The Call

  It took him a few seconds to become oriented. He swatted the sheets beside him to ensure that he was in fact lying on his back—that he was faceup, and that his eyes were pointed in that same direction.

  The golem was awake, too.

  “Dude. Golem. Why are you on the ceiling?”

  The golem was apparently quite at ease on the ceiling. He was lying on his back, mirroring Mack. But not quite directly above because there was a ceiling fan in the way.

  “Should I come down?”

  “I kind of think so.”

  The golem did not float down or drop down. It stood up, which brought its head down to just a foot above Mack’s face. Then it walked to the corner of the room and stepped from the ceiling onto the wall, where it was once again upright. In a horizontal sort of way.

  It sidestepped the dresser and stepped from wall to floor.

  “I thought you didn’t have any superpowers,” Mack said.

  The golem shrugged. “I am a golem.”

  “What are we going to do with you, man?” Mack wondered aloud. “I have to go to school. I keep expecting smelly old guy to show up and explain what’s going on.”

  “Smelly old guy?”

  “Is he the one who made you? This really old guy with, like, green fingernails?”

  “I was made by great Grimluk.”

  “Grim Look?”

  “Grimluk.”

  “Sometimes the name just fits, you know?”

  “Not really.”

  Mack sighed. He was trying to be a good sport. He was playing along. Mostly because he found golems more interesting than his usual life.

  It wasn’t that Mack was unhappy. He had nothing to be unhappy about, really. He did okay in school. He had one or two friends, although he didn’t think of them as particularly close. But they would say, “Hey, Mack,” when he walked by. And sometimes they’d hang out together on a Saturday and maybe even play some ball.

  He had parents who weren’t mean, kids who kind of liked him, teachers who weren’t terrible, a nice house, a nice room, a decent laptop—what was there not to like?

  But exciting? As exciting as having time frozen by ancient apparitions? As exciting as a mythical clay creature who slept on the ceiling?

  However, as much as Mack was willing to play along for the sheer adventure of it, he was feeling a need for answers. Question number one: Is this real, or am I having some kind of cosmic kernel panic? Is this the real-life equivalent of the Blue Screen of Death? Did I miss an important software update?

  If so, is there some way I can reboot?

  Ah, but Mack admitted to himself, you wouldn’t reboot this even if you could.

  He wasn’t looking for a quick, reassuring return to normal. He was anxious for the craziness to move to the next phase.

  He noticed the clock.

  “I’m late,” he said. “Look, Golem, stay clear of my mom, okay? Hide in the closet. Yeah. That’s what you do.”

  “Okay,” the golem said.

  Mack headed downstairs.

  “Make yourself a Breakfast Pocket,” Mack’s mother said. She was adding creamer to her coffee. The small kitchen TV was on to the news.

  “I want a Toaster Strudel,” Mack said.

  “Breakfast Pocket.”

  “Okay,” Mack said, surrendering. He pulled a Toaster Strudel from the freezer and popped it into the toaster. His mother had never yet noticed that he ignored her on this. Sometimes it puzzled Mack. Didn’t she notice when she went to the grocery store that she kept buying Toaster Strudels?

  “Have a good day at school,” his mother said. She headed toward the garage. “Love you.”

  “Love you,” he called back.

  His father was already gone. He had a longer commute.

  Mack headed down the street toward his bus stop as his mother backed her car out of the garage.

  It was a nice day out, a wide blue sky overhead with just a scattering of cirrus clouds off to the south. The heat of summer was mostly a memory now, and the desert air had just a slight snap to it in the morning. It felt good in Mack’s lungs as he trudged down the street to the corner.

  Out of the corner of his eye he happened to see an old man coming down the street.

  The man was very old and dressed spectacularly, all in shades of green. He was dressed nicely, not like a crazy street person. He wore dark green slacks and a grass-green blazer over a brownish green vest. His shirt was white and starched, the only touch of nongreen aside from brown shoes.

  The thing that made the whole outfit kind of work was the green derby hat.

