More muttering from Emily, and then a sustained hiss. Erno would check on her. He’d do it right after he’d finished the poem.
Polly sat downstairs with Biggs and the goblins and Harvey, ripping paper, ripping, specifically, the pages of an ’80s magazine she’d assumed was so old it was disposable. She would have panicked if you’d told her it was actually an expensive collector’s item, but it wouldn’t matter in the long run—everything in the house was going to burn soon anyway.
Conversation had vanished, replaced by one of those clock-ticking kinds of silences, a savagely quiet kind of thickness, and Polly was just rolling her bits of paper into pellets to throw at the goblins when they turned to her and spoke.
“Nothing to do, eh?” said Pigg.
“No secret mission, like the others,” said Poke.
“Quiet,” said Biggs.
“Eh …,” said Harvey. “Why don’t you leave thith one alone, boyth. She’th all right.”
“All right?” said Pigg.
“All right?” said Poke.
“She’s our captor.”
“Our rightful mark.”
“We have our natures to consider.”
“It’s a big house, you know.”
“She could sit somewhere else.”
“Okay, okay,” said Harvey with a shrug and a be-my-guest wave of his arms.
Polly looked squarely at the goblins. “So your question was, why no secret mission for me?”
“That’s right.”
“I’m only seven.”
Pigg nodded. “That’s what your Prince Fi said. ‘Just a little girl,’ he told your brother last night, in passing.”
Polly gasped. “He said that?”
“Pixies’re like humans that way,” said Poke. “Don’t respect children like the Fay do. Queen Nimue, you know—she wants to build an army of children.”
“Don’t listen,” said Biggs.
“The big lug’s right,” said Pigg. “Don’t listen to us.”
“Forget we brought it up.”
“I mean, even if she could win Fi’s respect—”
“It’s not possible, Mr. Pigg. I hope you aren’t suggestin’ what I think you’re suggestin’—”
“Oh, I agree, Mr. Poke. We could show her, and it’d be amazing, but still it wouldn’t melt Fi’s cold, cold heart.”
Polly tightened her fists. “You don’t know him. You’re wrong about him.”
“I’d like to be wrong,” said Poke. “I would.”
“And stop talking about me like I’m not in the room,” said Polly, getting to her feet. “Grown-ups always do that, and I hate it!”
“An’ well you should.”
“You know what else I hate?”
“Tell us, tell us.”
“I hate TV shows where the character knows the bad guy’s trying to trick her into setting him free, but still all he has to do is say one kinda true upsetting thing and she’s all like, ‘You’re wrong! I’m gonna unlock your handcuffs and prove it to you!’”
The room fell silent again, and Biggs smiled at her. She took her seat.
Harvey snorted. “Ah, the girl took you to thchool, ladth,” he said. Then Polly allowed herself a little smile, too.
The goblins just stared, their chains hanging limply around them.
“Not scared of monsters anymore, you know,” Polly added. “Or the dark. I haven’t been scared of any of that since I was little.”
Poke let his attention drift to the empty fireplace, feigning disinterest. But Pigg continued to watch Polly, and said, “You invented the darkness, you know. You humans. Filled it with stories of bogeymen and bridge trolls and sharp little hands snatching children in the night.”
Polly narrowed her eyes. “That’s not right. You Fay, you are those things. You do steal children. Mick told me.”
“Yes,” said Poke, turning.
“Oh yes,” said Pigg.
“But only because we were invited.”
“Only because you let us in.”
John shifted in his seat and eyed a plate of shortbread on the table. He hadn’t eaten any breakfast. Finally the queen herself appeared from behind a blind, wearing a pink dress, pearls, and a diamond brooch. John stood, bowed at the neck, and they sat down together as the cameras flashed.
“They can’t hear us if we talk quietlike,” said the Goblin Queen in a gruff, sailorly sort of voice. “There ain’t no microphones.”
John pretended to celebrate this by saying a rude word.
“Thassa spirit. Just lie back an’ thinka England, an’ it’ll all be over soon.”
