The Key

by Michael Grant

  They always say that, don’t they? “Shots rang out.” But shots don’t actually “ring;” they explode.

  Blam blam blam!

  A man in the natty uniform of the gendarmes was calmly firing up at the second Gudridan’s head even as the first tottered like a felled tree in a national forest.

  It seemed to take forever for the first monster to fall, and all the while, blam blam blam continued, accompanied by stabs of bright orange.

  Brave gendarme.

  Unfortunately, bullets don’t matter much to Gudridan.

  As the first of the monsters hit the ground so hard that stopped cars jumped from the impact, the second Gudridan snatched up the policeman, opened its hideous jaws, and bit off the top half of his body.

  For a terrible, frozen moment, Mack just stared.

  It was the most awful thing he had ever seen. And it was somehow his fault.

  Mack climbed out of the car.

  The Gudridan, still standing, red fur even redder from its gruesome meal, almost smiled at him.

  “Gope-ma et stib-il belast!” Mack snarled.

  Sometimes terror kind of shuts off your brain.

  Other times it focuses your thoughts.

  Mack had just crossed the line into focused. Very focused.

  The Gudridan’s red fur began to turn black in patches. The monster noticed, held up an arm to examine it, and seemed almost to whimper.

  Its fur faded from red to pink, but what mattered was the creeping black growth that spread over the monster, here, there, surrounding and then absorbing fur now gone white, seeming to eat it up.

  Eating then into the skin beneath the fur.

  The Gudridan hollered in incoherent terror, and Mack thought, Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I can bring. I can bring rot and make you die, monster! I can do that.

  It was like watching time-lapse videography of an orange being consumed by mold.

  The creature’s fur was gone, replaced by the creeping mold. Its arms withered. Its legs were pins. It fell facedown across several cars.

  The other monster, the one Mack had smashed with the car, began backpedaling frantically.

  It had never seen such a thing. It had never seen one of its kind brought down by a skinny, curly-haired child spouting an ancient, forgotten language.

  More gendarmes and regular cops were arriving in a festival of flashing blue lights and frantic sirens. More gunfire. The Paris night was a battlefield.

  Mack ran to the rail and saw that Dietmar had swum to the far bank and was painfully hauling himself up onto the slick, wet stones.

  “Everyone!” Mack yelled in a voice that was approximately one-millionth as strong as a bellowing Gudridan. “Come on!”

  They formed up around him, Stefan limping and holding his side, Jarrah picking Gudridan fur out of her teeth, Sylvie and Xiao looking bruised and disheveled.

  “Dietmar is across. We run for it and hope the cops think we’re just normal people running for our lives!”

  Which is what they did.

  And what the French police assumed as they fired steadily into the back of the retreating monster.

  The battered kids joined a wet and slimy Dietmar and raced shivering and heartsick toward the entryway to the Paris sewers.

  * * *

  Twenty

  * * *

  MEANWHILE, BACK IN SEDONA

  The golem climbed down from the wall.

  He walked to his—Mack’s—desk and picked up his iPhone. Mack had told him not to bother him, that he should be a big boy and take care of himself.

  But the golem was having a very bad feeling down in the muddy hole he’d dug out of himself that now functioned as a stomach.

  He wrote a text to Mack.

  * * *

  I’m afraid. A girl named Risky was here. I think she will make me hurt people. Your golem.

  * * *

  He considered adding a smiley face. He often did that. But it felt wrong. So he typed: >:-(

  And he hit Send.

  The text went flying through the air, from Sedona to Paris. Where the cell phone signal failed to penetrate the deep, stony sewers.

  * * *

  Twenty-one

  * * *

  The sewer tunnels are bigger than you think. Some of them are so big they could practically be Métro tunnels. Others are narrower, or crammed full of dripping metal pipes that run along the arched stone ceilings.

  The parts of the sewers that are on the tour are safe and well lit. There are metal catwalks and railings. There are signs pointing toward the exits.

