But it didn’t move or make a sound.
Tick noticed some writing on the side of the box, shadowed by the light coming from the room. He shifted his position closer and squinted his eyes. It took a few seconds, but he finally made out what it said:
GNAT RAT
Manufactured by Chu Industries
What in the world . . .
Tick thought of Mr. Chu, his science teacher, but he obviously had nothing to do with this. Tick would know if his favorite instructor had his own company or was affiliated with one. It had to be a coincidence.
But . . .
His mind was blank, churning to come up with an explanation for the weird thing sitting in his closet. It had to be related to the letters from M.G., the Tingle Wraith, and Mothball, but how or why . . . ? No clue.
And what in the world is a Gnat Rat? He reached out a finger and brushed the back of the smooth gray metal box.
The thing jumped.
Tick gasped and fell backward, even though the Gnat Rat had barely moved—an inch at most—before coming to rest again. A slight buzzing came from it like the distant sound of his mom’s oven timer from downstairs. Whatever the thing was, it had just turned on or powered up.
A mechanized clicking sound sprung up and the ten pairs of metal legs started moving back and forth, slowly marching the Gnat Rat off the pile of clothes and out of the closet, toward Tick. His eyes wide and focused on the toy-like thing coming at him, Tick stood up, unsure what to do. It seemed totally harmless, a cheap robot you could buy at any discount store.
But then he remembered it slamming into his door when he’d closed it from the hallway that night. He thought about its name: Gnat Rat. And finally, he thought about how it had somehow disappeared and come back, magically. All of these things led to one conclusion.
A Gnat Rat is bad.
Tick was about to bolt away when he heard a loud click like the sound of a gun being cocked. He looked in shock at the ominous toy. A small door slowly swung open on the Rat’s back side.
Then little things started flying out of it.
~
Light or no light, a son suffering from insomnia or not, Edgar couldn’t ignore the call of nature. He finished washing his hands in the bathroom, flicked off the light, and stepped back into his bedroom. Trying his best to be quiet so Lorena could sleep—though he probably could’ve danced around the room with cymbals on his knees and blowing on a trumpet and she would’ve remained dead to the world—Edgar walked through the room and into the hallway.
Sure enough, it was Tick’s room with a light on, and an odd mechanical hum echoed out his door and down the hall. Did he get some new gizmo I don’t know about?
Edgar had taken only one step forward when he heard the boy scream.
~
Tick shrieked as dozens of winged, buzzing little drones flew out of the Gnat Rat in a torrent like a pack of raving mad hornets. Without exception they came directly at him, swarming around his body before he could react, attacking, biting, stinging.
Tick swatted at them, slapping and hitting his own body, dancing and kicking, yelling for help. Pinpricks of pain stabbed every inch of his skin, under his clothes, in his
hair; the mechanical gnats were hungry and Tick must’ve looked awfully delicious. Panic shot through him in a rush of adrenaline, his mind shutting down, offering no ideas on what he should do.
He heard his bedroom door slam against the wall.
“Atticus!” his dad yelled.
But Tick couldn’t look at him. He’d squeezed his eyes closed, scared the gnats would blind him. They were relentless, attacking him over and over again, their sharp stingers finding fresh spots to hurt him with a frightening ease. Overwhelmed by pain and fear, he fell to the ground.
He felt his dad gripping his arms, dragging him across the floor and out of his room. Down the hall, into the bathroom. He heard the rush of water in the bathtub.
Dad, he thought, wanting to warn him, but afraid to open his mouth. They’ll eat you alive, too.
It hurt too much to cry. Tick felt like he’d been taken to an acupuncture school and the overanxious students had given up on the little needles and decided to use knives instead. His whole world had turned into one big ouch. He’d never felt so hopeless.
His dad heaved Tick off the floor and plopped him into the tub, splashing the cold water all over his pajamas, his skin, his hair. Though his whole body felt racked with pain, Tick sensed the gnats leaving him in hordes even before he’d landed in the shallow pool of water.
