The Trap (The Magnificent 12 2)

“Nothing. I just walked into a sign and banged my knee.”

Mack went toward her and now he, too, could see the sign. “Freilichtmuseum,” Mack read. “What’s that?”

“A museum for freilichts?” Jarrah suggested.

“So, no idea?”

“Not a clue, mate.”

Mack carefully typed the word into the browser on his phone. “It’s an open-air museum.”

“Okay.”

He checked the map app. “I think we’re off the road a little. Stefan! Xiao!”

They managed to find one another by calling out. And now the fog was thinning just a bit. And yet it seemed colder. They were in what looked very much like a medieval village. An empty medieval village.

“I think it’s maybe like a German Williamsburg, you know?” Mack said, squinting to read his browser. “People dress up all medieval and show you how to shoe a horse or make candles or whatever.”

“There’s no one here,” Stefan said.

“Actually, there are people in that hut there.” Xiao pointed. Mack saw a couple of men dressed in leather breeches and loose-fitting shirts.

“I don’t see anyone,” Stefan said.

Just then a man came pushing past carrying a rough-hewn cage filled with rats.

“I hate rats,” Mack said.

“Me, too,” Stefan agreed. “But I don’t see any rats.”

“In that guy’s cage,” Mack said.

“What guy?”

Mack stopped walking. “Xiao? Jarrah? You saw the guy with the box of rats, right?”

Both said they had. Stefan had not.

Nor did Stefan see the woman leading a cow.

Nor did he see the two men laboring to lift bundles of firewood into a wagon. Or the young girl carrying a baby. Or the fat old bald guy riding backward on a horse.

In a few more seconds of increasingly perplexed and then panicky conversation, it became clear that Stefan was seeing something entirely different from what they were seeing.

Stefan saw a completely empty, but neat and well-preserved, assemblage of old buildings—a village with a large windmill.

The rest of them saw a scattering of lean-tos and barely standing shacks and a population of young, very dirty, rag-bedecked people with few teeth and no sense of style or standards of personal grooming.

The young girl carrying the baby was joined by a young man—in fact he might be no older than twelve or so—leading a pair of cows.

“You don’t see that?” Mack pressed.

“No. No, I don’t see cows or a baby or some dude,” Stefan maintained.

“He does not possess the enlightened puissance,” a voice said in German-accented English.

Mack spun around and there, emerging from the fog, was a boy. He had on jeans and a denim jacket. He might have looked tough, except that he didn’t. He was painfully thin, tallish, with fine blond hair down to his shoulders. He had a soft mouth and big brown eyes. Mack thought he looked about ten years old.