Grimluk hoped they were simply well-equipped cooks, but he doubted it. They moved with an arrogant swagger, not unlike the way the baron moved – or would have, had he been a very large grasshopper.
They gathered around the princess, illuminated by her own light.
For a moment Grimluk feared for the girl. They were a desperate, frightening bunch and looked as if they could make short work of the red-haired beauty.
But the girl showed no fear.
“Faithful Skirrit minions, do you bring me news of the queen, my mother?” she asked.
“We do,” one of the bugs answered.
“Good. You have done well to find me. And I will hear all you can tell me, gladly. But first, I hunger.”
This news caused a certain shuffling and back-pedalling among the Skirrit.
“Hungry?” their spokesman or leader asked with what must be nervousness among his kind. “Now?”
“One will be enough,” the princess said.
The Skirrit captain pointed his two left-side arms at one of his fellows. “You heard the princess,” he said.
The designated Skirrit drew a deep breath and released a shuddery sigh. Then he bent his long legs and knelt down. He bowed his triangular head and his ball eyes darkened.
And then the princess, the beauty beyond compare, began to change.
Her body… her form…
Grimluk had to clap both his hands over his mouth to stop the scream that wanted to tear at his throat.
The princess… no, the monstrosity she had become – the evil, foul beast – opened her stretched and hideous mouth and calmly bit the bowed head from its neck.
Green fluid spurted from the insect’s neck. The headless body collapsed with a sound like sticks falling.
And the princess chewed as if she had popped an entire egg into her mouth.
Grimluk ran, ran, ran, tripping and falling and leaping up to run again through the black night.
He ran, shrieking silently in his mind, from the terror.
“So, David, how was school?” his father asked as he tonged chicken strips onto his plate.
His parents called him David. It was his actual name, of course, the name they’d picked out for him when he was just a slimy newborn. So he tolerated it.
“Bunch of interesting stuff happened today,” Mack said.
“And don’t just tell us it was the same old, same old,” his mother said. She passed ketchup to her husband.
“Well, it definitely wasn’t the same old, same old,” Mack said. “For one thing, some ancient dead-looking dude froze time and space for a while.”
“How did the maths test go?” his father asked. “I hope you’re keeping up.”
“That wasn’t today. That was Friday. Today was the whole deadish guy suspending the very laws of physics and speaking in some language I didn’t understand.”
“Well, you’ve always done well in your language classes,” Mack’s mother said.
“Plus, it seems I’m Stefan’s new BFF.”
“A B and two Fs?” His father frowned and shook salt onto mashed potatoes. “That doesn’t sound good. You need to crack the books.”
Mack stared at his father. Then at his mother. It was one thing to have a theory that they didn’t really know him or listen to a word he was saying. It was a very different feeling to prove it.
It made him feel just a little bit lonely, although he wouldn’t have wanted to use that word.
After dinner he went to his room and found himself already sitting there.
“Aaaah!” Mack yelled.
“Aaaah!” Mack yelled back.
Mack stood frozen in the doorway, staring at himself sitting on the edge of the bed staring back at Mack in the doorway.
Although, on closer examination, it wasn’t him. Not entirely him, anyway. The Mack sitting on the edge of the bed looked a lot like Mack, but there were subtle differences. For one thing, this second Mack had no nostrils.
Mack slid into the room and closed the door behind him.
“All right, who are you?”
“David MacAvoy.”
Mack would not have believed that staring at himself could be quite so disturbing. But it was. His mouth had gone dry. His heart was pounding. There seemed to be a ringing sound in his ears and it was not the sound of happy sleigh bells; it was more like car alarms going off.
“OK, great trick,” Mack said. “I totally see that this is a great trick. I’m not freaking out, I’m laughing at the amazingness of this trick. Ha-ha-ha! See? I’m getting the joke.”
“Ha-ha-ha!” the other Mack echoed. And he made a grin with the mouth below the nostril-less nose. The mouth revealed white tooth. Not teeth. Tooth. The entire line of teeth was a curved white solid surface.
The two Macks stared at each other for a while, although Mack Number One did the better job of staring since the other Mack’s eyes tended not to point in quite the same direction. The right eye was fine, staring confidently at Mack’s face. But the left eye seemed to prefer staring at Mack’s knee.
“OK, this is… um…” Mack didn’t exactly know what it was. So he started over. “OK, whatever this is, I’d like it to stop now. We both had a good laugh. Whoever you are, kudos. Nicely done. Now take off the mask.”
“The mask?”
“The me face. Take it off. I want to see who you really are.”
“Oh. You want to see my true face?”
“There you go, that’s exactly right, dude; I want to see the real you.”
The face, the mask – whatever it was – melted.
“Yaaaahhh!” Mack cried and fumbled behind him for the door handle.
The face that looked very much like his own had grown darker, lumpier, cruder. Dirty. In fact, more than dirty: it was dirt.
Mack was staring at a thing made of mud. Like something a child would make playing in the dirt. Only full-size. And wearing his clothes.
The dirt creature had a mouth but no eyes. No teeth in that mouth, just a horizontal slit.
Mack’s fingers were numb on the doorknob. His whole body was tingling from the effect of hormones flooding his system with the urgent desire to get out.
But he couldn’t turn away. He couldn’t stop staring at the mud face and the mud hands. There even seemed to be bits of gravel and small twigs in that mud face.
When the thing opened its mouth, Mack swore he saw a piece of paper, maybe the