The Frighteners by Michael Jahn

further down the sidewalk. The second the thing was out of the building, the lights and whirring stopped. Again the Reaper looked around—Bannister was sure then it was looking for victims, but so far it had chosen two buildings that were closed at night. The restaurant had plenty of potential victims in it, and the Reaper had chosen one—as well as given long looks at many others, including Frank and Lucy. Where would the Reaper turn next?
    Frank had his answer in a moment as the creature’s narrow yellow eyes seemed to blaze extra bright when they focused on the banner, visible down the street, announcing the Egyptian exhibit. The creature suddenly took off in the direction of the museum. In a frightening burst of speed, it shot across the street and vanished around the corner.
    “My friends,” Frank gasped. He got out from behind the VW and ran after it.
    With the crowd of dignitaries firmly in her thrall, Janet King stood before an ornate, sealed coffin. As was common practice in ancient Egypt, a likeness of the deceased was carved in the lid of the stone sarcophagus. This one clearly bore the remains of a beautiful woman who had the misfortune to die in her early twenties. Her coffin stood vertically on a plinth set in the middle of a gallery.
    The crowd gathered around it, with museum curator Amos Osborne still on the outside of the circle. He had not entirely recovered from his encounter with Stuart and, while outwardly calm, kept the fingers of one hand wrapped about Frank Bannister’s business card.
    “This is Queen Merytaten from the eighteenth dynasty, or about fourteen hundred B.C. ,” Janet said. “In order to better understand ancient burial practice, we have conducted a number of scientific tests that weren’t available to Egyptologists even a decade ago. We have, for example, managed to extract live DNA from her tissue . . .”
    There were several “oohs” from the audience.
    “That’s right, we found still-intact DNA in her intestines and managed to compare it with the DNA of modern humans. It’s interesting that we got a ninety-nine-point-nine-seven-five percent match. In other words, this Egyptian queen who lived thirty-four hundred years ago was just like you or me.”
    “Except she was a queen,” somebody said, and the crowd laughed.
    “That’s right.” Janet smiled. “Furthermore, we used magnetic resonance imagining—MRI—on the body, and found that she suffered from a disease we regard as being one of the hazards of modern-day living . . . rheumatoid arthritis.”
    Several people laughed, and one man rubbed his lower back in sympathy.
    “That diagnosis was also confirmed by X ray,” Janet continued. “Yes, we also X-rayed Queen Merytaten. So you can see another advantage of being an ancient Egyptian queen—today the insurance companies would never pay for all these tests.”
    Janet flicked a switch and a row of monitors lit up behind the large glass screen set into the nearby wall, revealing a full-size X ray of the queen. Her shriveled features were grotesque when seen in X-ray form, not at all like the beautiful sculpture of her face on the sarcophagus.
    Using the laser pointer, Janet drew the audience’s attention to a dark mass situated within the body cavity.
    “This dark area here is, in fact, the queen’s viscera, carefully packaged and returned to the body cavity.”
    Unseen by anyone else, of course, Stuart, Cyrus, and the Judge stood between Janet and the coffin. It was one of the benefits of being an emanation that you never had to peer over anyone’s head to see something.
    “Can you imagine?” Stuart said. “Taking out your intestines, wrapping them up in a bag, and then putting them back in? That’s grotesque.”
    “Turkeys come like that,” Cyrus added. “You got to remember to remove the bag of giblets before putting the bird in the oven.”
    “People aren’t turkeys,” Stuart said.
    “Maybe the turkey growers got the idea from the ancient