The Key

by Michael Grant

  Where he sees a therapist three times a week.

  And wakes up screaming.

  But! If there were more golem to begin with, the water wouldn’t be able to wash him all down the drain. It would wash some of him away, sure, and that could be pretty unsightly. But if he were a really big boy, the water would only damage a tiny bit of him.

  That was math, and the golem liked math.

  In addition to school, the golem also filled in for Mack at home. He performed all of Mack’s important family duties: finding the remote control, nodding solemnly during parental lectures, pretending to do homework, wearing the same socks every day for weeks, taking out the trash after being asked exactly seventeen times, and heatedly pointing out examples of parental hypocrisy. Such as, “You say don’t eat the leather sofa cushions but you eat bacon, which is the same as leather!”

  There were days when Mack was ambivalent about saving the world, because if he did, he’d sooner or later end up back in Sedona with a lot of explaining to do.

  And there were times when the golem had just the most fleeting thought11 that if Mack succeeded and returned to reclaim his life, it would be the end of a very happy time for the golem.

  He wasn’t sure what happened to golems after they completed a mission. Maybe he would be sent off to “be” someone else.

  Then again, maybe he would just return to being unconscious mud and twigs.

  Meanwhile, the golem was showing up for school, pacifying Mack’s parents, and kind of dating Camaro Angianelli, one of the bullies at Richard Gere Middle School (Go, Fighting Pupfish!).

  Camaro found the golem very sensitive and insightful and an amazing dancer. And no one could take a punch like the golem.

  She was punching him right now, in fact, as he changed classes. “You look like you’re putting on weight,” Camaro said. And she punched him in the stomach to illustrate. Her fist went all the way in, all the way up to the leather bracelet on her wrist, before bouncing back out.

  “Yes. I am going to be a big boy,” the golem said.

  Camaro looked up at him speculatively. “Are you any good at punching people out? Because when I make my play for supreme bully power and try to take over Stefan’s old job, I could use a big boy backing me up.”

  “I will be big,” the golem confirmed, and grinned.

  “You have a twig in your teeth,” Camaro pointed out.

  “Yes. I do,” the golem said proudly.

  “I like that about you, Mack: you rock your own special style. No one else has twigs in their teeth. It’s a built-in toothpick.”

  The golem had to think about that for a moment before finally saying, “Yes.”

  “So,” Camaro whispered conspiratorially. “Sometime within the next few days, it’s me and Tony Pooch at the usual place.” She cracked her knuckles, flexed the biceps displayed by her sleeveless T-shirt, gave her neck the old, familiar Stefan Marr warm-up twist, and spit a wad of gum at a passing geek.

  “You’re going out with Tony Pooch?” The golem was bothered by this. He enjoyed spending time with Camaro—he found her random destructiveness charming. He almost felt jealous. Yes. Almost.

  Camaro threw back her head and laughed. Then she gave him an affectionate punch in the arm—a punch that would have reduced anyone else to whimpering and a possible blood clot—and said, “No, no, Mack. I mean I’m going to kick his butt.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’m your girl,” Camaro said affectionately, and followed that statement up with a snarling warning that he had better never forget it. Not if he wanted to keep all four of his limbs.

  He did want to keep all four of his limbs because it was crucial to passing as Mack. Coming home without an arm would definitely generate uncomfortable questions from Mom. And if he lost two or more limbs, even Dad might notice.

  “You’re my girl,” the golem said contentedly. “And I’m your big boy.”

  Mack was going to have a lot of explaining to do when he got home.

  But at the moment the golem had given him an opportunity....

  * * *

  Six

  * * *

  “I am the Wizard of the iPhone!” Mack cried, sounding a little desperate. “Gaze upon this and be afraid, William Blisterthöng MacGuffin! Behold, as I kill a pig using only an angry bird!”

  MacGuffin sat back hard when he saw that. Then he leaned forward to look closer, because the screen was pretty small. But Mack could see the fear in the old ginger’s eyes.

