The Trap

by Michael Grant

  But worse was the morbid terror of the goo oozing from the Lepercons’ many wounds.

  Mack suffered from twenty-one known phobias—unreasonable fears. We don’t have time to list them all, but they ran the gamut from fear of puppets to a fear of fear itself, which is called phobophobia.

  The thing with phobias is that they aren’t reasonable fears, such as a fear of clowns or brussels sprouts or reality shows. Phobias are at a whole different level. The phobia panic builds and builds until pretty soon a person just loses it altogether.

  And that’s what was happening to Mack. The grossness of the blue cheese goo—the unbelievable disgustingness of it, the football player’s armpit smell of it—was working on the scared little monkey brain buried deep down inside Mack’s otherwise pretty cool human brain.

  Of course the phobia thing wouldn’t be a problem if he were dead. In minutes, if not seconds, one of the needles would hit an artery or an eyeball or go in through Mack’s ear. He realized then that this wasn’t just a fight: it was life and death.

  There were words Mack could use, Vargran words, that could freeze time and let him escape. But it was hard to think of them when a dozen evil midgets were jabbing you with needles and when a sick fear was dumping all sorts of panic chemicals into your system.

  Then it came to him! He knew the Vargran command. It was ret click-ur.

  Not that hard to say, except that just as he was forming the words, a needle jabbed him in the gum. It wasn’t that hard a hit; it just scraped his gum. It didn’t knock out a tooth or anything, but the Lepercon wasn’t backing away. He had hold of Mack’s shirt with one hand and had hauled himself up onto Mack’s chest, and with his free hand he was trying to shove the knitting needle right down Mack’s throat.

  Mack bit down hard on the needle. He held it tight with his going-to-need-braces-in-a-few-years teeth.

  He tried to pull the Lepercon away, but the thing was swarming him. At least six of the things were on his body, hauling at him, grabbing handfuls of shirt and hair, using belt, nose, and ears as climbing grips.

  And smelling like a hobo’s sneakers.

  The needle scraped against Mack’s teeth. If he opened his mouth to say the spell, he would die.

  “Esk-ma belast!”

  But it wasn’t Mack who said this; it was Jarrah.

  She was a mess, hair all askew, and somewhat covered in Lepercon goo. She looked scared, wild, and furious.

  Stefan stomped a heel onto one of the Lepercons, which popped like a noxious water balloon. He yanked the needle out of his hair, laughed happily—this was Stefan’s idea of a party—and ran (finally!) to help Mack.

  But Mack didn’t need as much help anymore. The Lepercon on his shoulder fell heavily to the ground. The one on his chest—the one trying to jab a knitting needle down his throat—was changing. The small, wrinkled ShamWow face was becoming smoother, bigger, fuller. The wrinkles were filling in. Plumping.

  Mack felt the weight of the creature grow. He felt his shirt stretch farther and farther until the Lepercon lost his grip and slid, moaning (“Agara . . . agara . . .”), to the floor.

  Mack glanced wildly around. All the Lepercons were growing. Larger. Heavier. They were no longer the size of fat cats; they were the size of moderately full garbage bags. And still growing.

  They were not moving much.

  The needles looked tiny now in their bratwurst-sized fingers.

  Mack spit the needle out of his mouth and said, “Whoa.”

  “Huh,” Stefan remarked. He seemed disappointed.

  Jarrah, looking shell-shocked, came to them. The Lepercons were now the size of cows. Stunned bystanders stared in awe and horror. Some took pictures with their cell phones. YouTube would be getting some very odd uploads. Thumbs flew across touch screens: Twitter was getting the news out.

  Other folks stolidly wheeled their luggage past as though the problem of rapidly enlarging, leprous, cheese-stuffed monsters was just another obstacle to be overcome by the weary traveling public.

  “What did you do?” Mack asked Jarrah, panting.

  “It was all I could think of. I don’t know that much Vargran,” Jarrah said. “I was trying to say ‘follow.’ I was going to lead them away.”

  “They would have killed you,” Mack said.

  “Eh,” Jarrah said. “They might have tried.”

  Mack intercepted an admiring look from Stefan. Jarrah was his kind of girl.

  “I think what I actually said must have been ‘grow,’ not ‘follow.’ ‘Grow monster.’”

