldn’t find one thing. Now, they think Jane’s father might have taken it.”
“What! What’s missing?”
“A scarab from four thousand years ago.”
“Maybe they didn’t look everywhere,” Philip said. “Scarabs are pretty small.”
“No, Jane told Leon they looked all night. It’s really missing. They asked Jane’s father to come into the museum today so they could talk to him.”
“It doesn’t mean they think he took it.”
Emery shrugged. “Jane said it does.”
“Is Leon coming here today?”
“I told him where we’d be, but he said the mummy was out there somewhere, and he couldn’t leave the house.”
“Dumbbell,” Philip muttered.
Emery said, “We saw the mummy through the bushes yesterday, didn’t we?”
“We saw something.”
“The buried mummy was missing, and we saw it through the bushes,” Emery argued.
“Don’t tell me you’re going crazy, too?”
“What did we see, then?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Both boys jumped at the sound of someone diving through the bushes into hidden space.
“Leon,” Emery cried. “What are you doing here? I thought you were afraid of the mummy getting you.”
“I am afraid,” Leon said, more frightened looking than the boys had ever seen him. “I ran here. All the way. I figured out why the mummy’s after me, but I didn’t do it on purpose. I really didn’t. You know I didn’t.”
“Do what?” Emery asked.
Leon turned to Philip. “Did Emery tell you? An ancient scarab is missing. Remember when everything went flying through the air?”
“Yeah, I remember when you knocked the table over and broke the glass.”
“Ohhhhh,” Leon moaned. “But I didn’t do it on purpose. The mummy scared me. You saw the mummy. It called my name. You heard it.”
Philip had nothing to say.
Leon went on. “I didn’t look through my goody bag until today, after Jane called about her father. They think…”
“I told Philip,” Emery interrupted.
“I took out the stuff and down in the bottom of the bag, I found this.” Leon dug into his pocket and showed the boys what he’d found—a small piece of jewelry resembling a large beetle, painted pale blue with gold outlines. “Did you guys get one of these in your bags?”
Philip and Emery said they hadn’t.
“I knew it. I knew it. It’s got to be the missing scarab. It flew into my bag when everything went…” Leon blasted his hands apart. “The mummy knows I have it and wants it back.”
Philip frowned. “But… but you didn’t have the scarab when the mummy showed up.”
“But it knew I was going to have the scarab. Everybody says the ways of ancient Egypt are mysterious.”
Philip didn’t know what everybody said about the mysterious the ways of ancient Egypt, but he knew one thing. Leon held the missing scarab in the palm of his hand.