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The Trap
“Blueturophobia,” Mack said. “It’s a fear of blue cheese.”
“Are you going to have one of your crazy fits?” Stefan asked.
“Not if you knock me out, throw me in a taxi, and don’t wake me up until I’m standing in a shower,” Mack said.
Five seconds later Mack was draped over the luggage. Stefan wheeled him – blissfully unconscious – towards the exit.
David “Mack” MacAvoy was a normal-looking kid living a normal life in the almost normal city of Sedona, Arizona. He had no idea that he would be called upon to save the world from a terrible evil.
A terrible evil no one had actually heard of.
Everyone expects the world to eventually be destroyed by some combination of global warming, a giant asteroid strike, the sun going supernova, the planet falling off its axis, a wandering black hole, the explosion of the giant magma-filled zit below Yellowstone – Oh, you hadn’t heard about that? Well, it’s best not to think about it – or a rapidly spreading disease that turns people into flesh-eating zombies.
Asteroids, exploding sun, global warming, black hole, magma pimple, and zombie apocalypse – those are all happening for sure. Those are the things we know about.
But in the twenty-first century absolutely no one was worrying about the imminent release of the Pale Queen from the World Beneath, where she’d been imprisoned for three thousand years.
It’s always the thing you’re not worrying about that gets you. You’d think Mack would have realised that before most. After all, Mack suffered from a whole long list of phobias.
He had arachnophobia, fear of spiders. Dentophobia, fear of dentists. Pyrophobia, fear of fire (which was ironic considering he’d used a Vargran spell to turn into a sort of minisun while fighting Ereskigal at one point).
He had pupaphobia, fear of puppets; trypanophobia, fear of getting shots; thalassophobia, fear of oceans – which led fairly naturally to selachophobia, fear of sharks.
And as mentioned earlier, phobophobia, which is the fear of developing more fears.
The mother of all fears for Mack was claustrophobia, fear of small, enclosed spaces. Of being buried alive. Not that anyone would exactly enjoy that, but Mack could freak out just thinking about it.
But despite his close relationship with fear, Mack hadn’t known there was a Pale Queen about to be released from the World Beneath.
(By the way, if you know all this because you read the first book? You can skip this chapter and go to the next one. My feelings won’t be hurt.)
Mack’s part in that three-thousand-year-old story began when he was about to get the snot – excuse me, mucus – beaten out of him by Stefan Marr, King of All Bullies at Richard Gere Middle School. (Go, Fighting Pupfish!)
Just as the beating was scheduled to start, Grimluk appeared. Ghostlike. Special effects time. Booga booga.
Grimluk’s appearance froze time for a few seconds while he began to lay out the bad news for Mack. In effect, “Dude, you are one of a select group called the Magnificent Twelve. You need to drop out of school, assemble the rest of the Magnifica from the four corners of the Earth, learn this magic language called Vargran, and take down the Pale Queen when she emerges from her underground lair.”
Those weren’t Grimluk’s exact words. For one thing, Grimluk would never say “dude”.
Unfortunately Grimluk wasn’t able to sit down and have a nice long chat and explain everything since he could only appear briefly – usually in the reflective chrome surface of a bathroom fixture. So Mack had to operate on very limited information.
The golem that Mack discovered living in Mack’s room didn’t fill in too many details, either.
A golem, as you may know, is a sort of robot made of clay. The golem maker writes down an instruction and puts it in the golem’s mouth. Then the golem comes alive and does whatever the instruction says.
In the case of the golem in Mack’s bedroom, the message said, “Be Mack.” So the golem had done its best to look and sound like Mack. He might not be good enough to fool a really close observer, someone who really knew Mack well, but he fooled Mack’s parents.
Still, even with a golem, Mack didn’t go rushing off to save the world, not right away, because although Mack was open-minded about the whole ancient, smelly, Grimluk-manifestations thing, he wasn’t stupid. He needed more information before doing something reckless.
The “more information” came in the form of Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout trying to assassinate Mack by pushing a basketload of highly poisonous snakes into Mack’s house. And later, that same Nine Iron tried to run Mack through with a sword while Mack was taking a… um… utilising the wall-mounted facilities in the boys’ bathroom.
