by David Klass
There’s a corresponding flash from the ornate gold door, which then begins to slowly open.
The dark figures pass through the narrow doorway one by one and my mother follows them. I hesitate, feeling dizzy at the enormity of the moment: everything that has happened since I fled from Hadley-by-Hudson more than a year ago has brought me here—to this slit of a doorway leading into a dark cell. I sense that my father is inside—a man who I don’t know at all, but already love and hate. In many ways it was easier for me to swim to the bottom of the Atlantic or canoe to the lost regions of the Amazon than to cross this threshold.
I take a breath and force myself to walk in.
38
An old man with white hair lies on a platform in the center of the cell. His arms and legs are bound with golden ropes, so that he lies flat on his back looking up at us. He doesn’t react in any way to his visitors, and his face seems frozen in a death scowl of defiant agony. I fear we’re too late.
Then he very slowly turns his head to peer at the dark figures who have crowded into his cell, and his mouth opens. “Food,” he rasps in a dry voice. “Water.”
The reptilian Prince of the Dark Army’s royal family steps forward to look down at my dad, and his hatred makes him almost drip snake venom. “No, Simeon, I haven’t come to ease your suffering. Exactly the opposite.”
My father looks back up at him, and licks his parched lips. “Then let us go into the sunlight,” he whispers.
“We will go soon,” the Dark Prince assures him. “Thousands are waiting to watch. But don’t be in a rush. What we have prepared for you will take hours from start to finish. So let’s savor every moment of it.”
If these words scare my father, he doesn’t show it. “When you are ready, I am also,” he whispers. “We will go out into the blessed sunlight.”
He turns his head toward the doorway and blinks at the bright sunlight. I’ve visualized him in several out-of-body experiences during my adventures. Seeing him now in person is a very different thing.
As if sensing my presence, he looks right at me and I see his face more clearly. He’s got my features—my nose, my cleft chin, and my blue eyes. Or, I suppose more accurately, I have his. Our eyes meet and I suddenly feel such a deep kinship with this helpless stranger that all feelings of anger are swept away. I want to run up and touch his face and speak to him, and relieve his suffering.
I take a step forward, and my mother puts out a warning hand. “Wait, Jair. Don’t do anything till they untie him, or we’ll never get him out.”
When she speaks to me, my father looks right at us, as if he can see us, and he gives a tiny smile. His parched lips twist upward, and his blue eyes sparkle.
He’s not as old as I initially thought—not really an old man. But his hair and beard have turned as white as snow and his deeply lined face has endured so much for so long that it is a battlefield of suffering.
“Take your time,” he whispers to the Dark Prince. “Why should we be in a rush on such a magnificent day?”
“He’s lost his mind, my lord,” the Enforcer observes almost apologetically. “A shame.”
“I guarantee you he has enough mind left to feel what I’ve prepared for him,” the Dark Prince replies. “For hundreds of years these dogs of Dann have nipped at our heels. Today the last one will die nerve by nerve. When he utters his final cry for mercy, the long battle will be over and the future will be ours.” He smiles down at my father. “Do you understand that, my dear cousin?”
“I understand everything,” my father replies softly. “There’s a rat that crawls into this cell at night through a tiny hole. I can hear him and smell him and sometimes I even talk to him. He’s a smart rat, and he only comes for conversation because there’s nothing here for a rat to eat.” For a moment my dad’s mad old eyes flash contemptuously as he stares up at the Dark Prince. “I can hear you and smell you and there’s nothing left here for you to consume, either. So you must be just another sad rat that has crawled in for the conversation.”
“And I can smell you, you reeking old cur!” the Dark Prince fires back, and kicks my father in the side of the jaw with the toe of his boot.
It’s a vicious blow, which resounds in the small room like a pistol shot. My father’s head jerks sideways.
I can’t bear to watch this. Again I start forward, and my mother tries to stop me. But this time she’s a second too late. I kick a pebble across the floor.
The Dark Prince wheels around. His reflexes are lightning fast. “What was that?”
