Unlucky Charms (The Cold Cereal Saga) (32 page)

She walked back through the kitchen with the knife and stepped down the basement stairs. The sheep shifted at her approach. They never seemed to sleep. She walked right up to the adder, which shimmied back and coiled. Before she could give herself time to really think about what she was doing, she snapped her hand down and seized the snake at its tail, using the blunt edge of her knife to keep it from striking her.

“If you wanted to show me the adder, darling,” said Nimue, “I’ve seen it already.”

“You’ve seen it, I suppose, because you’re looking through my eyes? Is that how this works? I know you’re not really here. You’re in my mind.”
Listen
, she thought.
I can speak to you without speaking.

Nimue didn’t say anything for a long time. Meanwhile Emily was holding the struggling snake near the rift.

“I don’t need to be there,” said Nimue. “My men will be there soon.”

Emily put the shamrock in her mouth and swallowed it. That would keep her hands free. Then she removed her radio from another pocket and opened a channel.

“I know your men are coming,” she said, and everyone heard it. Erno, Scott, John, Mick, and Merle. “I know I blew it, told you where we are.”

“RUN, EMILY!” shouted Erno into his radio, but he was shouting to a locked and empty room. Emily still had the channel engaged.

“I’ve told you where we are and given you a rift. Let me tell you a little bit about your new rift, then,” said Emily. “First of all? You were … you were right about something. Magic split from the world when Merle and Arthur left for the future. I’m sorry, Merle, it’s true.”

In Pretannica, Merle sat heavily on a nearby stone.

“I’ve been studying the energy from the rift, and I’m a hundred percent certain,” said Emily. She looked at Nimue, or rather the illusion of her by the stairs. “He didn’t do it on purpose. He didn’t want it to be true, and it wasn’t entirely his fault. There was some kind of interference. Some big, magical hoo-ha. It confused me, because I was sure that if Merle’s time machines were responsible, then the bubble … well, never mind about the bubble.”

In his room, Erno sat down, stood up again. “That’s
it
,” he said. “The bubble. Finding the centers of circles.”

“Anyway,” Emily continued into the radio, “you found the remains of Merle’s time machine, and it taught you how to make magic milking machines, is that right? That’s how you’ve been stealing glamour all these years, storing it in batteries so that you can overload yourself and tear the rifts open, start your invasion, even if it kills you? But now …
now
you think it’s going to be easy. Now I’ve given you a big stable rift, so you think it won’t come to that.”

“It seems it won’t,” said Nimue. She was letting herself sound smug. “You have to learn to admit when you’ve lost, dear. It’s a part of growing up.”

“Oh, please,” she said to Nimue, and to everyone else on the radio. “I know we’ve lost. All we’ve managed to do so far is slow you down a little. Delay the release of a cereal. Waste some of that magic you’ve been saving. I mean, who ever really thought John was going to slay a dragon? No offense, John, if you’re listening.”

“None taken,” John said weakly into his radio.

“But you know something?” said Emily “Aha! There! Look!”

The snake had suddenly recoiled back upon itself and struck, seemingly at nothing. Its crisp and startling mouth clenched around something invisible but clearly there.

“See? It’s caught something. The adder can see it before we do. Do you know that in the instant before two creatures trade places, they’re actually a single mass? One interdimensional being? What do you think happens when that interdimensional being swallows itself in the middle of a rift?” said Emily. “I’m asking because I’d love your opinion—I’m honestly only about ninety-five percent sure.”

The snake engulfed the mouse on the other side, and the rift shrank. Emily couldn’t see that, but she could see the brick wall contract as if squeezed by an invisible fist.

“NO!” Nimue screamed in Emily’s mind. “NO NO NO!”

“Sorry,” Emily whispered to the snake, to the mouse. Then she set free the animals they had in cages, and cut the sheep’s tethers with her knife, and tried to shoo them all up the basement stairs.

Emily breathed heavily. Now the ceiling seemed to be crumbling. The floor was buckling and moving in toward the collapsing rift like the tide. She ran up the stairs behind the animals. “Wake Biggs!” she told Archimedes.

“Little
witch
!” said Nimue. “Do you know what I’m going to do to you and your friends?”

“Nothing bad, I’m sure,” said Emily, turning her back on Nimue, or on the idea of Nimue. “It would go against everything you believe in.”

Erno came tumbling out of his room with the unicat, Nimue’s influence suddenly broken. He was already packed. “What’s going on? Are they really coming?”

“They’re really coming. Help me get my things. And these animals out the front door.”

“I’m going to win,” said Nimue in her mind.

Emily sighed, exasperated. “I
know
you’re going to win. Of
course
you’re going to win. It’s just not going to be
easy
. You’re going to have to
die
. Now let me ask you something,” said Emily. “Seriously. Was this really your plan? To make someone super-intelligent and then TURN HER AGAINST YOU? How did you think
that
was going to work out?”

There wasn’t any answer. But still Emily knew she wasn’t alone.

“You,” she said. “You paper doll. You nothing. You’re not my fairy godmother, you soft-witted figment.” Emily breathed. “NOW GET OUT OF MY HEAD!”

She was alone. She could feel it.

Finally Biggs was awake, confused and pajama clad, and they left—not out the front door, but up the rotted staircase to the roof, then in Biggs’s arms across the rooftops of London just as the white vans pulled up.

