The Key Read online

  That seemed obvious to her, and Mack was frankly so confused by Sylvie he felt it best just to keep quiet.

  “Valin, he foolishly trusted me with the names of two others who he would attempt to recruit to his side.”

  “You beat him to those two?”

  For the first time, Sylvie smiled. “Valin is very old-fashioned. He does not know email, texting, Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus. Before he could even begin to reach the two, I had found them online. They figured out ways to come to Paris. And I went in search of you, to unite us all together.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “You leave a trail of YouTubes behind you, Mack.”

  Mack thought back on the first shaky YouTube video that showed him and Stefan running from Skirrit at Richard Gere Middle School;25 the YouTube video of him being dragged out the door of a jet by a monstrous version of Risky; the one about the swollen, bloated blue-cheese-filled Lepercons; the one some shaky tourist had filmed of the Great Wall of China.... Yes, he hadn’t exactly concealed his tracks. It didn’t seem as if the authorities had caught on yet. There were millions of hits on Mack’s various inadvertent (and terrifying) videos, but the consensus of opinion was that it was all a massive game being perpetrated as part of an advertising campaign for a movie.

  “Still, how could you find exactly where I was?” Mack asked. A bit of suspicion wormed at his brain. Sylvie had been friends with Valin. She had met Nine Iron.

  “I knew a Vargran phrase that led me to you.”

  “Valin taught you Vargran?”

  “No, not that. Valin is not a fool. As I told you, I have always known there was something odd about me. You see, from early on I had found a Vargran artifact.”

  “Where? At the merry-go-round?”

  She gave him a reproachful look. “Do not toy with me, Mack. No, I found it in the moat of the fort. There is a Vauban fort in Fouras. It is not so ancient, only a few centuries old. It was used under Napoléon’s rule. It has a moat, but the moat has long been dry, and children climb down there to play, or to hide from the petty tyranny of bourgeois parents.”

  “Okay.”

  “One day I was down there, alone, and I felt a strange presence. I looked up, and there appeared a spectral shape. A very ancient man with green-tinged fingernails and few teeth.”

  “Grimluk?”

  “Grimluk. He was weak and failing—”

  “He always is.”

  “And his time was short—”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “And when he spoke, it was in a riddle, gasping, incoherent and very hard to understand.”

  “That’s Grimluk, all right,” Mack confirmed.

  “He drew my attention to a piece of stone sticking up out of the muck of the moat. Then he faded from view. I went back the next day with a toy shovel—laughable, no? I had no true shovel, only a mockery of a shovel. But I dug, Mack. I dug like a mad thing, flinging clods of mud in every direction, in a frenzy, until, with dirt-crusted fingernails, I could claw away the last of the mud and see that to the stone was attached a golden shield.”

  “Gold?”

  “Gold does not tarnish, Mack. Not even after three thousand years. A scene was etched into that gold. It showed a terrible monster, unimaginable, huge, and surrounded by minions of a dozen horrible types. And facing them, twelve.... Just twelve.”

  “The original Magnificent Twelve,” Mack said in an awestruck whisper.

  “Yes. And along the edges of that depiction were strange words written in a strange alphabet. Each day I came back to that stone. I concealed it with branches so that only I could feast greedy eyes upon it. I tried to puzzle out the words, you see. For such a long time it did not work. Then, one day, I spoke the words flee-ma omias. All at once the moat began to fill with water. I was terrified, of course, and more so still when I saw that the rising water was filled with panicked fish, all thrashing as though to escape the water itself. You see, I had spoken the Vargran word for ‘run’ and the word for ‘fish.’”

  “Run fish?”

  “In the imperative, ‘or else’ tense. It was a macabre horror,” Sylvie said.

  “Fish trying to run away?”

  “Have you ever seen a thousand panicked fish?”

  “Not really.”

