Underworlds #2: When Monsters Escape (2 page)

T
HE WATER TOWER WAS A HUNDRED FEET TALL AND
ringed with a narrow walkway. To get to the top, we had to climb straight up an iron ladder that was dripping with cold rainwater.

“Wherever the Cyclopes are hiding,” Dana said, clinging to the rungs below me, “the tower will give us the best view.”

Sydney chuckled behind her. “Also the best view of where we’ll land when we fall.”

“Please don’t say things like that,” Jon squeaked.

Poor Jon. I felt bad dragging him up there, knowing he didn’t like heights. I also knew he wouldn’t let us go without him.

With a final pull, I swung my arms up and around the support posts of the iron railing, crawled between them, and slumped down on the cold walkway at the top of the tower.

“The lyre’s keeping dry?” asked Sydney, when she joined me.

I checked it, then pulled my hoodie tight around my head. “It’s good. Dana, you have your book?”

“Safe.” Dana patted the pocket of her sweatshirt.

Dana’s battered copy of
Bulfinch’s Mythology
had been our major source of information about the Underworlds. Besides the text, she had scribbled hundreds of notes in it. It had just about everything we needed to know about mythological places, creatures, and stories.

A lyre and a book. So far, these were our only weapons in this weird battle. Plus the sometimes-working cell phone Sydney had borrowed from her dad.

Some arsenal.

Dana squeezed up next to me. She was quiet for a few minutes, just looking out at our town. The giants were nowhere to be seen. The rain had let up a bit, but it was quickly turning into early evening, and streetlights and house lights were coming on.

“We should be home, not chasing monsters,” said Dana softly.

“I told my mom we had extra work at school,” I said. “Which is slightly true.”

“And slightly insane,” Dana added.

We all grinned at that, but Dana was serious. She had endured a lot. The unthinkable, really — being kidnapped by an evil god and held prisoner in the Underworld. I couldn’t imagine it. But she wasn’t wallowing. She was strong, and she was smart. Leafing through her book, she stopped at a page.

“Loki is known as the Dark Master for a reason,” Dana said, referring to what the monster Argus had called Loki when we rescued her. “He was known as a trickster, too. I figure he’s using tricks to get the Cyclopes to join him.”

“Not to mention that gross, giant wolf, Fenrir,” said Sydney.

We’d met Fenrir a couple of times, and we weren’t on the best terms. He was an extra-large red-furred wolf who breathed fire and smelled like garbage.

“Actually,” said Dana, “the wolf is one of Loki’s children.”

Jon froze. “Uh … what?”

Dana shook her head. “Don’t ask. Loki is the father of a bunch of monsters.”

“That’s probably what makes him so good at getting monsters on his side. He’s like a dad to them,” I said, trying to make it sound funny. (Okay, so I didn’t do a very good job.)

That made me think of my dad and my mom and my little sister, Mags. I hoped they would stay home and out of all this craziness.

“Dana,” Sydney said, “what are the Cyclopes actually like?”

Dana brushed the rainwater from her cheeks. “They’re not the sharpest crayons in the box. And they’re easily enraged, which we already found out.
But they do one thing well. They make lightning bolts for Zeus.”

“Do you think that’s what they’re doing here?” asked Sydney. “Making bolts for Loki? Was that why they were collecting metal junk?”

Dana shook her head. “I don’t know.”

None of us knew much, really. Only that the Underworlds were in turmoil. Loki was recruiting monsters for some big battle. But why he sent the Cyclopes here was a mystery. All I wanted was to get the giants back below and keep Dana safe.

The sky rumbled and turned blacker by the minute. Thick clouds hovered low over the buildings, the pine forests, the bluffs zigzagging the rocky shore, everything. I looked down at our small town. Nothing much was happening. The rain was keeping people inside. Good.

“It’s actually kind of peaceful up here,” I said.

I spoke too soon.

Out of nowhere came another fierce wind, and the two giants reappeared on the edge of the forest. They tore through the darkness outside of town, knocking
down trees in their way. Then all at once, the hairy giant slowed and turned. A car was moving down the street toward the stoplight.

“Oh, no,” I breathed.

The hairy Cyclops reached back and ripped a telephone pole out of the ground as if it were a weed. He threw it across the road in front of the car, which swerved up onto the sidewalk. Almost instantly, the power lines sparked, flamed, flashed brightly, and snapped, throwing the whole town —
whooom!
— into darkness. The driver leaped out of the car and ran back up the road, covering his head with a newspaper. I couldn’t tell whether he saw the Cyclopes or not.

