The Key Page 5

  Jarrah, Dietmar, Xiao, and Stefan were ushered unceremoniously through the door of MacGuffin’s castle. The door slammed behind them.

  Stefan was back in the enchantment zone and could no longer see the stones and tufts of grass around him, or the castle door closed behind him, or the walls looming above him.

  “We have to get him out of there,” Stefan said.

  “Can’t even call me mum for a few good words of Vargran,” Jarrah said. “MacGuffin took our phones. What can we do?”

  “I …,” Dietmar began. Then he shrugged. “I don’t know what to do.”

  Mack would have been secretly pleased to hear that, if he’d been there.

  One by one they looked at Xiao. Jarrah said what they were all thinking. “You could fly us over the walls.”

  Xiao looked down, deep in thought for so long it seemed as if she might have fallen asleep. “I cannot,” she said finally in a very sad whisper, and with a slow shake of her head. “There is a treaty. No eastern dragon may appear in the west. To violate the treaty is to risk a war.”

  “So risk it,” Stefan snapped.

  Xiao’s eyes flashed. “You don’t understand: it’s not only a risk to dragon folk; if the western dragons were to rise again, entire cities would burn!”

  “I don’t care,” Stefan snarled. He stabbed a finger in the general direction of the door he couldn’t see. “He’s under my wing. I protect him, and I don’t care what gets in my way. He’s under my wing!” He raged back and forth, demanding someone show him a rock so he could bang the door down with it.

  “If we could find the fairies …,” Dietmar said. “Frank and the others. Connie has betrayed them. They might be able to help us.”

  “But where are they?” Jarrah shouted. She had caught some of Stefan’s wild rage. “Where are the lying little—”

  Xiao said, “Wait.”

  “Wait? Wait on what? Until dawn, when he kills Mack?”

  “The fairies cast a Vargran spell that allowed us to see the castle,” Xiao said patiently.

  “Yes, but only because we have the enlightened puissance,” Dietmar observed.

  Xiao nodded. “The reason there must be twelve of us is that our power grows with each new member of the Magnificent Twelve. True?”

  Dietmar snapped his fingers. “Ah! But even if we are only three Magnifica, it may be that our power is greater than the fairies’!”

  “We must descend the hill,” Xiao said. “And when dawn comes, we must cast the spell and reveal the castle to as many people as we can get together. MacGuffin needs to remain hidden because he is no match for the terrible powers of the modern world. He has his band of skeletons and his spells. But what are these when weighed against the police and the army, and the city planners and zoning officials, the bureaucrats from Brussels, and, worst of all, the tourists who will descend like a plague of locusts should this castle suddenly be revealed to one and all?”

  “We will need to practice the spell, doing it together,” Dietmar said. “And we will need a good crowd of people to be at the bottom of this hill when morning comes.”

  “I’ll get you a crowd,” Stefan said, and everyone believed him.

  Oscur exelmo oo-ma!

  That was the spell Frank had spoken to reveal the castle. “Hidden castle show! Or else!”

  Vargran was a magical language, but not a beautiful one. It got the job done but it wasn’t a language for composing song lyrics. And it was dangerous in the hands of one who possessed the enlightened puissance, so you could get into a lot of trouble if you didn’t get it just right.

  But they had all heard the spell quite clearly and they were confident they had the words right. The problem was that, when they thought about it, there wasn’t really any way to practice it. Once you used a particular spell, it was a while before you could do it again. And if they sat around testing it out, they might be totally depleted when they needed it.

  So instead they practiced saying other things together. They recited the words to Lady Gaga songs. They recited bits of poetry and sang the birthday song in unison, and Jarrah taught them Australian limericks best not repeated here.

  Stefan had built a small fire in the rocks at the base of the hill, and the three Magnifica sat around it like a tiny glee club working on their harmony.

  “I don’t think it will be enough to speak in unison,” Xiao said somewhere around four in the morning, with the black sky just beginning to turn navy and the stars just fading the tiniest bit. “We must find a way to unite our hearts, so that our powers will be truly unified.”

  “I’ll unify your hearts,” Stefan muttered threateningly. He was getting very tired of standing by helplessly while the three of them sang songs around a campfire.

  “Go and focus on how you will get people to this place,” Dietmar said, “and stop pacing around here interrupting us.”

  Jarrah knew immediately that this was a mistake. Dietmar knew it a split second later when he was lifted clear up off the ground and held in the air by his throat. Stefan did this with one hand. He did it without grunting or straining, as if Dietmar were no bigger than a kitten.

  “Mack is under my wing,” Stefan said. “You … are not.”

  “Stefan is not our servant,” Jarrah said sharply.