  “It is something you will never forget. I climbed the vines to escape the moat. I thought it was a hallucination. But the next day the town was abuzz with the miracle of fish appearing suddenly in the moat. Dead of course, since the water soon seeped away. The smell was very bad.”

  “It would be.”

  “It was weeks before I ventured into the moat again. But with those first words I was able to unravel the meaning of the remaining words. I learned perhaps two dozen Vargran words.”

  “You learned enough to save my life,” Mack said.

  “Also enough to know that Valin was tricking me. For, you see, he refused to teach me any Vargran himself. He only wished to neutralize me, to use me to find others, and thus destroy you and your mission.”

  “He must really not be very happy with you, and I guess you don’t like him much,” Mack said, probing for any lingering loyalty she might have for her half brother.

  But her eyes blazed with sudden fury. “Why do you think I traveled to Scotland with my grandparents and not my mother and father?”

  “I—”

  “Valin!” She spit the word out like it was a bad olive pit. “He sought to control me by placing a Vargran spell on my parents.”

  “What spell?”

  “My parents are no longer merely the owners of the merry-go-round,” she said. “My father is one of the wooden horses. My mother is a wooden swan.”

  Mack felt as if his heart had stopped. And he had been suspicious of her.

  “They go round and round now, in a meaningless dance to music they cannot hear, twirling through the void.”

  At which point, with a shuddering thud, the jet touched down at Charles de Gaulle Airport, outside Paris.

  * * *

  Sixteen

  * * *

  Mack, Jarrah, Dietmar, Xiao, Sylvie, and Stefan took the train from the airport into the city. Needless to say, none of them had ever been to Paris before, except for Sylvie.

  It’s quite a city.

  You start with the river that runs through it: the Seine. It’s a moderately large river, much more than a stream, but not quite the Mississippi, either. It doesn’t hurry, but it doesn’t meander. It sort of chugs along.

  There are lots of bridges, most fairly modest but some with golden lion statues and whatnot. There are lots of boats—barges and tugboats and especially the bateaux mouches, which are amazingly long and narrow and usually glass-bubbled with tourists staring out at the city.

  In the middle of the river is a pair of islands, one of which is home to the Gothic cathedral of Notre-Dame—a very Hunchback of Notre-Dame kind of place.

  There’s the Arc de Triomphe, which is a sort of massive stone arch marooned in the middle of a crazy traffic circle with about nine different roads coming in.

  But the most identifiable sight in Paris is the Eiffel Tower. When the Eiffel Tower was first built (coincidentally by a guy named Eiffel, what are the odds?) everyone was all like, “Man, that sucks.” Or in French, “Mais, que cela sucks, n’est-ce pas?”

  The problem was that the Eiffel Tower looked like it was made out of an Erector set, which was what kids played with before the invention of Legos, which was what kids played with before the invention of iPad games.

  But over time people were like, “Maybe we were hasty in saying it sucks.”

  Followed by, “It’s actually not bad.”

  Followed by, “It’s epic!”

  Followed by, “Are you dissing my tower? Because I will totally kick your butt!”

  The tower is visible from just about anywhere in Paris. It will be at the end of an avenue, or you’ll be floating down the river and, hey, there it is, or maybe you’
ll see the top poking above a building. It’s ubiquitous. It’s a cliché.

  You know what else it is? Beautiful. Especially at night when it’s lit up.

  So anyway, add in a bunch of sidewalk cafés, the Métro, a few more churches, a scattering of museums, and you basically have Paris. So now you don’t even have to go, you’ve already experienced it.

  One other interesting feature of Paris: the sewers.

  Back in days of yore (say a thousand years ago, round numbers), when Paris was growing larger, people were saying, “Hey, we don’t have sewers, so we’re dumping our poop into the streets. Also our unused chunks of butchered hog, our dead rats, our rotted fruit, our three hundred and fifty-two kinds of cheese rind, and of course, during plague years,26 our dead relatives. The result is, shall we say, not as pleasantly fragrant as a nice glass of vin rouge.”

