Unlucky Charms (The Cold Cereal Saga) (17 page)

“Dim-witted when angry,” said Fi. “But also less sensitive to pain.”

The park was teeming with people, strollers, little dogs off the leash.

“RUN!” John shouted to everyone around him.

“Is that Reggie Dwight?” said someone.

By his watch, the ogre should have crashed into the park already, but a quick glance told him it wasn’t behind them anymore. Had it given up the chase? Or was it calming down, starting to think? John heard distant screams.

“Are you Reggie Dwight?” asked a man with a stroller. “My wife just called, said you punched the queen.”

“Everyone knows that, mate,” said another man.

“No, I mean, he punched her this morning.
Again.
”

“Pull the other one.”

“No, it’s true.”

“Finchbriton!” called John. “Where are you? Can you make these people run like I asked?”

The finch swooped down and drew a fiery little swoosh in the air.

“Thank you,” said John as the men retreated. “Oh, look at that! Perfect!” He’d spied a couple of teenagers facing off near the center of the park, wearing glasses and chainmail armor and wielding longswords.

“Hi!” shouted John, approaching the kids. “Hello. Fancy selling me one of those swords? Say, a hundred pounds?”

“Are you Reggie Dwight?”

Then a moped sailed through the trees, crashing to the ground right where John and the boy would have been standing if John hadn’t heaved them both out of the way.

The teens cursed and ran off as fast as their complicated outfits would allow, and John noticed with some satisfaction that the one had dropped his sword when tackled. John stooped to retrieve it, and it was only for this reason that he avoided getting flattened by a second moped.

Now the ogre came plowing through the trees, bellowing and holding a third moped over its head. John’s phone rang and went to voice mail. He readied his sword, and Finchbriton set the moped alight so that the beast dropped it on itself. Then the little bird let loose with an inferno that engulfed the ogre itself, transforming the monster into a crackling blue blazing nightmare. And still it advanced, oblivious. Finchbriton sputtered, his flame spent, and barely made it back to John’s shoulder.

“Tell your daughter …,” said Prince Fi. “Tell her I rode in a pocket.”

“Come now,” said John. “You know neither one of us is going to see Polly again.”

The ogre slammed his fiery fist down, and John rolled to the right, came up with his sleeve smoldering. He struck the ogre’s arm with his sword.

“I don’t think this thing is even sharpened,” he muttered. Then he ducked another swing from the ogre and plunged the sword tip into its belly. Sharpened or no, the blade went in, but then the monster turned and yanked the weapon from John’s hand. John’s phone rang again.

“Perhaps we should answer?” said Fi.

John took off running and called the number back. The ogre followed, dizzy and half blind from the smoke of his own burning flesh.

“Dad!” said Scott. “I’ve been calling.”

John was shocked into silence for a moment, and so was Scott. He’d said
Dad
. But it didn’t seem like the time to discuss it.

“I know,” John answered. “Sorry. Been busy.”

“Are you still near the museum? We’re circling Russell Square right now in the poppadum truck.”

“That’s terribly good news. Meet me at the northeast corner.”

He pushed through a wild hedgerow and emerged at the corner of the square, but the truck hadn’t arrived yet. And now he found he was right against another of those pointy iron fences he hadn’t wanted to vault before. He set about gingerly climbing over it.

“Hurry, man!” said Fi. Finchbriton chirruped.

Then there was a great rustle behind him, and he turned to see the ogre break through the bushes. It swayed, lurched, a smelly black cinder. It raised both arms and roared in horrid victory. A frozen moment followed. Then it pitched forward, falling on its face and driving the longsword deep into its gut. And then it was still.

The truck pulled up, and John stumbled over the fence to meet it. The back opened, and Scott put out his hand.

“Punched the queen again, didn’t you?”

“To be fair, this was an entirely different queen.”

When he thought they were far enough away, when he heard distant sirens, Erno allowed himself a glance back. There was a dark tower of smoke rising up from where he thought John’s house should be.

