Cold Cereal Page 21

  “What do you—”

  “Shhh!” Mick hissed.

  In front of it all a row of eight more Freemen entered on their knees. It took a moment for Scott to realize they were supposed to be kids—a Dennis the Menace-y cast of characters designed by someone whose attention to actual children had ended abruptly in 1950. Many bows and buckles, slingshots and huge lollies.

  “The children, stuffed with cereal

  and magic most ethereal,

  rise up and give themselves

  as sacrifices to the elves!”

  The dragon roared flame a fourth time. Scott thought that maybe he could hear a whistling after all. “Sounds like a bird,” he said.

  “Sounds like rain,” Mick growled, before dashing forward and leaping over the balcony.

  CHAPTER 32

  Eventually Erno gave up trying to read anything himself and just took to organizing piles of papers for Emily, who was breezing through reams of material at breakneck speed and apparently absorbing every word.

  The office of the Grand Ambrosius was large and lush. Carpets piled upon carpets. Velvety wallpaper and a huge desk so old looking and solid that it might have been a fossil from an age when prehistoric desks roamed the Earth. Emily looked adorable sitting behind it. The file cabinet in the corner had opened after only one spirited pull from Biggs, and its contents were stacked in piles on the desktop and around on the floor.

  “Look at this,” said Emily, and she handed a report off to Erno. The first page was a list of names and occupations. Wallace Spears, the liberal Democrat member of Parliament for Berwick-upon-Tweed, for example. Gordon Maris, jockey. Branson Murdoch, owner of NewsCast.

  “Who are they?”

  “Well, they’re all Knights Bachelor. And most of them are dead.”

  “Bachelor?” Erno said uncertainly. “Does that mean they weren’t married?”

  “In this case it just means they’re members of a particular order of knighthood. The lowest-ranked order, actually, but the oldest, too. But look about halfway down the first column.”

  “What am I—oh. Is that—”

  “Yes,” said Emily. “And I think it’s a good thing his name isn’t highlighted. A lot of those knights have disappeared, or died kind of young. A lot of accidents that might not have been accidents. A lot of natural causes that were probably anything but.”

  “We need to warn him.”

  “We will. Just let me finish this stack—”

  “Should go,” said Biggs. “Find Scott and Mick. Escape.”

  Both Utz kids looked up and spoke in unison, like twins do on TV:

  “Scott and Mick are here?”

  Mick’s drop from the mezzanine had been a long one, but luckily he landed on a Freeman. He skipped nimbly from the top of one man’s head to the heads of two or three shorter Freemen standing nearby and made it to the floor no worse for the wear apart from a slight limp. Meanwhile, the men recovered and spun about, bewildered, trying to identify whoever had the nerve to slap them on the heads like that. Scott saw all this from the mezzanine’s front railing, and then realized that while few if any of the Freemen could see Mick, Scott had just given himself away to the dozen or so old men sitting behind him.

  “Raise the alarm!” shouted an aged but still powerfully built man as he rose sharply. “One of them’s escaped!”

  “No…,” said another, his dry voice barely carrying over the music. “This is a different boy entirely.”

  “That’s right.” Scott nodded as he edged back toward the exit. “My dad’s down below.” Would this wash? He supposed the Freemen wouldn’t have a Take Your Child to Work Day. “He said I could watch from up here.”

  More men were rising. The one who’d spoken first was crab-walking along his row of seats, and he scowled. He’d obviously been scowling all his life, and his face, like a mother’s warning, had stuck that way. “Who’s your dad then? Hm?” he asked. There was a lot of “Gotcha!” in his tone.

  The music died. Grunts and shouts shot up over the railing, and Scott tried to peek casually over his shoulder as he racked his brain for the name of some classmate whose father would likely be a Freeman. Mick had made his way to the stage undetected but not without a certain amount of shoving, and came now to a stop just under the dragon’s jaws.

  “Denton Peters,” Scott said finally, remembering that Denton’s father had spoken on Career Day about being one of Goodco’s lawyers. And didn’t everyone call the boy Denton Peters the Third when they wanted to get under his skin? Scott congratulated himself on his quick thinking and wondered why none of the old men seemed to be as impressed with him as he was.

