Unlucky Charms

by Adam Rex

  “Yeah, it’s a pretty bad show,” Erno agreed.

  Despite having no good times to celebrate, they hit another bump.

  CHAPTER 3

  In Halifax, Polly wrapped John’s head in bandages, save for a bare strip around his eyes that she covered with sunglasses and a thin slit over his mouth. If anyone asked, they were going to say he’d burned himself horribly somehow.

  “We could tell people you were looking down the barrel of a flamethrower,” Polly suggested.

  “And why would I have done that,” John sighed.

  “To see why it wasn’t working. Like in a cartoon.”

  “We could say you took a hot omelet to the face,” said Merle.

  “Couldn’t it be something a little more … heroic?”

  “Are you okay?” Scott asked Emily. She was rubbing her temples. She didn’t look like she’d slept.

  “Just a headache,” she answered with a feeble wave. But you couldn’t help but get Scott’s sympathies with the word headache. He used to have migraines all the time. Every time he saw magical things, actually, but he’d finally gotten used to them, and his headaches had mostly gone away.

  “Weird dreams,” Emily added absently.

  They abandoned the party bus and walked down to the water toward a massive white cruise ship that rose like a cathedral from the dock. Harvey carried the unicat, which he was calling Grimalkin in defiance of every other name that had been suggested so far (Pointy, Stabs, Cat Stabbins, Lance, Pierce, Al Gore), in the hope that he’d be able to sneak quietly on board without getting either of them noticed. Mick and Prince Fi played gin rummy in Scott’s backpack.

  “Welcome to the Canadian Diamond Queen!” said a polo-shirted young woman when they reached the end of the queue. Then she put the brakes on her smile a little bit. Her attention swerved to avoid the giant and the man in bandages and finally parked itself on Merle. Here was someone familiar: a senior citizen, just like the last fifteen passengers she’d admitted. You could see her struggling to find the common thread that bound him to everyone else. Carnies? Circus people?

  “Carnies,” Merle told her.

  “Uh-huh. Well! Welcome aboard! Make sure to have your picture taken with one of our cast at the top of the gangway!”

  “Cast?” asked John. “You don’t mean crew?”

  The woman jumped when he spoke. “We … call them cast.”

  “Everyone wants to be in show business,” John muttered as he passed. “Did you see how she flinched?” he added when they were out of earshot. “What, just because I burned my face I’m not allowed to speak?”

  “You didn’t really burn your face,” Scott reminded him.

  “Maybe she expected you to be mute,” said Merle.

  Erno said, “Maybe she expected you to cackle about how you’re going to show all those fools, those fools who thought you were mad.”

  They entered the ship and plowed past the photographers. “We wrapped my face so I could be anonymous,” John groused. “This isn’t anonymous, this is just a worse kind of famous.”

  The inside of the ship looked like a floating Cheesecake Factory. It looked like a huge fancy gift shop. It looked like the tomb of King Hallmark III.

  It also looked like Biggs was going to be doing a lot of slouching. The guest areas, with their hallways and cabins, were all narrow and low ceilinged. The rooms themselves were barely larger than the beds, with closets the size of bathrooms and bathrooms the size of closets. But each had a dozen free movies on the TV and chocolates on the pillows and a balcony that overlooked the ocean. Finchbriton met them on one of these balconies.

  “There yeh are,” Mick said to him. “Wanna join me under the bed? ’S roomy.”

  Mick and Harvey, who both preferred the undersides of beds, were sharing a room with Scott and Erno. Polly was rooming with Emily and Grimalkin. John was with Merle, Biggs was by himself.

  “Come to our room, Prince Fi,” said Polly. “I’ll make you a little apartment out of a dresser drawer.”

  Fi sighed. “Thank you … no. That would be unseemly. I shall share quarters with the boys.”

  Polly hugged her shoulders. “Yeah, you’re … you’re right. Unseemly.”

  After a safety drill the ship got under way. And Harvey got immediately seasick.

  “Why didn’t you tell us you had trouble with seasickness?” Scott asked through the balcony door during a brief spell in which Harvey had either just finished or was about to commence vomiting onto the balcony below.

