But Balthazar was ready, and as the Host swooped down on him, he thrust up with the metal lightning bolt, driving it deep between his ribs. Right into his heart.
The entire universe froze as Balthazar waited for this man, this terrible other uncle, to do something. Scream. Fall. Anything.
“Well, well, well,” the Host chuckled at last. “This is an interesting development, isn’t it?”
36. Leviathan
The darkness of the Host’s empty, faceless stare ripped into Balthazar, deeper and deeper, smashing through all his closed doors and do-not-disturb signs, down, down, down into parts of him he didn’t even know existed.
“Leave the boy,” Ignatius whispered. “This is between you and me.”
“There is no you and me,” the Host snorted, and with a dismissive gesture like skipping a stone, he sent Ignatius’s limp body smashing into the wall on the other side of the hall. “You’ve been hiding something, haven’t you?” he said, turning back to Balthazar, his shadows stretching into a smile. “From everyone. Even from yourself.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then watch, I’ll show you.”
Then, horribly, the Host began to slurp. A grotesque, wet sound like a sucking wound.
Balthazar’s first thought was that whatever black rot had gotten inside his other uncle had obviously eaten out his brains. But then he felt it, a sudden jolt like the kind that sometimes startled him awake just as he was falling asleep. A tug deep in some part of him deep, deep down beyond anything knowable. Something down there had gotten hooked. A whale at the end of a fishing line. Huge and terrifying.
Black and burning cold, the horrible slurping continued, drawing whatever it was up into Balthazar’s body, though his stomach, into his chest, his throat.
It’s too much, he thought, panicking. It’s going to split me apart!
And the force wasn’t coming up alone; it was bringing with it all this other stuff as well. All these voices from the last couple of days: It isn’t my fault he’s magically brain-dead. . . . The term is delusional. . . . Not all of us are cut out to be a special.
But then other voices started tugging free, too. Better ones: When it’s time, your magic will come. . . . I had de most spectacular dream. . . . Razahtlab! Razahtlab! . . . The road that is not a road. Angus’s voice came back loudest of all: Time to crap or get off the pot!
All of that was a part of him, like the force rising up inside of him, he realized. That was his, too. He could either own it or be destroyed by it. And so, in that one weird, terrifying, incredible instant, he decided to own it. And in the moment of that decision, the force stopped busting him apart and joined with the rest of him, anchoring inside him and jarring into a sudden deadlock with the Host’s dark energy. The sudden jolt rippled out in massive shock waves, shattering the dome into hundreds of deadly sharp ice shards that came plummeting down from above.
“Let go.” The Host’s voice swarmed in Balthazar’s head.
NO WAY! Balthazar thought back as loud as he could, not sure whether anyone could hear or not, but what the heck. The shock waves were growing bigger and bigger, shaking the walls and sending huge cracks zigzagging across the floor, until all the ice of the lodge was shaking, the surfaces rubbing and rattling against each other with the earsplitting screech of lost souls.
“He’s going to bring down the whole place!” cried one of the ice-trapped Humbugs.
“Benjamin,” Ignatius gasped. “I’m so sorry.”
“There is no Benjamin,” the Host replied in an inhuman, swarming voice. But before he spoke those words there had been a tiny pause, infinitesimally small but there, a chink in the armor, and in that split second the Host lost his grip on the darkness he had been holding on to. Furiously, the tarry nothing swarmed out of the Host’s face, rolling toward Balthazar in a huge, greasy cloud. Benjamin’s body, emptied out entirely, fell away like an abandoned husk.
“Get away from that stuff!” Ignatius shouted.
But the darkness, the hugeness, the horrific-ness of the mass had Balthazar rooted to the spot. All he could do was watch as the sticky black fog oozed toward him.
He would have liked to think he faced it bravely or defiantly or with any hint of heroic-ness at all, but it was everything he could do to stay up on his feet at that point. So that was what he did. He stood on his feet as the churning, reeking stuff oozed toward him, ripping the tiles off the floor and pulling great pieces of the crumbling columns and broken statuary into its formless mass as it swarmed closer and closer.
