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Stupid Larry and his stupid vacation, Ahkmenrah thought, like the dignified four-thousand-year-old king he was.
The regular night guard was supposed to be out for three days. They’d had the conversation two nights ago.
“Legally, I have to take some time off, or else the museum will end up violating some labor laws. And it turns out I’ve banked so much PTO that they actually won’t roll it all over at the end of the year, so I really do have to take a vacation.”
Ahkmenrah nodded. “I see,” he’d lied.
“Yeah, so here’s my problem. You remember the chaos that first night I was here?”
“I can’t say that I do, no.”
“Oh, man, it was bad. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, you know, and it was just this crazy free-for-all. Not to mention Dexter, that little terror… anyway, I don’t want a repeat of that, even if everybody has calmed down from how they used to be. It’s just too much for one temp to deal with.”
He nodded again, thinking. “You could deactivate the tablet.”
“Hey, there’s an idea! No one would even notice while I’m gone, and the temporary guy will never have to know.”
“A simple solution,” he agreed.
Of course, it couldn’t have been that easy.
Ahkmenrah checked his watch. Over time, he had built up a small collection of things that had been abandoned in the Lost and Found; by now, it had become second nature to rummage around in the darkness and check the time before getting up. He liked to know how much time he would have before he started his day. The watch had appeared not even a week after he’d first started to explore the museum, but it still worked, and it was still one of his favorite possessions. The little digital screen lit up, so he didn’t even have to dig around for the flashlight he’d stolen from Larry.
Speaking of Larry, he should have set it up so their their nightly routine would be suspended until the 28th. The watch told him it was just after eight in the evening on the 25th.
Uh-oh, he thought.
So something had obviously gone wrong. His mind raced with possibilities; perhaps the museum director had come by and turned the center piece of the tablet, or the temporary guard had noticed that it was out of place and fixed it. Whatever had happened, it had most definitely not gone according to plan.
It’s okay, he thought, just stay here until you have more information. Don’t expose the secret of the museum. Go back to sleep.
He stared into the darkness, heart pounding rebelliously in his chest, and he tried to will it to slow down. It was the only organ he still had, so it should have been trivial to control. But it stubbornly refused to cooperate.
He checked the watch again after an eternity.
It had been thirty seconds.
Nope.
He pushed the lid open – gently this time, nothing like the panicked launch of that first night of freedom – and took deep breaths of the fresh air outside his coffin.
A glint in the corner of his eye caught his attention – it was the tablet, sitting safely in its niche in the wall. The center square was still sideways, sitting at a right angle to the rest of the tablet, just as it should be.
“Well, that is unexpected,” he murmured. He climbed out of the sarcophagus and replaced the lid out of habit. It scraped noisily along the edge and fell into place with a loud thunk. He winced at the sound, pausing to listen for any signs of life from the rest of the museum.
He heard nothing.
How strange.
As he walked down the hall, he decided that it was for the best that he’d closed the lid, after all. The last thing he wanted was for the temporary guard to walk past, see the open casket, and start asking the museum staff uncomfortable questions. More selfishly, no one else knew about the stolen stuff he was hoarding in there, and he would very much prefer it to stay that way. There were objectively useful items in there, like the watch and the flashlight, but there was also a printed pullover that had been worn soft from use and more than a few bags of candy in his collection. Hidden under everything was his most prized possession: a music player filled with enough music to last him a metaphorical lifetime. Unfortunately, the battery’s lifespan was significantly shorter than his own, and he hadn’t yet figured out how to get more power cells for the little device. Idly, he wondered if he could convince Larry to bring Nick to work sometime so he could help him puzzle it out.
He froze.
What was that?
It had almost sounded like—
“What the hell?” a gruff voice said.
He turned around slowly. Just as he had feared, it was the replacement night guard.
“Oh, no,” he sighed.
“Excuse me, you can’t be in here!” the man said. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
“I feel like you wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he said, wincing. The evening had started strangely enough, but this was just icing on the cake.
“I’m not even going to ask what that’s supposed to mean. Look, pal, you’re trespassing. The museum closed like two hours ago.”
“Hour and a half.”
“What?”
“We closed an hour and a half ago. The museum’s summer hours are ten AM to seven PM,” he recited.
“Why do you – never mind. You need to leave. I’m gonna have to call the cops if you don’t go, like, right now.” The guard brandished a pair of metal cuffs.
You are a terrible guard, he thought. They’ve fired Larry three times and he’s still ten times better than this moron. Instead of voicing this uncharitable thought, he said instead, “I’m sorry. Where else am I supposed to go?”
