The Call

by Michael Grant

  When it stared at Mack with its white jelly eyes and grinned its broken grin, Mack had no doubt, no doubt whatsoever, that it was coming for him.

  “Whoa,” Stefan said. “Gnarly.”

  The flight attendants were telling everyone to stay calm. But they didn’t look too calm themselves. Anyone could see that the creature was walking its way down the wing toward the plane.

  “It’s coming to kill me,” Mack said, sounding far more calm than he felt.

  “You’re under my wing,” Stefan said. But he sounded a little doubtful to Mack.

  “It can’t get in, can it?” Mack cried in a shrill, whinnying sort of tone that was definitely not heroic.

  “The door can’t be opened from the outside,” a flight attendant cried, sounding just like Mack had sounded. “Probably.”

  “I hate probably,” Mack said. He tried to think of a way out, of a way to fight the monster, or alternately a way to hide. “The bathroom!”

  “Yo, I have to go, too,” Stefan said, “but we got bigger problems.”

  “I mean we can hide in there.”

  Stefan did not argue. Click, click, and their seat belts fell away. They launched themselves out of their seats and pelted toward the bathroom.

  “Sit down!” the flight attendant shouted. “The captain has illuminated the seat belt sign!”

  The airplane bathroom was small, but they fit if Mack stood on the toilet. Stefan leaned his back against the door. Mack saw his own reflection in the mirror: he looked scared. Then he noticed how scared Stefan looked, and he got even more scared because Stefan wasn’t scared of anything, and if he was scared, Mack knew he himself had better be terrified.

  Suddenly from outside the bathroom there were screams.

  There was a loud sound and an incredible whoosh that popped Mack’s ears. The bathroom door flew open, and the two of them spilled out into the aisle.

  The inside of the jet was a madhouse. Paper napkins, peanut bags, plastic cups, purses, magazines and newspapers, and great big hardcover books were flying around as if a tornado had formed inside the plane.

  The door—the oval door to the outside—was wide open. Mack saw black night where he should have seen a comforting steel door.

  The pressure drop was sucking all the air, and anything not bolted down, straight out through that door. It was as if someone had hooked a massive vacuum cleaner up and cranked it to “deep clean.”

  Mack glanced to his right. The oxygen masks had dropped, little clear plastic tubes ending in plastic bags that might or might not inflate. People were snatching wildly for the masks, which were being pulled toward the door so that many of them hung almost horizontally and jerked as though they were trying to break free.

  Women’s hair was swept forward toward the open door. Headphones were yanked from ears and also jerked crazily toward the open door. An entire beverage cart rolled madly down the aisle, slammed a bulkhead, tossed off a Sprite, and was swallowed by that open door. Shoomp!

  The plane now tilted down, down, down, as if it wanted to plunge straight into the ocean.

  Where there were sharks.

  Which Mack did not like.

  A baby suddenly broke from its mother’s arms and went flying toward the door.

  Mack leaped, arms outstretched, and snagged the baby by its little blue jumpsuit. But the suction was so strong that the snaps on the Dr. Dentons pop pop popped and the diapered baby came loose.

  Stefan reached past and grabbed the baby’s arm, twisted, and managed to hand the baby to Mack before he lost his balance and slid toward the open door.

  The suction was lessening now, but only because there was no more air.

  Mack breathed in deep and got only a quarter of a lungful of oxygen.

  He tried to get back to his seat, back to one of the oxygen masks, back to the screaming, hysterical mother who held out her arms for her baby. But it was an uphill climb now with the plane tilted at a sharp angle.

  Mack had to use the legs of the seats almost as a ladder, straddling the aisle, climbing up the steep incline as his lungs sucked on nothing and his vision went red.

  He climbed to the mother and, with his consciousness fading, and with it the last of his strength, Mack handed the baby over.

  He clambered over the back of a seat—now almost a ledge beneath him—reached, and snagged one of the oxygen masks.

  Oxygen was flowing freely. He filled his lungs gratefully and searched for Stefan. Stefan had managed to grab on to a seat in first class and was also sucking oxygen as the plane plunged.

