The Key Read online

  In desperation she lashed her tail forward, snapping it like a bullwhip. But in midsnap the tail shrank and disappeared altogether.

  The boat roared away as Nessie fell behind.

  She was a duck. A very, very big duck.

  “Oh,” Mack said. “Now I see it: the long rock is the body and the little rock is a head and … ah.”

  Nessie, her eyes filling with horror and frustration, let loose a terrifying cry of hatred. “QUACK!”

  Stefan slowed the engines when they were a few hundred yards away. Mack and Xiao crept into the shattered cabin to find a bloody but unbowed Dietmar and a battered but defiant Sylvie.

  The shaken, drenched Magnifica stared in amazement at a duck the size of a cabin cruiser.

  The fight was gone from the All-Mother.

  Jarrah looked sidelong at Xiao and Mack. “Did you guys mean to turn her into a duck?”

  Together Xiao and Mack nodded. “Yes. Absolutely.”

  “Because?” Jarrah asked.

  “Plenty of time to discuss that later,” Mack said. “Stefan,” he yelled up to his friend. “Take us back to the dock. We need a hospital.”

  In despair, realizing now that she would likely never be free to wreak revenge, the duck-formerly-known-as-Nessie let go a pitiful quack of sadness.

  And what is sadder than a sad, sad quack?

  * * *

  Fourteen

  * * *

  MEANWHILE, IN SEDONA, ARIZONA

  The golem was sent home for largeness.

  There had never been a kid sent home for largeness in the history of Richard Gere Middle School.21 Then again, no other kid had ever broken the Chair of Doom.

  The office staff had called the school custodian to unbolt the desk and remove it from around the golem’s waist. It now lay in pieces. That was not the Chair of Doom, that was just the Desk of Disassembly.

  The Chair of Doom was what kids called the chair placed directly in front of the assistant principal’s desk. It was the chair you sat in when you were in trouble and about to be expelled, suspended, assigned extra study hall, or, in a harsh punishment unique to RGMS, forced to endure an hour of hot yoga.

  The golem had managed to wedge his largeness into the chair. But he had continued getting bigger as he sat there, and soon the arms of the chair pushed outward. And then the legs collapsed.

  Then the golem jumped up out of the collapsed chair and smacked his huge head into the ceiling tiles.

  Here’s the thing you need to know about assistant principals: they are usually responsible for discipline. But very few of them are prepared to deal with supernatural phenomena. Coping with violations of the Laws of Nature was not the purpose of the Chair of Doom.

  So the golem was sent home.

  He lumbered happily along the street, enjoying the totally new perspective he was getting: he could see the upper branches of trees now. And enjoying, too, the crunch crunch crunch of the cracking cement in the sidewalk.

  Mack’s mother had been called and she was on her way to meet him. And frankly, the golem wasn’t looking forward to it. He liked Mom—well, Mack’s mom—in fact he wished sometimes she really was his mom. After all, he’d never had a mom. Or a dad. In any case, though, he wasn’t looking forward to it because he had the sense that possibly he worried Mom a little. And he had the feeling that being sent home from school would worry her more.

  When he reached the house, Mom was just pulling into the driveway in her hybrid crossover vehicle.22

  The golem gave a cheerful wave.

  The hybrid crossover vehicle came to a stop in the driveway. Mom stepped out.

  And then a girl the golem had never seen before stepped out of the passenger side.

  The girl and Mom were chatting somewhat awkwardly. The golem was no judge of ages but he guessed the girl was maybe sixteen or eighteen years old. She had amazing red hair, and even more amazing green eyes. He was pretty sure she was beautiful, though again: he was not a great expert on female beauty. She was dressed in a very mature, grown-up, Nordstrom sort of way, very businessy.

  Mom was saying, “I really do hope you’ll stay for dinner, Risky.”

  And the girl or young woman, Risky, was eyeing the golem with amusement. “So this is your son? Mack, was it? Are you Mack?” She addressed that last part to the golem.

