Cold Cereal

by Adam Rex

  Scott reached over and turned it off.

  REGGIE

  Hello! I’m Reggie Dwight, and I’m visiting the good folks at Goodco to see how they make new Peanut Butter Clobbers™!

  Ow.

  Um, there are peanut buttery bumpers! And melt-in-yourmouth strawberry milk bubbles in every box of Peanut Butter Clobbers™.

  REGGIE

  OW! Is that going to happen every time I say “Peanut Butter Clobbers™”?

  I think that one was a man. (cough) Okay. This … um … cereal not only combines the great taste of peanut butter and strawberry milk, but it’s also chock-full of IntelliJuice™, the magic juice that makes you smarter! I wish I’d had some before agreeing to do this commercial.

  Hey! So, uh … try new Pea … try this cereal here.

  And wash it down with new Strawberry ThinkDrink™! It’s the punch with punch!

  VOICE-OVER ANNOUNCER

  Peanut Butter Clobbers—another good cereal from the good folks at Goodco! There’s a Little Bit of Magic in Every Box!

  CHAPTER 36

  The van and the Citroën skidded to a stop in the vast but empty Goodco factory parking lot. It was still a holiday weekend, Scott supposed. He realized in a detached and foggy sort of way that he didn’t have any idea what day of the week it was. He took off at a run toward the entrance, with its Freemen icons and spiky mascots.

  “Wait, what’re we doin’?” shouted Mick. “Just blowin’ through the front door?”

  “There’s no time for tricks!” Scott shouted.

  “I’ll wait in the car,” said Harvey.

  Mick narrowed his eyes. “Finchbriton, why don’t yeh stay an’ keep our Harvey company? See that he don’t get lost.”

  Scott paused at the entrance, and he was relieved to see the others fall in behind him. They all crashed through the double doors together and into the lobby, ran past the TV screen and down the hall to the factory floor to find … a commercial shoot.

  “Hey,” said Scott’s dad. He wore a pink shirt and white pants and a pleased smile on his handsome face. “You came after all. And you brought … friends!”

  Assuming that his dad could see Mick, Scott could hardly imagine what he thought of this crowd of gatecrashers. Add a couple of puppets, and they would have looked like a children’s television program.

  “I’m afraid you’re a trifle late, though,” his dad added. “We just wrapped. Got it in only three takes!”

  “You nailed it, Reggie!” said a seated man in a baseball cap.

  “Oh, please. It was good planning. I just read the lines and hit my marks.”

  There were people all around the huge room, and they all chuckled good-naturedly. Five of them were dressed like the Queen of England. The rest stood beside a big camera on wheels, or next to any number of spotlights on tripods, or by the factory machinery, holding a long pole with a microphone on the end of it.

  “Um,” mumbled Scott. “Guys, this is my dad, John. Or Reggie. Should they call you Reggie?”

  “As long as they don’t call me sir,” John joked. “Sir is my father’s name.” More laughter. Adults laugh a lot, thought Scott, even when nothing’s funny.

  He drew close to John. “Where’s Polly?” he asked.

  “Oh, around. She wanted to explore. Do you want to see the commercial?”

  John was grinning a lot. Too much? Was he trying to tell them all was not well?

  Scott’s gang gathered around the camera. Mick whispered, “Maybe I should go find your sis. Get outta here while the gettin’s still good.”

  “Um, I don’t know,” Scott whispered back. “Let’s not all get separated yet.” Maybe they were holding Polly captive, he thought. Maybe the crew all had guns and threatened to kill her if John didn’t play along.

  “This is hilarious,” Erno announced as he watched the camera’s small display. “The internet’s gonna love it.”

  “There’s a lot of punching in it,” Emily whispered to Scott. “Might explain the sounds we heard in the van.”