Having escaped the snakes and the sword, Mack was set upon by two Skirrit, who invaded the school and tried to kill him. Skirrit are one of the evil races that obey the Pale Queen. Think really large grass-hoppers walking erect. Grasshoppers or maybe praying mantises, possibly cicadas. Anyway, insectlike and as tall as a short man.
Clearly Richard Gere Middle School needed some new signage. They had a sign forbidding drugs, cigarettes, guns and alcohol. They had another sign forbidding bikes, skateboards, rollerblades and scooters. And a third sign forbade iPods, iPhones and anything else “i.” They even had a sign proclaiming the school a nuclear-free zone and a peanut-free zone.
Which was good in case terrorists ever came up with a nuclear peanut.
But there was no sign forbidding Nafia assassins or evil insectoid species in service to the Mother of All Monsters.
Being almost killed by snakes and then chased into a limousine by the Skirrit definitely helped convince Mack to save the world. Plus, in the limousine was an elegant young woman named Rose Everlast, who worked for a very respectable accounting firm. Rose handed Mack and Stefan passports under fake names, and a credit card tied to a million-dollar account.
So, that’s where we are. Everything explained.
Except for Princess Ereskigal, known in Greek mythology as Persephone and in Norse mythology as Hel. Not a real popular person, whatever name she used.
Fortunately Mack had used some words of Vargran and turned Risky into burned toast. She was gone. Dead. Vapour. No longer a worry. A ghost. History.
Are you buying that? No?
You’re wise to be suspicious. Because Princess Ereskigal is very, very hard to kill.
ABOUT A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, GIVE OR TAKE…
But no. He was just a rotten kid.
Patrick Joseph Trout was born eighteen seconds after his identical twin, Liam Sean Trout. The birth took place in the back of an oat wagon on the dirt road between the small village of Loathbog and the town of Trollbog.
Within seconds of his birth, Paddy was trying to bite through his twin brother’s umbilical cord. Of course Paddy had no teeth – any more than any newborn would – so all he could do was attempt to gum his brother to death, gnawing and crying in a thin newborn wail.
Gnaw gnaw gnaw, waaaah! Gnaw gnaw gnaw, waaaah!
He was a very bad baby.
Both Loathbog and Trollbog were in County Grind. County Grind was known for its beautiful vistas of shockingly green fields, bright pink pigs and pale amber whisky.
The reason the Trout family was on its way to Trollbog was to sell their load of oats. No one grew better oats than the Trouts, and Mother Trout was justly renowned for her many oat recipes: oats, oats with salt, oat cereal, oat bread, charred oats, grilled oats, fricasseed oats, barbecued oats, oat kabob, smoked oats, oat fondue, oat pie, oat loaf, oat terrine, Grimos (like Cheerios but not), oats stuffed with peat, oats à la turf, oats with three types of lichen, oats sous vide (she was an early pioneer in the technique), oats with pig feet, oats with pig snout, oats with a reduction of feet and snouts, oat-stuffed pig intestine, oat-stuffed pig stomach, oat-stuffed pig-organ-no-one-knows-the-name-of, oats with whisky, and of course, oatmeal.
Patrick and Liam were expected to grow up and take over the oat farm. Indeed, they were raised to care about little else. Once Patrick mentioned that some people enjoyed wheat, and his father promptly smacked him with a loaf of oat bread.
Not stale oat bread, because that’ll kill you.
By the time he was nine, Patrick could identify all major types of oat blight: oat weevils, oat rust, oat worm, oat mold, false oat mold, and oat-eating falcons.
See, he was trying to be good. Trying not to be just evil. Really, he was.
But as hard as Patrick worked at the science of oats, Liam, as the firstborn, got all the attention from their father. This was because County Grind had a primogeniture law, which meant that the firstborn would inherit everything. The second son was a sort of spare part. A sort of unpaid employee. Only if Liam died would the farm go to Patrick.
But Liam was even healthier than Patrick. So no such luck.
Unless…
But murder was frowned on in Loathbog, especially murder of a brother. The punishment was to be drawn and quartered by four powerful horses. Now, since no one could afford horses in Loathbog, they used pigs. And since pigs weren’t really strong enough to pull a person apart, it wasn’t exactly a death sentence. But it was humiliating, and you could easily dislocate a shoulder.
