Unlucky Charms

by Adam Rex

  “Why’d you tell them that?” asked Scott. “It’s kind of a weird thing to say.”

  Merle shrugged. “I have no idea. But the books said that’s what I said, so that’s what I said.”

  “But … wait. If the books say you said it, but you only said it because the books say you said it, then—”

  “I’m either too tired or not tired enough to have that kind of conversation right now,” Merle told him. They were winding through a cramped little maze of a town, and Merle added, “We should be close now.”

  “We won’t know we’re really close until we see water,” said Mick. “Avalon is an island.”

  “Yeah,” Scott agreed. “When I saw it with my … salmon sight, on the cruise ship, it was definitely wet. Swampy.”

  Merle checked the map again, but let it be. “Anyway, there’s one more thing to tell. Eventually Vortigern and his men leave, and while I’m standing there watching the dragons, an elf steps out of the shadows. A real familiar elf.”

  He was one of those regal, Tolkienesque elves that made you feel fat and unlovely. Six-five, lean, sloe eyed, with short green mossy hair.

  “You’re name’s Conor,” Merle said.

  The elf frowned almost imperceptibly. “My name is Mossblossom.”

  “Yick. I can see why you changed that.”

  “King Vortigern called you Merlin,” said the elf.

  “That’s what he called me, yeah.”

  “You know much, Merlin. My Lady of the Lake will be curious about you.”

  Merle didn’t know what to say to that. He winced at the dragons—the white had finally succeeded in subduing the red, and now the waters calmed. “They’re … they’re not actually fighting, are they?”

  “Not fighting, no.”

  Merle coughed. “I think maybe I’ll give them some privacy,” he said, turning to go. “You coming?”

  “Alas, I am … chaperone to this congress. By order of my Lady.”

  “Good luck with that,” Merle said as he left.

  “I hope we meet again, Merlin of Ambrosius,” said the elf.

  Merlin didn’t look back. “I don’t,” he said through his teeth.

  “This is it,” Merle said now, in the truck. “We’re right on top of it.” They’d passed through the town and emerged at the foot of a tall hill. Taller than Dinas Emrys had been.

  Merle, Scott, and Mick got out and stood around the poppadum truck in the dark, in the quiet little town of Glastonbury, in Somerset, in the west of England.

  “Well,” said Mick. “This doesn’t look right.”

  CHAPTER 14

  It was only when John looked in on him hours later that Erno realized the night had passed and he had quite possibly fallen asleep with his eyes open, half focused on the bleak and bleary poem. The unicat was curled in his lap.

  “Up already?” asked John. “Polly’s still conked out. Your sister, too.”

  Erno rubbed his eyes. “Good. Good, she needs the sleep.”

  The small square window was an ocean-bottom blue. It was very early. John was wearing a three-piece gray gabardine suit with a pink tie and handkerchief.

  “Don’t know when this so-called car is coming for me,” he explained. “Must be ready.”

  Erno stood, upsetting the cat, and followed John downstairs.

  Biggs was standing in one corner of the front room, asleep. Prince Fi paced back and forth like a sentry in front of the goblins, who seemed to be engaged in talk of good ol’ Pretannica with Harvey.

  “Jutht thurprized we didn’t know each other already,” Harvey told Pigg and Poke. “Uth havin’ the thame uncle and all.”

  “We’re nearly brothers, when it comes down to it,” said Pigg.

  “A pooka’s more goblin than elf, so they say,” added Poke.

  Harvey nodded. “Thatth true.”

  Just then a tinny rendition of “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)” started playing from somewhere. Everyone but the goblins looked around.

  “Is that a phone?” asked Erno.

  “Not one of mine,” said John.

  “It is, actually,” said Pigg, tilting his head toward the folds of Reggie skin hanging down around him.

  “It’s the mobile we stole off you at the Goodco factory last year,” Poke added, smiling apologetically.

