The Strangest Museum Visitors

Museum visitors do strange things. They sneak in food. They don’t watch their kids. They don’t read signs. They try and convert you to Christianity. They lie. They complain about lighting, crying children, the size of artifacts. They steal. Being warned about a visitor in the King Tut exhibit was always reserved for the especially strange. They slurred their words, or smelled of weed, or yelled at garbage cans. This, however, was altogether different.

For one, Bea warned us in person. She never did that; she’d get on the radio and inform everyone at once, if she’d say anything at all. Even then, it was usually a team lead who told us these things. In any case, this was the most I’d spoken to her in months. I’d never seen her look so serious. She usually was, but it was an authority figure seriousness, a cold professionalism that demonstrated her position and fit not at all with our otherwise casual, friendly work environment. This time she didn’t look authoritative. For some reason she looked diminished, like she wanted to be anywhere but here. There was something strange about her manner that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

 “Can I talk to you for a minute?” She said. I nodded, confused, and she looked around, as if checking to make sure the coast was clear. My gallery was deserted, but that seemed not to matter.

She leaned in toward me and lowered her voice. “We’re going to be having some…unusual visitors coming in. They’ll show up at eight-o-clock, sharp. They won’t stay long; I’ve never known them to be here longer than an hour.” Here she took a deep breath, and I could tell that what she was about to say next was what she had really come here to say. “Whatever you do, do not talk to them. Do not interact with them in any way. I mean it. If you do, they’ll be able to see you.”

 “See me?” What on earth was that supposed to mean? “What kind of visitors are they?”

“They’re…” Bea let the sentence hang in the air for a minute, then shook her head. “You’ll know it when you see them. You’ll get it, trust me.” Before I could utter another word, she turned and walked away. I stood there, stunned for a moment, and then it hit me. I suddenly understood why she was acting the way she was.

She was afraid.

 ****

 They came in exactly when Bea said they would: eight-o-clock on the dot. Bea herself had deserted us--shuttered herself inside her office, most likely--a cowardly, but wise, decision. There was simply no reason for her to be there. If something went wrong, there was nothing she could have done. It would have been between us, and them.

The lack of a speech before the introductory video played in the theater was my first clue. The gallery supervisor in the theater position was supposed to tell visitors what they weren’t allowed to do. No eating. No drinking. No gum. No photography. No re-entry. We were supposed to tell visitors that the video was narrated by Harrison Ford, and that they wouldn’t be needing their audio guides in the theater. None of that was said.

The video started, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. There was a coldness there that shouldn’t have been, and that wasn’t all. The sound on the video was all wrong; it was as though a demonic presence was trying to imitate Harrison Ford’s voice, and had in the process stolen the sweetness and majesty of the background music. Just before the video ended, the supervisor in the theater got on the radio and, ignoring proper radio protocol, said just two terrifying, trembling words:

“They’re coming.”

The music swelled, and the door opened.

****

 The first thing that hit me was the smell; sweet, cloying, and rotten. It put me in mind of how I imagined the houses of the dead would smell like, in Ancient Egypt. It was as though someone had tried to mask the scent of death with sweet perfumes and citrus fruit. The perfumes were powerful, but the odor of decay lingered beneath it all, and I could feel my stomach twist into a knot. They entered without a sound. There were ten of them, some shuffling ponderously, others appearing to glide. They brought with them a stillness that fell upon the room like a thick grey curtain. The air grew cold. The lights dimmed. Even the music had stopped, replaced with a soft, buzzing white noise that filled my head as well as my ears. The gallery descended into gloom. All was silent except for the sudden, sharp cry I was barely able to bite back.

None of the visitors were alive.

I backed against the wall, my heart pounding so hard that in the stillness I could hear nothing else. I knew instantly what Bea had meant by her warning. She needn’t have said it; I had no intention of letting them see me. And as for what would happen if I did, I decided I didn’t want to know. So I stood flattened against the wall, staying near the theater door, in case I needed to escape. And I watched them.

One had no eyes. Another was missing the skin around his jaw. Still another had no jaw at all. One woman in a long gray dress had a curtain of stringy hair that covered her face, and a dark red stain that covered her front. A skeletal man wore a faded cloak that swept the ground, leaving a smear of something black in his wake. There was even one who was over nine feet tall, his head bowed low with his chin touching his chest, impossibly long arms hanging limply at his side.

