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The question of whether or not the exhibits have souls is indirectly answered, in Teddy’s estimation, on their third night of waking, when the first few Names are discovered.
Names. Soulmate marks. Teddy remembers having a different one, etched across the inside of his forearm, there for as long as his borrowed memories will go back. But the same letters aren’t carved into his wax flesh, and the new name appears, tiny, wrapped around his wrist instead. It doesn’t take him very long to match it to the one written on the plaque underneath her exhibit.
‘Sacagawea’.
An impossibly beautiful name for an impossibly beautiful woman.
Yet, still, he cannot find it within himself to approach the barrier of glass which separates them. If he was really Theodore Roosevelt, he thinks he could. In a heartbeat. But, as the night guards tell him, that's not who he is. He might wear her name, but in the grand scheme of what they are and aren’t, what could one wax mannequin possibly offer another?
~
Sacagawea finds little to distract her, trapped as she is with only Lewis and Clark for company. The night guards ignore them. The few times something interesting happens in her line of sight, she can only watch, soundlessly, as events unfold beyond her control. The soldiers fight, or else they are restrained. The horses stamp nervously, until they are given feed bags to ease their nerves. Every night, it is more or less the same.
Under those circumstances, it doesn’t take her long to catalogue everything about her physical form. The words are elegantly scripted, painlessly written along the arch of her foot in pale marks and slight indentations. ‘Theodore Roosevelt Jr.’ they say, and she takes them as a promise – that there is a path out of here. That she will one day escape this prison she wakes to, night after night, and find the owner of that name, if only to see where her own letters are written into him.
Her opportunity will come, and she will seize it when it does.
~
Jedidiah knows darn well what those lousy letters on his stomach are trying to imply, and they’re wrong. There’s no way, no how, that his soulmate is a man, let alone one of those Roman jackasses, and it is especially not the head Roman Jackass himself. It’s probably just… some kinda mistake. Jed can look around and do the basic math. There are way more male exhibits than female in the museum, especially in their neck of the woods. Probably stands to reason that a few wires would get crossed, right? Like the fates are tryin’ to match ‘em up to their own kind, or something, and it’s gone and put him with – with the wrong person. Even if he is kind of easy on the eyes, which he ain't. Not even a little. No sir.
Maybe the man upstairs went and got hate confused for love. That’d sure explain it.
No way is his soulmate Octavius.
He presses a hand against his belly, and glares through the locked case at the Roman display.
~
Octavius doesn’t think he has a Name on his person at first.
He doesn’t in his other set of memories, after all, and no matter where he checks, he can’t see one on himself. Granted, he can’t see every spot, but it’s also reasonable to assume that he simply is not – and has never been, in any incarnation – destined for a soulmate. It’s fine. His great love is reserved for Rome.
He tells himself he’s not disappointed. But he cannot deny the sudden jolt of excitement in him when he turns just so, one evening, and catches sight of an unfamiliar indentation on the back of his shoulder. It’s after a round of sparring with his men. His armour has been put aside, and in a moment of serendipity, the light and the angle are just right for him to barely see it in the reflection off of the polished barricade surrounding their prison.
With a flurry of motion that surprises himself, he pulls at his shoulder, yanking down his tunic and straining to see as much as he can.
‘J’. That’s definitely a ‘J’. And an… ‘e’? Perhaps an ‘o’?
“General?” one of the men inquires.
He stops almost immediately, and rights himself. He could ask one of the others to look, surely, and tell him… but, no. This is private. This is secret. For some reason, he feels as if this is something he must guard even from those he would trust with his life.
That doesn’t stop him from straining to see it, a little more, every night.
That’s definitely an ‘e’, he decides.
~
Screaming in the dark, in his sarcophagus, Ahkmenrah cannot see the Name that has written itself over top of his heart.
He only notices it decades later, as he is unwrapping himself from his bandages – and then there isn’t even enough time for him to read it, for the tablet has been taken and they must fly to retrieve it before sunrise. After fifty-four years of imprisonment and isolation, Ahkmenrah spends his first night of freedom riding dinosaur skeletons and commanding mismatched legions and dancing. It is so thrilling that even the sudden addition of a soulmate manages to escape his mind.
It is as he is forced to re-wrap himself, to return to his sarcophagus, that he remembers it again. He glances at the upside-down marks, and then reads them in the reflection of his tablet.
Lawrence Daley.
After a few astounded blinks, he looks over to see the man in question standing at the entrance to his exhibit.
“So, um,” Larry says, somehow managing to look at everything but the pharaoh clearly wearing his name across his chest.
Ahkmenrah stares incredulously at him.
“This is an unexpected development,” he eventually says.
“Would you believe that it actually kind of explains a lot, for me?” Larry asks, laughing nervously and rubbing at the bicep of his right arm.
“The gods do have a unique sense of humour,” he concedes. Still, he thinks, looking at this strange, daring, dedicated man who has championed him this night, and somehow won over the museum and its warring inhabitants with just one speech. This may be one instance where he won’t begrudge them their meddling.
~
Larry is born with his mark.