  “I’m Mack,” the golem said, feeling just the slightest reluctance to talk to her. He didn’t have a lot of experience with people and therefore he was usually inclined to think that people were basically good.

  But this girl didn’t seem good.

  Also, despite the fact that her clothing fit her perfectly, she didn’t seem to fit the clothing. It was like when you see a monkey wearing pants. Only in this case it was like seeing a crocodile wearing a business suit: the outfit may say, “Safe,” but the eyes said, “Danger.”

  “I’m a big boy,” the golem said.

  “I have got to stop feeding him,” Mom said.

  Risky gave a knowing little laugh. “Oh, I doubt that would have much effect. But I bet I can slim him right down.”

  “Diet and exercise?” Mom suggested.

  “That never works,” Risky said. “Except in rare cases where people actually eat less and exercise. No, I have a better way. A more … high-tech way. It turns out there’s an app for that.” She pulled a smartphone from her purse. Two, actually.

  “I don’t see how an app …,” Mom said doubtfully.

  “Silence, fool!” Risky snarled. Then, “I mean … trust me.”

  “Mack,” Mom said, “I happened to meet this young lady at the salon. I started telling her about you. About some of the … well, the issues … we’ve had lately. She’s already at the university and doing a paper on … On what is it, Risky?”

  Risky smiled, showing too many brilliant white teeth. “I’m doing a paper on pseudosupernatural phenomena. Things that seem to be supernatural, hard to explain, but are really quite normal.”

  “She thinks you’re probably quite normal, sweetie.” Mom said this with such a mix of hope and love and lingering fear that, well, if the golem had had a heart, it would have swelled.

  As it was, the rest of him was still swelling.

  Risky was finished thumbing the phone. She smiled up at the golem and said, “Just put this in your mouth.” And she held the phone out to him.

  Nothing about this seemed the slightest bit strange to the golem, of course, but Mom was a different story. She had her doubts and she said so in no uncertain terms. “I hope this app is suitable for his age group.”

  “Everything I do is suitable,” Risky said.

  The golem put the phone in his mouth and began to chew.

  “No! Don’t bite it!” Risky said. “Just hold it in your mouth.” Then she thumbed a text message into her own phone and hit Send. Seconds later, the phone in the golem’s mouth chimed as the text arrived.

  And suddenly the golem began to shrink. His giant Popeye forearms deflated to become Mack’s relatively puny arms. His ankles no longer popped out of his shoes like mutant muffins. His belly was once more flat and he could no longer see the tops of everyone’s heads.

  “That is a very impressive app,” Mom said. The golem noticed something about Mom then: her eyes weren’t quite looking at him, they were looking past him. And her voice had a dreamy sound to it. Maybe she was tired.

  The golem took the phone out of his mouth and held it out to Risky. He noticed that the only thing on the screen was a standard text box. It read, “Shrink back to your normal size.”

  Just that. Just words.

  “No, keep that phone, please,” Risky said. “Be sure to answer it if it ever rings.” Then she leaned in close and said, “And don’t forget to do whatever the voice tells you to do.” She winked at him and then, rather belatedly, said, “I’d love to stay to dinner. In fact, I can’t wait to get to know your whole family.”

  Later, the golem sent Mack a text.

  * * *

  I�
�m not a big boy anymore but I am perfectly normal.

  * * *

  He had used the phone to take a picture of Risky sitting at the family dinner table. Risky had been charming throughout dinner (chicken piccata with spaghettini) and very pleasant to the golem.

  “How do I send you a picture?” he texted. Because as charming as the red-haired girl was, there was something about her....

  In fact, he’d had to take two pictures to get one good one. The first one had some kind of problem: it showed Mom and Dad and, seated between them, something very like a monster. A monster wearing a linen business suit and just-this-side-of-Gaga high heels.

  The second shot, the one Risky had noticed him taking, showed her as she was. (Or so the golem thought.) But it all added to the golem’s sense that something here was off. Weird. (And he had a very high threshold for weird.)

