The Key (8 page)

The golem turned toward the door. He felt as if he had perhaps done something wrong and didn't quite understand what it was.

So he was feeling a little self-conscious as he headed down the lonely hallway, banging the edge of his desk against the lockers as he walked.

Camaro was seated in a chair outside her own class.

“Hey, Mack,” she said. “What are you doing?”

“Going to see the principal. Why are you sitting in the hallway?”

She shrugged. “Kicked me out for not knowing an answer.”

“What was the question?”

She made a grin that didn't last very long. “Teacher asked me what my problem was. I didn't have an answer.”

“Why did she ask you that?”

Camaro waved her hand dismissively. “I superglued the chalk to the board. It was kind of cool, I thought. Five pieces. They were the points of a star if you looked at it the right way. I thought …” She glanced up at him, self-conscious. Then she forced a laugh. “I thought it was kind of artistic.”

“I wish I had seen it,” the golem said.

“They're in there chiseling it off now,” Camaro said. And indeed the golem heard the sound of a hammer striking a steel chisel. “I'll see you tomorrow, right? For the fight?”

“Yes. They can punch me if they want. It doesn't bother me. Especially now that I'm big.”

“Watch your head, by the way. You could bump into that doorjamb.”

T
he skeletal crew threw Mack onto the ground before the throne of William Blisterthöng MacGuffin. The landing skinned Mack's knees. Not that this was his major concern right then, but it was still painful.

His hands were bound behind him, but his feet were free and he had a plan.

“Ah heard a lot o' screaming frae yer cell. Some weeping tae,” MacGuffin said. He grinned his yellow-toothed grin inside his bristly red beard-of-fear. “Sae ye'r a feartie-cat. A weeping, blubbering wee feartie-cat.”

“I am not a feartie-cat,” Mack said. “I'm phobic.”

That stopped the conversation for a few seconds while Connie, who was fluttering around MacGuffin like a tween around Justin Bieber, explained to MacGuffin.

MacGuffin looked different in daylight. He still had the exploding head-bush of red hair; and the sallow, wrinkly skin; and the too-large teeth, but now he seemed almost to sparkle a bit around the edges. Like someone had sprinkled him with glitter.

Ah, Mack thought: fairy dust. That would make sense.

He took a step toward MacGuffin. “See? I'm not afraid of you.”

Well, of course he was. Because as you know, among Mack's numerous phobias was an irrational fear of beards. He was fine with beards at a distance. But a beard up close caused him acute feelings of panic.

He'd once had a horrible dream in which he'd been locked in a room full of rabbis, imams, and Santa Clauses. In his dream he had searched frantically through Santa's bag, looking for a razor. All he had found were socks.

The mere memory of that dream gave him the shakes.

Mack had a beard comfort zone of about ten feet. A beard farther away than that just made him vaguely nauseous. A beard at, say, eight feet would make him start to feel the first slight edge of panic. And a beard within three feet would have him sweating, weeping, and begging an unfeeling heaven for an angel-barber armed with clippers to save him.

MacGuffin unfortunately had the worst of all possible beards: wild and red. So subtract a foot from each of those distances.

At a distance of five feet, Mack wasn't sure he could incinerate MacGuffin. At the same time, he wasn't sure he could force himself to move any closer.

Somewhere there was a math formula that balanced “likelihood of incineration” against “fear of beards,” but Mack didn't know it. He had probably been daydreaming in that class.

“You should be afraid,” Connie said, and made an expressive hand gesture that was a pantomime of throat cutting. “You should be very afraid.”

Mack needed to get closer to use the Vargran spell. He wished that Connie would get out of the way because he figured she was just blinded by love, and he didn't need to burn her up.

MacGuffin, on the other hand, had it coming.

Now out of the coffin-cell, out in the air with a blue sky overhead and a cool breeze on his face, Mack was recovering fast from his night of terror but now edging into full-blown beard panic.

But here's the thing about Mack: he was scared of many things, but he wasn't weak. He could hold it together. Usually.

Except for times when he couldn't.

“Where are my friends?” Mack demanded, and took another bold step forward.

MacGuffin shot a conspiratorial look at Connie. The two of them seemed to share a private laugh.

“You don't need to worry about your friends,” Connie said. “In a few minutes you won't need to worry about anything at all. Ever again.”

Another step closer. Four feet from a bushy red beard!

Close enough. And now Mack decided it was too bad about Connie, but she was a bad, bad fairy. And if Mack died here, all of humanity was doomed.

“Fur th' crime o' invading mah secret hame 'n' trying tae steal mah possessions, ah sentence ye tae death, Mack o' th' Magnifica!” MacGuffin cried, and pounded his stick on the ground.

“Oh yeah?” Mack snarled. “And I sentence you to fry like a hamburger.” With a supreme effort of courage he closed his eyes and leaped toward MacGuffin and his beard and cried, “
E-ma edras!
”

The light was like an explosion. Like someone had taken all the light of the sun, squeezed it into a balloon, then popped that balloon.

It was like a small nuclear fireball.

The heat instantly incinerated two skeletal guards.

It scorched the very walls and made the mortar bubble from between the seams of the stones.

MacGuffin and Connie wavered, like reflections in troubled water.

But not like they were burning up.

The light faded. The searing heat, which had spared Mack as the one who had cast the spell, dissipated.

And MacGuffin still sat calmly while Connie floated on gossamer wings.

“Um …,” Mack said. “Why … why aren't you …”

“Dead?” MacGuffin asked, and burst out laughing. “Whit a stoatin' gowk A'd be tae let ye wirk a Vargran spell oan me.”

