“You see, look at that, Boris,” Tasha heard Grandpa Ivan say sternly. “Perfect hunting from little-black-kitten-I-can-never-remember-the-name-of. Practice! Practice, that’s all it takes! Learn to control your paws!”
“Yes, Grandpa,” Boris muttered, and Tasha gently brushed whiskers with him. She didn’t think Boris had been that bad.
“I’m always falling over my paws,” she whispered to him.
“I’ve never been so hopeless before.” Boris heaved a sigh. “I reckon it’s that horrible bit of paper.” He glared at the papyrus in its glass case. “It’s cursed all right.”
“No, it isn’t!” Tasha hissed, but then her whiskers twitched worriedly.
Something was wrong, she could feel it. Peter was marching proudly towards them across the gallery– but then his ears began to flatten back and the fur stiffened up all along his spine.
There was a strange creaking noise and somehow Peter’s shining black fur seemed to turn grey all at once. Tasha looked up slowly towards the ceiling and saw a great dark crack spread across the white plaster, branching out like the rivers on the maps she’d studied in the Map Room. Dust shimmered down like a waterfall.
“Run!” Boris yowled, and Peter scrambled out of the way just as the middle of the ceiling collapsed. Huge chunks of plaster crashed to the floor, right where he’d been standing.
[Êàðòèíêà: img_13]
“Peter!” Tasha mewed, nuzzling anxiously at him. And then she looked back at the gallery and whispered, “The treasures! Bastet’s statue! The mummy cases! The papyrus!”
“All of you, out of here,” Smoke hissed, herding the kittens to the safety of the doorway. They scurried along in front of her, glancing back at the scene of devastation, but it was hard to see anything through the haze of dust.
“Are you all right?” Boris asked Peter worriedly as Bianca tried to groom the dust out of his black fur. He was a small, skinny grey kitten instead of a small, skinny black kitten now.
“There’s no point licking him,” Grandpa Ivan told her. “What he needs is a bath.”
Peter stared at Grandpa in horror but the old white cat was already thinking about more important things.“Where’s that caretaker when we want him?” he muttered. “Lazy so-and-so. He should have come running… Ah…”
Grandpa Ivan’s whiskers bristled and the kittens looked round to see the Old Man hurrying through the Roman Room. He was carrying a radio, gabbling into it as he ran. He stopped in the doorway, staring at the pile of plaster with eyes as round as marbles.
“About time,” Smoke muttered. “On your way, kittens. We don’t want the Old Man thinking we’ve got anything to do with this.”
“He already does,” Peter whispered back. “Look. He’s glaring at us.”
The three other kittens peered round and saw that Peter was right. The elderly caretaker was eyeing the cats suspiciously.
“How can he think we’ve broken the ceiling?” Boris asked indignantly. Then he scowled at Tasha and the others, who were looking at each other meaningfully. “That’s not fair! I’venever broken a ceiling. It was only a smallish sort of dinosaur. And we put it all back together before anyone noticed!”
[Êàðòèíêà: img_14]
The Old Man seemed to stare suspiciously at the kittens every time he saw them after that. And Boris was absolutely sure they weren’t given as much food as usual either.
“There was hardly any breakfast!” he complained to Peter as they sneaked upstairs the next morning to spy on all the interesting goings-on in the Egyptian Gallery. Tasha and Bianca had already hurried off to see what was happening. “No nice meaty bits. Just that horrible brown biscuit stuff. He’s paying us back because he thinks we did something to the ceiling. I told Tasha that papyrus was cursed! We have to do something now it’s spoiling our breakfast – the most important meal of the day! Things are getting really serious.”
“It tasted all right to me,” Peter said.
Boris shook his head sadly. Peter had arrived at the museum in the middle of a rainstorm a few weeks before. Until then, the black kitten had been living on the streets and he’d always been hungry. Boris couldn’t imagine what that would be like. But really, even a street cat ought to be able to tell the difference between manky cat biscuits and a lovely bit of fish.
Last night, whoever the Old Man had been talking to on his radio had turned up in a hurry and brought a whole lot of fussy people with clipboards. Grandpa Ivan had come back down to the cellars looking worried.
“They’re going to close the Egyptian Gallery and the Roman Room until the ceiling’s been mended,” he’d explained to the other cats. The four kittens had curled up in their nest of old tapestries, pretending to be asleep but listening with all their ears.
There had been an anxious chorus of mews– the Egyptian Gallery was very popular with visitors. Shutting it down was going to make a lot of people really cross.
Now Boris and Peter crept under the portable screens the museum staff had put up at the door between the Roman Room and the rest of the museum. There were all sorts of strange noises coming from the Egyptian Gallery– bangs and screeches and occasional shouting. It didn’t sound like their museum at all. Usually an unruly school party was the noisiest it got.
“Ooooh, out of the way,” Peter squeaked as the screen was pulled back and two burly men staggered by. The two kittens squished themselves against the wall to avoid their stomping boots. The museum staff couldn’t see above the huge box they were carrying.
“Where are they going with that?” Boris wondered.
[Êàðòèíêà: img_15]
“I suppose they want to get the precious things out of the way,” Peter said, peering thoughtfully across the Roman Room. “Do you think they’re moving everything? Some of those mummy cases are huge. And what about that stone sarcophagus? They’d need a crane!”
“A crane…” Boris purred excitedly. “Do you think so? I’ve never seen a crane.” Then he nudged Peter. “If they’ve got builders in to mend the ceiling, there could be all sorts of things! Drills! Cement mixers! Maybe an angle grinder!”
Peter stared at him.“I don’t even know what that is.”
Boris lowered his head.“It’s for cutting things… I like machines,” he admitted.
“Mmmm.” Peter eyed the bustling scene in the Egyptian Gallery. “Well. We’d better be careful. I don’t think they’re going to want us in there. And your mother did tell us to stay out of their way. She said everyone would be busy and we shouldn’t bother them.”
“I don’t see why we can’t be here,” Boris said, but he didn’t meet Peter’s eyes. “We’re only making sure no rats get in, aren’t we? I wouldn’t put anything past those nasty creatures. They’re probably planning an attack on the mummies right this minute!” He marched forwards,tail high, and Peter sighed and scurried after him.
The Egyptian Gallery was full of people. The elderly professor was standing in the middle, directing her staff, who were frantically packing huge crates or putting wooden frames around the exhibits that were too big to move easily. They seemed to be clearing out the middle of the gallery under the fallen bit of ceiling. The kittens had seen most of the people from the museum before, from a distance, but there were strangers here too. A big platform built of metal bars had appeared in the middle of the gallery and there were three builders in hard hats standing on it, staring at the ceiling.
“A scaff tower!” Boris gave a little purr of bliss. “I’ve always wanted to go up a scaff tower.”
“How do youknow all this stuff?” Peter asked.
Boris shrugged.“Well… I like things that move and make noises and go fast… Big things…” He looked longingly at the scaffolding tower again. “Do you think they’d let us go up there?”
“No.” Peter shook his whiskers firmly.
“I suppose you’re right.” Boris sighed. “Oh well.” Then his ears twitched and he started forwards. “Hey, look! It’s Bianca. She’s up there already!”