“Mr. Dumfrey’s celebrating,” Pippa said, ignoring his last comment. She was annoyed that she couldn’t quite verbalize what she felt: there was something wrong about it. Earlier, she had seen the crowds swarming the display case that held the shrunken head, nearly toppling one another to get a better look, and she’d felt an instinctive revulsion, like when she saw alley cats fighting over a bit of rotten meat. There were many strange and gruesome things in the museum—the mummified big toe of an Egyptian pharaoh, the supposed eyeball of an actual Cyclops floating in a jar of formaldehyde, a baseball-size rock said to be the world’s largest kidney stone—but she thought the shrunken head, and all the clamor about it, was the worst.
“Well, it’s better than it was before, ain’t it, when hardly no one came at all?” Max said, breaking up the yolk of her egg with a spoon.
Pippa decided her question was so hopelessly ungrammatical she couldn’t possibly correct all her errors. So she just sniffed. “I’m not sure it is better,” she said.
“Do you think there’s something to it?” Max said. She had just stuffed her mouth with eggs, so it sounded more like do oo fink eres umefing to if, which was at least more grammatical than her last comment. “The curse,” she clarified, swallowing. “The old hag died, didn’t she? Maybe it’s true. Maybe the head is bad luck.”
“If it is true,” Sam said suddenly, “the curse will fall on us next.”
There was a second of silence. A shiver ran down Pippa’s back, as it sometimes did when she came across something unexpectedly cold or metallic or dangerous in someone’s pocket, like a knife or a revolver. She remembered what she had overheard Mr. Dumfrey say to Miss Fitch backstage, and Miss Fitch’s response: Let’s hope they’re safe. She hadn’t told the others yet—the shrunken head, and the death of Mrs. Weathersby, had driven the words straight out of her mind—but now she wondered whether she ought to. She nearly opened her mouth to repeat the conversation.
Then Thomas laughed.
“Seems like good luck to me,” he said.
Max finished her eggs and then—much to Pippa’s disgust—took the plate and licked it. “I’m pooped,” she said. “I’m going to bed.”
But just then Pippa heard a noise from outside the kitchen: footsteps, descending from the first floor. “Shhh,” she said, at the same moment Sam said, “There’s someone coming.”
All of them froze. Pippa’s breath turned to ice in her throat. Please, she thought, please let it not be Mrs. Cobble. Or even worse, Miss Fitch. They were not supposed to be up, and they were certainly not supposed to be in the kitchen. But the footsteps kept going.
Thomas started to move toward the door.
“No, Thomas. Not yet,” Pippa whispered. But he had already cracked the door and peered into the hall.
“It’s all right,” he said, withdrawing his head. “It was just Potts, and he’s gone.”
The four of them—Pippa, Thomas, Sam, and Max—snuck upstairs together, with Thomas scouting by shimmying through the vents that connected the floors, then returning to report the coast was clear. By the time they arrived in the attic, they were near breathless with laughter and only just managed to restrain themselves. But then Sam bumped into Danny’s bed and the dwarf sat up with a roar, flailing his arms, shouting murder, and they dissolved into laughter again.
It was only two or three minutes from the kitchen to the attic—and yet it was the first time, Pippa thought, as she slipped into the clean white sheets of her cot, that she had ever felt as if she had real friends.
But just before she fell asleep she felt that sudden thrill of alarm that she hadn’t been able to express or explain, and she remembered what Sam said: The curse will fall on us next.
Thomas was awakened on Tuesday morning by a blood-curdling scream. He sat up, his heart rocketing into his throat. It was not yet light outside; the sky was a mottled gray, like an old man’s complexion. All around the crowded attic space, the residents of Dumfrey’s Dime Museum came awake, yanked into consciousness by that terrible scream.
“What is it?” Lights clicked on in various corners of the attic.
“Did you hear that?”
“Of course I heard that, you dolt. I may be a dwarf, but I’m not deaf.”
“You’re not a dwarf, either, so just stop pretending.”
“Sounded like someone had his head cut off,” Quinn and Caroline said at the same time. Then, again simultaneously: “Jinx.” And: “Stop copying me!”
Sam’s words of the night before came back to Thomas in a rush: The curse will fall on us next. Without bothering to get changed from his pajamas, he kicked aside the vent in the floor and squeezed himself into it, just as Sam sat up, blinking and rubbing his eyes, saying, “What’s all the noise?”
Thomas didn’t answer. He shimmied down the vent, using his back and feet for leverage, going as fast as he could. The scream sounded again, so loud it sent a tremor through the vent, making his teeth vibrate. He had traveled the museum’s walls, pipes, ducts, and vents for almost his whole life, and knew every twist and drip and screw and knob. He knew the way voices and whispers carried through the walls, could map the entirety of the museum in his mind, and now he knew instinctively that the scream had come from the ground floor.