One of the builders shuddered and nudged the other.“You see that? Those dust sheets are moving. I don’t like this place. Gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
“You’re not the only one,” his mate agreed. “Let’s get on with those pipes.”
“Gosh…” Boris edged out past Bianca. “Look at that, he’s got a blowtorch!”
“Boris, come back!” the others whispered.
But the ginger kitten was entranced. The builders had gone back to cutting out the broken pieces of pipe now, and the blue flame of the blowtorch hissed and roared in the most exciting way. He padded over to look, darting from one shrouded plinth to another. But as he got closer to the builders and their tools, he was too interested to be careful.
“Boris! We’re supposed to keep out of their way!” Tasha mewed worriedly.
“Look at him, he’s right in the middle of the gallery,” Peter squeaked. “They’ll see him any minute!”
It would have been better if the builder with the blowtorchhad seen Boris. As it was, when he switched off the blowtorch and stepped back to check how the pipe was looking he fell straight over the kitten instead.
[Êàðòèíêà: img_24]
Boris shot out of the gallery with a squeal and the builder landed flat on his back in the middle of the floor.“What was that?” he yelled.
The other men were laughing too hard to answer him properly but eventually one of them managed to explain that it was a cat.
The builder went on shouting about it for quite a while.
“I told you they were horrible,” Bianca said smugly as the four kittens lurked in the Roman Room, listening to the stomping and yelling from inside the Egyptian Gallery.
“He sat on me! I was nearly squashed flat!” Boris held up one shaking paw and then the other, gazing at them as if he thought they might fall off. “I mean, I know I’m accident-prone but that man had a blowtorch! He could’ve set the whole museum on fire.”
“He’d turned it off before he fell over you.” Bianca rolled her eyes. “And actually, it was your fault.”
“Was not!”
The white kitten shrugged and Boris glanced round at the others.
“It wasn’t!” Boris insisted.
Tasha wrinkled her nose.“You did creep up behind him,” she told her brother gently. “I don’t see how he was supposed to know that you were there.”
“What is going on here?” Grandpa Ivan stalked into the Roman Room with his fur all on end. It looked as though he’d been woken up from a nap. “I could hear the shouting three rooms away. Oh, it’syou again…” he said, glaring at Boris. “What did you do this time?”
“I was only looking at the blowtorch,” Boris said in a small voice.
“Thewhat?” The fur lifted along Grandpa Ivan’s spine and he whisked round to stare at the Egyptian Gallery in horror, obviously expecting flames to billow out any moment.
“It’s all right, it was off when that man fell over Boris,” Tasha explained helpfully.
“Oh, good gracious,” Old Ivan growled. “Enough. I don’t want to hear any more! You’re confined to the cellars, the lot of you! Downstairs, now, at the double!”
[Êàðòèíêà: img_25]
The kittens spent the rest of the day holed up in the cellars, trying not to imagine that the canopic jars were watching them. Boris sat curled in a ball with his tail over his ears, while Tasha and Peter were trying their best to make him feel better. Even Bianca was nicer to him than she usually was. He looked so miserable.
Boris hardly even touched his supper. Afterwards Grandpa Ivan and Smoke sat the kittens down in one of the few clear spaces left in the cellar. The museum cats who weren’t on watch were gathered round them in a circle.
“Are we being banished from the museum?” Peter squeaked to Tasha.
“No! At least … I don’t think so,” she whispered back, but her ears were flattened down. How much trouble were they really in?
“You four…” Grandpa Ivan began, glaring at them.
Boris jumped up.“I’m sorry! It was all my fault!” he gabbled. “Please don’t be angry with Tasha and Bianca and Peter. I only wanted to see how a blowtorch worked.”
Smoke sighed, and Grandpa Ivan said,“Hmf!” and all the cats sitting around them seemed to shift and stretch. Suddenly the underground room felt warmer.
“You are an absolute nuisance,” Smoke told her biggest kitten, but then she licked his ears so it didn’t feel as though she was really that cross.
[Êàðòèíêà: img_26]
“Those kittens need something to do,” one of the other cats suggested. He was a long-legged tabby with thickly marked dark stripes over a brownish coat and bright yellow eyes. “They’re getting older. They should be too busy to fool about tripping up builders.”
“We don’t fool,” Tasha said to Peter under her breath.
“Can we guard the Egyptian Gallery? Please?” Boris begged. “The rats have it staked out. We keep on hearing them! I’m sure they’re after that papyrus, or maybe the builders’ packed lunches…”
The other three kittens nodded eagerly.
The dark-striped tabby cat looked thoughtful.“I have noticed quite a few rats close to the Egyptian Gallery when I’ve been on my shift.”
The other museum cats began to murmur.
“Mm-hm.”
“We could do with some extra lookouts…”
“Those rats are getting cheeky.”
“And the kittenshave been improving their hunting skills,” Smoke put in.
Grandpa Ivan looked grim.“Very well then. Tonight, you can have your first shift as museum cats.” He eyed the four of them fiercely. “You’d better not let me down!”
[Êàðòèíêà: img_8]
Tasha was keeping watch from a packing case next to the statue of Bastet. She was sitting tall, her head held high like the cat goddess. She knew she was only a scruffy tabby kitten, and not an Egyptian goddess– but tonight she was guarding the gallery!
The kittens were under strict orders to watch for rats creeping in through any of the huge holes that the builders had made in the walls, the floor, the ceiling… But so far, no one had seen anything.
The goddess statue seemed to be staring at the glass case with the papyrus and Tasha stared at it too. The dust sheet covering the case had slipped a bit and she could see the picture writing– strange little squiggles and figures. Except … she could make out some of the pictures. If she squinted sideways, wasn’t that faded scribble there a cat? There was definitely a cat in the little painting in the corner too. She needed to have a proper look later on. Perhaps if there was a curse, they could find out how to get rid of it?
[Êàðòèíêà: img_27]
Tasha leaned out round the plinth to catch Boris’s eye. “Anything?” she mouthed.
Boris shook his head. He was just as proud of their new job as Tasha was, but he’d been hoping for a bit more excitement. He huffed out a sigh and fixed his eyes back on the hole in the wall he was supposed to be guarding.
It was a very boring hole.
So boring that he kept imagining little ratty whiskers poking through it. There they were again. Every time he looked closer they turned out to be dust, or a trick of the light. Boris narrowed his eyes and glared at the whiskers.
This time, they didn’t disappear. In fact, they came a little closer and behind them was a pinkish ratty nose.
“There’s a … there’s a—” Boris let out a stifled mew. Now that the big moment had finally arrived, he was just too shocked to say anything. “Rat … rat!” Boris whispered. “There’s a rat! Oh my!”
The rat smirked at him. No, it full-ongrinned. Obviously it could see that Boris didn’t know what to do.