The Key (9 page)

And then there was the screaming.

And suddenly Mack heard a voice, audible even over the shriek of the wind whipping past.

He didn't think he recognized the voice. Then again, it's sometimes hard to recognize voices when you're screaming and hurtling to your death.

“Halk-ma simu (ch)ias!”

The walls of Urquhart Castle were so close that Mack could see ants crawling up the rock when all of a sudden he was free of the rope and his arms spread and caught the wind.

The wind filled his wings and he soared!

His what now?

His wings!

It strained very muscle fiber in his body. It was like he was being stretched on a rack, but his wings took the wind, filled, shot him up, up, up past the wall, so close that the tip of his nose scraped the rock, and then he was up over the walls, up in the air, zooming up into the sky.

Up and up until momentum died away and he sort of hung there between acceleration and gravity.

Gravity gently tugged at him, and he began to fall. But his wings—they were like a seagull's wings, actually, white and swept back, but as wide in span as the largest condor's—held him aloft.

His feet were melted together and had sprouted a wide fan of feathers. The rest of him was pretty much regular old Mack.

He caught an updraft and swooped low above a crowd of utterly amazed faces, all turned skyward.

He would have liked to land, but no feet.

So he hovered in the sky, riding the thermal,
¹⁸
floating on an updraft of warm air rippling up from the grassy field.

A girl with black lipstick dressed in black, white, and a few strategic accents of red, looked up at him and said, “Say, ‘
Halk-ma simu (ch)ias!
'”

So because she seemed to know what was going on, Mack said, “
Halk-ma simu (ch)ias!
”

And with that his wings folded in on themselves. And the feathered tail split again into legs.

Unfortunately he was still about twenty feet in the air, so he dropped like a stone.

Stefan leaped and caught him before he hit the ground.

“Dude,” Stefan said, and set Mack on his feet.

Mack's legs felt like they might buckle. He had had a pretty bad twenty-four hours, really, and shakiness was natural.

“Thanks,” Mack said to Stefan.

“You're alive,” Jarrah said with a satisfied grin. “Was it kind of cool?”

His friends rushed to embrace him. Even Dietmar. And after some backslapping and whatnot, Mack disengaged and went to the goth girl.

“You saved my life,” he said.

“
Oui
,” she said. Which is French for “yeah.”

“You're one of us,” he said.

“Yes, I am.”

“What's your name?”

“Sylvie Zola de Rochefort,” she said. It was a lot of name for a girl who wasn't very big. She was definitely smaller than Jarrah and even smaller than Xiao.

Her black hair was cut to chin length. Her eyes were dark and somewhat sad-looking. Her lashes were absurdly long and curved up to add a quizzical air to the sadness. Her skin was naturally pale—she didn't seem to be wearing goth or emo white makeup. But her lipstick was black and her fingernails were bloodred.

“My name is Mack. This is Jarrah, Xiao, Dietmar, and my friend and bodyguard, Stefan.”

“Good catch, friend and bodyguard,” Sylvie said to Stefan.

“Huh,” Stefan replied.

“Where are you from, Sylvie?” Mack asked.

“A tiny little town in France, called Fouras. It is nowhere special.”

She pronounced
special
as
spess-ee-al
. Mack liked that. He liked it a lot.

“Okay, life stories later. Right now we need to go get that Key from MacGuffin,” Mack said. (Give the boy credit: he recovered quickly.) “Who are all these people?”

“Tourists,” Xiao said.

“They can see the castle?”

“Most of them appear to be aware of the castle,” Dietmar said.

“Okay, then,” Mack said. Then he raised his voice to be heard by all. You might wonder why a bunch of tourists would listen to Mack. After all, he was just a kid. But it's a fact: if you want to get people's attention, being catapulted through the air and then turning into a sort of goofy bird is a pretty good way to do it.

“Listen to me,” Mack said. “No one has seen that castle in a thousand years. A thousand years! Plus there are walking skeletons in there. Can you imagine the YouTube possibilities? The person who gets the best video online will get millions of hits. Millions!”

“And don't forget Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter,” Jarrah pointed out.

“You'll be more important in the Twitterverse than Ashton Kutcher,” Mack said.

After that, nothing was going to stop the horde. Roughly sixty-five people and approximately a hundred cameras began to march to the castle.

The rough climb over the rocks thinned the herd a bit, but in the end the Magnificent Five were accompanied to MacGuffin's gate by about forty hardy men and women.

“William Blisterthöng MacGuffin!” Mack yelled at the closed door. “You have visitors!”

There was a long silence. Then, “Go away!”

“No,” Mack said.

Another long silence. Then, “Gang awa', ye interlopers. Ah demand mah privacy. Ah huv rights!”

“You lost your rights when you tried to kill me!” Mack shouted back.

Stefan used a big rock to bang on the door.
BANG BANG BANG
.

“Stop banging, ye'll ruin mah door. That's hert o' oak, ye cannae buy wood lik' that anymair!”

MacGuffin was concerned about the woodwork.

“Then open the door and give me the Key!” Mack yelled. “And our phones!”

This time the silence dragged on and on. But Mack made a “stay put” gesture at his posse and they waited.

Then, with a clattering of chains and locks, the door opened a crack. Bristly beard and a single eye came into view. Every camera was rolling.

MacGuffin thrust out a hairy hand holding a stone circle perhaps seven inches across, with a hole in the middle.

Mack did not want to get near enough to that beard to take the stone. He nodded at Stefan, who stepped forward.

“Grrrr,” MacGuffin said furiously at Stefan.