And then he was inside it, pieces of icy wreckage battering and scraping him from every angle. His eyes were blinded by the smothering, suffocating darkness.
“Take it,” a voice whispered in the dark. “It’s yours now.”
Balthazar could feel the darkness shifting around him. Waiting for his command. All of it. All that power. All the huge things it was capable of, that he would be capable of. Good things. Amazing things. All he had to do was say yes. To accept.
“Use it or be destroyed by it.”
Nothingness crashed in on him like an icy wave, blackness squeezing the breath out of him. But as he dropped to the floor, he felt something warm beneath his hand. No bigger than a walnut. Not a solid, not a liquid, not a gas. Something else. Something unlike anything he had ever touched before.
Sheltering the thing, whatever it was, against the crashing darkness, he lifted it up to his face and saw that it was glowing. Faintly, like a dying ember, but glowing anyway. And in the tiny halo around it, as far as the glow carried, the darkness was pushed back.
Then, eyes straining, he saw more faint, glimmering, pulsing points of light flickering faintly through the murk.
And suddenly he knew what they were. The magic that had been stolen from his family, from the Fistulas, from Pagan. It was still here! Still alive! Barely. But alive.
Fighting his way through the slimy, clinging fog, Balthazar crawled toward another one of fading embers. It was barely even warm, but as his hand closed around it its light flared up, sending the darkness shriveling back for an instant, before it surged in again with even greater, more desperate force. Flies materialized out of the darkness and stung at his face and hands.
“You will never make it,” the voice buzzed. “You will fail in this, just as you have failed in everything else.”
Gritting his teeth, Balthazar forced his way forward, groping through the roiling, sludgy cloud until his hand closed around another glimmering ember. And then another. And the more embers he gathered, the brighter and warmer their light grew, spreading the most amazing warmth through his body until he, too, was glowing. The feeling was . . . amazing. But it wasn’t his.
“The Gloaming can make it yours,” the voice swarmed in his ears, weaker and more desperate.
Without magic to feed on, the oily fog was getting thinner and thinner. Through it, Balthazar could see the intricately carved walls of the lodge sloughing off in great melting sheets and the floor turning to slush beneath his feet. Melting ice water lashed down like rain from the cracked remains of the dome. The whole place would be underwater soon. He needed to get off the creek before he was washed away. But not yet. There was one last flicker. He had seen it somewhere. Faint, but there.
Sloshing, stumbling forward, he searched through the water and the fog and the stinging flies. Refusing to give up hope, although that was seeming more and more like the only reasonable thing to do, he continued to search, and then . . . then he saw it. Not hovering like most of the other embers had been, but lying in the melting ice, its light a sickly green. Poisoned, he thought. Beyond help. It felt wrong and bad even to look at it, but kneeling beside it he did anyway, stared right into the very heart of the thing. Which was where he saw it, so tiny you would miss it if you didn’t have incredibly good eyes—a tiny speck of purest light.
“Uncle Benjamin?”
The light flickered. Dying out. Plunging his hand into the ic
y puddle, he grabbed for it, the sickly green light shedding away as his hand passed through it, dissolving between his fingers until he had nothing left but a tiny granule. That speck of purest light. And as his hand closed around it, it blazed out, igniting all the other embers he had collected into a blinding explosion of white.
37. Meltdown
It took a few minutes for Balthazar’s sight to return to normal, and by the time it did, all trace of the tarry fog was gone. And so was Benjamin. Like a vanishing act. The Humbugs, defrosted now, were scurrying off as well, tails between their legs. All that remained was the starry night sky and the melting ruins. Just a few feet away, Pagan lay flat on her back in the melting ice, deathly still as the icy water rushed around her, stretching the corkscrews of her curls out into long, twining tendrils.