The bald giant gripped the car in one hand and dropped it into his friend’s sack. Then both Cyclopes headed toward the shore.

“Where are they going?” said Jon.

We watched as the Cyclopes reached the rocks and climbed down to the water. They waded into the waves, which came up to their chests.

Then I saw it.

“They’re going there,” I said, pointing to a rocky island several miles up the coast. “Power Island.”

The little island was a collection of dark buildings, the remains of a power plant that had been abandoned five years ago.

“It makes all the sense in the world,” said Sydney slowly.

“Nothing about this makes sense!” said Jon, shaking his head. “What do the Cyclopes want out there?”

“Electricity and lightning are essentially the same thing,” said Dana. “If I needed to make lightning bolts, that’s where I’d go. Plus, the power plant’s been empty so long, the Cyclopes can hide there without anyone seeing them.”

The idea of two giants working in an old plant creeped me out.

The dark town suddenly exploded in sound. Alarms jangled. Sirens wailed. Police cars screeched up Main Avenue, their lights spinning blue and red. Fire engines lumbered out of the town’s only fire station.

“Should we call our parents?” asked Jon.

“We don’t want our families involved in this,” I said, watching the two giants clamber up the rocky shore of the island. “We need to get over there —”

Fire-red emergency lights flashed at the school. I suddenly remembered that, because of the emergency generators and the big gym and cafeteria, the school was a community shelter during storms.

“Everyone will be going to the school,” Sydney said. “What happens when we bring the giants there?”

I couldn’t take my eyes off the Cyclopes dragging their sack of junk to the power plant. The idea that we would actually return them to Hades seemed so far-fetched. The fact that we had to go through the school to do it just seemed crazy and impossible.

“We’ll figure that part out when we get to it,” I said. “First, we follow them. Somehow.”

“Our quickest way is by water,” said Jon matter-of-factly. “My ship is at the docks.”

Sydney turned to him. “Wait. You have a
ship
? You mean a
boat
, right? With a motor?”

“It’s actually a rowboat,” said Jon. “But it has oars and everything. One for each of us.”

“And it’s really yours?” Dana asked.

“Technically … no. It’s my dad’s,” Jon said. “But it’s no problem if we borrow it. When he’s not looking.”

It was better than nothing.

We carefully climbed down the water tower’s slippery ladder to the ground and made our way quickly to the coast. When we arrived at the inlet among the bluffs, the docks were deserted. Of course they were. Nobody in his right mind would be in a boat on a night like this.

“Now … we take to the high seas,” said Jon. We followed him to the end of the pier, where he waved his arm at the tiniest boat I’d ever seen. “Ta-da!”

“You expect us to fit into that?” Sydney said.

“Not that one,” said Jon. “This one.” He pointed to one even smaller.

A sudden flash of red light glowed from the distant power plant.

“The Cyclopes have already started,” Dana said. “Let’s move it.”

The minute we climbed into the boat and rowed out beyond the rocks, the sea really let loose. Waves slapped both sides of the tiny hull at once, spraying and soaking us even more. Jon was a good sailor and knew just how to turn the boat into and against the waves, but the farther from shore we rowed, the wilder the sea became.

Sydney touched my arm. “Owen, maybe you should use the lyre to calm the sea?”

I still had no idea what power the lyre really held. Or what my dizziness meant. But we needed to get to the power plant, which sort of meant not drowning. I slipped the lyre out of its holster and hunched over it to protect it from the rain, while everyone else put in their earplugs.

As we headed into the waves, my fingers moved instinctively to the second and fifth strings. My brain seemed to swim with the sound as time rolled more slowly. I wondered how long the uncomfortable feeling would go on, but I kept playing because it was working. The waves calmed around us, and the rowboat neared the island.

The plant towering against the sky was a coal-burning facility that had shut down when a new hydroelectric power station was built a few towns over. This old place was perched on the very summit of the island. From there, a narrow flight of stairs wound down through the rocks to a short pier jutting into the sea.

“Head for that pier!” Jon yelled out. “Everyone. One. Two. Come on!”

While I played the lyre, my friends kept up the rhythm Jon set with his oar. Together we brought the boat in between the waves. Jon tucked it in under the pier and tied it to a rail.

“Jon, you’re a regular Jason,” I said, referring to the Greek hero who commanded a famous ship.

