The Midnight Market

by Beth McMullen

  This is not what you want to hear when you are out in the woods at night, in the pitch dark, armed only with a moody parrot.

  “What kind of something?” Jin whispers, clutching my wrist so hard I’m sure he’s going to draw blood.

  Hannah raises a hand and points. There before us, blocking our way, is a huge, dark form. A huge, dark, furry form with eyes, to be more specific. And teeth. Let’s not forget the teeth. Big teeth. “Grrrrrr,” says the bear.

  Suddenly, everything I know about bear encounters disappears from my memory. Was it make a lot of noise? Run? Play dead? Ask the bear politely not to eat you? What on earth is a bear doing on an island anyway? And what’s truly terrifying is Zeus’s absolute silence. I’d figure this is the sort of situation about which he’d have something to say.

  “What do we do?” Jin whispers. We don’t move a muscle. Behind us, there is a rustling in the low, scratchy blueberry bushes. Very slowly, I turn toward the sound. And there, frolicking to the side of the path, is Baby Bear. She kicks up great plumes of dead pine needles as she spins in a playful circle. Of all the bear warnings, I do remember one, which is never get between a mother and her cub. That our being here is completely accidental will not improve our chances of survival. Bears do not tolerate excuses. Mama Bear steps toward us. Baby Bear frolics.

  “What do we do?” Jin repeats, this time with urgency.

  Besides panic? I have no idea. “Did we learn about bear safety in school?”

  “Not exactly.” Hannah’s voice is still high and squeaky. “If we get gored to death in the next few minutes, I want you guys to know I’ve had more fun since I met you than in the rest of my life combined.”

  “We aren’t going to get gored,” I say quickly.

  “You don’t know that,” Jin responds. He’s right. I don’t. But I’m hopeful.

  “Grrrr,” says Mama Bear. Baby Bear snorts with pleasure. She’s probably building sandcastles out of pine needles and just having the best old time. We can’t stand here forever.

  “When I say run,” I whisper, “run. Okay?”

  “Are you sure that’s what we’re supposed to do?” asks Jin.

  “Yes.” No. I haven’t a clue, but I have to pick something because doing nothing is not an option. “One. Two. Three. Run!”

  Only when we bolt do I realize I should have given more detailed instructions. We scatter in every direction. Jin dodges around Mama Bear and takes off down the path, Zeus clinging to his shoulder for dear life. Hannah dashes into the woods and I make a break for the cabins, hunkering down in the shadows of the closest one and trying to catch my breath. The bears, for their part, lumber away. Now that we are no longer between them, they seem utterly uninterested in us.

  But just as my pulse begins to settle down, Jin comes tearing out of the shadows and nearly gives me a heart attack.

  “Are you okay?” I ask, stumbling to stand up.

  “No!” he shrieks. “Zeus is gone!”

  And we thought Mama and Baby Bear were a problem.

  CHAPTER 18 DON’T SEND A HUMAN TO DO A BIRD’S WORK

  LIGHTS FLICK ON IN TWO of the cabins. Jin’s yelling has woken our fellow campers, who are ready for anything and anxious to prove it. I bet they’d be tripping over one another for a chance to wrestle that bear. But as fun as that may be to witness, it’s time to flee. Hannah intercepts us as we race along in the shadows back toward our cabin. Her shoes squish with each step.

  “I fell in the river,” she groans.

  “Did you see Zeus?” Jin asks, breathless.

  “What? No! Where is he?”

  “Run faster!” I urge. There are voices. They are gaining on us.

  Dodging around clumps of trees, I spin doomsday scenarios about Zeus’s fate. He got eaten by the bear. He got lost in the dark. He ditched and flew back to the mainland because the food here is terrible. I am so dead. I might as well have asked the bear to kill me. It’s better than what will happen when Great-Aunt Irma finds out about Zeus. Oh, why didn’t I send him home the minute I realized he’d stowed away? Regret tastes metallic in my mouth. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, as Dad likes to say. Seriously. Not helpful, Dad.

  Hannah slams the cabin door behind us and we collapse on the floor, heaving and panting. “Total failure,” Jin gasps. You can say that again. But he won’t because the first time was hard enough.