Sloshing over, Balthazar saw that the horrible burned-lightbulb color was gone from her skin, but she wasn’t moving.
“Pagan,” he said, touching her shoulder.
Slowly she faded from view, becoming more and more transparent until she was no longer there at all. He was looking at nothing.
Tears blurred his eyes. He had lost everything.
Then, an instant later, she reappeared.
“I told you I’d get it back,” she said, opening her eyes. “My invisibility’s back!” With a huge grin, she grabbed him in a soggy, shivering hug.
It was too amazing for Balthazar to be ticked off by the head fake.
Over her shoulder he saw the twins, jumping and splashing toward him, babbling nonsense at a million miles per minute. The rest of his family was close behind.
“Dis place could use a good mop,” Gaga pronounced disapprovingly.
“I could use a stiff drink,” Ignatius grunted, sitting up painfully.
“Ignatius?” Mr. Fabuloso gasped.
Ignatius hesitated, then turned around, his sore red eyes meeting his brother’s wondering gaze. Everything that had passed between them was in that look, the guilt, the anger, the years falling away.
Mr. Fabuloso’s mustache trembled. “Brother!” he cried.
“The ribs, watch the ribs!” Ignatius protested as his brother grabbed him and held him tight. “Don’t do hugs.” But Ignatius was just going to have to suffer, because Mr. Fabuloso wasn’t letting go.
“And just like that, you have your happy ending,” a slurpy voice said bitterly.
Turning, Balthazar saw Stan, eyes burning, limping toward him through the slush, a fire-blackened pistol in his hand. The old Colt .45 from Ignatius’s portrait. The one from the Bullet Catch.
“Where . . . where did you find that?” Ignatius asked, going white.
“A little birdie showed me,” Stan said, training the gun on Balthazar with a skittery smile. “Some of that magic is mine. The Gloaming. Give it to me.”
“C-Come now, Sam,” Mr. Fabuloso said in his best nonthreatening, take-charge voice, “this is Balthazar we’re talking about. Kid’s about as magical as a protractor.”
“The name,” Stan shouted, cocking the hammer, “is Stan!”
“I don’t have it,” Balthazar said. “I never took any of it.”
“Even you aren’t stupid enough to turn down that opportunity,” Stan said, leveling the black hole of the gun’s muzzle at Balthazar’s face.
“No!” Ignatius shouted.
There was a flash of gunpowder and then POP! The bullet shot out of the muzzle and flew straight at Balthazar. Crying out, Ignatius threw himself in front of the gun.
“Ahhhhhhhh!” Ignatius screamed, crashing to the floor, clutching his chest. “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
Jumping on Stan, Mr. Fabuloso wrestled the gun from his hands.
“Halt!” a voice cried. “Police!”
Turning, they saw Detective Lightfoot and Ms. McGinty with her busted-up bike standing in the crumbling ice archway.
“This is so not a safe environment for children!” Ms. McGinty declared, looking around in outrage.
38. Better Late Than Never
“Shhh, shhhh, easy now,” Ms. McGinty said, holding Ignatius’s hand as the paramedics loaded him into the ambulance.
“Everything’s so blurry. Are you . . . are you an angel?”
“You’re the angel,” Ms. McGinty said. “If it wasn’t for you . . .”
“I’m not seeing any bullet wound,” one of the paramedics said. “Are you sure—”
“Entry wounds can be incredibly small,” Ignatius said, cutting him off. “Oh, oh the pain!” he groaned loudly before the paramedic could contradict him.
“Shhh, easy there, I’ve got you,” Ms. McGinty said soothingly, climbing into the ambulance next to him.
Noticing that Balthazar was still there, Ignatius waved him away impatiently. “Go on. Lead a good life. Be happy. Think no more of your old uncle who sacrificed himself so that you might live.”
“You don’t want me to come with you?”
“No. Go on. Get. Shoo.”
“I’m so cold,” Balthazar heard Ignatius say to Ms. McGinty as the paramedics shut the doors. “If you might just hold me a little closer . . .”