  And it was then that the wing monster stepped through the door, tentacle fingers grabbing bulkheads.

  It hauled itself all the way in. It bowed its creepy upside-down head but still scraped its slobbery, broken-toothed mouth along the ceiling.

  And then the creature did something very strange (like up until this point it had been normal). It began to melt. To change. A sort of black vapor formed a wreath around it, a swirling veil that hid it from sight.

  When the smoke cleared, the monster was no more. In its place stood the most beautiful girl Mack had ever seen or ever even imagined.

  She had luscious red hair and eyes greener than Mack would have thought possible. Her skin was pale and perfect. Her lips were a dark, dark red.

  She stood easily, as though the tilted deck was not even an issue.

  She smiled, and it was as if a sun had appeared in the middle of a storm and that sun shone just for Mack, for Mack alone.

  “Hello,” she said in a laughing, musical voice. “You must be Mack.”

  Mack sucked on his oxygen mask and wondered in some distant corner of his mind how she could breathe and how she could speak and how the sound waves propagated across a relative vacuum. Because he had learned in science class that sound waves needed air. In fact, he had done an experiment that…But that wasn’t really important just then because the most beautiful girl in the history of the world was talking to him, just him.

  “Hi,” he mumbled into his plastic mask. “I’m Mack.”

  “It’s good to meet you, Mack. My name is Ereskigal. My friends call me Risky.”

  “I’ll bet,” Mack said.

  “Come on, Mack,” she said. She held out one perfect, pale, red-nailed hand. “Let’s get out of here.”

  * * *

  DEAR MACK,

  I HAD AN EXCELLENT DAY AT SCHOOL. THE WOMAN CALLED MS. CHAPMAN ASKED ME IF I WAS STILL DEVOURING BOOKS. SHE SMILED SO I KNEW THIS WAS A GOOD THING. I SAID THAT I WAS. I DEVOURED ONE FOR HER AND SHE STOPPED SMILING. THEN I MET THE MAN CALLED ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL FURMAN, WHO ASKED ME WHAT MY MAJOR MALFUNCTION WAS. I EXPLAINED TO HIM THAT I CANNOT MALFUNCTION BECAUSE I AM A SUPERNATURAL CREATURE MADE OF MUD. HE TOLD ME TO GO AWAY.

  YOUR FRIEND,

  GOLEM

  * * *

  Sixteen

  “I’m good right here,” Mack said.

  “He’s good right here,” Stefan said, coming as close as he could while keeping his oxygen mask on.

  Risky smiled. It was a dazzling smile. But not really friendly.

  The temperature in the plane had dropped like a rock. Mack could see his breath steam around the mask as he exhaled.

  “Eng Ereskigal, Arbast,” Risky said. “Eng-ma!”

  And suddenly Mack was up out of his seat and walking like a zombie. Like an old-fashioned zombie, not like one of the cooler 28 Days Later or I Am Legend kind of zombies who mostly ran really fast.

  He walked on stiff legs that were not under his control.

  Mack knew his legs were not under his control because taking off his oxygen mask and walking into the howling, freezing wind that came in through that awful open door were not things he really wanted to do.

  Really, really did not want to do.

  But his legs were moving just the same.

  And Risky was grinning.

  Mack gasped at thin air. More air than before—it wasn’t completely airless now that the plane had dropped somew
hat—but it was like trying to fill your lungs after a long run while breathing through a straw.

  “No!” Mack yelled, not that his voice carried very far. Somehow Risky could make herself heard just fine despite the lack of oxygen, but Mack sounded like he was a squeaking mouse.

  Mack’s mouth cried, “No!” but his legs and feet said, “Let’s go!”

  Risky leaned close to him, her face just inches from his. She smelled like dark woods at night, and like the perfume counter at Macy’s, and a little like Mack’s aunt Holly, who lived in a converted school bus on a communal farm in Mendocino.

  It was an intoxicating smell.