  “You changed the ringtone,” John said, aghast. As if this was the final straw, the ultimate indignity. Not the identity theft and character assassination so much as the ringtone. He set about the distasteful task of rifling through the pockets of a full-length Halloween costume of himself and found the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “That’s it today?” said the voice on the other end. “Just hello? No ‘Queenpunchers Anonymous’ or ‘You have reached Reggie’s House of Fruit’ or whatever?”

  John winced at Erno. “It’s early,” he said.

  “That it is. Car’s out back.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  The sun was up, and Merle, Mick, and Scott had driven in and around Glastonbury and the surrounding countryside twice; asked for directions three times; breakfasted in the truck; and made mildly personal comments to one another on the subjects of eating habits, driving ability, age, height, and all-around usefulness. Scott made the mistake of mentioning that in books about magic villains and world saving, there was always a main character who died, and they had a spirited discussion about which of them, if any, it would be. Or if any of them even qualified as a main character. Then they didn’t say anything for a long time.

  Finally, in unspoken agreement, they gave up.

  They were sitting now in a pretty garden on the edge of a stone ring around a two-thousand-year-old hole in the ground called the Chalice Well. It was apparently one of Glastonbury’s chief attractions, purportedly the last resting place of the Holy Grail.

  “This mission of ours,” said Mick. “’Twas always doomed, wasn’t it? That’s why they sent the likes of us?”

  “It was a long shot,” Merle admitted. “Assuming this place was the mythical Avalon, we didn’t even know where to begin looking for the queen.”

  Scott could just barely see Glastonbury Tor from here, a sharp hill with a church on it that rose up from the surrounding plains. This hill had been an island back when the area was flooded, but the lady at the Chalice Well admissions gate said it hadn’t been that flooded for a while.

  “So when the Freemen’s files said Avalon, do you think they meant somewhere else?” asked Scott. “When I saw the queen with my salmon sight, she was hard to focus on.”

  “Is that definitely what we’re callin’ it?” said Mick. “Your ‘salmon sight’? I vote for somethin’ else.”

  They’d driven all night for nothing and were all a little grumpy. Scott read aloud from the visitor’s brochure again, just because he knew it annoyed Mick.

  “‘The interlocking circles on the well cover represent the inner and outer worlds, a symbol known as the Vesica Piscis. A sword bisects these two circles, possibly referring to the legendary Excalibur, sword of King Arthur, who is believed by some to be buried nearby.’”

  “Please shut it,” said Mick.

  Scott put the brochure away. Merle appeared to have nodded off.

  “Maybe I should check in at home,” Scott said, dialing one of the new disposable cell phones they all had now.

  “Hi,” said Polly on the second ring.

  “Glastonbury’s a bust, maybe,” Scott told her. “It doesn’t look like Avalon. What’s going on there?”

  “Dad left awhile ago. Erno and Biggs are working on the puzzle poem with Archie the owl. Erno wants to thank Merle again for leaving Archie.”

  “What about Emily?”

  “She’s sleeping in. Hold on, Erno wants to know how you’re doing.” Scott listened to Polly explain to Erno that they hadn’t found the queen, that Avalon didn’t even look like Avalon. Then there was a pause. “Um, Scott?”

  “What?”

  “The gobli
ns overheard me talking,” said Polly, “and one of them, I think Pigg … no, maybe that’s Poke. Which one’s the ugly one?”

  Scott didn’t know how to answer that question. “Does it matter?”

  “I guess not. One of them just said, ‘Course they didn’t find Her Majesty. She’s in the other Avalon.’”

  Scott felt suddenly more tired than he could have thought possible. “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not, but maybe they are?”

  “No, it makes sense, actually—I bet they’re telling the truth.” Scott sighed. “I think they kind of like telling the truth if they know it isn’t gonna make your life any easier. The queen is in Pretannica,” he said, and Mick groaned. “How are we going to get to Pretannica?!”

  “I dunno,” said Polly. “Maybe Mr. Wilson’s poem is a clue?”

  “That’d be nice. Can you put Erno on?”

  “Just a sec.”

  Erno took the phone. “Hey.”