That in and of itself isn’t really noteworthy, but his is weird. Not just because it’s written in hieroglyphics, of all things, but because it only appears at night.
Every morning, Larry wakes up and the name is gone. The first time it happens, when he’s a newborn baby in the hospital, everyone thinks that his soulmate has died. They’re all sad for him – the little baby who only had a soulmate for a day. His mother cries over it and everything.
But then it comes back, the next night. And it’s gone again by morning. No one knows what to make of it.
Experts puzzle over it. Names are a subject of interest in a lot of fields, and they’re not always consistent. Some people never get them. Some get more than one. Some people seem to be mismatched, although there are questions as to whether that’s really the case, or whether it’s more like mistaking the wrong ‘John Smith’ or ‘Jane Brown’ for your soulmate. Sometimes they change, although usually when they do, it’s from one name to another – not coming and going the way Larry’s does.
Larry spends most of his childhood years fascinated by his come-and-go Name, and most of his teenage years desperately trying to escape the bizarreness of it. Even Erica, Nameless, doesn’t seem to know what to make of it, the strange crawl of letters that rewrite themselves around his bicep every evening when the sun goes down.
And then one night he opens up a sarcophagus and the most beautiful man he’s seen in his life climbs out of it, an Egyptian pharaoh who only lives at night, and all he can think is:
‘Oh. That makes sense.’
Followed by:
‘Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit…’
~
Amelia remembers having six different Names all scrawled down the back of her calf, like a sort of a checklist of men.
Plenty of people had been scandalized by the very notion of her Names. Just imagine, a girl with so many marks on her! What tawdry implications!
“I’m going to find them all,” Amelia had once proudly declared. “Even if I have to go all around the globe myself. I’m going to gather them up, and they’ll follow me around and we’ll all have marvelous adventures and do whatever we like.”
When she wakes up in the basement of a museum, she at first assumes the list is still there. But she’s a sharp tack, and it doesn’t take her long to put two and two together. After those goons march off with Larry, she takes a minute to yank her pant leg out of her boot, and checks. Sure enough, there isn’t a single Name on there. She looks at the other leg, too, just on the off chance that she’s somehow mixed them up, but the only thing she finds is pale skin.
But then, as she’s shoving her pants back into place, she feels it. Her fingers manage to run along on an indentation at the back of her ankle, the definite curve of a letter.
For a moment she contemplates ripping off her boot and having a look. If she is what she thinks she is – and she knows she is, she’s not blind to what’s going on around her or what waking up in the basement along with all of the reanimated stuffed animals and paintings and statues means, thank you very much – then this name might be the only thing about herself that really belongs to her.
But she’s already got an adventure to go on.
“Next time,” she promises herself, securing her boots instead.
Even Amelia Earhart can’t be bold every second of the day. Or night, as the case may be.
~
Tilly is born with two Names on her – one on the back of her knee, in rounded letters that disappear when she’s ten years old, erased as if they were never there to begin with, and another on the side of her hip, in tiny marks that seem to get fainter and fainter as she gets older. Her mum says it’s bad luck, that it’s a sign she’s missing life’s chances and her soulmate’s slipping away. Tilly tells herself it doesn’t matter. After all, if a soulmate can just, like, wander out of range, then he’s not much of a soulmate, is he?
Besides, ‘Brundon’ is a stupid name. She thinks she would’ve preferred the girl on the back of her knee. Sometimes she wonders what happened to her. A car crash, maybe, or maybe she got sick, or murdered. She googles it, but it’s such a common name that she gets too many potential results to really know.
At first she’s really unsettled by the new name that suddenly appears on top of her other knee.
For one thing, it just says ‘Laaa’. What the hell kind of a name is that? Did some hippy parents just let their baby name itself or something? Not even a last name. She thinks maybe it’s a prank her shithead boyfriend’s pulled on her, but no matter how hard she scrubs in the shower, the letters don’t smudge or fade. Shit. She’s in her twenties, and apparently her new soulmate’s been born just now? Does the universe expect her to wait a couple of decades for this ‘Laaa’ to grow up just so she can become some kind of creepy cougar?
Whatever. Tilly doesn’t need a soulmate. She’s not even disappointed when the weird Name is gone the next morning, like she just imagined it or something. It’s like, you can be perfectly happy without one, right? Date whoever you want to and all that. Not bother about it. No fuss.
For instance, she could even date the weirdly attractive, rugged guy who keeps staring at her while his crazy twin does god-only-knows-what in the museum. Probably defacing priceless artifacts or something.
She’s definitely going to get sacked for this.
Probably couldn’t make things any worse if she just makes out with him a little.
~
Laaa have Name.
Long Name, on leg. Laaa not read, but others do. Laaa shows leg to Man on Horse.
“She’s called ‘Matilda’, dear boy,” Man on Horse say. “A fine name.”
“Maaa?”
“Ma-Til-Da,” Man on Horse say slowly, for him.
“Maaa-Tilll-Daaa,” Laaa sounds out. Then he laugh and clap and cheer. He show Brothers. Brothers laugh and clap and cheer for him. He try to show Dada, but Dada move too fast, say ‘not now, Laaa, I’ve got to handle this situation’.
