Another Pan (22 page)

“It looked about that big.” Wendy made a fist.

“Hah!” Peter laughed, almost triumphantly. “You weren’t even close. Distances in the underworld are bigger than they look. You’d have had to go in using a completely different part of the overworld. There’s no way she’d put one of the five mummies near the base. No way.” He shook his head vehemently. “In the last overworld, Elan’s temple was halfway in the middle of the pyramid. I had to go in through a construction site. Get it? Because Elan was a builder. . . . It always corresponds like that to the overworld. The pyramid is like a leech. It gets its energy from the world above it. It can’t survive without a host, so the two worlds share lots of features. It’s a good thing, ’cause I can use clues from the five stories to find my way — like a construction site for Elan the builder.”

A leech
. Wendy thought about the eerie feeling she had lately, even before today’s events, every time she walked through the halls of her school. She thought about all the creepy similarities she had already seen between the two worlds.

“So the gates . . .” John started, his voice a bit weak.

“As far as I know, there are five major gates,” said Peter, “each with a guardian and one of my mummies. The rest of the labyrinth is just designed to keep intruders confused.”

The way he said
my mummies
felt uncomfortable to Wendy.

“Do you have more?” she asked. “If you have all five, you’ll be immortal. Is
that
true?”

“It’s all true, Wendy,” said Peter.

“Do you have any of the others?” asked John.

“Just the second one . . . sort of,” said Peter.

“I figure it should be in a desert. That’s where Garosh went to die, or not die,” said John.

“Yeah, I know. I
had
it.”

“What happened?” asked Wendy. “Did you make it past the gatekeeper?”

“Oh, yeah.” Peter smiled. “That wasn’t a problem. But then —”

“The death god,” whispered John.

“Death
goddess,
” said Peter. “If we’re gonna get technical.”

So that part was true, too — the Anubis legend that all the scholars studied was wrong, and the obscure five myths lore about the Dark Lady was real. They had just seen her. John had even touched her.

“Anyway, I had to hide the second batch of bonedust inside the labyrinth,” said Peter.

“You hid an entire mummy?” John asked. “Must be one heck of a hiding spot.”

“Uh . . . yep,” said Peter proudly. “No one’s ever gotten closer than I have. Why do you think she’s after me?” Wendy saw a serious look, a hatred, overtake Peter’s features. This was obviously an intensely personal grudge, and one that Wendy could understand. Peter didn’t just want the bones. He wanted revenge — to defy her, the way a child wants to defy a selfish mother. “I hid it in the best possible spot. . . .”

“How about a hint?” said John, his tone not all that hopeful.

Peter laughed. “I’ll just tell you, kid. It was in the mouth of a giant sphinx.”

“So that’s why you want to go back,” said Wendy.

“Wanna come?” said Peter, grabbing her hand. “It’s the biggest adventure in the world.”

Wendy blushed. “We should clean up the blood. Someone must have heard the noise.” They stood up, taking one last look at the door that had served as the gate. On the other side was just another utility closet.

“We were almost killed,” Wendy mused as they prepared to leave.

“Nah,” said Peter, relishing his success as if it were something much bigger, a victory over all forces of evil, a blow to every power-mad teacher and abandoning mother and wicked, black-hearted nanny. “That was Peter
one,
Dark Lady
zero
.”

“How about a half point for nearly ripping my arm off?” said John, rubbing where his gaping wound used to be.

“No,” said Peter. “One–zero, me.”

A turning knob, a clicking lock, and the echo of a door slowly creaking open — a door without the Eye of Ra to mark it.

When the children had cleaned up the mess and left the basement, Nurse Neve crept out of the basement broom closet, wiped her pale, squinty face with her handkerchief, and walked back into the school.

In the halls of Marlowe’s underworld, the dark nurse moved in secret. In the school corridors, too, she walked unseen, the way all aging, plain-faced women without public accolades go unseen. She was hindered by the frailties of this most ordinary of human bodies, but she could see that Peter had found his way back. And he had brought others, intruders looking for fame, fortune, long life. With her broken eye, the darkness watched them, assessed them. Now there were two who had used the bonedust to heal themselves, and she could afford no time for rest. Until the boy had all five mummies, death would not be conquered, and so the Dark Lady held the most powerful bonedust close. She might be weak, but she had once used this very body to accomplish epic things. She didn’t need to be a stunning governess to conquer worlds, because Neferat was so much older, more experienced. She could do it all again now. She sat in her attic office, the one she had requested from the school, and coughed blood into her napkin.

The moths, these tiny messengers, circled around frantically, looking for approval from their mistress, sharing in the stench of her gloom. She was beginning to like this humbler form — it was a subtle disease infecting the school, a forgettable nurse in moth-eaten blue, seemingly harmless but in truth the crucial lulling ingredient in a dark trinity. In the meantime, let the children play in the underworld maze. Let Peter play his games just as he had done when he was a child, a wayward, unrepentant child who rejected her plans for his own. Let them all come a little closer. Each time they opened a gate was a brand-new opportunity to infect the world with malice, hatred, and sorrow. Every time someone new entered, another soul could be corrupted forever.