Sirens and flashing lights pierced the night as the ambulance drove off with its wounded hero, followed close behind by Detective Lightfoot’s squad car with Stan Snopes, handcuffed and sucking bitterly on a cough drop in the back.
The creek bank was a zoo, crawling with reporters snapping pictures, firefighters throwing blankets over people, and police officers taking statements, putting up crime-scene tape and trying to build a logical case out of something that defied all logic. Behind it all, the dissolving ruins of the giant ice theater foundered in the melting water of the creek. All but gone.
Moving away from the crowds, Balthazar found himself a seat on a snowdrift and stared up at the stars. He had wanted more than anything to be back with his family, but now he needed a minute to be alone.
“Well,” a familiar Scottish brogue rang out as Angus McAnguson took a seat beside him, his bare, bony old knees poking out from under his kilt. “We got your message. Better late than neva’, I suppose.”
“Hmph,” Balthazar grunted.
“Go on then, spit it out.”
Balthazar could have pretended he didn’t know what the old Scotsman was talking about, but he could tell he knew. Swishing his tongue back into the hollow of his cheek, he spit out a bullet. The bullet that Stan had shot at his head. The one he had caught between his teeth.
“He would have taken a bullet for me,” Balthazar said. “He was trying to.”
“Hmph,” Angus snorted, examining the dark metal nub. “We have much to discuss.”
Balthazar nodded, looking over at his family. Wrapped in emergency blankets, they were running through their tricks one after another, making sure they had all of them back, but they would be looking for him soon.
“Later,” the old Magus added, dropping the bullet back into Balthazar’s hand. “First I have to help my colleagues put this pig’s breakfast to rest.” Rising creakily to his feet, the Scotsman walked off toward the crowd, where Balthazar noticed Daphne, Mede and a number of other incredibly wrinkly, eccentric-looking old people talking earnestly to clusters of suspiciously glazed-looking law enforcement officials and journalists.
“There you are,” Pagan said, coming around the drift. “What are you doing back here?”
Balthazar shrugged. “I just needed a moment.”
“Yeah.” She studied him for a second then looked away. “So I guess this is it. Back to being enemies again.”
“Does it count for anything that I got your family’s magic back?”
Pagan shook her head. “We Fistulas don’t believe in gratitude.”
“Well, I don’t consider you an enemy.”
“Then you’re stupid. Hey, what’s that in your hand?”
“Nothing,” Balthazar said, quickly closing his fingers around the bullet.
And when he opened his hand again, it was true. The bullet was gone.
Log # 8
58
Well, after all the fuss and bother, life had pretty much gone back to normal. Humphrey was still dead. Blake still sucked. Dad and Moms still hated each other. Life was as meaningless and empty as ever. Even emptier, actually, on account of my #1 nemesis, Balthazar Fabuloso, having just left for some top-secret old-fart-in-training camp for amazingly stupid people, totally ruining my summer plans to destroy him. Oh, and if you’re wondering about all the screaming, Moms has found out about Blake’s “secret” girlfriend, Fanella Fabuloso (note to Blake: Skype tongue-kissing Instagrams are disgusting).
So anyway, I was heading back to throw myself out my fifty-fourth-story bedroom window when something unexpected happened.
The first thing I noticed was how cold my room was. Weird, considering it is the middle of summer and our air conditioning is busted. The cold seemed like it was coming from under my bed, so I lifted up the blanket to have a look. The whole floor area underneath was covered in frost like the inside of an old refrigerator. I could see the terrarium was still there where I had left it, but it was coated in ice so I couldn’t see inside. I put my hand against the glass to melt a spot to look through. The corpse of that Burrower thing that I’ve been saving to get stuffed was still there, all rigor-mortised and matted. Still not alive. But not exactly dead anymore, either.
That’s when I knew. . . . life was about to get interesting again.
Balthazar Fabuloso in the Lair of the Humbugs Page 17