  “Hey. What have you worked out so far?”

  “Well,” said Erno, and Scott could hear papers rustling. “Practically all the lines are about time or temperature. It has the words year, week, frozen, hours, day, degrees, minutes, sec—”

  There was silence on the line for a bit. “Seconds?” finished Scott.

  “Yeah, hold on,” said Erno. “Saying those words out loud got me thinking. Degrees, minutes, and seconds. What does that sound like to you?”

  Scott thought. “I dunno. Two words about time and one about temperature?”

  “No. No. I think I just figured something out. I was always kind of into military history, and maps and stuff.”

  “Okay.”

  “So coordinates of latitude and longitude are written out in degrees, minutes, and seconds. Like a specific point on the globe might be written as minus fifty-three degrees, ten minutes, eighteen seconds latitude; twelve degrees, twenty-three minutes, five seconds longitude.”

  “So do you think the poem tells you a point on a map?” asked Scott.

  “… Maybe. I wonder—” There was a faint noise on the line, like a shout from far away. “What was that? Hold on.”

  Scott hummed to himself until Erno returned.

  “Man,” said Erno. “Emily is, like, shouting in her sleep. It’s hilarious. She must be having a dream.”

  “What’s she saying?”

  “I couldn’t make out any words. You coming back?”

  “I guess so, when Merle wakes up.”

  “Hope your dad’s doing better than you guys.”

  “He’d almost have to be.”

  CHAPTER 15

  That was not strictly true.

  He was an actor, John told himself as he exited through the back door of his house; a good actor, and today he was not John Doe. He wasn’t even Reggie Dwight—he was two awful little monsters in a suit, ready to take tea with a pantomime queen.

  The car that waited for John outside his home in St. John’s Wood was an ordinary black London cab, but it had an extraordinary driver. He was a black-suited, hardheaded man with stubbly black hair you could strike a match on, and so large and powerfully built that it seemed the car must have been manufactured around him. Soon he’d have to leave the shell of it behind for another, larger one, thought John, like a hermit crab.

  “Lads,” greeted the driver as John got in the back.

  “So what was decided?” asked John. “British Museum?”

  The driver frowned. Not that John could see his face, but he’d swear you could hear this man frown. “You weren’t supposed to know that yet.”

  Oh, thought John. “Well, I have my ways.”

  “I?”

  Shoot shoot shoot. “Yes, I. Mister Pigg, speaking. Mister Poke hasn’t got my ways, you understand. He’s got his own ways.”

  “That I do, Mister Pigg,” John added.

  “Right,” said the driver with another frown, and the sound that made. Sort of a meat-tenderizing sound. Anyway, the moment had passed. John was supposed to get the driver to confirm the location of the meet, then make a quick sign through the rear windshield to Erno, who was watching from a window. But he’d gotten flustered and forgotten, and now they were blocks away.

  It was early, and traffic was light. When they were near the museum, John asked, “So where are we setting up? Reading Room?”

  “Look,” said the driver, craning his neck. “You didn’t tell anyone, did you?”

  “Only our grocer. And the lady who does our hair. And this nice bloke from the Daily Telegraph, what was his name?”

  “Funny. You’re funny. Never have I known such a funny pair of goblins.”

  They pulled up Great Russell Street to the museum grounds and were waved through gold-tipped gates that would normally turn away all automobiles. They came to their final stop right in front of the building’s columned facade. John’s door was opened for him, and he stepped out to be frisked by police officers. They didn’t find him to be carrying a weapon, even though he was.

  The museum wasn’t yet open, so everyone here was attached to the queen in some way. John wondered how many of them were in on the joke—how many of them knew the queen wasn’t the queen, that John wasn’t John. There was a distinct lack of winks and knowing smiles, so he was inclined to think most of them were legit. Then a prissy and pucker-mouthed little man who looked like he was sucking on boredom itself came alongside him.

  “I thought I’d talked you both into the navy-blue check,” he whispered.

