LITMIR.BIZ

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of rapidly enlarging, leprous, cheese-stuffed monsters was just another obstacle to be overcome by the weary travelling public.

      “What did you do?” Mack asked Jarrah, panting.

      “It was all I could think of. I don’t know that much Vargran,” Jarrah said. “I was trying to say ‘follow’. I was going to lead them away.”

      “They would have killed you,” Mack said.

      “Eh,” Jarrah said. “They might have tried.”

      Mack intercepted an admiring look from Stefan. Jarrah was his kind of girl.

      “I think what I actually said must have been ‘grow’, not ‘follow’, ‘Grow monster’.”

      “‘Grow monster’?”

      Jarrah looked sheepish. “Yeah, that could have gone badly, eh?”

      The Lepercons were still getting bigger. In fact, they were crowding the baggage area. Lepercons weren’t built to be the size of parade balloons, so they were as helpless as slugs. Big, giant slugs.

      “Agara!” the one-legged Lepercon slurred.

      “Yeah? Agara you, you big fat scab!” Jarrah snapped.

      Mack spotted his bag on the carousel. He snagged it and wedged it on to the luggage cart along with Jarrah’s and Stefan’s luggage.

      Nine Iron was just coming around on the carousel, still wedged between a garment bag and a duffel.

      “You wait right there!” Nine Iron raged. “I’m coming for—”

      He paused. Fumbled for his plastic mouthpiece. Breathed. Breathed.

      Breathed.

      Breathed.

      “—you!”

      Mack was breathing as hard as Nine Iron. The fear of death was gone, but he was now surrounded by what had to be a thousand pounds of warm blue cheese or a blue cheeselike product.

      Nine Iron was struggling to get up off the carousel, but he was sitting kind of far down, with his legs over the side, so he had to use his walking stick to get himself up. Unfortunately, since Nine Iron was moving, the floor was also moving, and he couldn’t get the stick… Well, you get the picture.

      “Do you have any idea what Lepercons cost?” Nine Iron cried.

      “Leave me alone, you crazy old man!” Mack yelled.

      “I’ll follow you to—”

      He breathed. Breathed.

      And then the carousel ran Nine Iron straight into the engorging, growing, swelling, bloated butt cheek of a massive Lepercon.

      So Mack didn’t hear where exactly Nine Iron was going to follow him. He just heard a sort of angry “Mmmphh mmmph!”

      “Let’s get out of here,” Jarrah said. “Place smells.”

      “Blueturophobia,” Mack said. “It’s a fear of blue cheese.”

      “Are you going to have one of your crazy fits?” Stefan asked.

      “Not if you knock me out, throw me in a taxi, and don’t wake me up until I’m standing in a shower,” Mack said.

      Five seconds later Mack was draped over the luggage. Stefan wheeled him – blissfully unconscious – towards the exit.

      

      

ow we’ll explain all the stuff we didn’t explain earlier. It’s called “exposition”. Toss that word into the middle of your next English class. Your teacher will be like, “Wow, someone is actually paying attention!” That will be kind of sad, really.

      David “Mack” MacAvoy was a normal-looking kid living a normal life in the almost normal city of Sedona, Arizona. He had no idea that he would be called upon to save the world from a terrible evil.

      A terrible evil no one had actually heard of.

      Everyone expects the world to eventually be destroyed by some combination of global warming, a giant asteroid strike, the sun going supernova, the planet falling off its axis, a wandering black hole, the explosion of the giant magma-filled zit below Yellowstone – Oh, you hadn’t heard about that? Well, it’s best not to think about it – or a rapidly spreading disease that turns people into flesh-eating zombies.

      Asteroids, exploding sun, global warming, black hole, magma pimple, and zombie apocalypse – those are all happening for sure. Those are the things we know about.

      But in the twenty-first century absolutely no one was worrying about the imminent release of the Pale Queen from the World Beneath, where she’d been imprisoned for three thousand years.

      It’s always the thing you’re not worrying about that gets you. You’d think Mack would have realised that before most. After all, Mack suffered from a whole long list of phobias.

      He had arachnophobia, fear of spiders. Dentophobia, fear of dentists. Pyrophobia, fear of fire (which was ironic considering he’d used a Vargran spell to turn into a sort of minisun while fighting Ereskigal at one point).

      He had pupaphobia, fear of puppets; trypanophobia, fear of getting shots; thalassophobia, fear of oceans – which led fairly naturally to selachophobia, fear of sharks.

      And as mentioned earlier, phobophobia, which is the fear of developing more fears.

      The mother of all fears for Mack was claustrophobia, fear of small, enclosed spaces. Of being buried alive. Not that anyone would exactly enjoy that, but Mack could freak out just thinking about it.

      But despite his close relationship with fear, Mack hadn’t known there was a Pale Queen about to be released from the World Beneath.

      (By the way, if you know all this because you read the first book? You can skip this chapter and go to the next one. My feelings won’t be hurt.)

      Mack’s part in that three-thousand-year-old story began when he was about to get the snot – excuse me, mucus – beaten out of him by Stefan Marr, King of All Bullies at Richard Gere Middle School. (Go, Fighting Pupfish!)

      Just as the beating was scheduled to start, Grimluk appeared. Ghostlike. Special effects time. Booga booga.

      Grimluk’s appearance froze time for a few seconds while he began to lay out the bad news for Mack. In effect, “Dude, you are one of a select group called the Magnificent Twelve. You need to drop out of school, assemble the rest of the Magnifica from the four corners of the Earth, learn this magic language called Vargran, and take down the Pale Queen when she emerges from her underground lair.”

      Those weren’t Grimluk’s exact words. For one thing, Grimluk would never say “dude”.

      Unfortunately Grimluk wasn’t able to sit down and have a nice long chat and explain everything since he could only appear briefly – usually in the reflective chrome surface of a bathroom fixture. So Mack had to operate on very limited information.

      The golem that Mack discovered living in Mack’s room didn’t fill in too many details, either.

      A golem, as you may know, is a sort of robot made of clay. The golem maker writes down an instruction and puts it in the golem’s mouth. Then the golem comes alive and does whatever the instruction says.

      In the case of the golem in Mack’s bedroom, the message said, “Be Mack.” So the golem had done its best to look and sound like Mack. He might not be good enough to fool a really close observer, someone who really knew Mack well, but he fooled Mack’s parents.

      Still, even with a golem, Mack didn’t go rushing off to save the world, not right away, because although Mack

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