The Frighteners by Michael Jahn

keeping in touch with your wife. Do you talk to her often?”
    “Now and again,” Frank said.
    “You better talk to a lawyer, buster,” Ray threatened. Again, Frank ignored him.
    “I think you’ve led a very interesting life,” Lucy commented. “But I can’t imagine you get a lot of business in a town like Fairwater.”
    “Oh, you’d be surprised how active the spirit world is around here,” Bannister said. “You’ve just got to go out there and find it.”

Seven
    A s Frank spoke, his ghostly cohorts were doing just what he said—going out there and finding business. On that evening it was at the Fairwater Museum, where the exhibition Evidence Embalmed: The Secrets of Ancient Egypt, was having its grand opening. The museum was a gray stone edifice, suitably adorned with ivy and surrounded by maple trees and black, cast-iron fences, positioned on a small hill behind Main Street. The glitterati of Fairwater were streaming up the grand staircase steps, which were covered with red carpet for the occasion. It was the black-tie opening of the town’s long-awaited Egyptian exhibition.
    Inside a high-ceiling exhibition hall crafted of marble and limestone, Janet King guided the dignitaries through the spectacular Egyptian display, which was housed in a series of galleries. An attractive young Egyptologist dressed in a smart, pin-striped suit, she led them past an impressive array of stone sarcophagi, funeral statues, and images of Imhotep, Akhenaton, and Amon. Chariots, funeral masks, coffins embossed in shimmering gold and lapis lazuli, rows of hieroglyphics, and even a full-size mock-up of a burial chamber—all were lavishly displayed in the museum’s dramatically lit galleries.
    Pausing by a meticulously bandaged mummy, Janet King expounded on ancient Egyptian funeral practices. “The most elaborate method of mummification was inevitably the most expensive,” she told the impressed crowd. “The liquefied brain was drawn out through the nose, using a hooked iron. An incision was made in the side of the abdomen and viscera were removed, except for the heart, which was believed to be the seat of the emotions and intellect.”
    Following the slowly moving crowd was curator Amos Osborne, justifiably proud of the number of solid citizens gracing his museum that night. Everything seemed to be going as smoothly as silk, he thought as his just-polished shoes stepped on something on the marble floor. He looked down, and discovered to his shock that he had just stepped on a little pile of business cards—Frank Bannister’s business cards.
    He quickly bent low and gathered them up. How did these get here? he wondered. I haven’t seen Bannister tonight. Osborne walked briskly to a litter basket alongside a vertical display case in which a dry, shriveled, unwrapped mummy was propped up. He was just about to throw the cards in the garbage when he noticed the mummy’s head slowly turning toward him.
    A bead of sweat rolled down the curator’s forehead. The mummy’s thin, desiccated lips tightened into a ghoulish grin.
    Osborne looked back and forth from the suddenly revivified mummy to the cards in his hand. Then he stuffed one of Frank’s cards in his pocket before tossing the others in the litter basket. Sweating noticeably, he hurried off to rejoin the crowd, which had moved a distance down the exhibit.
    Now visibly behind the mummy, Stuart’s fingers pulled the mummy’s lips back.
    “Subtle, but effective,” Stuart said.
    “You made the man look like Boris Karloff,” Cyrus agreed, appearing nearby and looking at the ancient corpse with distaste. “Man, I never thought I’d lay eyes on someone more decayed than the Judge.”
    “Show some respect for your elders, boy,” the Judge said, stepping gingerly out of the display case that contained the mummy and reaching into the litter basket to retrieve the rest of Frank’s cards.
    “Who you callin’ boy?” Cyrus snapped.
    “I’m callin’ you boy, boy,”