They’re machines, he thought distantly. They run on electricity. The water would kill them.
An angry buzz filled the bathroom, but Tick couldn’t bring himself to open his eyes. He heard a towel whipping through the air. His dad must be trying to chase the gnats away and out of the room. Horror filled Tick’s stomach as he realized the vicious gnats might be going for his sisters, his mom.
“Dad!” he yelled with a slur, his mouth swollen. “Kayla! Lisa! Mom!”
And then he passed out.
~
“What were they?” the doctor asked. “Where did they come from?”
Edgar didn’t feel like talking. Even if he did, he had no answer for the man.
They stood in a curtained-off section of the emergency room, surrounded by the sounds of medical machines beeping, the murmur of voices, the squeak of gurneys rolling along the hallway; a child cried in the distance. Everything smelled of ammonia and disinfectant. It was all extremely depressing.
Edgar stared down at his son lying on the bed, eyes closed. Every inch of the boy’s body looked red and puffy, pockmarked with hundreds of black dots. Lorena and Lisa cried in the corner, clutching little Kayla in a three-way hug. Edgar felt certain his heart had broken into two pieces and was slowly sinking to his stomach.
Tick had always been a lucky kid. Edgar liked to joke that Tick had been born clutching a rabbit’s foot. When Tick had been only five years old, the family had taken a shopping trip to Spokane and Tick had darted for the middle of a busy road, already two steps past the curb before Edgar even noticed. Even as Edgar had sprinted to save his boy, he watched in utter horror as a huge truck, blaring its horn and screeching its brakes, seemingly ran right over Tick. Edgar would never forget the scream that erupted from his own throat at that moment, an alien sound that still haunted his dreams sometimes.
But when the truck passed, Tick stood there in the street, untouched, his hair not so much as ruffled. It had been nothing short of a miracle.
Then, a few years later, the family had gone to the coast for a summer trip, enjoying a rare hot and sunny day on the Washington beach. Tick, showing off his newly discovered body-surfing talent, had been swept away by a sudden and enormous wave, sucking him out to sea. The current pulled the poor boy from the soft sands directly into an area of jagged, vicious rocks nearby. Edgar and Lorena barely had time to register the shock and terror of what was happening before they saw Tick standing on a jutting shoulder of stone, waving with a huge smile on his face.
Or the time he fell off the big waterslide tower at Water World Park, only to land on a pile of slip ’n slide tubes left there by a family eating lunch.
The stories went on and on. They never talked about it; Edgar was afraid to jinx the whole thing, and he had no idea if Tick even realized anything out of the ordinary was happening. Kids rarely do—life is life, and they know nothing different until much later.
But despite all that he’d seen of Tick’s narrow escapes, Edgar couldn’t help but feel the panic rising in his chest. Had the boy’s streak of luck finally run out? Would he survive this—
“What happened?” the doctor repeated.
“I don’t know,” Edgar mumbled. “A bunch of bugs, or bees, or gnats, or something attacked him. I threw him in the bathtub, shooed the things away with a towel. They stayed in a tight pack, and when I opened a window, they flew right out.”
The doctor looked at Edgar, his expression
full of doubt and concern, eyebrows raised. “You shooed them away?”
“Yes, I did.” Edgar knew the man’s concern before he
said it.
“But you—”
“I know, Doctor, I know.” He paused. “I didn’t get stung. Not once.”
Chapter
10
~
The Temptation of the Flames
Tick could think of a million things he’d rather do than get stung all over his body by mechanical gnats that popped out of a demon lunch box with legs. It was a long list and included being dropped in a boiling vat of vinegar and having his toenails removed with hot pincers. Two days after the attack, he’d returned home from the hospital feeling and looking much better, but the experience remained vivid in his mind, playing itself out over and over again. Without any doubt, he knew the Gnat Rat and its stinging bugs had been the single worst thing that had ever happened to him. And that included the time Billy “The Goat” Cooper had almost broken Tick’s arm in front of the girls’ locker room.