Emily was half awake, squinting foggily over Biggs’s shoulder. “No surprise,” the big man said. “Like t’ burn things.” Erno agreed—he remembered what the Freemen had done to Biggs’s treehouse—but he was thinking of the goblins. So was Harvey.

“We should have let them go,” said the rabbit-man.

CHAPTER 17

The new address, the one Erno had found, was on a sunny little street called St. George, in Islington, in the north of London. It was lined with friendly trees and tall row houses. They’d all made it here, and they’d all converged quite naturally on this particular house without even checking the address—it was like one rotten fang among a set of otherwise fine teeth. A neglectful gray, with scabby wood and pockmarked masonry. A tiny yard that somehow gave the impression of being both dead and overgrown at the same time. A garden where all the troublemaker plants came to smoke.

They’d converged on this house because they all felt, without realizing it consciously, that they belonged in a place like this. They were home. They stood in front of their new home now, exposed and unsure how to proceed. It wasn’t even noon.

“Why is there a big sign that says
TOILET
?” asked Erno.

“Because you can’t read,” Emily answered. “It says
TO LET
.”

“Oh, right. Why is there a big sign that says
TO
—”

“It means for rent. The house is for rent.”

There was a phone number at the bottom of the sign. On a whim, Erno dialed it. After a moment, he held the phone to Emily. “Listen.”

It was a voice-box message from the building’s owner. He was on holiday, it said, wasn’t showing the property right now, but leave your name and number, etc.

“It’s … Dad,” said Emily. “It’s Mr. Wilson.”

“Really?” said Scott.

“Then this is definitely th’ place,” said Mick.

“Whatever place this is,” said John.

They continued to stare at it and didn’t notice the little girl approaching from behind until Finchbriton twittered.

“’S haunted,” the girl said, her tone letting them know that haunted houses bored her personally, but she thought maybe these nice people with their bird and cat might be interested.

“It does look pretty scary, doesn’t it?” John turned and said, smiling.

“These squatters?” said the girl. “Were squatting in it. That means they were living there for free. And one of them? Turned into a stag. So the other squatters ran out screaming, ‘HE TURNED INTO A BLOODY GREAT STAG,’ and no one’s been in since.”

Everyone mulled this over.

“Haunted,” the girl concluded. “I can’t play right now. My mum’s making curry. I’d invite you, but I’m not allowed to talk to strangers. What’s a ghost’s favorite fruit?”

“Is it booberries?” asked John.

“Specterines?” said Merle.

“It depends on the ghost. Okay, bye.”

They watched her cross the street.

“That girl was weird,” said Polly.

“You were exactly like her not two years ago,” Scott replied.

Emily was studying the house. “Are you guys all thinking what I’m thinking?” she said.

“Yes,” said Scott, nodding.
There’s a fairy in there, turning people into animals.

“There’s a rift in that house that leads to Pretannica, the magical Britain,” Emily finished.

Scott looked at the others. “Wait—is that what we were all thinking?”

“I wasn’t really thinking anything,” said Erno.

“I was thinking of my brothers,” said Fi.

“I was thinking about that chip shop we pathed back by the tube thtation,” said Harvey. “Could anyone elthe go for thome chipth right now?”

Emily looked exasperated. “When someone makes the Crossing, they have to trade places with another living thing of similar size on the other side, remember? Some squatter got a trip to Pretannica, and a stag ended up here. C’mon.” She strode right up to the house, stepped onto the porch, and pushed through the door.

The building was broken up into single-room flats and zippered up the middle by a staircase so out of plumb it was nearly a ramp.

“Nobody try going upstairs,” said Merle.

