Alvin J. Crow 3

Now all the kids are curious, especially the guys who are young and lairy and may have something to prove, and who think the whole thing comic. The girls think it creepy and are holding back a little, arms folded. But the guys, the older ones too, gawk and wonder at the curtain, tugging at it, full of a morbid desire to reveal its secrets, almost as though what might be concealed was something salacious, something stark, grim, sexual.
The mysteriousness, arcanity, strange frozen life of the museum exhibit.
Now they began to be determined to view what was inside this secret alcove. A plan was formulated. They approached the exhibit carefully and by hoisting one another up were able to lift the curtain almost fully aside. One of the older guys balanced precariously, supported by a younger kid, his arms holding the pearl curtain aloft while he peered curiously and anxiously inside the recess. Another boy, lean and hungry-eyed, managed to grip its outside ledge and, hauling himself up, looked boldly in.
All the kids could see now what the pearl-coloured curtain had concealed; apparently nothing. The recess went back far deeper than expected, so far in fact that its farthest wall could not be seen, and the interior lay swathed in thick, impenetrable shadow, a threatening void like the darkness that fills a drippy, narrow-walled cave.
Maybe, then, the exhibit lay in shadow, and needed to be illuminated or activated. Since it was hard to hell how for the recess went back, it could be possible that the artefacts or figurines rested against the far wall. To the kids who peered inside the alcove, trying to penetrate the gloom, the impression received was of air and space, so that they perhaps were looking into more of a full-sized room than a mere recess, which receded into the wall for several metres. The kids became convinced, conjecturing among themselves, that this unusual exhibition-space must contain something.
Yet, they had a natural trepidation, which was like the ancestral fear of early man peering into the deepest recesses of a newly-discovered cave, listening out for the bear's breath.