Dedication

For Katherine Tegen,

who believed I could be funny.

And for Katherine, Jake and Julia,

who still aren’t sure.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

avid MacAvoy – whose friends called him Mack – was not an unlikely hero. He was an impossible hero.

First, there was the fact that he was only twelve years old.

And then there was the fact that he was not especially big, strong, wise, kind, or good-looking.

Plus he was scared. Scared of what? Quite a list of things.

He had arachnophobia, a fear of spiders.

Dentophobia, a fear of dentists.

Pyrophobia, a fear of fire, although most people have some of that.

Pupaphobia, a fear of puppets. But he was not afraid of clowns, unlike most sensible people.

Trypanophobia, a fear of getting shots.

Thalassophobia, a fear of oceans, which led fairly naturally to selachophobia, a fear of sharks.

And phobophobia, a fear of phobias. Which makes more sense than it may seem at first because Mack was always finding new fears. And it scared him to have more scary things to be scared of.

Worst of all, the horror among horrors: Mack had claustrophobia, a fear of cramped spaces. A fear, to put it as unpleasantly as possible, of being buried alive.

So this was not a twelve-year-old you’d expect to become one of the greatest heroes in human history – not the person you’d expect would try and save the world from the greatest evil it had ever faced.

But that’s our story.

One thing to remember: most heroes end up dead. Even when they don’t end up dead themselves, people around them very often do.

Mack was an OK-looking kid: crazy, curly brown hair; medium height; medium build. He had a serious case of mediumness.

His eyes were brown, too, which is the most common eye colour in the world. But there was something else about his eyes. They were eyes that noticed things. Mack didn’t miss much.

He noticed how people looked at him, but he also noticed how they looked at each other and how they looked at things and even how they looked at a printed page.

He noticed details of how people dressed, how they moved, how they spoke, how they trimmed their fingernails and how they held their book bags. He noticed a lot.

This habit of noticing things was very useful when it came to Mack’s hobby, which was provoking bullies and then fleeing from them.

Just five days before Mack learned that he was going to have to save the world, he was first concerned with saving himself.

Mack attended Richard Gere Middle School in Sedona, Arizona. (Go, Fighting Pupfish!) The school was blessed in a number of ways, but cursed in others. It was known to have a number of excellent teachers. It had advanced placement yoga classes and something called noncompetitive bowling was an elective.

It also had more than its share of bullies, which meant that the bullies had to organise. The bullies at RGMS each had his or her own sphere of influence.

The jocks had a bully, the skaters had a bully, the prep/fashionistas had a bully. The stoners had a bully, but he tended to lose focus and so was not very effective at terrorizing people. The nerds had one bully and the geeks had another. Even the goth kids had a bully, but he was out with mono so the emo bully was filling in.

But there was one bully to rule them all, one bully to find them, one bully to bring them all and in the darkness pound them. And this bully was Stefan Marr.

Like Mack, Stefan Marr was in seventh grade. Unlike Mack, he was fifteen.

Stefan was big, blue-eyed, blond and handsome. And he was terrifying.

Stefan was not academically gifted. Let’s just put it that way because the alternative way of putting it might be rude. But he was fearless. While Mack had twenty-one identified phobias, Stefan had zero. In fact, you could say his number of phobias was in the negative numbers because there were some scary things that even completely normal people avoided that Stefan went looking for.

When Stefan saw a sign that read, ‘Beware of Dog,’ he would interpret that to mean ‘come on in.’

On this particular day, a Wednesday in October, Mack would have a run-in with Stefan that would change both of their lives.

The problem had started with Horace Washington III, a kid Mack kind of knew and kind of liked, who was being introduced to the concept of a swirlie. Horace was a nerd and therefore the swirlie was being administered by Matthew Morgan, the bully for nerds. Matthew was ably assisted by his frequent partner, Camaro Angianelli. Camaro had never gotten over being named after her father’s favorite car and she expressed her sensitive nature by bullying geeks.

Strictly speaking, Camaro should not have been in the boys’ bathroom at all, but the last person who had pointed this out to her now ate his meals through a straw.

In any event, Matthew and Camaro had Horace upended. His head was in the toilet and things were falling out of his pockets, but he was squirming and he was a bit on the heavy side, so the two bullies were unable to reach the flush button. So, hearing that someone else was in the bathroom, they called for help.

Mack opened the stall door and immediately saw the problem.

“It’s a self-flushing toilet,” Mack pointed out.

“Duh, we’re not morons,” Matthew said.

“Then you actually need to move Horace away from the toilet before the flush will activate,” Mack explained.

“That would defeat the entire purpose of a swirlie,” Camaro said. Camaro was not stupid; she was just hostile.

“Yeah,” Matthew agreed, not sure what he had just agreed to.

“There’s a manual override button,” Camaro pointed out, shifting her grip on Horace’s ankle.

“Yes,” Mack agreed. “But I don’t see why I should help you torture Horace.”

“Because we’ll kick your butt,” Matthew said.

This is where a sensible kid would have said, ‘Good point,’ and pushed the manual flush button. But Mack had never been accused of being sensible. He had an innate dislike for bullies.

So he said, “You can try.”

“Try what?” Matthew asked, baffled.

“He means,” Camaro explained patiently, “that we can try to kick his butt. He’s implying that we are unable to kick his butt.”

Camaro was an attractive girl in a bodybuilder, zero-per cent-body-fat, sleek and predatory sort of way.