They moved as if in a dream, smooth and unnaturally silent. Though their feet touched the floor, they seemed to bear no weight. The silence deepened, until even the radio static buzz had softened to a hiss. The lights flickered, like lit torches. The room grew colder, and despite being in a daze I noticed that I could see my breath, clouds of light mist that disappeared into the darkness. And that smell, that stench of death, persisted. The dead spread out in two straight lines among the artifacts and regarded them closely.

Almost, I thought, as if they were regular visitors.

If I’d been in the mood, I would have laughed. It painted an absurd picture—the dead here to visit a museum, like the thousands of vacationers and families we welcomed every year. Where did they come from? Why here? How did Bea know they were coming?

I stood and stared for a few moments longer--long enough to regard the ectoplasmic trail that one of the dead was leaving behind--until I noticed them gathering at the other end of the gallery. Their movements had looked almost choreographed, the two straight lines, each individual a set distance apart from the others. They never got in each other’s way. They spent the same amount of time looking at each artifact, then turned and moved to another. Now they gathered at the end of the gallery, all of them, as if by prior agreement, walking away from the artifact they were looking at simultaneously. They grouped together, and I realized that they were preparing to move to the next room. Backing as far as I could into my corner, I got on the radio. To this day, I don’t know how I found my voice.

“Anna, they’re in your gallery.”

There was no answer, but there didn’t need to be. I knew my coworker had likely found her own safe corner to hide in, and that the dead had entered. The silence, the gloom, had not lifted, but I knew they would not return to my gallery, and breathed slightly easier. Despite this, the tension was palpable, and I hoped no one would be foolish enough to neglect Bea’s instructions.

The minutes crawled. My legs finally found the strength to move and I crept through my gallery, wondering what I was going to do with the black slime on the carpet from the man in the cloak. I picked up my radio to call for cleanup (was it a body fluid spill? I couldn’t begin to guess) then stopped when I noticed that it was slowly disappearing, fading into the carpet like disappearing ink.

Every so often, I would hear a call come over the radio. It seemed that the others had followed my lead, and decided to warn the next person that the dead were coming.

“Larry, they’re in your gallery.”

“Sandra, they’re in your gallery.”

“Vicky, they’re in your gallery.”

I noted the names as they were said, counting down the galleries that they had entered. We used our names, rather than the customary gallery titles (Gallery 1, 2, or 3). It was as though we had decided that we needed some way to distinguish ourselves as living human beings. Finally, after an eternity, the staff member at the exit came over the radio, her voice tremulous with relief:

“They’re gone.”

It was as if the words had broken the spell. The lights brightened. Warmth filled the room, as did the music. The smell disappeared. I took several deep breaths, each one easier than the last. I stood for awhile, unsure what to do. Then, as my sanity and senses appeared to return to normal, I set about cleaning the cases.

****

There were a few things that I found out later, as our team lead had come around to make sure everyone was all right, and to compare notes on what we had all witnessed:

There had still been visitors in the last gallery when the dead had gone through. It had not occurred to me that this would be the case, and Vicky, the gallery supervisor in charge, had been about as terrified as I imagined I would have been, had I been there. She stood as near as she dared, keeping a close eye on both sets of visitors, living and dead. “I felt like I had to protect them, or something,” she said, “though god only knows what I would’ve done if something had gone wrong.” Her fears turned out to be baseless—the living visitors had not been able to see the dead, and vice versa, though the living did remark as they left on how “awfully cold” it had gotten in the gallery.

In the gallery marked The Treasury Room, there is a display with a gabled wooden box, a simple, plain thing, with dark handles and little paint. Inside the box had been two fetuses, withered little mummies, both girls. They had been Tutankhamun’s stillborn daughters, in an era long past. According to Sandra, who worked in that gallery, the woman with the bloody dress had spent the longest amount of time at that particular case, just staring. She had been the last to join the others, and before she broke her gaze, she put a white hand, tenderly, on the glass. The handprint she’d left behind disappeared without a trace after she’d left the room.

According to Bea, the dead had come to see the exhibit in every city it had been in. No one knew how or why, but their routine was always the same. Bea would know that they were coming when she would walk into her office and discover a single black rose sitting on her desk. They always came at night, at the last entry time, and spent the same amount of time inside the exhibit. Once they exited, they’d vanish again to parts unknown. In all the time Bea had worked with Museum Exhibitions International, only one person had broken the rules, a security guard who’d tried to reach out and touch one of the dead. When asked what had happened next, Bea merely went white and shook her head, refusing to speak of it. Her hands, it was said, were shaking.

Still, despite the trailing ectoplasm, the foul smell, the cold, the darkness, and the constant fear of unspeakable horrors, we all agreed on one thing:

They were the best behaved visitors we’d ever had.