Across the street from the house, a little girl was up late (as she was most nights) filming the haunted house with an old camcorder, just in case something interesting happened. So she captured it when the front door opened and something small like a rabbit hopped out, followed by a fox. Followed by three sheep, which fumbled right and left and smack into one another like a comedy trio before cantering off in separate directions. Then a squad of white vans screeched to a stop in front of the haunted house, and the little girl saw what might have been movement up at the roofline. It was hard to say. Men in black outfits and helmets and guns rushed from the vans toward the building, which sort of flinched, as if they’d startled it. The men stopped short, looked at one another. Then the building crumpled like a soda can, flicking bits of brick and mortar every which way, cracking helmets. The men retreated as the whole haunted house collapsed into a super-dense lump and sank beneath the earth.

The little girl watched this, wide-eyed. It wasn’t exactly what she’d been expecting, but still she whispered, “I knew it,” because she’d been waiting to whisper that for a long time.

The following evening she tried to show the video to her dad, but her brother had erased it to record himself burping the alphabet. “He already showed me,” her dad told her. “As soon as I got home. Say, did you notice your haunted house is gone?”

CHAPTER 35

Tiny Polly and the pixie brothers found Harvey, right where they left him.

“Thomething’th different about you,” he said when he saw Polly. “Ith that a new dreth?”

“Harvey,” said Polly, “this is Fee, Fo, and Denzil. Your Not-So-Highnesses, this is the pooka Harvey.”

They exchanged uncomfortable handshakes.

“We were afraid you’d have run into trouble, since we were gone so long,” said Polly.

“No. No trouble. Should we go?”

Harvey was quiet on the way back to the house. He hunched over the steering wheel and paid a lot more attention to the road than usual. But then the brothers were doing most of the talking—sharing the details of their misadventures, their failed attempts to rescue Morenwyn.

“Fi said that Fray said that Morenwyn likes him,” Polly announced.

“I … do not remember saying that.”

“You did.”

“Nonsense,” said Fo. “Anyone at court would tell you she found me most handsome and Denzil the best conversationalist.”

“She would want me,” said Fee, “if only I wasn’t the youngest.”

“Or perhaps she does not want any of us, my brothers,” said Denzil. “We have to accept it: fair Morenwyn does not wish to be saved. We cannot make her change.”

“That’th exactly it,” Harvey said, suddenly animated. “You’ve put your tiny finger right on it. Can’t save everyone. Can’t change anybody. Gotta play the cardth you’re dealt.”

“I don’t believe that’s what I intended—”

“You know, when I wath a captive of Goodco mythelf … I remember the day the guardth brought me the firtht box of Honey Frothted Thnox. Fresh off the line, they told me.”

Harvey ran a red light, but Polly didn’t say anything. “They pointed at the Thnox Rabbit in hith shirt and tie, jutht like the clotheth they’d drethed
me
in, and thaid, ‘Look. You’re trademarked. You belong to
uth
, now.’”

Polly crawled up to the front. “Did something happen while we were inside the factory?” she asked.

“Courth not. What could have happened?”

Nobody spoke again until they pulled up St. George Road.

“Weird,” Harvey said, leaning over the wheel. “Could’ve thworn there wath a building here when we left.”

“I can’t believe it,” said Merle, in Pretannica. “All my fault. I mean … I was afraid it was true, but then the kid didn’t used to believe it, and she was so scary smart....”

Finchbriton hopped to Merle’s shoulder, nipped his ear in what was presumably an affectionate way.

“She said there was something else that caused it,” said John. “Some ‘magical hoo-ha.’”

“We don’t lose ourselves to self-pity,” said the queen. “We keep calm and carry on. If this rift has been closed, then how are we to get home?”

“I can’t believe it,” said Mick. “Emily marooned us. We’re doomed.”

“No,” said Scott. “No, she wouldn’t do that,” he added, convincing himself. “She did the right thing. She kept the rift from Nimue.” Scott fiddled with the walkie-talkie. “I think this thing is dead—whatever happened when the rift collapsed must’ve fried the batteries. Not only can I not reach Biggs and the Utzes, I can’t reach John and Merle, either.”

They had a moment to themselves right now, but Mick was sure the elves would be good trackers. They had to keep moving.

“Don’ know what we’re gonna do,” said Mick. “We might find a rift close to May Day that’s big enough for me, but I’m not leavin’ without yeh.”

Scott smiled at him. Then he thought. “But that’s not true, is it? Emily knew we had other options. I’ll see my mom again, and Polly. And my dad. We can visit Fi’s pixie witch! She has rifts. Big ones. We can talk her into letting us use one.”

“Yeah, that’s good. She sounded like a real nice lady.”

“We just have to get to the Isle of Man,” Scott continued. “How hard can that be?”

“Have yeh ever heard of anythin’ good comin’ of a person sayin’, ‘How hard can that be?’”

“Sorry.”

Polly and the brothers and Harvey sat in the car in utter silence for several minutes, staring at the house-sized hole in the neighborhood.

“I do not understand,” Fee said finally. “We are looking at what, exactly?”

“A house that used to be there,” whispered Polly.

“A mysterious absence that knells like a bell in our hearts,” said Fi.

“Yeah,” said Polly. Then she noticed a bit of movement—a dash of white. “Is … is that an owl at the end of the street? Harvey, drive to the end of the street.”

Harvey complied, and at the end of the street they spotted Archimedes sitting in a willow tree. “Roll down the window!” said Polly. And when Harvey did, the owl glided down from its perch and into the car. Fi’s brothers scattered everywhere. Denzil came up hooting.

“He’s not a real owl,” Polly told him. “Look! He has Merle’s watch.” Polly struggled with the hugeness of it, and read the face. “Emily says she figured out that I didn’t go to Pretannica. Well, course she did. And Erno and Emily and Biggs are okay! They just had to make the building vanish, is all, and now the … the rift is gone.”