The Call (2 page)

A REALLY, REALLY LONG TIME AGO…

G
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 percent chickpeas, 8 percent milk—supplied by cow and cow—and 2 percent rat.

Although, truth be told, not a single one of the villagers could have calculated those percentages. Math was not a strong suit of the villagers, who, as well as not being math 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 honor, 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 colored 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.

S
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 okay,” 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 toward 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 practicing 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, gathered 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 backpedaled, 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 realized 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: hemaphobia—fear of blood.

Escape would be easy. And Mack definitely considered running.

Instead he spit 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 toward his pants pocket.

“Okay, 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 toward the stairs and the shower.

L
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 counselor. And a minister. And a shrink. Two shrinks. Two shrinks, two parents, a minister, a school counselor. 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 toward 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 toward 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 color 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 moldy, 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 toward 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.