I suppose I walked right into that one, he thought as he was shuffled gracelessly into the back of a police car.
“Nice crown,” the driver commented. She was an older woman whose hair was tied into a severe bun. Her dark eyes glared at him in the rearview mirror. “Reminds me of that Egyptian guy they got on those big posters.”
“Thanks,” he said dryly.
“What’s your name, kiddo?” The car door slammed shut, punctuating her sentence.
“Please, I’m not a child. I’m twenty-one.” It wasn’t entirely true, of course, but he suspected his real age would not go over very well with these officers. He had died when he was twenty-one, though, so that was close enough. He certainly looked it.
The woman scoffed. “Yeah, so that makes me what, more than twice your age? All you youngsters are kids to me. Hell, I’m old enough to be your mother. So I’ll ask you again,” she said as her partner slid into the passenger seat. “What’s your name?”
“My friends told me never to talk to the cops without a lawyer,” he said dully. That was another partial truth – he’d first heard it in a detective movie, but Larry had assured him it was sound advice.
“Oh, he thinks he’s funny,” the partner said from the front seat. “Well, we’ll see what you say once we’re down at the station, King Tut.”
He bristled at the comparison. That joke had stopped being funny four thousand years ago.
Ahkmenrah was nothing if not stubborn, so when they dumped him on a cold metal bench inside a colder concrete room and started asking him questions, he kept his mouth shut and did not say a word. He just sat and ignored them and shivered in the chilly air. They’d left his hands bound, which would have been an insult to his royal person, if he still cared about that kind of thing. Ever since he’d died, though, he didn’t put very much stock into his own status. Either way, the cuffs were nothing but a minor inconvenience. The magic that sustained him at night made him strong enough to move the solid gold lid of his sarcophagus by himself. Tearing apart these thin handcuffs would be laughably easy.
The police officer at the desk was insistent that he give her some kind of information, but his silence had worn her down. “Look, kid, we’re probably not gonna bother to charge you with anything, okay? We’re just gonna hold you here until you can get someone to come pick you up. You don’t even have to give us a name, just a phone number. Alright?”
He sighed and recited the number Larry had made him memorize “for emergencies only, you understand?” This, he figured, counted as an emergency, and at this point there really wasn’t any way it could make the situation worse. The cop punched in each number as he rattled them off.
They made awkward eye contact as the phone rang.
“Hi, you’ve reached the voicemail of Larry Daley,” the phone said after a moment. “Sorry I couldn’t get to the phone! Leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”
“Hi, Mr. Daley,” the cop said into the phone after the beep. “My name is Officer Johnson with the NYPD. We have your…” She looked at him questioningly.
“Friend,” Ahkmenrah supplied. “We aren’t related.”
“We have a kid here that gave us your number,” she said, ignoring him. “He won’t tell us his name, but he’s got a real fancy accent and he’s dressed like one of those old Egyptians. We got a call from the guy down at the history museum – guess he was a trespasser or something. Anyway, he’s down here at the station. We can release him as soon as you can come by and get him. Okay. Bye-bye.” She put the phone back into its cradle and plucked a pen from the cup on the desk.
“What am I supposed to do now?” he asked.
“You sit right there and wait for your buddy to come get you. I have paperwork to fill out. Lucky for you, I like to put the radio on.” The pen rolled off the desk. She cursed softly and bent down to pick it up. “So where are you from, kid?”
Finally, a question he could answer.
“Memphis,” he said, fighting to keep the smile off his face. That was a fun memory – discovering Wikipedia. He’d spent night after night glued to the front desk’s computer, reading everything he could get his hands on, catching himself up on the thousands of years of human history that he had missed. Naturally, he’d looked up what had happened to his old home city, Men-nefer, and discovered that not only had the Greeks bastardized the name into “Memphis”, but then the Americans had taken it and used it for themselves! Teddy had found his outrage hilarious, of course, and Larry had made the same incomprehensible joke – something about the king leaving the building – for a week.
The cop looked at him like he’d grown a second head. “Memphis, huh?”
“Yes.”
“Well, my mother-in-law lives in Tennessee and you don’t sound like anybody I’ve ever met there. You’re from the fancy side of town, huh?”
Shit.
“I went to Cambridge,” he offered. After all, it had worked the first time. Why shouldn’t it work again?
“Sure you did, honey,” she said, turning back to her paperwork. She turned the radio up loud enough to cover the sound of her pen furiously scratching on the paper in front of her.