  “Young Peters is only a Second Squire,” creaked a frail and nearly translucent man in a wheelchair some twelve feet away. “He shouldn’t be here tonight—”

  “He’s not,” said the big Freeman with a yellow grin. “And neither is his son.”

  Onstage, Mick leaped high and hung from the dragon’s lower jaw, crumpling its papier-mâché teeth. He fished his arm to the back of its throat and grasped at something. Something electric, it seemed, because the jaws sprayed sparks and Mick was thrown backward eight feet toward the front of the stage, where he creamed the unicorn.

  “BENNETT!” a ringing voice called out. It must have belonged to one of the men wearing microphones onstage. “TURN UP THE BLACK LIGHTS! SOMETHING IS HERE!”

  Then the man behind the console, who between his duties and headphones had not yet noticed Scott at all, dialed down all of the lights except for a scattering of deeply purple bulbs that were arranged around the auditorium. The only other illumination came from the console itself, and from what little moonlight bled through a stained glass rosette in the ceiling. And from the teeth and white aprons of the Freemen themselves, which now glowed in a cosmic bowling kind of way. Scott mentally applauded himself for having chosen dark clothes.

  “Watch him!” ordered one of the old men. “He’ll slip away!”

  Down below, the grunts and shouts of confusion suddenly jelled, gained purpose. Mick was as bright as a glow stick now, and any Freeman could see him shake off the electric shock and make another run at the dragon.

  “What the devil’s going on down there?” said the scowling man.

  Scott ducked the grabby arms of a nearby Freeman and the swooping cane of another and darted front and center of the mezzanine, where he heaved hard against the wheeled chair of the man behind the console. The man, Bennett, was small and sagged like a half-melted snowman. He rolled some five or six feet, still tethered to the console by his headphones, and was yanked face-first off his chair.

  Scott lost a moment gaping at the console, dazzled by its multitude of sliders, buttons, knobs, and dials. Then he did what boys have always done when confronted with some electronic contraption they don’t know how to use: he pushed everything at once.

  The theater got very, very bright. Brighter than it was meant to, apparently, because then there was a hair-raising squawk and a pop, and everything went entirely dark. No black lights. Only the dim blush of the rosette skylight. And quiet. For a moment every Freeman was afraid of that dark, and silent. Scott felt his way along the balcony rail, gazed out toward the stage, and held his breath.

  Then there was a hot flourish of blue like a flaming sword in the darkness. And with this a trill, a whistling. Weak orange emergency lights flickered on and gave a twilight radiance to the hall, and blue flame erupted again. The Freemen panicked, collided with one another, and otherwise behaved like the theatergoers at the end of King Kong when the gorilla decides he doesn’t want his picture taken. And center stage was Mick, smiling, with a finch on his head.

  “There’s the boy!” an old Freeman shouted behind Scott. “It’s his fault!”

  “Grab him!” said another, and Scott turned to find Freemen all around him. Then, distantly, the bang of a door; blows and grunts growing closer, a flailing of robes and arms, and Scott was being grabbed by large, strong hands that lifted him a
nd took him hurtling over the balcony.

  CHAPTER 33

  For a second or two all Scott could think about was gravity, but then they landed on the floor below the mezzanine—safely—and he had a look at the man who had grabbed him.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Hey,” said Erno.

  Biggs was carrying Scott under one arm like a folding chair, Emily under the other; Erno was hanging down his back. Biggs set Scott down and Erno dropped to the floor, but the big man seemed reluctant to give up Emily.

  Many Freemen had fled and continued to flee to the exits, but some stalwarts had stayed. Thirty, maybe. More than enough to make Scott nervous. And what if those men from the freezer with the guns had gotten themselves untied? What if there were more like them?

  Mick and Finchbriton were still onstage, and a dozen or more Freemen were circling them, closing in. Including the Freeman in drag and, ironically, the one dressed up like a St. Patrick’s Day decoration. If they couldn’t see Mick without the black lights, they could apparently see the bird just fine.