  I stagger to my feet. “Brainstorm,” I say. “Solutions to this problem include…” I wait for my friends to throw out ideas about how we might find Zeus, but all I hear is their ragged breathing. A cold spasm of fear makes me shiver. Zeus is a pain, but the idea of him out in this big, dark, bear-infested forest all by himself makes me queasy. He’s a house pet. He has no skills other than a sharp tongue. He’s going to get eaten by an owl! I flop down beside Hannah and bury my head in my hands.

  Think, Lola, think!

  Outside, a branch brushes against the cabin window, tapping out an eerie Morse code. This is all my fault. If I hadn’t insisted on going rogue, Zeus would not have become a bear appetizer.

  Tap—tap—tap. Tap—tap—tap. “Will someone stop that branch before it drives me insane?” I shout. Hannah glances at Jin, eyebrows raised, as Jin slowly rises from the ground to deal with the window. But when he throws it open, a tangle of color and noise rushes in. Jin yelps in surprise and Hannah ducks. My first thought is that the bear is back to shred us to ribbons. I throw my arms in front of my face to ward off whatever just plowed through our window.

  “Lola! Lola! Lola!”

  Zeus? In a flurry of feathers, the mighty Zeus alights on my shoulder. A folded piece of paper dangles from his beak. Jin rushes over and hugs us both, but let’s be honest, this overt display of affection is really for the bird. Gently, I pull the paper from Zeus’s sharp beak. Even before I unfold it, I know what it is. But how this birdbrained bird knew how and where and what is utterly beyond me. Zeus gives me a smug, condescending look. Don’t send a human to do a bird’s work. Okay. I deserve it.

  “Did he really?” Hannah asks, standing over my shoulder, looking at the flyer.

  “He did,” I confirm. “Don’t ask how.”

  “I won’t,” she says.

  I stroke Zeus’s head. “Good bird,” I say softly.

  “Lola,” he coos, and takes a quick nip of my ear. Ouch! Talk about a complicated relationship.

  “Is it the same paper you saw in the cafeteria?” Jin asks. Up close, it is colorful like a peacock, a spray of embossed, rainbow-colored stars twinkling as if somehow lit from within. In the center is a bloodred circle, in a braided pattern, enclosing the letters MM, done in swirling emerald-green calligraphy.

  “Yes,” I reply.

  Jin shakes his head. “That’s some bird,” he says, voice full of awe. If we keep this up, Zeus is going to get a big head and become even more intolerable than he is now. We gather around the small tree-stump coffee table and smooth out the wrinkled flyer.

  We study it intently until finally Jin says, “So it doesn’t actually have any information on it.”

  He’s right. I half expected a time, address, and RSVP request for the Midnight Market. But that would have been too easy. “I think we should go to bed,” Hannah says with a defeated sigh. “This is pointless and I’m tired.”

  Outside, the crickets chirp maniacally. I’m about to agree with Hannah’s assessment when something occurs to me. Dad loves a good cave drawing or hieroglyphics. He has lectured me a thousand times on how rudimentary pictures were used to tell a story or give directions or level a warning. Of course, when I told him that’s what emojis are for too, his head nearly exploded.

  “Not the same!” he thundered. But whatever, that is not the point. The point is, what if the information on the page does actually tell us where the market is?

  Hannah digs an elbow into my ribs. “You’re muttering.”

  I am? Embarrassing. “Okay. How about if this is all the information we need, but we don’t understand it?”

/>   “Like, the market is out in the stars?” Jin asks. “You can’t Uber a rocket ship, you know.”

  “That’s not it,” I reply. “The stars mean something and we have to figure out what. Like, a clue or a cipher or a puzzle.”

  “Oh,” he says, like a light bulb went on. “Duh. I get it.”

  “But what?” asks Hannah. Well, honestly, I have no idea. The possible meaning of a bunch of rainbow stars seems endless. I deflate.

  “I would kill for the internet right now,” Hannah complains. “It’s like we are stuck in the 1980s or something awful like that.”

  “We could use the phone,” Jin says after a pause.

  We debate the prohibited use of the internet well into the wee hours of the night. Oh, who am I kidding? We do nothing of the sort, pouncing right on that phone without pausing to consider the consequences for even a second.