“You see,” Camaro explained in the pedantic manner that had made her a natural fit for the job of bullying geeks, “he’s trying to trick us into putting Horace down and chasing him.”

Mack nodded, acknowledging the truth. “You see right through me.”

“Mack, Mack, Mack,” Camaro said. “You’re cute.”

“I am,” Mack agreed.

“I don’t want to beat you up,” Camaro admitted. “So why don’t you just run away?”

Mack sighed. “OK. But I’m taking this.” He reached down and snagged Matthew’s book bag. It was surprisingly light since it contained no books – just a pack of Red Vines liquorice, a Mountain Dew and a pair of nunchakus.

This Matthew understood. He released Horace, which put all the weight on Camaro, who was strong but not that strong. Horace plunged but did not swirl. Matthew leaped, but Mack leaped faster.

Mack was out the door, racing down the hallway with Matthew in lumbering pursuit.

Timing worked in Mack’s favor. (He had of course noticed the clock on the wall.) The bell rang, ending the school day and kids exploded from classrooms like buckshot from a shotgun.

Mack unzipped Matthew’s book bag, scattering Red Vines everywhere in the crush of frenzied kids.

Mack had a detailed map of the school in his head. He knew every door, every locker and every closet. He knew which were unlocked, which exits were alarmed and where an open window might be found.

He had very little concern that Matthew or Camaro, who had now joined the chase, would actually catch him. He dodged into the chem lab and took the connecting door through to the former chem lab. It was being remodeled following an unfortunate explosion. He noted a ladder and the roller tray of paint that was perched atop the ladder. He placed Matthew’s book bag just so, beneath the ladder.

The windows were open to allow for ventilation and the painters were on break outside. Mack slid out through the window just as Matthew rushed into the first lab.

Mack crouched outside, just out of sight but not out of hearing and waited.

“Hey!” Matthew yelled.

Pause.

Mack heard the sound of Matthew’s knees popping as he knelt down to pick up his bag.

And then… thunk! Followed by a soggy clattering sound and a cry of pain.

“Arrggh!” Matthew yelled.

Mack knew he shouldn’t risk it but he did anyway – and peeked. Matthew’s head was dripping with pale yellow paint. It ran down his face and into his yelling, aggrieved mouth.

Camaro was a half step behind him.

She spotted Mack and was after him in a heartbeat.

Across the open space between Building A and Building C, Mack found an open door. He ran into a crush of kids very similar to those he’d left behind. He worked his way against the flow, intending to exit by the far door, the one that led to the gym.

But then, to his horror, he saw a massive blond beast just coming in through that very door.

No way he could have known that Stefan Marr would be coming from the gym, having previously forgotten his gym clothes and needing (badly) to take them home to be washed.

“Bluff it through,” Mack told himself.

He smiled at Stefan and started to walk very calmly past him. Ten feet and he would be safe. Stefan didn’t even know Mack was fleeing.

But then Camaro’s voice, a hoarse roar, rose above the happy hubbub. “Bully emergency!” she cried. “I’m declaring a bully emergency!”

Mack’s eyes went wide.

Stefan’s eyes narrowed.

Mack leaped for the door, but Stefan wasn’t one of those great big guys who’s kind of slow and awkward. He was one of those great big guys who was as fast as a snake.

One massive paw shot out and grabbed Mack’s T-shirt and suddenly Mack’s feet were no longer in contact with the floor.

He did a sort of Wile E. Coyote beat-feet air-run thing, but the effect was more comical than effective.

Camaro and a paint-dripping Matthew were there in a flash.

“Bully emergency?” Stefan asked. “You two can’t handle this runt?”

“Look what he did to me!” Matthew cried, outraged.

“You know the rules,” Camaro said to Stefan. “We dominate through fear. A threat to one of us is a threat to us all.”

Stefan nodded. “Huh,” he said. The word huh was roughly one-third of Stefan’s vocabulary. It could mean many things. But in this case it meant, “Yes, I agree that you have properly invoked a bully emergency, in which all bullies must unite to confront a common threat.”

“Better round everyone up,” Stefan said. “The usual.”

Everyone meant all the other bullies. The usual meant the usual place: the Dumpster behind the gym and up against the fence.

“I am going to mess up your face!” Matthew raged at Mack. He pointed for emphasis with a hand dripping pale yellow paint.

“Not the face,” Camaro said. “I like his face.”

Matthew and Camaro went off in pursuit of the others, while Stefan, seeming more weary than highly motivated, stuffed his sweaty shorts into Mack’s mouth and dragged him outside.

This was the point where Mack should have started begging, pleading, whining and bribing. But the weird thing about Mack was that even though he was afraid of puppets, sharks, the ocean, shots, spiders, dentists, fire, Shetland ponies, hair dryers, asteroids, hot-air balloons, blue cheese, tornadoes, mosquitoes, electrical outlets, bats (the kind that fly and suck your blood), beards, babies, fear itself and especially being buried alive, he was not afraid of real, actual trouble.

Which, when you think about it, is what tends to get heroes and those around them killed.

A REALLY, REALLY LONG TIME AGO…

rimluk was twelve years old. Like most twelve-year-olds he had a job, a child, two wives and a cow.

No. No, wait, that’s not true. He had one wife and two cows.

Grimluk’s wife was called Gelidberry. Their baby son’s name was as yet undetermined. Picking names was a very big deal in Grimluk’s village. There wasn’t a lot of entertainment, so when the villagers had something other than eking out a miserable existence to occupy their minds, they didn’t rush it.