  “Be happy we’re wearing pants,” said John. Who was this man? Was he a Freeman? Was he even human?

  “At least you had the good sense to wear pink,” the prissy man conceded. He was wearing pink himself—an ascot and a small carnation. John scanned the crowd—there were maybe only ten others wearing some little blush of color, including one police officer with a breast cancer awareness pin.

  The Great Court of the British Museum was vast, clean, a gleaming blue-white at this time of the morning. A round, bright, modern structure with tall, evenly spaced windows like a zoetrope stood in its center, boxed in by more classical peaks and pillars and sheltered beneath a curvilinear lattice of metal and glass. A wide walkway clasped its staircase arms around the zoetrope, tapering down to rest its cold hands on either side of a door that led into the old Reading Room. This room was currently showing an exhibit of reliquaries, which, if John understood correctly, was a collection of the body parts of famous dead religious people. But they weren’t going into the Reading Room.

  Between the staircases, a blue backdrop had been erected, and in front of that, a table and tea set. He thought this place had the sort of symbolism the royals liked—a bit of old, a bit of new, a place of learning where he and the queen would supposedly come to a better understanding of each other blah blah blah. He took his place at the table and immediately started working out escape routes.

  “Where are Katt and Bagg?” whispered John, hoping he’d gotten the other goblins’ names right.

  “First you, then the press are called, then the Goblin Queen makes her royal entrance.”

  “We hate waiting,” said John.

  The new year has a week to wait till waking, thought Erno with an atlas across his lap. Could that mean December twenty-fourth, then, or maybe twenty-fifth? Or … or, if there’s a week until the new year, then that means fifty-one weeks have passed. He checked the atlas. Assuming that the first number in the poem would be the first number of the coordinates, then fifty-one degrees latitude was far enough north of the equator to possibly be in England. Or Canada or Germany or about five other countries, he thought. Still, it was a nice coincidence.

  The water’s almost frozen in the well. “Archie?” Erno said, and the owl turned. “What temperature does water freeze at?” He read the answer off Merle’s watch. Thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, or zero degrees Celsius. So if water’s almost freezing, it would be thirty-three. Or one. Again, fifty-one degrees, thirty-three minutes latitude could keep him in Englan
d, and Erno started feeling the thrill of discovery.

  Within a half-hour, John was told the press had assembled outside the Great Court, waiting to be let in. He checked his phone and found the more traditional news outlets predicting a staged and uneventful reconciliation, while the tabloids speculated wildly about fresh queen punchings and royal retaliations. One newspaper was calling the event the “Tussle on Great Russell.”

  The table was real wood beneath the tablecloth, some expensive antique. The china teacups looked as delicate as fingernails. There was a small creamer of milk and a bowl filled with perfect sugar cubes. Somewhere, someone was making the tea. The whole tableau glowed under powerful lights. This kind of ridiculous stagecraft, this was his world—Reggie’s world, really. He could do this.

  Now the press was let into the Great Court and began immediately to snap pictures and pepper John with questions. They were kept at a distance, and he smiled and waved back and pretended not to hear them. A servant (who was not wearing pink, John noted) came with a bone china teapot on a silver tray and placed it in the center of the table. John took the lid off the teapot, under the pretense of smelling the tea, and slipped a four-leaf clover and a primrose unnoticed into the brew.

  “Please don’t touch the service, sir,” said the servant.

  “Sorry.”

  Erno rubbed his palms into his eyes and tried to focus on something apart from his sister mumbling in her sleep in the next room.

  The hours of the day

  pass swiftly by, then drift away …

  Twenty-four hours in the day, obviously, thought Erno, and he wrote 24 beside 51 and 33.

  and yet there’s nothing, less than nothing left to tell.

  Here he stumbled, until remembering that a coordinate could be positive or negative. Negative latitude meant it was south of the equator. Negative longitude was west of the prime meridian. So less than nothing is negative one, maybe? Or even negative zero. The way Mr. Wilson had repeated the word “nothing” made Erno think the latter was more likely.