Cars had just been invented, so there was some thought given to using cars for the drawing and quartering. But seriously, if you can’t afford a horse, you sure can’t afford a car. I mean, please. Cars in Loathbog? No. It was still pig-drawn wagons in Loathbog. After all, County Grind wasn’t exactly County Snoot.
County Snoot: everyone hated those guys.
One day when Patrick was about twelve, his father had a little talk with him. He sat him down on a bale of oats and said, “Um… wait, it will come to me…Patrick! Yes, I knew I’d remember your name.”
“My friends call me Paddy,” he answered tersely.
“You have friends? Ah-ha-ha-ha, that’s a good one.” Mr Trout slapped his knee. Patrick’s knee. “Sure an’ ye have the gift o’ blarney, that ye do, that ye do, laddie buck.”
I could kill you with a pitchfork, old man is what Patrick did not say, but what he thought.
“Well, I’ll get right to it, um…”
“Paddy.”
“Whatever. As you know, your brother, Liam, is to inherit the farm when your sainted mother ’n’ me shuffle off this mortal coil. Now, normally you could stay on and work for Liam.”
Patrick produced a sort of low growl mixed with a serpentine hiss.
“But Liam doesn’t much like the notion of you hanging around and trying to kill him.”
“Me?” Paddy said innocently. “Try to kill him? Me? That’s crazy! I’m innocent! Oh, the pain of false accusation!” Then he leaned in close to his father and snarled, “So who told you?”
“The point is, son, we can’t have you trying to murder your brother all the time. We’re sending you to America.”
“America?”
“For the last nine years your mother has saved all her prize money from the County Grind Fair oat-cooking competitions, and we’ve now got the money to send you abroad.”
“Wait. She’s been saving up to get rid of me since I was three years old?”
“No, no, no, laddie. That’s just the first time she won any prize money. Lord love ye, we’ve been trying to get the cost of the ticket set aside since you were four months old and reached for your first meat cleaver. And especially since our farmhand Tommy O’Doul disappeared. By the way, you don’t happen to know where Tommy is, do you, laddie?”
“I categorically deny all accusations, and I refuse to answer any questions on the grounds that it may incriminate me,” Paddy said.
“Ah, you’ll do just fine in America.”
Which is how Patrick “Paddy” Trout came to leave Loathbog and County Grind and took ship for the land of opportunity.
It was a stunning hotel. Beautiful. Expensive. Swank. All those things. Mack woke up in the elevator, moaning and whining about blue cheese, so as soon as they got to their room, Stefan dragged him to the bathroom, turned the shower on, and tossed him in.
Mack showered using several cleaning agents: hand soap, bath soap, tangerine body wash and shampoo. Then he started it all over again. And finally he felt clean of the awful blue-cheesy-guts stuff.
He emerged scrubbed and pink, swathed in a plush bathrobe, and far less likely to whine.
Jarrah had snagged a candy bar from the minifridge and was standing beside Stefan, who was looking out one of the floor-to-ceiling windows.
“You know, you boys didn’t mention there was a crazy old loon trying to kill you,” Jarrah accused.
“I didn’t think he’d come after us,” Mack said. He flopped back on to the bed, which was amazingly soft. There were two beds in this room, and another bed in the adjoining room. “I thought Grimluk might have said something about a trap. It wasn’t clear. I thought I was imagining it. But I guess that was the trap.”
“The possibility of a trap is something you definitely want to mention,” Jarrah said. “Still and all, here we are, right as rain. No worries.”
Jarrah was a cheerful, optimistic sort of girl. Mack wished he could be like that. The cheerful, optimistic part, not the girl part.
Stefan was looking at the room service menu. “I can’t read this.”
Jarrah took the menu from him, flipped from the Chinese-language pages to the English-language pages, and handed it back.
“Huh,” Stefan said.
“That was weird, wasn’t it?” Jarrah said thoughtfully. “I mean, so I say these Vargran words, and stuff happens. I mean, that’s weird, right?”
Mack lifted his head. “Some people might think so. Like, sane people. They would think so.”