  He wanted to send Mack that second picture. Maybe the first one, too.

  “Picture?” Mack texted back. “No pictures, I’m homesick enough. Have to get on a plane to Paris. I’ll be off-line anyway.”

  Risky had watched the golem thumb in a text and then heard the chime for incoming text.

  “Is that your girlfriend?” she asked, and Mom and Dad laughed a bit too loudly.

  “No, it’s just … just …” Why was it so hard to tell her a simple lie? Mack had told him many times never to reveal the truth of who he was and what was going on. He had explained the concept of lying to the golem. And the golem mostly understood, in his own way.

  But there was something about her eyes.... When she stared at him, he almost couldn’t look away.

  “Tell me,” Risky said, in a voice that was like a loud whisper for his ears only. As if her lips were pressed against his ear. And yet, the golem noticed, her lips never actually moved.

  “It’s a friend,” the golem said. “On his way to Paris.”

  “Paris?” Risky said, and nodded as if to herself. “Of course.”

  Five minutes later Mom looked over at the place where Risky had been. She frowned at the plate of food, untouched. “Why on earth is there a plate of food there?”

  Dad frowned as well. “I have no idea.”

  And that was when the golem really started to worry.

  * * *

  Fifteen

  * * *

  Fortunately, in addition to being excellent inventors, the Scots know a bit about medicine, too. The captain was patched up. Dietmar and Sylvie were treated for their not-too-serious injuries.

  Cost: 0.00 GBP.23

  It was still two days before the Magnifica managed to leave Scotland.

  They drove away toward the nearest airport—in Inverness—destroying quite a number of mailboxes, lampposts, fences, and, of course, side mirrors en route.

  The road they drove on was already lined with signs and billboards hastily altered to take advantage of the new situation. Everywhere they looked, “Search for the Loch Ness Monster!” had already been changed to “See the Loch Ness Duck!”

  The traffic heading toward the loch was practically gridlocked.

  The tourism business—which had sputtered along on one ruined castle and an elusive mythical beast—now exploded with the addition of a castle only some people could see, and a massive duck everyone could actually feed.

  They never heard from Frank again. And the only thing the All-Mother had to say was a loud, furious quack.

  It was a short flight to Paris. Just long enough for Mack to get Sylvie’s story. (Cost of six one-way tickets to Paris: 3,023.28 GBP.24)

  She told it in excellent English and with a French accent Mack found charming. For a while he hoped that his paying attention to Sylvie would inspire some jealousy in Xiao. But it didn’t. And why he should want her to be jealous he couldn’t possibly have explained. Any number of things had changed for Mack lately—he had a golem, his former bully was now his bodyguard, he was bearing enormous responsibilities, and he could apparently turn dinosaur sea serpents into giant ducks—but at the same time some much more mundane changes were taking place.

  He was beginning to see the world differently. He was seeing people differently.

  He was even seeing himself differently, and it was all a bit disturbing. Given that he had plenty of craziness going on, the personal changes were mostly unwelcome.

  But there was no escaping the fact that he had gone from not caring about girls as anything other than a sort of subspecies of kids at school to paying slightly more attention to them and wishing they would pay slightly more attention to him.

  In this he was behind the girls, who had long since begun to notice boys and had already formed some pretty definite opinions about them in general and Mack in particular.

  There were many things that Vargran might cure, but boys being just a few steps behind girls was too basic a fact of life for mere magic to alter.

  “I have always known that I was strange,” Sylvie said as the jet rose steeply away from Inverness and arced out over the sea. “As a little girl I did not play with dolls. I did not play at all, except in my imagination. In my imagination I saw myself as a warrior, and a companion to other warriors. Strange, no? Because most little girls see themselves as princesses.”

  “Strange maybe,” Mack allowed. “But Xiao is a dragon, so the bar is pretty high on ‘strange’ in this group. Dietmar was a little like you: he kind of knew something was coming, if you know what I mean.”

  He wanted to bite his tongue. Why would he draw her attention to Dietmar?