  “I, too, am a wizard!” Jarrah cried, getting into the act. “I can make nanobots take over a human brain!”

  “And I can look up words and translate them from German to English!” Dietmar announced.

  This assault of smartphones baffled and amazed the thousand-year-old man. In MacGuffin’s world the very height of technology was the windmill, the crossbow, and something very new and exciting: the fork.

  He had never seen a phone, let alone a phone that contained tiny people within it and could play music. From his point of view, Mack and his friends were indeed magicians. Wizards! Who else could cause rectangular lights to appear in their palms? Who else could plant tiny crops of wheat and corn inside that rectangle of light? Who else could reveal pictures of themselves playing volleyball at their cousin’s birthday party?

  “Give us the Key, William Blisterthöng MacGuffin, or we will unleash the power of the iMagic to shrink you to the size of one of these captive pigs, and we will pelt you with the angriest of birds!”

  Mack put that out there in his deepest, most impressive voice, and he wore his most serious and solemn expression.

  And it would have worked. Maybe.

  Except that something like a very large dragonfly suddenly zipped into the torchlight.

  “It’s a trick,” Connie the fairy said. “Don’t believe them, Willy.”

  MacGuffin leaped from his chair. He stood there and stared, stared hard like he was seeing the end of the world or maybe like he was seeing something impossible or maybe like he was seeing another Transformers sequel and just not believing it.

  His mouth moved but no sounds came out.

  And then a single great sob.

  “Con?” he said through quivering mustachioed (top and bottom) lips.

  “Yes, Willy, it’s me. It’s me, your Connie.”

  “Efter a’ thae lang years, mah yin true loue?”

  Which, to the amazement of absolutely everyone, even Stefan, meant, “After all these long years, my one true love?”

  The fairy flew—that’s not a metaphor, she flew—to him and wrapped her arms around his hairy red head, and MacGuffin lifted a massive paw with amazing gentleness to cradle her tiny face.

  “Willy, this is all Frank’s doing,” Connie said, and made the fist of forcefulness again. “He’s shown them the way to take the Key. In exchange, they’ve sworn to release the All-Mother.”

  “She wha haes vowed tae string a fiddle wi’ mah tendons, then speil a jolly tune ’n’ dae a jig?”

  (“She who has vowed to string a fiddle with my tendons, then play a jolly tune and do a jig?”)

  “Aye, my love,” Connie said, stroking his Gandalf eyebrows.

  They gazed into each other’s eyes with the tenderest of love. Such love.

  With sinking heart, Mack faced the terrible truth: Connie had betrayed her fellow fairies.

  Which was pretty heinous.

  But of far greater concern to Mack was that she’d also pulled the rug out from under him and his friends.

  “Seize them!” William Blisterthöng MacGuffin roared.

  At first this didn’t trouble Mack too much because he hadn’t seen any minions who might do any seizing. But he soon saw that he had simply lacked imagination. Because the skulls set above the archways—human and not-human—suddenly creaked and groaned and opened their jaws. Yellow torchlight leaped into the empty eye sockets. And, to Mack’s infinite horror, the skulls began to grow necks and shoulders in the very stone of the wa
lls.

  Let’s make this clear: the stone itself seemed to soften, to liquefy, and from that gooey stone emerged skeletons, like dinosaur bones rising up out of a tar pit, or Upper East Side society women emerging from the mud bath at the spa.

  The hair on Mack’s head stood up.

  Stefan went in swinging. He punched the first skeleton so hard the skull went flying like a penalty kick.

  But in a heartbeat three other skeletons—a human, something that looked like it might have been a wolf, and something else that looked like it had too many hands and a partial exoskeleton—bore him down to the paving stones with kicks and jabs.

  “Ret-ma belast!” Mack cried. Which in Vargran is, “Stop, monsters!”

  This worked, but only a little. About a quarter of the skeletons stopped dead. Well, stopped, anyway. The rest kept right on coming.

  “Thay aren’t a’ monsters, ye wee twit,” MacGuffin chortled.