Despite the lingering horror he felt, Tick was madly curious to know where the Gnat Rat had come from. And where it had gone. The boxy contraption must have disappeared right after releasing the bugs because his dad said he never saw it and saw no signs of a nest or a hole anywhere in the walls or floorboard. The Rat would’ve been impossible to miss since Tick had collapsed right next to it in his room. The thing had simply vanished—or run away to whatever magical hole it lived in. Either way, Tick knew he could never look at the world in the same way again, and the knowledge made him feel sick, fascinated, and scared, all at the same time.
The doctors had probed him over and over, not bothering to hide their suspicion that some serious child abuse had occurred. But they found dozens of stingers, just like the ones that came from a normal yellow jacket common to the area. That finding, coupled with the obvious fact that Edgar and Lorena Higginbottom were perhaps the two nicest people to ever live in Deer Park, and quite possibly the world, quickly dissolved the distrust of the doctors toward the parents.
Though they said no fewer than a hundred times how impossible it seemed that the bees targeted Tick and no one else, let alone the fact that bees rarely attacked during the middle of winter, the doctors eventually let the matter drop and sent Tick home.
I must have some seriously sweet blood, Tick thought, picking at the bandages covering his arms.
The only thing more baffling than the lone victim and the Gnat Rat disappearing was how quickly Tick healed. He almost felt disappointed he wouldn’t miss more than a couple of days of school. Almost.
Now, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling late the next Tuesday night, he couldn’t sleep. More than ever before in his life, Tick felt terribly afraid. His life was at risk, and for what?
He’d put on a show for his family, acting brave and cracking jokes, but he knew he did it more for himself than anyone else. He didn’t want to accept the horror of what he’d experienced, didn’t want to accept the potential for worse things to come. But the fear crashed down on him after dinner and he’d never felt so hopeless.
Sighing, he sat up in bed and retrieved the letter and clues from his desk drawer, staring at them for a long moment. As he did, he felt the last ounce of bravery drain from his spirit. Quietly, he crept from his room and took the letters downstairs to the living room.
It was the only room in the house with a fireplace.
~
Twenty minutes later, the gas-log fire had heated the entire room, its blower wafting warm and comforting air across Tick’s face as he sat directly in front of it, staring at the licking flames. The rest of his family had long since fallen asleep, and he had been extra, extra careful not to wake his freakishly light-sleeping dad. This was Tick’s moment of truth and he needed to be alone.
He gripped the first letter tightly in his right hand, clenching a fist around the wrinkled cardstock. He didn’t know how it worked, but he trusted the instruction told to him by the mystery-person, M.G. If ever he wanted it to stop, just burn the letter and everything would “cease and desist.” Tick had no doubt it was true, just as he had no doubt that Gnat Rats, Tingle Wraiths, and an eight-foot-tall woman named Mothball really and truly existed.
Burn the letter, stop the madness.
The thought had run through his mind a thousand times since he’d first come to consciousness after the brutal gnat attack. Only two clues in—ten to go—and he wanted to quit. Desperately wanted to quit. How could he keep going, when things worse than the Gnat Rat might attack him? How could he, Atticus Higginbottom, a kid with a pretty decent brain but the body of a thirteen year old, fight the forces that some unknown enemy threw at him? How could he do it?
He sat up, crossing his legs under him, facing the fire. He thought about the tremendous ease of simply throwing the letter into the fire not two feet in front of him, of watching it crinkle and shrivel into a crispy ball of black flakes, of returning his life back to normal. He could do it and be done. Forever.
And then it hit him—an odd feeling that started somewhere deep down in his stomach and swelled into his chest, spreading through his fingers and toes.