  Scott, for his part, was barely listening. He wasn’t watching the camera screen. He was staring at John Doe, waiting for a sign, some secret message encoded in the dots and dashes of his eyes. But his dad was no longer looking at him. He appeared to be looking everywhere but: at the camera, at Erno and Emily, at Merle, at the commercial crew who no doubt had equipment to put away and lives to get on with but who nonetheless lingered, watching. And then John did something wrong. Afterward Scott couldn’t have told you just what that something was: a twitch, a tilt of the head? But while Scott would never have admitted this to Erno or Polly or even to himself, he had made a great study of John Doe. John Doe was his life’s work. He’d watched, with fake nonchalance, every movie, every music video, every online interview. From a thousand photographs he knew the cleft in John’s chin, the cut of his teeth, the exact former site of the neck mole that John had had removed in the fall of the previous year. He knew the back of his hand like the back of his hand. And this man was not his father.

  “THIS MAN,” he announced, pointing, “IS NOT MY FATHER!”

  Everyone on the factory floor was stunned into silence.

  Mick sidled up and asked, “Do yeh mean that in a ‘He never remembered my birthday’ kind o’ way, or—”

  “No,” said Scott, “I mean he really isn’t my father.” He glared at the impostor and presented his fists.

  “Um,” said Erno.

  “Kid?” said Merle. “You sure?”

  “He’s sure,” Mick answered. “Let’s get ’im.”

  The thing that looked like John Doe grinned. “The jig is up,” it said in a spidery voice, then its skin unzipped at the face and fell to the floor.

  CHAPTER 37

  The John Doe costume, the perfect suit of clothes and hair and skin, lay in sickening folds on the factory floor. The impostor was revealed to be two short creatures, one perched on the other’s shoulders, both still wearing the same terrible smiles.

  “Goblins,” growled Mick.

  They were each perhaps just a half foot taller than Mick, with milky white bodies but startling red faces. Red as if they’d been dipped to their chins in blood and the stuff had dripped some foreign alphabet all over their necks and collars. From top to bottom they had: bald pates, all the worst features of both toad and bat, little gray wool suit jackets with ties, short pants, and chicken feet. The one hopped off the other’s shoulders, and they both bowed and said,

  “Misters Pigg—”

  “—and Poke, atcher service. Specializin’ in the ’mpersonation of queens of all stripes.”

  “And in creatin’ diversions, Mister Poke—you know you’re quite good at that.”

  “No better than you, Mister Pigg.”

  Scott turned when he realized what the goblins were getting at, and saw that the commercial crew had managed to surround them. Even the Queens of England. People came at them from all sides, and Scott felt a poke at his neck. When he turned around he saw the goblins’ bodies puff up and scab over like toasted marshmallows. Then the creases smoothed and they were perfect replicas of Scott and Mick, clothes and all. Scott flinched and punched himself in the face. It was a singularly odd thing to have to do.

  Behind him Erno and Emily protected each other; Biggs threw crewmen and queens around with gusto, knocking over studio lights and a snack table covered with Danishes. Merle put them to sleep with his Slumbro. One crewman ran to shield the movie camera—he pried it off its stand and ducked beneath the assembly line, then ran off into a darkened wing of the factory.

  The goblin-Scott that Scott had punched staggered backward, and Mick head-butted his own doppelgänger in the stomach.

  “So what was the plan here, exactly?” sneered Mick. “Didja think I’d get confused an’ accidentally hit myself?”

  Then a Queen of England got too close to Emily, and she had a fit. Her eyes rolled back, and the lights went out with a crack, and when they came on again there was a donkey w
earing a tiara, and Scott couldn’t tell which Mick was Mick anymore.

  “Emily turned a lady into a donkey,” Erno announced.

  Emily was shivering on the concrete floor, looking drowsy. Biggs ran to her side. The two or three crewmen and actors who were not already asleep or unconscious ran for an emergency exit.

  One Mick pointed directly at the other Mick and sort of vaguely toward both Scotts. “Grab ’em before they get away!” he shouted.

  “Why yeh little—” the other Mick grumbled.

  The donkey flicked its ears, upsetting its tiara, and wandered over to sniff at a trash bin.

  Merle approached. “My Slumbro doesn’t work on Fay. I could wave it at all of you, and we’d find out who the real Scott is, anyway.”

