Late one night at the New York Metropolitan Museum, two workers carried a stone sarcophagus into a room that had the words Ancient Egyptian Exhibit emblazoned above the door. Panting and grumbling, they deposited the heavy coffin on a large table in the centre of the room.
'This guy weighs a ton!' one worker complained to the other as they caught their breath.
'It's the coffin that weighs a ton,' his workmate replied. 'The guy inside is nothing but thousand-year-old bandages.'
'Who the heck's he supposed to be, anyway?' said the first worker, peering at the information plaque which was already in place. 'Pharaoh Amanhotep the Third. Subjected Ancient Egypt to a reign of tyranny and bloodshed the like of which had not been seen since the days of Rameses. Legend tells us that Amanhotep discovered the secret of eternal life, but was assassinated by his own priests before he could make himself immortal. With his dying words, he cursed all who should ever live while he himself did not, and vowed to rise from the dead to achieve his goal of eternal life. Man, what a crock!'
'You never know,' said the second worker. 'I've heard there's something in these ancient mummy curses.'
'Come on,' the first worker scoffed, 'you don't really believe that stuff, do you?'
'I don't know, man,' said the second worker. 'But that thing sure gives me the willies, curse or no curse! Let's just bring the rest of his stuff in, then we can get out of here.'
The two workers turned their backs on the sarcophagus and left the room. In doing so, they failed to notice a green glow enveloping the casket for a few seconds. Ever so slowly, the lid began to slide back.
'It's all a bunch of superstitious hocus-pocus,' the first worker continued, as the two men came back into the room with several large jars clasped to their chests. 'Those pharaohs used to say their tombs were cursed because they didn't want people breaking in and stealing their treasure.'
'Yeah,' said the second worker, 'and then when archaeologists did start breaking in and stealing their treasure, the curse was activated!'
'Bull!' said the first worker. 'And what the heck is in these jars, huh?'
'The pharaoh's vital organs,' said the second worker. 'Removing and preserving them was a big part of the burial ceremony.'
'That's just sick, man,' said the first worker.
'Not to the Ancient Egyptians,' said the second worker. 'You put the canopic jars on that shelf above the coffin, and I'll go get his mummified cat. Deal?'
'Sure,' said the first worker. 'Why did he have his cat mummified, anyways?'
'Cats were sacred in Ancient Egypt,' said the second worker. 'Everyone knows that.'
The first worker snorted disdainfully as he turned his attention to the jars. Alone in the room now, he suddenly experienced an inexplicable feeling of dread. He tried to shrug it off, but then the coffin lid crashed to the floor and a brown, bandaged hand emerged and grasped him firmly by the shoulder.
'Is everything okay?' asked the second worker as he came back into the room, cradling a mummified cat in his arms. 'I heard a crash. Oh my gosh, why did you open the casket?'
The first worker made no reply. He was still standing by the canopic jars, but in the darkened room the second worker could not see exactly what he was doing. Cautiously, the second worker approached the first. He leapt back in alarm as a canopic jar was hurled to the floor at his feet, where it burst into a thousand fragments.
'What the heck are you doing, man?' the second worker shrilled. 'You can't just... saints preserve us!'
He recoiled in horror as he saw that the first worker had the contents of the smashed jar in his mouth, and was even now in the process of swallowing them. His eyes had started to glow with an eerie green light.
'In the realm of Anubis,' the first worker growled in a deep, unnatural voice, 'it is not saints that preserve us.'
With that, he slogged the second worker under the chin and sent him flying across the room, where he crashed into a wall and slumped to the floor, unconscious. Paying him no further attention, the first worker bent down and picked up the mummified cat that had fallen to the floor.
'Now then, Isis,' he rumbled, 'let's see about finding you somewhere to live forever.'
Kylie stood anxiously on one side of the examination table as the vet prodded and poked at her disgruntled cat, Pagan.
'So what seems to be the problem, Kylie?' asked the vet. 'Do you think he's got worms again?'
'No,' said Kylie. 'It's just that weird lump above his left eye.'
'Okay, let's see here,' said the vet. 'Ah yes, that certainly needs looking at.'
