Unlucky Charms (The Cold Cereal Saga) (15 page)

“Yeah, hold on,” said Erno. “Saying those words out loud got me thinking. Degrees, minutes, and seconds. What does that sound like to you?”

Scott thought. “I dunno. Two words about time and one about temperature?”

“No. No. I think I just figured something out. I was always kind of into military history, and maps and stuff.”

“Okay.”

“So coordinates of latitude and longitude are written out in degrees, minutes, and seconds. Like a specific point on the globe might be written as minus fifty-three degrees, ten minutes, eighteen seconds latitude; twelve degrees, twenty-three minutes, five seconds longitude.”

“So do you think the poem tells you a point on a map?” asked Scott.

“… Maybe. I wonder—” There was a faint noise on the line, like a shout from far away. “What was that? Hold on.”

Scott hummed to himself until Erno returned.

“Man,” said Erno. “Emily is, like, shouting in her sleep. It’s hilarious. She must be having a dream.”

“What’s she saying?”

“I couldn’t make out any words. You coming back?”

“I guess so, when Merle wakes up.”

“Hope your dad’s doing better than you guys.”

“He’d almost have to be.”

CHAPTER 15

That was not strictly true.

He was an actor, John told himself as he exited through the back door of his house; a good actor, and today he was not John Doe. He wasn’t even Reggie Dwight—he was two awful little monsters in a suit, ready to take tea with a pantomime queen.

The car that waited for John outside his home in St. John’s Wood was an ordinary black London cab, but it had an extraordinary driver. He was a black-suited, hardheaded man with stubbly black hair you could strike a match on, and so large and powerfully built that it seemed the car must have been manufactured around him.
Soon he’d have to leave the shell of it behind for another, larger one
, thought John,
like a hermit crab.

“Lads,” greeted the driver as John got in the back.

“So what was decided?” asked John. “British Museum?”

The driver frowned. Not that John could see his face, but he’d swear you could hear this man frown. “You weren’t supposed to know that yet.”

Oh
, thought John. “Well, I have my ways.”

“I?”

Shoot shoot shoot.
“Yes, I. Mister Pigg, speaking. Mister Poke hasn’t got my ways, you understand. He’s got his own ways.”

“That I do, Mister Pigg,” John added.

“Right,” said the driver with another frown, and the sound that made. Sort of a meat-tenderizing sound. Anyway, the moment had passed. John was supposed to get the driver to confirm the location of the meet, then make a quick sign through the rear windshield to Erno, who was watching from a window. But he’d gotten flustered and forgotten, and now they were blocks away.

It was early, and traffic was light. When they were near the museum, John asked, “So where are we setting up? Reading Room?”

“Look,” said the driver, craning his neck. “You didn’t tell anyone, did you?”

“Only our grocer. And the lady who does our hair. And this nice bloke from the
Daily Telegraph
, what was his name?”

“Funny. You’re funny. Never have I known such a funny pair of goblins.”

They pulled up Great Russell Street to the museum grounds and were waved through gold-tipped gates that would normally turn away all automobiles. They came to their final stop right in front of the building’s columned facade. John’s door was opened for him, and he stepped out to be frisked by police officers. They didn’t find him to be carrying a weapon, even though he was.

The museum wasn’t yet open, so everyone here was attached to the queen in some way. John wondered how many of them were in on the joke—how many of them knew the queen wasn’t the queen, that John wasn’t John. There was a distinct lack of winks and knowing smiles, so he was inclined to think most of them were legit. Then a prissy and pucker-mouthed little man who looked like he was sucking on boredom itself came alongside him.

“I thought I’d talked you both into the navy-blue check,” he whispered.

“Be happy we’re wearing pants,” said John. Who was this man? Was he a Freeman? Was he even human?

“At least you had the good sense to wear pink,” the prissy man conceded. He was wearing pink himself—an ascot and a small carnation. John scanned the crowd—there were maybe only ten others wearing some little blush of color, including one police officer with a breast cancer awareness pin.

The Great Court of the British Museum was vast, clean, a gleaming blue-white at this time of the morning. A round, bright, modern structure with tall, evenly spaced windows like a zoetrope stood in its center, boxed in by more classical peaks and pillars and sheltered beneath a curvilinear lattice of metal and glass. A wide walkway clasped its staircase arms around the zoetrope, tapering down to rest its cold hands on either side of a door that led into the old Reading Room. This room was currently showing an exhibit of reliquaries, which, if John understood correctly, was a collection of the body parts of famous dead religious people. But they weren’t going into the Reading Room.

Between the staircases, a blue backdrop had been erected, and in front of that, a table and tea set. He thought this place had the sort of symbolism the royals liked—a bit of old, a bit of new, a place of learning where he and the queen would supposedly come to a better understanding of each other blah blah blah. He took his place at the table and immediately started working out escape routes.

“Where are Katt and Bagg?” whispered John, hoping he’d gotten the other goblins’ names right.

“First you, then the press are called, then the Goblin Queen makes her royal entrance.”

“We hate waiting,” said John.

The new year has a week to wait till waking
, thought Erno with an atlas across his lap.
Could that mean December twenty-fourth, then, or maybe twenty-fifth? Or … or, if there’s a week until the new year, then that means fifty-one weeks have passed.
He checked the atlas. Assuming that the first number in the poem would be the first number of the coordinates, then fifty-one degrees latitude was far enough north of the equator to possibly be in England.
Or Canada or Germany or about five other countries
, he thought. Still, it was a nice coincidence.