  “Her, I like,” Stefan explained further, pointing at Jarrah. “Because she’s cool. And her?” Stefan asked, jerking his head toward Xiao. “I told her father I’d take care of her.”

  “A large, large guy, Xiao’s father,” Jarrah said. “Large and scary.”

  “He’s not the least bit scary, he’s a scholar,” Xiao said. “Though,” she admitted, “he is large.”

  Xiao’s father was a dragon roughly the size of an entire subway train.

  “Put me down,” Dietmar said. Then when he found it suddenly hard to breathe, he added, “Please.”

  Jarrah gave Stefan a shrug, and he put Dietmar down.

  Dietmar rearranged his shirt and smoothed back his hair. “I know that I am not popular. I am never popular,” Dietmar said. “Sometimes I seem rude. Because sometimes I am rude. But it is not how I mean to be. I just want to do the correct thing.”

  Xiao said, “Sometimes people think that I think I am superior. That, too, is not how I feel.”

  “And people think I’m crazy,” Jarrah admitted. “You know, reckless and dangerous.” She shrugged. “Well, I am, a bit. But I’m normal otherwise.”

  “We are all strange creatures,” Dietmar said. “I have always known I was to be part of something important. For a long time I did not know what.”

  “The way I understand it,” Stefan said, “it’s all or nothing. It takes twelve. All twelve. So you’re all in this together.”

  One by one they nodded.

  “So we can’t lose anyone. Not even the pipsqueak here.”

  Dietmar frowned. “What does he mean, pipsqueak?”

  “Get your spells or whatever ready,” Stefan said. “I’ll bring you some witnesses.”

  With that, he strode off manfully in the direction of the road.

  “He is a bully,” Dietmar observed.

  “Mack says he’s the greatest of all bullies,” Jarrah said. “Let’s get ready. The sun will be coming up soon.”

  “How do you suppose Mack is faring?” Xiao wondered aloud.

  “I’m sure he is fine,” Dietmar said.

  “He’s brave,” Xiao said.

  “Yeah, the boy will be all right,” Jarrah said.

  None of them really believed it.

  And with good reason, because at that very moment Mack was huddled in a corner of his tiny cell, pulling himself into as small a space as he could, as if that would make the rest of the cell seem larger. Less coffin-like.

  He stared mostly at the skull lamp. It was just about the only thing there was to stare at. The alternative was staring at the chamber pot. That wasn’t a great alternative, although the porcelain did have a pleasant blue flower pattern. And the firelight did re
flect like a second small flame from the shiny …

  Hold up.

  There was something other than firelight reflected in the chamber pot. Mack badly needed something to take his attention off the whole buried-alive thing so he conducted a small experiment: he moved his hands to block the skull light from reaching the chamber pot.

  Sure enough, there was an entirely different glow in the porcelain. It was a whiter light.

  Mack scrambled forward on hands and knees and stuck his face right close to the pot. Not a good choice if you were looking for a pleasant smell. But, as it happened, useful in a way that made Mack’s heart leap. For there in the porcelain was the tiny, dim image of Grimluk.

  “Grimluk!”

  “Is that you, Mack of the Magnifica?”

  “Of course it’s me!”

  “Can you turn up the lights? It seems awfully dark where you are. And my time is short … my power … fades....”

  “Whoa! No no no. None of that power-fading baloney! I’m in a dungeon!”

  Grimluk was one of the original Magnificent Twelve. He was no longer 12, of course; in fact he was 3,012. How he had managed to cling to life for better than three thousand years, Mack did not know. Nor did he know where Grimluk was. Presumably some distant cave. Or possibly a secret compound. Although it occurred to Mack that, for all he knew, Grimluk might be sitting by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel drinking mojitos.

  In which case Mack really hated him, because he would have loved to be there with Grimluk.

  Though not if Grimluk was wearing a bathing suit. Grimluk was 3,012 years old, after all, and had a beard that was rated “three Civil War generals” in size and bushiness. He had eyebrows that would have had Dumbledore reaching for the scissors. He was so wrinkled you could stash french fries down in some of the folds of skin.13

  All this, though, was beside the point. The real point was that it was Grimluk who had first informed Mack that he was required to assemble a group of twelve twelve-year-olds possessed of the enlightened puissance.

  Or to put it another way: it was all Grimluk’s fault.

  “Where have you been?” Mack demanded furiously. “I haven’t heard from you in a long time.”

  “This apparition thing isn’t easy,” Grimluk protested. “I’m old. I’m weak. I’m not the man I once was. I fail, I—”

  “Get me out of here!” Mack cried. He grabbed the chamber pot and held it close so that he could look Grimluk in the eye. “Listen to me: some crazy person has me in a dungeon and he’s going to kill me.”

  “Who?”