  But that’s just the part that’s on the tour. There are miles and miles of sewer tunnels. (And beyond the sewer tunnels, connected to them here and there, are the tunnels no one wants to talk about. But we’ll get to that later.)

  The last sewer tour was long since done for the night and the entrance was bolted shut (there went 24 euros for unused tickets), but Sylvie twisted the numbers on a combination lock with practiced ease.

  “This is a side entrance,” she said. “My grandfather is one of the engineers who maintain the tunnels used for tours. It is because of him that I knew of the perfect hiding place.”

  They stepped inside and immediately noticed the aroma. Yes, let’s go with the word aroma. It’s much more genteel than stink.

  “The light switch is on this wall.” There was the sound of Sylvie scrabbling at the brick and a loud snap, and light flooded the space. It was a tunnel, arched, made of limestone. There were pipes running along one wall, four or five of them in different sizes.

  And the aroma.

  “This way,” Sylvie said, and led them onto a steel catwalk. The catwalk took a hard right turn away from the pipes and into a place that smelled less but seemed older. Here the brick was weathered and crumbly.

  “This area is not safe for tours,” Sylvie explained.

  “Then why is it safe for us?” Dietmar wondered.

  “It isn’t. But it leads to our hiding place.”

  The tunnel had begun to narrow. Already a tall man would not have been able to walk erect. They reached the end of the reassuring catwalk and had to step down onto damp, worn stones that formed a walkway beside the channel.

  There was no question that in a hard rain the two feet of sludgy, smelly water running through the channel would swell to fill half this tunnel and become a raging white-brown river.

  “Not much farther,” Sylvie said.

  Only now there were no longer lights running down the roof of the chamber. It was getting darker, and ahead was absolute darkness.

  “I should have picked up a flashlight!” Sylvie cried. “I was shaken up; I forgot.”

  “Phones will do the trick,” Jarrah said. She whipped out her phone, pushed a button, and shone an amazingly dim and pitiful light at the darkness ahead.

  The others all did the same so that it was six dim, pitiful lights combining to make one dim, pitiful light. But it was enough to let them place their feet carefully, one before the other.

  “It’s not that much farther,” Sylvie said.

  But it was that much farther. Soon they lost sight of the lit part of the sewer. Now they were a tiny island of dim light shuffling along while they all tried really hard not to think about rats.

  Because once you start thinking about rats, well, there’s no unthinking it, is there?

  Rats.

  And in Mack’s case, claustrophobia. Darkness in an underground space is one of the starting points for serious claustrophobia. After all, claustrophobia is a fear of small, enclosed spaces, which is to say, caskets, which is to say, being buried alive, which was not so very different from being twenty feet down in a musty sewer in the dark.

  “Mmm-hhhh-nnn,” Mack moaned without realizing it.

  What goes really badly with being buried alive?

  Rats.

  And something out there in the dark was making scritchy-scratchy little noises.

  Scritchy.

  “Mmmm-rrrr-nn
nhhh!” Mack said more urgently.

  Stefan clamped a hand over his mouth about a millisecond before Mack was going to let go with a moan that turned into a kind of trilling scream.

  “Mmmph!” Mack said.

  “Yeah,” Stefan answered.

  In a matter of seconds Mack was going to start squirming and thrashing. If necessary, Stefan would punch him in the head and either stun him or knock him unconscious. Neither was a great choice from Mack’s point of view.

  “Here,” Sylvie said. They stopped, and in the sudden, profound quiet—the quiet of the grave, if I may—they could hear the sound of slow-moving sewer water and, ever more clearly, the sounds of rats.

  Sylvie aimed her phone light at the wall. There was a slot. She stuck her hand in. And pulled on an iron lever within.

  Suddenly bright light formed a tall rectangle.

  “It’s me, Sylvie,” she said into the light.

  And the rectangle grew until it was revealed as a doorway. They stepped into a room with tall stone walls. Also, a flat-screen TV mounted on one of those walls. It was showing an old Fairly OddParents cartoon. But everyone was speaking French. Even Timmy.

