Unlucky Charms (The Cold Cereal Saga) (12 page)

The goblins thanked everyone for their good work and stepped into their private car. “Won’t be back tomorrow, though!” they called. “Have a secret meeting! An ecret-say eeting-may with the Queen of England-way! Okay, bye-bye.”

“Home, sir?” asked the driver.

“Yes, Jeeves,” they told the driver, whose name was Michaels. “I’m going to fill a big bath and soak in it until my skin puckers and falls off.”

“Sir,” Michaels answered. He drove them to Reggie’s home in St. John’s Wood in the north of London. The gate opened onto a three-story stone house surrounded by trees, and Michaels edged the car up the drive.

“You should join me, Jeeves,” said goblin Reggie. “It’s a big bathtub.”

“Thank you, sir, no.”

The goblins dismissed Michaels and let themselves into the dark, empty house. They pulled the door shut behind them and paused. Centuries of being the things that creep in darkness had given them some insight into unlit houses. The darkness here was most certainly alive. They could sense it without knowing just exactly what it was, and for a moment it made them afraid. They smiled.

“So
that’s
what that feels like,” they said, just before they were jumped from all sides.

CHAPTER 11

“JACKIE IS A PUNK! JUDY IS A RUNT! THEY BOTH WENT DOWN TO BERLIN, JOINED THE ICE CAPADES! AND OH I DON’T KNOW WHY! OH I DON’T KNOW WHY! PERHAPS THEY’LL DIIIIIIEE, OH YEAH! PERHAPS THEY’LL DIE!” sang the goblin Reggie Dwight, tied to a banister. “THIRD VERSE! DIFFERENT FROM THE FIRST! JACKIE IS A PUNK! JUDY IS A RUNT—”

“Can’t we gag them?” asked John, his fingers in his ears.

“They’re two goblins inna suit,” said Mick. “The singin’ isn’t even technic’ly comin’ from their mouth.”

“Well, then can we at least make them stop looking like me while they do it?”

“That we can,” Mick answered, and trotted off toward the kitchen.

Polly came to a stop near her father. “This is a nice house,” she said. She’d spent the last ten minutes running all over it with Erno. “He has this big cabinet full of gold records and awards and things in the bathroom,” she told Scott.

“VERSE EIGHT! I AM REALLY GREAT! JACKIE IS A PUNK—”

“In the bathroom?”

John smiled sheepishly. “So I can display them while pretending I don’t care if they’re displayed or not.”

“Uh-huh,” Scott said, turning to wince at his father’s duplicate. The goblins were bound to the iron staircase with iron chains festooned with horseshoes. Biggs kept them under close watch. Prince Fi menaced them with his sword, for all the good it did. Scott didn’t know the song the goblins were singing, but he doubted it had as many verses as they were currently claiming.

“VERSE TWELVE! WORD THAT RHYMES WITH TWELVE! REGGIE IS A—”

Mick returned from the kitchen with a pot of tea. “Helped myself,” he told John. “Hope yeh don’t mind.”

“Of course not. Why …?”

“Yeh’ll see.” Mick lifted the lid of the pot and dropped a four-leaf clover and a little yellow primrose into the steaming tea and swished it around. “Hey, fellas,” he said to the goblin Reggie. “Yis want a cuppa?”

“NONE FOR ME, THANKS.”

“Biggsie?”

Biggs took the teapot from Mick and opened the goblin Reggie’s jaw like a change purse. The goblins gargled and growled. Then Biggs poured a stream of scalding tea down the passable replica they’d made of Reggie’s throat.

They sputtered. They cursed in dead languages. Then they shuddered and rattled and their Reggie skin peeled like a banana.

“Yeesh,” said Merle.

“That’s what we’re going to do to the queen?” said Scott.

“She’s not the queen,” said Emily from her corner of the sofa. “And if she is, it’ll just be tea with some yard clippings in it.”

The goblins, now laid bare, tried to wriggle out of their chains. Biggs pulled them tighter. One goblin sat atop the other’s shoulders. They were wearing familiar little suits.

“This isn’t Pigg and Poke, is it?” said Scott.

“The same.” Pigg grinned.

“Cretinous hobgoblins!”

“Yis two really get around,” said Mick. “Who’s ’mpersonatin’ the queen, then?”

“Misters Katt and Bagg,” said Poke. “Took over for us after we got demoted to permanent Reggie duty.”

“And where’re yis supposed t’ meet wi’ them? Where was fake Reggie gonna meet wi’ the fake queen?”

“Ah, you know about that, eh?” said Pigg.

“They’re clever, Mister Pigg,” said Poke. “There’s no gettin’ around it.”

“The royals’re sending a car tomorrow mornin’,” said Pigg. “Location TBD, though I unnerstand it’ll probably be the British Museum.”

“They’re being awfully helpful all the sudden,” said Emily.

“Maybe it’s the horseshoes and clovers and such,” said Poke. “
Makin’
us help.”

“Or maybe we’re secretly wonderful people,” said Pigg.

“Everyone except Biggs, upstairs,” Emily ordered. She started up the spiral staircase past the goblins, and the others dutifully followed. Finally the goblins were left alone with Biggs. They jiggled their chains.

“Left behind.” Poke smiled sadly at Biggs. “They don’t trust you.”

“Trust me to do muh job,” Biggs replied, staring over their heads.

“What’s your job, big feller?” sighed Pigg.

“Peel your skins again if yuh try to ’scape.”

And now the goblins were still.

“Our group should leave right away for Somerset,” Scott whispered as soon as they were upstairs. “It’ll take a couple hours just to get there, and we’re not even sure what we’re looking for exactly. Apart from the Queen of England.”

