Between the two World Wars, the most famous employee of the British Museum was a cat called Mike. For some twenty years, Mike made it his home and his friend was a most irregular Egyptologist, Wallis Budge, a freebooting fieldworker and smuggler of antiquities. It was a time when the wildest spiritualist ideas were in full resurgence, when ghosts, mummies and lethal curses were held to stalk the earth and many leading scientists, writers and thinkers saw no contradiction between science and belief in the supernatural. And through such tempestuous times, Budge and Mike remained friends and allies as unearthly forces flickered all about them and the objects of the museum collection refused to be mere exhibits but pursued their own dark purposes across the years.
