Force of Nature ▸ House of Anubis [3]

chapter sixty-five. house of cunning

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            So far, Joy and I have translated only two of the hieroglyphs in the diary entry—the ones I already knew. Then again, it's only been five minutes, and Joy's been tapping away on her computer, scouring the web for the most common hieroglyphics in tombs to see if we have any of those. I've got my phone open to some recreational website where you can type in stuff and it gives you the translation in hieroglyphs.

            Obviously, I tried searching Ammit, and looking up how her name is actually transcribed in glyphs. It was not on the list of hieroglyphs in the diary.

            "Hey, I think this one's a number," Joy states, tapping on the symbol with her pen. It's like an arch, an upside down capital U, and after it are two thin lines. "Twelve. It's a number."

            "Twelve?" I repeat. "Twelve what? What's the hieroglyph that follows?"

            "Hello, trying to figure that out," she says as she gestures dramatically to the screen. I hold back a mocking chuckle, noting in my mind that she's made for the stage with those dramatics. "But check out this one, here. It doesn't look like a hieroglyph so much as a... person. Or something humanoid, you know?"

            "No. What do you mean?"

            "Well, you know how in those tombs in Egypt," she says, talking with her hands as well, "they have images—scenes that accompany the hieroglyphics to tell the story. Like illustrations in a book. It looks like one of those."

            "So maybe that one's not a hieroglyph. What is it then?"

            Joy thinks for a moment, her lips pursed. Then she lets out a short and kind of an 'aha!' gasp as she opens a new tab on her laptop, typing quickly into Google. "Maybe it's one of the gods or goddesses. Looks more like them than a regular person. We should go through all of them and see if we can match."

            "All right," I agree. "Let's. It's not Anubis, I can tell you that..."

            She clicks on a website meant for the education of children, which has the traditional drawings as seen in things from ancient Egypt as well as info on these. She holds up her phone with the zoomed-in photograph to the screen, comparing. "It's none of these. But there's only twelve here and there's way more gods than that. These are just the major ones. We should try the minor ones."

            The minor ones... like Ammit.

            "Checking them out in alphabetical order..." Joy mumbles as her new results page come up, and I wait with bated breath as she scrolls. "Found it! It's Ammit, whoever that is. Kind of creepy, isn't it? Following the link... devourer of souls. Ashley."

            "Yes, Joy?"

            "Your grandmother wrote this in 1922. The expedition to open King Tut's tomb was in 1922 that her parents were on," she lists, and I nod along slowly with pressed lips. "I'm thinking that's more than a coincidence."