  “HOW WOULD I KNOW?” Harvey sputtered, shivering. “I’m a pooka! I uthed to live underground. I went through a hole in the univerthe to get to thith turd of a planet. I’ve never thailed an ocean before.”

  “Yeah.” Scott tried to sympathize. “Mick told me all about how he just turned up in this world suddenly, in a baby carriage. I guess it must have been a weird surprise for you too. When you made the Crossing, I mean.”

  That’s what the Freemen had called it in their secret papers: the Crossing. The Walk Between Worlds—when a person or animal from the shrinking magical land of Pretannica traded places with some other person or animal here.

  “Yeah, big thurprize,” Harvey answered. “Didn’t thee it coming.”

  “So … how did it happen with you?” Scott asked the pooka. “How did you make the Crossing?”

  “I would love to have thith converthation with you? But I’m thuper busy. Thith boat ithn’t going to throw up on itthelf!”

  Polly stepped out onto the balcony and plunked down into a plastic lounge chair. Harvey watched her out of the corner of his eye, as if she might weave him a friendship bracelet if he wasn’t vigilant. She watched him back, appraisingly.

  “I like your ears,” she said.

  “I wish I could thay the thame,” he replied, wobbling.

  “I think you must have been a really important fairy back in Pretannica,” she continued, undeterred. “Girls are experts on this kind of thing. Like you must have been a prince or a jack or something.”

  Scott stared at his sister. Harvey did, too. “Showth what you know. I wath a king. Harvey the First of the Lepusian Kingdom.”

  Polly nodded. “In my homeland I was known as Princess Babyfat Von Pumpkinbread. Before I was adopted by commoners,” she added, indicating Scott. Harvey gave Scott a sneer.

  Scott frowned. “Hey, I was just—”

  “Leave uth! Leave uth before I—” shouted Harvey; but he didn’t finish his sentence, unless the remainder was “vomit,” in which case he finished it spectacularly.

  Scott pulled his head back in.

  “So wait …,” said Erno to Mick. “A five is higher than a king?”

  “If it’s a trump, yeah.”

  “This game is stupid.”

  “Harvey’s pretty sick,” Scott mentioned.

  “The mongrel has brought it upon himself,” said Prince Fi, who struggled to hold playing cards that were nearly as tall as he was. Like at any moment they might seize him and bring him before the Queen of Hearts, and then off with his head. “Hares are meant to eat vegetable matter, are they not?”

  “I think he might have gotten some relish accidentally on his last hot dog,” Scott offered.

  “Harvey’s got a little glamour left,” said Mick. “It’ll sort him out.”

  Scott watched them a moment, then shrugged. “All right, whatever. I’m going to go play video games.”

  The thing about a moving cruise ship was that you couldn’t get too lost. There was never any need for the parental admonishment, “Don’t go too far.” Unfamiliar adults, who in any other situation might have reported an unattended child or even tried to corral him like he was an unleashed dog, tended to ignore Scott even more than usual. Over the next few days he ate a sundae for breakfast, saw three movies while floating in a heated pool, failed to watch any whales during a whale watch, and accidentally took a Zumba class.

  The fourth night was a formal night, which meant that everybody was expecte
d to dress up extra nice for dinner. John had taken them to a tailor, so all the men and boys had tuxedos. Even Mick, who could wear the clothes off a ventriloquist’s dummy if he took them in a bit. Even Biggs, who’d been greeted as if he were the natural disaster the tailor had been preparing for all his life.

  Only Harvey couldn’t come to dinner. His stomach had settled, but his rabbit head was still a rabbit head. If anyone saw Mick, his size could be explained by dwarfism or Made-Up Disease Syndrome or whatever. But Harvey? Harvey was stuck, and getting cabin fever. He claimed he could handle it after decades of confinement at Goodco headquarters, but in truth he’d been sneaking out while the rest were at dinner and idly stealing things from both passengers and crew—bath towels, cell phones, cocktail shakers, sunglasses and shoes left poolside while their owners swam. He didn’t keep any of it; he threw it overboard—he wasn’t a thief. It was only to pass the time.