John was fairly certain he was supposed to wait for the queen herself to pour. He was her guest here. He calmed himself by studying the queen’s diamond brooch and discovered that what he’d mistaken for an abstract design was actually a giraffe throwing up a smaller giraffe.
“Where’d you get that?”
“Had it made.”
Finally the Goblin Queen asked if John took milk, and when he said no she lifted the teapot and filled his cup, then her own. John didn’t want any sugar either, so the queen helped herself to two lumps and stirred.
“I suppose you’ve both grasped the comedy a’ this sitiation,” said the queen. “It was you two what got punched, when you were ’personatin’ Her Majesty. An’ now it’s you apologizin’ t’ us!”
“Misters Katt and Bagg,” said John, “always with such a fascinatin’ analysis of the facts. Except we’re not apologizin’ to you lot, we’re tellin’ you to shut your gobs and drink your tea.”
“Heh,” said the queen with an unladylike leer, and she took up her teacup and pressed it to her lips. Then a man, the same man who’d brought the tea, rushed from the blind and came to a stop by her side. This man gave John a queer look, then leaned close to the Goblin Queen and whispered something in her ear. She lowered the teacup, the tea untouched. Then she gave John a bit of a queer look herself.
Soon the final days are numbered, then forgotten, read Erno, and he thought, If there’s a week left until new year, then there must be seven days.
and the new year’s hardly worth the time it’s taken.
So it’s the new year now? All right.
By degrees the hourglass reckons
all the minutes, all the seconds …
He was pretty sure this bit was just there to get him thinking about coordinates.
and the next year still has weeks to wait to waken.
So if it’s the new year, then the next year has … fifty-two weeks to wait?
He looked at the notes he’d been taking. They read 51, 33, 24, -0, 7, 52.
He felt iffy about it but asked Archimedes to show him exactly where fifty-one degrees, thirty-three minutes, twenty-four seconds latitude; minus zero degrees, seven minutes, fifty-two seconds longitude would be on a map. And the owl sent him an answer, and it was a north London house three miles away.
Only three miles. He could hit it with a rock from here. No, he couldn’t. But still! This had to be the answer—and he’d found it without any help from Emily, he thought, with a rush of pride. Then, as if rebuking him, Emily shouted in her sleep from the next room.
Polly came up the stairs. “It sounded like Emily yelled real words this time,” she said.
“Yeah … it did,” Erno agreed, and he shifted himself closer to the bedroom door. They were both silent, waiting, and then it came.
“St. John’s Wood!” shouted Emily in a mumbly dream speech. “We’re in St. John’s Wood!”
“Ohhh,” said Erno. “That can’t be good.”
CHAPTER 16
The queen had sent her servant away, and now she stared at John with a little smile. John sipped his own tea, just to show it wasn’t poisoned or anything, but the queen went on considering him for another dreadful minute. He thought even the reporters collectively sensed something was amiss. They had the reverent hush of sports fans watching to see if a ball thrown from half-court and backward was going t
o go in the basket or not.
“There’s a wonderful story from the Hebrew Bible,” said the queen in a queenly voice. John thought it could only be a bad sign that the goblins were using a queenly voice. “The Gileadites had defeated the Ephraimites in battle, and the surviving Ephraimites were trying to cross the River Jordan back into their homeland. Do you know the story?”
John coughed. “Don’t think so,” he answered.
“The Gileadites stopped every man crossing the River Jordan and asked, ‘Are you an Ephraimite?’ But of course no one answered yes. So the Gileadites told every man, ‘Say the word ‘shibboleth.’”
There was a pause. John said, “What is—”
“It’s a Hebrew word for a part of a plant or something. The meaning isn’t important,” said the Goblin Queen. “What’s important is that the Ephraimites had no sh sound in their dialect, while the Gileadites did. You see?”
“So—”
“So any man who said ‘sibboleth’ was killed. Say it with me: shibboleth.”
John breathed. “Shibboleth,” he repeated.