  The man in green had a walking stick in one hand and a bulky leather overnight bag in the other. Mack glanced back at him a couple of times but didn’t want to look as if he was staring.

  Mack spotted the knot of kids waiting for the bus just a few feet ahead: Ellen and Karl from his grade, some younger kids, and one older kid named Gene or John or something.

  Mack did the nod-of-acknowledgment thing and got the same in return from Karl.

  “Tsup?”

  “Enh.”

  “Tsup?”

  “You know.”

  Mack saw the bus coming down the side street. It would be here in three minutes. He had timed it before.

  Something was wrong. Mack felt it before he knew what it was. But it took only a few seconds to decide what the problem was: the old man in green. He’d been walking this direction. He should still be in view.

  But he wasn’t. Which meant he had turned off at one of four possible homes on this side of the street. The Reynoldses never answered their door, no matter what; the Applegates were out of town; the Tegens were already at work, and their daughter was standing right here at the bus stop.

  Which left the MacAvoy household.

  The old man in green was not a yard worker or a plumber or a carpenter or anyone else of the workman breed. So what was he doing? Where did he go?

  Mack wanted to go back to check. If he did, he would miss the bus. If he missed the bus, he would miss the bell, even if he ran all the way to school.

  That would mean walking into homeroom late. People would stare at him and laugh, and it would be marked on his attendance record.

  But he had no choice. His curiosity was piqued, and he had to go see.

  “I forgot something,” he said to the other kids, none of whom cared. He began trotting back down the street.

  He glanced at the Reynoldses’ home. Nothing. The Applegates’ home. Nothing. Likewise the Tegens’.

  He reached his own home. No green man.

  Mack frowned. So he’d been wrong. But then he noticed the fact that the gate to the backyard was slightly ajar. With his heart in his throat, he pushed through the gate.

  There was nothing unusual in the yard: the same unused swing set, a basketball rocking slightly in the breeze. Except that there was no breeze.

  His father’s grill was close at hand. He reached up under the plastic cover, felt around for a moment, and pulled out the big long barbecue fork.

  Armed and dangerous with his fork, Mack proceeded.

  The back door was shut. But there! The window. The kitchen window. Had it been open before? No. No, he didn’t think so. But now it was clearly open a crack.

  Mack debated for a second. No way the green man could have slid through the window.

  He pulled out his key and unlocked the back door.

  “Anybody home?”

  No answer.

  He considered swapping the fork for a kitchen knife but decided the fork had the added advantage of being so weird no burglar would know quite how to react.

  He passed through the kitchen. Now he heard the sound of the TV in the family room. It wasn’t loud, and it sounded like a commercial was playing.

  Closer and closer Mack crept.

  Someone was sitting on the couch, its back turned to Mack.

  “Golem?” he called.

  The golem stood up and turned, grinning his creepy, not-quit
e-Mack-like grin.

  Mack screamed. Screamed like a little girl.

  Attached to the golem’s arms, thighs, ankles, belly, and neck were a dozen brown snakes. Each was maybe three feet long, maybe four. Mack wasn’t going to measure them.

  “Aaaahhhh!” Mack yelled.

  The golem hesitated. Then he yelled, too, in a pretty close approximation of Mack’s own voice.

  “Snakes!” Mack yelled.

  “Snakes!” the golem repeated.

  “W-w-w-w-why?” Mack stammered.

  The golem looked down at the snakes. He plucked the one from his neck and held it out to see it better. The snake hissed and writhed and twisted to sink its fangs into the golem’s wrist.

  “The man put them in the window,” the golem said. “I don’t know why.”

  Mack had not previously suffered from ophidiophobia, although he was pretty sure he would start soon enough.

  As mentioned earlier, Mack noticed things. And he remembered the things he had noticed, even when those things involved class field trips to the zoo.

  “That’s an Australian brown snake, dude!” Mack said.

  “Yes, of course, the zoo trip,” the golem said.

  Mack felt his insides churning. “It’s one of the most poisonous snakes on earth.”

  “Yes, yes, it is,” the golem said, and nodded, pleased to have accessed Mack’s memories of this normally useless fact. “It doesn’t seem to be bothering me.”