THIS BOOK IS ABOUT MACK, NOT ABOUT ME. I’M JUST HIS GOLEM. SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO READ THIS PART. UNLESS YOU WANT TO. DO YOU WANT TO? ARE YOU HOLDING THE BOOK SIDEWAYS SO YOU CAN READ IT? ARE PEOPLE STARING AT YOU BECAUSE YOU’RE READING A BOOK SIDEWAYS? DO YOU FEEL KIND OF SILLY? I FEEL SILLY A LOT. LIKE THE OTHER DAY WHEN IT RAINED AND MY FEET GOT WET AND STARTED DISSOLVING. I WAS RUNNING LATE, SO NO TIME TO STOP AND RE-MUD MYSELF. BY THE TIME I GOT CLASS, I WAS WALKING ON MY KNEES. I FELT SILLY. ALSO SHORT. THEN KIDS STARTED SCREAMING.
Jarrah took a thoughtful bite of her candy bar. “I mean, what’s weird is that I’d spoken Vargran before. While I was with my mom and she was working on the Uluru cave wall. We’d puzzle words out. But nothing ever happened before. Not like that. Not something supernatural.”
Stefan said, “It’s all Chinese food. Except the club sandwich.” He tossed the menu aside and turned on the TV.
“I think there’s some kind of match-up between the person and the things they can do with Vargran,” Mack said. “I don’t know. I tried Google, Bing, Wolfram|Alpha, all the search engines. There isn’t much about Vargran.”
“You think they’ll eventually shrink back? The Lepercons, I mean?”
Mack nodded at the TV, which was showing a news report. It was an exterior shot of the airport. There were police cars and ambulances with lights flashing.
A small army of workers pushed wheelbarrows full of goo that looked a bit like soft blue cheese. Firefighters had hooked up a hose and were spraying down some very disgruntled-looking people and their luggage.
The broadcast was in Mandarin – one of the two main Chinese languages – so no one understood the commentary. But Mack guessed it was something like, “Holy fajita, the airport baggage claim is full of giant creatures oozing stinky cheese. What the heck is going on?”
“This Vargran stuff is cool,” Stefan said. “I could buy a Snickers, right? And Jarrah, you could do your magico mumbo jabumbo and make it, like, huge.”
“And then we’d be smothered in creamy nougat,” Mack pointed out.
“Nah. Just eat your way out,” Stefan said. He made a face like he thought maybe Mack was being an idiot.
“I don’t know what we’re supposed to do,” Mack said. He got up and went to stand between Stefan and Jarrah at the window. They were on the twenty-first floor, high up. It was dusk; lights were just coming on all over the city.
“We have thirty-five days,” Mack said. “We have to find ten more kids. The exactly right ten more kids. We can’t just go to the nearest middle school. Then we have to, like… Well, I don’t exactly know. Grimluk said we had to find these ancient, unknown forces. And mostly, we had to learn Vargran.”
“Well, my mom is working on deciphering more of that,” Jarrah said. “Why did Grimluk send us here to China?”
“All Grimluk told me was, go to the nine dragons of Daidu. If I hadn’t Googled it, I wouldn’t even have known Daidu was the ancient name for Beijing. There was only one hotel named the Nine Dragons Hotel. So. Here we are.”
“We’re here to find the next one of our group, right?” Jarrah said. “So, it’s what, like, a billion people in China? No worries, we just start asking around.”
“Let’s go out and get some food,” Stefan said.
“We only have thirty-five days!” Mack cried.
“We still have to eat,” Jarrah said. “And we’re here, right? Let’s go out, see what’s what. Maybe the third member of the Magnificent Twelve is at the local McDonald’s.”
“It’s getting dark,” Mack said, but it was a weak objection because Stefan and Jarrah were already on their way.
The hotel was situated on a broad avenue. Traffic wasn’t heavy but it was dangerous. There were more bikes than buses, more buses than taxis, more taxis than private cars. But none of them seemed overly concerned with traffic lights.
The Magnificent Two plus Stefan had a map, given to them at the hotel. Marked on it was the night market, the Donghuamen.
Seriously. That’s the actual name.
The woman at the hotel had told them it was the place to go for food. They could see the bright glow of it from blocks away.