“Arrh!” he said, doing his best impression of Charon, the Underworld ferryman we’d met a few days before. “That’ll cost you one blue penny!”

I instinctively checked my pocket. I had borrowed several pennies from Mags that morning, just in case we needed a ride from Charon later. The pennies were still there.

“Let’s go,” said Sydney.

Staring up the ladder, I dreaded what we’d find at the top. Fear iced my veins. But there was no time to waste. I hitched the lyre’s holster on my shoulder and, one by one, we climbed the stairway up through the rocks.

B
Y THE TIME WE REACHED THE TOP OF THE STAIRS
and saw the power plant up close, it was raining icy bullets. Twin smokestacks of black brick leaned over a hulk of broken windows and sunken walls. The whole place looked ghostly and dead.

Until the black windows flared with red light.

“They’re definitely busy with something,” Sydney said.

We took shelter under an angled coal chute and
heard sirens wailing in the distance. The town was still dark. The school was probably filling with people.

I pushed that thought out of my head. “First things first,” I said. “We get inside.”

“Okay,” Jon said slowly. “But how did
they
get inside?”

“Right,” said Dana. “How are they vanishing and reappearing? There’s nothing in the myths about any magical abilities.”

“Just your standard, violent one-eyed giants,” said Jon. “Somehow, that doesn’t cheer me up.”

I suddenly remembered seeing the necklace on the hairy giant. “The giant who fell next to me had a weird stone hanging around his neck. It had marks carved all over it.”

“Greek letters?” asked Sydney. “Like alpha and omega?”

I shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know Greek.”

“Or was it a rune?” asked Dana. “Runes are stones that hold power, if you know the symbols and how to use them. Loki was called a Rune Master. Maybe he gave the Cyclopes magic rune stones to get them out
of the Underworld. That could be how they escaped from school and vanished in the woods.”

“I’m pulling up a bunch of stuff about runes now,” said Sydney, tapping away on the screen of her cell. “Owen, if you can remember what the design of the rune was, we could use that same magic to get the giants back to Hades.”

It seemed like a long shot, but I liked the idea of something working in our favor. “That’s a better plan than mine,” I said.

“I didn’t know you had a plan,” said Jon.

“I don’t,” I said. “Come on.”

Carefully but quickly, we darted along the outside wall of the plant until we found a large steel door. I may not have known very much about the lyre’s different powers, but I knew how to make it open doors. My friends popped in their earplugs, and I brushed the strings of the lyre until the door quivered like heat off a hot stove and popped open.

The main room of the plant was a giant open box made of coal-blackened bricks. It rose eight stories from the floor to the ceiling, where a narrow gallery
was accessible only by a rickety set of stairs on the far side of the room. Part of the ceiling had crumbled in, and rain was pouring down like a waterfall, flooding a sunken section of the floor.

There was a narrow set of iron tracks around the perimeter of the room, leading deeper into the plant. The tracks had a small coal car sitting on them. Beside that, enormous machines made up of wheels and gears and pipes — generators, I guessed — seemed to have been ripped from their places and shoved to the sides of the room as if they were toys.

Against one wall was a huge coal-burning furnace. Its big iron door stood open to the room, and a fire was blazing inside. Among the flames we saw street poles, a section of bleachers, the body of a car.

“They threw all that stolen junk into the furnace,” whispered Jon.

Not far away from the furnace sat a flat-topped pile of iron girders. They seemed welded together into a giant block.

“I know what that is,” Sydney whispered. “Dad has one in shop class. An anvil. The Cyclopes would
need a furnace
and
an anvil to make lightning bolts. This is really not good.”

No, it wasn’t.

But not everything was bad. Even though the room was big and open, the piles of equipment pushed aside to make room for the anvil created tunnels and shadows where we could hide if we needed to.

And we needed to — fast.

Something heavy scraped across the floor deep inside the plant, and we took cover behind a mess of busted machines.

Scrape.
Pause.
Scrape.
And something the size of a mountain moved into the room.

In the light from the blazing furnace, we saw one of the giants clearly for the first time.

If he was huge when we saw him outside school, he seemed to have grown. To call him a giant hardly seemed big enough. The guy was gargantuan. He was almost as tall as the eight-story room itself. He lumbered in slowly, every muscle in his massive arms and legs clenched and menacing.