  “‘Grow monster’?”

  Jarrah looked sheepish. “Yeah, that could have gone badly, eh?”

  The Lepercons were still getting bigger. In fact, they were crowding the baggage area. Lepercons weren’t built to be the size of parade balloons, so they were as helpless as slugs. Big, giant slugs.

  “Agara!” the one-legged Lepercon slurred.

  “Yeah? Agara you, you big fat scab!” Jarrah snapped.

  Mack spotted his bag on the carousel. He snagged it and wedged it onto the luggage cart along with Jarrah’s and Stefan’s luggage.

  Nine Iron was just coming around on the carousel, still wedged between a garment bag and a duffel.

  “You wait right there!” Nine Iron raged. “I’m coming for—”

  He paused. Fumbled for his plastic mouthpiece. Breathed. Breathed.

  Breathed.

  Breathed.

  “—you!”

  Mack was breathing as hard as Nine Iron. The fear of death was gone, but he was now surrounded by what had to be a thousand pounds of warm blue cheese or a blue cheeselike product.

  Nine Iron was struggling to get up off the carousel, but he was sitting kind of far down, with his legs over the side, so he had to use his walking stick to get himself up. Unfortunately, since Nine Iron was moving, the floor was also moving, and he couldn’t get the stick . . . Well, you get the picture.

  “Do you have any idea what Lepercons cost?” Nine Iron cried.

  “Leave me alone, you crazy old man!” Mack yelled.

  “I’ll follow you to—”

  He breathed. Breathed.

  And then the carousel ran Nine Iron straight into the engorging, growing, swelling, bloated butt cheek of a massive Lepercon.

  So Mack didn’t hear where exactly Nine Iron was going to follow him. He just heard a sort of angry “Mmmphh mmmph!”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Jarrah said. “Place smells.”

  “Blueturophobia,” Mack said. “It’s a fear of blue cheese.”

  “Are you going to have one of your crazy fits?” Stefan asked.

  “Not if you knock me out, throw me in a taxi, and don’t wake me up until I’m standing in a shower,” Mack said.

  Five seconds later Mack was draped over the luggage. Stefan wheeled him—blissfully unconscious—toward the exit.

  Chapter Three

  Now we’ll explain all the stuff we didn’t explain earlier. It’s called “exposition.” Toss that word into the middle of your next English class. Your teacher will be like, “Wow, someone is actually paying attention!” That will be kind of sad, really.

  David “Mack” MacAvoy was a normal-looking kid living a normal life in the almost normal city of Sedona, Arizona. He had no idea that he would be called upon to save the world from a terrible evil.

  A terrible evil no one had actually heard of.

  Everyone expects the world to eventually be destroyed by some combination of global warming, a giant asteroid strike, the sun going supernova, the planet falling off its axis, a wandering black hole, the explosion of the giant magma-filled zit below Yellowstone— Oh, you hadn’t heard about that? Well, it’s best not to think about it—or a rapidly spreading disease that turns people into flesh-eating zombies.

  Asteroids, exploding sun, global warming, black hole, magma pimple, and zombie apocalypse—those are all happening for sure. Those are the things we know about.

  But in the twenty-first
century absolutely no one was worrying about the imminent release of the Pale Queen from the World Beneath, where she’d been imprisoned for three thousand years.

  It’s always the thing you’re not worrying about that gets you. You’d think Mack would have realized that before most. After all, Mack suffered from a whole long list of phobias.

  He had arachnophobia, fear of spiders. Dentophobia, fear of dentists. Pyrophobia, fear of fire (which was ironic considering he’d used a Vargran spell to turn into a sort of minisun while fighting Ereskigal at one point).

  He had pupaphobia, fear of puppets; trypanophobia, fear of getting shots; thalassophobia, fear of oceans—which led fairly naturally to selachophobia, fear of sharks.

  And as mentioned earlier, phobophobia, which is the fear of developing more fears.

  The mother of all fears for Mack was claustrophobia, fear of small, enclosed spaces. Of being buried alive. Not that anyone would exactly enjoy that, but Mack could freak out just thinking about it.

  But despite his close relationship with fear, Mack hadn’t known there was a Pale Queen about to be released from the World Beneath.