The cows didn’t have names either, at least not that they had shared with Grimluk.

The five of them – Grimluk, Gelidberry, baby, cow and cow – lived in a small but comfortable home in a village in a clearing surrounded by a forest of very tall trees.

In the clearing the villagers planted chickpeas. Chickpeas are the main ingredient in hummus, but the discovery of hummus would take another thousand years. For now the chickpea farmers planted, watered and harvested chickpeas. The village diet was 90 per cent chickpeas, 8 per cent milk – supplied by cow and cow – and 2 per cent rat.

Although, truth be told, not a single one of the villagers could have calculated those percentages. Maths was not a strong suit of the villagers, who, as well as not being maths prodigies, were illiterate.

Grimluk was one of the few men in the village not involved in the chickpea business. Because he was quick and tireless, he had been chosen as the baron’s horse leader. This was a very big honour and the job paid well (one large basket of chickpeas per week, a plump rat and one pair of sandals each year). Grimluk wasn’t rich, but he earned a living; he was doing all right. He couldn’t complain.

Until…

One day Grimluk was leading his master’s horse when he spotted a hurried, harried-looking knave who, judging by the fact that his clothing was coloured by light brown mud rather than good, honest dark brown mud, was not from around these parts.

“Master!” Grimluk said. “A stranger.”

The baron – a man with more beard than hair – twisted around as best he could in order to see the stranger in question. It was an awkward thing to do since the baron was facing the horse’s tail as he rode. But he managed it without quite falling off.

“I don’t know the knave. Ask him his name and business.”

Grimluk waited until the stranger was in range, loping and wheezing along the narrow forest trail. Then he said, “Knave? My master would know your name and business.”

“My name is Sporda. And my business is fleeing. I’m a full-time fleer. If you have any sense you’ll join me in that line of work.” He glanced meaningfully back over his shoulder.

“Ask the knave why he is fleeing and why we should flee,” the baron demanded.

The stranger had been brought up well enough to pretend he hadn’t heard the baron’s question and waited patiently for Grimluk to repeat it.

Then the stranger said the words that would haunt Grimluk for the rest of his very, very long life. “I flee the… the… Pale Queen.”

The baron jerked in astonishment and slid off the horse. “The…” he said.

“The…” Grimluk repeated.

“The… Pale…” the baron said.

“The… Pale…” Grimluk repeated.

“No… no, it cannot…”

“No…” Grimluk said, doing his best to replicate the baron’s white-faced horror. “No, it cannot…”

The baron could say no more. So Grimluk said no more.

Only Sporda had anything else to say. And what he said then also changed Grimluk’s life. “You know, if your master sat facing the other way on that horse, facing the horse’s head instead of his tail? He wouldn’t need you to guide him.”

In less time than it took a rooster to summon the morning sun, Grimluk had lost his job as a horse leader and been forced to switch to a far less lucrative career: fleer.

o, back in the present day, Mack was waiting to get his butt kicked. Stefan kept his iron grip on Mack’s shirt and insisted that Mack keep chewing on Stefan’s unpleasant gym clothes.

They had reached the usual spot. Big green Dumpster. Chain-link fence. Cinder block back wall of the gym. Asphalt underfoot. No teachers, cops, principals, parents, or superheroes anywhere in sight.

Mack was going to get a beating. Not his first. But the first since sixth grade. One month into the new school year and he was already in the grip of Stefan Marr.

“I’m thirsty,” Stefan said.

“Mmm hngh nggg uhh hmmmhng,” Mack offered.

“Nah, that’s OK,” Stefan said. “I guess this won’t take long.”

Sure enough, Matthew and Camaro had been able to quickly assemble the available Richard Gere bullies. Six boys and Camaro were striding towards them with a purposeful, thuggish stride.

Mack had one and only one possible escape route. There was a fire door in the back of the gym. It had frosted reinforced glass that revealed nothing of what was on the other side, but Mack knew the cheerleaders would be practising just beyond that door.

He also knew the door was supposed to be locked at all times. But Coach Jeter sometimes unlocked it and turned off the alarm so that he could sneak out between classes and smoke a cigarette here in the alley.

Mack had one chance.

He waited, gathering his strength and focus. He went limp, almost collapsing. And in the split second that Stefan took to adjust his stance, Mack lunged.

His T-shirt ripped away in a single piece, leaving behind only the neck band.

He broke free.

Three steps to reach the door. One, two, three! He snatched at the handle and yanked hard.

The door did not open.

Mack sensed movement behind him.

He spun. Stefan’s fist flew and Mack ducked.

Crash!

“Yaaaah!” Stefan cried.

Mack jerked away, off balance, feet tangled. But he didn’t fall. He back-pedalled, needing just to get his feet back under him.

Then he saw the red spray all over the shattered window.

Stefan’s fist had gone through the glass. He had a four-inch gash in his arm, like a red mouth, spurting.

The approaching bullies froze.

Stefan stared in fascinated horror at his arm.

The bullies hesitated, almost decided to keep coming, but then, with a sensible assessment of the risks involved, decided it was time to run away.

They turned tail and bolted, yelling threats over their shoulders.

Stefan used his left hand to try and stop the blood flow.

“Huh,” he said.

“Whoa,” Mack mumbled with a mouth full of shorts.

