The Key by Michael Grant Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    If he lay down on the hard stone floor, his feet would touch the door and his head would touch the far wall. And he would be able to press his hands against both side walls.
    He was being buried alive.
    â€œAaaahhhh!” he screeched when he saw the cell. “No, no, no, no! Nooooo! Nooooo!”
    The skeletal guards didn’t have an answer: they had no tongues or lips, or voice boxes or lungs. Pretty much all of the things you need to speak were missing.
    â€œNoooo! I can’t … you can’t....”
    Oh, but they could. And they did. They threw Mack into the cell, pushing his head down with claw-like hands so that he would fit through the short door.
    Mack turned and ran at them. He gibbered madly in Vargran, but casting two earlier spells had pretty well wiped out his enlightened puissance for now. So he might as well have been speaking Portuguese. 12
    The iron door slammed in his face.
    The oil lamp guttered, and for a frozen moment of terror, Mack thought it might go out, and if there’s anything worse than being buried alive, it’s being buried alive in the dark.
    â€œNo! No, you have to let me out! Nooooo!”
    One is tempted to look away. Because to keep looking at Mack is to watch him completely fall apart. It’s to see our hero whimpering, crying, sobbing, begging for his mother.
    You see, a phobia isn’t just a fear, like maybe you’re afraid you’ll fail a test. A phobia is much, much deeper. A phobia taps into the