It wasn’t that John was invisible in the halls of Marlowe; that would have been too easy. And he wasn’t exactly an object of scorn; that would have been too maudlin. No, after his attempt at reinventing himself, Marlowe had prepared the perfect torture for little John Darling, who couldn’t help how smart he was (well, maybe he could stop darting his hand up every time the teacher asked a question). And he couldn’t help that his dad was a brilliant and respected, and only slightly kooky, professor at the school (well, maybe he could stop reminding everyone all the time). And especially, John couldn’t help the fact that everybody knew he had his pick of top colleges even though he was only thirteen and college was five years away (well, three years for him, actually, and before the aborted Facebook makeover, he kinda blogged about it).

It must have really ticked off all the upperclassmen angling for leadership positions and teacher recommendations that this thirteen-year-old freshman (accelerated into high school, naturally) had already aced the SATs. Not just aced them; he really beat the living crap out of that Scantron. John was the king of computations, the sultan of smarts. He was a badass of books. No matter how much he fought it, he was a big . . . fat . . . nerd.

OK, he was a big fat nerd. Whatever. He couldn’t help it. This sucked. Maybe he could help it. He shouldn’t be so arrogant about his brains. But then, if he wasn’t, it felt like he didn’t have
anything
to bank on. He wasn’t ripped like Connor. And it wasn’t like he had a phone full of contacts calling him the “Great One” all the time. He wasn’t six feet tall like Peter, with chicks licking his neck and a crew of boarding students helping him live a real-life Egyptian fantasy. He didn’t have that smirk. Geez, John really hated that smirk.

So basically, John was doomed to be invisible to everybody, until he decided to make his talents known (which just happened to be unbridled genius), and
then
he was the object of scorn. And if he tried to be someone else, more scorn.
Sweet
.

Just three more years and I’ll be someplace where prodigies get the girls,
thought John as he skulked down the hall through passing period. Hundreds of classmates were gabbing, grabbing books from lockers, laughing, playing jokes, and doing ninety-nine other things that didn’t involve John. Some guy bumped John’s arm as he chased his friend, sending a tingling feeling all the way up to John’s shoulder. John couldn’t tell if he’d been hit in the funny bone or if this was some aftereffect on the arm that had been mangled yesterday. John rubbed his forearm. It was fine. In fact, it was better than fine. It was a weird thing to say, but it felt new. Even the burn mark he’d gotten from a Bunsen burner last year seemed to be faded and gone.

The bell sounded for next period, and everyone had a buddy to walk with. John still hadn’t made it to his locker. It was so freaking difficult just to navigate between all the stupid cliques standing in the middle of the halls, getting in the way. John had to zigzag the whole time. As the space cleared, John heard a few girls in an animated discussion.

“Ommagod. He was
soooo
hot; he should be in a musical!”

“I know, right? He’s so college.”

“Tell us, Wendy, are you dating? What about Connor?”

“And isn’t dating RAs against the rules?”

John realized that the three girls with their backs to him were facing his sister. They were three of the richest witches at Marlowe. All they ever cared about was shopping on Daddy’s plastic. To them, cachet was cash. The only sin was not to be
in
. They’d all had work done. They all thought the Darlings were peasants. And John hated them completely. But Wendy had been hanging around them a lot more since dating Connor. Even though she had heard them call her Trendy Wendy as a joke, she still tolerated them. She played like she didn’t care, but John thought that Wendy had been really lonely since their mom left.

John perked his ears. “No, we’re just friends,” said Wendy, “We met outside school.”

“Outside school?” said one of the girls. “Like, was he cleaning up?”

“RAs don’t clean, stupid,” said another one.

Wendy interrupted. “He was just hanging with his advisees.”

The girls were still confused. “I don’t get it. Boarders hanging with staff? Why?”

“He’s pretty hooked up,” said Wendy. “And it’s not like they have parents around.”

“They have bodyguards.”

“Nope,” said Wendy. “Not allowed in the dorms.”

“Wow, it’s like olden times.”

“He almost kissed me,” said Wendy, for a moment forgetting caution. It was almost as if she
wanted
them to tell Connor.

“He
did not
!”

Their voices were full of glee, and suddenly Wendy looked nervous. “Not really,” she backtracked. “Well, almost, but I didn’t let him. I’m with Connor.”

They didn’t pay attention to the recant. “I bet he has a tongue ring.”

“It’d be so romantic if he got fired because of some illicit affair.”

Wendy shook her head vehemently. “No! Do
not
say anything. If he gets fired, he won’t have a job or money . . . and there’s nothing going on, OK? I lied.”

“Figures,” huffed one of the girls.

“I’ve seen him hanging around that Hispanic chick.”