“I’m kind of bleeding,” Stefan observed. Then he sat down too fast and landed too hard and Mack realised that what he was seeing here was not a painful but well-timed minor injury. Way too much blood was coming out of Stefan’s arm. There was already a puddle of it on the ground – a little pool was forming around a discarded candy bar wrapper.

The king of the bullies tried to stand up, but his body wasn’t working too well it seemed, so he stayed down.

Mack stared in amazement. In part he was terrified that he was on the verge of acquiring a whole new phobia: haemaphobia – fear of blood.

Escape would be easy. And Mack definitely considered running.

Instead he spat out the shorts. He straddled the seated Stefan and said, “Lie back.”

When Stefan didn’t seem to track on that, Mack pushed him none too gently onto his back.

Mack then knelt over Stefan and pushed down with the heel of his left hand on the wound. This was deeply unpleasant. The blood flow slowed but did not stop.

With his free hand Mack grabbed the aromatic T-shirt and clumsily tied it around Stefan’s massive bicep. He knotted it tight, all while keeping his palm pressed down on the red gusher.

The blood flow slowed some more.

“I can’t keep this up; we need help,” Mack said.

Stefan’s eyes flickered with what would surely be a temporary understanding of the word we.

A powerful word, we.

“You have a cell phone?” Mack asked. Cells were absolutely banned at school, so only about two-thirds of the students carried them.

Stefan nodded. His never exactly perky expression was even duller than usual. But he jerked his chin towards his pants pocket.

“OK, you need to pull on this tourniquet, right?” Mack said. Seeing the blank expression, Mack explained, “The shirt. Pull on the knot with your left hand. Pull hard.”

Stefan managed to do this but barely. Mack noticed that his fingers were clumsy, fumbling. His strength was fading.

Mack pried the cell out of Stefan’s pants pocket and dialed 911.

“Nine-one-one, what is the nature of your emergency?” a bored voice asked.

“I have a nine-year-old boy pumping blood all over the place,” Mack said.

“Nine?” Stefan asked, like he wasn’t totally sure it wasn’t true.

“They’ll come faster for a bleeding kid than a bleeding teenager,” Mack explained, covering the mouthpiece. “Now shut up.”

It took eight minutes for the ambulance to arrive, which, as it turned out, was barely fast enough.

After the EMTs took Stefan away, Mack made it home unmolested by any more bullies, possibly because he was shirtless except for the neck band of his destroyed T-shirt and his hands were red with blood up to the elbows. That sort of fashion choice tends to discourage people from bothering you.

Mack’s father was home when Mack came in the side door. His father was staring into the refrigerator with the door open, looking like he might see something really cool there if he just kept searching.

“Hey, big guy,” his father said.

“Hey, Dad,” Mack said.

“How was school?”

“Enh,” Mack said. “School’s school.”

“Yeah. I hear you,” Mack’s dad said without looking up.

Mack headed towards the stairs and the shower.

et’s just skip the part where Stefan lost two pints of blood. And the part where the doctor told him he could easily have ended up dead.

Let’s skip over the slow workings of Stefan’s mind as he sought to make some sense of the fact that he had come quite close to dying at the age of fifteen.

And while we’re doing that, let’s skip over the fact that Mack’s father didn’t notice that Mack was more or less covered in blood.

Mack’s parents didn’t pay a lot of attention to him.

It wasn’t really sad or tragic. They weren’t bad parents. It was just that at some point they had given up trying to figure Mack out.

He’d had one phobia or another since age four. His mother had tried many, many, many (many) times to talk him through these irrational fears. His father had tried as well. And sometimes both at once. And sometimes both at once with a school counsellor. And a minister. And a shrink. Two shrinks. Two shrinks, two parents, a minister, a school counsellor. But they had never had much success.

In between talking Mack out of being terrified of things that weren’t really scary, they had tried to talk him into being scared of things he actually should be afraid of.

Things like bullies, for example.

The boy had no sense. That was clear to his parents and everyone else. The boy simply had no sense.

So, over time, Mack’s parents had learned to steer around him. They’d given him his own space. Which was how he liked it. Mostly.

Mack assumed that when Stefan returned to school he would have to demonstrate his toughness by giving Mack a serious beat-down. The upside was that in anticipation of the epic bloodbath, the other bullies were leaving Mack alone. It was just possible that Stefan would be irritated with any bully who presumed to prebeat Mack. No one wanted to deny Stefan his clear rights.

So in the short term, things were good for Mack in the aftermath of the Wednesday Massacre (as it came to be called).

Stefan was not back at school on Thursday or Friday.

“Maybe he croaked after all,” Mack said to himself on Friday. “And that would be bad. Yes; bad.”

But when Monday rolled around, that guilty hope was banished.

Stefan was definitely not dead. He had a massive bandage on his arm, white gauze wrapped by a sort of weblike thing. But Stefan wouldn’t need both arms to murder Mack.

It was a scary moment when Mack looked up and saw Stefan’s sullen face at the far end of a hallway full of kids on that fateful Monday.

It was scary for Mack and the few kids who considered him a close friend. But everyone else was just plain giddy. This was the most anticipated moment in the history of Richard Gere Middle School. Imagine the degree of anticipation that might have greeted the simultaneous release of an Iron Man movie, a brand-new sequel to a Harry Potter book and albums by the top three bands all rolled into one happy, nervous, “OMG, I totally can’t wait to see this!” moment.

The kids saw Mack step into the hallway.