  One of the snakes was eyeballing Mack. Fangs buried in the golem’s arm, it was looking straight at Mack. It was not a pleasant look.

  He had to get rid of them. It was going to be tough explaining a dozen poisonous vipers to his parents. He and the golem had to get them. Get them all. But how?

  “Walk to the kitchen,” Mack said.

  The golem did.

  The snakes were like weird hair extensions hanging from odd parts of him.

  “Okay, this is going to be gross,” Mack warned.

  He threw the switch for the garbage disposal.

  The golem detached the first snake and tried to urge it into the roaring hole.

  Mack took his barbecue fork and, with extraordinary care and much flinching, pushed the snake in.

  Grrrchunkchunkwgheee!

  The snakes were not geniuses, that much was clear. They didn’t seem to have the sense to let go of the golem and run for it. A second snake followed the first.

  Grrrchunkchunkwgheee!

  As he murdered snakes, Mack replayed the morning’s events in his mind. The man in green had known where he was going. The man in green had never made eye contact with Mack, and at that distance he would surely not have recognized Mack even if he had spotted him.

  Everyone knew golems were made of mud. And no one was dumb enough to think that viper poison would kill a golem.

  Therefore: the man in green had been trying to kill Mack.

  He had actually been trying to kill him.

  Knowing this made the disgusting sound of the snakes going grrrchunkchunkwgheee in the disposal almost musical.

  Eight

  A REALLY, REALLY LONG TIME AGO…

  After his run-in with the Skirrit and the princess, Grimluk devoted himself with even more enthusiasm to the job of fleeing.

  Fleeing 2.0. A whole new level of fleeing.

  He pushed Gelidberry, the cows, and the baby at top speed: three miles an hour.

  They fled all through the rest of that first night and all through the next day. Exhausted and cranky, they arrived toward dusk at the edge of the forest. Ahead of them was a vast open meadow. From the center of the meadow there rose a steep hill. The hill looked as if it had been built entirely of tall, jagged slabs of granite, then decorated with earth and grass and even the occasional tree. And then as if, over many years, most of that blanket of earth had been worn down by rain and snow and whatever mysterious force pulled things down toward the ground (gravity, but that hadn’t been discovered yet).

  Atop this grim and stony hill sat a castle that looked almost to be carved out of the very stone of the hill. The walls were a dark gray, upswept to crazy heights and then crenellated.

  Crenellations: the little jigsaw-looking things at the top of castle walls.

  Grimluk hadn’t seen that many castles. In fact he’d seen just one, the baron’s castle, which, to tell the truth, was about as impressive as an Office Depot.

  This castle, on the other hand, had a seriously dangerous look and feel. And even from far off Grimluk could tell that it was on a high state of alert. Spear tips glinted from the crenellations, sunset painting the bronze points red. There were even archers armed with state-of-the-art bows.

  The castle was expecting trouble.

  Towering above the walls was the keep. The keep was the last resort, a castle-within-a-castle. If enemies breached the outer walls, they then had to start all over again to take the keep.

  From the top of the keep fluttered a black and sky-blue banner. There was some sort of symbol on the banner, but Grimluk couldn’t quite make it out.

  Far below, crouching by the foot of the hill, was a village, a few dozen thatch-roofed buildings.

  “Let’s go to the village,” Grimluk said. “Maybe we can sell some milk and get a room for the night.”

  “We don’t have reservations,” Gelidberry pointed out.

  But Grimluk didn’t care because reservations hadn’t yet been invented, let alone Priceline and Expedia and hotels.com. In fact, if there had been any such thing, it would have been called inns.com or even stables.com.

  They reached the edge of the village just as night fell. They parked the cows and carried the nameless baby into the first inn they found.

  It was crowded with drunken men and a few drunken women. But it was quiet for a room full of drunks. People were more sullen than rowdy. When Grimluk and Gelidberry came in, every eye turned toward them, appraising the tired family.

  “How many in your party?” the innkeeper asked.