“What, my lord?” the Enforcer asks, raising his two-headed ax. “I heard nothing.”
“Analam, what was it?” the Dark Prince asks the zombie warlock. “Are we alone here?”
“Alone and not alone,” the living skeleton hisses back. “Perhaps the spirits of Dann have come to escort their King to the other side. Let us see.” He swings his censer and mutters an incantation. The dark smoke curls around us and seems to stick to us.
I feel a tingling similar to what I felt when the Star of Dann turned us invisible. But this time it has the opposite reaction. Looking down I can see faint lines where my limbs are, as if someone is sketching me as a stick figure, and slowly shading it darker and darker.
The Dark Prince draws his sword. “Whatever they are,” he bellows, “kill them!”
39
Jair,” my mother commands, “strike now!” As she says it, she ducks out of the way of the simian Enforcer’s ax blow and draws her laser saber.
I pull out the haft of my scimitar and telepathically switch on its ten-foot sapphire blade. I’m hoping that the Dark Prince can’t see the weapon yet, but when I swing it at him he must glimpse its outline because he leaps out of the way with a speed I’ve only seen twice before. He’s not only a blood relative of Dargon and the Dark Lord, but he also apparently trained in the same Dark Army martial arts academy.
He probes the air delicately with the point of his sword, as if searching the ether for me. I circle, and see out the corner of one eye that my mother has sliced the Enforcer in two and turned to face the zombie sorcerer.
The Dark Prince slashes at me with a lightning stroke that I barely manage to parry. The force of his blow knocks the scimitar spinning out of my hands.
I dive to get it, but the clattering sound it makes when it hits the floor tells the Dark Prince exactly where I’m headed. He anticipates my dive, leaps toward the spot, and aims what would surely be a deathblow at me.
But his leap takes him over my father’s tied-down body. Somehow my dad is able to raise his head several inches and grab the Dark Prince’s right boot in his teeth. The Prince pulls his foot loose as he flies through the air, but Dad’s bite tugs him momentarily off balance and disturbs the downward arc of his sword swing.
I twist my body to avoid his death stroke and, at the same time, grab my scimitar and plant it upward. His sword misses me and then the Dark Prince stumbles a half step as he lands awkwardly and impales himself on the point of my scimitar. I thrust upward, and the sapphire blade cuts right through his chest and pokes out through his back. His forked tongue flicks out one final time as he makes a gurgling noise that rises to a shrill, high-pitched scream.
No, I realize, the scream didn’t come from him but rather from my mother. The zombie warlock has cast some spell on her that is forcing her backward, inch by inch, against her will. She is soon backed up against the cell’s wall and she stands there helplessly, battling to be free but unable to move.
The sorcerer draws a long, ceremonial black dagger from a sheath and steps forward, raising it as if to sacrifice her.
I’m too far away to grab his arm so I hurl my scimitar end over end. He senses that it’s coming and turns, just as the curved blade bites into his neck and decapitates him. The zombie’s surprised shriek is cut short as his head falls to the floor and rolls into a corner. His body stays upright for several seconds as his bony arms thrash. Then his torso totters and falls.
As he dies, whatever invisible force is pinning my mom to the wall melts away. She quickly runs to my father and bends to examine him. He’s tied to the platform by what appear to be thin golden cords that glisten like the ornate door to the cell. The cords are mere strands—they look so thin I’m positive I can snap them with my fingers. But when I grab them and yank, they hold tight. I try to saw through them with my scimitar, and I see my mother trying with her saber, but the golden cords don’t even fray.
Meanwhile, an alarm is sounding from outside. I can hear it rise and fall, and I also hear a furious snarl.
Turning toward the doorway, I see the gargoyle peering in at us. He’s too big to squeeze through the narrow doorway, but he’s clearly enraged at what’s going on inside.
“There’s no way to cut him loose, Jair,” my mother says.