Kylie stood anxiously by, waiting for the vet to announce his findings.
'This is nothing too serious,' the vet announced at last, to Kylie's great relief. 'It's a fairly large abscess, but it just needs draining and disinfecting. I'll give him a worm pill too, just to be on the safe side. No cause for alarm.'
'That's good to know, Doc,' said Kylie. 'I was worried it might be cancer or something.'
'No, no – just an abscess,' the vet assured her. 'He probably got it in a fight with another cat. They often go for the eyes – a vulnerable spot, you know. Pagan must have sustained a wound above this eye and it got infected.'
'Pagan,' Kylie said admonishingly, 'I can't believe you've been fighting again.'
'Cats will be cats,' the vet laughed. 'I've got no other appointments for an hour so I can see to this right now, if you'd like.'
'That'd be great,' said Kylie, 'but I really have to get to work.'
'No problem,' said the vet. 'You can come back and pick him up any time this afternoon. He'll want to sleep for a while after the procedure anyways, so I'll make sure he's quite comfortable and leave him a light meal to eat when he wakes up properly.'
'You're not going to put him under, are you?' Kylie asked anxiously. 'I've heard horrible stories about anaesthetics accidentally killing animals.'
'That's extremely rare,' said the vet. 'But there's no need to worry anyhow – I won't be putting him under. I'll just give him a small sedative to keep him docile so he'll let me drain the abscess without ripping my hands to shreds.'
'Thanks a lot, Doc,' Kylie beamed at the vet. 'I'll see you this afternoon, then. Bye, sweetie – be good for the doctor, okay?'
Pagan threw Kylie a reproachful glance as she left the surgery, and unsheathed his claws ready to attack the vet at the first opportunity. Kylie, meanwhile, found a blue Mustang parked against the kerb just outside the surgery, apparently waiting for her.
'Hey, Kylie,' Roland's voice wafted through the window. 'Hop in.'
'What are you doing here, Roland?' Kylie asked in surprise, as she boarded the vehicle. 'I could've easily made my own way to the firehouse. Oh, not that I'm not pleased to see you.'
'Egon asked me to come get you,' said Roland. 'Janine got your message and told us where you were. There's been some kind of disturbance in the Egyptian section of the Metropolitan Museum. One of the night shift workers is in hospital, and another one's turned up missing.'
'Sounds like a case for the police,' said Kylie, 'not us.'
'The police told the museum to call us,' said Roland. 'Apparently there's a mummy gone missing as well.'
'Missing as in, maybe gone walkabout?' said Kylie.
'Could be,' Roland replied. 'We're meeting the others at the museum. Egon will fill us in on the details.'
Kylie and Roland ducked under several cordons of yellow police tape and entered the Egyptian exhibit room. Here they found Garrett and Eduardo examining the exhibits with their PKE meters, while Egon and the museum curator talked together in a corner.
'Hey, Kylie, glad you could make it,' said Garrett, shooting her a cheeky look. 'I didn't think you were going to show. Runaway mummies not interesting enough for you, huh?'
'For your information, I find all aspects of Egyptology extremely interesting,' Kylie replied, 'especially the supernatural ones. As you already know, I had to take Pagan to the veterinarian! And what makes you so sure that this mummy has run away?'
'Well, he sure ain't here,' said Eduardo, withdrawing a few mouldy bandages from the sarcophagus. 'And this is where he's supposed to be, according to the delivery sheet.'
'Maybe someone stole him,' Kylie suggested.
'Could be,' said Eduardo, running his PKE meter up and down the bandages. 'I'm only getting residual traces off these ancient Band-Aids.'
'So what, you think a low-level ectoplasmic entity came in here and stole the mummy?' said Garrett. 'Why would it want to do that?'
'We can't tell anything for sure at this stage,' said Roland. 'But there's also the matter of the canopic jars, don't forget.'
'They got smashed when the mummy escaped, either on its own or by someone taking it,' said Garrett. 'There's no big mystery there.'
'Not quite correct,' Egon's voice cut into the conversation, as he came to join the other Ghostbusters. 'My concern is not how the canopic jars got broken, but what happened to their contents.'