  On this night, servers flitted about in feathery masks, offering the adults free champagne. Violinists circled like mosquitoes. There were grand staircases that served mostly as backdrops for having one’s picture taken, since every other passenger exclusively rode the elevators, of which there were twelve. But the staircases were nonetheless wide and made from great slabs of polished marble with gleaming gold banisters. Only if this gold could have been peeled back to reveal chocolate might the cruise have gotten any more stupidly self-indulgent.

  John had a personal rule against using elevators if stairs were available, so they were always shooing photographers out of the way as they descended to Triton’s Promenade Deck for meals. Passengers who had never considered using the stairs nonphotographically turned now to watch Scott’s group make its entrance: first John, with his bandaged face and sunglasses; then massive, monstrous Biggs; and then … Polly and Merle. You could see their disappointment—just one wolfman or a Dracula away from a solid theme.

  All food was included in the price of the cruise, so when their waiter came to the table Erno indulged his new habit of ordering the first three things on the menu and deciding later what he actually wanted to eat. Scott ordered two things himself, but the second was for Mick. Mick sat in an empty chair and tried not to grumble when the server always took his utensils away.

  Their food came. Scott thought he knew what salmon looked like, so he was surprised to find a spiral of green foam topped by a puff pastry covered in yams.

  “I think they brought me the wrong thing,” he said. “I don’t see any fish.”

  “We need to discuss our plans,” said Emily.

  “Oh, wait—I found it.”

  “We’re going to want to move fast once we reach England,” Emily added.

  They had two good reasons for going to the British Isles. Papers in the Freemen filing cabinet Emily had memorized said that the real queen was being held captive in Avalon, in the west of England. And they also had indicated that Prince Fi’s pixie brothers were prisoners of the Goodco U.K. headquarters in Slough, a town west of London.

  “Perhaps I should reach out to … some other knights while we’re near London,” John suggested.

  The table swooned with silence for a moment. Merle said, “Yeah. Yeah, maybe that’s a good idea.”

  “Just as a sort of plan B, you understand.”

  “Right.”

  Eventually they all expected to run afoul of a colossal pink dragon, and only knights could beat dragons. But Goodco had been quietly getting rid of knights, so the only one who was preparing for this was John.

  Scott had noticed his father’s confidence slipping. One day John would behave as if he was destined to slay the largest dragon in two worlds; the next you could tell he was thinking that a proper knight should be known for something more valiant than performing his own stunts in a stage production of The House at Pooh Corner.

  Scott swallowed a yam. “You can do it.” He shrugged. “Slay Saxbriton, I mean.”

  John’s head lifted; even through the bandages he looked like someone had just given him a tiara and a dozen roses. “Do you think so?” he asked, with such a rainbow of a smile on his face that Scott found he couldn’t look at him.

  “Sure. Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe we should get some other knights anyway.”

  “Hmm,” Emily mused. “Not to be indelicate, John, but who do you know who isn’t already dead?”

  Merle coughed. Everyone picked at their food. Scott excavated a piece of salmon from inside its pastry shell.

  “A few people. I know Richard Starkey.”

  “Who’s he?” said Erno.

  John nearly choked on his Roasted Winter Vegetable Tower with Bacon Lardons. “Richard Starkey? Drummer for the Quarrymen? Only the most important rock-and-roll band of the twentieth century?”

  “Oh.”

  “We should warn him,” said Emily. “Where does he live?”

  “In the Holland Park district of London, in a house formerly owned by the painter Frederic Leighton,” Scott answered, his cheeks still full. Then he frowned at his own mouth, if one can do such a thing.

  “Ha,” said Erno. “That might be the first time anyone’s known anything Emily didn’t.”

  Mick was glancing back and forth between Scott and his plate. “Wait a minute,” he said, pointing at the fish. “Is that …?”

  Scott nodded furiously, his eyes wide.

  “The Salmon of Knowledge!” gasped Mick.

  “The … what?” said Emily.

  “The Salmon o’ Knowledge!” Mick whooped. “First caught by the great Irish hero Finn McCool! One taste an’ yeh gain ultimate wisdom. Yeh know everythin’! But I thought Finn killed it centuries ago.”

