The Key

by Michael Grant

  Ah, Mack thought: fairy dust. That would make sense.

  He took a step toward MacGuffin. “See? I’m not afraid of you.”

  Well, of course he was. Because as you know, among Mack’s numerous phobias was an irrational fear of beards. He was fine with beards at a distance. But a beard up close caused him acute feelings of panic.

  He’d once had a horrible dream in which he’d been locked in a room full of rabbis, imams, and Santa Clauses. In his dream he had searched frantically through Santa’s bag, looking for a razor. All he had found were socks.

  The mere memory of that dream gave him the shakes.

  Mack had a beard comfort zone of about ten feet. A beard farther away than that just made him vaguely nauseous. A beard at, say, eight feet would make him start to feel the first slight edge of panic. And a beard within three feet would have him sweating, weeping, and begging an unfeeling heaven for an angel-barber armed with clippers to save him.

  MacGuffin unfortunately had the worst of all possible beards: wild and red. So subtract a foot from each of those distances.

  At a distance of five feet, Mack wasn’t sure he could incinerate MacGuffin. At the same time, he wasn’t sure he could force himself to move any closer.

  Somewhere there was a math formula that balanced “likelihood of incineration” against “fear of beards,” but Mack didn’t know it. He had probably been daydreaming in that class.

  “You should be afraid,” Connie said, and made an expressive hand gesture that was a pantomime of throat cutting. “You should be very afraid.”

  Mack needed to get closer to use the Vargran spell. He wished that Connie would get out of the way because he figured she was just blinded by love, and he didn’t need to burn her up.

  MacGuffin, on the other hand, had it coming.

  Now out of the coffin-cell, out in the air with a blue sky overhead and a cool breeze on his face, Mack was recovering fast from his night of terror but now edging into full-blown beard panic.

  But here’s the thing about Mack: he was scared of many things, but he wasn’t weak. He could hold it together. Usually.

  Except for times when he couldn’t.

  “Where are my friends?” Mack demanded, and took another bold step forward.

  MacGuffin shot a conspiratorial look at Connie. The two of them seemed to share a private laugh.

  “You don’t need to worry about your friends,” Connie said. “In a few minutes you won’t need to worry about anything at all. Ever again.”

  Another step closer. Four feet from a bushy red beard!

  Close enough. And now Mack decided it was too bad about Connie, but she was a bad, bad fairy. And if Mack died here, all of humanity was doomed.

  “Fur th’ crime o’ invading mah secret hame ’n’ trying tae steal mah possessions, ah sentence ye tae death, Mack o’ th’ Magnifica!” MacGuffin cried, and pounded his stick on the ground.

  “Oh yeah?” Mack snarled. “And I sentence you to fry like a hamburger.” With a supreme effort of courage he closed his eyes and leaped toward MacGuffin and his beard and cried, “E-ma edras!”

  The light was like an explosion. Like someone had taken all the light of the sun, squeezed it into a balloon, then popped that balloon.

  It was like a small nuclear fireball.

  The heat instantly incinerated two skeletal guards.

  It scorched the very walls and made the mortar bubble from between the seams of the stones.

  MacGuffin and Connie wavered, like reflections in troubled water.

  But not like they were burning up.

  The light faded. The searing heat, which had spared Mack as the one who had cast the spell, dissipated.

  And MacGuffin still sat calmly while Connie floated on gossamer wings.

  “Um …,” Mack said. “Why … why aren’t you …”

  “Dead?” MacGuffin asked, and burst out laughing. “Whit a stoatin’ gowk A’d be tae let ye wirk a Vargran spell oan me.”

  Which in English was, “What am I, a moron?”

  “Turn around, you foolish child,” Connie said.

  Slowly Mack turned.

  There at the far end of the courtyard was the throne, and MacGuffin upon it. The appearance—the illusion—of MacGuffin just a few feet away from Mack faded like the last scene of a movie.

  “Tis nae enough tae huv th’ power, ye mist huv th’ cunning tae uise it.”