Which in English was, “What am I, a moron?”

“Turn around, you foolish child,” Connie said.

Slowly Mack turned.

There at the far end of the courtyard was the throne, and MacGuffin upon it. The appearance—the illusion—of MacGuffin just a few feet away from Mack faded like the last scene of a movie.

“Tis nae enough tae huv th' power, ye mist huv th' cunning tae uise it.”

Or: “It's not enough to have the power, you must have the cunning to use it.”

A half dozen skeletons of various species came at a rush.

“You've used up your
enlightened puissance
for a while,” Connie said. “And by the time you are strong enough to cast another Vargran spell … well …”

And that is how we come to the point where Mack was bound in the basket of a trebuchet.

“Cheerio the nou, ye scunner,” MacGuffin said, and he swung the sword.

The blade parted the frayed rope.

Gravity worked the way it usually does, and the big basket of rocks dropped like a big basket of rocks.

“Aaaahhh!” Mack screamed.

It was like being shot from a cannon.

Mack flew like … okay, like a cannonball.

The flight lasted only seconds. Then he hit the wall of Urquhart Castle. His bones were all broken. His skull popped open like a dropped melon. He was dead before the gelatinous mass of his pulverized body could ooze down to—

Okay, that's not what happened. It's what would have happened. Except that Stefan had made good on his promise to round up a crowd.

He had done it by spotting a pair of tour buses that were parked just off the road at Urquhart Castle, waiting to visit said castle and watch the sun rise and light up Loch Ness.

Stefan banged on the doors and then each of the windows of the buses, hammering them with his fists and yelling, “The Loch Ness monster is running around loose! Grab your cameras!”

For a while the sleepy tourists just stared at him. Then, one man—a man with two cameras slung around his neck—broke and ran for the door.

“This way!” Stefan shouted, and the man, bless his gullible heart, followed.

Well, that was all it took. Because there was no way the rest of the tourists were going to sit idly by while that one guy got all the good pictures.

In a flash both buses were gushing forth the usual bus-tourist folk: people in Bermuda shorts who had no business wearing shorts; old couples with matching plaid outfits; sullen goth teenagers who couldn't believe they were stuck touring with their grandparents OMG; guys with unfortunate facial hair; women in giant bonnets; the kind of old dudes who like to repeat stupid jokes until you laugh just to make them stop; cheek pinchers; sour-faced crones; tiny Asian people who take pictures of everything, even the bus tires; vegans wearing hemp T-shirts—the entire cross section of subspecies
Touristus fotograficus
.
¹⁵

All of them raced after Stefan, who led them away from the actual lake and toward a hill that neither they (nor Stefan himself) could see.

The crowd faltered then.

They slowed.

They began to think they were being made fools of. Then Jarrah, Xiao, and Dietmar rose from behind a stone wall.

The three of them joined hands. They focused on what united them: affection and concern for Mack, a Determination
¹⁶
to Stop the Pale Queen, and Regret
¹⁷
at not getting some Magnum bars for themselves.

Hands linked, with Jarrah in the middle.

Hands linked, they climbed atop the stone wall. And for the first time in 3,000 years, a group spell was spoken in the Vargran language.

“Oscur exelmo oo-ma!”

The three Magnifica waited. Tense. Scared.

And then, the goth tourist kid said, “Whoa.”

She was a girl. Not quite a teen. Maybe … well, exactly … twelve years old.

“There's a castle there. On top of a mountain.”

She was with her grandparents. Not the wrinkled-up type of grandparents—these were the active, fit, nutrition-beverage-drinking kind of grandparents.

And they saw it, too.

Not all the tourists did. But some did. At least half of those standing there were looking up with their jaws down and their eyes wide and their cameras forgotten for a moment.

“What are you all staring at?” others demanded, frustrated.

One of the bus drivers said, “I've lived here all my life: I've never seen this. It's … it's impossible.”

“No, not impossible,” Dietmar announced somewhat grandly. “It is the castle of William Blisterthöng MacGuffin, long concealed by fairy magic.”

The crowd continued the jaws-hanging, eyes-wide thing, but now some were pointing their cameras and others were moving toward the castle.

A scream pierced the air.

A cannonball flew from the castle's highest tower.

The cannonball was writhing and yelling.

Xiao, Jarrah, and Dietmar all saw it at the same instant.

Stefan cried out in anguished recognition.

No chance to use Vargran! The three Magnifica had used up their
enlightened puissance
revealing the castle.

“Noooo!” Xiao cried.

Mack flew in a long, flat arc straight toward the unyielding stone walls of Urquhart Castle.

“Halk-ma simu (ch)ias!”

The Vargran spell rang out clear and loud.

And it came from the goth girl, who stood legs apart, both hands together, and pointing with her clenched fist, like she was aiming a gun or something, as Mack flew overhead.

W
hat do you think about in the seconds before death?

Have you ever considered that? You're probably considering it right now.

In Mack's case he was thinking about his life. Which, prior to Grimluk suddenly informing him of his importance in an age-old struggle between good and evil, had been pretty boring.

And Mack was thinking about how great boring is. Boring is excellent, compared to dying.

In those last seconds he was thinking about his mom. And screaming. And his dad. And screaming.

And he was feeling guilty because now the world would not be saved and the Pale Queen would enslave all of humanity. She would probably outlaw video games and movies and fro-yo and Toaster Strudel and all the truly good things in the world.