Laaa’s Name say Maaa-Tilll-Daaa. But then Laaa meet Tillleee. Hair like gold in magic tablet, voice like angry flock of birds.
Name is wrong. Laaa takes marking stick from museum desk, cross out extra parts. Leave ‘Till’ sound. Needs last part. ‘Eee’. How spell? Laaa thinks, thinks, has to think fast before daylight come and brain go sleep. Make Name right.
Laaa has it! ‘E’! ‘E’ is mark! Laaa make it, and goes back to brothers.
Name is right now. Yes. Good. Universe will know, send Til-E back to Laaa.
~
It should say ‘Guinevere’.
Shouldn’t it?
Lancelot thinks it should. Right there, on the inside of his elbow. Or perhaps over the top of his heart. Or on the side of his ribs. Anyway, somewhere, it should say ‘Guinevere’, but no matter how he looks or the questionable angles he employs mirrors at, the body underneath his armour is pristine and spotless. He feels as if he has lost her, but how can he, when she was never real to begin with? Not even a piece of history. A legend. A dream.
He doesn’t know if this is freedom or robbery.
But he knows what it means when he sees the young pharaoh habitually tracing the shape of letters across his chest.
“Why are you here?” Lancelot finally asks him, one night. It earns him a startled glance.
"I didn't realize I'd been banned from the hallway full of severed animal heads," Ahkmenrah replies, recovering swiftly. "Did my father issue another of his 'edicts'?"
"No. I'm not talking about the hall, I'm talking about the entire museum," Lancelot clarifies. He doesn't even bother to hide his annoyance. He can never tell when this man is being purposefully obtuse or not.
“My family is here,” the man in question replies.
When he’d first arrived among his friends, the young king had seemed easy and comfortable, approachable even in all his regalia. Now he wears his finery like a shield, and there is a perpetual distance between him and everyone he encounters. The other exhibits find him princely.
Lancelot thinks it may be princely, indeed, but that doesn’t mean it’s an improvement.
“You mean your parents are here,” he corrects, with a derisive snort. The old pharaoh and his queen live life as though they are still in Egypt, as though they still have legions to command and power to wield. No matter how hard their son works to make them see that the world has changed, that they are but waking dreams themselves, now, and always will be until they accept what they have become, they refuse. They do not want to see it – just as Lancelot hadn’t.
Ahkmenrah raises one haughty brow at him.
“I hear that in most cultures, parents generally are considered family,” he points out, dry as the desert he hails from.
Lancelot gives him his most unimpressed look. It’s pretty good, if he does say so himself.
“In a hundred years, your parents will still be dead, and I doubt they’ll have changed much for it,” he says, turning on his heel. “But unless I miss my guess, those letters on your chest will be gone for good in far less time.”
He feels Ahkmenrah’s gaze follow him as he leaves the hall, along with half a dozen curious animal stares. It’s just because of that monkey, he tells himself.
He hates to see a quest defeat its own purpose.
~
Mysterious Museum Thieves Strike Again?
Last week, the National Museum of History made headlines after a massive heist left authorities baffled. On the morning of January 1st, Museum employees arrived at work to discover that several exhibits had vanished during the night. Though the most notable aspect of the theft remains the inexplicable disappearance of two massive dinosaur skeletons (the museum’s own Tyrannosaurus Rex, and a Triceratops on loan from the London Museum), authorities believe that the thieves’ main target was the Tablet of Ahkmenrah, a priceless, solid gold relic that was a permanent fixture of the museum’s Ancient Egypt exhibit for more than fifty years, and had recently returned for several months as part of an international exchange program.
Also stolen were several more innocuous items, among them miniatures from the museum’s dioramas, taxidermy specimens, and a bevy of life-size wax models, many of which had been slated for replacement as part of the museum’s efforts to revitalize its displays. More baffling still, the thieves left behind several relics of obvious value, including objects on display in the very same exhibit which Ahkmenrah’s famous tablet was taken from. What was not spared was the pharaoh’s own mummy, which vanished alongside his priceless possession. Though officials still hope that many of the relics may be recovered, experts fear for the condition of the four-thousand-year-old remains.
Police believe that the same culprits may be behind a recent spree of disappearances from the Smithsonian archives. Though nothing of comparable value to the Tablet of Ahkmenrah has been taken, several more wax models, mannequins and figurines have gone missing from storage, with no clues left behind on the museum’s security systems. The Smithsonian’s security system is notable for the extensive upgrades it has been receiving since 2009, when vandals devastated several exhibits, though at the time only a single wax replica of the Pharaoh Kahmunrah was found to be missing. The National Museum of History installed a similar security system in 2014, after a debacle involving its infamous Night Hours program ended with the museum’s lone night guard and head program coordinator, Larry Daley, resigning. Critics have cited the system’s over-reliance on computers as a potential flaw which may have been exploited by the thieves.
But for now, both the identity and the methods of the persons involved in the bizarre heists remain unknown.