  Or: “It’s not enough to have the power, you must have the cunning to use it.”

  A half dozen skeletons of various species came at a rush.

  “You’ve used up your enlightened puissance for a while,” Connie said. “And by the time you are strong enough to cast another Vargran spell … well …”

  And that is how we come to the point where Mack was bound in the basket of a trebuchet.

  “Cheerio the nou, ye scunner,” MacGuffin said, and he swung the sword.

  The blade parted the frayed rope.

  Gravity worked the way it usually does, and the big basket of rocks dropped like a big basket of rocks.

  “Aaaahhh!” Mack screamed.

  It was like being shot from a cannon.

  Mack flew like … okay, like a cannonball.

  The flight lasted only seconds. Then he hit the wall of Urquhart Castle. His bones were all broken. His skull popped open like a dropped melon. He was dead before the gelatinous mass of his pulverized body could ooze down to—

  Okay, that’s not what happened. It’s what would have happened. Except that Stefan had made good on his promise to round up a crowd.

  He had done it by spotting a pair of tour buses that were parked just off the road at Urquhart Castle, waiting to visit said castle and watch the sun rise and light up Loch Ness.

  Stefan banged on the doors and then each of the windows of the buses, hammering them with his fists and yelling, “The Loch Ness monster is running around loose! Grab your cameras!”

  For a while the sleepy tourists just stared at him. Then, one man—a man with two cameras slung around his neck—broke and ran for the door.

  “This way!” Stefan shouted, and the man, bless his gullible heart, followed.

  Well, that was all it took. Because there was no way the rest of the tourists were going to sit idly by while that one guy got all the good pictures.

  In a flash both buses were gushing forth the usual bus-tourist folk: people in Bermuda shorts who had no business wearing shorts; old couples with matching plaid outfits; sullen goth teenagers who couldn’t believe they were stuck touring with their grandparents OMG; guys with unfortunate facial hair; women in giant bonnets; the kind of old dudes who like to repeat stupid jokes until you laugh just to make them stop; cheek pinchers; sour-faced crones; tiny Asian people who take pictures of everything, even the bus tires; vegans wearing hemp T-shirts—the entire cross section of subspecies Touristus fotograficus.15

  All of them raced after Stefan, who led them away from the actual lake and toward a hill that neither they (nor Stefan himself) could see.

  The crowd faltered then.

  They slowed.

  They began to think they were being made fools of. Then Jarrah, Xiao, and Dietmar rose from behind a stone wall.

  The three of them joined hands. They focused on what united them: affection and concern for Mack, a Determination16 to Stop the Pale Queen, and Regret17 at not getting some Magnum bars for themselves.

  Hands linked, with Jarrah in the middle.

  Hands linked, they climbed atop the stone wall. And for the first time in 3,000 years, a group spell was spoken in the Vargran language.

  “Oscur exelmo oo-ma!”

  The three Magnifica waited. Tense. Scared.

  And then, the goth tourist kid said, “Whoa.”

  She was a girl. Not quite a teen. Maybe … well, exactly … twelve years old.

  “There’s a castle there. On top of a mountain.”

  She was with her grandparents. Not the wrinkled-up type of grandparents—these
were the active, fit, nutrition-beverage-drinking kind of grandparents.

  And they saw it, too.

  Not all the tourists did. But some did. At least half of those standing there were looking up with their jaws down and their eyes wide and their cameras forgotten for a moment.

  “What are you all staring at?” others demanded, frustrated.

  One of the bus drivers said, “I’ve lived here all my life: I’ve never seen this. It’s … it’s impossible.”

  “No, not impossible,” Dietmar announced somewhat grandly. “It is the castle of William Blisterthöng MacGuffin, long concealed by fairy magic.”

  The crowd continued the jaws-hanging, eyes-wide thing, but now some were pointing their cameras and others were moving toward the castle.

  A scream pierced the air.

  A cannonball flew from the castle’s highest tower.

  The cannonball was writhing and yelling.

  Xiao, Jarrah, and Dietmar all saw it at the same instant.