“Go,” my dad commands, and I see that he’s far more in command of his senses than he let on to the Dark Prince. “You’ve done all you can. They’ll be here in seconds. Save yourselves!”
“We’re not going anywhere,” I tell the King of Dann. Then I turn to my mother. “The ropes he’s tied with look like they’re made from the same material as the door.”
She looks back at me. “How can that help us?”
I take the black dagger out of the hands of the dead zombie wizard and slice deeply into his chest. I cut through skin and bone, pus and maggots, and soon I’ve gutted him open, like a fish. The odor from his decaying corpse is nauseating, but I pry the two sides of his chest apart, and see something gleam on the left side where his heart should be. I stick my hand into that foul cavity, and pull out what looks almost like a mirror.
I hold it up toward the platform my father is tied to, and it gleams. The golden ropes flash in an answering gleam and fall away.
My father climbs slowly to his feet. He sways for a second, and I run over to brace him.
But the King of Dann recovers quickly. He picks up the sword that the Dark Prince dropped when he died. “Let’s go,” he says, and starts for the door.
It’s not exactly a warm father-son reunion moment. Oh well—I suppose now’s not the time to catch up. I grab my scimitar and follow him and my mom toward the door.
I can hear the gargoyle growling and snarling eagerly just outside, waiting for us.
40
The gargoyle is waiting for us right outside the only door, so we’re going to have to exit another way.
I take out one of the Big Popper bombs that the armorer of Dann gave me and switch it on telepathically. I count in my mind—five, four, three, two . . . and then hurl it and we all lie flat. The explosion in the confined space is deafening, but when the dust clears I see that a hole has been blown in the far wall of the cell.
We squeeze out through the smoking hole and the gargoyle crawls toward us, fangs and claws slicing the air. Lumbering behind it I see the Enforcer who burned his arm off and was left behind by his fellows. He’s holding his ax in his remaining hand, and swinging it back and forth with a vengeance.
“Split up!” my dad commands as the gargoyle gets close to us, and we separate as if we’ve practiced this tactic a hundred times.
The gargoyle knows who the most valuable prey is here. It launches itself in a soaring leap so that for a second it seems to take wing, and then it swoops straight down like a hawk toward my dad. Its jaws are gaping wide open and its talons gleam like a set of knives.
I’m sure it will shred my father. But before the hobgoblin can pounce on him, Dad goes airborne himself. I saw Eko execute high leaps on the Outer Banks, and she taught me that the secret was a kind of mental discipline. But I never saw Eko try anything remotely like what my dad does to meet the challenge of the flying gargoyle.
He pitches forward and rolls, and uses the momentum to launch himself skyward. He times his leap so that he’s rising just as the gargoyle is falling, and his flight path takes him behind the hell-troll.
Somehow the gargoyle manages to twist its body in midair just as my dad’s sword falls on it. The blade bites into the heavily muscled shoulder of the hobgoblin, who lets out an earsplitting yowl of surprise and pain as it falls to earth.
The gash in its shoulder instantly heals itself. When the gargoyle turns to confront my mother and father again, it’s just as strong as before and twice as angry.
I would like to watch round two, but I hear my mother shout, “Jair, watch out!” just as a double-headed ax swipes at my head.
I duck under it, and circle to my left, attacking the simian Enforcer from the side where he lost his arm. He pivots to protect his weak side, but he’s a heartbeat too slow. My scimitar bites through his ribs, and he goes down screaming and shouting curses at me.
I wheel around to see how my mom and dad are faring with the gargoyle. They’re swift and skilled fighters, but they don’t have a chance. No matter how seriously they wound the creature, it immediately heals and comes after them again. They’re tiring from the furious struggle, and the gargoyle’s claws and teeth are getting closer and closer to ripping them apart.
I run to try to help them, wondering how we can possibly kill a creature that can regenerate itself.
As I sprint across the roof of the fortress, I recall reading about Hercules and the Hydra back in Hadley Elementary School. Every time Hercules cut off one of the serpent’s many heads, two grew back in its place. He finally slew the monster by figuring out that if he cut off a head and scorched the neck with a flaming torch, that would keep replacement heads from growing back.