“Say it with both your voices,” said the queen.
The Great Court was crushingly silent. Gather enough quiet in one place, in a big enough room, and John thought it could almost kill a man. It almost killed him now.
“Say it,” said the queen. “Say shibboleth with both your voices at once, and I’ll drink my tea and smile for the cameras and we’ll all go home to our plum house-sitting jobs.”
John was momentarily stuck for an ad lib.
“Sir Richard!” called the queen. And from behind one of the blinds came Sir Richard Starkey, drummer for the Quarrymen. This had the effect of really warming up the reporters. They shouted and surged against the velvet rope, a seething mass of nonsense.
“I’m sorry, Reggie,” said Sir Richard. “I had to tell. You need help, you and your friends.”
John rose sharply, and his chair clattered to the floor behind him. “You were always a mediocre drummer, Richard!” he said, pointing.
“Oh, look here, now—”
“You didn’t even play on The Pennyfarthing Policemen Ride Again! It was a studio drummer!”
Speaking of policemen, several were now advancing on John. He sighed.
“I’m about to do something stupid, lads,” he said.
“We sort of figured,” said an officer.
“I wasn’t,” said John, grabbing the teapot, “speaking to you.” Then something unexpected happened.
For weeks the world would buzz over the mystery of this unexpected thing, and the things that would follow. Television news cameras these days catch a lot of detail, and those at the British Museum appeared to show Reggie Dwight unfurl his arm with a flourish, and a small bird fly from his sleeve. One of the reporters went, “Oooh.” Then the bird started breathing fire, and John punched the queen again.
She tumbled backward onto her royal bum. “THE QUEEN IS AN IMPOSTOR!” John shouted. It appeared to everyone present that he was about to pour hot tea on Her Majesty’s face, but a couple of fearless staffers managed to avoid Finchbriton’s canopy of fire and grabbed hold of his arms. John struggled, they held him fast, but then each in turn yelped in pain and lost their hold, retreating to nurse fresh cuts on their hands and arms. And the news cameras may or may not have captured the likeness of a four-inch-tall man with a sword, clinging to John’s suit coat.
John turned, teapot still in hand, but by now the Goblin Queen had scrambled to safety. “Finchbriton!” he shouted. “Right flanking screen execute!”
They’d worked out some plans in advance. But John wasn’t certain how much the bird had understood until now, when it fluttered to the right of the Reading Room and laid down a wide screen of perfectly smoky fire while John ran behind.
“I think today went really well,” John said as he ran.
“Is this sarcasm?” asked Fi. “My family didn’t believe in sarcasm.”
Behind the Reading Room and through the Great Court there was another exhibition space, dimly lit, that was dominated by a large stone moai statue from Easter Island. For a moment John thought this moai moved. But no, it was just the seven-foot-tall figure of his cab driver stepping out from behind it. The brute cracked his knuckles and grinned.
“Good,” said John, “our ride’s here.”
Fi said, “Once again—”
“Sarcasm, yes.”
Finchbriton was all too occupied keeping the queen’s guard out of the hall. Fi said, “Coin toss! Execute!” and John threw him high in the air. The driver arched his neck to watch Fi’s trajectory, and it occurred to John that he was still holding a teapot. So he hit the driver with it. It shattered against the big man’s jaw, and hot tea got on everything, including John’s hand. He winced from the pain of the strike and the scalding liquid, but the driver howled. By now Fi had landed on the man’s shoulder, and he proceeded to stab him in the eardrum before he was shaken off. He hit the floor hard, and John ducked to scoop him up.
“You okay?”
“I am fine. We pixies are a hardy lot.”
“Finchbriton!”
The driver, meanwhile, was taking the tea pretty badly. His face was cut up, but now it also seemed to be bubbling, steaming. The big man spat liquid, hunched over, and with a wrenching squelch, transformed suddenly into the Incredible Hulk.
