Phantom Heist

The things are finally quiet, and I glide down the corridors to the Egyptian room. I feel a bit nervous, so at one point I stop minding the cabinets and the walls and simply go through them. The benefits of being a ghost!

It gets trickier when I get to the case with the mummy I’ve selected. The sensors don’t react to me, but when I’ll start tempering, the alarm would go off, ghost or not. Fortunately, I have had many opportunities to observe how the employees disable them when they need to retrieve an item. I’ve got the right card (phantom sleight of hand, ha-ha), and the guard on duty should be snoring by now after all the diazepam I added to his coffee. Thanks Mary for getting your prescription before you came to work, so that I could borrow some.

Still, it is painstakingly slow. It took me much more time to develop the poltergeist skills than to learn my ways around the museum and its security mechanisms. Most of the time I barely feel my body – it has a dimension to it, but hardly any mass, and it is difficult to focus on any particular part. I am like blob – whole and not definitive. When I finally dig out the muscle-mind connection, it feels like conjuring a limb out of thin air. And it immediately starts to prickle with numbness, telling me off for not using it for so long. I honestly don’t have time for this, so I am focusing on the mechanism.

I listen attentively, but the museum is in its usual state of the night lethargy. Like that seated Buddha in Asia section reaching for nirvana. Perhaps, it deserves it – all throughout the day people shuffle and stomp through its galleries, chatter and point, pry the lenses of their cameras, breathe on the glasses. It’s like the paparazzi plague. But for me it’s salvation. The visitors always think it’s the air conditioning blowing on them, or the temperature requirements to keep the exhibits safe – they never know it’s me craving the touch. I wonder if people knew, would they write laws? Issue writs forbidding the ghosts to invade humans’ private space? Would they come up with some force fields to repel us? I am happy they don’t know – better remain invisible but still have some sort of phantom interaction, then to be kept at bay and have to admit I am an outcast – I am dead. That’s how I feel at night – just like all those objects in their glass cases. If only I could leave the museum for those hours (London never sleeps), but I am tied to the place.

I finally manage to disable the security and begin to open the door on the hinges. It’s a huge case and I am nervous. They can’t catch me, but if the guard wakes up and comes here, I will have to stop – I am not going to go violent on him, it’s completely different from spiking his coffee. It will mean a wait of another year. Now and then I lose connection to my fingers and they begin to go through the glass. All this concentration creates a weird sensation – as if my body forms clumps here and there and all the efforts make them course through me. It’s painful.

When the case is open, I lean over the mummy and study the dark-brown desiccated skin stretched over the ancient bones. Here is another test for me. I don’t know whether All Hallows’ Eve spreads to the Egyptian corpses, or they have their own Samhain. I wave my palm in front of the mummy’s face – birds of a feather, bla-bla-bla, dead should be able to see dead, shouldn’t they? It doesn’t work. Suddenly, our school lessons of first aid come to mind. I know it’s stupid, but I lean close and start to breathe into its flat leathery lips. For once, I am glad death robbed me of the senses of taste and smell. There is no point to massage its heart, because it is not there. But I hope that my ghost particles or ectoplasm or whatever it is can make this sack of bones move for a few hours.

Surprisingly, it works. With a lot of caution the mummy lifts its head and inhales creepily. There is no exhale, because the air just goes straight down the bones and disperses inside it – no lungs either. Now it is the long trip to the tiny staff-only room. I’ve chosen the one on this floor, because I am not sure mummies are good with staircases. It literally crawls, and I monitor the whole process. It would be mauvais ton to leave some of the bones or wrapping behind. After all, I am only borrowing this Egyptian friend for a night.

After some time, the mummy finds its agility and now I have to check it doesn’t crawl into the wrong corridor.

“You’ll like what I came up with,” I tell it. “After all, it’s Halloween.”

The mummy pauses for a moment and twists its neck.

“Well, it’s customary to have lots of sweet treats, pull out bobbing apples, light candles. And I have something special also.”