I don’t have any torches on the roof of this fortress. But I do have a source of extreme cold. I open the silver locket that dangles from the chain around my neck.
I point it at the gargoyle, and try to switch it on. Come on, Star of Dann. Do your thing.
Nothing happens.
Meanwhile, I see the gargoyle catch my mother with a blow that knocks her fifteen feet, end over end. She gets up very slowly. I can tell that she’s hurt.
I open myself up and try to apologize to the Star. Look, I’m really sorry I threw you away. It was extremely unappreciative of me to toss you into an Amazon stream, given the many times you’d saved my life. I just didn’t understand what you were. Forgive me. You’ve been loyal to the House of Dann for generations. The King and Queen need you now. Help them!
At first nothing happens. Then the blue flame from the locket shimmers out. And the temperature on the rooftop dips noticeably.
The gargoyle has cornered my mother with her back to a wall of the cell. She is not in good shape, and my dad runs over to make his last stand with her.
The gargoyle swipes at them and Dad beats him to the blow and severs one of the clawed forelegs.
Before the limb can grow back, blue flame flashes out of the locket and singes the wound. The gargoyle yowls and carries on the fight with three legs. Mom chops at its shoulder, and blue flame keeps that wound from suturing itself. Sizzling yellow gargoyle blood seeps out.
I join the fight and try to hack off the beast’s head from behind. It senses my presence and evades the blow so that my scimitar hacks off one of the pointed, twitching ears. Again, the wound is instantly cauterized by cold blue flame. We’re digging chunks out of this cat-faced griffin, but it’s still clawing and snapping and fighting.
Then the King of Dann seizes his moment and flashes forward, moving at incredible speed. Dad darts in under the gargoyle’s claws and buries his sword deep in the center of the troll’s chest.
A plume of cold blue flame jets out of the locket and encases the beast in a glowing cocoon. The gargoyle screams, writhes, and spits out a geyser of yellow blood. When the blue flame subsides, the creature is dead.
My father helps my mother up, and the three of us come together on the roof of the fortress. A light wind blows my father’s bushy beard and stirs his white hair. We all look at each other. “Well done, Jair,” my dad whispers.
I look back at him. “That’s it? Not ‘Thanks for saving me’ or ‘I’m sorry I s
ent you away as a baby, never arranged for you to learn the truth, and screwed up your whole life’?”
He glances at my mother. “He is much like you.”
“No,” she says, “he gets that from you, Simeon.”
I look from one of them to the other. “I don’t get anything from either of you,” I say. “I wasn’t around you so I couldn’t have learned anything from you. But now I’m right here on this roof so instead of talking about me, why don’t you try talking to me! And one more thing—for the hundredth time, my name isn’t Jair. It’s Jack!”
My father smiles slightly, and this time it isn’t a pained smile. “Thanks for saving me, Jack. I’m sorry I had to send you away as a baby. We’re in a bit of a bind here, so can I please have my Star?”
“What bind?” I ask. “We killed the monster.”
Dad nods behind me and I wheel around. Dozens of heavily armed Dark Army fighters are pouring out the minaret doorway a few hundred yards away. They immediately spot us, and make a beeline in our direction. The zombie wizard’s censer smoke must have finished making us visible.
This is clearly not the time for a father-son argument. I take off the locket and hand it to the King of Dann. “Here, take it.”
He places the chain around his neck and the Star gleams. “Thank you, Jack,” he says.
“You’re welcome,” I tell him. I’m watching the Dark Army warriors run at us. There must be two hundred of them, and they’re moving fast. “Even with the Star of Dann, how can we possibly fight all of them?” I ask.
“We can’t,” my father whispers back. “We’ll have to jump.”
41
We run to the edge of the fortress roof and look down. The ground below is distant, and the prospect of leaping off is dizzying. This is what it must be like to seriously contemplate hurling oneself from the Matterhorn.