  Jarrah had leaped to Stefan’s defense and was hauling back on skulls, and Xiao had raced to grab a torch from its sconce and was now swinging it around her so fast it was like a circle of fire.

  Dietmar grabbed Mack’s arm. “We need more Vargran!”

  “Ret-ma … um … What’s the word for man?”

  “Dood!” Dietmar supplied.

  “Ret-ma dood!” Mack cried, and at that instant a skeletal fist that had closed around his neck froze. Unfortunately, it froze in place. It froze choking Mack’s throat.

  Mack’s eyes began to bulge. He grabbed the skeletal human arm and yanked it wildly back and forth. The elbow snapped and the arm came loose. The grip stayed tight, so Mack twirled and gagged with a bony hand around his neck and a bony arm sticking out, and it’s amazing how quickly choking will drop you to your knees.

  The world was swimming around Mack and he knew his time was measured in seconds.

  Suddenly, there was Dietmar getting his fingers around the skeletal thumb and pulling just hard enough to let a few pumps of blood reach Mack’s buzzy brain.

  But then whatever skeletons weren’t either monster or human knocked Dietmar to the ground.

  Jarrah now had a torch of her own and was stabbing it into weird rib cages and up under bony jaws, and Xiao copied that action, and it seemed that, dead though they might be, the bony creatures didn’t like that much.

  The Magnifica had used Vargran to stop about half the skeletons, and with their fists and torches they were holding their own … until.

  Until MacGuffin seized a massive cudgel—a stick with a gnarled knob of polished wood on one end—and came wading into the fight.

  He jabbed the stick with amazing force into Stefan’s chest. Stefan staggered back, clutched at his chest, sucked air, and landed on his back.

  Seeing him down, the remaining skeletons regrouped. They pulled back, bunched together, and came on in a rush.

  Mack was still struggling with the bony hand around his throat, still gasping for air.

  Xiao, Dietmar, and Jarrah took the worst of it and all three were down in seconds, buried by a tangle of clacking bones.

  MacGuffin strode over to Mack, who was still very much in danger of passing out.

  “Gimme up tae th’ All-Mother, wull ye?” He grabbed a handful of Mack’s curls and looked hard into Mack’s bulging, tear-streaming eyes. “Na, ah think ah will murdurr ye ’n’ then see howfur this rabble o’ yers likes it.”

  Connie zipped over, fast as a hummingbird but twice as mean. She had a coil of rope, and a weakened, gagging Mack could do nothing to stop being hogtied.

  MacGuffin pried the skeletal hand from Mack’s throat. A heap of bones assembled itself back into a proper skeleton and came over to retrieve the missing limb.

  Oxygen flooded Mack’s lungs, and his delirious brain refocused in time to see the skeleton army marching the Magnifica and Stefan to the gate of the castle, beaten, humiliated, and helpless.

  Mack himself was taken to the dungeon.

  * * *

  Seven

  * * *

  Have you ever seen a dungeon? They aren’t happy places. Down toward the foundation, the castle was built of massive blocks of granite, each of them about six feet by four feet.

  Those stones weren’t going anywhere.

  The dungeons were cells, with damp stone walls covered in lichen and mold and mildew and moss. But the lichen, etc.—that’s not what bothered Mack. He had no great fear of primitive plant phyla.

  In the corner of the cell was a cracked pottery jar that was supposed to be the toilet. At some later point, one of MacGuffin’s skeletal helpers would be coming by to collect whatever was in the chamber pot—and really, there were never going to be good surprises there—but that was not what bothered Mack.

  Well, it bothered him a little bit, because like most of us he was fond of indoor plumbing. But none of the terrors and inconveniences compared to the thing that really bothered him.

  Three stone walls, a stone ceiling, a great stone floor—and the remaining wall of the cube was a sheet of rusty black iron pierced only by the door, which was itself massively iron. In that door was a single narrow vertical slit no more than six inches high and one inch wide, just enough for a skeletal eye to appear occasionally and spy in on Mack.

