McMummy Read Online Free Page A

reached for a bottle of Vita Grow—a strange-looking liquid, brownish in color with a distasteful smell. Mozie poured the foul liquid into the valve and closed it.
    Mozie was still holding his breath though his face was turning red. He was reaching for the sprinkler system when suddenly, he paused.
    He stood for a moment without moving. Then, slowly, he let out his breath and inhaled the thick, scented air of the greenhouse. He turned and faced the rear where THE plant grew.
    Everything seemed to have grown since he was here yesterday. The plants’ limbs reached out over the aisle, forming a sort of arch that led him forward. Some of the trumpetlike flowers had fallen to the ground, and in their place vegetables were already beginning to form.
    Slowly Mozie began to move down the aisle, the arch of branches closing over his head. Huge leaves brushed his cheeks. He stepped over a squash that had fallen and now blocked his way.
    He felt as if he had shrunk, like in a science-fiction movie where normal blades of grass were like skyscrapers.
    To ease his fears, he began a conversation with the absent Batty, taking both sides himself.
    “Well, Batty, I’m inside. You wait outside, like you always do, all right?”
    “Okey-doke!”
    “Make sure I come out?”
    “Okey-doke.”
    “If I don’t, get the police. They’ll know what to do.”
    “Okey-doke.”
    The “okey-dokes,” spoken in what really sounded to him like Batty’s voice, helped lift Mozie’s spirits. He went deeper into the greenhouse. He could not explain why he continued. He didn’t want to go in. He wanted to be running for the Esso station and Valvoline’s car.
    He paused at the end of the greenhouse where he had stopped yesterday. This time he did not reach out and push the leaves aside. He knew what was behind them.
    “I’m not going to look, Batty,” he said.
    “Okey-doke,” he answered for Batty.
    And yet even as he spoke his hand reached toward the leaves. Carefully, trying to disturb as little as possible, Mozie shifted the leaves aside.
    There was the pod.
    It was bigger than it had been yesterday, so heavy now that it seemed impossible the stem could hold it. The bottom of the pod rested on the rich black soil.
    “It’s either the dirt or that stinking Vita Grow stuff,” Batty had said yesterday when Mozie told him about the mummy pod. “Remember? I never did trust that dirt.”
    “The dirt?”
    “Yeah, that dirt. Remember? That’s one reason I didn’t want to go in there because I didn’t like the smell of that dirt. It’s like one million B.C. dirt. Smelling it could be bad for you. It could cause something.” Batty was afraid of inhaling anything that didn’t smell right.
    “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the dirt,” Mozie had said.
    To add credit to his theory, Batty had said, “I bet it came from Egypt.”
    “Egypt?”
    “Well, it would explain the mummy pod,” Batty had answered defensively. “If it is a mummy pod, you know what’s got to be in it, don’t you? A mummy! And you know what mummies do to you, don’t you?”
    Mozie said, “What?” He knew what werewolves did to you, and vampires, but he wasn’t sure about mummies.
    “They—they put an ancient curse on you. That’s what they do!”
    The soil did give off a scent richer, more exotic, than local fields. It did smell, Mozie thought now, as he stood deep in the greenhouse, sort of like the Nile. Mozie had never been to the Nile, but he had seen pictures of it, and this was the way it looked like it would smell.
    Mozie didn’t know where it came from, but he was sure he would never, ever forget the smell of the greenhouse. For the rest of his life—assuming he got out of here—whenever he saw a picture of the Nile, this rich, exotic scent would fill his nostrils.
    Mozie shifted, but the pod did not move. Perhaps, Mozie thought, it did lean a little forward toward him, straining on its stem, but it didn’t turn.
    He suddenly felt