  (By the way, if you know all this because you read the first book? You can skip this chapter and go to the next one. My feelings won’t be hurt.)

  Mack’s part in that three-thousand-year-old story began when he was about to get the snot—excuse me, mucus—beaten out of him by Stefan Marr, King of All Bullies at Richard Gere Middle School. (Go, Fighting Pupfish!)

  Just as the beating was scheduled to start, Grimluk appeared. Ghostlike. Special effects time. Booga booga.

  Grimluk’s appearance froze time for a few seconds while he began to lay out the bad news for Mack. In effect, “Dude, you are one of a select group called the Magnificent Twelve. You need to drop out of school, assemble the rest of the Magnifica from the four corners of the Earth, learn this magic language called Vargran, and take down the Pale Queen when she emerges from her underground lair.”

  Those weren’t Grimluk’s exact words. For one thing, Grimluk would never say “dude.”

  Unfortunately Grimluk wasn’t able to sit down and have a nice long chat and explain everything since he could only appear briefly—usually in the reflective chrome surface of a bathroom fixture. So Mack had to operate on very limited information.

  The golem that Mack discovered living in Mack’s room didn’t fill in too many details, either.

  A golem, as you may know, is a sort of robot made of clay. The golem maker writes down an instruction and puts it in the golem’s mouth. Then the golem comes alive and does whatever the instruction says.

  In the case of the golem in Mack’s bedroom, the message said, “Be Mack.” So the golem had done its best to look and sound like Mack. He might not be good enough to fool a really close observer, someone who really knew Mack well, but he fooled Mack’s parents.

  Still, even with a golem, Mack didn’t go rushing off to save the world, not right away, because although Mack was open-minded about the whole ancient, smelly, Grimluk-manifestations thing, he wasn’t stupid. He needed more information before doing something reckless.

  The “more information” came in the form of Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout trying to assassinate Mack by pushing a basketload of highly poisonous snakes into Mack’s house. And later, that same Nine Iron tried to run Mack through with a sword while Mack was taking a . . . um . . . utilizing the wall-mounted facilities in the boys’ bathroom.

  Having escaped the snakes and the sword, Mack was set upon by two Skirrit, who invaded the school and tried to kill him. Skirrit are one of the evil races that obey the Pale Queen. Think really large grasshoppers walking erect. Grasshoppers or maybe praying mantises, possibly cicadas. Anyway, insectlike and as tall as a short man.

  Clearly Richard Gere Middle School needed some new signage. They had a sign forbidding drugs, cigarettes, guns, and alcohol. They had another sign forbidding bikes, skateboards, rollerblades, and scooters. And a third sign forbade iPods, iPhones, and anything else “i.” They even had a sign proclaiming the school a nuclear-free zone and a peanut-free zone.

  Which was good in case terrorists ever came up with a nuclear peanut.

  But there was no sign forbidding Nafia assassins or evil insectoid species in service to the Mother of All Monsters.

  Being almost killed by snakes and then chased into a limousine by the Skirrit definitely helped convince Mack to save the world. Plus, in the limousine was an elegant young woman named Rose Everlast, who worked for a very respectable accounting firm. Rose handed Mack and Stefan passports under fake names, and a credit card tied to a million-dollar account.

  So, that’s where we are. Everything explained.

  Except for Princess Ereskigal, known in Greek mythology as Persephone and in Norse mythology as Hel. Not a real popular person, whatever name she used.

  Fortunately Mack had used some words of Vargran and turned Risky into burned toast. She was gone. Dead. Vapor. No longer a worry. A ghost. History.

  Are you buying that? No?

  You’re wise to be suspicious. Because Princess Ereskigal is very, very hard to kill.

  Chapter Four

  ABOUT A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, GIVE OR TAKE . . .

  You might think that Patrick Trout, the feared Nafia assassin—who would come to be called Paddy and, still later, Nine Iron—would be a product of a bad upbringing.

  But no. He was just a rotten kid.

  Patrick Joseph Trout was born eighteen seconds after his identical twin, Liam Sean Trout. The birth took place in the back of an oat wagon on the dirt road between the small village of Loathbog and the town of Trollbog.