I feel the mummy’s gaze on me. It might be reproachful, but it’s hard to tell without the eyeballs. On second thoughts, open fire is no good close to this dried body. I also don’t think it’s a good idea for it to eat sweets – to kill its teeth with dental caries after all those centuries is a poor way to repay for the thing’s company. And as for the apples, I am not sure its jaws could draw that far apart to accommodate one. Besides, what will happen to a mummy if it gets wet?

“Don’t worry,” I reassure it. “It’s not going to be for real. It’s… you’ll see…” Much as I’d love to chew on skull-shaped marshmallows or taste the super-sour jellied dissolving on my tongue, both would probably just drop through me. Besides, a serious museum isn’t a place to find kid’s stuff.

In the staff room, everything has been arranged a few hours prior. There is a print-out of a jack-o’-lantern I tore off one of the garlands in the other staff room. It can’t stand, so it simply lies on the floor. There are a few chocolate bars I stole from the staff’s lockers and bags scattered around. No one brought any apples with them today, so there is just a jug of water from the cooler. The candles are also artificial. I was lucky Janine bought them for home, and I sneaked out two from the pack. I’ve already taken the safety film out, so now it’s merely about sliding the switch into the right position. It takes four attempts, and finally we have some light. They throw a dim yellow circle at the Japanese ceremonial doll I procured earlier. It has, of course, all the wrong features, and there is huge disparity between the doll and the mummy in size, but it will have to do.

I assemble the chocolate bars in a short pyramid and stick one vertically in the centre.

“You can’t sing, can you?” I ask the mummy. There is no point in asking the doll.

The mummy points at its throat. Ah yes, whatever was there has dried and it has not tongue. Besides, it surely doesn’t know the song.

“Well, just gurgle along,” I sigh and begin myself in a trembling voice. “Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me.” The mummy does try to keep up. “Happy birthday dear Sheila. Happy birthday to me.”

I focus and knock off the chocolate bar in the middle, even though I haven’t made a wish. What could I wish? Stronger poltergeist powers? So that they could finally realise I am there? And what then? Finding somebody else like me? I am not even sure why I ended up here. I definitely didn’t die here. I used to believe I should have gone back to our house, to be with my parents. But it is very possible they perished in that car accident as well. Could they be roaming the world seeking for me? Whatever the afterlife has taught me, it is that you don’t get a wide range of territory – the museum shop and the cafeteria are out of bounds for me for some reason. No, they wouldn’t be out there. I glance at the mummy, who looks nothing like my father – too short, too skeletal, no roundness about the cheeks and the middle, no thickness of the neck or biceps. I take in the miniature doll, sitting on its heels, which my mom always found painful. Do they know I miss them? Have they heard any of the secrets I’ve been telling them since I ended up here. That I didn’t send my university application to French and International Business programme, because I didn’t want to study more (even though my French is très très bien, non – manifique). That I was going to go on the trip with a guy, not my girl friends a week after that car accident? Does it even matter now? Even if the doll and the mummy wanted to accuse me, they don’t have that capacity.

We sit there in silence for hours. I tell the mummy some stories of the modern world and my life, nothing too exciting – who knows, maybe mummies aren’t bound by All Hallows’ Eve and now it has risen, it could go on like that forever. I don’t want it to be too tempted to go outside. So I keep mentioning the constant London rain and buses it could get under. When it’s close to dawn, we repeat our track back to the Egyptian hall. I am a bit worried that the mummy wouldn’t cooperate, but it looks like the whole adventure has tired it. It is once again slow as a snail. When I help it back into its glass case, it seems even content.

When the door is secured, I feel like not feeling my body for the rest of my afterlife, but I still need to return the ceremonial doll. It would have been my seventeenth birthday, I think as I glide back to the staff room. But it wasn’t much fun. Still, I think I might try a few more tricks for the next All Saints’ Day. Maybe, if I study some of the papyruses, I can learn how to make the mummy talk, and then together we could open the gates that would bring me to where my parents are. It would be freakingly weird but also, in a sense, appropriate to die properly on my birthday. You know, like a true rebirth into whatever is there after. For now, however, I have another 365 days to see what a ghost can do in a museum.