  Stefan cried out in anguished recognition.

  No chance to use Vargran! The three Magnifica had used up their enlightened puissance revealing the castle.

  “Noooo!” Xiao cried.

  Mack flew in a long, flat arc straight toward the unyielding stone walls of Urquhart Castle.

  “Halk-ma simu (ch)ias!”

  The Vargran spell rang out clear and loud.

  And it came from the goth girl, who stood legs apart, both hands together, and pointing with her clenched fist, like she was aiming a gun or something, as Mack flew overhead.

  * * *

  Eleven

  * * *

  What do you think about in the seconds before death?

  Have you ever considered that? You’re probably considering it right now.

  In Mack’s case he was thinking about his life. Which, prior to Grimluk suddenly informing him of his importance in an age-old struggle between good and evil, had been pretty boring.

  And Mack was thinking about how great boring is. Boring is excellent, compared to dying.

  In those last seconds he was thinking about his mom. And screaming. And his dad. And screaming.

  And he was feeling guilty because now the world would not be saved and the Pale Queen would enslave all of humanity. She would probably outlaw video games and movies and fro-yo and Toaster Strudel and all the truly good things in the world.

  And then there was the screaming.

  And suddenly Mack heard a voice, audible even over the shriek of the wind whipping past.

  He didn’t think he recognized the voice. Then again, it’s sometimes hard to recognize voices when you’re screaming and hurtling to your death.

  “Halk-ma simu (ch)ias!”

  The walls of Urquhart Castle were so close that Mack could see ants crawling up the rock when all of a sudden he was free of the rope and his arms spread and caught the wind.

  The wind filled his wings and he soared!

  His what now?

  His wings!

  It strained very muscle fiber in his body. It was like he was being stretched on a rack, but his wings took the wind, filled, shot him up, up, up past the wall, so close that the tip of his nose scraped the rock, and then he was up over the walls, up in the air, zooming up into the sky.

  Up and up until momentum died away and he sort of hung there between acceleration and gravity.

  Gravity gently tugged at him, and he began to fall. But his wings—they were like a seagull’s wings, actually, white and swept back, but as wide in span as the largest condor’s—held him aloft.

  His feet were melted together and had sprouted a wide fan of feathers. The rest of him was pretty much regular old Mack.

  He caught an updraft and swooped low above a crowd of utterly amazed faces, all turned skyward.

  He would have liked to land, but no feet.

  So he hovered in the sky, riding the thermal,18 floating on an updraft of warm air rippling up from the grassy field.

  A girl with black lipstick dressed in black, white, and a few strategic accents of red, looked up at him and said, “Say, ‘Halk-ma simu (ch)ias!’”

  So because she seemed to know what was going on, Mack said, “Halk-ma simu (ch)ias!”

  And with that his wings folded in on themselves. And the feathered tail split again into legs.

  Unfortunately he was still about twenty feet in the air, so he dropped like a stone.

  Stefan leaped and caught him before he hit the ground.

  “Dude,” Stefan said, and set Mack on his feet.

  Mack’s legs felt like they might buckle. He had had a pretty bad twenty-four hours, really, and shakiness was natural.

  “Thanks,” Mack said to Stefan.

  “You’re alive,” Jarrah said with a satisfied grin. “Was it kind of cool?”

  His friends rushed to embrace him. Even Dietmar. And after some backslapping and whatnot, Mack disengaged and went to the goth girl.

  “You saved my life,” he said.

  “Oui,” she said. Which is French for “yeah.”

  “You’re one of us,” he said.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Sylvie Zola de Rochefort,” she said. It was a lot of name for a girl who wasn’t very big. She was definitely smaller than Jarrah and even smaller than Xiao.

  Her black hair was cut to chin length. Her eyes were dark and somewhat sad-looking. Her lashes were absurdly long and curved up to add a quizzical air to the sadness. Her skin was naturally pale—she didn’t seem to be wearing goth or emo white makeup. But her lipstick was black and her fingernails were bloodred.