The first letter said many lives were at stake. Whether that meant ten or ten thousand, Tick didn’t know. Neither did he have any idea how twelve clues, written to him in cryptic messages from some stranger, had anything to do with saving people’s lives. But could he really risk that? Could Tick really be a coward and throw this challenge to the flames, when so much might be on the line? When so many people’s lives were on the line?
Even if it were just one person?
What if that one person was Kayla and her life was in the hands of someone else? The thought gripped Tick’s heart, squeezed it hard. He pictured Kayla’s big-toothed smile, her cute look of concentration when she played on the computer, her giggle fits when Tick tickled her under her arms. Tick’s eyes rimmed with tears. The thought of anything bad happening to his little sister made him feel a sadness that was heavy and bleak.
In that moment, in the darkness of deepest night, sitting in the warmth of a flickering fire and thinking about things far beyond what any kid should have to contemplate, Tick made his decision, committing to himself that he would never waver from it, no matter what.
In that moment, he answered the question posed to him by the one known as M.G.
Will you have the courage to choose the difficult path?
“Yes,” Tick whispered to the flames. “The answer is yes.”
He folded up the letter and turned his back on the fire.
~
In a place very far from the home of Atticus Higginbottom, Master George awoke with a start. Exactly what had jolted him from sleep, he wasn’t sure, but it didn’t make him very happy. He rather liked the act of blissful slumber and believed very strongly in the old adage about beauty sleep. (Though he knew if Mothball or Rutger were around they’d say something persnickety about him needing to sleep for the next forty years to gain a single ounce of beauty.)
He looked down at his toes, poking out from his red crocheted socks like little mice searching for food. He’d pulled his blanket up too far, exposing his feet, and wondered if the chill of the night had awakened him.
No, he thought. I don’t feel cold. This was something much more. Something shook me.
And then he shot up into a sitting position, any remnant of sleep completely quashed. He threw the covers off, put on his velvet slippers, and shuffled to the next room where all kinds of buzzing machinery and humming trinkets blinked and clinked and chirped. A large computer screen took up the entire left wall. Several hundred names were listed in alphabetical order, their letters glowing green, a variety of symbols and colors to the right of each name.
One of the names had a flashing purple checkmark next to it, which made Master George gasp and sit down in his specially-ordered, magnetically adjustable, ergonomically sophisticated swivel chair. He spun in three complete circles, moving
himself with the tips of his toes, almost as though he were dancing. And then he laughed. He laughed loud and long and hard, his heart bursting with pride and joy.
After many disappointments, someone had finally made a Pick, one so powerful it had shaken the very foundation of the Command Center. The ramifications could be enormous, he thought, giddy and still chuckling.
And then, to his utter and complete astonishment, defying every sense of rational thought in his bones, two more purple checkmarks appeared on the screen, almost at the same time.
Three? So close together? Impossible!
He stood up, rocketing the chair backward with the backs of his knees, squinting to make sure it hadn’t been a trick of his eyes. There they were—three purple marks.
While dancing an old Irish jig he’d learned from his great-grandpapa, Master George went in search of his tabby cat, Muffintops. He found her snoozing behind the milk cupboard in the kitchen and yanked her into his arms, hugging her fiercely.
“Dearest Muffintops,” he said, petting her. “We must celebrate right away with some peppermint tea and biscuits!” He set her down and began rummaging through his pots and pans to find a clean teapot. Once he’d set some water on the stove, he straightened and put his hands on his hips, staring down at his whiskered friend.
“My goodness gracious me,” he said. “Three Picks within a few minutes of each other? I daresay we have a lot of work to do.”
~
Upstairs in his room, Tick was wide awake, despite the late hour.
He studied the first letter from M.G. until the sky outside faded from black to bruised purple and the first traces of dawn cast a pallid glow outside his window. The wind had picked up, the infamous branch that used to haunt his dreams as a kid taking up its age-long duty, scraping the side of the house with its creepy claws of leafless wood. But Tick kept reading, searching, thinking.
The magic words.