  Our trespasses are adding up. Sneaking around at night. Stealing the flyer. Scaring the bears. Using the internet. Dad likes to say that eventually you pay the piper, which means that at some point there will be consequences for our actions. But being as we intend to go rogue, our mountain of misdeeds seems inconsequential.

  We are in “all or nothing” territory now.

  CHAPTER 19 A SLIPPERY SLOPE. DOWN WHICH WE CAREEN. OUT OF CONTROL.

  AS WE HUDDLE AROUND THE tiny blue screen, searching for what the flyer might mean, I feel that familiar buzz, the sense that we are onto something, all pulling in the same direction, combining our energy and smarts to create something larger than ourselves. We are ready to do what must be done. We will uncover what these stars mean, no matter what.

  Or we won’t. Forty-five minutes later, Jin is snoring on the couch, muttering about Paul, with a fast-asleep Zeus tucked into his armpit. And I keep pinching myself to stay awake.

  “I get that technology is not the answer to all our problems,” Hannah says, rubbing her eyes. “But I really thought it might be in this case.”

  “Keep searching,” I chide. “This star pattern means something.”

  While she searches, I study the flyer, looking for an embedded code or a secret message written in the stars. So far, zippo. Suddenly, Hannah exhales sharply. I perk up. But her shoulders sag just as quickly. “I thought I had something,” she says. “A constellation that is no longer a constellation.”

  “Wait. You can get fired from being a constellation?” Is there really no such thing as job security these days?

  “It’s kind of like Pluto,” she explains. “It used to be a planet, but then it got voted off the island. Pluto itself hasn’t changed, but how we think about it has. It doesn’t matter. Our stars don’t quite match anyway.”

  Back to square one. A half hour later, Hannah leans over and bangs her forehead gently on the coffee table. Uh-oh. “We’ve checked every constellation,” she grumbles, “every weird space anomaly, every black hole and known galaxy and star map. I feel like a time traveler, I’ve been across the universe so many times. And for what? Nothing. I’m so tired I can’t even yawn.”

  But she doesn’t chuck the phone across the room and collapse in a heap. Instead, she resumes scrolling through endless star images in hopes of stumbling upon something that corresponds to the images on the paper. I’m exhausted too but also afraid to give up. It’s like the end of a string is floating inches beyond my grasp and if I could grab hold and pull, this mystery would unravel before us.

  “Maybe it’s really just a pretty picture with stars,” Hannah says dejectedly. “I want to go to bed. My thumbs hurt from scrolling. And my eyes hurt. And my feet are wet.”

  “You fell in the river.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “Do you want to go to bed?” I ask quietly.

  “No way,” Hannah says. “We are in this now. Let’s keep looking.”

  But at some point our efforts become hopeless. Hannah slumps over Jin, dead asleep. My vision swims in and out of focus, which is why I dismiss the ghostly image of Lipstick at our cabin window. Obviously, I’m hallucinating. It’s like those dreams I sometimes have where she is lurking in the shadows ready to kidnap me. I always try to scream, but my voice is gone. This is the point where I usually wake up, sweaty, heart pounding. That Lipstick thrives in my head is more than a little disturbing.

  I rub my eyes to make her go away. Nope. She’s still there. Now she’s smiling and beckoning me. What the heck? I shake my head vigorously. But she remains at the window, no longer smiling, and gesturing a bit more aggressively.

  Oh no. Is she real? Like in the dreams, I break out in an instant sweat, and my heart thunders in my ears. I leave my friends and bird snoozing on the couch and tiptoe to the cabin door. If it turns out she actually is a hallucination, I really don’t want them to know I’m seeing things.

  The door creaks loudly on its rusty hinges as I pull it open. Cringing, I throw a glance over my shoulder, sure Zeus is going to wake up and start bellowing. But everyone remains still and peaceful. I peer out into the darkness. The day’s humidity still clings to the air. I glance left. Nothing. I glance right. Nothing. My heart slows. Lipstick is all in my head. It’s fine. All good.

  Except it’s not. Suddenly, a hand clamps over my mouth and I’m dragged out of the cabin. The door slams shut behind me. I try to scream, but nothing comes out. When people talk about dreams coming true, I’m pretty sure this is not what they mean.

  “You’re spitting all over my hand,” Lipstick says. “It’s disgusting.”