His head was the size of a hot-air balloon. Shaggy
hair hung in tangled clumps to his shoulders, which were as wide as a house. Under a brow as big as a hedge stood one large, round, wet eye.

“Gross …” Jon said, swallowing behind his hand. “I think I’m going to —”

I knew how he felt.

The white of the monster’s one huge eye was the color of eggnog. The brown pupil at the center pulsed, causing the eye to drool yellow liquid down his cheeks.

A wave of nausea moved from my stomach up to my throat. I breathed deep and swallowed hard.

From his massive shoulders to his knees, the Cyclops wore a kind of blacksmith’s apron that looked patched together from a whole herd of cattle.

Dana crept up beside me, nudging me to look at the giant’s massive hand. In it, he held a hammer with a head the size of a garbage can.

The floor thundered and now the hairless giant entered, casting his big eye on the anvil. “The Dark Master freed us for one thing only,” he bellowed in a voice like rolling thunder. “He needs it fast.”

The hairy giant nodded. “The forge is hot. Let us begin,” he said in the same way.

“They’re each wearing one of those necklaces,” I whispered, creeping as close as I dared.

Together, the two giants took a big pair of tongs, dragged something out of the furnace, and dropped it on the anvil.

FWA-A-A-ANG!

A blinding crash of light flared from the anvil, blasting the room with heat. The giants laughed, then positioned themselves on either side of the anvil. Raising their hammers, they began to pound the hot metal.
Doom! Doom! Doom!
First one Cyclops hammered, then the other, over and over, until the metal on the anvil began to take shape.

Putting down his hammer, the hairy giant reached for the tongs and tossed the hammered object into the huge pool of rainwater.
SSSSS!
The water exploded with steam, filling the room with a nasty-smelling cloud. Both Cyclopes coughed and tried to wave the steam away.

As the bald giant thundered over another piece of
metal at the anvil, the hairy one dragged the cooled piece out of the pool and drew a long file from his apron. With each stroke, the metal lost its crude shape. He ran the file over and over the metal, until it was as bright as silver and shone with brilliant light.

Dana groaned softly. “And that’s how they make lightning bolts.”

Piece after piece went from the forge to the anvil to the cooling pool. After Baldy hammered them, Hairy polished them, making the pieces so bright they were almost impossible to look at. Shielding my eyes, I glimpsed one piece shaped like a silver platter the size of a breakfast table. Another was a long tube bent at a right angle. One of the others looked like a large hand with blades running along the fingers.

Jon tapped my shoulder. “I haven’t seen a lot of actual lightning bolts up close,” he whispered, “but none of that stuff looks like lightning.”

The bald Cyclops removed one last piece from the pool and held it up. It was a large cone, made of bands of metal crisscrossing one another and twisting to a point at the top.

I didn’t know what it was, but I knew what it looked like.

A helmet.

“Uh-oh.” Dana’s face was suddenly as pale and frightened as when she had disappeared to the Underworld. “They’re not making lightning bolts for Loki. They’re making armor!”

“Yes, yes!” Sydney whispered, tapping on her cell. “I just saw something about Loki’s armor. According to legend, Loki was wounded by Odin, the chief Norse god. He was hurt so severely, he couldn’t be healed.”

Dana nodded quickly. “My parents told me that. He was seriously hurt, but he couldn’t die. Though armor made by the Cyclopes would be … indestructible …”

My brain sparked with a crazy idea. “If this armor is for Loki,” I whispered, “and we trapped the Cyclopes
and
wrecked the armor, it would solve two problems.”

“Hold on, look at this,” whispered Sydney, pushing her phone in front of us. “It’s an alphabet of rune symbols. Owen, did you see any of these runes on the necklace?”

I studied the strange carvings and pointed to one of them. “There were a couple on the stone. That was the biggest one.”

“Thurisaz,” Dana whispered. “Of course. Owen, I should have remembered that when you first told us about the necklace. Thurisaz is Loki’s special rune. He uses it to control shape-shifting. The Cyclopes must have used it to get out of the Underworld, out of our school, and to vanish in the woods.”

“Then we’ll use it on the giants to capture them,” Sydney said.

“Okay,” whispered Jon. “But how will we get that close to them?”

Before anyone could answer, the hairy Cyclops stood and stretched his mighty arms. “Done?”

“Done.” The bald giant clanged his hammer suddenly on the empty anvil.

And all at once, a passage in the far corner of the big room thundered with the sound of marching feet.

Hundreds and hundreds of feet.