  “I don’t want to go to sleep,” said both Scotts at roughly the same time.

  “I think I might have a solution,” said a female voice.

  Everyone turned. Standing amid the factory lines was a beautiful woman with raven black hair in a smoky nightgown—smoky because it was gray, and smoky because it seemed at once to be both there and not there at all. As if the gown, and the woman who wore it, might only have been a figment of everyone’s imagination.

  “YOU!” shouted Merle.

  “YOU?” said one of the Micks.

  “You!” Erno said out of camaraderie, though he wasn’t really all that surprised. He knew he’d be seeing his doctor again sooner or later.

  She clasped her hands in front of her and said, “Merle Phillip Lynn. Scottish Play Doe. Erno Utz. Emily Utz. Brian Macintyre Biggs. Fergus Ór.” A cold flare of light like a slow camera flash tumbled through the room in waves. “There now. I’m afraid you’ll find that not one of you can move.”

  One Mick and one Scott shed their skins and were goblins again. They went to stand at either side of the beautiful woman and held her hands like gentlemen when she ducked under the factory rollers to join Scott and his friends. Closer now, you could see that her beauty was a glamour, and perhaps not as glamorous as it used to be. To Erno and Emily, who had seen her most recently, she looked careworn and tired.

  “I cannot believe my good luck,” she said. “I’m getting everything I want for Christmas. I’ll admit my magic is not what it once was, but I’ve done some poking around and discovered each of your True Names—does no one learn to keep the old secrets in this world?—and with these I have barely to lift a finger to keep you all in my thrall.”

  Scott, for his part, was confused. He could move, couldn’t he? Sure, he had been frozen with fear there for a second, but the rest of his friends seemed to be genuinely paralyzed. They didn’t even blink. Scott twitched a fingertip just to be sure, and he could move just fine. Then he struggled to compose himself as the woman turned to gaze directly at him.

  “Forgive my manners, young man. Everyone else here has at least one good name for me, and perhaps a few less savory ones besides. You may know me as Queen Nimue, the Lady of the Lake.

  “Merlin,” she said, turning to the tense and pink-faced accountant. “Wormed your way out of the earth. The worm that dieth not, it would seem—just how old are you now, wizard? No, don’t answer—it was rude of me to ask.

  “Fergus—” she said to Mick, and here her face fell, and a little of the glamour came loose, just for a moment. She was an altogether less beautiful but more lovable person in that moment. “I hope by my apples that you’ll live to understand what I’m doing here. These are miserable means, but there’s an honorable end in sight. Not for me perhaps, but for you, and for all our cousins. You’ll see.”

  She straightened and surveyed the lot of them. “What a class of apt pupils. Let’s have a history lesson, shall we?”

  “Yes, Miss,” said either Pigg or Poke.

  “Yes, please,” said the other.

  “Hm. The Fay were first forced underground by an invading army, you know. Such is the way of things, I think you’ll soon find. We were the light of the world, hiding under bushels. Cowering beneath toadstools. We lived for so long in our twilight world that I think even some of our own came to see it as our natural place. Not I. I wanted back some of the world we’d lost. Not so much, really—Ireland could be ours, and Somerset. Maybe Orkney. They were doing practically nothing with Orkney, you know.”

  “’S a bit unfashionable, Miss.”

  “Well, you have to have someplace to put the pixies. So I sought to have dealings with a mortal king, King Arthur. I gave him a great sword of enchanted metal: metal that would get into his blood and turn his heart toward our cause. Because here I thought I saw a king to unite all the human world, for good or for ill. But I also hedged my bets, as I think you say. I made sure Arthur begat a son who would be my cat’s paw, to replace him if necessary. But then the two killed each other at Camlann. So it wasn’t a very good plan, you see.”

  “Oh, don’t say it, Miss,” said one of the goblins.

  “I will say it. The Fay have always preferred a good story to a well-laid plan. It’s a failing of ours. And then came the Marvel—the Gloria. It took me centuries to understand it. The humans, bless them, thought it was just more of their God’s punishment on Arthur for consorting with devils and magic. My own people thought it was some black magic conjured forth when father and son murdered each other on the battlefield. I alone knew—it was some trick of yours, wasn’t it, Merlin?”