  Wait a minute. She pulls me from my cabin in the dead of night and then tries to make me feel bad? That is not okay. “Let me go,” I mumble through her fingers.

  “No screaming. Promise.”

  “I promise.” She still does not let go. Is she waiting for a blood oath or something? “I swear.”

  Finally, she releases me. I shake myself out like a dog with fleas. Lipstick watches curiously. “Are you having a seizure?” she asks.

  I refuse to answer that. “What are you doing here? It’s the middle of the night.”

  “I know,” she says, giving me a sly grin. “I also know you took an evening stroll around campus. You met Daisy and Pipsqueak? They swim over from the mainland for the berries. Quite unusual.”

  The bears have names? They swim here? I struggle to come up with an appropriate response, but I’m busy berating myself for being so stupid. Why did we think for even a second that something could happen at Camp Timber Wolf without Lipstick knowing about it?

  “Pipsqueak?” I gulp after a long pause. “Really?”

  “The part with the bird was a neat trick,” she says. “I’m curious how you trained him to fetch. All the parrots I’ve ever known have too much dignity for parlor tricks.”

  Well, Zeus has no dignity, let’s start with that. As for his fetching skills, it’s a mystery to me, too. But I don’t want to look clueless. Lipstick already has the upper hand. Actually, she has all the hands. So I shrug like a fetching parrot is no big deal.

  “Well, never mind that.” She waves off the parrot. “Let’s move on to the faintly blue glow emanating from your cabin. Couldn’t survive forty-eight hours without an infusion of YouTube videos? Or social media with your BFFs? Or maybe the latest episode of whatever garbage you youngsters are streaming these days? Or was it something else entirely? Something much more interesting.”

  This is it, the part where she kicks us out of Camp Timber Wolf. And we totally deserve it. What is wrong with us? Why did I think going rogue would solve our problems? My heart sinks, my dreams of chasing down magical mythical potentially dangerous treasures evaporating like fog in sunshine. We screwed up and got caught. It’s like when I was trying to be a thief. Screw up. Get caught. My chin drops to my chest. I feel about two inches tall.

  “Oh, cut the drama,” Lipstick says with disgust. “It’s beneath you.” I wish she’d get to the expulsion part. Standing here waiting for the axe to fall is exhausting. Plus, my thin hoodie is no match for the damp night air. I shift my
weight from foot to foot. What am I going to tell Jin and Hannah when they wake up? Our team is just starting to get back in the groove and now this.

  I think I might cry, but no way Lipstick tolerates blubbering. I bite my lip to keep the tears at bay. But she doesn’t kick us out, at least not yet.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she says. “Well, I’m always thinking, and usually it’s brilliant things, but that’s a given, right?” I nod because it’s not like I’m going to disagree with her. “I need something done, and unfortunately, you might be the only kids who can do it.” She makes a face like the words taste bad.

  “Naturally, you’ve heard buzz about the Helm of Darkness?” she continues. “The whole camp is seething with it.” Her eyes twinkle as if Camp Timber Wolf in upheaval is such good fun.

  I cock my head to the left. “Yeah.”

  “As you probably know, the acquisition of magical objects is very competitive,” Lipstick says. “And while I’m currently sidelined”—she gestures at her ankle monitor—“I still hate losing, especially to certain people.” Her eyes darken and her hands ball into tight fists. “I do not want this certain person, a particularly annoying competitor, to acquire the Helm. If she does, she will gloat and hold it over me forever, an absolutely intolerable situation. What I want is for her to fail.” She pauses. The orchestra of nighttime crickets plays on. I don’t move a muscle. “That’s what I want. Now, Lola Benko, tell me what you want?”

  What? Aren’t we talking about her nemesis, whoever that unfortunate soul is, getting the Helm while Lipstick is trapped on an island, under house arrest and surrounded by a bunch of overmuscled kids? No? She waits quietly, and I get the feeling I’m actually supposed to answer.

  Okay, then. What do I want? It’s kind of a broad question. I mean, right now I want a warmer hoodie and socks. I also don’t want to worry that my friends are going to ditch me. And I want my father to be safe. And I want Great-Aunt Irma to not kill me over the Zeus thing and also to be brave enough to go outside. And I’d like some chocolate ice cream.