Oh, I see. She thinks I’m insane.
Jail, as Ahkmenrah was learning, was boring. Being stuck on a metal bench in a concrete room was only marginally more fun than being locked in his sarcophagus for fifty years. He’d tried to content himself with simply listening to his surroundings, but the cop’s pen was very scratchy and she had terrible taste in music. Occasionally, another officer would walk in, then they’d leave again.
It was mind-numbingly repetitive. His one small comfort was that he’d been given a jacket after shivering in the freezing cell for a while.
He spent an hour or so considering all the reasons only he had woken up when the tablet was deactivated. The most likely cause, he decided, was that the particulars of whatever magic was controlled by the center square only applied to the other things that were meant to be in his tomb, and he himself was not bound by its rules. The tablet must consider the rest of the museum his grave goods, in a sense. Unfortunately, he hadn’t paid the jackals any mind when he’d walked out of the exhibit.
Damn. He could have used that information.
“I’m sorry,” he said to the officer, raising his voice to be heard over the tenth replay of If You Like Pina Coladas. “Do you have the time?”
“It’s coming up on five AM,” she said, checking her watch.
“And how far away is sunrise?”
“Sunrise?”
“It’s, er, my curfew,” he said. It wasn’t entirely incorrect.
“Well, you’re gonna miss it. I think the sun rises at a quarter to six this time of year. Unless that friend of yours gets here awful quick, there’s no way you’re getting back home in time for that.” She looked a tiny bit apologetic. “Sorry, kid. I hope you don’t get in too much trouble when you get back – wherever you’re supposed to be.”
It’s not my trouble I’m worried about, he thought. It’s yours.
Another hour passed. He had almost managed to doze off, but the radio jolted him out of his sleepy state before he could nap properly. At least he hadn’t had to listen to the the pina colada song again. But his time was up – the sun would rise any second now. He could feel it. The tip of his nose had gone numb and the skin on his face felt dry and tight.
“Hey,” the other cop said. He’d appeared a while ago, but Ahkmenrah had paid him no mind at the time. “Johnson, he doesn’t look too good.”
She frowned. “You alright, kid?”
No. He wasn’t.
“Whatever is about to happen,” he said slowly, looking between both their faces, “I am very sorry.”
Then he closed his eyes. The last thing he saw was the sun just beginning to shine through the window.
The officers watched the young man’s eyes close. He exhaled, slumped sideways, and fell face-first off the bench. He landed with a dry slap of skin against concrete and the clang of metal as his fancy hat smacked into the floor.
“Ouch,” said Johnson, still at her desk.
They stared at him. He didn’t move.
“A fall like that, you’d think it’d wake him up,” the other officer, Moore, said, nudging his shoulder with the tip of his boot. He still didn’t move.
“Huh,” Johnson said. She stood and put her hands on her hips. “What’s up with him?”
“It’s too damn early in the morning for this,” Moore complained as he dropped into a squat. “Hey, kid,” he said, grabbing his shoulder and shaking it.
“Something’s wrong with him,” she muttered.
“You think?”
“Don’t give me that attitude. Think I should call EMS?”
“Nah,” he said. “Just give me a minute. No reason to bother ‘em if I can…” He shook him again, pushing him onto his side.
The chill of the room settled into their skin as they both stared silently into the desiccated, mummified face of Ahkmenrah, King of Egypt.
“Fuck,” she whispered.
Moore swallowed audibly. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”
She blinked down at the corpse. “I’m going out for a smoke,” she said abruptly.
Moore joined her outside a few minutes later, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand as the door closed behind him. “I thought you quit,” he commented.
“Shut the fuck up.” Johnson blew a cloud of smoke into the early morning sun. “This is one of those days, you understand?”
He nodded.
They watched the smoke dissipate into the air.
“So I was thinking,” he began. “I got a theory.”
“If this is anything like your last theory, I’m quitting right now.”
“No, just listen. So he – it – you know, that – kinda reminded me of a Halloween prop. You know, one of those real fucked-up realistic ones. Hear me out,” he said, seeing the look on her face. “Have you ever been to the mummy thing at the history museum?”
She turned to look him in the eye properly. “You do not think—”
“I do think!” he interrupted. “You said – you said the security guard at the museum called you in, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So you bring in this guy, who they found wandering the history museum dressed like a fuckin’ pharaoh, and he’s got no ID and he doesn’t give you any identifiers.”