They saw Stefan also in the hallway.

The kids parted magically in the middle, as if they were hair and someone had dragged a comb right down the middle of the hallway.

There was a part. That’s the point. Kids hugging the lockers to the left. Kids hugging the lockers to the right. And all the kids were incredibly excited.

Mack felt a lump in his throat. He was excited, too, but of course in a very different way. He was excited in the way that had to do with thinking, So, I wonder if there really is an afterlife? That kind of excited.

“Should I run?” Mack wondered.

He sighed. “No. Wouldn’t do any good, would it?” No one answered, so he answered himself. “Better to just take my beating here.”

If Stefan pounded him here in the hallway, some teacher would probably break it up. Eventually.

So Mack squared his shoulders. He tugged at the back of his T-shirt. He rolled his neck a little, loosening the muscles there. He wasn’t going to win this fight, but he was going to try.

Stefan walked straight towards him, his overly adult biceps barely contained by his T-shirt sleeves. Stefan had pecs. Stefan had muscles in his neck. He had muscles in places where all Mack had was soft, yielding flab.

Mack walked towards him and oh, boy, you could have heard a pin drop. So everyone certainly heard it when Santiago dropped his binder and everyone jumped and then giggled – and the anticipation just grew because now it had an element of humor to it.

Stefan came to a stop five feet from Mack.

And at that moment, a very, very old man wearing a black robe that kind of hung down over his face – a man who Mack could not help but notice smelled like some unholy combination of feet, garbage cans and Salisbury steak – simply appeared.

Appeared as in, ‘Not there,’ followed immediately by, ‘There.’

“Ret click-ur!”

That’s what the apparition cried. And no, it did not make any sense.

And weirdly all the kids in the hallway – all except for Mack and Stefan – were bathed in a sort of overbright light. It was like the light in a bus station bathroom. Wait, you’ve probably never been in a bus station bathroom (lucky for you), so imagine the kind of light you’d get if you floated up and stuck your face in a Wal-Mart ceiling light.

It was an eerily bright light of a colour that seemed to drain all signs of life out of normal kids’ faces.

“Hold!” the old man said in a whiny, hectoring croak of a voice.

And he lifted one wrinkled, age-spotted hand. The fingernails were long and yellow. The cuticles were greenish. Not happy, flowery meadow-green but mouldy, eewww-something-is-growing-on-this-sandwich green.

The aromatic, ancient, green-nailed apparition stared at nothing. Not at Mack. Not at Stefan. Possibly because his eyes were like translucent blue marbles. Not blue with a little black dot in the middle and a lot of white all around, but a sort of smeary blue that covered iris, pupil and all the other eye parts. As if he had started with normal blue eyes, but they’d been pureed in a blender and then poured back into his eyeholes.

Mack froze.

Stefan did not freeze. He frowned at the ancient man and said, “Back off, old dude.”

“Touch ye not this Magnifica,” the old man said. And he stepped between Stefan and Mack and spread his arms wide.

Then he dropped his arms, seeming too tired to hold them up.

“Fie-ma (sniff) noyz or stib!”

At least that’s what Mack thought he said. That’s what it sounded like.

And suddenly Stefan was clutching at his chest like something was going very wrong inside. His face began to turn red. He didn’t seem to be breathing very well. Or at all.

“Hey!” Mack yelled.

Stefan definitely did not look good.

“Hey, hey, hey!” Mack protested. He had some questions for the old man, starting with, Who are you? Where did you come from? How did you just appear? And even, What’s that smell? But none of those was quite as urgent as the question he did ask.

“Hey, what are you doing to him?”

The old man’s eyebrows lifted. He turned towards Mack. His creepy blue eyes were on him without seeming to focus and he said, “He may harm you not.”

“That’s fine, Yoda, but he’s not breathing!”

The old man shrugged. “It matters not. My strength fails.”

And sure enough Stefan coughed and then sucked air like a drowning kid who had just barely made it up off the bottom of the pool.

The old man blinked. He seemed perplexed. Lost. Or maybe confused.

“I fade.” The old man sighed. His shoulders slumped. “I weaken. I will return when I am able.”

Then, with a wheeze, he added, “My head hurts.”

And he was gone. As suddenly as he had appeared.

His smell left with him. And the light.

And suddenly, the kids were moving again. Their eyes were bright in anticipation again.

Mack looked at Stefan. “I know you have to beat me up and all,” Mack said to Stefan, “but before you do, just tell me: Did you see that?”

“The old guy?”

“So you did,” Mack said. “Whoa.”

“How did you do that?” Stefan asked.

“I didn’t,” Mack admitted, although maybe he should have pretended he did.

“Huh,” Stefan commented.

“Yeah.”

The two of them stood there, considering the flat-out impossible thing that had just happened. Mack could not help but notice that none of the other kids in the hallway seemed upset or weirded out or even curious, aside from a certain curiosity as to why Stefan had not yet killed Mack.

They hadn’t seen any of it. Only Mack and Stefan had.

“I wasn’t going to kick your butt anyway,” Stefan said.

Mack raised one skeptical eyebrow. “Why not?”

“Dude – you saved my life.”

“Just now you mean?”

“Whoa!” Stefan said. “That makes two times. You totally saved my life, like… twice.” He’d had to search for the word twice and he seemed pretty pleased to be able to come up with it.

Mack shrugged. “I couldn’t let you bleed to death, or even choke. You’re just a bully. It’s not like you’re evil.”