Or something like that. He doubled in size, his black suit opening like a time-lapse blossom and then hanging limply in ragged petals all around him. The ridge of his brow had thickened and his skin had lost all color. He swung a massive arm and cracked the moai in half.
John goggled. “What?”
“Ogre,” said Fi.
“Only grab what you can carry!” shouted Erno, who carried the unicat. “We have to go now!”
Biggs was holding six suitcases, and Emily. She was still asleep. No one seemed to be able to wake her.
“Why?” said Polly as she rushed around, grabbing things, new things, things that didn’t make sense. Stuff from John’s house that she’d never even seen before yesterday. “Just ’cause Emily shouted in her sleep?”
“She shouted our location,” said Erno. “She told me she’s been dreaming for weeks about her mother or … someone trying to find her. What if it’s Nimue, sneaking into her head?”
“How will Dad and everyone know how to find us?”
“Everyone still has the new cell phones. We’ll have to call them, tell them where we’re going.”
“Where are we going?”
“Can’t say right now; the goblins might hear.”
“WHAT?” Pigg shouted from downstairs.
“Keep trying to wake Emily,” Erno told Biggs. “We can’t have her talking in her sleep anymore.”
They dragged their belongings down the stairs, and Erno dialed Scott.
“How’d you get through?” griped Scott. “I’ve been trying you, but the network’s been overloaded.”
“Why?” said Erno. “What’s happened?”
“Haven’t you been watching the queen’s tea?”
“We couldn’t figure out how to work your dad’s TV. What?”
“We saw it on at a gas station. John’s in trouble. We’re coming back.”
“Well, don’t come here. I don’t think it’s safe anymore. I’m texting everyone a new address.”
John’s new phone rang, and then chimed to report a text, but he ignored it because he was being chased by an ogre. It chased him down the steps to the street, it chased him northeast toward the parkland of Russell Square. It might have overtaken him already if its broken eardrum hadn’t been sending bad signals to its limbs and brain, causing it to stagger at times and jostle tour buses. Londoners screamed and ran from the sight of the monster; cars swerved. The only nice thing about being chased by an ogre was that the sight of it caused the policemen who were also supposed to be chasing you to pull back a bit and think about what they wanted out of life.
The ogre found a motorcycle
and threw it at John. “Duck!” shouted Fi, who was clinging to John’s collar and watching his back. John obeyed without question, and the bike skimmed his head and skipped against the pavement some fifteen feet distant, searing a blackened path toward the square. It broke down a section of iron fence John had been worried about jumping, so that was all right.
“So what do you know about ogres?” asked John.
“Dim-witted when angry,” said Fi. “But also less sensitive to pain.”
The park was teeming with people, strollers, little dogs off the leash.
“RUN!” John shouted to everyone around him.
“Is that Reggie Dwight?” said someone.
By his watch, the ogre should have crashed into the park already, but a quick glance told him it wasn’t behind them anymore. Had it given up the chase? Or was it calming down, starting to think? John heard distant screams.
“Are you Reggie Dwight?” asked a man with a stroller. “My wife just called, said you punched the queen.”
“Everyone knows that, mate,” said another man.
“No, I mean, he punched her this morning. Again.”
“Pull the other one.”
“No, it’s true.”
“Finchbriton!” called John. “Where are you? Can you make these people run like I asked?”
The finch swooped down and drew a fiery little swoosh in the air.
“Thank you,” said John as the men retreated. “Oh, look at that! Perfect!” He’d spied a couple of teenagers facing off near the center of the park, wearing glasses and chainmail armor and wielding longswords.
“Hi!” shouted John, approaching the kids. “Hello. Fancy selling me one of those swords? Say, a hundred pounds?”
“Are you Reggie Dwight?”
Then a moped sailed through the trees, crashing to the ground right where John and the boy would have been standing if John hadn’t heaved them both out of the way.
The teens cursed and ran off as fast as their complicated outfits would allow, and John noticed with some satisfaction that the one had dropped his sword when tackled. John stooped to retrieve it, and it was only for this reason that he avoided getting flattened by a second moped.