The Call Read Online Free PDF

falling.
    And the princess chewed as if she had popped an entire egg into her mouth.
    Grimluk ran, ran, ran, tripping and falling and leaping up to run again through the black night.
    He ran, shrieking silently in his mind, from the terror.

Six
    M ack’s parents always asked him about his day at school. But he’d never quite believed they cared about the actual details. At dinner that evening he put his theory to the test.
    â€œSo, David, how was school?” his father asked as he tonged chicken strips onto his plate.
    His parents called him David. It was his actual name, of course, the name they’d picked out for him when he was just a slimy newborn. So he tolerated it.
    â€œBunch of interesting stuff happened today,” Mack said.
    â€œAnd don’t just tell us it was the same old, same old,” his mother said. She passed ketchup to her husband.
    â€œWell, it definitely wasn’t the same old, same old,” Mack said. “For one thing, some ancient dead-looking dude froze time and space for a while.”
    â€œHow did the math test go?” his father asked. “I hope you’re keeping up.”
    â€œThat wasn’t today. That was Friday. Today was the whole deadish guy suspending the very laws of physics and speaking in some language I didn’t understand.”
    â€œWell, you’ve always done well in your language classes,” Mack’s mother said.
    â€œPlus, it seems I’m Stefan’s new BFF.”
    â€œA B and two Fs?” His father frowned and shook salt onto mashed potatoes. “That doesn’t sound good. You need to crack the books.”
    Mack stared at his father. Then at his mother. It was one thing to have a theory that they didn’t really know him or listen to a word he was saying. It was a very different feeling to prove it.
    It made him feel just a little bit lonely, although he wouldn’t have wanted to use that word.
    After dinner he went to his room and found himself already sitting there.
    â€œAaaah!” Mack yelled.
    â€œAaaah!” Mack yelled back.
    Mack stood frozen in the doorway, staring at himself sitting on the edge of the bed staring back at Mack in the doorway.
    Although, on closer examination, it wasn’t him. Not entirely him, anyway. The Mack sitting on the edge of the bed looked a lot like Mack, but there were subtle differences. For one thing, this second Mack had no nostrils.
    Mack slid into the room and closed the door behind him.
    â€œAll right, who are you?”
    â€œDavid MacAvoy.”
    Mack would not have believed that staring at himself could be quite so disturbing. But it was. His mouth had gone dry. His heart was pounding. There seemed to be a ringing sound in his ears, and it was not the sound of happy sleigh bells; it was more likecar alarms going off.
    â€œOkay, great trick,” Mack said. “I totally see that this is a great trick. I’m not freaking out, I’m laughing at the amazingness of this trick. Ha-ha-ha! See? I’m getting the joke.”
    â€œHa-ha-ha!” the other Mack echoed. And he made a grin with the mouth below the nostril-less nose. The mouth revealed white tooth. Not teeth. Tooth. The entire line of teeth was a curved white solid surface.
    The two Macks stared at each other for a while, although Mack Number One did the better job of staring since the other Mack’s eyes tended not to point in quite the same direction. The right eye was fine, staring confidently at Mack’s face. But the left eye seemed to prefer staring at Mack’s knee.
    â€œOkay, this is…um…” Mack didn’t exactly know what it was. So he started over. “Okay, whatever this is, I’d like it to stop now. We both had a good laugh. Whoever you are, kudos. Nicely done. Now take off the mask.”
    â€œThe mask?”
    â€œThe me face. Take it off. I want to see who you really are.”
    â€œOh. You want to see my true