“Huh,” Stefan said.

“Kick his butt already!” Matthew shouted. He’d tolerated this cryptic conversation for as long as he could. He had waited patiently for this moment, after all, for the king of all bullies to destroy the boy who had caused him to be painted yellow.

Bits of yellow could still be seen in the creases of Matthew’s neck and in his ears.

Stefan processed this for a moment. Then he said words that sent a shock through the entire student body of Richard Gere Middle School. “Yo,” he said. “Listen up,” he added. “MacAvoy is under my wing.”

“No way!” Matthew snarled.

So Stefan took two steps. His face was very close to Matthew’s face and a person who didn’t know better might think they were going to kiss.

That was not happening.

Instead, Stefan repeated it slowly, word by word. “Under. My. Wing.”

Which settled it.

A REALLY, REALLY LONG TIME AGO…

o twelve-year-old Grimluk hit the road as a fleer. He wasn’t quite sure why he was supposed to flee from the Pale Queen, but he knew that’s what people did. And in those days long, long ago, smart people didn’t ask too many questions when they heard trouble was on the way.

Grimluk rounded up Gelidberry, their nameless baby son and the cows and hit the road.

They carried with them all their most prized possessions:

 One thin mattress made of straw and pigeon feathers that was home to approximately eighty thousand bedbugs – although Grimluk could never have conceived of such a vast number

 A lump of clay shaped like a fat woman with a giant mouth that was the family’s goddess, Gordia

 One small hatchet with sharpening stone

 A cook pot with an actual metal handle (the family’s most valuable object and one of the reasons many others in the village were jealous of Grimluk and thought he and his family were kind of snooty)

 One jar of bold ale, a beverage made of fermented milk and cow sweat flavoured with crushed nettles

 The tinderbox, which contained a piece of rock, a sliver of steel that had once chipped off the baron’s sword and a tiny bundle of dry grass

 Gelidberry’s sewing kit, consisting of a thorn with a hole in one end, a nice spool of cowtail-hair thread and a six-inch-square piece of wool

 The family spoon

Other than this they had the clothes on their backs, their foot wrappings, their caps, the baby’s blanket and various lice, fleas, ticks, crusted filth and face grease.

“I can’t believe we’ve acquired all this stuff,” Grimluk complained. “I was hoping to travel light.”

“You’re a family man,” Gelidberry pointed out. “You’re not just some carefree nine-year-old. You have responsibilities, you know.”

“Oh, I know,” Grimluk grumbled. “Believe me, I know.”

“Just point the way and let’s get going,” Gelidberry said, gritting her teeth – she had six, so her gritting was a subtle dig at Grimluk, who had only five.

“The Pale Queen comes from the direction of the setting sun. We’ll go the other way.”

So off they went towards the rising sun. Which was rather hard to do since in the deep forest one seldom saw the sun.

They walked with the cows and took turns carrying the baby. The mattress was strapped to one of the cows while the other cow carried the pot.

At night they lay the mattress down on pine needles. The three of them squeezed together on it, quite cosy since it was still the warm season.

They rose each day at dawn. They milked the cows and drank the milk. Sometimes Grimluk would manage to hit an opossum or a squirrel with his axe. Then Gelidberry would start a fire, cook the meat in the pot and they would hand the spoon back and forth.

From time to time they would encounter other fleeing families. The fleers would exchange information on the path of the Pale Queen. It was pretty clear that she was coming. Some of the fleers had run into elements of the Pale Queen’s forces. It was easy to spot the people who’d had that kind of bad luck because they didn’t always have the full number of arms (two) or legs (also two). Many had livid scars or terrible wounds.

Clearly fleeing was called for. But Grimluk still had no idea what the Pale Queen herself was, or what her agenda might be. None of the others he met had seen her.

Another way of putting it was that those who had seen the Pale Queen were no longer in any position to flee or tell tales.

But it happened that on their fifth night in the forest, Grimluk came to a better understanding of just what or whom he was fleeing.

He was out hunting in the forest, armed with his hatchet. The forest was a frightening place, full as it was of wolves and werewolves, spirits and gnomes, flesh-eating trees and flesh-scratching bushes.

It was dark in the forest. Even in the day it was dark, but at night it was so dark under the high canopy of intertwined branches that Grimluk could not see the hatchet in his own hands. Or his hands, either. Let alone fallen branches, twisted roots, gopher holes and badly placed rocks.

He tripped fairly often. And there was really very little chance that he would come across an animal to strike with his hatchet. No chance, really. But the baby was teething and therefore crying quite a bit and Grimluk hated that incessant crying so much that even the forest at night seemed preferable.

As he was feeling his way carefully through the almost pitch black, he saw light ahead. Not sunlight or anything so bright, just a place where it seemed starlight might reach the forest’s floor.

He headed towards that silvery light, thinking, Hey, maybe I’ll find an opossum after all. And then I will rub it in Gelidberry’s face.

Not the opossum. The fact that he’d found something to eat. That’s what he would rub in her face. Because Gelidberry had accused him of only pretending to hunt so that he could get away from the crying, crying, crying.

Grimluk expected to find a clearing. But the trees did not thin out. Instead, he noticed that he was heading downhill. The further downhill he went, the more light there was. Soon he could see the willow branches that lashed his face and make out some of the larger rocks that bruised his toes.

“What’s this about?” Grimluk wondered aloud, reassured by the sound of his own voice.