The ground floor had two flats, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a door to the basement. The ceilings were clouded over with water stains. The electricity was off, but John showed them little coin-slot boxes in each room that could be paid with pound coins to turn it on, as if the whole house was a grim nickelodeon. They got the juice flowing in the kitchen, which flustered an anxious, naked lightbulb in the ceiling and set the refrigerator to jittering back and forth between the cabinets like a bumper car. There was a single sheet of paper stuck to the fridge with a pie-shaped magnet, and the vibrations sent it skating across the surface of the freezer door until Erno unstuck it and gave it a looking over.

Emily, meanwhile, was blithely leading everyone into the basement. The door opened onto a creaky but serviceable set of stairs and a pull chain that wasn’t attached to any actual lightbulb. And now Emily hesitated at the edge of the dense blackness. “Here,” said Merle as he lit his flashlight. The cold spill of it fell on an old stone wall, a concrete slab floor, the flinch of a cricket, other bugs, lots of bugs—and then horns, hooves, bones.

“Gah! Skeleton horse!” said Scott before he could stop himself. There was a polite pause.

Emily said, “I think it’s the stag—”

“Okay, yeah. I got it.”

It was almost entirely skeletonized. The lower jaw had nearly fallen away and gave it a look that was more or less completely terrifying. Its ribs had come loose and were set like kindling on the floor. Something slick and dark twisted in the kindling.

“Ooh, careful there,” said John. “That looks like a black adder.” The snake coiled itself into a question mark, a formal written request to be left alone.

Further investigation of the basement would reveal a lot more bugs, some food wrappers, and another skeleton (they’d eventually agree on badger), but the real discovery was a large cabinet against the wall opposite the stairs.

It was tall and plain, shabby really, with symmetrical doors. They opened these carefully to find that the back and floor of the cabinet had been removed, and a small octagon was drawn in chalk just behind it on the wall. Emily waved at it.

“Ta-da, the rift. He put a wardrobe in front of it,” she added, smirking. “I guess that was his idea of a joke.”

“I wonder if the rift’s open,” said Merle.

“It’s open,” said Scott.

Most of the rest turned to look at him. Not Polly and John, though. They were still staring at the octagonal rift as well, tilting their heads and squinching up their eyes.

“It’s kinda … glimmery,” said Polly.

“It looks like oil on water,” said John.

Emily frowned at the chalk octagon. Because she could still only hear and not see the Fay among them, she said “Mick, Harvey, are you down here? Can you see what they’re talking about?”

“Nope,” said Harvey.

“No,” said Mick. “Maybe it’s ’cause they’ve fairy blood, but they were born here? They’re of both worlds.”

“The rift’s bigger than the octagon Mr. Wilson drew,” said Scott. “Like, four times bigger. Mick could walk right through it.”

“It’s growing,” said Emily. “Probably gets bigger and bigger toward May Day.” She grinned. “Who wants to go to Pretannica?”

CHAPTER 18

Scott slept through the afternoon in one of the musty ground floor apartments and awoke to find plans crackling all around the house. They’d gotten the lights working in the basement, which didn’t really do the basement any favors appearance-wise, and had moved the wardrobe aside. The rift was noticeably larger even than it had been before Scott went to sleep. In the corner now was a stack of metal cages, ropes, stakes, and bags and bags of animal feed.

Scott eyed the cages blearily. “For the … snake?” But the snake was still coiled in its little tepee of ribs.

“We seem to have a working arrangement with the snake,” said Emily. “Just don’t put any part of yourself near his mouth; he’s poisonous. No. The cages are for whatever comes through the rift.”

Scott thought. “Because …”

“Because some of us are going through there, and when we do, it’ll only be because something else happens to be on the other side. Hopefully it’ll be an animal, and we can capture that animal and keep it here in the basement to swap it back for our team when they’re ready to be extracted.”

“When our team is ready to be
extracted
?”

Emily shrugged. “Your dad is big on this kind of talk.”

“But then …,” said Scott. “What if the thing that comes through isn’t an animal? What if it’s a Pretannican human, or an elf?”
Or an ogre? Or a dragon?