  “Me!”

  “No, Mack of the Magnifica, I mean, who is holding you?”

  “William Blisterthöng MacGuffin!”

  “Ouch,” Grimluk said, and bit his lip and shook his head and just generally did not look encouraging. “No lotion ever created by man or magic really deals with the symptoms of blisterthong. I had a case back in, oh, I guess it would have been the year—”

  “Grimluk! Focus! I have to escape!”

  “Have you tried—”

  And there the image of Grimluk faded out, leaving Mack staring at the chamber pot.

  “No! No! Get back here!”

  He was still yelling at the porcelain when he heard the bolt on the door thrown back. He dropped the pot, spun, and leaped for the opening, fast as a tiger.

  A skeletal hand closed over his arm and pulled him out into the passageway. Unfortunately two more skeletons were at the ready and grabbed him.

  Mack tried his best to think of a Vargran spell. He was seriously cursing his own laziness—he really should have studied—and running through the Vargran he’d used in the past.

  The obvious one was the spell he’d used to burn up Risky.

  That one he remembered.

  Oh, he remembered it just fine.

  E-ma edras.

  If he could burn Risky, he could surely burn MacGuffin.

  * * *

  Nine

  * * *

  MEANWHILE, AT RICHARD GERE MIDDLE SCHOOL14

  “Mr. MacAvoy. Are you … are you …? Never mind.”

  That was Mack’s English teacher, Ms. Telford. Ms. Telford had asked the golem—who she believed to be Mack, of course—numerous questions over the last week, and she had never liked the answers much.

  She had, for example, once asked the golem whether he could please speak up in answer to a question. The golem had said, “Up!” Which might be a perfectly understandable error to make. But she had then said, “I meant could you speak a little louder. Project your voice, Mr. MacAvoy.”

  The golem had projected his voice. He said, “UP!” very loudly. And he projected his voice onto a silk plant that sat forlornly on the edge of Ms. Telford’s desk.

  And then he projected his voice onto the flag, and onto the shelf of ancient books so that it seemed exactly as if some old copies of Animorphs books were yelling, “UP! UP! UP!”

  And then the backpacks beside each desk began yelling it, one after the next, while kids jumped up shouting, “How did you do that?”

  It had been extremely upsetting.

  Ms. Telford had learned that if she wasn’t absolutely, 100 percent sure of the answer she’d get, it was best not to ask Mack any questions.

  So she stopped herself.

  But Matthew Morgan—nerd bully—was sitting behind the golem and decided to poke the golem in the back and say, “You’re getting fat, MacAvoy.”

  “No, I’m getting big,” the golem responded.

  And sure enough, he was getting big.

  “I’m a big boy,” the golem said proudly. And he stood up. Which unfortunately caused his desk to get up with him because he was now wedged tightly into it, so tightly that it was hard to see how he was ever going to get out of it.

  Matthew stood up slowly, his face a mask of dawning horror. He stood up to his full height, and there was no denying that the golem was taller. Taller by a good foot. And broader by another foot.

  “Is this big?” the golem asked.

  At his biggest and scariest, Stefan Marr had never been this big. The golem looked like a pale, pleasant-faced Incredible Hulk. Only maybe not so much Incredible as Unusual. Or Odd. The Odd Hulk.

  Because while he had grown taller and broader, and he absolutely filled out his shoes, jeans, and shirt, he had not ripped any seams but rather had expanded in all the parts that were beyond his confining clothing.

  His ankles were huge.

  His forearms looked like Popeye’s—postspinach.

  His neck was the size of a tree trunk.

  And his head was a watermelon. Figuratively speaking.

  In Ms. Telford’s class every jaw hung open. Every eye bulged. But Matthew wasn’t just amazed, he was threatened.

  “Been working out, huh?” he demanded. And he sort of turned his head back and forth in a tough-guy way that made his neck crack. And then he laced his fingers together and cracked his knuckles the way he’d seen Stefan do. And then he hunched his shoulders and tried to swell his pecs and biceps and whatever the other muscles are called.

  Then, as he gazed at the golem’s massive, Thanksgiving-turkey-sized forearms, something seemed to die behind the bully’s eyes.

  He sat down.

  Ms. Telford had a strange, faraway look in her eyes. The golem thought it might be a look of admiration. Actually it was Ms. Telford imagining the margarita with extra salt that would be waiting for her when she left school at the end of the day.

  Ms. Telford often pictured that margarita.

  “Mr. MacAvoy, you need to go see the principal,” she said regretfully.

  “Do you want me to tell him something?” the golem asked helpfully.

  “No. I think he’ll figure it out all on his own.”

  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 e
dge 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.”

  * * *

  Ten

  * * *

  The 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.