He heard a sound ahead. He froze. He listened hard and tried to peer through the gloom.

He crept, silent as he could make himself. He crouched and crept and squeezed the handle of the axe for comfort.

He moved closer and closer, as if he could no longer stop himself. As if the light was drawing him forward.

Then…

Snap!

The sound came from behind him! Grimluk spun around and stared hard into the utter darkness. It was too late to go back now – something was there.

Grimluk now had an unknown terror behind and a light that seemed ever more eerie ahead. He lay flat and breathed very quietly.

There was definitely something moving behind him and coming closer. Something too large to be a tasty opossum.

Grimluk wished with all his heart that he could be back at the little campsite with the screeching nameless baby and Gelidberry and the cows. What would happen to them if he never returned?

Grimluk crawled on his belly, away from the approaching sound, towards the light, further and further down the slope.

And there! Ahead in the clearing… a girl!

She was beautiful. Beauty such as Grimluk had never seen or even imagined. Beauty that could not be real.

She was perhaps his age, although there was an agelessness to her pale, perfect skin. She had wild red hair, long curls that seemed to move of their own accord, twisting and writhing.

Her eyes were green and glowed with an inner light that pierced him to his very soul.

She had a sullen mouth, full red lips and more teeth than Grimluk and Gelidberry combined. In fact, she seemed, miraculously, to have all of her teeth. And those teeth were white. White without even a touch of yellow.

She wore a dark red dress that lay tight against her body.

Grimluk realised with a shock that the light he had seen was coming from her. Her very skin glowed. Her eyes were green coals. Her hair glistened as it moved.

“Who comes hither?” the girl asked and Grimluk knew, knew deep down inside, that he would answer, that he would stand up, brush himself off and answer, “It’s me, Grimluk.”

But he also knew this would be a bad thing. No creature could possibly be this beautiful, this bright, this clean, this toothy, unless she was a witch. Or some other unnatural creature.

As he was in the act of standing up, a voice spoke from the darkness behind him.

“Your servants, Princess.”

The voice was definitely foreign. It wasn’t simply that the voice spoke the common tongue with an accent; it was that it seemed to form sounds within that speech that were unlike anything that could come from a human mouth.

A dry, rasping, irritating, whispery voice in response to the cold, confident voice of the stunning object identified as ‘Princess.’

“Ah,” the girl said. “At last. You have kept me waiting.”

Grimluk heard things moving behind him, more than one thing – several things, maybe as many as six. Or some other very large number.

He crouched and did not move. If he could have stopped the very beating of his heart, he would have. For the creatures that now emerged into the light of the princess’s perfect form were monsters.

They stood as tall as the tallest man (five feet, three inches). But they were not men.

Like huge insects they were, like locusts that walked erect. They moved with sliding steps of bent-back legs and planted clawlike feet. Jointed arms stuck out from the middle of their foul, ochre-tinged bodies. And a second set of arms, smaller than the first, emerged from just below what might be a neck.

And the heads… smoothly triangular, with bulging, wet-shining eyes mounted atop short stalks.

They were hideous and awful. And from their midsections – not waists so much as precarious narrowings – hung belts that held varieties of bright metal weapons. Knives, swords, maces, scrapers, darts and all manner of objects for stabbing, cutting, slicing, dicing and chopping.

Grimluk hoped they were simply well-equipped cooks, but he doubted it. They moved with an arrogant swagger, not unlike the way the baron moved – or would have, had he been a very large grasshopper.

They gathered around the princess, illuminated by her own light.

For a moment Grimluk feared for the girl. They were a desperate, frightening bunch and looked as if they could make short work of the red-haired beauty.

But the girl showed no fear.

“Faithful Skirrit minions, do you bring me news of the queen, my mother?” she asked.

“We do,” one of the bugs answered.

“Good. You have done well to find me. And I will hear all you can tell me, gladly. But first, I hunger.”

This news caused a certain shuffling and back-pedalling among the Skirrit.

“Hungry?” their spokesman or leader asked with what must be nervousness among his kind. “Now?”

“One will be enough,” the princess said.

The Skirrit captain pointed his two left-side arms at one of his fellows. “You heard the princess,” he said.

The designated Skirrit drew a deep breath and released a shuddery sigh. Then he bent his long legs and knelt down. He bowed his triangular head and his ball eyes darkened.

And then the princess, the beauty beyond compare, began to change.

Her body… her form…

Grimluk had to clap both his hands over his mouth to stop the scream that wanted to tear at his throat.

The princess… no, the monstrosity she had become – the evil, foul beast – opened her stretched and hideous mouth and calmly bit the bowed head from its neck.

Green fluid spurted from the insect’s neck. The headless body collapsed with a sound like sticks falling.

And the princess chewed as if she had popped an entire egg into her mouth.

Grimluk ran, ran, ran, tripping and falling and leaping up to run again through the black night.

He ran, shrieking silently in his mind, from the terror.

ack’s parents always asked him about his day at school. But he’d never quite believed they cared about the actual details. At dinner that evening he put his theory to the test.

“So, David, how was school?” his father asked as he tonged chicken strips onto his plate.

His parents called him David. It was his actual name, of course, the name they’d picked out for him when he was just a slimy newborn. So he tolerated it.

“Bunch of interesting stuff happened today,” Mack said.

“And don’t just tell us it was the same old, same old,” his mother said. She passed ketchup to her husband.