  “How did you just happen to be in Scotland?”

  “I did not ‘just happen,’” Sylvie said. “It is more complicated than that. It began for me in the summer. Fouras is a village with beaches. Tourists come to swim and lie in the sun, yes?”

  “Oui,” he said, feeling self-conscious. Oui was pretty much the limit of his French.

  “My parents have a small merry-go-round near the beach. There are restaurants and crêperies and souvenirs, and there is the merry-go-round. Only it is not so merry, I think. I find it melancholy. Children climb on looking for joy and find only a meaningless circular pursuit that cannot relieve the existential pain of existence, the fundamental ennui that must afflict any thinking person.”

  Mack had no idea what she had just said, beyond “merry-go-round,” but he loved the way she said it.

  “There was a boy there, one day. He was strangely dressed, flamboyant, you might say. I was collecting tickets, and he said to me, ‘What is that brass ring that you taunt the children with?’

  “You see,” Sylvie explained, “a brass ring dangles from a rope. It is yanked here and there by my mother, or by me when I am helping. A child who rides the wooden ponies must grab the ring to get a free ride.”

  “Okay,” Mack said, mentally filing away the fact that this must be where the phrase grab the brass ring came from.

  “This boy said to me, ‘Why should the children strain for the bauble merely to repeat a meaningless experience that only serves to make them aware of the void that lies before them depriving life itself of any meaning?”

  “So this boy was French, too?” Mack asked.

  “No, he was from India. He had an accent, dark skin, and, as I said, dressed in unusual style.”

  Mack got a tingling on the back of his neck. “Wait a sec. It wasn’t Valin, was it?”

  “Yes, Mack, it was,” Sylvie said, not surprised that he had guessed.

  “But didn’t you say he was your brother?” Mack said, and then, without waiting for Sylvie’s response, added, “And doesn’t he work for Paddy ‘Nine Iron’ Trout?”

  Sylvie shrugged expressively. “He learns from the man in green, but does he serve him? Valin serves himself alone, I think.”

  “As long as he is working against us, he’s working for the Pale Queen,” Mack said sharply.

  “You see the world in simple black and white? It must be us and them? Good and evil?”

  “In this case, yeah,” Mack said. “The Pale Queen is
evil.”

  “How do you know this? Because the ancient Grimluk has told you?”

  Mack moved back a few inches. “Okay, yes. But I’ve also met Risky. That girl is evil.”

  “You feel it here?” Sylvie lay her hand over his heart.

  He nodded because he couldn’t speak.

  Sylvie returned that wordless gesture. “Yes. And so I felt when Valin introduced me to l’homme en vert, the man in green. Paddy ‘Nine Iron’ Trout.”

  “Yeah, he gives off a kind of evil vibe.”

  “A vibe. Yes,” Sylvie said, not quite agreeing. “It was Valin who told me that I was one of the Magnificent Twelve. He told me that the strangeness of my life was because of this curse.”

  “Curse?” The word surprised Mack.

  “Of course it is a curse. How could it be a blessing, Mack? To have power is to have responsibility. I would have to devote my life to maintaining the empty shell of existence.”

  “Um … well, I kind of guess I don’t think existence is meaningless,” Mack said.

  That caused one of Sylvie’s eyebrows to rise in amused skepticism, but she didn’t respond directly. “Valin told me all. He revealed what I had never known: that we shared a father. But Valin was obsessed with his mother’s side of his family, indifferent to the father we shared. He told me that a terrible wrong had been done to his family by your people.”

  “Did he tell you what his beef was? Because as far as I know, my family is pretty boring.”

  “It was a long time ago,” Sylvie said.

  “Even a long time ago my family was boring.”

  “He did not explain this … as you said, beef. Instead he told me of himself and of the man in green. He told me too much, perhaps. Because as he explained, it seemed to me that I must not join him. But rather that I should fight against him.”

  “Wouldn’t that be meaningless, too?”

  “I must defend la liberté, liberty, no? I am French, after all.”