  “They were keepin’ him inna metal box!” Mick shouted to Scott. “An’ shockin’ him like a dancin’ chicken! Danu help me, Finchbriton, I didn’t know yeh were here!”

  Finchbriton flapped atop Mick’s head like some preposterous hat.

  “We have to just get out of here,” Scott called to the others. “Before they figure out what to do with us.”

  “What’s the rush?” asked the old elf. “Me an’ the bird have a hundred an’ fifty years o’ small talk to catch up on with these gennlemen. We’ve been indisposed, yeh see.”

  “No, c’mon, guys—”

  “I’m with the leprechaun,” said Erno.

  “Clurichaun,” said Scott. But he could see the bloodlust in Erno’s eyes. Here he was, among his captors, with a pet Bigfoot at his command. With the biggest big brother of all. And Biggs wasn’t exactly shrinking from a fight, either. There were cloaked figures all around him, and the big man took his first swing. Which missed.

  At this the throng of Freemen fell upon them. Biggs swung again, connecting spectacularly with a chin inside a dark hood. But soon he had two Freemen hanging from his good arm. Finchbriton let loose another jet of flame, which scattered a half dozen robes before catching the edge of the theater curtain. Licks of blue started climbing the proscenium. Then a Freeman produced a fire extinguisher from the inside of his robe and gave the bird (and Mick’s head) a good foaming. Finchbriton was whisked across the stage and landed, ruffled and sputtering, on the floor.

  Erno was rolling himself at the feet of approaching Freemen and sending them reeling. Biggs socked most of the rest. But not all. Eventually he was forced to set Emily down as more and more dark-robed shapes attached themselves to him like leeches—at the arms, the shoulders, the neck—trying to weigh him down and squeeze the fight out of him.

  Scott felt useless. Eventually he ran to Emily’s side.

  “Is … is that Mick?” she asked him. She was looking right at the elf. Or possibly she was looking right at the pasting of extinguisher foam on his head that, to her eyes, probably appeared to be floating two feet above the stage. The Freemen certainly seemed to see it, and they were now rushing toward both elf and finch. They tackled Mick at roughly the same time as Erno was pinned and Biggs crumpled under a dog-pile of black bodies.

  There were only a handful of unoccupied Freemen now. Maybe these, like Scott and Emily, were the most timid, the least athletic of those who hadn’t simply panicked and run at the first sign of trouble. But they looked confident now with only a pair of sixth graders to contend with. They looked pretty pleased with themselves, actually.

  “Any ideas?” Scott whispered to Emily.

  Emily gave it some thought. “Stay low, aim for the crotch,” she concluded.

  Thank goodness we have a certified genius on our team, thought Scott. Then he fished his arm around and unhooked one of the zipper pulls from his backpack. He held the thing aloft, his thumb twitching over its red button.

  “Don’t come any closer,” he told the Freemen, “or I’ll do it.”

  The men stopped dead. The one in front winced at Scott’s hand. “Do … do what?”

  Activate my LED flashlight, thought Scott. “Trust me, you don’t wanna find out,” he told them. “We’ve planted them on every floor of the temple.”

  The Freemen hesitated. More than one of them took a halting step backward. The whole of the stage curtain was now engulfed and dripping blue fire, so for a moment all was quiet apart from crackling flame.

  Fourteen more men were sitting on the prostrate Biggs, pinioning every foot of his arms, legs, and torso. The Freeman with the fire extinguisher approached his head, evidently to crack it with the heavy canister. Erno struggled uselessly against two men. Onstage, Finchbriton spat foam and feeble sparks, and Mick was entirely surrounded.

  “Everyone get away from my friends!” shouted Scott. “I don’t want to press this, but I’ll do it! We all agreed we’d rather die than get taken prisoner! We talked about it in the car.”

  The man with the fire extinguisher paused. Everyone looked to someone else to make the call.

  “It’s probably a Nintendo or some nonsense!” shouted an old man from the mezzanine. “He’s just a boy! Take him!”

