The Key (The Magnificent 12 3)

Camaro was seated in a chair outside her own class.

“Hey, Mack,” she said. “What are you doing?”

“Going to see the principal. Why are you sitting in the hallway?”

She shrugged. “Kicked me out for not knowing an answer.”

“What was the question?”

She made a grin that didn’t last very long. “Teacher asked me what my problem was. I didn’t have an answer.”

“Why did she ask you that?”

Camaro waved her hand dismissively. “I superglued the chalk to the board. It was kind of cool, I thought. Five pieces. They were the points of a star if you looked at it the right way. I thought …” She glanced up at him, self-conscious. Then she forced a laugh. “I thought it was kind of artistic.”

“I wish I had seen it,” the golem said.

“They’re in there chiseling it off now,” Camaro said. And indeed the golem heard the sound of a hammer striking a steel chisel. “I’ll see you tomorrow, right? For the fight?”

“Yes. They can punch me if they want. It doesn’t bother me. Especially now that I’m big.”

“Watch your head, by the way. You could bump into that doorjamb.”

* * *

Ten

* * *

The skeletal crew threw Mack onto the ground before the throne of William Blisterthöng MacGuffin. The landing skinned Mack’s knees. Not that this was his major concern right then, but it was still painful.

His hands were bound behind him, but his feet were free and he had a plan.

“Ah heard a lot o’ screaming frae yer cell. Some weeping tae,” MacGuffin said. He grinned his yellow-toothed grin inside his bristly red beard-of-fear. “Sae ye’r a feartie-cat. A weeping, blubbering wee feartie-cat.”

“I am not a feartie-cat,” Mack said. “I’m phobic.”

That stopped the conversation for a few seconds while Connie, who was fluttering around MacGuffin like a tween around Justin Bieber, explained to MacGuffin.

MacGuffin looked different in daylight. He still had the exploding head-bush of red hair; and the sallow, wrinkly skin; and the too-large teeth, but now he seemed almost to sparkle a bit around the edges. Like someone had sprinkled him with glitter.

Ah, Mack thought: fairy dust. That would make sense.

He took a step toward MacGuffin. “See? I’m not afraid of you.”

Well, of course he was. Because as you know, among Mack’s numerous phobias was an irrational fear of beards. He was fine with beards at a distance. But a beard up close caused him acute feelings of panic.

He’d once had a horrible dream in which he’d been locked in a room full of rabbis, imams, and Santa Clauses. In his dream he had searched frantically through Santa’s bag, looking for a razor. All he had found were socks.

The mere memory of that dream gave him the shakes.

Mack had a beard comfort zone of about ten feet. A beard farther away than that just made him vaguely nauseous. A beard at, say, eight feet would make him start to feel the first slight edge of panic. And a beard within three feet would have him sweating, weeping, and begging an unfeeling heaven for an angel-barber armed with clippers to save him.

MacGuffin unfortunately had the worst of all possible beards: wild and red. So subtract a foot from each of those distances.

At a distance of five feet, Mack wasn’t sure he could incinerate MacGuffin. At the same time, he wasn’t sure he could force himself to move any closer.

Somewhere there was a math formula that balanced “likelihood of incineration” against “fear of beards,” but Mack didn’t know it. He had probably been daydreaming in that class.