“The Freemen files definitely didn’t say anything specific except that she’s being held in Avalon?” Merle asked Emily. She closed her eyes.

“I … I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so?”

Emily scrunched up her face. “I don’t remember! Why are you asking me? Ask the owl! I told him everything I learned.”

Archimedes turned his head and whistled, and Merle looked at his watch.

“‘In a secure location in Avalon,’” he read. “I guess that’s all the Freemen knew.”

They reviewed their plans for the next day, such as they were, and separated. Scott, Merle, and Mick left for Somerset in the poppadum truck. Erno scooched up to Emily with Mr. Wilson’s poem.

“Wanna work on this?”

“I just want to go to bed,” she replied, and no wonder—she looked tired. “You know that kind of headache where it feels like someone’s rummaging through your brain?”

“… Nnnnno.”

“Good night, Erno.”

She left him alone in an odd little room that didn’t look like it got much use. It was snugly fitted with furniture that was better to look at than sit in, and shelves lined with matching spines of the sort of classics of Western literature that you could buy by the yard. He reread the poem:

The new year has a week to wait till waking.

The water’s almost frozen in the well.

The hours of the day

pass swiftly by, then drift away
,

and yet there’s nothing, less than nothing left to tell.

Soon the final days are numbered, then forgotten
,

and the new year’s hardly worth the time it’s taken.

By degrees the hourglass reckons

all the minutes, all the seconds
,

and the next year still has weeks to wait to waken.

The unicat brushed up against his shins, stabbing him lightly in the leg.

“The new year has a week to wait,” he told it. “Christmas Eve is a week before the end of the year. I wonder if that’s important.” In the margins he wrote
Christmas, Xmas, eve, 12/24
. “I guess it’s about winter? Or time? Half the words are about either time or temperature.”

He puzzled over the poem as the house slept around him.

CHAPTER 12

“Tired,” said Merle, hunched over the wheel of the poppadum truck.

“I’d drive if I could,” said Mick.

“You could teach me,” Scott offered. He felt wired. “It’s left brake, right accelerator, right?”

“Maybe you should just concentrate on keeping me awake.”

“Tell us more about the good ol’ days,” said Mick. “The good ol’ days that haven’t happened yet, in your case. If yeh stop talkin’ we’ll give yeh a shove.”

“Well …,” Merle began, hesitant, feeling his way back into the story. “I kept working on the time-travel question. I knew I could send things like Archimedes to the future, maybe even people to the future, but travel to the past seemed really impossible.”

“You weren’t sure you could send people to the future?” asked Scott.

“I hadn’t tried it yet.”

Scott huffed. “I would have tried it right away.”

“Would you?” Merle asked, turning. “Are you sure? You’d really be in a hurry to be the first human in all creation to try that, to have all your atoms taken apart and put back together again?”

Scott saw his point.

“Besides, I wasn’t prepared to explain to everyone why I’d disappeared for a whole year. But word must have gotten out about my little trick with Archie, and soon the Fay showed up to ruin everything, like they always do. No offense, Mick.”

“None taken, ugly.”

“I’d just gone outside for some fresh air,” Merle began, “when I got the feeling I was being watched.”

He’d just gone outside for a smoke break, actually—arguably the exact opposite of fresh air—but like all former smokers he was ashamed to admit this in the presence of children. He was pacing the strip of sidewalk between the physics building and the tennis courts when a chill raised the hairs on the back of his neck.

Maybe it was because he was an invasion baby—a human born in the year the elves came, when magic swept like hurricanes over the earth—that he could sense something was wrong. Maybe, he’d think later, it was because one of the Fay
wanted
him to know. Whatever. He tossed his cigarette under his heel and walked swiftly back into the building.

Merle worked in a secure wing—the college had put locks on all the doors after some laptops and a bike had been stolen, years ago—but he cursed these locks now, even as he heard them click behind him. Put a keyed lock on a door, and one of the Fay might still get through it if you’re careless, if you neglect to
make certain
you’ve shut it tight behind you. But these doors had combination locks. And a fairy’s guesses were nothing if not lucky. Merle still had his hand on the knob when the door’s small window filled with the face of Captain Conor of the Trooping Fairies of Oberon. There were more elves behind him, and Conor looked at Merle, then at the keypad below.

Merle turned, stumbled, raced down the hall shouting, “Archimedes! Octagon!” The mechanical owl met him at the door of his lab with the golden octagon, the time machine, in its claws. They turned the corner toward the wing’s only other entrance and saw that here too was a group of elves, just on the other side of the door, patiently punching lucky guesses into the keypad. They’d get it right, and soon.

“Archie,” Merle gasped, turning to the owl flapping in place beside him. “Calculate a time jump for both of us. For both me and you.” The owl whistled back, and Merle checked his watch. It said
DURATION?

Distantly, from around the corner, Merle heard the click of a door.

“One year,” he said. “No! Wait! They might think of that, come wait for me. A hundred years! No, that’s nothing to an elf.”

Archimedes whistled again. The sound of light footfalls tapped down to them from the far door. The nearest door clicked, and the elves pushed through.

“Five hundred years,” he whispered to Archie. “Execute as soon as you’ve done the math,” he added, and grasped the underside of the octagon so that he and the owl were holding it together.

Three elves stopped close on his left; another three turned the corner on his right. Conor was at the front of these.

“Put the device down, Merle,” said Conor in that creepy voice he had. “Oberon himself requests an audience.”

“
That’s
kinda desperate, isn’t it?” said Merle. “Collecting an audience at sword point? Must be a pretty bad show.”

Five elves cocked their slings, aimed sharp flint missiles at Merle’s head.

“Is Queen Titania gonna let him be the ventriloquist this time, or is he still the—”

Merle and Archimedes winked out of existence.