The Trap Read Free Page B

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 realized 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 was open-minded about the whole ancient, smelly, Grimluk-manifestations thing, he wasn’t stupid. He needed more information before doing something reckless.
    The