  Yes: they noticed that poop and dead things smelled.

  So they built sewers, giant underground tunnels. That way, the fecal matter and dead things that got dumped in the street eventually sloshed down into the sewers, which helpfully carried such things to the river. The same river whose water people drank. So they quickly went from, “Man, the air stinks,” to, “Man, this water tastes awful. Plus, I’m sick now.”

  Hey, it was medieval times. It took a while for people to figure stuff out in those days.

  Anyway, the sewers are no longer in use much except for when it rains and the water goes rushing through the ancient tunnels. In fact, now you can take a tour of the sewers. People do.

  Cost of Paris sewer tour for six kids: 24 euros.27

  “We are being followed,” Dietmar said as the Magnificent Five (so far) emerged from the train station weary and worried.

  “The guy in the trench coat?” Mack asked. Because Mack had also noticed the person in the trench coat with the hat pulled down low over his brow.

  It was night and the city was lit up but not so well lit as to banish all shadows. The trench coat seemed to be staying with those shadows, circling wide around bright-lit cafés and melting into closed-down shop fronts.

  “Yes,” Dietmar confirmed. “There is something strange about him.”

  “Yeah,” Mack confirmed, feeling a tightening in his throat. “Very strange for a man, not strange at all for a Skirrit. And there’s another one across the street.”

  “They’ve spotted us already?” Sylvie asked. “That is bad. I had hoped to take you straight to the sewers.”

  “Sewers? I was hoping for a hotel. And a sandwich,” Jarrah said.

  “We have a hotel,” Mack said. “The trick will be getting there alive.”

  “Surely they wouldn’t attack us right out in the open on a Paris street?” Xiao said.

  Sylvie said, “They are not attacking, they are following. They want us to lead them to the others.”

  Mack decided that was probably right. It was also probably true that Skirrit—even ones with hats—would be noticed in a brightly lit, crowded place.

  “I doubt they can follow us down into the Métro,” Mack said. They were walking on the rue La Fayette, which was not one of the biggest, widest avenues, but a respectably important street. But it was late, and only a few restaurants and cafés were open.

  “I have a Métro app,” Sylvie offered. “I don’t live in Paris so I don’t know the system. But there is a stop—Poissonnière. I know we need to get to Alma-Marceau....”

  She began thumbing information into the app.

  “Okay, then, we take the Seven line and switch to the Nine line,” Sylvie said decisively.

  “We’ll follow you.”

  Down the narrow, dirty stairs into the station: white tile, cement floor, modern ticket-vending machines. They used the million-dollar credit card to buy six tickets.28 This took a while. And during that while, the Skirrit came down the stairs after them.

  As Dietmar handed out tickets, two Skirrit stared and twitched nervously in their weak disguises.

  In the unlikely event that you don’t know what a Skirrit is, think grasshopper or maybe praying mantis, but about the height of a moderately short man, and walking erect.

  Parisians, being city people, seldom look anyone in the face, so it seemed possible to Mack that the Skirrit might go unnoticed. They might even wait until the crowd had thinned a little and—

  “Aaaahhh!” An older woman, built like a fireplug but with an attractive scarf around her throat, pointed in horror at a face that did not belong on anything human.

  The Skirrit drew a knife from under its trench coat and seemed ready to go for the woman to silence her.

  “Hey!” Mack yelled. “This is between us.”

  The Skirrit’s expressionless insect eyes turned to glare at him. The knife wavered. The woman ran. The Skirrit hissed, then turned and quickly ran with his companion up the stairs.

  “That was easy,” Jarrah said, sounding slightly disappointed.

  “That was both brave and self-sacrificing, Mack,” Xiao said, sounding a bit too surprised.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Mack said. He was troubled. Jarrah was right, it had been easy. Too easy.

  They passed their tickets through the ticket reader and found their way to the right platform. The light was cold and gray. The white tile was grimy. The only color came from large posters that followed the curve of the walls and advertised banks, tours, sneakers, and movies.

