The Key (6 page)

Which was pretty heinous.

But of far greater concern to Mack was that she'd also pulled the rug out from under him and his friends.

“Seize them!” William Blisterthöng MacGuffin roared.

At first this didn't trouble Mack too much because he hadn't seen any minions who might do any seizing. But he soon saw that he had simply lacked imagination. Because the skulls set above the archways—human and not-human—suddenly creaked and groaned and opened their jaws. Yellow torchlight leaped into the empty eye sockets. And, to Mack's infinite horror, the skulls began to grow necks and shoulders in the very stone of the walls.

Let's make this clear: the stone itself seemed to soften, to liquefy, and from that gooey stone emerged skeletons, like dinosaur bones rising up out of a tar pit, or Upper East Side society women emerging from the mud bath at the spa.

The hair on Mack's head stood up.

Stefan went in swinging. He punched the first skeleton so hard the skull went flying like a penalty kick.

But in a heartbeat three other skeletons—a human, something that looked like it might have been a wolf, and something else that looked like it had too many hands and a partial exoskeleton—bore him down to the paving stones with kicks and jabs.

“
Ret-ma belast!
” Mack cried. Which in Vargran is, “Stop, monsters!”

This worked, but only a little. About a quarter of the skeletons stopped dead. Well, stopped, anyway. The rest kept right on coming.

“Thay aren't a' monsters, ye wee twit,” MacGuffin chortled.

Jarrah had leaped to Stefan's defense and was hauling back on skulls, and Xiao had raced to grab a torch from its sconce and was now swinging it around her so fast it was like a circle of fire.

Dietmar grabbed Mack's arm. “We need more Vargran!”

“
Ret-ma
… um … What's the word for
man
?”

“
Dood!
” Dietmar supplied.

“
Ret-ma dood!
” Mack cried, and at that instant a skeletal fist that had closed around his neck froze. Unfortunately, it froze in place. It froze choking Mack's throat.

Mack's eyes began to bulge. He grabbed the skeletal human arm and yanked it wildly back and forth. The elbow snapped and the arm came loose. The grip stayed tight, so Mack twirled and gagged with a bony hand around his neck and a bony arm sticking out, and it's amazing how quickly choking will drop you to your knees.

The world was swimming around Mack and he knew his time was measured in seconds.

Suddenly, there was Dietmar getting his fingers around the skeletal thumb and pulling just hard enough to let a few pumps of blood reach Mack's buzzy brain.

But then whatever skeletons weren't either monster or human knocked Dietmar to the ground.

Jarrah now had a torch of her own and was stabbing it into weird rib cages and up under bony jaws, and Xiao copied that action, and it seemed that, dead though they might be, the bony creatures didn't like that much.

The Magnifica had used Vargran to stop about half the skeletons, and with their fists and torches they were holding their own … until.

Until MacGuffin seized a massive cudgel—a stick with a gnarled knob of polished wood on one end—and came wading into the fight.

He jabbed the stick with amazing force into Stefan's chest. Stefan staggered back, clutched at his chest, sucked air, and landed on his back.

Seeing him down, the remaining skeletons regrouped. They pulled back, bunched together, and came on in a rush.

Mack was still struggling with the bony hand around his throat, still gasping for air.

Xiao, Dietmar, and Jarrah took the worst of it and all three were down in seconds, buried by a tangle of clacking bones.

MacGuffin strode over to Mack, who was still very much in danger of passing out.

“Gimme up tae th' All-Mother, wull ye?” He grabbed a handful of Mack's curls and looked hard into Mack's bulging, tear-streaming eyes. “Na, ah think ah will murdurr ye 'n' then see howfur this rabble o' yers likes it.”

Connie zipped over, fast as a hummingbird but twice as mean. She had a coil of rope, and a weakened, gagging Mack could do nothing to stop being hogtied.

MacGuffin pried the skeletal hand from Mack's throat. A heap of bones assembled itself back into a proper skeleton and came over to retrieve the missing limb.

Oxygen flooded Mack's lungs, and his delirious brain refocused in time to see the skeleton army marching the Magnifica and Stefan to the gate of the castle, beaten, humiliated, and helpless.

Mack himself was taken to the dungeon.

H
ave you ever seen a dungeon? They aren't happy places. Down toward the foundation, the castle was built of massive blocks of granite, each of them about six feet by four feet.

Those stones weren't going anywhere.

The dungeons were cells, with damp stone walls covered in lichen and mold and mildew and moss. But the lichen, etc.—that's not what bothered Mack. He had no great fear of primitive plant phyla.

In the corner of the cell was a cracked pottery jar that was supposed to be the toilet. At some later point, one of MacGuffin's skeletal helpers would be coming by to collect whatever was in the chamber pot—and really, there were never going to be good surprises there—but that was not what bothered Mack.

Well, it bothered him a little bit, because like most of us he was fond of indoor plumbing. But none of the terrors and inconveniences compared to the thing that really bothered him.

Three stone walls, a stone ceiling, a great stone floor—and the remaining wall of the cube was a sheet of rusty black iron pierced only by the door, which was itself massively iron. In that door was a single narrow vertical slit no more than six inches high and one inch wide, just enough for a skeletal eye to appear occasionally and spy in on Mack.

Not that even a skeletal eye could see much, because it was very dark in the room. There was an oil lamp set into the wall. The lamp itself would have been kind of a cute Halloween decoration: a skull with a jaw that worked like a drawer. The jaw-drawer could be pulled out, and inside would be found the little clay cup that held the reeking oil. When lit, the dim light flickered through the eyeholes and noseholes and the fine cracks where the plates of the skull were joined, and also the jagged hole where the crossbow bolt had long ago pierced the skull's brain.

But even that wasn't what terrified Mack, and overwhelmed him, and stripped away his dignity and his self-control.