'You mean the mummy's internal organs?' said Kylie.
'Right,' said Egon. 'The curator assures me that the jars were all intact and occupied when he saw them yesterday evening.'
'So someone took the mummy and its organs,' Garrett surmised.
'Or the mummy took its own organs with it when it walked out of here,' said Eduardo.
'The important question is, where's the mummy now?' Egon continued.
'And what does it want?' Roland added. 'Or, what does someone want with it?'
'There's very little to go on here,' said Egon. 'All we can say for now is that the mummy's gone, the canopic jars have been smashed and emptied of their contents, and one single artefact has been taken from the exhibit.'
'What's that?' asked Kylie.
'A sceptre,' said Egon. 'Here, take a look – the curator gave me this photograph of it.'
Kylie took the photograph and studied it carefully, her brows creasing in thought.
'The carving on the top...' she said. 'That's Ankh.'
'Yes,' said Egon, 'the Ancient Egyptian symbol for eternal life. It's certainly a clue, though not a very helpful one at present.'
'There might be some clues at the home of the worker who's gone missing,' said Roland.
'Carter Howard,' said Egon. 'The police are checking his apartment right now, but we should definitely take a look at it as well. The curator has agreed to give us the address before we leave.'
'What about this second worker?' asked Kylie. 'Shouldn't we go to the hospital and interview him?'
'We can't,' said Eduardo. 'The dude's in a coma.'
'You'd know that if you'd been here on time, like the rest of us,' Garrett teased.
'We'll certainly talk to him as soon as he comes round,' said Egon. 'If he comes round, that is. In the meantime, I want Kylie and Eduardo to get over to Carter Howard's apartment in the Ecto-1 and conduct a thorough search.'
'What, you mean like look for evidence that he's selling crusty old mummies on the black market?' said Eduardo.
'Possibly,' said Egon. 'Just see what you can find that might be relevant to this case, if anything. Roland and Garrett, I want you to dig up all the information you can about the mummy – exactly where and when it was exhumed, and everywhere it's been between that time and now. I'll do some research on this Amanhotep character, and find out if he's really as bad as his plaque says.'
At that point, the curator came back into the room. He handed Egon a small card with the missing worker's address on it, which Egon immediately passed on to Kylie.
'One more thing before you go, Dr Spengler,' said the curator. 'Some of my staff have been going over the inventory and they've found another missing artefact. It wasn't here in the exhibit room, but it was in storage with the mummy and the canopic jars.'
'And what was that?' Egon prompted him.
'The pharaoh's mummified cat,' said the curator.
Kylie and Eduardo had been standing outside Carter Howard's apartment for the greater part of two minutes, waiting for someone to answer their knock.
'Guess he's not home,' said Eduardo.
'Guess he isn't,' said Kylie, and tried the door handle.
'What are you doing?' asked Eduardo.
'What's it look like?' Kylie returned, as the door swung open. 'Bingo. Come on.'
'But we can't,' Eduardo said uneasily, glancing up and down the hallway to check that no one was watching them.
'Sure we can,' said Kylie. 'Don't be a wuss, Eduardo.'
'Hey, I ain't no wuss,' Eduardo scowled, pushing past Kylie into the apartment. 'Okay, let's see what this guy's hiding in here.'
They split up and searched the apartment, but there was nothing much to see. While Kylie was searching the living room, she was alarmed by a scurrying noise just behind her. She whirled around to see a gerbil in a cage, climbing into an activity wheel. She breathed a sigh of relief and smiled at her own jumpiness. Then she noticed that a green file with the words Verne's Medical Records had been left open on the table beside the cage. Curious, she went over to take a look.
'Nada in the bedroom,' Eduardo reported as he came into the living room. 'Well, there's all the usual stuff, but... what have you got there?'
'Medical records for the guy's gerbil,' said Kylie. 'Verne the Gerbil.'
'I don't think that's the kind of information Egon wants,' said Eduardo.
'It could be,' Kylie said evasively, still flicking through the file.
'The dude's got a gerbil,' said Eduardo. 'So what?'
'So look what I've found in with all these papers from the veterinarian,' said Kylie, looking up at him and revealing a short length of mouldy brown bandage clasped in her hand.
