Michael Grant - The Key

And of course one bully to rule them all, one bully to bind them, one bully to bring them all and in the darkness pound them. Which would be Stefan.

That system had worked surprisingly well. It kept kids from being “overbullied.” It wasn’t like just any bully could push a nerd around—only the designated bully of nerds could do that. And Stefan had established some limits. He had even conducted a bullying seminar, laying out what was and what was not acceptable bully behavior.

Yep. Those were the good old days.

Now, with the King of the Bullies off saving the world with Mack, everything was chaos. Suddenly bullies were trying to expand beyond their usual victim group. The emo bully had tried to claim that anyone who went to Hot Topic was, by definition, one of his rightful victims. This was opposed strongly by Ed Lafrontiere—the current Twilight fans’ bully—and this had set off a power struggle as various bullies tried to take over the title of King of the Bullies (or in the case of Camaro Angianelli, Queen).

Somehow the intrabully war had resulted in a sort of competition to see who could be the biggest bully to Mack. Or in fact: the golem.

His mom usually drove him to school in the morning. If by his mom, you meant Mack’s mom. The golem didn’t really have a mother, or a father. This was the first time in his brief life he’d had any sort of family, and they weren’t really his.

The golem had been formed and given life by Grimluk. He had suddenly opened his eyes in a tiny stone house on a distant hillside in . . . well, now that he thought about it, the golem wasn’t really sure where it was. Not around here, anyway.

He had begun to achieve consciousness when his head was formed. He had opened his eyes to see Grimluk’s ancient, grizzled, wrinkled, rheumy-eyed face staring down at him. Grimluk’s gnarled fingers had literally smoothed the mud that made the golem’s forehead.

The golem had blinked and looked around, confused. He was in some ways no different from a newborn baby.

He had looked down to see that his body was nothing but some tree branches—bark still on for better mud adherence 9—tied together with rattan to form a sort of bare scarecrow form.

There was a massive wooden tub full of mud. And a smaller crockery pot with more sticks and loops of rattan.

“I’m getting too old for this,” Grimluk had muttered.

“Mama?” the golem had asked, gazing up hopefully.

“No, fool. You’re a golem. You have neither father nor mother. You have a maker. That’s me.”

“I . . . I feel like . . . like we should hug,” the golem had said.

Grimluk had been somewhat taken aback by this. But after he’d harrumphed a bit and chewed on his lip and forgotten what he was doing a few times and made some grunting noises and scratched and hitched up his robe, he’d finally said, “Eh? Let’s shake hands.”

Then after Grimluk had packed mud onto the golem’s stick arm and stuck in five twigs to act as supports for fingers and then carefully formed the hand, the golem had shaken hands with his maker.

“What’s my name?” the golem had asked.

“You don’t have one. Until I place the scroll in your mouth—and then you’ll know what part you are to play in the great events that rush toward us like an enraged boar.”

“What’s an enraged boar?”

“An angry wild pig.”

“What’s a pig?”

Grimluk was not a great teacher. The golem never did find out what a boar was. But Grimluk was a good golem maker.

When at last the golem was completed and stood on his own two muddy feet, Grimluk smiled a toothless smile. “All right, then.”

The golem had watched, mystified but also hopeful, as the elderly Magnifica, the sole surviving member of the first Magnificent Twelve, wrote two words on a slip of parchment.

The words were “Be Mack.”

“I don’t understand,” the golem said.

“You will,” Grimluk said. “Open your mouth and stick out your tongue.”

“What’s a mouth?”

Grimluk helped him understand that. Then he placed the scroll on the golem’s tongue.

What magic then!

The transformation was miraculous. The creature of mud and twigs suddenly had skin. He had eyes with whites and colored irises. He had hair. Fingernails.

Now, granted, Grimluk had sort of glossed over the internal organs—the golem would have to dig some of those out himself—but the result was a creature that looked very much like Mack MacAvoy.

So much like Mack that Mack’s best friends—those who knew him really well—were only a little suspicious. And his parents never guessed at all.

And then, he had met Mack face-to-face. A real human boy. The boy he was to be for however long it took Mack to save the world.

That had been kind of wonderful, meeting Mack.

But right now, here, today, he had no time for more nostalgia. He had to be a big boy now.

The question was: just how big?

He looked down and noticed that the mud-passing-as-flesh was oozing out over the tops of his shoes. And his jeans were already tight.

Yep: time to be a big boy.

William Blisterthöng MacGuffin’s castle turned out to be right there in the open atop a sheer outcropping, less than a quarter mile from Urquhart Castle, which was right beside Loch Ness.

Frank had chanted a Vargran spell over the Magnifica and Stefan, and the castle had appeared in perfect clarity. Big as life.

Then the fairies had urged them forward with encouraging words.

“Wait, you’re not coming with us?” Mack demanded.

“This could get violent,” Frank pointed out, “and we are peaceable folk.”

“No fairy has ever—” Connie started in, and Xiao, who was usually very polite, said, “Yeah, right.”

Over the years rare individuals who possessed just a little of the enlightened puissance had caught vague, fleeting glimpses of the castle. But when they reported this, they were condemned as drunk or crazy. Or as crazy drunks.

It was even worse for those few who would also report having seen a sort of sea serpent swimming around in Loch Ness. Those people were also derided as drunk or crazy or both, plus they were often compelled to write books and set up websites in a desperate attempt to prove that they were right.

They were right. But merely writing a book doesn’t prove you’re sane or sober (more the opposite).

Here’s what the local folk and passersby saw as Mack, Jarrah, Xiao, Stefan, and a nonflowery and rather annoyed Dietmar climbed the incredibly steep face of the hill: nothing. That’s what. Once Mack and the gang had come within a hundred feet of the massive promontory (there’s a word to dazzle your teacher with), they simply slipped from view. A person watching from the road would have seen five kids crossing a field and passing beneath a small stand of stunted trees, and then . . . nothing.

And here is what Stefan saw: also nothing. Because although Stefan had many great qualities, like, um . . . toughness and dangerousness . . . he did not possess the enlightened puissance. In fact, as far as Stefan could tell, the rest of them were crazy people gazing up at nothing.

This made it very difficult for Stefan to climb. He could feel the ground under his feet, he could even climb, but it was sketchy work. Try climbing something you can’t see. Go ahead, try. The story can wait.

See? It’s not easy, is it?

The climb was mostly over tumbled boulders. At some point back in history, the side of the mountain had crumbled. The other sides were all still nearly vertical cliff. But this side offered some possibilities for ascent.