  Two kids stood within that room, eyes wary, poised to fight or flee.

  One was a tall, painfully thin boy with brown hair and a sharp-featured, handsome face. He wore stylish glasses and had the collar of his shirt turned perfectly to frame his jawline.

  The other boy was shorter, a bit stout, with full lips and a look of interested but sarcastic intelligence about him.

  “We weren’t really watching that,” Rodrigo said, pointing his male-model chin at the TV.

  “Actually, we were,” Charlie said. “Because we only get the one channel down here. And no one thought to set the place up with books or games, so we’re going slowly out of our minds and we would watch anything, anything at all.”

  “Except Jersey Shore,” Rodrigo interjected. “I’ll turn it off.”

  “No!” Mack said, way too urgently. “No, no. It’s … soothing.”

  Obviously Stefan had let go of Mack. Stefan had a pretty good grasp of Mack’s phobias by this point. He wasn’t academically gifted, Stefan, but he had a certain intuitive grasp of other people’s weaknesses. He got Mack. And so he knew that a well-lit underground room, especially one with a TV, was manageable for Mack. After all, no one ever got buried alive with a TV and Nicktoons playing.

  Sylvie did the formal introductions. And she gave a brief explanation. “Long ago this was a secret place for people hiding from the king.”

  “Which king?”

  “All of them, really. All of them tried to kill their enemies.” Sylvie shrugged. “Kings. It’s what they do. Later they hid from the emperors. And various invaders. Most recently cheese makers have used it to hide from health inspectors from Brussels. And now, we use it.”

  “How did you know you had to hide?” Mack asked, feeling the panic sweat begin to cool.

  “A creature that fires tiny arrows out of its fingers shot me once here.” Rodrigo pointed to his left bicep. “And would have shot me many more places except that I jumped out of a second-floor window.”

  “I wonder if those are Bowands,” Mack said wearily. He hadn’t seen them, just heard of them in one of Grimluk’s grim perorations.32

  “And I figured it out when an old fart dressed in green sicced a bunch of lederhosen-wearing dwarves on me,” Charlie said.

  “Paddy ‘Nine Iron’ Trout and the treasonous Tong Elves,” Jarrah said.

  “What’s that, a rock band?” Charlie asked.

  “A Nafia assassin and … well, a bunch of treasonous Tong Elves.”

  “Okay then, it’s all perfectly clear,” Charlie said sarcastically. “Can we get out of here now? I doubt you’ve noticed, but it smells a bit down here. And the entertainment options are quite limited.”

  “Things are a little dangerous out there,” Mack said. “So we need to be prepared. Let’s take a minute and plan.”

  “I’ve got it,” Charlie said. “You stay and plan; I am out of here.”

  “Dude,” Mack said, and put his hand on the boy’s arm.

  Charlie’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “Hey. Who died and made you king?”

  “He’s the leader of the group,” Jarrah said, looking every bit as dangerous as Charlie.

  “Says who?” Charlie demanded.

  “Says Grimluk,” Mack said.

  “And the rest of us,” Jarrah said.

  “And me,” Stefan said.

  Then Charlie had an opportunity to take a close-up look at Stefan because Stefan stepped up to him and stood very close, which brought Charlie’s nose to about the level of Stefan’s muscle-bound chest and swollen biceps.

  “Yes, well, all right then,” Charlie said briskly.

  Mack sat down on the couch. He sighed. “We’re trapped in this game where we’re trying to get the Twelve together and Risky is chasing us. All she has to do to win is make sure we never get to twelve. And she already has Valin. So, I’ve been thinking about this—in between being stomped by giants—and I think we need to go on the offensive. We need to start hitting back now that we have the Key. Maybe the first thing to do is go right at them.”

  “Go at them?” Dietmar asked in a shrill, disbelieving voice. “How do we do that?”

  Mack shrugged. He hadn’t figured that out yet.