'The mummy's been here!' Eduardo deduced. 'And he's been... looking at the gerbil's medical records?'
'Looks like it,' said Kylie. 'Check this bandage for ecto traces.'
Eduardo took the bandage from her and ran his PKE meter over it. He nodded.
'Same as the readings in the sarcophagus?' asked Kylie.
'Exactly the same,' said Eduardo.
'So the mummy's been here... or Howard has been doing something to the mummy here... and the gerbil's medical records are somehow important,' Kylie surmised, flicking through the green file again. 'Oh my gosh! The gerbil's registered with the same veterinarian as Pagan.'
'I don't know what a veterinarian could have to do with all this,' said Eduardo.
'Neither do I, yet,' said Kylie, scanning the living room one more time. 'Hey, that computer's been left on! The monitor's switched off, but...'
Kylie went to the computer and turned on the monitor. Eduardo came to join her as she scrolled through the internet window that had flashed up.
'This is Streetmap-dot-com,' said Kylie. 'Someone's been planning a route from here to the vet's surgery! This is really weird.'
'I'll say,' Eduardo agreed. 'Why would a runaway mummy want to go to a vet? Do you think he needs some kind of emergency surgery, or something? Like, maybe he wants to get his organs sewn back in?'
'I suppose it's possible,' said Kylie. 'Eduardo, I'm starting to feel a little uneasy. I left Pagan at that surgery a couple of hours ago... I really want to go and pick him up... right now.'
'We should report back to Egon first,' said Eduardo. 'He'll probably want to check out the surgery himself.'
'Egon can wait,' said Kylie. 'I need to get Pagan.'
'I guess if the mummy's really gone to the vet's, we might catch up with him there and maybe even trap him,' said Eduardo. 'I'm sure Egon wouldn't want us to let him get away.'
'If we find the mummy there and we manage to trap him, fine,' said Kylie. 'Whatever, I just need to get Pagan.'
The vet looked up from his desk as Kylie entered the surgery.
'I've come to collect Pagan,' she said.
'Yes... yes, of course you have,' the vet replied. 'Well, I'm not sure this is such a good time...'
'Is he okay?' Kylie asked sharply. 'There wasn't a problem with the operation, was there?'
'Don't worry; Pagan's fine,' the vet assured her. 'I drained the abscess and gave him an injection of antibiotics, but he's still sleeping off the sedative so it might be best to leave him for a few more hours.'
'He can sleep at home,' said Kylie. 'I'm sure he'd prefer to wake up in his favourite chair instead of one of your cages.'
'Yes, I... I suppose he would,' the vet was forced to agree.
'So can you give him to me, please?' Kylie said irritably. 'What did you do with his basket? I left it here, beside the counter.'
'Here it is,' said the vet, producing Pagan's carrier from under the desk. 'I'll, er... I'll just go and get Pagan to put in it, then.'
'You do that,' said Kylie, narrowing her eyes at him.
As the vet shuffled out to the back room, the door to the street opened and Eduardo entered the surgery.
'What's the hold-up?' he asked.
'I'm not sure,' said Kylie. 'He's gone to get Pagan, but he's sure acting strange.'
'You think he knows anything about the mummy?' said Eduardo.
'Wouldn't surprise me,' said Kylie. 'There's definitely something going on here.'
The vet returned from the back room, carrying the sleeping Pagan in his arms. Kylie opened the cat carrier, and the vet lowered the animal inside. Kylie snapped the lid shut, and shot the vet a suspicious glance over the top.
'You seen any other animals this morning, man?' Eduardo asked him.
'Er... one or two, after Pagan's operation,' the vet replied.
'How about a gerbil,' said Kylie, 'have you seen one of those?'
'Er... a gerbil?' the vet replied uneasily.
'Yeah, one by the name of Verne,' said Eduardo. 'Or maybe you've seen his owner, Carter Howard?'
'I don't know anyone by that name!' the vet blurted.
'We know his gerbil is a patient of yours,' said Kylie. 'We thought he might've been here this morning.'