  Scott shook his head. He pushed the bite of fish around with his tongue. “Dere’s ahways a Salmon ub Knowwige. Iffit dies, one ub iss shildren eecomes da new Salmon ub Knowwige.”

  “How do you know all that?” asked Erno.

  Scott pointed at his mouth.

  “Oh, right.”

  “Iss too mush,” he added, wincing. “Too mush knowwige. Can’t concendrate.”

  “Finn got all the wisdom o’ the world from just a wee bit o’ salmon fat that got on his thumb,” Mick explained. “For the rest o’ his life he could suck that thumb an’ answer any question.”

  “Scott’s the new Emily,” said Erno. Emily scowled and crossed her arms.

  Scott was shaking his head again. “Finn ried.”

  “Ried?”

  “He … didm’t tell da troof. He rost … lost all da knowwige as soon as he swawwowed! Juss rike I’m going to! Finn juss bretended to know ebrything.”

  Emily huffed. “Typical. Boys.”

  “’Tis a wonder the Salmon ever came to be in this world in th’ first place,” said Mick.

  “Rifts open petween da worlds in oceans, too,” said Scott as he pushed his fists against his eyes.

  “It’s hurting him,” said John. “Scott, you should swallow.”

  “No!” said Merle. “Wait. We could learn a lot.”

  “Everyone ask him questions,” said Mick. “Help him focus.”

  “Maybe he could guess what word I’m thinking of right now,” Emily muttered.

  Scott stared at Emily in shock.

  “Useful questions,” suggested Mick.

  “Okay, um …,” said Erno. “We spoiled all that Milk-7 back at the Goodborough factory. Did we stop Goodco from putting out a cereal with Milk-7 in it?”

  “No. But dey onwy haf enough to sell it in big cities at first. Dey’re trying to get more dragon milg agross so dey gan sell it ebrywhere.”

  “Shoot.”

  “That doppelgänger of mine …,” said John. “The goblin Reggie Dwight. What’s he up to?”

  “Da goplins are in London, regording your negst album.”

  “Good lord. Can they sing?”

  “But lissen,” Scott spat. “Goblin Reshie Dwight is gonna meet wif goblin Queen Erizabef. Live, on gamera. Dey’re gonna bretend to make up, wike eberyone wants dem to.”

  Th
e table fell silent.

  “This is big,” said Merle.

  “If we get close enough to goblin Reggie, I can take his place,” said John. “I could expose the goblin queen as a fake.”

  “How many goblins does Nimue have, anyway?” asked Erno.

  “Seben.”

  “We should split up,” Emily said quietly. “One group helps Scott’s dad, the other rescues the real queen.”

  “It’s going to be dangerous,” said John.

  “Too bad we can’t all take some of that chemical that makes everyone huge and strong,” said Erno. “Like it did for Biggs.”

  “Didn’t make everyone bigger,” Biggs mumbled. “Just the boys.”

  “Is Emily right about the queen being held in Avalon?” Erno asked Scott.

  “I … dunno? Yeah, I dink so. Ish … hazy.”

  “That’s weird,” said Merle to Mick. “Shouldn’t he know?”

  Mick shrugged. “Maybe they’ve got the location protected by a spell?”

  “I guess it’s a good thing I memorized an entire filing cabinet, then,” said Emily bitterly. “I mean, it’s no magic fish, but—”

  “Wait,” said Scott. “Yes. Afalon. In Somerset. Deffinidly.”

  “You can see her?”

  “Yeb. She loogs … weird? Dere’s someding weird about her.”

  “What a super-useful piece of information,” said Emily.

  “You’re being mean begause you habben’t been sweeping,” Scott told her, and their eyes locked.

  “Sweeping?” said Erno.

  “Sleeping,” Emily corrected. “It’s no big deal.”

  “And also you’re sgared. Sgared you’ll get dumb now dat you’re nod daking the Milk.”

  Emily curled up in her chair. “Why’d you say that?”

  “Id’s drue.”

  “That doesn’t mean you had to say it.”

  For a moment nobody could think of anything to add. Biggs cleared his sinuses.

  Scott grimaced. “It’sh breaking up in my mouf! Too delicate. Hafta shwallow soon.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said John. “The chef here is quite good.”