“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…
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