by Adam Rex
“Kids,” said Biggs, pointing. “Sky.”
Everyone looked as the fire faded, burned out as if for lack of oxygen. The marines cheered. They could see now that it was early morning—the sun would be up soon.
But there was still a dark scar in the heavens. Emily watched it.
“Young lady,” said the queen as the men high-fived all around her. “Is it not over?”
Emily searched her mind. “Nimue’s dead,” she said. “But it’s feeding on itself, now.”
John sobbed, sitting awkwardly in an empty spot where his friend had been. Mick put a hand on his shoulder.
“We were always taking the mickey out of each other,” said John. “Just teasing, you know? But what if he didn’t know I liked him?” He wiped his face. “What . . . what if he didn’t like me?” he added, as if that wasn’t a thought that occurred to him much.
“Yeh’ve no cause to worry,” said Mick. “An elf gets to be my age, an’ he sees how people are.”
There was a mewing sound, and a plain gray cat approached and rubbed itself from head to tail against John’s hip.
“Hullo,” John sniffed. “Is this . . . is this the unicat? What was Harvey calling him . . . Grimalkin?”
“Not a unicat no more,” said Mick.
John lifted the animal into his lap. “Still a good boy, though.”
The staff sergeant drew up alongside them.
“I’m sorry to interrupt your . . . ,” he trailed off. “I’m sorry. But I thought you two would want to hear the reports I’m getting from outside.”
John smiled wanly up at him. “It’s over, isn’t it?” And he had a look that said “It has to be. After all that.”
“The fire’s cleared. There’s no one left at that rift business ’cept the cast of Fantasia. But the blackness is still in the sky, and the lightning . . .” The staff sergeant rubbed his neck. “And it’s getting worse. I think your friend only bought us time. Time for what, I got no idea.”
“Hmm,” said Mick.
John turned and seized the leprechaun’s shoulders. “Mick, before . . . before you said you had an inkling where Scott was going, and what he was doing. Does he know how to fix this?”
Mick nodded slowly. “I’ve been thinkin’ it over. And I think he might, at that. It won’t be easy, though, and it will be dangerous.”
“Is this your son we’re talking about?” asked the marine. “If he had information, he should have shared it with someone with the training to see it through.”
“What trainin’ would that be? I’ll be keepin’ my money on Scott Doe.”
“Mick,” John pleaded. “Mick, what is my boy up to?”
CHAPTER 29
Here’s what Scott was up to:
He breathed evenly through his mouth to keep from freaking out, throwing up, and he looked out the big bay door of what Erno would later inform him was a Black Hawk helicopter as it whisked him over the treetops.
It was like being in the stomach of a huge dragonfly, he thought. And then he thought, no, actually—he’d spent a little time inside a stomach once, and this wasn’t really like that at all. It was really more like being inside a military helicopter. Scott sat back and adjusted his helmet, which felt huge, which felt like a bucket.
“What’s the plan here, buddy?” asked Haskoll. Scott flinched. He’d no idea the ghost had stowed himself on board. “Running away?”
“I’m busy, Haskoll. Why don’t you go teach Papa the true meaning of Christmas or something?”
“I ask—and you just tell me if this is a sore subject, big guy—because all the danger seems to be back in Goodborough, with all your friends and loved ones.”
“I’m about to try something stupid,” Scott told him. “Stupid and so complicated it’s giving me a migraine and if any little part of it goes wrong, I die.”
“Sweet. Death’s not so bad. Me an’ you’ll hang out more. We’ll sneak into movies.”
“If you don’t mind,” Scott told Haskoll, “I’d rather be alone right now.”
“Wish I could oblige, sir” came a voice through Scott’s bucket of a helmet. “But somebody has to fly the helicopter.” He understood after a moment that it was the pilot, speaking to him over a radio.
“Um, yeah. Sorry,” said Scott. “I was just talking to myself.”
“If you don’t mind me saying so, sir, you seem to do that a lot.”
Possibly, thought Scott. He couldn’t see Haskoll anymore. “Do you know why you’re taking me to the Grand Canyon?” he asked the pilot.