  “My name is Mack. This is Jarrah, Xiao, Dietmar, and my friend and bodyguard, Stefan.”

  “Good catch, friend and bodyguard,” Sylvie said to Stefan.

  “Huh,” Stefan replied.

  “Where are you from, Sylvie?” Mack asked.

  “A tiny little town in France, called Fouras. It is nowhere special.”

  She pronounced special as spess-ee-al. Mack liked that. He liked it a lot.

  “Okay, life stories later. Right now we need to go get that Key from MacGuffin,” Mack said. (Give the boy credit: he recovered quickly.) “Who are all these people?”

  “Tourists,” Xiao said.

  “They can see the castle?”

  “Most of them appear to be aware of the castle,” Dietmar said.

  “Okay, then,” Mack said. Then he raised his voice to be heard by all. You might wonder why a bunch of tourists would listen to Mack. After all, he was just a kid. But it’s a fact: if you want to get people’s attention, being catapulted through the air and then turning into a sort of goofy bird is a pretty good way to do it.

  “Listen to me,” Mack said. “No one has seen that castle in a thousand years. A thousand years! Plus there are walking skeletons in there. Can you imagine the YouTube possibilities? The person who gets the best video online will get millions of hits. Millions!”

  “And don’t forget Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter,” Jarrah pointed out.

  “You’ll be more important in the Twitterverse than Ashton Kutcher,” Mack said.

  After that, nothing was going to stop the horde. Roughly sixty-five people and approximately a hundred cameras began to march to the castle.

  The rough climb over the rocks thinned the herd a bit, but in the end the Magnificent Five were accompanied to MacGuffin’s gate by about forty hardy men and women.

  “William Blisterthöng MacGuffin!” Mack yelled at the closed door. “You have visitors!”

  There was a long silence. Then, “Go away!”

  “No,” Mack said.

  Another long silence. Then, “Gang awa’, ye interlopers. Ah demand mah privacy. Ah huv rights!”

  “You lost your rights when you tried to kill me!” Mack shouted back.

  Stefan used a big rock to bang on the door. BANG BANG BANG.

  “Stop banging, ye’ll ruin mah door. That’s hert o’ oak, ye can
nae buy wood lik’ that anymair!”

  MacGuffin was concerned about the woodwork.

  “Then open the door and give me the Key!” Mack yelled. “And our phones!”

  This time the silence dragged on and on. But Mack made a “stay put” gesture at his posse and they waited.

  Then, with a clattering of chains and locks, the door opened a crack. Bristly beard and a single eye came into view. Every camera was rolling.

  MacGuffin thrust out a hairy hand holding a stone circle perhaps seven inches across, with a hole in the middle.

  Mack did not want to get near enough to that beard to take the stone. He nodded at Stefan, who stepped forward.

  “Grrrr,” MacGuffin said furiously at Stefan.

  “Grrrr back at you,” Stefan snarled.

  “The phones,” Mack said, his voice hard.

  A fairy hand pushed a burlap bag out of the door, then withdrew.

  The door slammed shut.

  Mack turned to the somewhat disappointed tourists. “Listen, folks: we’ve got what we came for. We have to go. But you can all stay and drive that guy crazy.”

  No one likes a spoiler, but no one likes a story that skips over an interesting development, either. Mack and the Magnifica have to move on. But just so you know: within a few days MacGuffin had cracked and opened his castle for regular tours. In fact, he was making a pretty penny from a gift shop that featured William Blisterthöng MacGuffin dolls and a recording of MacGuffin’s craziest rants.

  Connie appeared in the background of a YouTube video but was never seen by the public. The rumor is that she moved to Ireland to avoid Frank’s revenge.

  As for Mack, he would be going to France. Why? Because Sylvie said, “There are two others like us, Mack. They are hiding in Paris. I risked everything to join you so that you and your friends might save them.”

  “Save them from what?” Mack asked.

  “They have all come to Paris, Mack, all the forces of evil. They knew there were three of us who had gathered there, so they came to Paris to kill us and leave you powerless to complete the Twelve.”