  “If I want a fight, I call someone out,” Stefan said.

  “What does that mean, call someone out?” Rodrigo asked, intrigued, as if he liked the sound of it.

  “It means I say, ‘You, me, after school,’” Stefan said.

  Mack had received just such an invitation from Stefan. So had many others. Stefan had changed, but he had not changed completely.

  “We issue a challenge? Why would we do that?” Dietmar asked.

  “To throw them off balance,” Xiao said. “To force them out into the open. For all the power of my people, we have survived by remaining hidden. The dragons of China would never have survived if people had known about us.”

  “Maybe that’s the takeaway from old Billy Blisterthöng, eh?” Jarrah said, nodding. “He was all tough and bad so long as he was invisible to the world.”

  Sylvie said, “People have seen the YouTubes of different things you have done, but I have read the comments and most people think they are fake. Many think they are some strange advertising, as if the display of your raw emotions and the suspension of normalcy is too threatening to accept. They prefer the comfort of self-deception. It is as if to believe this truth is to be cast into the abyss, the bottomless emptiness that is existence without—”

  “Riiight,” Jarrah said, cutting her off with a sigh and rolling her eyes. “We gotta make people believe us. Gotta rub their faces in it.”

  Mack nodded. “We need help. Which means we need people looking for the Skirrit and the Tong Elves and the Gudridan. We need people to be watching for Paddy Nine Iron. And Valin.”

  “Call them out,” Charlie said, adopting the phrase. Then, in a sardonic tone, “What could possibly go wrong?”

  Mack pulled out the two pieces of the Key and laid them on the coffee table.

  “We prepared a little and still ended up nearly getting killed by those giant things. We need more. We need each of us to know at least three spells in Vargran. We need some of those to be things we do on our own, and others to be things we can do together, in combinations.”

  Xiao sat down beside him and gazed thoughtfully at the stone circles. “There are not a lot of words in this language. We should be able to learn a fair amount. But where do we start?”

  Mack thought about that, as did the others. Then he smiled. “We want something very big and very public. Something undeniable, right? Okay, then simple question: What’s the Vargran word for ‘tower’?”

  * * *

  Twenty-two

  * * *

  They worked the night through, not that it was ever daylight down in the sewer tunnels.

/>   But by morning they were a tighter group than they had been. They were prepared. They had a plan. Well, a plan of sorts.

  But there’s an old saying among soldiers: no plan ever survives contact with the enemy.

  Contact with the enemy came much sooner than they had expected.

  As they were retracing their steps toward the lighted part of the tunnel, Mack again heard the scritchy-scratchy sound of rats. Stefan was walking right behind him, prepared for a friendly mouth clamp and possible head smack.

  Mack felt a little better walking out of the sewers than he had walking in, for the same reason it’s better to be getting out of a casket than into one.

  He had it under control, so long as they didn’t stay down there too long. And so long as there weren’t, oh, let’s say, rats.

  Mack had picked up a pretty good flashlight in the underground hideaway, so he now aimed it at the rats, hoping to scare them off.

  Only they were not rats. Not even big rats. They were, for lack of a better word, centipedes.

  Big centipedes.

  The flashlight beam highlighted a particular one that was just a little bit out in front of the others. Mack stared for what felt like a very long time but was probably no more than a second. In that second he saw a glistening, pulsating, yellow-white wormlike body, way too many legs, and a face dominated by dead-staring insect eyes and gnashing mouthparts, and really, that was all he needed to know to figure out his next statement. Which was:

  “Ruuuuun!”

  The others had seen what he’d seen and, not surprisingly, they agreed with his recommendation that they ruuuuun!

  They ran. But so did the centipede things. And with that many legs, they were fast. They were especially fast running upside down on the ceiling. Something about six-foot-long insects running down the arched roof of an ancient sewer struck particular terror into Mack, and he wondered in some still-functioning part of his mind whether he had just developed a phobia about centipedes.