What bothered Mack was a little thing called claustrophobia.

Mack had twenty-one identified phobias. They included arachnophobia, a fear of spiders.

Dentophobia, a fear of dentists.

Pyrophobia, a fear of fire, although most people have some of that.

Pupaphobia, a fear of puppets. But he was not afraid of clowns, unlike most sensible people.

Vaccinophobia, a fear of getting shots.

Thalassophobia, a fear of oceans, which led fairly naturally to selachophobia, a fear of sharks.

And of course, phobophobia, which is the fear of developing more fears. Someone famous—either Franklin D. Roosevelt or possibly SpongeBob—once said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Well, that wasn't the only thing Mack had to fear, but it was one of them.

But the mother of all fears for Mack was claustrophobia: a fear of small, enclosed spaces. For example: a cramped space not that much bigger than a casket in the stony bowels of a castle. Because the cell was not the large room you've been picturing in your head. It was five feet deep, three feet wide, and four feet tall.

Mack could not even stand all the way up.

If he lay down on the hard stone floor, his feet would touch the door and his head would touch the far wall. And he would be able to press his hands against both side walls.

He was being buried alive.

“Aaaahhhh!” he screeched when he saw the cell. “No, no, no, no! Nooooo! Nooooo!”

The skeletal guards didn't have an answer: they had no tongues or lips, or voice boxes or lungs. Pretty much all of the things you need to speak were missing.

“Noooo! I can't … you can't....”

Oh, but they could. And they did. They threw Mack into the cell, pushing his head down with claw-like hands so that he would fit through the short door.

Mack turned and ran at them. He gibbered madly in Vargran, but casting two earlier spells had pretty well wiped out his
enlightened puissance
for now. So he might as well have been speaking Portuguese.
¹²

The iron door slammed in his face.

The oil lamp guttered, and for a frozen moment of terror, Mack thought it might go out, and if there's anything worse than being buried alive, it's being buried alive in the dark.

“No! No, you have to let me out! Nooooo!”

One is tempted to look away. Because to keep looking at Mack is to watch him completely fall apart. It's to see our hero whimpering, crying, sobbing, begging for his mother.

You see, a phobia isn't just a fear, like maybe you're afraid you'll fail a test. A phobia is much, much deeper. A phobia taps into the bottommost layers of your brain, down where the brain is just the sediment of evolution and where blunt animal terror lies, far away from your reason and your logic and your calm, soothing voices.

So the Mack we would see in that terrible cell is not the Mack who stood up to Stefan back when Stefan was the most feared bully at Richard Gere Middle School. (Go, Fighting Pupfish!) Nor would it be the Mack who threw down with Risky in the Australian Outback and killed her once. It's not the Mack who faced dragons and fought Skirrit and treasonous Tong Elves and insane Norse gods and Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout.

It's possible to be very brave some of the time. And pants-wetting scared another time. That's the reality of it. The same person can run away in blind terror one moment, then turn suddenly and face certain death with unearthly determination.

Humans are strange that way.

The thing about Mack's fear was that it was so intense that if you'd told him he was just hours away from being catapulted to certain death, he wouldn't have been even 1 percent more terrified. He had already turned the fear meter up to eleven.

J
arrah, Dietmar, Xiao, and Stefan were ushered unceremoniously through the door of MacGuffin's castle. The door slammed behind them.

Stefan was back in the enchantment zone and could no longer see the stones and tufts of grass around him, or the castle door closed behind him, or the walls looming above him.

“We have to get him out of there,” Stefan said.

“Can't even call me mum for a few good words of Vargran,” Jarrah said. “MacGuffin took our phones. What can we do?”

“I …,” Dietmar began. Then he shrugged. “I don't know what to do.”

Mack would have been secretly pleased to hear that, if he'd been there.

One by one they looked at Xiao. Jarrah said what they were all thinking. “You could fly us over the walls.”

Xiao looked down, deep in thought for so long it seemed as if she might have fallen asleep. “I cannot,” she said finally in a very sad whisper, and with a slow shake of her head. “There is a treaty. No eastern dragon may appear in the west. To violate the treaty is to risk a war.”

“So risk it,” Stefan snapped.

Xiao's eyes flashed. “You don't understand: it's not only a risk to dragon folk; if the western dragons were to rise again, entire cities would burn!”

“I don't care,” Stefan snarled. He stabbed a finger in the general direction of the door he couldn't see. “He's under my wing. I protect him, and I don't care what gets in my way. He's under my wing!” He raged back and forth, demanding someone show him a rock so he could bang the door down with it.

“If we could find the fairies …,” Dietmar said. “Frank and the others. Connie has betrayed them. They might be able to help us.”

“But where are they?” Jarrah shouted. She had caught some of Stefan's wild rage. “Where are the lying little—”

Xiao said, “Wait.”

“Wait? Wait on what? Until dawn, when he kills Mack?”

“The fairies cast a Vargran spell that allowed us to see the castle,” Xiao said patiently.

“Yes, but only because we have the
enlightened puissance
,” Dietmar observed.

Xiao nodded. “The reason there must be twelve of us is that our power grows with each new member of the Magnificent Twelve. True?”

Dietmar snapped his fingers. “Ah! But even if we are only three Magnifica, it may be that our power is greater than the fairies'!”

“We must descend the hill,” Xiao said. “And when dawn comes, we must cast the spell and reveal the castle to as many people as we can get together. MacGuffin needs to remain hidden because he is no match for the terrible powers of the modern world. He has his band of skeletons and his spells. But what are these when weighed against the police and the army, and the city planners and zoning officials, the bureaucrats from Brussels, and, worst of all, the tourists who will descend like a plague of locusts should this castle suddenly be revealed to one and all?”