  “Poor Mack,” Risky said. “Did you really think you could be one of the Magnifica? Did you think you would rush around heroically and stop my mother from retaking all that is hers?”

  Mack didn’t really have a good answer to that. Because he wasn’t really listening. He was marching his lead feet toward the open door, and now he was so close he could reach out a hand and try to grab the frame and try to stop himself, but he couldn’t, he couldn’t, and his fingers were slipping, and OMG, he could look straight down and see moonlight sparkling off the waves miles and miles below.

  “Odaz,” Risky whispered. Then, in a shout of triumph, “Odaz-ma!”

  And Mack was now in the doorway itself, hands gripping the sides, toes already hanging, like a surfer hanging ten. The wind was beating him up, making his cheeks vibrate, his hair froth, his eyes water.

  Risky was behind him now. He felt her hand against his back.

  “No way!” Stefan yelled, although his voice sounded as squeaky as Mack’s had. Mack glanced back and saw Stefan swinging something big and black.

  Stefan hit Risky in the back of the head with someone’s carry-on bag.

  Risky staggered forward, nearly pushing Mack out of the door. But Mack moved fast. He detached one hand, swung around, grabbed Risky by her wondrous red hair, and tripped her over his leg and out the door.

  Risky fell through the door.

  But even as she fell, she struck out with one arm, one arm that was now the branched, tentacled arm of the monster.

  The tentacles completely imprisoned Mack’s free arm. The pressure of the five-hundred-mile-per-hour wind dragged at Risky, and she dragged at Mack. Stefan wrapped his strong arms around Mack and tried to hold on, but it was no good, no good at all.

  Mack lost his grip. He flew out of the door.

  The wing flashed by beneath him, the tail flashed by, a huge scythe. It barely missed him, and then Mack was tumbling and spinning and screaming as he fell through the night.

  Stefan had released his grip, but it was too late to save himself. Now as Mack spun crazily through the air, he saw flashes of Stefan, his arms windmilling: a crazy windblown action figure twirling out of control.

  And Risky fell, too, her clothing billowing comically, her red hair a tornado. She laughed as she fell. Mack couldn’t hear it over the hurricane howl of wind, but he could see her mouth.

  They were all three close, within a few dozen feet of each other.

  The jet, on the other hand, was already far away and far above. Rushing away from them at five hundred miles per hour.

  Mack saw moonlit sky and silvery clouds. He saw dappled ocean far below. In the east the sun was peeking up over the curve of the earth. And in the other direction he could just make out what must be a city’s lights—Sydney, no doubt.

  The ocean that he had feared for so long was now rushing up to crush him like a windshield hitting a bug.

  Sharks would eat whatever was left.

  Seventeen

  “Nooooooooo!” Mack screamed, but the wind tore the words right out of his mouth.

  The plane had been cruising about seven miles up. It had dropped since losing pressure, but when Mack was yanked from the jet, it was still four miles up.

  Mack recalled reading once that the fastest something could fall was about 120 meters per second. Which was pretty fast. In fact, it was about 268 miles per hour.

  If he’d had access to his computer so he could use Wolfram|Alpha, Mack might have figured out that he didn’t have a lot of time.

  But of course he had a more immediate problem: very little air.

  Just as Mack lost consciousness, he saw the smaller craft, Risky’s weird flying seedpod, come sweeping in at a strangely slow speed. It seemed to be coming to a stop in midair. But that, Mack knew, might be an illusion.

  Mack blacked out.

  But as he fell toward the ocean and back into the earth’s air, he revived. He swam up through layers of clinging unconsciousness. For those first few seconds he was lost, not knowing what had happened or where he was.

  The truth was a stab in the heart.

  He cried out in terror.

  He was much closer to the ocean. Fifteen thousand feet. There was air at fifteen thousand feet, but it was still incredibly cold.

  Which was not going to be a problem for very long.

  If you know what we mean.

  He had time to scream once more, and he did, but his brain was working at desperate speed. How to survive a fall from four miles up?

  Answer: no way.

