The Key (The Magnificent 12 3)

Seeing him down, the remaining skeletons regrouped. They pulled back, bunched together, and came on in a rush.

Mack was still struggling with the bony hand around his throat, still gasping for air.

Xiao, Dietmar, and Jarrah took the worst of it and all three were down in seconds, buried by a tangle of clacking bones.

MacGuffin strode over to Mack, who was still very much in danger of passing out.

“Gimme up tae th’ All-Mother, wull ye?” He grabbed a handful of Mack’s curls and looked hard into Mack’s bulging, tear-streaming eyes. “Na, ah think ah will murdurr ye ’n’ then see howfur this rabble o’ yers likes it.”

Connie zipped over, fast as a hummingbird but twice as mean. She had a coil of rope, and a weakened, gagging Mack could do nothing to stop being hogtied.

MacGuffin pried the skeletal hand from Mack’s throat. A heap of bones assembled itself back into a proper skeleton and came over to retrieve the missing limb.

Oxygen flooded Mack’s lungs, and his delirious brain refocused in time to see the skeleton army marching the Magnifica and Stefan to the gate of the castle, beaten, humiliated, and helpless.

Mack himself was taken to the dungeon.

* * *

Seven

* * *

Have you ever seen a dungeon? They aren’t happy places. Down toward the foundation, the castle was built of massive blocks of granite, each of them about six feet by four feet.

Those stones weren’t going anywhere.

The dungeons were cells, with damp stone walls covered in lichen and mold and mildew and moss. But the lichen, etc.—that’s not what bothered Mack. He had no great fear of primitive plant phyla.

In the corner of the cell was a cracked pottery jar that was supposed to be the toilet. At some later point, one of MacGuffin’s skeletal helpers would be coming by to collect whatever was in the chamber pot—and really, there were never going to be good surprises there—but that was not what bothered Mack.

Well, it bothered him a little bit, because like most of us he was fond of indoor plumbing. But none of the terrors and inconveniences compared to the thing that really bothered him.

Three stone walls, a stone ceiling, a great stone floor—and the remaining wall of the cube was a sheet of rusty black iron pierced only by the door, which was itself massively iron. In that door was a single narrow vertical slit no more than six inches high and one inch wide, just enough for a skeletal eye to appear occasionally and spy in on Mack.

Not that even a skeletal eye could see much, because it was very dark in the room. There was an oil lamp set into the wall. The lamp itself would have been kind of a cute Halloween decoration: a skull with a jaw that worked like a drawer. The jaw-drawer could be pulled out, and inside would be found the little clay cup that held the reeking oil. When lit, the dim light flickered through the eyeholes and noseholes and the fine cracks where the plates of the skull were joined, and also the jagged hole where the crossbow bolt had long ago pierced the skull’s brain.

But even that wasn’t what terrified Mack, and overwhelmed him, and stripped away his dignity and his self-control.

What bothered Mack was a little thing called claustrophobia.

Mack had twenty-one identified phobias. They included arachnophobia, a fear of spiders.

Dentophobia, a fear of dentists.

Pyrophobia, a fear of fire, although most people have some of that.

Pupaphobia, a fear of puppets. But he was not afraid of clowns, unlike most sensible people.

Vaccinophobia, a fear of getting shots.

Thalassophobia, a fear of oceans, which led fairly naturally to selachophobia, a fear of sharks.

And of course, phobophobia, which is the fear of developing more fears. Someone famous—either Franklin D. Roosevelt or possibly SpongeBob—once said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Well, that wasn’t the only thing Mack had to fear, but it was one of them.

But the mother of all fears for Mack was claustrophobia: a fear of small, enclosed spaces. For example: a cramped space not that much bigger than a casket in the stony bowels of a castle. Because the cell was not the large room you’ve been picturing in your head. It was five feet deep, three feet wide, and four feet tall.

Mack could not even stand all the way up.