  “Two adults, one child,” Grimluk answered.

  “We don’t have a kids’ menu,” the innkeeper warned.

  They elbowed their way to the end of one of the long tables. Grimluk ordered a tankard of mead and three bowls of gruel. It was a Tuesday: gruel night. Grimluk felt a little disappointed. If he’d come on Monday, it would have been fish and chips.

  Across the table sat a burly, older man of perhaps sixteen years. He had a full beard studded with bits of food. Little pig eyes stared out from beneath a scarred, tanned brow. The man had an ax slung over one shoulder. Grimluk fingered his own hatchet and winced to realize that the ax was maybe three times bigger.

  “Hi,” Grimluk said. “How’s the gruel here?”

  The man made a deep, grumbly sound that might have been a sort of restaurant review. Then he said, “You’re a stranger, as am I. Do you come to join up?”

  “Join up?”

  “The Army of Light,” the man said. “They’re hiring. If you have the right stuff.”

  “We have two cows,” Grimluk said. “And this spoon.” He showed the spoon.

  The man laughed, a sound that seemed totally out of place in a room where people were mostly whispering and glancing nervously over their shoulders.

  “We have no need of spoons! Spoons will not defeat the Pale Queen!”

  The whispering came to a very sudden stop. The man winced, clearly embarrassed, as if he’d farted or used an offensive word. (Soap was one such offensive word.)

  “Sorry. I meant to say, ‘the Dread Foe.’”

  The people in the room went back to their slurred whispers.

  “This Army of Light,” Gelidberry said, “do they pay well?”

  “Hey, I’m not looking for a job,” Grimluk protested.

  “You have a family to feed,” Gelidberry snapped. “And in case you haven’t noticed, you’re not doing very well at that.” She pointed at her ribs. “I can count these clear through my clothing.”

  “All right, all r
ight,” Grimluk said. He pointedly turned back to the man, ignoring Gelidberry’s reproachful gaze. “I used to be horse leader to the baron. Now I’m a fleer.”

  “Everyone’s a fleer nowadays,” the man snorted. Then he held out a fat-fingered hand. Grimluk shook it.

  “My name is Grimluk.”

  “Wick,” the man said. “I came to join the Army of Light as a pikeman. I could get you in to see the pike captain.”

  “I have no experience with a pike.”

  Wick shrugged. “Eh. There’s not much to it. It’s a big, long spear. You hold the pointy end toward the enemy. I’m not saying there’s not some skill involved, but you seem sharp enough.”

  It took Grimluk a few seconds to think about that. “Sharp enough? Was that a pun?”

  Wick chewed at his lip. “I’m not sure. All I know is, they’re hiring pikemen. It pays two loaves of bread and a small hatful of cheese curds per week, and they supply the pike.”

  “I used to earn a large basket of chickpeas and a plump rat per week, and one pair of sandals a year,” Grimluk said.

  Wick guffawed. “Ha! You won’t find that kind of riches carrying a pike, that’s for sure. A plump rat? A pair of sandals? That’s Magnifica money.”

  “Magnifica?”

  The use of that word had the opposite effect on the room from what the words Pale Queen had caused. Instead of stunned silence and fearful glances, Grimluk saw drunken eyes open wide and fill with tears of hope.

  “He can do that,” Gelidberry said quickly.

  Wick shook his head sadly. “Oh, my lady, your confidence does your husband proud, but to be a Magnifica, a man must be no more than twelve years of age.”

  “He’s twelve,” Gelidberry said.

  “And he must possess the enlightened puissance.”

  That shut Gelidberry up pretty effectively. Because she had no idea what enlightened puissance might be. But by this point Grimluk was feeling a little disrespected, both by Gelidberry and by Wick’s casual dismissal of the idea that he might possess puissance.

  Grimluk had no more idea that Gelidberry had what enlightened puissance might be. But he didn’t see why he couldn’t possess it. Lots of it.

  By this point Grimluk had swallowed half the tankard of mead.

  “I have that,” Grimluk asserted. “I have a bunch of it.”