  This was all the motivation most of the Freemen needed. They began to advance again, cautiously.

  “Scott?” said Emily.

  “Yes.”

  “Is that a flashlight?”

  “Yes,” he answered, and pointed it at the Freemen like a light saber.

  “Is it … bright?”

  “Not really.”

  The Freemen grinned easily now; aware that, at best, they were only in danger of being slightly illuminated. Having to squint. Maybe getting their sinuses checked.

  “Get ready to run,” whispered Scott.

  Then the rosette skylight shattered inward, and Scott looked up to see a dark figure sliding down from the rafters on a light and fluidly uncoiling rope, his black mantle unfurling like pure opera, like Batman. It was just the sort of entrance his father would make in a movie, and Scott’s heart stirred as Freemen were scattered by fear and falling glass. “Dad?” he said, not too loudly, but breathlessly, as the dark rescuer alighted and turned.

  But it wasn’t his father.

  It was Merle Lynn, C.P.A.

  Much to everyone’s confusion.

  CHAPTER 34

  All the Freemen who were not otherwise engaged rounded on Merle, expressions of baffled anger on their faces. This was not how these Initiation pageants went, normally. You could easily miss it, owing to the high ceilings and antique appointments of this theater, but the Freemen Temple was really a treetop clubhouse. It was a fort made of sofa cushions. It was any sort of stronghold dedicated to the promotion of US and the exclusion of THEM. And the 377th level of membership was supposed to guarantee that on a night like this they would mingle only with servants and with Walnut Crescent types who had servants of their own. None of these frustrating inbetweeners. There were not supposed to be children here. There were not supposed to be rabble-rousers. Right now each Freeman should have been holding a glass, maybe his pipe, and speaking with a group of nearly identical men who could really appreciate a funny story about his butler.

  Instead they were forced now to subdue a sweatshirt-wearing and possibly crazy old man. And was that a Freeman robe he was wearing? “This,” a red-faced Freeman bellyached, “is a private function!”

  Scott’s thoughts were a little more complimentary. He hadn’t seen Merle Lynn since their brief meeting three weeks ago, and he realized his memories of the man had not been true: he was not quite the hobo Scott remembered him to be. His square gray beard was tidy. His skullcap was neatly pinned to his thinning hair, which was not anywhere as flyaway as you’d expect, considering he’d just dropped sixty feet through a broken window. He wore the black cloak of a Freeman, which Scott found kind of alarming; but beneath t
he open robe was only a pair of dark brown corduroy pants and a sweatshirt from Coney Island. He looked to Scott like the sort of well-meaning bachelor uncle who would pull quarters from your ears and forget to close the bathroom door when he peed. But then he pulled a glossy white wand from his sleeve, and in an instant he looked like a wizard.

  He lunged with the wand like it was a saber, framed by the raging blue fires and greasy smoke of the proscenium. As a gang of Freemen neared, he flicked his wand and they dropped like marionettes. Two more Freemen rushed him, but with another wave of the wand they pitched forward and slid headfirst across the floor, eyes shut.

  It was getting hazy. The fire spread to the thick columns that flanked either side of the stage. Something on the painted globes was especially flammable, and each Earth blistered and flew apart like a flock of crows.

  Merle was moving about the floor now, and even the Freemen who’d been detaining Biggs and Mick and Erno now released their charges and leaped into action, only to fall abruptly asleep the moment they fell within Merle’s sphere of influence. But there were too many, and they came too quickly. One Freeman managed to slip up behind Merle and hoist his arms up in a full nelson, and when Merle flicked his wand over his shoulder and put this particular man to sleep, the dead weight dragged both of them down. Merle might have been quickly disarmed had Scott not finally roused himself to action. He dashed between Merle and the final two Freemen, screaming a poorly planned battle cry that was almost “LOOK OUT!” and was almost “NOOOOOO!” but came out something like “Noot.” Then, following Emily’s advice, he aimed low and tackled one of the Freemen in the groin. The second tripped over the first, and Merle gained enough time to disentangle himself from his narcoleptic wrestling match and put the last of the Freemen to sleep.