“It’s right next to the Forbidden City,” Mack said, turning the map in his hands.
“Forbidden,” Stefan said with a smirk. “Yeah, well, it’s not forbidden to me.”
Jarrah laughed. “Got that right, mate.”
(Author’s note: I forgot to mention that Mack had changed out of his bathrobe. So if you were picturing him still in a robe, no: regular clothes.)
Mack read the brief description on the map. “The Forbidden City is open to anyone nowadays. It’s this gigantic palace complex. Bunch of palaces and museums and stuff, with nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine rooms. Back in the old days no man could enter. Instant death. Unless you were a eunuch.”
“What’s a eunuch?” Stefan asked.
Mack told him, and as a result Stefan headed into the Donghuamen Night Market walking a little strangely.
The market was about four dozen blazingly bright stalls topped by cheery red-striped awnings. The attendants all wore red caps and red aprons and screeched insistently at the passing crowd. It was very clean and well-organised, and smelled of fresh fish.
The food choices were rather unusual. First, most of the food was on sticks. Like shish kebab. Or corn dogs. Except that these were no corn dogs.
There were fried silkworm cocoons on a stick.
Fried grasshoppers on a stick.
Fried beetles on a stick.
Seriously, none of these are made up.
Fried sea horse on a stick.
Fried starfish on a stick.
Fried scorpion on a stick.
And fried snake wrapped around a stick.
The philosophy at Donghuamen seemed to be: Is it really gross? OK then, put it on a stick!
The crowd was predominantly Chinese, and mostly they weren’t eating the various stick-based foods. They were eating little buns stuffed with meat and vegetables, or pointing at pieces of fish and having it fried up in blistering-hot woks. Or chewing brightly coloured glazed fruit.
It was the American, British and Australian tourists eating the OMG-on-a-stick food.
“Huh. Those are, like, bugs,” Stefan said. “Bugs on a stick.”
“You’re not scared to try them, are you?” Mack taunted.
Stefan narrowed his eyes, shot a dirty look at Mack, but then noticed Jarrah smiling expectantly at him.
“I will if you will,” Jarrah said. She had a dazzling smile. At least Stefan looked dazzled by it.
“Yeah?”
Mack rolled his eyes. “You guys really don’t have to.”
“Starfish?” Jarrah suggested.
“Why, you scared to eat a fried snake?”
“Oh, I’ll eat a fried snake, mate,” Jarrah shot back. “The question is, are you man enough to eat a fried silkworm cocoon?”
It was a strange sort of courting ritual, Mack decided. Two crazy people sizing each other up.
“Scorpion,” Stefan said.
Jarrah high-fived him. “You’re on.”
They bought two orders of scorpion on a stick. Each stick had three small scorpions.
Stefan said, “OK, at the same—”
Jarrah didn’t wait. She chewed one of the scorpions, and Stefan had to rush to keep up.
“The two of you are mental,” Mack said as Jarrah and Stefan laughed and crunched away with scorpion tails sticking out of their mouths.
“Oh, come on, don’t be a wimp, Mack,” Jarrah teased. “At least try a fried grasshopper. They don’t look so bad.”
Mack made a face and looked dubiously at the plastic tray loaded with fried grasshoppers. “Yeah, I don’t think so. They look a little bit too much like those…”
The words died in his mouth. What the grasshoppers looked like were Skirrit.
One of which, wearing a tan trench coat and a narrow-brimmed fedora that didn’t exactly hide his giant bug head, had just stepped up beside Mack.
He jerked away from the food, away from the Skirrit in the trench coat. But another was right behind him and wrapped its insect stick arms around him. The first pulled a bladed weapon like a short, curved sword from beneath its coat and pointed it at Mack’s chest.
A ripple went through the crowd of tourists as more and more realised that a couple of very big grasshoppers – grasshoppers not unlike the ones some of them were eating – were kidnapping a kid.
People ran. The vendors and cooks working the food stands ran. It took about four seconds for everyone to go from normal to complete panic, and then it was screaming and running and knocking over hot woks, and awning poles broken and ice bins spilled all over the sidewalk, and everywhere food: food flying and food dropping and food slithering because it was still alive.
