The Book of the Dead by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child Read Free Book Online

million square feet of space, and eighteen miles of corridors—and that’s not even counting the sub-basement tunnels, which no one’s ever surveyed or diagrammed. I once tried to figure out how many rooms there were in this joint, gave up when I hit a thousand. It’s been under constant construction and renovation for every single one of its hundred and forty years. That’s the nature of a museum—collections get moved around, rooms get joined together, others get split apart and renamed. And a lot of these changes are made on the fly, without blueprints.”
    “But surely they couldn’t lose an entire Egyptian tomb!” said Wicherly.
    McCorkle laughed. “That would be difficult, even for this museum. It’s finding the entrance that might be tricky. It was bricked up in 1935 when they built the connecting tunnel from the 81st Street subway station.” He tucked the blueprints under his arm and picked up an old leather bag that lay on his desk. “Shall we?”
    “Lead the way,” said Menzies.
    They set off along a puke-green corridor, past maintenance rooms and storage areas, through a heavily trafficked section of the basement. As they went along, McCorkle gave a running account. “This is the metal shop. This is the old physical plant, once home to the ancient boilers, now used to store the collection of whale skeletons. Jurassic dinosaur storage… Cretaceous… Oligocene mammals… Pleistocene mammals… dugongs and manatees…”
    The storage areas gave way to laboratories, their shiny, stainless-steel doors in contrast to the dingy corridors, lit with caged lightbulbs and lined with rumbling steam pipes.
    They passed through so many locked doors Nora lost count. Some were old and required keys, which McCorkle selected from a large ring. Other doors, part of the museum’s new security system, he opened by swiping a magnetic card. As they moved deeper into the fabric of the building, the corridors became progressively empty and silent.
    “I daresay this place is as vast as the British Museum,” said Wicherly.
    McCorkle snorted in contempt. “Bigger. Much bigger.”
    They came to an ancient set of riveted metal doors, which McCorkle opened with a large iron key. Darkness yawned beyond. He hit a switch and illuminated a long, once-elegant corridor lined with dingy frescoes. Nora squinted: they were paintings of a New Mexico landscape, with mountains, deserts, and a multistoried Indian ruin she recognized as Taos Pueblo.
    “Fremont Ellis,” said Menzies. “This was once the Hall of the Southwest. Shut down since the forties.”
    “These are extraordinary,” said Nora.
    “Indeed. And very valuable.”
    “They’re rather in need of curation,” said Wicherly. “That’s a rather nasty stain, there.”
    “It’s a question of money,” Menzies said. “If our count hadn’t stepped forward with the necessary grant, the Tomb of Senef would probably have been left to sleep for another seventy years.”
    McCorkle opened another door, revealing another dim hall turned into storage, full of shelves covered with beautifully painted pots. Old oaken cabinets stood against the walls, fronted with rippled glass, revealing a profusion of dim artifacts.
    “The Southwest collections,” McCorkle said.
    “I had no idea,” said Nora, amazed. “These should be available for study.”
    “As Adrian pointed out, they need to be curated first,” Menzies said. “Once again, a question of money.”
    “It’s not only money,” McCorkle added, with a strange, pinched expression on his face.
    Nora exchanged glances with Wicherly. “I’m sorry?” she asked.
    Menzies cleared his throat. “I think what Seamus means is that the, ah, first Museum Beast killings happened in the vicinity of the Hall of the Southwest.”
    In the silence that followed, Nora made a mental note to have a look at these collections later—preferably, in the company of a large group. Maybe she could write a grant to see them moved to updated