“No, there was one,” she said. “I asked him where he was from, thinking he wasn’t gonna answer ‘cause he hadn’t said a word to me the whole time, but he… oh, my God.” She dropped her cigarette to the ground, then quickly stamped it out after a second.
“What?”
“You know how my daughter is huge into Egypt right now? Well, she was tellin’ me the other day, she said, ‘hey, Mama, did you know there used to be a city named Memphis in Egypt, too’. That’s where her grandma lives, so that’s probably why she mentioned it, but…”
“No shit,” he breathed. “So. What are we supposed to do about it?”
“We aren’t doing anything,” she said. “You stay and wait for his friend to show up and figure out what the fuck to do with the corpse in our holding cell. I’m going home.”
The clock had barely ticked over to 6:30 when the station door opened.
“Hello?” the man said as he crossed the threshold.
“Morning,” Moore said, feeling better after a cup of coffee. He’d spent his downtime sorting emails in his inbox; it was the perfect mundane task to get his mind off the weirdness that had happened earlier. He could almost convince himself that it had all been a strange nightmare.
“Yeah, morning,” the man said. “Um, I got a voicemail from an Officer Johnson telling me to come pick someone up?”
“Can I have a name?”
“My name is Larry. Uh, Larry Daley. But the officer on the phone said my friend refused to give you his name. He’s…” Larry sighed. “He’s probably dressed like an Egyptian pharaoh?”
Moore felt all the blood leave his face.
Ahkmenrah awoke to crushing, suffocating darkness, and could have wept at the beautiful familiarity. He reached a hand up to feel the ridges that decorated the sarcophagus lid. He was home! Of course, he had probably scared the life out of the police, and he had yet to find out just how many people now knew the secret of the museum thanks to him, but he was home. Everything else could come later.
To his surprise, there were more people in his exhibit than usual when he opened the sarcophagus.
“Hello, Larry,” he said, sliding the lid to the floor. “It’s nice to see you.”
“Yeah, you too. Hey, did you know mummies are dry?”
“What?” He glanced down at himself, feeling vaguely self-conscious.
“Sorry,” he said. “That’s not important. I’ve been awake for… God, too long. Welcome back, by the way.”
“Yes, thank you. I assume I have you to thank, that is? I don’t remember how I got back here.” He glanced around at the familiar faux tomb.
Larry stared intently at the tablet on the wall. “You know, I’ve played fetch with a T-rex, and fought your weird evil brother with a sword, and flown a plane with Amelia Earhart, and been pissed on by two different stuffed monkeys, but picking up a mummy from jail just might take the top spot on the list of the weirdest things I’ve done at this job.”
“You seem rather fixated on the mummy part. Everyone knows I’m dead. See,” he said, knocking on his exposed ribs. “I’m hollow.”
Larry’s face took on a vaguely green cast. “Yeah, I know, but I don’t like thinking about it! As far as I’m concerned, you’re one of the most normal coworkers I have.”
“I’m a four-thousand-year-old reanimated corpse of a king of a dead civilization.”
“Would you stop reminding me about the dead thing?” he said, eyes squeezed shut in a look of anguish.
“Sorry.”
“Anyway, since I know you’re wondering, I just told the cops about the tablet and the whole… nightlife thing.”
Ahkmenrah raised his eyebrows. “You told them the truth?”
“Yeah, and I had to bribe them to not tell anyone, especially after they drove you back here in the back of an animal control van.” He rubbed his eyes. “Man, it has been a long day. Oh, and good news – they’re definitely not charging you with anything. Apparently it’s a real gray area when you don’t actually legally exist.”
He nodded. “I can see why that would be a problem. However, have we considered that as a foreign head of state, I would have diplomatic immunity?”
Larry gaped at him for a silent moment. “Man, I should never have let you on Wikipedia.”
He smiled, but it fell away as soon as he remembered the last stranger he’d encountered in the night. “What about the substitute guard?”
“Oh, I gave up on that plan as soon as I got the voicemail. We explained you, introduced him to the rest of the exhibits, and we’ll see if he comes back tomorrow night,” he said. “My money is on him leaving once the Romans get to him. It’s a shame, honestly, ‘cause I kind of enjoyed having the night off.”
Ahkmenrah nodded apologetically. “I am truly sorry I interrupted your vacation. I meant no harm.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s not your fault that guard freaked out.” He set one hand on his shoulder. “By the way, you need to return that MP3 player. The lost and found is not free stuff.” He turned to leave.
From the doorway, Ahkmenrah could hear the sounds of the museum coming alive.
He grinned. It was good to be home.