“Yes, sir. I am taking you because those are my orders. Any other reason you think I should know about?”
Scott smiled sort of ruefully. “I could tell you, but you wouldn’t believe me.”
“On a day like this one, I might believe just about anything.”
Scott shrugged. Not that the pilot could see him. “You’re taking me there because I lost my sister.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s kind of hard to explain.”
“Suit yourself. That’s the canyon coming up on your right, by the way.”
As if Scott needed telling. He marveled at it. He marveled that, despite all the improbable things he’d seen in the last six months, this should still amaze him. The Grand Canyon was a rough Deco metropolis of painted rock cathedrals and sky islands. A red wound in the earth, filled with mountains.
“Park Service has cleared the area, so I’ll be able to bring us down right next to the Skywalk.”
The Skywalk was as Rudesby had described it—a huge bend of glass and steel that jutted out like a shelf over the rim of the canyon. It glinted in the glare of two nearby spotlights.
They set down beside one of the ends of the horseshoe, and Scott jumped free quickly, ducking under the rotors, and jogged to the rim. He still wore his helmet. He was vaguely aware of a number of distant men and women—park rangers, maybe, or just spectators who were waiting to see who was so important that he could have the Skywalk all to himself. He had this idea that the pilot, or any of them, might try to stop him if they had too much time to think about what he was doing, so he had to move fast. Still, it took faith to take that first step out onto the glass deck, with only darkness beneath his feet.
The earth trembled, like an earthquake. Great, thought Scott. And I’m standing on a big glass U on the side of a cliff.
As he walked, he kept his eyes on the sky. It looked strange, in a way he couldn’t define. It was going to be on fire soon, but he was going to miss most of that.
The pilot was following him onto the deck. Scott came to a stop at the halfway point, far out over this giant dark nothing, and hoisted his belly up onto the railing so that he could peer below.
“Sir?” said the pilot. “Sir, be careful.”
He saw it—a giant shimmering thumbprint, a smear of air just below the northern tip of the Skywalk. A rift.
“Good,” he breathed. “Okay.” He hurdled up onto the rail, and balanced there.
“Sir! Sir? I need you to get down immediately and step back from the railing!”
“What’s about to happen . . . ,” Scott told him, “you should know afterward that it wasn’t an accident. That I meant to do it, and that you shouldn’t feel bad, if it goes wrong.”
“Sir, get down now!”
“And if it goes right, then there’s about to be an eagle. So watch out for that,” Scott added, and jumped.
CHAPTER 30
He didn’t remember closing his eyes, but moments later he tumbled into a coarse web of thick ropes and opened them to find himself suspended a dizzying fifty feet over the stone floor below. And on the floor, a dead whale. Something screeched, and he had to give it some thought before deciding that it hadn’t been him.
He yanked off his helmet and disentangled his legs, and rolled over in the net to see three pairs of furious eyes staring down at him.
“Eagles,” said Haskoll. “Cool. So where are we, that pixie witch’s castle?”
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Scott scrambled clumsily to the edge of the net as the eagles watched him from their perches above. One of them shifted from side to side on its cartoonishly deadly feet.
“You know,” Haskoll said, “last time I saw this place, there was a bigger-than-average dragon crashing through it. How’d you know it would still be standing?”
“Didn’t,” said Scott as he found a rolled rope ladder and let it unfurl to the floor. “But Fray did say something about this place being held together by magic.”
“Did I?” asked a dry voice. Scott looked about as he descended the ladder and saw the tiny figure of Fray waiting where it touched the floor.
Scott paused, but Fray didn’t look like she was out for blood. He finished his descent and stepped gingerly away from the ladder, and the pixie. Behind him was the massive flipper of the poor dead animal that Saxbriton had traded places with only two days before.
“When you and your friends crossed over, you left this behind,” said Fray, nodding at the whale. “I’ve been keeping it for you, in case you came back for it. If you hadn’t claimed it in a few days I was going to put up flyers.”
“Sorry,” said Scott. “Can you maybe just . . . magic it away?”