  Not that even a skeletal eye could see much, because it was very dark in the room. There was an oil lamp set into the wall. The lamp itself would have been kind of a cute Halloween decoration: a skull with a jaw that worked like a drawer. The jaw-drawer could be pulled out, and inside would be found the little clay cup that held the reeking oil. When lit, the dim light flickered through the eyeholes and noseholes and the fine cracks where the plates of the skull were joined, and also the jagged hole where the crossbow bolt had long ago pierced the skull’s brain.

  But even that wasn’t what terrified Mack, and overwhelmed him, and stripped away his dignity and his self-control.

  What bothered Mack was a little thing called claustrophobia.

  Mack had twenty-one identified phobias. They included arachnophobia, a fear of spiders.

  Dentophobia, a fear of dentists.

  Pyrophobia, a fear of fire, although most people have some of that.

  Pupaphobia, a fear of puppets. But he was not afraid of clowns, unlike most sensible people.

  Vaccinophobia, a fear of getting shots.

  Thalassophobia, a fear of oceans, which led fairly naturally to selachophobia, a fear of sharks.

  And of course, phobophobia, which is the fear of developing more fears. Someone famous—either Franklin D. Roosevelt or possibly SpongeBob—once said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Well, that wasn’t the only thing Mack had to fear, but it was one of them.

  But the mother of all fears for Mack was claustrophobia: a fear of small, enclosed spaces. For example: a cramped space not that much bigger than a casket in the stony bowels of a castle. Because the cell was not the large room you’ve been picturing in your head. It was five feet deep, three feet wide, and four feet tall.

  Mack could not even stand all the way up.

  If he lay down on the hard stone floor, his feet would touch the door and his head would touch the far wall. And he would be able to press his hands against both side walls.

  He was being buried alive.

  “Aaaahhhh!” he screeched when he saw the cell. “No, no, no, no! Nooooo! Nooooo!”

  The skeletal guards didn’t have an answer: they had no tongues or lips, or voice boxes or lungs. Pretty much all of the things you need to speak were missing.

  “Noooo! I can’t … you can’t....”

  Oh, but they could. And they did. They threw Mack into the cell, pushing his head down with claw-like hands so that he would fit through the short door.

  Mack turned and ran at them. He gibbered madly in Vargran, but casting two earlier spells had pretty well wiped out his enlightened puissance for now. So he might as well have been speaking Portuguese.12

  The iron door slammed in his face.

 
The oil lamp guttered, and for a frozen moment of terror, Mack thought it might go out, and if there’s anything worse than being buried alive, it’s being buried alive in the dark.

  “No! No, you have to let me out! Nooooo!”

  One is tempted to look away. Because to keep looking at Mack is to watch him completely fall apart. It’s to see our hero whimpering, crying, sobbing, begging for his mother.

  You see, a phobia isn’t just a fear, like maybe you’re afraid you’ll fail a test. A phobia is much, much deeper. A phobia taps into the bottommost layers of your brain, down where the brain is just the sediment of evolution and where blunt animal terror lies, far away from your reason and your logic and your calm, soothing voices.

  So the Mack we would see in that terrible cell is not the Mack who stood up to Stefan back when Stefan was the most feared bully at Richard Gere Middle School. (Go, Fighting Pupfish!) Nor would it be the Mack who threw down with Risky in the Australian Outback and killed her once. It’s not the Mack who faced dragons and fought Skirrit and treasonous Tong Elves and insane Norse gods and Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout.

  It’s possible to be very brave some of the time. And pants-wetting scared another time. That’s the reality of it. The same person can run away in blind terror one moment, then turn suddenly and face certain death with unearthly determination.

  Humans are strange that way.

  The thing about Mack’s fear was that it was so intense that if you’d told him he was just hours away from being catapulted to certain death, he wouldn’t have been even 1 percent more terrified. He had already turned the fear meter up to eleven.

  * * *

  Eight

  * * *