“Grrrr back at you,” Stefan snarled.

“The phones,” Mack said, his voice hard.

A fairy hand pushed a burlap bag out of the door, then withdrew.

The door slammed shut.

Mack turned to the somewhat disappointed tourists. “Listen, folks: we've got what we came for. We have to go. But you can all stay and drive that guy crazy.”

No one likes a spoiler, but no one likes a story that skips over an interesting development, either. Mack and the Magnifica have to move on. But just so you know: within a few days MacGuffin had cracked and opened his castle for regular tours. In fact, he was making a pretty penny from a gift shop that featured William Blisterthöng MacGuffin dolls and a recording of MacGuffin's craziest rants.

Connie appeared in the background of a YouTube video but was never seen by the public. The rumor is that she moved to Ireland to avoid Frank's revenge.

As for Mack, he would be going to France. Why? Because Sylvie said, “There are two others like us, Mack. They are hiding in Paris. I risked everything to join you so that you and your friends might save them.”

“Save them from what?” Mack asked.

“They have all come to Paris, Mack, all the forces of evil. They knew there were three of us who had gathered there, so they came to Paris to kill us and leave you powerless to complete the Twelve.”

“When you say, ‘They have all,' what do you mean by that?”

“The Tong Elves. Bowands. Skirrit. They say there is even a Gudridan—a giant—and maybe more. All under the command of two people: the man in green and his apprentice—he who is the twelfth of us.”

“Valin?”

“Yes,” Sylvie said. “My half brother, Valin, the twelfth of the Twelve.”

S
ylvie had a short and emotionally repressed parting from her grandparents, who apparently understood that she would have to be gone for a while saving the world. There were shrugs, a few small hand gestures, and they did the kiss-kiss-on-the-cheeks thing.

The now–Magnificent Five plus Stefan crammed back into the car and drove with their usual destructiveness—two sideswiped cars, a crushed stop sign, and a young woman on a bike who had to plow into a ditch to escape injury
¹⁹
—to reach the Clansman Hotel, where a boat could be found to take them out onto Loch Ness itself.

Normally the boat would take a whole load of tourists, but the tourists were all still busy at Castle Blisterthöng—as it would come to be known—so Mack and his friends had the boat to themselves.

The captain was extremely reluctant to allow them to stop in the middle of the loch and use his megaphone to begin shouting at the water. But, as you may recall, Mack had a million-dollar credit card and, again, it's kind of amazing what you can get people to do when you have that much money.

Boat rental: 500 GBP.
²⁰

So the boat, HMS
Heather Lochlear
, stopped and wallowed in the midst of Loch Ness. It's a fairly narrow lake—you can see both sides at once—but quite long, so you can't see end to end. They could see Urquhart Castle quite clearly and Blisterthöng Castle beyond—a sight that had the captain losing his meerschaum pipe into the water when his jaw dropped in amazement.

He had a bit of the
enlightened puissance
, the captain had. After all, you don't spend your life floating around and looking for the Loch Ness monster without possessing a powerful imagination.

After seeing the castle that had never been there before, the captain was very cooperative.

Mack had no clear idea how to let the All-Mother, aka the Loch Ness monster, know that he had the two pieces of the Vargran Key in his possession and was now ready to free her from the curse that had been placed on her.

If you think about it, talking to a sea serpent whose very existence is in doubt is not an easy proposition.

So he borrowed the captain's megaphone, climbed out onto the very tip of the bow, and yelled, “All-Mother. I have what you need!”

When that didn't work, he yelled, “Frank the fairy sent me!”

Which also didn't work.

“Her names,” Dietmar said. “Frank told us her names. Maybe they have the power to summon her.”

“Does anyone remember the names?” Mack asked.

Dietmar raised his hand.

“Anyone besides Dietmar?” Mack asked.

The rest all looked down at the ground.

“Okay, Dietmar,” Mack said. He handed the megaphone to the blond boy and let him take his place in the bow.

“Eimhur Ceana Una Mordag!” Dietmar cried.

Nothing.

“And All-Mother to clan Begonia,” Dietmar added.

Still nothing. Just faint ripples from the chill breeze that blew across the surface of the water.

“Beloved of the Gods and Ultimate Warrioress?” Dietmar tried, obviously beginning to doubt his plan now.

Still nothing.

“But that was all,” Dietmar said, shrugging his shoulders and looking perplexed.

“No, there was one more thing,” Xiao said. “I remember! Holder of the record for longest sustained note on the bagpipes!”

“But that is silly,” Dietmar protested.

“Try it,” Mack said.

So Dietmar pressed the button on the megaphone and said, “Eimhur Ceana Una Mordag, All-Mother to clan Begonia, Beloved of the Gods, Ultimate Warrioress, and a past holder of the record for longest sustained note on the bagpipes, please speak with us!”

“Thar she blows!” the captain cried. Not exactly in those words, because that's from
Moby-Dick
. What the captain actually said does not bear repeating and should never have been said in front of a bunch of twelve-year-olds. But you have to understand: the man was excited. He had navigated these waters for thirty-two years and never even caught a glimpse of Nessie.

The captain was the first to see—but then Mack did as well—the bulge of water, a moving wave. It was as though a submarine were powering by just beneath the surface.

Then an eruption! A geyser of water, and up and up and up rose something like a snake. A very big snake, but not with a snake's head. No, the head was more distinct, more elongated, more like something that ought to be attached to a dinosaur.

The head was the size of the car they'd been driving. The mouth had a bit of a quirky dolphin smile about it, and the eyes were intelligent and alert.