“Well, it definitely wasn’t the same old, same old,” Mack said. “For one thing, some ancient dead-looking dude froze time and space for a while.”

“How did the maths test go?” his father asked. “I hope you’re keeping up.”

“That wasn’t today. That was Friday. Today was the whole deadish guy suspending the very laws of physics and speaking in some language I didn’t understand.”

“Well, you’ve always done well in your language classes,” Mack’s mother said.

“Plus, it seems I’m Stefan’s new BFF.”

“A B and two Fs?” His father frowned and shook salt onto mashed potatoes. “That doesn’t sound good. You need to crack the books.”

Mack stared at his father. Then at his mother. It was one thing to have a theory that they didn’t really know him or listen to a word he was saying. It was a very different feeling to prove it.

It made him feel just a little bit lonely, although he wouldn’t have wanted to use that word.

After dinner he went to his room and found himself already sitting there.

“Aaaah!” Mack yelled.

“Aaaah!” Mack yelled back.

Mack stood frozen in the doorway, staring at himself sitting on the edge of the bed staring back at Mack in the doorway.

Although, on closer examination, it wasn’t him. Not entirely him, anyway. The Mack sitting on the edge of the bed looked a lot like Mack, but there were subtle differences. For one thing, this second Mack had no nostrils.

Mack slid into the room and closed the door behind him.

“All right, who are you?”

“David MacAvoy.”

Mack would not have believed that staring at himself could be quite so disturbing. But it was. His mouth had gone dry. His heart was pounding. There seemed to be a ringing sound in his ears and it was not the sound of happy sleigh bells; it was more like car alarms going off.

“OK, great trick,” Mack said. “I totally see that this is a great trick. I’m not freaking out, I’m laughing at the amazingness of this trick. Ha-ha-ha! See? I’m getting the joke.”

“Ha-ha-ha!” the other Mack echoed. And he made a grin with the mouth below the nostril-less nose. The mouth revealed white tooth. Not teeth. Tooth. The entire line of teeth was a curved white solid surface.

The two Macks stared at each other for a while, although Mack Number One did the better job of staring since the other Mack’s eyes tended not to point in quite the same direction. The right eye was fine, staring confidently at Mack’s face. But the left eye seemed to prefer staring at Mack’s knee.

“OK, this is… um…” Mack didn’t exactly know what it was. So he started over. “OK, whatever this is, I’d like it to stop now. We both had a good laugh. Whoever you are, kudos. Nicely done. Now take off the mask.”

“The mask?”

“The me face. Take it off. I want to see who you really are.”

“Oh. You want to see my true face?”

“There you go, that’s exactly right, dude; I want to see the real you.”

The face, the mask – whatever it was – melted.

“Yaaaahhh!” Mack cried and fumbled behind him for the door handle.

The face that looked very much like his own had grown darker, lumpier, cruder. Dirty. In fact, more than dirty: it was dirt.

Mack was staring at a thing made of mud. Like something a child would make playing in the dirt. Only full-size. And wearing his clothes.

The dirt creature had a mouth but no eyes. No teeth in that mouth, just a horizontal slit.

Mack’s fingers were numb on the doorknob. His whole body was tingling from the effect of hormones flooding his system with the urgent desire to get out.

But he couldn’t turn away. He couldn’t stop staring at the mud face and the mud hands. There even seemed to be bits of gravel and small twigs in that mud face.

When the thing opened its mouth, Mack swore he saw a piece of paper, maybe the size of a Post-it, but curled up in a tube.

“OK. Let’s try the other face again,” Mack whispered.

Slowly the mud grew pink. The slit of a mouth formed lips. Eyes like mucous globules formed in the right places and slowly acquired semihuman characteristics. Hair sprouted, looking at first like an eruption of earthworms before it settled down and became hair.

Mack whistled softly. There was no doubt in his mind that this, this, this… thing… was related to the ancient man with the ancient smell.

“I’ve finally gone crazy, haven’t I?” Mack said. “I guess it was just a matter of time.”

He had the absurd thought at that moment that he still had homework to do. It was right there on his desk.

“Dude. Or whatever you are… actually, what are you? Let’s start with that.”

“I am a golem.”

“Gollum?”

“Golem.”

“OK. How do you spell that?”

The golem raised its eyebrows, which kind of stretched its eyelids upward, revealing more eyeball than was right. “G-O-L-E-M.”

Mack sidled past the creature and slid into his desk chair. He opened his laptop and clicked on the browser icon.

He typed the word golem into the Google search box. The first hit was Wikipedia.

Mack scanned down the page.

“You’re Jewish?” he asked the golem.

“I’m whatever you are,” the golem answered.

“But golems, they’re a Hebrew thing, originally. An incomplete being made of clay.”

Mack was just beginning to get the idea that having a golem could be useful. He hadn’t quite worked out how, but he was sensing an opportunity there.

“Do you have superpowers?”

The golem shrugged. “I am made to be you.”

Mack pushed back from the computer, swivelled his desk chair and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.

“Why are you here?”

“I am here to replace you.”

That didn’t sound good. “Um… what?”

“While you are away, I will take your place here.”

“Am I going somewhere?”

The golem smiled, revealing its creepy tooth thing and a hint of the little paper scroll. “You are going everywhere.”

he golem was supposed to spend the night on the floor beside Mack’s bed. Mack had sneaked an extra blanket and one sheet from the linen closet in the hallway. But when Mack woke up the next morning, he was looking at the golem.

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 face-up 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.

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