  The train came in a whoosh of fetid air and screeched to a stop. Doors opened. Glum-faced people stepped off. Other glum-faced people got on, along with Mack and his friends.

  The train was crowded—standing room only—which seemed odd this late. Maybe all the people were coming from some special event.

  The six kids were soon separated. Mack found himself clinging to a chrome pole he had to share with four other hands. People pressed close around him as the train lurched away from the station.

  Mack felt a hand touch his on the rail.

  He moved his hand away an inch (or 2.5 centimeters since it’s France).

  This time the hand—a delicate, pale, female hand—covered his. He followed the hand to the wrist. Then the wrist to the arm. The arm to the shoulder. To those eyes. Those impossibly green eyes.

  “Bonjour, Mack,” Risky said.

  * * *

  Seventeen

  * * *

  MEANWHILE, IN MACK’S BEDROOM IN SEDONA

  The golem lay on the wall of Mack’s room. He had never gotten entirely used to sleeping on the bed. Or horizontally. There was just something about lying flat against a wall that felt comfortable and right.

  But this night he was having a hard time getting to sleep. He was tossing and turning, sometimes rolling all the way up to the ceiling.

  The golem wasn’t a thoughtful creature.29 He didn’t normally lie awake wondering what to do about the deficit or pondering the nature of existence or wondering why any human being would willingly consume CornNuts.

  He was not a philosopher, and those questions were beyond him.

  But the encounter with Risky had gotten him thinking. There was something wrong about that girl. The thing she had done with the phone in his mouth … He hadn’t decided to shrink back to normal; she had sent a text and it had worked just like the scroll that Grimluk had placed in his mouth at the moment of his completion.

  He still had the phone. It was sitting on his—Mack’s—desk. He wondered if she would ever call him.

  He wondered if he would be able to resist if she told him to put the phone in his mouth.

  He wondered whether he would have to become whatever she texted.

  The idea was troubling. The golem furrowed his brow, a phrase he had learned in school. He furrowed his brow thoughtfully, and then became distracted for a while with the realization that furrows are what farmers form in the fields. They plant corn and soybeans and beets30 in the furrows. And should he try doing that with the furrows in his forehead? Would Camaro be impressed that he could grow tiny corn in his forehead?

 
; Thinking of Camaro just made him toss and turn some more, and he finally got up and paced around the ceiling for a while. He had promised to be a “big boy” when she did something—he wasn’t quite clear on what—with Tony Pooch.

  Now he was no longer a big boy. Although maybe he could become big again. He thought about testing it out, growing a little. But he was afraid to try. What if it didn’t work?

  In some strange way, Risky taking him over had changed his outlook on life. He’d always been content to just “Be Mack.” Those were the words on the scroll, and he had never questioned them.

  But now … now he had been forced to change, and that changing thing, becoming something different—even for just a while as he shrank—had broadened his outlook. It had introduced … possibilities.

  If she called … he would try not to obey.

  What a crazy thought! How could a mere golem refuse to obey the words of power placed in his mouth?

  But he would have to try, wouldn’t he?

  He lay back down again, snuggled between two wall posters.

  Be Mack.

  He was doing that as well as he could. He would do that until Mack returned. And then …

  Oh, right: then he would return to the mud he had been fashioned from.

  Unless of course she called.

  * * *

  Eighteen

  * * *

  “So close, eh, Mack?” she asked.

  “Close?” he squeaked.

  “Already you have assembled five. And more await here in Paris. N’est-ce pas? As the locals would say?”

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  That got the attention of some of the passengers nearby. One man cast a very suspicious look at Mack.

  “Kill you?” Risky echoed. “Wherever did you get that idea?”

  “I think maybe it was because you tried to kill me before. Several times.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, and gazed off into space as if she was savoring the memories. “Good times. Good times. By the way, don’t you want to know how I found you?”