  Tears were streaming down Merle’s face. But then there were tears streaming down each of the prisoners’ faces—they could scarcely blink, could hardly breathe under Nimue’s influence. Scott would have to do something, and he flicked his eyes about for an idea.

  “We have always been jealous of each other’s magics. I never discovered the secret behind your gift of foresight. And you, for your part, made a careful study of any and all things enchanted by the Fay: Arthur’s sword, fairy gold—oh yes, I know all about your little experiments on fairy gold. Did you long to be a great alchemist, Merlin? You cared only for the scientific magics with their laws and order, and turned away from sacred chaos and uncertainty. You cast it out of your heart and mind and wished for a world of rules and law, where the human arts were the only arts. You made your wish come true, somehow. And you left us to die in a bubble.

  “You see, I was haunted by the memory of the Gloria, and the sense I could not shake that the world had been split in two. It was you who put the idea in my head, Merlin, just before I imprisoned you in that dank cave. You said that Arthur would return, return to a world I couldn’t imagine. Where is our dear Arthur, Merlin? Resting up? Do tell him I asked after him.”

  There were a few things around Scott that could conceivably be used as weapons, and he would have liked very much to get any one of them into his hand without somebody noticing. But one of the goblins (Poke, he thought), would not stop looking at him. Did he know? Did he seriously just wink?

  “It took all my skills and half my magics,” said Nimue, “but I soon found this new human world through the mists. I was able to part the curtains, just long enough, just wide enough, to make the Crossing. I left a land of feral beauty and wonder and entered New Jersey. It probably goes without saying that I got a bit moody for the next ten or fifteen years.

  “But I had a plan. A good one. I would open a door and bring the rest of my people to this world before the bubble burst. I needed power. Influence. I needed more, much more magic than I’d currently had at my disposal if I wanted to open this door. And I knew other Fay had made the Crossing, albeit accidentally, before me. I could… I could take their glamour for my own if I had to. Store it away. So I needed an organization that could scour the Earth for magical creatures. If I could not yet have the company of my fellow Fay, then I needed a company of men. I grabbed power the only way a woman in the 1830s could: I married well.

  “Zachariah Terribull Goode was not a good man. He was an Old World Puritan, and he did not care for women. In fact he’d made a small fortune inventing ways to shame and torture them: painful headdresses, metal
wired to teeth and so forth….”

  Here she looked sidelong at Emily.

  “But his business was in decline. The punishment of shrews and wantons was falling out of favor. It was I who pointed out that the women he tortured had lovely smiles, when they smiled at all. It was I who saw that the devices were straightening their teeth, I who saw that parents would pay good money to have their children tortured for vanity. New devices had to be tested, and I volunteered to do the testing. I obtained a number of orphans, which was of course much easier to do back then. Not that it’s entirely impossible now.”

  Again she glanced at Emily, with a smile like a knife.

  “An honorable life—such is the way of the Seelie Court.”

  “If y’ say so, Miss,” said Pigg.

  “Have to take your word for it,” said Poke, and here he most definitely winked at Scott.

  “But stealing children has always been our right,” Nimue continued. “We take them from their parents, leave behind a changeling. The fairy is raised as a human, and becomes more human. The human is raised as one of the Fay, and becomes more Fay. In the end they’re both changelings, in their way.

  “I raised my orphans as if they were fairies: I fed them only a bitter stew of flowers and rainwater each morning, taught them about all of the magic creatures, told them that our kind would once again rule the Earth. The symbol of our strength, our great potential, I told them, was the dragon Saxbriton, most powerful of all creatures, whom I had raised myself from an egg. The first of my adopted children. And I filled their mouths with enchanted metal and made little cages for their minds. But in the end too many of them resisted, died, went mad. And I had to admit I had failed, just as I had failed with Arthur. I needed to get my magics inside them, to turn them from the inside out.