The water’s almost frozen in the well.
“Archie?” Erno said, and the owl turned. “What temperature does water freeze at?” He read the answer off Merle’s watch. Thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, or zero degrees Celsius.
So if water’s
almost
freezing, it would be thirty-three. Or one.
Again, fifty-one degrees, thirty-three minutes latitude could keep him in England, and Erno started feeling the thrill of discovery.

Within a half-hour, John was told the press had assembled outside the Great Court, waiting to be let in. He checked his phone and found the more traditional news outlets predicting a staged and uneventful reconciliation, while the tabloids speculated wildly about fresh queen punchings and royal retaliations. One newspaper was calling the event the “Tussle on Great Russell.”

The table was real wood beneath the tablecloth, some expensive antique. The china teacups looked as delicate as fingernails. There was a small creamer of milk and a bowl filled with perfect sugar cubes. Somewhere, someone was making the tea. The whole tableau glowed under powerful lights. This kind of ridiculous stagecraft, this was his world—Reggie’s world, really. He could do this.

Now the press was let into the Great Court and began immediately to snap pictures and pepper John with questions. They were kept at a distance, and he smiled and waved back and pretended not to hear them. A servant (who was
not
wearing pink, John noted) came with a bone china teapot on a silver tray and placed it in the center of the table. John took the lid off the teapot, under the pretense of smelling the tea, and slipped a four-leaf clover and a primrose unnoticed into the brew.

“Please don’t touch the service, sir,” said the servant.

“Sorry.”

Erno rubbed his palms into his eyes and tried to focus on something apart from his sister mumbling in her sleep in the next room.

The hours of the day

pass swiftly by, then drift away …

Twenty-four hours in the day, obviously
, thought Erno, and he wrote 24 beside 51 and 33.

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

Here he stumbled, until remembering that a coordinate could be positive or negative. Negative latitude meant it was south of the equator. Negative longitude was west of the prime meridian.
So less than nothing is negative one, maybe?
Or even negative zero. The way Mr. Wilson had repeated the word “nothing” made Erno think the latter was more likely.

More muttering from Emily, and then a sustained hiss. Erno would check on her. He’d do it right after he’d finished the poem.

Polly sat downstairs with Biggs and the goblins and Harvey, ripping paper, ripping, specifically, the pages of an ’80s magazine she’d assumed was so old it was disposable. She would have panicked if you’d told her it was actually an expensive collector’s item, but it wouldn’t matter in the long run—everything in the house was going to burn soon anyway.

Conversation had vanished, replaced by one of those clock-ticking kinds of silences, a savagely quiet kind of thickness, and Polly was just rolling her bits of paper into pellets to throw at the goblins when they turned to her and spoke.

“Nothing to do, eh?” said Pigg.

“No secret mission, like the others,” said Poke.

“Quiet,” said Biggs.

“Eh …,” said Harvey. “Why don’t you leave thith one alone, boyth. She’th all right.”

“All right?” said Pigg.

“All
right
?” said Poke.

“She’s our captor.”

“Our rightful mark.”

“We have our natures to consider.”

“It’s a big house, you know.”

“She
could
sit somewhere else.”

“Okay, okay,” said Harvey with a shrug and a be-my-guest wave of his arms.

Polly looked squarely at the goblins. “So your question was, why no secret mission for me?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m only
seven
.”

Pigg nodded. “That’s what your Prince Fi said. ‘Just a little girl,’ he told your brother last night, in passing.”

Polly gasped. “He said that?”

“Pixies’re like humans that way,” said Poke. “Don’t respect children like the Fay do. Queen Nimue, you know—she wants to build an
army
of children.”

“Don’t listen,” said Biggs.

“The big lug’s right,” said Pigg. “Don’t listen to us.”

“Forget we brought it up.”

“I mean, even if she
could
win Fi’s respect—”

“It’s not possible, Mr. Pigg. I hope you aren’t suggestin’ what I think you’re suggestin’—”

“Oh, I agree, Mr. Poke. We could show her, and it’d be
amazing
, but still it wouldn’t melt Fi’s cold, cold heart.”

Polly tightened her fists. “You don’t know him. You’re wrong about him.”

“I’d like to be wrong,” said Poke. “I would.”

“And stop talking about me like I’m not in the room,” said Polly, getting to her feet. “Grown-ups always do that, and I hate it!”

“An’ well you should.”

“You know what else I hate?”

“Tell us, tell us.”

“I hate TV shows where the character
knows
the bad guy’s trying to trick her into setting him free, but still all he has to do is say
one kinda true upsetting thing
and she’s all like, ‘You’re wrong! I’m gonna unlock your handcuffs and prove it to you!’”

The room fell silent again, and Biggs smiled at her. She took her seat.

Harvey snorted. “Ah, the girl took you to thchool, ladth,” he said. Then Polly allowed herself a little smile, too.

The goblins just stared, their chains hanging limply around them.

“Not scared of monsters anymore, you know,” Polly added. “Or the dark. I haven’t been scared of any of that since I was little.”

Poke let his attention drift to the empty fireplace, feigning disinterest. But Pigg continued to watch Polly, and said, “You invented the darkness, you know. You humans. Filled it with stories of bogeymen and bridge trolls and sharp little hands snatching children in the night.”

Polly narrowed her eyes. “That’s not right. You Fay, you
are
those things. You
do
steal children. Mick told me.”

“Yes,” said Poke, turning.

“Oh yes,” said Pigg.

“But only because we were invited.”

“Only because you let us in.”

John shifted in his seat and eyed a plate of shortbread on the table. He hadn’t eaten any breakfast. Finally the queen herself appeared from behind a blind, wearing a pink dress, pearls, and a diamond brooch. John stood, bowed at the neck, and they sat down together as the cameras flashed.