  Gravity had hold of him and was determined to smash him into the water that would be as hard as concrete at this speed.

  He needed time to think! He needed to stop falling. To stop everything, because if he didn’t stop everything he was dead at the age of twelve, a pulpy mess to be eaten by sharks, his bones to be coated with coral.

  He needed to stop time.

  He could see individual waves now, fluorescing in the starlight, the tallest tips just touched with pink sunrise.

  “Ret click-ur!”

  That’s what Mack shouted, with eyes closed, his body clenched tight for the impact that would snap his bones and pop him open like a water balloon. The words bubbled up out of some pocket of memory, a once heard and almost forgotten phrase in a tongue he did not recognize or know.

  The wind stopped. That was the first thing he noticed.

  The wind stopped.

  He pried one eye open. The waves were still there, still below him. And so close below him, so close he could smell the salt.

  But they were not getting closer.

  Mack hung in midair, balled up as if he were hoping to cannonball and make a big splash and then swim back to the diving board.

  His body was trembling, shaking so hard from cold and fear he thought the shaking might pop his shoulders out of their sockets.

  Amazingly, the ocean was no longer rushing toward him at four times the speed limit on most freeways.

  Mack twisted his head around. He saw stars. And outlined by those stars, Stefan. The bully of all bullies was hanging in midair, just like Mack.

  The girl, Risky, was nowhere to be seen. Neither was the bizarre craft Mack now recalled slowing down and coming to a near stop.

  “Huh,” Stefan said.

  “We’re alive,” Mack whispered. “It worked.”

  “What worked?” Stefan asked calmly.

  “I just said the words that the old dude—Grimluk—said when he made everything stop.”

  Stefan thought about that for a while and said, “Huh.” Then, “Now what?”

  Mack wasn’t ready to think about “now what?” His heart was still trying to beat its way out through his ribs. His stomach was about twenty thousand feet behind him. His entire body was shaking like the rough-road simulator in an arcade racing game.

  “How high up do you think we are?” Mack asked.

  “Not as high as we were,” Stefan said reasonably. “Probably if we dropped from this high we wouldn’t get totally squashed.”

  Mack peered through the darkness all around. He could clearly see the coastline, with the bright lights of Sydney and all its suburbs spread in a north-south line.

  And in the other direction the sun was definitely coming up and pushing the darkness back. In fact, it was kind of pretty in a pinkish, pale purple kind of wa
y.

  “Here’s the thing,” Mack said when he had regained his composure. “I don’t exactly know how to turn it off. The spell or whatever it is.”

  “Huh,” Stefan observed.

  “Maybe I need a whole different thing to say. But I have this feeling Grimluk just said the same thing over again. You know, like if you push a power button to turn something on, you turn it off by pushing the same button. Right?”

  “Huh.”

  “The thing is, though, we kind of stopped time or whatever, so—”

  “You stopped time, not me,” Stefan said, sounding like he was trying to avoid responsibility.

  “So, if I start it up again, do we go back to what we were doing?”

  “Sure.”

  “Falling?”

  “Yeah,” Stefan said, “but we wouldn’t be falling as far.”

  “It’s not distance I’m worried about,” Mack said. “It’s speed. What if we kept all the speed we had before?”

  Stefan had no answer and neither did Mack. But at that moment he noticed something: a sailboat. It was floating along on the breeze not far below and not far away.

  “I think our ride’s here,” Mack said. “I’m going to try it.”

  “What about the…eh, never mind. Whatever,” Stefan said.

  “Ret click-ur!”

  Mack yelled it.

  Gravity reached up and snatched him again.

  It dragged him straight down. He hit the water hard. Hard enough to squeeze the air from his lungs. Hard enough to sting. It felt like a really bad session of dodgeball.

  He plunged deep. Deeper than he’d ever been in a swimming pool. Down and down, and it seemed like he would never stop.

  He kicked and thrashed and headed for the surface, which was a silvery barrier so very high above him.

  Lungs screaming, heart pounding, he went up and up, but sooooo veeeeery slooowly.