Fray narrowed her eyes. “I told you once before, I’m—”
“Not a genie, right. Sorry.”
Fray tilted her head. “You know what magic is, don’t you, boy?”
Scott scanned the great hall of the witch’s castle. The huge leaded window was still broken, and a salt wind whipped in and made everything smell like whale. The whale itself nosed out through the ruined window and onto the rocks. Down the north wall, about even with the animal’s lifeless eye, Scott could see the rift he thought he wanted.
Fray answered her own question. “It’s stubborn belief. It’s a tantrum against the universe. You throw your tantrum with such ferocious conviction that the universe breaks down and gives you your candy.”
There was also, for some reason, a penguin in here. It skirted the edge of the hall. It had a look of deep loneliness that only solitary penguins in castles can really pull off.
Then Scott heard a rusty metal squeak. A dog and a crew of Fray’s ragged humans came up through the floor. Three of them wore only their underwear and confused, panicky expressions. Rudesby waved at him. They were letting him wear pants now.
“Strength of belief has never been a difficulty for me,” Fray continued. “It got me cast out of polite society and branded a witch. My Morenwyn believed in the cause of the princes—Denzil’s boys—and left with them. What do you believe in, boy?”
“Ghosts,” said Haskoll. “Isn’t that adorable?”
“I believe . . . ,” said Scott, “that you can help me save both of our worlds. Before the elves ruin everything. I’m here for the scabbard.”
Fray frowned. “The . . . ,” she began, and then her eyes lit. “The scabbard. Of course. I’ve been an idiot. Is it—”
“King Arthur’s, yeah,” said Scott. “Morgan le Fay stole it from him and threw it into the sea. It must have washed up here. It’s probably why there are so many rifts in this place, don’t you think? It’s warping reality with its magic.”
Fray lost herself in thought, muttering and chewing a nail. Her giants shifted uncomfortably in the distance. One of them was wearing a pink rubber helmet, and only then did Scott realize that the three men in their underwear must be Freemen who’d come to Pretannica when Scott, John, and Merle had left it. Maybe the penguin had traded with the queen? Or Mick?
“I have a notion of what you’re thinking,” said Fray finally. “I wonder if it would have worked. But alas, the thing you seek is currently under three hundred thousand pounds of whale.”
Scott turned and winced at the thing. “Oh,” he said. “Right.” He worked his way, hand over hand, down the side of the animal until he reached the spot where he thought the witch’s golden monument might be.
“To answer your question,” said Fray, “no. I cannot simply magic this away. It was our intention to begin carving it up and hauling the pieces out to the rocks to feel the gulls—but that will take weeks.”
“Haskoll?” said Scott as he searched the chamber for the ghost. “Are you still here?”
“Up here, buddy! Just messin’ with the eagles.”
“To whom do you speak, boy?”
“Haskoll . . . you could get that scabbard, couldn’t you?”
Haskoll descended slowly, like a leaky balloon. “S’pose I could, champ. Don’t want to, though.”
“You wouldn’t be doing it for me,” said Scott, feeling desperate and antsy. “It’ll save the whole world! Two worlds!”
“I’m dead,” said Haskoll. “What do I care about the world?”
“Boy . . . ,” said Fray as she peered around the room. “Are you claiming there’s a presence here?”
“Lemme guess—you’re going to tell me there are no such thing as ghosts now, aren’t you?”
“Oh, there are ghosts,” said Fray. “After a fashion. But they are exceedingly rare. So many conditions must be met before such a thing can be. Was this Haskoll killed by magic? Did he leave something unfinished? Was he one of the Fay?”
“Um. A pooka made a piece of airplane fall on him, yeah.” Scott felt iffy about reminding Haskoll what he’d been in the middle of doing when he died. “And he’s a changeling, like me.”
“Stop talking about me like I’m not in the room,” said Haskoll.
“You aren’t in the room,” Scott reminded him.
“It isn’t his spirit who speaks to you,” said Fray. “It’s his glamour. The last vestige of it, unleashed onto the world.”
“I’m not glamour,” said Haskoll, scowling. “I’m me.”