  Within seconds of his birth, Paddy was trying to bite through his twin brother’s umbilical cord. Of course Paddy had no teeth—any more than any newborn would—so all he could do was attempt to gum his brother to death, gnawing and crying in a thin newborn wail.

  Gnaw gnaw gnaw, waaaah! Gnaw gnaw gnaw, waaaah!

  He was a very bad baby.

  Both Loathbog and Trollbog were in County Grind. County Grind was known for its beautiful vistas of shockingly green fields, bright pink pigs, and pale amber whiskey.

  The reason the Trout family was on its way to Trollbog was to sell their load of oats. No one grew better oats than the Trouts, and Mother Trout was justly renowned for her many oat recipes: oats, oats with salt, oat cereal, oat bread, charred oats, grilled oats, fricasseed oats, barbecued oats, oat kabob, smoked oats, oat fondue, oat pie, oat loaf, oat terrine, Grimos (like Cheerios but not), oats stuffed with peat, oats à la turf, oats with three types of lichen, oats sous vide (she was an early pioneer in the technique), oats with pig feet, oats with pig snout, oats with a reduction of feet and snouts, oat-stuffed pig intestine, oat-stuffed pig stomach, oat-stuffed pig-organ-no-one-knows-the-name-of, oats with whiskey, and of course, oatmeal.

  Patrick and Liam were expected to grow up and take over the oat farm. Indeed, they were raised to care about little else. Once Patrick mentioned that some people enjoyed wheat, and his father promptly smacked him with a loaf of oat bread.

  Not stale oat bread, because that’ll kill you.

  By the time he was nine, Patrick could identify all major types of oat blight: oat weevils, oat rust, oat worm, oat mold, false oat mold, and oat-eating falcons.

  See, he was trying to be good. Trying not to be just evil. Really, he was.

  But as hard as Patrick worked at the science of oats, Liam, as the firstborn, got all the attention from their father. This was because County Grind had a primogeniture law, which meant that the firstborn would inherit everything. The second son was a sort of spare part. A sort of unpaid employee. Only if Liam died would the farm go to Patrick.

  But Liam was even healthier than Patrick. So no such luck.

  Unless . . .

  But murder was frowned on in Loathbog, especially murder of a brother. The punishment was to be drawn and quartered by four powerful horses. Now, since no one could afford horses in Loathbo
g, they used pigs. And since pigs weren’t really strong enough to pull a person apart, it wasn’t exactly a death sentence. But it was humiliating, and you could easily dislocate a shoulder.

  Cars had just been invented, so there was some thought given to using cars for the drawing and quartering. But seriously, if you can’t afford a horse, you sure can’t afford a car. I mean, please. Cars in Loathbog? No. It was still pig-drawn wagons in Loathbog. After all, County Grind wasn’t exactly County Snoot.

  County Snoot: everyone hated those guys.

  One day when Patrick was about twelve, his father had a little talk with him. He sat him down on a bale of oats and said, “Um . . . wait, it will come to me . . . Patrick! Yes, I knew I’d remember your name.”

  “My friends call me Paddy,” he answered tersely.

  “You have friends? Ah-ha-ha-ha, that’s a good one.” Mr. Trout slapped his knee. Patrick’s knee. “Sure an’ ye have the gift o’ blarney, that ye do, that ye do, laddie buck.”

  I could kill you with a pitchfork, old man is what Patrick did not say, but what he thought.

  “Well, I’ll get right to it, um . . .”

  “Paddy.”

  “Whatever. As you know, your brother, Liam, is to inherit the farm when your sainted mother ’n’ me shuffle off this mortal coil. Now, normally you could stay on and work for Liam.”

  Patrick produced a sort of low growl mixed with a serpentine hiss.

  “But Liam doesn’t much like the notion of you hanging around and trying to kill him.”

  “Me?” Paddy said innocently. “Try to kill him? Me? That’s crazy! I’m innocent! Oh, the pain of false accusation!” Then he leaned in close to his father and snarled, “So who told you?”

  “The point is, son, we can’t have you trying to murder your brother all the time. We’re sending you to America.”

  “America?”

  “For the last nine years your mother has saved all her prize money from the County Grind Fair oat-cooking competitions, and we’ve now got the money to send you abroad.”

  “Wait. She’s been saving up to get rid of me since I was three years old?”