'Well, you thought wrong,' said the vet. 'Even if this man does have a pet registered here, doesn't mean I have all his personal details memorised! Maybe I have treated his gerbil, I don't know! But he definitely hasn't been here this morning – no one has!'
'What about the "one or two" animals you saw after Pagan?' Eduardo asked.
'No one except them!' the vet squeaked. 'I saw a dog and a monitor lizard – no gerbil! Now please, you have to leave.'
'All right,' said Kylie, still looking at him with piercing, suspicious eyes. 'I've got what I came for. See you again, Dr Poole... see you real soon.'
Kylie turned on her heel and flounced from the surgery, Eduardo holding the door for her as her arms were full. The vet watched through the window as Kylie put the cat basket on the backseat of the Ecto-1, before she and Eduardo climbed into the front and the vehicle sped away.
'You gave her my cat.'
The vet turned to stare in trepidation at the tall, red-eyed figure that was now emerging from the back room, leaning on the stolen Ankh-topped sceptre like a walking stick.
'But it's her cat too!' the vet twittered. 'I couldn't refuse to let her have it – she would've gotten suspicious!'
'I don't see how she could fail to get suspicious, the way you were carrying on,' King Amanhotep the Third growled through the mouth of Carter Howard. 'I told you I needed a cat; you gave me a cat. This pleased me. Then you gave the cat to that scrawny girl. This did not please me at all!'
'We... we can use another cat!' the vet squeaked in alarm. 'One's bound to be brought in soon, or we could find a stray...'
'I don't want a stray!' Amanhotep roared. 'Only a healthy, well cared for specimen will do for my Isis to spend eternity in! Besides, it's too late now – the ritual is complete. Isis is inside that cat – Pagan – and now I shall be forced to go to the trouble of retrieving him. You have caused me this trouble, animal physician, and you will pay for doing that!'
'You... you do know what Kylie's job is, don't you?' the vet said nervously. 'Are you sure you want to go after her and try to steal her cat?'
'It is my cat now, and I will take it back!' Amanhotep insisted. 'I have no interest in the former owner's job, I assure you.'
'But she's a Ghostbuster!' said the vet. 'So's that guy she was in here with, by the look of him. They drove off together in the Ghostbusters' car, anyways.'
'And why should I be afraid of these Ghostbusters, as you call them?' Amanhotep demanded.
'Because... because... well, you're a ghost, aren't you?' the vet reasoned. 'Or a zombie or a living mummy or whatever you're supposed to be.'
'So?'
'So... well, they might bust you. They seem to be interested in you already. You heard them asking about the man whose body you've stolen, didn't you?'
'I heard them,' Amanhotep confirmed, 'and I really could not care less! Ghostbuster or not, this Kylie will not stop me from reclaiming my cat! You can find her address on that computer of yours, can't you? Give it to me, now.'
'No, I can't do that,' said the vet. 'I... I won't do that!'
'If you want to keep your intestines inside your body, you will do that!' Amanhotep growled, taking a threatening step forward.
'Okay, okay,' the vet shrilled in alarm, turning his attention to his computer. 'Okay, let's see, patient records... owners... G... Griffin... yes, there she is. I'll print off her details for you.'
'And show me how to get to where she lives using Streetmap-dot-com!' Amanhotep ordered.
'I can't do that!' the vet wailed.
'You dare to refuse me?'
'No, it's not that! It's just, I don't have the internet here! I can't afford it!'
'Useless!' Amanhotep growled, as he ripped Kylie's details from the printer. 'I'll have to find the information myself – this delay will cost me precious time! And now you will pay for all the inconvenience you have caused me, wretch!'
'No!' the vet grovelled. 'Please, no! I've been useful to you! I gave you a cat! I gave you Kylie's address, even though it could cost me my veterinary licence!'
'It will cost you a good deal more than that,' Amanhotep chuckled. 'Still, I suppose you're right – you were of some help to me... in the end.'
With that, the mummy held out his hand and sent a stream of mouldy bandages straight at the vet. Dr Poole screamed and clawed at his face as the bandages began to encircle him, but his efforts were in vain. After half a minute Amanhotep withdrew his hand and the vet fell to the floor behind his desk, completely mummified.