“The glamour thinks it’s the man. It is animated by the last wish, the thing left undone, the unfinished business. His business is with you, and this is why you see him.”
Scott and Haskoll looked at each other. Haskoll drifted a bit closer.
“Well, shoot,” he said. “I think I can remember what my business was with Scotty here.”
But Scott—Scott thought maybe he understood Haskoll after all. He knew better than to share this with Haskoll, though. The man struck him as the type who didn’t want to be understood. Who might do something crazy, just to prove you wrong. But here’s what Scott thought: that Haskoll had had every opportunity to kill him, or get him killed, over the past eight days. And he hadn’t. He thought he understood Haskoll’s unfinished business better than Haskoll.
“Two worlds,” Scott said, piercing the hush of the room, barely. “Everyone you’ve ever known, saved. I just need that scabbard.”
Haskoll’s face pruned, looked suddenly ghoulish. “Didn’t you hear Thumbelina? I’m not . . . I’m not even a proper ghost! When Haskoll was alive, he didn’t care about anyone or anything, and I’m less a man than he ever was! I got no stake! None of this is real—it’s just some dumb story!”
There was another rumble—through the ground, the air, across every mote of reality.
“So . . . don’t you want to know how it ends?” asked Scott.
Haskoll stared at him. And then the whale. He smirked. Then he took and held a deep breath, which probably wasn’t strictly necessary, and dove into the whale.
The castle was pretty quiet.
“So,” Scott said to Fray after a moment. “Too bad about your window. It was nice.”
“Took two weeks of incantations to craft it, and half a second to break.” Fray sighed.
“I . . . guess my sister left with Fi and your daughter?”
“She did. I can only tell you that she looked well when she did so.”
“Thanks.”
Then a spectral arm thrust up out of the top of the whale, out the blowhole, actually, and it was grasping the scabbard of Excalibur. Fray’s giants gasped.
“Da-da-da-daaa,” sang Haskoll, apparently trying to gild the moment with a little pomp. “Da-da-da-da-da-daa-da-da-da-da-da-da-
da-da-da-da-da-daa-da-da-daaaaa,” he continued. Maybe the Twentieth Century Fox theme was the only trumpety song Haskoll knew. The ghost emerged entirely from the whale and tossed the scabbard to Scott. Scott fumbled the catch but got it before it hit the floor.
“All right,” said Haskoll, “let’s see what you do with . . . with it. Hey. Hey, wait.” Haskoll’s already insubstantial form was beginning to pale. “Are you kidding me?”
“This was your unfinished business,” said Scott.
“What, going Dumpster diving in a dead whale? Come on!”
“Deciding. Deciding whether to help me or hurt me. I remember that night in the park, looking down the barrel of your gun while you made speeches. Talking, talking, talking. Stalling for time while you decided whether you could really shoot an unarmed eleven-year-old in the chest. And all this past week—just watching, never acting. Because you didn’t know who you were.”
“Not true,” said Haskoll, or the barest wisp of Haskoll. “Not true. I’m cold-blooded. I could have killed you. I still can.”
And the ghost rushed Scott, bleeding glamour, losing shape, until it flew apart just inches from his face and faded back into the ether.
“He’s left this world, hasn’t he?” asked Fray.
“Yes,” said Scott. “I mean, I think so.”
“How odd. I could not feel him till I felt his passing. Like a ringing in the ear, heard only in its sudden absence.”
“Okay. Which one of these rifts goes to the ocean?”
Fray jerked her head. “The ocean? Surely not. I have a rift that can take you to your home in England, if I shrink you first.”
Scott shook his head and thought of his friends, and his father. “My home is in New Jersey. Currently. Please—the ocean rift. I kinda sorta know what I’m doing.”
Fray shrugged theatrically and waved her hand at a low stall near the ruined window. “Mea octagon est vestra octagon,” she muttered.
It was a small stall, with an oily octagon barely bigger than a stop sign. So Scott dropped into a squat, curled himself into the rift, and waited. The scabbard dug into his armpit like a crutch. But not like a metal crutch—it was inexplicably warm.